Al Capone Does My Shirts by Gennifer Choldenko Page A

beautiful.” My voice cracks.
    My mom’s eyes register that something is wrong. “Moose.” She touches my shoulder. “It was hard to leave her there. Of course it was. What did we expect? But this is her chance, son. She’s going to get better. I know it. I feel it right here.” She pats her heart.
    I can’t look at her. “Time to wake Dad,” I mutter.
    The bed creaks when I sit down in my parents’ dark room, but my dad doesn’t stir. His hair seems to have slipped back on his head. It isn’t growing thick and full across his forehead the way mine does. His bald spot, which used to be no bigger than a quarter, is now the size of a baseball. The creases in his face look deeper too.
    I jiggle his arm. “Dad,” I say, “we have to go pick up Natalie. Mr. Purdy called. They don’t want her at the Esther P. Marinoff. She can’t stay there, not even tonight.”
    My father opens his eyes. He looks as if he’s just stepped on a nail. “Come again,” he says.
    By the time I finish explaining the second time, he’s sitting up in bed.
    “Does your mom know?”
    I shake my head.
    He takes a deep breath and lets it out with a whistle. His eyes focus on a worn spot on the rug.
    “Okay, son. I’ll take it from here,” he says.

11. The Best in the Country
    Same day—Monday, January 7, 1935
     
    When my dad tells my mom, she seems to have no reaction. She goes in her room, puts on her regular clothes and comes out with her purse and her gloves in her hand. “Let’s go,” she says, her face blank, her eyes dead.
    “Sit down, honey,” my father says. “We don’t have to go right this minute. Let’s just take a deep breath here.”
    “NOW,” my mom says, waiting like a child at the door.
    My father’s shoulders are hunched. He gets his shoes, jacket and hat and starts to open the door.
    “No,” my mother says. “You can’t go. You have to be at work at eight. I’ll go myself.”
    “You can’t go by yourself.”
    “YES!” My mom shoves my dad hard. His arm bangs the wall.
    My mouth falls open. I’ve never seen her do anything like this.
    “Moose,” my father asks, his voice quiet. “Will you go with your mother?”
     
    On the boat, my mom seems better. Her eyes are angry now. Not dead. Here we go again, I think. Before the Esther P. Marinoff, the Barriman School was “It” and before that the heat treatments and before that the aluminum formula and before that UCLA.
    At UCLA they made us cut Natalie’s hair. Shaved it right off. They tested her like she was some kind of insect. They tested the movement of her eyes, the sensitivity of her ears, the color of her pee. They tested allergies, reflexes, muscle strength. Her speech in a dark room. Her reaction to Tchaikovsky. The way she ate, slept, burped, blew her nose and even what she thought. Especially what she thought. Nothing about her was private.
    At home she’d spend hours in her room rocking like a boat in a terrible storm. But it was UCLA, my mother would remind us. When she said the name, it had a golden glow. They had promised us a cure, if —a word my mother can’t ever seem to hear—Natalie’s problem fit the diagnosis they were studying.
    And so I spent months riding in the rumble seat of my gram’s car to and from Westwood and hours sitting in the waiting room, until the day they let us know their findings. “An interesting case,” they said. “But not what we’re looking for. You should consider donating her brain to science when she dies.”
    “When she dies?” my mother said. “She’s ten years old.”
    They shrugged their shoulders and handed my dad a bill.
    Things fell apart at my house after that. Ants in the sink. Flies on the garbage. Cereal for supper. No clean dishes. Natalie in the same dirty dress. The blood of picked scabs on her arm.
    It was months before my mother left the house again. And that was with my mom’s sisters, my gram and grandpa, her friends and cousins all around.
    I don’t remember