Katy Kelly_Lucy Rose 01 Read Online Free PDF Page B

off from work we borrowed Madam and Pop's station wagon, which, if you can believe it, is purple, and we went to Frager's Hardware store and bought a Christmas tree that is called Fresh Cut and we went to Grubb's and got a box of candy canes. When we got back to our house I helped my mom put the lights on our tree which took forever on account of they were tangled and then we decorated it.
    After dinner, when it was eight-thirty at night which is my exact bedtime and I had already brushed my teeth, my mom let me come downstairs and have cocoa with her in the living room.
    She is usually serious like anything about LIGHTS OUT, especially on school nights. But instead we sat on the floor and looked at the Christmas tree and I was glad we had the decorations from before in Ann Arbor but I wondered what my dad was going to put on his tree. Then when I said it my mom pulled one big surprise and let me stay up even longer. We went into the kitchen and we mixed flour and salt and water and food dye to make dough and then I squished some of it through the garlic press and made hair so I could make one ornament with curly black hair that looks like Gumbo and one with red hair that looks like me. When I was done we put them in the oven to make them cook until they got dry and when they did I wrapped them both up in red tissue paper and then I broke off a little piece of our good-smelling Fresh Cut tree and tied it to the front. This morning we sent them by FedEx to my dad in Ann Arbor.

December 12
    This afternoon I got an e-mail from my dad and it said: “Dear Lucy Rose, Of all the ornaments I haveever seen, the ones you sent me are my favorites.” And that was a fine feeling for me.

December 15
    This morning my mom went to work and had to do a lot of it because she is new and the old people get to pick days off first which my mom says is just fair because when they were new they worked the weekends. For Madam and me this was double A-OK because we had one big plan.
    The thing about our new house is that we are short on furniture. My mom says it's no big deal because she likes the house to feel uncluttered which is good feng shui which is how they do houses in China but Madam thinks she is partly saying it to be a good sport and that she would really like a dining room table because, Madam says, “Who wouldn't?”
    And I said, “I am one person who agrees with that.”
    So we went to the tag sale of Madam's friend, Mrs. Greeley, who is 70 and has got a boyfriend who is really an old man friend because he is 72.They are going to get married and move to San Diego, California, to be closer to Mrs. Greeley's daughter and also to the sun because the boyfriend never wants to shovel another flake of snow in his whole life. Those are fine reasons if you miss your daughter and are against snow, I guess, but I felt like I needed to tell her so I did. “Mrs. Greeley,” I said, “moving is not as much fun as you think.”
    A little bit later, in the back of Mrs. Greeley's house I found an old table with a little bit curvy legs and called out, “Hey, Madam, come look!”
    And she did. “It's made of wood from a cherry tree,” Madam said. “And I think it's older than me.”
    “That is one old table,” I said, and then I saw a scrape right on the top of it. I told Madam, “Let's find a better one.”
    “No,” Madam said. “This one has good bones.”
    I think she is wrong about furniture having bones but I don't know everything.
    Then the boyfriend showed us four chairs that are also made of cherry tree and Madam wrote a check for all of it.
    The man that was in charge of the money box and is also Mrs. Greeley's great-nephew that goes to college at Georgetown University helped us put the chairs inside the station wagon and tie the table to the top of the car with bungee cords and Mrs. Greeley said, “I am glad they are going to a good home.”

    And I said, “A very good home.”
    When we got to my grandparents' house, Pop helped