When Ratboy Lived Next Door

by Chris Woodworth

  I was so mad I reached down and grabbed some of the coins, hurling them after him. I wanted to scream but I couldn’t. To my horror, great racking sobs came from me. I hate to cry. I’d do anything before I’d let someone see me cry, even someone I trust as much as Rae Anne. I sat down on the curb and rubbed my sore head until the tears stopped.

  Rae Anne picked up the money. She was fired up from the fight, asking a blue million questions. “What was that all about? Who is he? Why would he do that just for a nickel?” And when I didn’t answer right away, she said, “We have to tell your dad!”

  I cleared the lump out of my throat. “No. I don’t want to tell anyone and I want you to swear that you won’t, either.”

  “Lydia! You were attacked! We have to tell.”

  “He moved into your grandma’s house. I’m going to have to see him every day.”

  “Oh, Lydia, that’s who rented Grandma’s house?”

  “Yeah.” I wiped my eyes on my sleeve. “I don’t want him thinking I run to my daddy every time something goes wrong. He’ll call me a baby and never leave me alone. I’ll handle this my own way.”

  I had lost all taste for ice cream and the Free Show. This boy was meaner than a snake and had the strength to back it up. Just thinking about living next door to a bully made my throat feel tight and my eyes sting. I hated that feeling. It meant I was close to crying again.

  We walked back to the library lot. Rae Anne slid down on the blanket where Mother and Nanna were sitting. I knew she wanted me to say something, but she was a good enough friend to keep quiet about it. Daddy was standing next to the blanket. He looked so tall and strong. I slid my hand into his and, without looking, he gave it a squeeze. I was glad he was staring at the movie. I got so much comfort from just being at his side and touching him that I didn’t want him to ruin it by asking what was wrong.

  Finally he said, “Well, we’re going to have to call an emergency city council meeting to get more money. This setup just won’t do it. We’ve got to find a way to mount that projector straight. Nobody’s going to watch a show this way, even if it is free.”

  I looked out over a sea of Maywood folks with their heads all tilted to the left as Gene Autry rode his horse, Champion, through the cracks of the Laundromat wall straight toward the sky.

  * * *

  “I’m tired.” I yawned as we walked into the kitchen after the show was over.

  “Too much fun for one night, Ladybug?” Daddy asked as he knelt down to kiss my cheek. He was in a talkative mood now. People had enjoyed themselves and the merchants of Maywood had made money, even if the movie hadn’t turned out straight. It would be a while before everyone went to bed. I just wanted to be alone.

  “I guess so, Daddy. Good night.”

  “Good night,” Mother mumbled as she pulled out a kitchen chair, not even looking at me.

  I walked toward the stairs, when Nanna pulled me to her. I could smell the lilac perfume she usually saved for church as she squeezed me into her softness.

  “Good night, baby.”

  It didn’t matter how stern or strict Nanna was with me during the day, at bedtime she poured all the love she had into her good-nights.

  From my bedroom I could hear Daddy, Nanna, and Mother in the kitchen reliving the evening. To hear Nanna talk about the good time she had, you would have thought the whole thing was her idea. After all that complaining I’d had to listen to! I heard Mother once say that Nanna worked like a hot water faucet. You had to let the water run a long time before it got warm, but then it went straight to hot.

  As I listened to them, I wondered what I was going to do about Ratboy. It had always been my way to handle things on my own. Daddy’s turn-the-other-cheek attitude didn’t sit well with me, and Nanna would just try to turn Ratboy and me into friends. The thought of that made my skin crawl. The truth is, I was a little bit afraid of Ratboy. Fear was something I couldn’t allow, so I did what I always did when I needed to gather up my courage: I lay there in bed and talked to Robert.

  Robert was Mother’s son and he was dead, but I didn’t let a thing like that stop me.

  3

  I had learned about Robert accidentally. It wasn’t something I was brought up knowing. Two years before—the spring I was ten years old—I had overheard Daddy and Nanna talking. I had walked into the house as noisy as ever, but they’d been deep in their conversation and hadn’t heard me.

  “Glen, we go through this every spring and you know it. Evelyn mopes around like she’s the only person in this house. Lost in her own world, she is.” Nanna made quick swipes back and forth across the floor with her broom the way she always did when she was agitated.

  “I know, but she doesn’t want to talk about it. We need to have patience.”

  “How much patience, Glen? He’s been dead for over thirteen years. It’s time that girl realizes she has a family here and now.”

  “Who died?” I asked.

  Nanna looked up and her hand flew to her chest. For once she didn’t have a single thing to say.

  “Who died, Daddy?”

  He coughed, stalling for time. “You know, Ladybug, I was just thinking the mushrooms ought to be up. How about we head over to Trotter’s woods and see what we can find?” Which meant he’d tell me, but he’d take his own sweet time about it.

  We walked through the woods with him naming different bugs and plants, and in the same soft tone of voice he used to tell me the difference between poison ivy and poison oak, he said, “Your mother was married when she was young. She had a boy named Robert, and about thirteen years ago, he died.”

  “She did? I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, there’s more. Her husband died, too. Her first husband.”

  Another husband? I always knew Mother was older than Daddy, but I never knew she had had a whole other family before she had us! “What happened?”

  “It was springtime and Robert was eager to go out on a lake fishing with his friend. Your mother said no. He wasn’t a strong swimmer.”

  Daddy found a log and sat down. “When he didn’t show up for supper, your mother got worried and called his friend’s house. She found out they had gone fishing anyway, so her husband drove out to the lake.

  “Robert’s friend later said that he and Robert had been goofing off, standing in the boat and all. When it overturned, Robert panicked. His friend tried to help him but couldn’t get him to the boat. Robert went under, and that’s when his father saw them. He tried to swim to them but never made it to the boat. Turned out he had a heart attack trying to save his boy.”

  “Holy cow!” I let that sink in for a minute. “How old was Robert?”

  “Fourteen years old. Still a baby.”

  I bridled at that.

  “I didn’t know your mother then, of course. When she came here to Maywood that was all behind her. But every spring reminds her of her loss and she gets the blues.”

  Daddy looked hard at me and said, “Your mother was so grief-stricken after losing both her husband and Robert the same day that she doesn’t even remember their funerals. All this has been more than she could deal with.”

  I tried to imagine how awful it would feel to be so upset that you wouldn’t even remember a funeral.

  Daddy went on. “She moved to Maywood to get a new start. That’s when I met her.” He stood and picked up the sack of mushrooms. “I don’t want anyone tearing the scabs off those wounds of hers. Promise me you won’t talk about this to your mother.”

  “I promise,” I said. But I didn’t promise I wouldn’t ask Nanna.

  When he dropped me off at the house, I ran in and threw the sack of mushrooms on the counter. “Nanna, tell me about Robert.”

  She must have been wanting to talk about him for a long time because she didn’t shush me at all.

  “That scamp.” She lowered herself into a kitchen chair, shaking her head as she sat there remembering. “Robert was handsome as the devil and every bit as mischievous. He was always u
p to something, like the time he climbed the water tower.”

  “Water tower!”

  “When your mother got married, she moved from Michigan to Ohio. She didn’t work then, so she didn’t need me. I was staying with my sister, Louise, but your mother wrote to me often, so I knew a lot about Robert’s escapades. This one happened when he was a couple years older than you. It seems the boys in town would climb the water tower and paint their names on the side of it. Robert was too young for that, and it’s a dangerous thing to do at any age. But he decided he would do it someday anyway, so he might as well do it when he was twelve. That would make him the youngest boy ever to climb the water tower.”

  Robert was taking on heroic proportions in my mind.

  “Once he was spotted, a crowd gathered to watch. Your mother heard all the commotion, came outside, and saw a boy climbing the tower. When she found out it was Robert, she nearly fainted. She stood waiting, barely daring to breathe until Robert’s feet were planted back on Ohio soil. She was mad at him and said she cried something awful, probably from fear and relief that he was safe.”

  I thought about that. It was one thing for Nanna to be smitten with Robert. Nanna loved lots of people. It was another to imagine Mother so worried about him that she would cry “something awful.” I didn’t know of one tear she’d ever shed over me. I wondered why Mother cared so much about Robert. Was it because he was a boy?

  Nanna leaned close and said, “You’ll never believe what he did next.”

  She didn’t notice what her words were doing to me. She was too wrapped up in her story.

  “Lydia?” Nanna asked. “Are you listening to me?”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am.”

  “Robert was sent to his room, but he climbed out his bedroom window and sneaked the clothes basket off the back porch. He went around the neighborhood filling that basket with every yellow flower he could find: daylilies, daffodils, even dandelions. He knew how much your mother loved flowers, especially yellow ones.”

  It made me feel funny that Robert had known Mother loved yellow flowers and I hadn’t.

  “Then he set the basket of flowers on the front porch with a note stuck on top that said, ‘I wanted to do it, so I did it. I just never meant to make you cry.’”

  Nanna took off her glasses and dabbed her eyes with the corner of her apron. She said, “Now, how could you stay mad at a kid like that?”

  Nanna had raised me since I was a baby. I knew she loved me, but if you looked up the word “strict” in the dictionary, you’d see Nanna’s picture. If I got into trouble, then sneaked out after she’d sent me to my room, she’d probably put bars on my window. Yet Robert could do what he did, leave a note that didn’t even say he was sorry, and Nanna couldn’t stay mad at him. I felt glad he wasn’t around anymore.

  Nanna wiped her floury hands on her apron and walked over to the cabinet that held her cookie tins. She took down one of the tins, pulled out a picture, folded it in half, and ripped it in two.

  “Nanna! What are you doing?”

  She handed me half of the picture and said, “I’m showing you your brother.”

  My brother! The bitterness I was feeling toward Robert eased when she used the word “brother.” I hadn’t thought of him as that. Just a part of Mother’s life a long time ago.

  The picture showed a smiling boy squatting on one knee and holding a trophy of some sort. He had the same dark, wavy hair I do, but the thing that set me back on my heels was Robert’s eyes. In the picture they looked almost white, as if there wasn’t any color at all. My eyes are a light blue, but some people call them gray. I was thinking how Robert looked so much like me, we could be brother and sister. I laughed out loud when I realized how funny that was.

  I’d almost hated Robert a few minutes before, but thinking of him as my brother changed things somehow. I hugged the picture to me as if I’d been given a new toy. But I was still puzzled by what Nanna had done. “Why did you tear the picture in half?”

  “It’s the only one I have, and it was taken with his daddy. We don’t have any business discussing him.”

  I didn’t see what that had to do with anything, but I didn’t really pay it any mind at the time. I kept my promise to Daddy and never mentioned Robert’s name to Mother. And I put my picture of him in an envelope taped under my sock drawer so she wouldn’t accidentally stumble across it.

  * * *

  I’d thought a lot about Robert in the two years since that day. At first I couldn’t wait to tell Rae Anne. She had a big brother, Darryl. She used to fight with him when they were younger, but that all changed when Darryl went into the army. Darryl never got cross with Rae Anne anymore, and he looked tall and handsome in his uniform—a regular Elvis Presley, straight out of the movie G.I. Blues. When he came home on leave, he’d put the top down on his convertible and take us girls for rides in his car as he cruised around visiting old friends. Rae Anne and I would pretend we were Audrey Hepburn and put scarves around our hair, wear sunglasses, and crank the radio up as loud as it would go.

  I had always wanted a big brother just like Rae Anne’s. Here Nanna had just handed me one. Yet I couldn’t get the words out when I tried to tell Rae Anne about Robert. Keeping him to myself made him seem as if he were just mine somehow.

  Whenever something happened that made me feel I could use a little courage, like my run-in with Ratboy, for instance, I sneaked my picture of Robert out of its hiding place and talked to him. Knowing about Robert made me braver somehow. It made me feel that, even if I couldn’t exactly touch him, I wasn’t alone.

  * * *

  “Lydia! Your breakfast is getting cold.”

  I opened my eyes when I heard Nanna’s voice. I rolled over to look at the clock and the back of my head throbbed. The pain brought back the memory of Ratboy pulling my hair last night. I rubbed my head and tried to look at the clock again. There was Robert’s picture on my nightstand. I had drifted off to sleep before I put it back. I grabbed the picture and jumped up. For two years, I had kept my promise to Daddy not to mention Robert to Mother, and I didn’t aim to break that promise now.

  I hurried over and pulled open my sock drawer. Before tucking the picture back in the envelope underneath, I took one more look at my brother. I rubbed my finger over his face and said, “If the same blood that runs in your veins runs in mine, how can I let a little thing like a no-account bully scare me?”

  That thought got me dressed and ready to meet Ratboy face-to-face.

  4

  “I’m sure our new neighbors are busy enough without having to entertain on their second day here.” Mother was still in her bathrobe.

  “It’s a friendly gesture, Evelyn. It’s just what you do when you have new neighbors,” Nanna said.

  “Well, I plan to spend the morning writing an article about the Free Show while it’s still fresh in my mind.” Mother sat down with her legal pad and pencil. Nanna’s orders didn’t carry the same weight with Mother that they did me.

  Nanna just said, “Suit yourself,” and let it go. I wished she’d say “Suit yourself” to me just once in my life, especially today. Instead, by nine o’clock she had me standing on the Merrills’ front porch, with a scrubbed face and holding the applesauce cake.

  “Yes?” Mrs. Merrill answered the knock.

  Nanna said, “How do! I’m Lydia Baldwin and I live next door, but please call me Nanna—everyone does.”

  “Oh … hello!”

  “What’s all that racket?” a deep voice bellowed from inside the house.

  Mrs. Merrill’s face turned beet red and instead of inviting us in, she slid out onto the porch and quickly closed the screen door behind her. I didn’t know where those people were from, but not inviting a person into your home was a downright insult in Maywood. Nanna pretended not to notice and kept on talking.

  “This is my niece, Lydia Carson—my namesake.” Nanna threw that in whenever she could. “And we just wanted to welcome you to our little town by bringing this
cake over.”

  “Oh, gracious! Thank you so much!” For someone who hadn’t seemed all that friendly, Mrs. Merrill sure was tickled by that cake.

  “Boys! Beth! Come here, please.”

  The moment I’d been dreading came when Ratboy showed up with a taller boy and a little girl.

  Mrs. Merrill said, “I’m Carolyn Merrill.” She put her hands on the little girl’s shoulders and said, “And this is Elizabeth. We call her Beth.” She pointed to the boys and said, “This is Elliot and his brother, Willis.”

  So Ratboy’s name was Willis. I kept my eyes on Elliot, the older boy, but I was tuned into Ratboy more than if I’d looked straight at him.

  “Hi, Elliot,” I said.

  His mouth turned up on one side in a half smile and he said, “Hi.”

  Then I turned to Willis. He just looked right back at me. No way was I going to be friendly to that maniac.

  Nanna nudged me forward. “Aren’t you going to say hello?”

  If I acted nasty or said what was really on my mind, Nanna would drag me home by my ear. I finally just nodded. A nod would be easy to take back if need be, but a “Hello” was something altogether different. Ratboy nodded back.

  “Elliot, would you bring out the kitchen chairs,” Mrs. Merrill said in a low voice. Then she stood there beaming at us, as if not inviting people into your home was the most normal thing in the world. The oldest boy, Elliot, quietly took the cake inside and brought out two kitchen chairs.

  The porch ran across the whole front of the house. Elliot set the chairs at one end, under the hooks where Rae Anne’s grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Ogle, used to hang their porch swing in the summer. Seeing those hooks made me long for Mrs. Ogle and Rae Anne.

  “Carolyn, I need to go now,” Elliot said. Then he turned to Nanna. “Nice meetin’ ya, ma’am.”

  He nodded at me and ran down the steps. I hoped Willis would excuse himself next. No such luck. He sat like a lump on the other end of the porch, so I moved to the steps and sat there. The little girl, Beth, ran over and sat close to me. I figured she wanted to get as far away from Willis as she could, too.