He looked at his sister—her pale face, her thin, wild hair she was always trying to curl. He could remember the day his parents brought her home from the hospital—his father setting her on the bed in her pink blanket and unwrapping her like a present.

“Take a look at what we brought you, Nathan,” he’d said. “A perfect baby girl. It’ll be your job to look after her.”

“How do you propose doing this, Junie?” Nate asked her now. “Seeing as how Warm Springs is hundreds of miles away.”

“I’ll ask Poppa to take me,” she said.

“Oh, right,” said Nate. “Even before this happened, Poppa was fed up with Dad, you know that. He’s never forgiven Dad for that bad crop of hay. And a million other things.”

“But he likes me.”

“It doesn’t make any difference. You’re a kid. He thinks he knows best.”

“So what are we going to do, Natie?” she asked him.

It occurred to him, looking at her—looking at her looking back up at him—that she actually believed he could come up with an answer. Seeing that made him feel like he had to. “I don’t know yet, Junie. But I’m working on it. I promise, I’ll get us to Warm Springs somehow.”

They were quiet for a moment, studying a picture of Ramona and her father in the book—a happy, normal pair whose biggest problem was Ramona eating too many apples one time.

“I’m going to sing Daddy my new song when we see him,” she said. “You know, ‘Yellow Submarine.’ And I’ll bring him a picture I drew.” It was of herself on her horse, Bucky, wearing a cowboy hat and swinging a lariat. “I’ll hang it on the wall next to his bed. For him to look at, till he gets to come home.”

In Junie’s mind, the thing that was going to make everything all better was just getting to see their father again and bringing him home. Nate understood it wasn’t that simple. He had never known anyone whose parents got divorced, and the word had not been spoken in their house. But from the way his mother and Aunt Sal and his grandparents acted, he had begun to realize that none of them saw his dad as a part of their lives anymore. It was hard to imagine that they would ever again live as a family, the way they used to.

What he hoped for—that seemed attainable—was to accomplish what old one-armed Frank had suggested: to make his father proud of him in some small way. If he could just lay one huge and glorious victory at his father’s feet— in the form of the science fair prize—maybe he could make his dad understand how important he had been to his son.