Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare)(45)

This seemed significant now.

No answer. None of those little dots, even, that meant he was working on an answer. They all looked helplessly at Uncle Theron. “Perhaps a phone call?” he suggested again.

Kate steeled herself and took her phone back from Bunny. At the same instant, it made a soft swooping sound, which startled her so that she fumbled and dropped it, but only in her lap, luckily. Bunny gave another cluck and picked it up. “?‘A terrible event,’?” she read out.

Their father said, “What!” He leaned past Uncle Theron and grabbed the phone out of Bunny’s hand and stared at it. Then he started typing. Just with one index finger, it was true, but still, Kate was impressed. They all watched him. Finally he said, “Now what do I do?”

“What do you mean, what do you do?” Bunny asked him.

“How do I send it?”

Bunny tsked and took the phone from him and punched the screen. Peering over her shoulder, Kate read their father’s message: “What what what.”

There was a wait. Dr. Battista was breathing oddly.

Then another swooping sound. “?‘Mice are gone,’?” Bunny read out.

Dr. Battista made a strangled, gasping noise. He buckled in the middle and crumpled onto the pew in front of them.

To Kate, the word “mice” made no sense, for a moment. Mice? What did mice have to do with anything? She was waiting for news of her wedding. Uncle Theron seemed equally uncomprehending. He said, “Mice!” with a look of distaste.

“The mice in Father’s lab,” Bunny explained to him.

“His lab’s got mice?”

“It has mice.”

“Yes…” Uncle Theron said, clearly not seeing the distinction.

“Guinea-pig mice,” Bunny elaborated.

Now he looked thoroughly confused.

“I can’t take it in,” Dr. Battista was saying faintly. “I can’t seem to absorb this.”

Another swooping sound came from the phone. Bunny held it up and read out, “?‘The animal-rights activists stole them the project is in ruins all is lost there is no hope.’?”

Dr. Battista groaned.

“Ah, yes, that kind of mice,” Uncle Theron said, his forehead clearing.

“Does he mean the PETA people?” Bunny asked everyone. “Is there some rule that grown-ups aren’t allowed to abbreviate, or what? ‘PETA,’ you idiot! Just say ‘PETA,’ for God’s sake! ‘Animal-rights activists,’ ha! The guy is so…plodding! And notice how all at once he puts a ‘the’ every place he possibly can, even though he almost never says ‘the’ when he’s talking.”

“All those years and years of work,” Dr. Battista said. He was doubled over now with his head buried in his hands, so that it was hard to make his words out. “Those years and years and years, all down the drain.”

“Oh, dear, now surely it can’t be that bad,” Uncle Theron said. “I’m sure this is repairable.”

“We’ll just buy you some new mice!” Bunny chimed in. She handed the phone back to Kate.

Kate was beginning to grasp the situation finally. She told Bunny, “Even you ought to know that only those mice will do. They’re at the end of a long line of generations of mice; they were specially bred.”

“So?”

“How did these people get into the lab?” Dr. Battista wailed. “How did they know the combination? Oh, God, I’ll have to start over from scratch, and I’m too old to start from scratch. It would take me another twenty years at the very least. I’ll lose all my funding and I’ll have to close the lab and drive a taxi for a living.”

“Heaven forbid!” Uncle Theron said in real horror, and Bunny said, “You’re going to make me drop out of school and get a job, aren’t you. You’re going to make me go to work serving raw bloody sirloins in some steakhouse.”

Kate wondered why they were both contemplating careers they were so unsuited for. She said, “Stop it, you two. We don’t know for sure yet whether—”

“Oh, what do you care?” her father demanded, raising his head sharply. “You’re just glad, I bet, because now you don’t have to get married.”

Kate said, “I don’t?”

Her uncle said, “Why would she have to get married?”

“And you!” Dr. Battista told Bunny. “So what if you drop out of school? No great loss! You’ve never shown the least bit of aptitude.”

“Poppy!”

Kate was staring at the hymnal rack in front of her. She was trying to get her bearings. She seemed to be experiencing a kind of letdown.

“So that’s it,” her father said bleakly. “Excuse me, Theron, will you? I need to get down to my lab.” He stood up by inches, like a much older man, and stepped into the aisle. “Why should I even go on living anymore?” he asked Kate.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” she snapped.

She would be reclaiming her old room, it appeared. Her life would pick up where it had left off. On Monday when she went in to work she would explain that things just hadn’t panned out. She would tell Adam Barnes that she wasn’t married after all.

This didn’t cheer her up in the least. Adam had nothing to do with her, really. He would always make her feel too big and too gruff and too shocking; she would forever be trying to watch her words when she was with him. He was not the kind of person who liked her true self, for better or worse.