Tap, Tap, Torn
Starring Rosie, Paislee
On a Friday visit to Daddy's house, Rosie's tiny worry notebook gets ripped loose when Daddy's overeager hound Rex comes bounding across the yard. When a hidden page falls out revealing a secret worry Rosie never told anyone, steady, patient Paislee is the one who falls apart, not Rosie. The sisters have to figure out, without any grown-up fixing it for them, how to mend a torn page and a bigger, unspoken feeling between them. It is a story about how the person who always listens sometimes needs someone to listen back.
Every other Friday, the packed bag goes in the trunk, and every other Friday, Rosie taps the yellow ribbon on her notebook three times before she gets out of the car. Tap, tap, tap. Nobody asks why. It is just a thing Rosie does. "Race you to the mailbox," Paislee says, already halfway there, backpack bouncing.
Daddy meets them on the porch, tomato sauce stains on his apron and dirt under his fingernails from the garden. "You're just in time," he says. "Rex has been asking about you all week." From somewhere behind the house comes a low, excited bark, and the sound of something large crashing through tomato stakes.
Rex comes around the corner like a reddish brown boulder with ears, tail already wagging so hard his whole back end sways. He loves Rosie best of anyone, and he shows it the only way he knows how, by launching himself straight at her. Rosie laughs and starts to lift her notebook out of the way, tap, tap, tap, but Rex's paw catches the yellow ribbon mid jump. The ribbon snaps. A single crinkled page flutters loose and lands face up in the grass.
Paislee reaches the page first. She almost hands it back without looking, the way you'd hand back a dropped mitten. Then she sees Rosie's small, careful handwriting. "I don't want them to forget me at breakfast," Paislee reads out loud, slow, like the words don't fit right in her mouth. She looks up. "You wrote this about me?"
Paislee had been so sure, always sure, that Rosie was the steady one, the one who never needed anybody to sit with her worries. Now the page shakes in her hand and her face crumples, and she cries so hard her shoulders jump with it, great heaving gulps that surprise them both. "I thought you were okay," Paislee gasps between sobs. "I thought you were always okay." Rosie doesn't know what to do with a crying Paislee. Usually it's the other way around.
Daddy comes out with two tomatoes still warm from the vine, sees the tears, and does not swoop in to fix anything. He just sets the tomatoes down on the step and sits nearby, quiet, letting the girls work it out. Rex noses the torn yellow ribbon in the grass, then flops down and starts gnawing it into a soggy, useless knot. Nobody stops him. There are bigger things happening.
"I always thought you liked my stories better than you liked me," Paislee says finally, wiping her nose on her sleeve. "So I never asked if you needed anything back." Rosie looks at the ruined ribbon, then at the crinkled page still in her hand. "Just ask sometimes," she says. "That's all." Paislee nods, and for the first time all evening, she does the thing Rosie always does. She reaches for the torn notebook and taps the cover, once, twice, three times.
They tape the page back in with a strip from Daddy's junk drawer, crooked and a little wrinkled, but held. Rosie ties a new ribbon around the notebook, an old shoelace since the yellow one is a lost cause, gnawed to string in Rex's jaws. On the porch steps, in the last of the porch light, Paislee leans her head against Rosie's shoulder and taps the notebook cover herself. Tap, tap, tap. "Goodnight, worries," she whispers, and Rosie taps it right back.
