Chapter 3

Chapter 3 You Don't See That Every Day The plan had been to go get Grandma in the morning. She was getting discharged from the hospital first thing, which meant she could finally come home. Mrs. Treski decided they would stay through New Year's Day to make sure Grandma was settled. Jessie couldn't wait for Grandma to walk in the door. Maybe then things would go back to normal. But the plan had to change, thanks to the storm. Overnight the snow had turned the whole world into a scene from the book that Jessie was reading— The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—all winter white and silent. The driveway had disappeared under the heavy, fresh snow, and the local news reported that road conditions were "challenging." On top of that,

the battery in the car was dead (because Jessie had left one of the interior lights on overnight), and it was going to be a while before the guy from AAA could come out to the house. Apparently, a lot of people were having car trouble because of the weather. Jessie spent part of the morning curled up in front of the wood stove reading her book and eating from the box of store-bought powdered doughnuts that Pete had brought with him. Pete and Evan were down in the basement now, checking out the furnace. There was a lot of banging, and every once in a while she heard them laughing. Jessie didn't get it. What was so funny about a broken furnace? After that, Jessie climbed the stairs to see what her mother was doing. She found Mrs. Treski in the room with the hole in the floor, going through boxes of papers that had gotten wet after the fire. She was looking for Grandma's homeowner's insurance policy. The woven rug

with swirls of maroon and deepest blue was pulled back and folded over on itself, revealing the bare wooden floor beneath it. "Ruined," said Mrs. Treski, as she worked her way through the box. "I don't think any of this can be saved." But she kept plucking through the papers. Jessie started to wander over to the built-in bookcase that ran along one wall of the room. Grandma had bookcases in every room in the house, each one stuffed to overflowing, but the books in her office were the ones that were most important to her. "Jessie, stop," said Mrs. Treski. "I'm not sure I got all the glass off the floor." "I'm wearing shoes. I'll be careful," said Jessie, walking delicately across the floor. "Are Grandma's books ruined, too?" "Some, probably. I hope not her favorites." "They're all her favorites," said Jessie, staring at the bookcase.

These books were like old friends to Jessie. She'd known them since she was old enough to crawl into her grandmother's lap and sit patiently while Grandma turned the pages. Books on birds, books on meditation, books on string instruments and baseball and antique quilts. Aesop's fables and Greek mythology. She looked quickly for her favorite and found it exactly where she had left it the last time she visited. It was called The Big Book of Bells, and it was more than one hundred years old. Jessie loved this book for a lot of reasons: the red tooled leather cover with gold lettering on the spine, the thick pages that made a whispery sound when you turned them, the photographs of men in bowler hats and ladies in long skirts. But mostly Jessie loved this book because it had a photograph of Grandma's bell in it, the very same bell that hung on Lovell's Hill. Jessie tipped the book off the shelf and into

her hand, relieved to see that it wasn't wet or burned. She carried it downstairs, settled herself on the couch, and turned first to the photo of Grandma's bell, feeling proud that it was so famous and important that it appeared in a book. Then she turned to the diagram that showed all the different parts of a bell. The parts were named for parts of the human body, and most of them went in the order you would expect: the crown, the shoulder, the waist, the hip. But then came the lip! That always made Jessie laugh, to think of having lips on your hips. She was still poring over the book two hours later, reading about the largest bell in the world, which was in Russia, when the guy from AAA

showed up and told Mrs. Treski that she needed an entirely new battery—which he didn't have on his truck. She would have to wait until later this afternoon when he could come back. "No, no!" said Mrs. Treski. "You don't understand. I have to go pick up my mother this morning. She's getting discharged from the hospital." Then she explained how her mother had put the kettle on the stove but accidentally turned on the wrong burner and then forgotten all about it and gone for a long walk, and when she came back from her walk, she found her house on fire and tried to rush inside, but the fire department blocked her way, and she fell and broke her wrist. The AAA guy listened very quietly and even nodded his head as if he was agreeing with her, but then he said what he'd already said. "I'm sorry, but I can't get back out this way until the afternoon. Probably after four." Mrs. Treski threw up her hands and said something under