“Yeah. It’s really good.”
“Is it better thanAlvin Hatter and the Mysterious Disappearance? That was always my favorite one.”
“It’s better than all of them. Honestly. It’s the best one.”
“I knew it couldn’t be over,” she said. She took the flash drive finally. “So many people are going to love this book. Thank you for bringing it to me.”
“Don’t thank me,” I said. “Thank her.”
And then we were quiet. Because, more than anything, we wanted to. We wanted to be able to thank her. And we couldn’t.
“Here, I made these for you,” Grandpa Hatter said, pushing a plate of impeccably decorated pink-and-white frosted cupcakes toward Margo. She stared at them as if not sure whether she would eat them or they would eat her.
“You made these?” she repeated after a moment of silence. “You made these pink cupcakes?”
“You’re not a very nice child,” he said.
“No, no! They look really good! I just didn’t know you baked.”
“I bake, I cook, I do whatever I want, okay? You either want them or you don’t. I don’t care either way. The garbage can is right over there.”
He gave the plate another push and busied himself with other things in the kitchen, drying an already-dry glass, wiping an already-clean counter. Margo couldn’t help but feel like he was waiting for her to take a bite. So she did.
“Oh, wow,” she said.
“Do you like them?” Grandpa Hatter asked, suddenly in front of her again, his face lit up in an expression she could only describe as utmost hopefulness.
“They’re REALLY good,” she said, her mouth still full.
“Oh, you’re just saying that,” he said, batting the air, looking about as pleased as she had ever seen him look before.
—fromAlvin Hatter and the Mysterious Disappearance
10
Wendy’s office was crammed with children’s books, a floor-to-ceiling library of anything and everything worth reading. She made tea for Sam and me, and she read the first chapter of the new book aloud while we burned our tongues and were quiet and listened to Margo tell us about her brother’s deep depression, about their new lives living in the house in the middle of the woods (the safest place for them, as the Overcoat Man could not enter it), about her haphazard plans to make them some money so they could eat.
“Oh, they simplyhaveto find their parents,” Wendy said, finishing the first chapter and closing her laptop. “It’s been such a long journey for them. They need their happy ending.”
“She won’t tell me,” Sam said. “She says I have to wait for the book.”
“And she’s right! You have to find out for yourself, orit won’t mean anything.” Wendy took a sip of her tea and put her hand on her laptop. “I can’t thank you enough for bringing this to me. I’ve been having such a hard time. She was one of my best friends.”
“And you’ve been her agent for all six books, right?” I asked.
“Seven!” Wendy corrected me, the smile on her face so wide that it became infectious in turn. “Going on seventeen years, if you can believe it.” She looked somewhere over the tops of our heads, lost in thought, then turned conspiratorial and whispered, “Did you know—I talked her out of calling him the Seersucker Jacket Man.”
“No... ,” Sam said.
“She had a thing with seersucker; I can’t explain it,” Wendy insisted, laughing now, pulling her laptop toward her as if it held the very reincarnated soul of my aunt.
Which... I mean, sort of, kind of, it did.
“Ah, this is going to stir things up. This is going to stir things up very nicely,” Wendy said, still patting the laptop, still laughing. “And don’t worry,” she continued, “they’ll want to rush this. It won’t be long at all. I’ll call the publisher the moment I’ve finished it.”
“How long do you think it will take?”
“Oh, a few months—basically the blink of an eye in the publishing world. And I’ll make sure you’re the very first one to get a copy. I know that’s what your aunt would have wanted.”
