The Great Peach Experiment 1, Erin Downing [books to read romance .TXT] 📗

poked out of the folds. It seemed that three teeny-weeny mice babies had made their home in an old T-shirt inside the food truck!

Fascinated, Herb settled down on the nubby silver floor, cradling the little pouch full of critters in the palms of his hands. “Hello,” he whispered. One of the mice twitched its nose. Carefully, Herb tucked the edges of the fabric up and around the three little mice, capturing them inside the soft pouch. With a smile, he cupped his newfound treasure in his hands and headed toward the back door of the truck. “Dad?” he called out. “You promised I can keep anything I find, right?”

“Whatever you find in there while you’re cleaning,” his dad said distractedly, “is yours.”

Herb grinned. Three mice of his very own, to keep! Because a promise was a promise. “I’m going to keep you safe and happy, little mice,” he whispered to the little critters. “I promise.”

From the Sketchbook of Freddy Peach:

HOW TO SPEND A MILLION DOLLARS

When I sell a bunch of my art to some crazy rich lady, I’m going to build a moat around our house and hire a footman whose only job is to raise and lower the front drawbridge. He would also have a giant sword and armor, because that would look fierce.

5

  THE FINAL DETAILS

“I have a question,” Lucy said to her dad later that night, after she’d gotten her brothers settled into bed. As always, she’d read Herb a chapter of The Penderwicks (the book they were reading aloud together), and then tucked his favorite stuffed pig under his pillow, just the way he liked. “So this food truck experiment of yours is supposed to last a month, right?”

“Ours,” Dad corrected.

“Huh?”

“It’s our experiment, Lulu,” Dad pointed out. “Not just mine. We’re doing this in Mom’s honor, as a family.”

“Okay…ours.” Lucy sighed, still not entirely convinced this was a sane or full-fledged idea that would actually stick. “You still haven’t explained how you’re suddenly able to take all this time off work. You never take vacation. Science conferences don’t count.”

Lucy thought about the only trips they’d taken after Mom died. For Dad’s work, they’d visited a couple of fun places, like San Francisco, San Diego, and San Antonio. But none of those trips had actually been any fun at all. When they got to San Francisco, they didn’t get to visit the redwood forest or traipse across the Golden Gate Bridge, as they’d all been hoping and expecting. Instead, the three Peach kids sat at a round table in a windowless banquet hall in a Ramada Inn, snacking on a platter of cookies while they colored pictures of famous monuments.

In San Diego they didn’t go to the world famous San Diego Zoo (like Dad had promised) or even so much as dip their feet in the ocean. Instead, they watched a documentary about zoo animals in a stale hotel room while their father oohed and aahed over chunks of soil someone had pulled out of the ocean floor. (Freddy had done some digging, and helpfully explained to his siblings, “Those long tubes of soil are called cores, and they help scientists understand climate change and other stuff.”)

When they drove into San Antonio, the Peach kids had pressed their noses against the glass windows, peering at the Alamo as they drove past on their way to the convention center that would host the Mysteries of Paleoclimate! conference. But they hadn’t stopped to get out and explore, so that trip had been another bust.

“Ah, yes,” Dad said, pulling his eyebrows together. “Yes, it has been a while, hasn’t it?”

Lucy snapped, “You haven’t taken a single day off work in two years. Not since Mom died.” In the first few weeks after they lost Mom forever, it had seemed like Dad might be capable of handling everything. That he’d be willing and able to pick up the bruised and smushed remnants of their family and try to reshape them into something new. Because Mom had died from cancer, he’d said at the time, there was plenty of time for him to prepare. He’d been warned it was coming, and that was supposed to have made her death easier to handle.

Lucy had also had time to prepare; yet she never felt that made Mom’s passing any easier. In some ways, knowing what was coming had been worse—because she’d had all those months to worry about what was going to happen, and when. And then, after it actually happened and Mom was gone for good, Lucy was faced with the reality of the situation and the day-to-day absence that no one could have prepared her for.

Nobody had been able to warn her about all the days she’d forget, come home from school, and—for one passing second—think about sitting down to tell her mom all about her day. Then she’d remember, and that rock would drop in her stomach again, and she’d start the cycle all over.

But the hardest part was watching how Dad dealt with his grief in the first weeks after Mom’s death. It made Lucy feel like she wasn’t allowed to be sad. His way of coping made Lucy feel like knowing Mom was going to die should have made it all easier somehow.

Those first few weeks after the funeral had been awful. But then, about three weeks after she died, Dad disappeared, too. That’s when life got even worse. Dad’s sadness caught up with him, and he buried himself in work to hide from the reality of their situation and—poof!—evaporated from daily life altogether.

That’s when Lucy took over. Watching how her Dad unraveled in the months that followed, she had wished she was allowed to wallow and be sad, too. But Lucy had two little brothers that needed someone to take care of them, and no one else had volunteered to do the job. Their only real family—Great Aunt Lucinda, who was Dad’s aunt and the person Lucy had been