The Many Mysteries of the Finkel Family

investigating something at all.
The feeling that Lara now couldn’t shake off.
She hadn’t wanted to believe it. But the paper Caroline found was perfectly clear. Two weeks ago, Dad had been “terminated.” (What a horrible word! But Lara supposed that horrible things needed horrible words.)
As she read further, she filed away more information in her mind. Dad’s newspaper had fired him two weeks ago. They’d given him something called a severance package, which seemed to mean he got a lot of money. It was a staggering number that had to be more allowance than Lara would ever get in her whole life. But still. Fired meant fired.
That was why Dad burned the brisket. He must have been . . . distracted.
Lara flapped her fingers. Dad’s job at the newspaper was supposed to be the one that worked out for him. He’d had it for nearly three whole years. Whenever he talked about work, he went on about how much he liked his boss and his stories. “The best job in the world,” he’d say, “apart from being a dad, of course,” and the whole thing was so cheesy that Lara groaned on principle.
Dad getting fired from the best job in the world was not supposed to happen. But it did, and now it couldn’t un-happen.
“Why didn’t Dad tell us?” Lara wondered out loud. “Not telling something important is basically the same as lying.”
Caroline did not respond for a long while. It was so long that Lara thought maybe she’d gone into a not-talking mood. But eventually Caroline spoke. “I don’t like it either. But maybe there’s a reason Dad didn’t tell us about it.”
“And what would that be?” Lara asked, still cross.
This time, Caroline’s response came much more quickly. “Maybe it has something to do with the reason why he got fired.”
Lara locked her gaze on her sister. Caroline was right. The reason behind Dad’s firing probably was important. Did he make a mistake in one of his stories? No, Dad would never. Maybe he’d written something that a powerful person didn’t like. Dad was always complaining about “the higher-ups” at his newspaper and how they wanted to control things. Yes. That had to be it.
Still, Lara wished she knew for sure. She did not care at all for the not-knowing feeling. Wanting to know things was precisely why she’d become a detective in the first place. She hadn’t realized that answering one question would lead to so many more. Was this what real detectives did? Enter an endless spiral of questions, one after another?
“Ima probably knows,” Caroline continued. “Maybe they just don’t want us to worry.”
It made sense. And yet Lara couldn’t shake the Very Bad Feeling from her gut.
“Don’t you remember what happened last time Dad lost his job?” Lara asked.
“Not really.”
Lara stared at her sister. As a nine-year-old, Lara had only been a little kid when it happened, but she doubted that the memories would ever go away.
At first she’d thought the whole thing would be fun. If Dad was going to stay at home during the day instead of going to work, that meant he would have more time to play with her. Cook her favorite foods. Listen to her detailed accounts of life in fourth grade.
Only it didn’t happen. In fact, Dad didn’t play with her at all during those long months. He didn’t cook much, either, leaving everyone to suffer through microwaved dinners and Ima’s questionable attempts at cooking. And whenever Lara tried to talk to him about her days, he never asked questions or laughed at the proper places in her stories. He just sat there on the couch, fiddling with his hands and staring at the TV screen.
Then Dad got his job at the newspaper and things got better again. It didn’t happen all at once, but soon enough life in the Finkel family was normal. Or about as normal as it ever got. And Lara could almost—but not quite—forget that her dad had ever spent days at a time in his pajamas, watching game shows on TV.
There had been only one bright spot to the whole experience: Georgia Ketteridge. Lara read her first Georgia book a month after Dad lost his job. Within four days, she’d finished the entire series and started her first of many rereads. Maybe she didn’t have her father, but at least she’d had Georgia. In Georgia’s world, dads didn’t start acting scarily weird all of a sudden. Her dad certainly would not lose his job, ever. And even when things got really, really bad for Georgia, everything worked itself out by the end of the book. Always.
Yet apparently none of these events had made much of an impression on Caroline.
“You really don’t remember it at all?” Lara asked her sister. “Dad was . . . weird. Ima too. That was the only time Ima ever let us have mac and cheese out of the box for dinner. Which we had about three times a week.”
Caroline frowned. “I remember the mac and cheese. I never liked the box stuff.”
“Well, you’ll probably need to get used to it,” Lara said, thinking back to the ruined brisket. “At least until Dad gets a new job. Or Ima learns how to use the oven. Which will probably happen at around the same time Kugel gives up shrimp and goes kosher.”
“Oh,” Caroline said.
That was all—oh. Well, Lara understood her sister’s feelings. “We need to do something,” she declared.
Caroline tapped her tablet for quite a while, but decided against actually saying anything. Lara often envied her sister’s way of communicating. She could think of more than a few occasions when deleting her words would have been quite useful. But sometimes not knowing what Caroline wanted to say was just plain annoying.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes! We may have completed the first phase of the investigation, but FIASCCO’s work isn’t done. Not while there are still loose ends.”
Georgia always talked about the need to tie up loose ends. Lara figured that there were plenty of those in the Case of the Gross