Dandelion Summer

by Lisa Wingate

  When I listened to the lady telling her story, I could relate to not being welcome someplace. I liked the idea that God might take that very thing that stunk the worst about your life and change it around into something good.

  “I worked in the back at a dry cleaner’s.” Her voice was crackly and old. “When I was done at the end of the day, the man would let me use the sewin’ machine, and I’d alter up dresses for all the black women who couldn’t return them to the stores—for lots of white women, too, who couldn’t fit the sizes, and such. But the black women, they wanted those dresses to fit so they could look good at the jazz clubs down in Deep Ellum. I saved that sewin’ money, and it wasn’t too many years before I started my own little store.”

  She looked around the room then, and her eyes got misty, and she said we kids oughta remember there was a time when some folks had it a lot harder than others. I couldn’t see how things were so different now. The upscale neighborhoods in Blue Sky Hill weren’t all lily white anymore, but you could be sure their kids didn’t wear our kind of clothes, or get free lunches at the Summer Kitchen, or pick up used books and magazines down at the Book Basket store, or go to the public school. These days, it wasn’t about what color you were, but how much money you had. The same, only different. It was still people not wanting to be with people who weren’t their kind.

  I wasn’t the kind to be heading up the sidewalks of Blue Sky Hill, but Mama’d told me that if I didn’t make some money to pay for the damages at the church, I could just get out of her house. After that, she warned me about the man, Mr. J. Norman Al-vord. She wanted me to practice saying his name right. I wasn’t about to practice some stupid rich guy’s stupid name, but I didn’t want to end up out on the street either. DeRon had asked me to come with him after basketball practice, and part of me, the Epie part, thought about chucking the Blue Sky Hill job and hanging out with DeRon. I’d started to think that, if I was DeRon’s girlfriend, the rest of the kids in that school might leave me alone.

  But there I was, lugging my backpack while the private school kids in their nice cars drove by and stared at me like I was an alien from another planet. Guess I wasn’t as much Epie as I thought, because I was afraid not to show up for the job.

  Just because you’re showin’ up don’t mean you gotta do the job, Epie whispered in my ear. You let this old man know you ain’t the help. Let him find some other sucker to cook for him and clean up his nasty mess. Who’s he think he is, anyway? You ain’t his aunt Jemima. . . .

  What I really wanted to do was go on home. I could have the whole place to myself. After hanging around all weekend, Russ was supposed to pack up his piece-of-junk trailer and head out to a knife and gun show tonight. That was Russ’s job, if you could call it that—selling weapons and T-shirts and Harley stuff at gun shows and flea markets. Usually, jobs were supposed to actually make money, but Russ spent about as much as he brought in. Right now, Mama was on Russ’s case about money, which was good, because it’d get him out of the house. I’d had to crawl into Mama’s bedroom while he was sleeping to take the Someday Book from under the bed. Tonight, after he left and Mama was gone to the temp job, I was headed for the closet to see what else was in there.

  I found Mr. J. Norman Al-vord’s house, and, sure enough, it was high-dollar. The place was old, like most of the houses on Blue Sky Hill. They’d all been put there by folks who got rich off oil back in the roaring twenties or something—the history teacher told us about it—and not far away, there’d be streets crammed full of little houses where the maids and the cooks and the gardeners had lived. You can guess which of those streets was ours.

  Who in the world needed three built-in garages and another one out by the street, anyway? The house was like a redbrick castle, three stories high, with about a million long windows that had fancy colored glass around the edges. Other than being a TV star or playing for the Dallas Cowboys, what did a person do to get a house like that? Even the garage out by the street looked like good digs, with a place for cars underneath and an apartment up top. It was, like, twice the size of our place.

  One of these days, I’m gonna live in a house like that, I thought. Epie laughed in my head and said, Girl, you trippin’. You better just turn your little bubble butt around and head on back to your own neighborhood. It ain’t even healthy, looking at a house like that.

  I shut Epie down, because by then I wanted to see the inside of that house, job or no job. I’d never been in a place so big.

  I headed up the driveway, and a window blind slapped shut, then another, and another, and another. A shiver ran across my shoulders. Maybe I was at the wrong address. What if they called the police, and I got hauled off for trespassing?

  The closer I came, the more I felt like I wasn’t supposed to be there. The house had a weird vibe to it, and I got the creepy idea that someone in there was watching me. I stopped and looked at the address number again. Yup. This was it. There was a little nameplate above the house number that read, MR. AND MRS. J. NORMAN ALVORD.

  I crossed the porch and knocked on the door. Nobody answered, so I leaned close to one of the long, skinny side windows. There was a filmy curtain over it, like the veil a bride wears, so I couldn’t see much inside, except a dark hallway and the bottom of a staircase. “Hey,” I called out, and pushed the doorbell again. “Hey, I know somebody’s in there. I’m supposed to come work this afternoon.” Mama’d warned me that the old man was a real jerk, and whatever he said, I should ignore it, because his daughter was the one writing the checks. She’d even given Mama a little extra. She called it hazard pay.

  I wondered if she’d hand me money me for sitting on the porch, since I couldn’t get in the door.

  I pushed the doorbell a half dozen times in a row. Finally the locks clicked and the door swung open. The dude on the other side was pretty much what I expected—an old white guy. He was skinny and kinda stooped over, so that he just about looked me level in the eye, but I could tell he must’ve been tall before he got, like, way old. He was wearing a tank top thing, with chest hairs and droopy skin hanging out everywhere, and striped pajama pants pulled almost to his armpits. His hair, what there was of it, looked like the fuzz on a baby’s head after you pull a T-shirt on in the wintertime and the air crackles with static.

  His lips made a big ol’ frown, and he tipped his chin up, looking at me through glasses so thick, they were like the magnifier we used in science lab. He seemed like he was waiting for me to say something, and I was waiting for him, I guessed.

  “What?” he asked finally. “I told you Girl Scouts not to come here anymore.”

  That made me laugh, but he probably didn’t mean for it to. I figured he was trying to make trouble so I’d give up. But I was supposed to get twenty dollars for fixing him supper and cleaning up his kitchen—eight dollars each for two hours’ work, and another four just for walking over here from school, then riding the city bus home. That wasn’t bad money for a little cooking, and I liked to cook, because I used to do it with Mrs. Lora.

  That look he gave me made Epie pop right to the surface. She worked up some major attitude, just like the mean girls at school would’ve. Sounded like them, too. “Mister, I ain’t no Girl Scout. I’m here to cook your dinner. My mama cleaned your house yesta’day.”

  “Yes-ter-day.” He spit out the middle of that word like he was making sure I knew how to say it right. Then he looked me over again, and I could tell what he had on his mind. I’d been getting that look my whole life. You’d think it wouldn’t be too hard for people to figure how a white woman gets a brown baby, but people, especially old people, always looked at me like it was some kind of surprise.

  “Mmm-hmm, yes-ter-day af-ter-noon.” I put on the voice we’d learned in after-school enrichment last year, when we got to spend a week pretending we were news broadcasters. “Your daugh-ter said to come at four thirty.” I’m not so dumb, when I don’t want to be, but you go talking all proper around the kids in school and somebody’ll
jump you, thinking you’re trying to act like you’re too good. This old dude wouldn’t know one thing about that.

  He kept an arm stretched across from his shoulder to the doorframe, like a bar to shut me out. “I’m not hungry.”

  Mama was right about Mr. Al-vord. “Well, your daughter says you are.” I bent down, ducked under his arm, and ended up on the other side of him, in the hallway. All of a sudden, even if I didn’t want this job, I was gonna show him he couldn’t go trashin’ on me. I got a stubborn streak that doesn’t give in easy, especially not to some old rich dude with his nose in the air, telling me not to come in his big house.

  He turned around, his mouth popping open and shut like one of the little tadpoles the country boys used to catch in the creek behind my old school. They’d hold those things out of the water just to watch them squirm and try to get a breath. I never did know why they did that, but with Mr. J. Norman Alvord, it was kind of funny. He looked like he didn’t have a clue what to do now.

  He coughed, and then pulled out a hankie and coughed some more, then folded whatever he’d hocked up inside the hankie and tucked it in the waistband of his pajamas. That was about the nastiest thing I’d ever seen. And these old dudes were the ones complaining about boys wearing their pants sagging? Least people my age didn’t hock one up and keep it for later.

  “Come back another day,” he barked. “I have work to do. I’m in the middle of a project.”

  I turned my shoulder to him and went a couple more steps into the house. The hallway was big, with paintings hanging in fancy gold frames, like you’d see in a museum. Off to the right side, there was a room with flowered couches and little chairs. That room had doorways to other rooms, and then to the left, a hallway stretched way too far to be in any one person’s house. Ahead was a huge staircase with a big stained-glass window halfway up, and what looked like another big room sat off to the right. This guy was seriously loaded, but the place felt like Dracula’s castle, with all the shades pulled, shadows everywhere, and the air stale and quiet.

  “Tell you what,” I said to Mr. J. Norman Alvord. “You go do your work, and I’m gonna do my work, and we won’t bother each other, huh? House like this, you prob’ly won’t even know I’m here.”

  “Most pro-ba-bly I will,” he grumbled, pronouncing the word like I hadn’t said it good enough. Then he smacked the front door shut and headed for the stairs without saying another thing.

  “Hey, you gonna show me where the kitchen is?” I called after him, but he didn’t answer. “Guess not.”

  I stood there for a few minutes, waiting to see if he’d come back. When he didn’t, I slid my backpack down and set it on the tile. The zipper hung open where it was broke, and I could see the Someday Book inside. I’d been carrying it with me since I got it out from under the bed. It was mine, after all, and even though the ideas in it seemed stupid now—someday I’m gonna fly an airplane; someday I’m gonna have a horse; someday I’m gonna have a big bedroom with a roof thing over the bed—it was still kind of interesting, looking back at what you dreamed about in the seventh grade. Besides, if Mama found it around our place, I’d be dead for sure, because she’d know I’d been in her box.

  I wandered through the downstairs, checking out the hallway to the left. A couple bedrooms and bathrooms, and a little room with lots of bookshelves and windows, some sofas at one end, and an old pool table at the other. There were photos in the hall, the old kind with the colors faded—a little girl running in the waves on a beach, a boy playing in the sand under a palm tree, a family standing on the deck of a sailboat, smiling for the camera. Mom, dad, two kids. The perfect postcard. The sailboat was high-dollar, and the man looked enough like J. Norman that I figured out who it was. He had red hair when he was young. He wasn’t a bad-looking dude—nothing like the prune-faced guy who’d just opened the door. But the man in the picture didn’t look happy, either. The woman and the little girl and the boy were all focused on the camera, but the man was looking off a bit, like he’d pasted on a smile for the picture, but his mind wasn’t in it. I stared at it and thought, If somebody put me on a boat like that, my mind wouldn’t be anyplace else. That looked like the good life, right there.

  I wandered on past some more baby pictures and high school graduation pictures, and pictures of J. Norman and his wife. They’d gone on trips all over the world—the Great Wall of China, some pyramids like in Egypt, a big ship out in the ocean, a castle someplace. His wife had on pretty dresses in some of the old pictures, and hats to match, and little white gloves. She was as classy as an old-time movie star, with a big white smile, and red lipstick, and dark hair piled high on her head. From where I was standing, the life in those pictures was a fairy tale.

  I left the photos and went back up the hall and across the entryway, past the stairs. I could hear J. Norman up there making noise in one of the rooms. He had a TV on loud, and drawers and cabinets were slamming. Mama’d told me I was supposed to keep an eye on him, and that his daughter didn’t want him upstairs, but what was I supposed to do about it—go up there and carry the man down like a big ol’ baby? He was a grown-up, after all, and if he felt good enough to be smacking drawers around, he couldn’t be in too bad shape.

  Then I thought, Yeah, what if he fell down or something, and that’s what all the racket up there is about? I remembered when Mrs. Lora came home from the hospital the first time. The night she got back, she fell in the bathroom and was stuck beside the toilet. I had to break the door lock to get in there and help her out.

  Maybe I should check on Mr. J. Norman Grouchface Smartmouth Alvord. . . .

  Then again, if he saw me, he’d probably bite my head off for bothering him. The kitchen was a safer place, since that’s where I told him I’d be. . . .

  I tiptoed up a couple steps and listened, anyway. He was talking to someone up there . . . or talking to himself. Anyway, he wasn’t yelling for help, and so I decided he wasn’t dying or anything. I left him be and went through the rest of the downstairs. There were so many rooms there, you could get lost. I liked the front room with flowered sofas and lace curtains and a cabinet full of teacups from all over the world. Each one had a little label on the bottom telling where it came from. I could’ve stayed in that room all day, but I figured I’d better go do the job I was supposed to do.

  The kitchen was huge, with green tile countertops, a refrigerator big enough to stuff dead bodies into, and a giant brick archway with pans hanging overhead. Inside it, the shiny new stainless-steel stove looked weird, since everything else in the kitchen was old. Off to the left, a little table sat tucked back by some windows. There were bird feeders hanging all over the backyard—like, fifty of them. Birds darted in and out, checking the feeders, but they were empty and it looked like they’d been that way for a while. I wondered if the pretty lady in the pictures used to fill them. One time when we lived in Odessa, Mama and me rented a trailer house from a lady who fed the birds out back of her house. She said a free bird is good for the soul.

  There was an envelope on the counter with my name on it. I opened it and found money and a note inside. J. Norman’s daughter wrote the note, I guess. It was full of instructions, step by step, for what I was supposed to cook, and where everything was, and how to turn on the stove, and to be sure to turn it off, and where to set J. Norman’s plate, and that I was supposed to hang around and clean up after he ate. Geez. Really, as long as she must’ve spent writing all that, she could’ve just fixed him dinner herself. At the bottom, the note said, I assume your mother told you that my father is not to be climbing the stairs unassisted, under any circumstances. All necessary items have been moved downstairs for him. If he argues with you about this, please call, and I’ll talk to him. After that, there was a phone number and her name, Deborah. At the top of the page, the stationery had a fancy emblem from the college, and her full name, Deborah Lewis, PhD. She had perfect handwriting, and the strokes were deep into the paper, like she was pushing hard when she wrote.
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  Since I’d already messed up in my first thirty minutes on the job, there was no way I was gonna call her. Anyone who’d write a note like that wasn’t about to pat me on the head and tell me it was all right.

  I was supposed to make some kind of pasta for J. Norman. His daughter’d left all the ingredients in the refrigerator, chopped up in separate little baggies—onions, mushrooms, green peppers, and low-fat imitation hamburger crumbles. There was pasta and a bottle of sauce on the counter, and whole-wheat bread. The note did everything but tell me which side to butter it on. Guess Deborah didn’t know I’d been cooking since I was old enough to pull a chair up to the stove, because Mama was always too tired, and most of her boyfriends liked food on the table when they came in. I didn’t mind it so much. Once I got old enough to come home and stay by myself after school, cooking gave me something to do, and besides, I like to eat.

  J. Norman didn’t have to worry about me eating his food, though. That low-fat fake hamburger smelled nasty, even once I put the vegetables in. I looked around in the refrigerator to see if there was anything else I could add to it, and came up with a little low-fat ham. I chopped it thin and put it in, and fried it all and added the sauce. In about twenty minutes, dinner was done, and it was only four fifty-five. Now what was I gonna do with myself until six, when I was supposed to leave? Four till six Tuesdays and Thursdays. Man, this was gonna stink.