When feuding neighbors Sonnet and Zeke are paired up for a class project, they unearth a secret that could uproot Sonnet’s family—or allow it to finally heal and grow.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Claudia Mills’ The Last Apple Tree, which is out now.
Twelve-year-old Sonnet’s family has just moved across the country to live with her grandfather after her nana dies. Gramps’s once-impressive apple orchard has been razed for a housing development, with only one heirloom tree left. Sonnet doesn’t want to think about how Gramps and his tree are both growing old—she just wants everything to be okay.
Sonnet is not okay with her neighbor, Zeke, a boy her age who gets on her bad side and stays there when he tries to choose her grandpa to interview for an oral history assignment. Zeke irks Sonnet with his prying questions, bringing out the sad side of Gramps she’d rather not see. Meanwhile, Sonnet joins the Green Club at school and without talking to Zeke about it, she asks his activist father to speak at the Arbor Day assembly—a collision of worlds that Zeke wanted more than anything to avoid.
But when the interviews uncover a buried tragedy that concerns Sonnet’s mother, and an emergency forces Sonnet and Zeke to cooperate again, Sonnet learns not just to accept Zeke as he is, but also that sometimes forgetting isn’t the solution—even when remembering seems harder.
Award-winning author Claudia Mills brings enormous compassion and depth to this novel of unlikely friendship and generational memory.
1. Sonnet
Moo-Moo was missing, and Sonnet didn’t know what to do.
Well, she knew she had to find him. That much was obvious. And she knew she couldn’t let Gramps know he was missing. That was even more obvious. How could she possibly tell him that the cat Nana had loved so much had somehow disappeared, and maybe it was her fault for not shutting the back door all the way, but more likely it was his fault because he was the one who had left that door slightly ajar just the other day?
Sonnet had already searched Moo-Moo’s favorite places: the laundry basket, the hearth by the woodburning stove, the pillow on Gramps’s bed on the side where Nana used to sleep. He had to have snuck out of the house, so Sonnet had slipped outside, too, where a cold wind was sending fat, wet flakes of snow whirling through the frigid air, as if the sky had forgotten it was the last day of March, the last day of spring break, and far too late for this kind of weather.
“Moo-Moo!” she called, not that he had ever responded to anybody calling his name. The only noises that caused him to come running were the pop of the lid on a can of Fancy Feast or the sound of a door opening . . . and then not shutting. “It’s me, Sonnet! Your friend, Sonnet!”
No cat answered this summons.
She tried a different tactic. “Something might eat you! Do you want to be supper for a hungry coyote?”
Were there coyotes in Indiana, the way there had been in Colorado?
But she knew the bigger danger for a lost cat at Gramps’s house was getting hit by a car. The cars that passed in front of the farmhouse went by so fast, and the road would be getting slippery from the snow.
Sonnet peered to the right and left as she kept walking through the orchard behind the farmhouse. Gramps and Nana had lived there for the whole of their long life together until Nana’s heart attack, and she and Mom and her little sister Villie had been living there since Christmas.
When they had come for the funeral, Gramps had looked half dead himself. He had sat slumped on the couch, Moo-Moo in his lap, hair uncombed, clothes soiled with bits of dried food, and face twisted in a grimace that was somehow worse than tears. But plenty of tears had flowed, too, that terrible week.
Moo-Moo was a black-and-white cat; he had been named after those black-and-white cows Sonnet had seen pictures of in nursery-rhyme books. But when she saw something that could have been Moo-Moo crouched on the ground, it turned out to be a white dish towel Villie had dropped onto last fall’s dark, trampled leaves while she was playing some game of her own invention.
“Moo-Moo!” Sonnet called again, her voice catching in a sob. If Moo-Moo never came home again, what would Gramps do? Would he go back to being that broken-down old man weeping soundlessly on the couch the way he had been last fall, but this time with no comforting cat beside him?
“Please come home! Moo-Moo! Moo-MOOOOO!”
In the distance, she heard a screech of brakes on the curve of the road right by the farmhouse. Was it the sound of someone swerving to avoid hitting a cat? Or of someone braking too late?
“Moo-MOOOOO!” Sonnet wailed, as if this could make any difference to whatever might have happened.
Then she saw someone coming through the place where the fence at the back of the orchard had fallen down. The orchard wasn’t really an orchard—just a stretch of trampled grass with one old apple tree. Most people would just call it a backyard. But Gramps always called it the orchard, so the rest of them did, too.
The house on the other side of the fence belonged to a family with a boy her age, who was in some of her classes at Wakefield Middle School. The person coming toward her was the right height to be Zeke. She didn’t know him very well. He always seemed sullen and bored, and everything he said in class came out sounding superior or sarcastic.
Zeke must have heard her shrieking “ Moo- MOOOO!”
She hoped he hadn’t heard how close she was to crying. Well, he’d be crying, too, if it was his cat that had been struck by a speeding car.
What was he doing in their orchard anyway?
Then she heard a frantic meowing and saw a black-and-white object wriggling in his arms.
“This is your cat, right?” Zeke said, as she ran to him, her heart bursting with relief and gratitude. Moo-Moo hadn’t been hit by a car! Moo- Moo was alive! Moo-Moo was coming home again to Gramps!
Zeke had never seemed friendly at school, but this was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for her, or at least the best thing, the thing she wanted most in all the world. She almost felt like hugging him, but seventh grade girls didn’t hug seventh-grade boys, and Zeke didn’t look like someone who would want to be hugged by anyone anyway.
“Yes! Thank you, thank you, thank you! Thank you for bringing him back home again!”
Moo- Moo let her scoop him into her arms, still meowing (he wasn’t the kind of cat who wanted to be hugged by anyone, either), but not as loudly as before.
“Did you know domestic cats kill one billion songbirds every single year?” Zeke said coldly, instead of saying, “You’re welcome” or “No problem” like a regular person would have done. “You might want to think about that the next time you let your cat run wild.”
Sonnet felt as if he had slapped her full in the face, not that anyone had ever slapped her in real life, or even so much as shoved her. But that’s what Zeke’s nasty comment felt like. What a horrible thing to say to someone who was searching desperately to find her cat and had thought her cat was dead. How could he possibly think she had let Moo- Moo out on purpose? Or was he being hateful just to be hateful?
Still, Moo-Moo was found, and that was what mattered now.
Cradling Moo- Moo in her arms, without another word she turned back toward the house.
She wouldn’t have to tell Gramps that Moo-Moo had been lost.
And that the rudest person she had ever met had brought him back.
