Penelope Crumb by Shawn K. Stout Page B

chance to send me away.
    He stands at the door in a green coat and looks at me while I step over piles on the way to the table. I grab a couple of pictures, newspapers, and magazines from the top of each one. Grandpa Felix follows and sits beside me but doesn’t say anything. He rubs his fingers over his whiskers.
    “Were you going someplace?” I ask, pointing to his coat.
    “It can wait, I guess,” he says, taking off his coat and throwing it over the back of a chair.
    I thumb through a
Life
. “That’s a funny name for a magazine.”
    “You think so? Maybe that’s why they stopped printing it.”
    “Do you still take pictures?” I say.
    He pulls a card from his coat pocket that’s got a drawing of a camera on it and big letters that say: A THOUSAND WORDS . “Have you ever heard of the saying, ‘A picture’s worth a thousand words’?”
    “No.”
    “Well, there you are,” he tells me.
    “‘A Thousand Words,’” I say, reading the card. “So you do still take pictures?”
    “On occasion.” He points at the stack in front of me and asks, “What do you have there?”
    The picture on top is of a boy in blue-striped overalls sitting on a porch step and grinning like he just won first place. His front teeth are missing. I hold the picture out to him. “Who’s this?”
    He takes the picture from me, looks it over, and then hands it back. “Yours truly.”
    “You were little,” I tell him.
    “That’s what they tell me,” he says. “Guess I’d be about ten in that picture.”
    “Same as me. Well almost. I’ll be ten next year.”
    “Is that so?” he says.
    I tell him that it is so and he nods. “Can I have this picture?”
    Grandpa Felix scratches his whiskers for a long time. So long that I think maybe he forgot what I asked. But then he says, “I guess so,” and I tuck the picture into my toolbox before he changes his mind.
    “How’s that brother of yours?” he asks.
    I make a face. “Terrible.”
    Grandpa Felix gives me a look that says, He Can’t Be All Bad. So I tell him that Terrible is so all bad. And that he was snatched by aliens and he smells and that I’ve got a list that I’m going to send to NASA. But instead of offering his help to send Prince Stupider back to Planet Jupiter, Grandpa Felix says, “You should give your brother a break. It’s not easy being the man of the house when you’re only fourteen years old.”
    But when I tell him that he’s an alien, not a man, and that we don’t even live in a house, he just says, “You know what I mean.” Only I don’t really.
    The next picture in the pile is a face I know. “We have the same picture of my dad on our bookshelf at home.”
    Grandpa Felix drops his eyes on the picture but doesn’t take it. Then he looks away. “That your toolbox?”
    “Yep. It belonged to my dad.”
    “It belonged to
me
,” he says. “I gave it to your father when he moved out.”
    We’re both quiet for a little while longer. I watch his yellowed fingernails tap on the tabletop. He’s got some kind of rhythm going, but if it’s to a tune, I can’t make it out. “You know what else I have of yours?” I say. “My nose.” I stick it up in the air and turn my head so he can get a good look.
    “I’ll say you do,” he says. “Too bad.”
    “What do you mean? I like the Crumb nose. It makes for a good drawing subject.”
    “You can’t miss it, that’s for sure,” he says. “You can see one coming from miles.”
    “You can?”
    “No,” he says. “I’m exaggerating.”
    “Oh.”
    He clears his throat. “The Crumb nose has stood out in this family for a long time. My father, that would be your great-grandfather, also was blessed with this beast.”
    “Is that so?” I say.
    A glint of a smile appears on his face. “That’s so. There was a time when I very much did not like my nose. But after a while…”
    “After a while what?”
    Grandpa Felix settles back in his chair and folds his arms. “There are certain