Chapter 8
Memorial Day
With summer so near and the camping jaunt already delayed twice, it was decided to move the trip to June, when it could be extended to four days instead of two. This, Jessie noted sourly to herself, would be the most ridiculously overprepared camping expedition in history. Outwardly she tried to seem excited for the others, or at least neutral. All she could really think about, though, was what summer would be like once they got back – a dozen hot weeks under the ever-watchful eye and ever-tightening grip of the Sergeant, without the relief of school.
Outside she heard two sets of footsteps coming up the driveway, probably those of Chris and his new Siamese twin, Ben. The two did everything together these days. They’d even botched the same assignment in school a few weeks earlier, each receiving an F on a paper Mr. Head had assigned about history. The F had something to do with the Bible, Jessie had heard. Since the Sergeant seemed suspiciously pleased with that particular bad grade, she had decided it wasn’t something she needed to know about.
A look out the window revealed that Chris wasn’t with Ben today. The boy wasn’t one of his regular friends at all, but a spike-haired member of the senior class whom Jessie knew only by sight. It would be interesting to know what that guy was doing even breathing Chris’s air – more interesting still to see what the Sergeant would do if he saw his stepson with such a character. No luck on the latter, as the Sparrows were out shopping right now – probably by design on Chris’s part. Jessie wandered downstairs to snoop, passing Chris and his new friend as they hurried up to Chris’s cave. Had Mr. Cool come over to play video games? Not likely, she decided, choosing a convenient surveillance post on the couch, with a magazine for a prop.
Jessie was barely settled when the two came back down the stairs, talking too quietly for her to hear. They parted with the strangely formal gesture of shaking hands. Then Chris went back up to his cave, leaving his sister’s curiosity thoroughly aroused. She followed him a few minutes later, and found him stuffing video games into a black garbage bag.
“Okay, I almost don’t want to ask what you’re doing.”
“I’m selling my video games. What does it look like?”
“Chris, you love your video games. When you’re playing them is the only time I ever see you happy.”
“Well, maybe that’s the wrong kind of happy.”
“I see. You know, let me just take a wild guess: I’m going to say this was the Sergeant’s idea, not yours.”
Chris stood his full height – which hardly seemed to make him taller – and looked his sister squarely in the eye. “Listen, I’m sick of you dissing the Sergeant,” he asserted darkly. “So what if it was his idea? What’s wrong with that? I respect the man, even if you don’t.”
“Hey, they’re your video games!” Jessie threw up her palm in a defensive gesture. “You can do whatever you want with them. So, how much did you get from old spike-hair down there?”
Chris resumed packing the games. “Two hundred,” he said. “Brandon’s going to bring the money over tonight.”
Jessie gave a low whistle. “Two hundred bucks is a lot of money. Gonna blow it on another try at Heather?”
“I’m over trying to play out of my league,” Chris said. “I’m going to use fifty to finish paying back the Sergeant, and spend the rest on some things.”
“Things for camp, right?” Jessie rolled her eyes.
“Oh yeah!” Chris grinned. “Totally.”
“Well, don’t have too much fun with that. I just hope you aren’t sorry later that you sold your games.”
“I might be,” Chris admitted. “But that’s okay, even if I am. ”
“Anybody home?” It was the Sergeant’s voice, from downstairs.
“Yeah, we’re up here!” Jessie called back.
“Come on down a minute,” her mother asked.
Downstairs, the Sergeant was waiting to show them a large wreath. “Your mom and the twins and I picked this out today,” he said. “I thought we all might like to go out and put it in place. You do know what day this is?”
“It’s... a day off from school?” Jessie shrugged.
“It’s Memorial Day,” Chris corrected, eager to show that he knew the answer.
“And that wreath is for...?”
“It’s for your dad’s grave marker,” Mom explained quietly.
“Let me get my jacket.”
The cemetery was only five minutes from the house, but they had seldom visited it since that first time, when the steel gray coffin bore Dad away from their sight. Mom found it too painful, the twins barely remembered him anyway, and Chris and Jessie just didn’t think about it.
Even on the outskirts of the busy city in the middle of the day, the cemetery was almost eerily quiet. Jessie found herself shivering as the wind moaned across the rows of cold granite. They had to walk quite a long distance, picking their way around monuments, to find the grave. Finally they came to it, and stood back as Mrs. Sparrow carefully dusted off the marker and placed a vase with some red flowers. Then she stepped aside for the Sergeant to add the wreath, but he turned and handed it to Chris instead. Standing taller, Chris accepted the wreath and put it very carefully on his father’s grave. Then he rejoined the group and they all stood and looked for a few moments, re-reading the inscription. Moses Enrico Rivera. He was only twenty-nine when he died, Jessie noted with a start. Not even twice as old as she was now.
The Sergeant finally broke the silence. “Tell me something about your dad,” he said. “Just anything you remember.”
Katie piped up first. “I’m afraid I don’t remember him at all,” she admitted regretfully. “I thought once I had a memory of him, but it turned out to be Uncle Ernesto.”
“He sang a lot,” Jessie offered. “He would sit at the table and play the guitar and we’d dance in the kitchen till we dropped. You don’t remember, Katie, but you danced too. He was a happy man,” she went on, looking directly at the Sergeant, “always smiling. He was a wonderful dad.”
“He was a man of character,” Chris said definitely, also looking straight at his stepfather. “He always did the right thing, not the easy one.”
“Thanks for sharing those things with me,” the Sergeant smiled. “I know he must have been a wonderful father, because he left a very special family behind.”
All the way back to the house, Chris’s own words rang in his head. He was a man of character. He did the right thing. Why he’d said that, Chris had no idea. He couldn’t specifically remember his dad ever making a particular choice to do the right thing (except for the times he had made his rowdy eldest go back and do it). Somehow he just knew that about him, and suddenly Chris found that he wanted to be like his father in that way. He was glad he was selling his video games.
Or was he? What was wrong? He knew he shouldn’t keep them, so why didn’t he feel altogether peaceable with selling them? The reason occurred to Chris sometime after they arrived back at the house. If these games were bad for him, they were just as bad for Brandon. Never mind he might get them somewhere else; Chris wasn’t responsible for somewhere else. He was only responsible for one thing – the very lucrative contents of a large garbage bag up in his cave.
Now Chris realized why he hadn’t wanted Mom and the Sergeant to see him making the deal with Brandon, and why he had been planning to slip the games outside in a garbage bag after dark. It was because he knew, deep down, that he should be destroying them, not just passing them on to hurt somebody else.
But all that money! It would buy a lot of very cool, totally wholesome things. The multi-function camp knife he’d been eyeing. The orienteering compass with a built-in LED light. The insulated backpack hydration bottle. Possibly a pair of night vision binoculars! How could he just throw it all away?
Chris had been stretched out on his bed, thinking. Now he rose and paced the room. He could almost hear those games calling to him from the cave, reminding him of all the money and good things th
ey could bring him. This situation seemed to eerily echo something he’d read recently, and Chris opened his e-book reader to find it. He hadn’t wanted to commit himself as far as getting a physical Bible everyone could see, but the KJV was free in the e-book store, so he had surreptitiously downloaded it.
After devotions, he would often look up the passage they’d discussed and read it again, trying to make sure he understood everything he could about it. He was thinking now of a particular story they’d gone over a few nights ago. He didn’t remember where the story was found, but a phrase from it had stuck in his head: “Curious arts.” Undoubtedly envisioning finger paint, Moe had asked the Sergeant what that meant. (Chris was glad Moe had voiced the question, as he wanted to know himself, but didn’t want to look foolish.) “Curious arts,” the Sergeant had explained, was used in Old English to refer to the occult – charms, spells, witchcraft, and that kind of thing.
Using a text search to find the phrase, Chris quickly reached the 19th chapter of Acts, which told the story of a revival in a place called Ephesus. The people who were saved wanted to get rid of everything to do with their “curious arts,” chiefly a huge pile of occult books that was worth, all together, the ancient equivalent of over six million dollars. They didn’t even consider selling the books to somebody else, he noted. They burned them.
Without thinking, for fear he’d change his mind, Chris picked up the phone, called Brandon, and told him that he had decided not to sell the games after all. Brandon was annoyed, but he would get over it. As soon as he hung up, Chris took his garbage bag down to the basement and set it in front of the Sergeant’s huge paper shredder. This paper shredder was big enough to pulverize sixteen sheets of paper at once – or one DVD. In went the first. As the blades groaned to crush it, Chris imagined the sound of breaking chains. On and on he went, as quickly as the shredder would work, until at last his once-prized collection was a bag of shiny confetti.
The shredder was so loud that Chris didn’t know when the Sergeant quietly entered the room, saw what he was doing, and left again. No one could know if the angels rejoiced in heaven that night, but upstairs behind their bedroom door, Mr. and Mrs. Sparrow did. And down the hall in his own bedroom, Chris Rivera slept better than he had in years.
The Sparrow Found A House (Sparrow Stories #1) Page 8
