The Kneebone Boy Read Online Free PDF Page B

what happened to Mum than he’s telling us,” Max said. “I think we ought to ask him about her again.”
    “Don’t. You know he hates being asked about her,” Otto said.
    “But she’s
our
mother, after all,” Max said. “We have a right to know. She’d want us to.”
    “How do you know that? You barely remember her,” Otto said.
    Sadly, this was true. Memory, in my opinion, is a complete noodle. It hangs on to the silliest things but forgets the stuff that really matters. The Hardscrabbles had forgotten so much about their mum that she only existed in fragments, like a doll that’s been taken apart and has pieces that are lost and others bits that are drawn on with a marker.
    Otto, being the oldest, should have remembered her best, but in fact he remembered her least. His memory of her was as vague and ghostly, he told them, as one of Casper’s quick charcoal sketches.
    Lucia remembered her hands, particularly a constellation of freckles around one of her right knuckles that right side up looked like a bowler hat and upside down looked like a dog with floppy ears. She remembered that same hand running through her own hair, making her feel sweetand drowsy. She remembered having kisses blown at her, and blowing them back, but she couldn’t remember the lips that blew them.
    It was maddening really.
    Max said that the thing he remembered most of all was the way she smelled. He said she smelled of peppermint. When Otto and Lucia told him that of course she did, the whole town smelled of it, he shook his head. “No, it was peppermint that grew from the ground, not the kind that came from the Such Fun Chewing Gum chimneys.”
    Still, at four o’clock on Tuesdays and Fridays, the Such Fun factory pumped out their mountain mint flavor, which was close, Max said, to Mum’s smell. On those days Max liked to sit on the roof and smell the air.
    That was all the Hardscrabbles had left of her. No photographs—Casper said she hated to be photographed—few memories, and a father whose face grew so sad when her name was mentioned that they stopped mentioning her at all.
    “Think about it logically,” Otto said. “If Mum’s alive, she knows where to find us. She knows where we live, since we’ve lived in the same place all our lives. If she’s alive and wanted to see us, she might have come whenever she liked. She hasn’t, so she doesn’t. And if she’s dead, well, then what does it all matter?”
    They were silent for a moment. Then Lucia said, “So what do we do now?”
    “Nothing,” Otto said. “Things will go on as just they always have.”
    Note to reader: If you ever want your life to turn topsyturvy, say, “Things will go on just as they always—” Oops, I almost said it. Anyway, say the last words that Otto just said. I, however, want to keep my life as normal as possible, so I can get on with writing this book.

Chapter 3
     
In which the Hardscrabbles take a train to London, enter a portal to the Perilous-World-at-Large, and make a tattooed man really angry
     
    The following day, when the Hardscrabble children came home from school, they found that their bags were packed and piled near the front door. This was the beginning of things happening that had never happened before.
    In the past, they usually had a few weeks between the time Casper started sleeping at night and when he finally sent the children off to stay with Mrs. Carnival. During those weeks, Casper would gently break it to them that he had to go away for a job. He’d show them the place on a map and tell them about the people whom he would be painting, and little by little, the children would ease into the idea of spending time with Mrs. Carnival and her neck cyst.
    “What’s this?” Otto said to the bags when he and Luciawalked through the door. Just then, Casper came down the stairs, dressed in regular clothes—black trousers and a mostly clean white button-down shirt.
    “Where are you going
this
time?” Lucia asked