The Exact Location of Home by Kate Messner

Mom’s gotten so far behind on rent. Dad’s been gone three years, and she’s been doing nursing school and waitressing for two of them. How come there’s suddenly not enough money when there was before?
    I put my pencil down and check the clock. It should still be half an hour before Mom gets home.
    I gather up the papers with Mrs. Delfino’s letter, open the door to Mom’s room, and add the papers to the stack already on top of her dresser. The pile of bills is there, along with a folder of other papers and the checkbook on top.
    We learned how to balance a checkbook in Home and Careers class last year. I turn to the front of it and check the withdrawals and deposits.
    Most of it makes sense. Monthly checks to Mrs. Delfino until July. And then I can see why they stopped. There hasn’t been $800 in the account since then.
    I flip through the pages looking for what changed, and then I see it. A $900 deposit dated June first from Kirby Zigonski, Senior.
    Child support. That’s the other income that was paying the rent. And it hasn’t shown up since the beginning of summer.
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    â€œHi there!” When Mom gets home later, her voice has more energy than the rest of her. There’s a big splotch of strawberry ice-cream on her sleeve, and her eyes look droopy. She sniffs the air. “Did you burn something?”
    I close my binder, finally done with the math that should have taken ten minutes but took an hour. “Yeah, pizza.”
    â€œWe have pizza?”
    â€œWe did. Till I burned it. I had a peanut butter sandwich instead.”
    â€œHere.” She pulls a plastic to-go box out of her tote bag and hands it to me. I open it and find half a club sandwich, my favorite. “Here’s a piece of pie, too.” She hands me a smaller box.
    â€œAwesome. Thanks.” I take a big bite of the sandwich and figure I’ll tell her about Rudolph Delfino and his letter tomorrow.
    â€œSo what did you do today?” Mom pulls a wad of ones from her pocket—tip money for the night—and heads for the office.
    â€œWent out hiking with Gianna,” I call in to her. “We messed around with the GPS unit. It’s pretty cool.”
    â€œIs that what this stuff on the computer is all about?”
    I’ve just taken a huge bite of pie, and all of a sudden, it’s all sticky and dry in my mouth. The computer. I left Dad’s profile page up on the screen when the smoke alarm went off.
    â€œThat’s something Gianna was showing me with the geocaching stuff. I didn’t pay much attention.”
    â€œWell, finish up here while I get changed. Then I need to use the computer,” Mom says. When I hear her bedroom door close, I race to the computer.
    Geocaches. When the burned pizza alarm went off, I had just clicked on geocaches under Dad’s profile. It’s all loaded now. And it’s a list.
    I can hear Mom’s dresser drawers opening and closing. I scan the page quickly. There are two columns. One is a list of caches that Senior Searcher owns and set up for other people to find. The other is a list of different people’s caches that Senior Searcher found and logged.
    I check the first list. Sure enough, there’s the Nest Egg cache. And there are dates here, too. According to the log, Dad hid that one three years ago. It must have been right after he and Mom split up. No wonder he wanted to ditch the Canada key chain.
    There are two more caches on the list, both set up around the same time as the first one. I need to find those. I wish it didn’t get dark so fast after school in the fall.
    I hear water run in the bathroom. Mom will be out soon. I click the back button and click on the other list—geocaches that Dad has found.
    This list is a lot longer. Dad sure must like geocaching. He’s found forty-seven caches. I scan the list of dates. They start around the same time as the others—three years ago. But these