by Jen Bryant
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
For more than forty years,…
Part 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Part 2
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Part 3
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Part 4
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Acknowledgments
Also by Jen Bryant
Other Yearling Books You Will Enjoy
Copyright
For—
Leigh, Jeffrey, Rachel, Michael, Maddie Jo, and Miles…
and for young artists everywhere
“Live your life. Write your life. Paint your life…
very few people do that. They’re scared of it.”
—Andrew Wyeth
For more than forty years, Yearling has been the leading name in classic and award-winning literature for young readers.
Yearling books feature children’s favorite authors and characters, providing dynamic stories of adventure, humor, history, mystery, and fantasy.
Trust Yearling paperbacks to entertain, inspire, and promote the love of reading in all children.
part 1
“I was a rather silent child.”
—Jamie Wyeth
1.
Mrs. Yocum called me
down to her office today. She’s the counselor at school who I
have to go to once a week ’cause I’m on
some “At Risk” list that I saw once on the secretary’s desk.
(Ronnie Kline, Marianne Ferlinghetti, Sam Katzenbach,
Danita Brown—and some others I forget—are on it, too.)
Most of them have substance abuse next to their names,
but I have financial/single parent—father/possible medical?
next to mine.
Anyway, when Mrs. Yocum called me in, I sat
in her big green chair, and she sat
across from me in her big blue chair—
blinking at me like a mother owl through her oversize glasses—
and it all started off as it usually does,
with her asking me about my stomachaches
and if I had raised my hand more often in class
and if there was anything particular on my mind I thought
I needed to talk about.
Then all of a sudden she asked me if I
miss you. She never
asked me that before, and I couldn’t make the words
come out of my mouth, they seemed to be
stuck in my throat, or maybe they were just tangled up
with the rabbit I seemed to have swallowed
that started kicking the sides of my stomach,
desperate to get out.
I guess it must have been four or five minutes we sat there,
her making notes in her folder
and me with that rabbit
thrashing around my insides and still no
words coming out.
I started to draw on the top of my binder,
like it seems I always do
when I don’t know what else to do, so I
didn’t notice that she was trying to hand me
a red leather notebook (this very one I’m writing in),
and she said: “Georgia, why don’t we make
a deal? I will excuse you
from coming to Guidance for a while, provided—
you promise to write down your thoughts and feelings
at least a few times a week
in this diary. You don’t have to show it to me, or to anybody,
unless you want to,
and it might be a good idea if you tried—sometimes, or
all the time if you want—
to write down what you might tell, or what you might ask,
your mother
if she were here.”
So, Momma, that’s how I’ve come to start
writing to you in this pretty red leather diary
that I keep in the drawer of my nightstand.
But I’m not sure what I’m going to tell you, ’cause my life
is not all that interesting, but anyway
it will fill
a few minutes after school
or maybe that half hour or so after dinner,
after homework, after doing the dishes,
when I’m stretched out in the back of our trailer and Daddy
is trying to keep the TV down so I can fall asleep
but loud enough so he can still watch
whatever game is on
and I’m trying to remember what it was like six years ago
when we were a family
and Daddy was happy
and you were here.
2.
Today I turned thirteen.
As usual for mid-February, it snowed a little bit, then the
sun came out like a tease, ’cause it never got above
thirty-two degrees.
As usual, it was just me and Daddy having my birthday dinner
at the fold-down table in the kitchen.
I said I could make chicken, baked potatoes, and peas,
but he brought home a pizza after work
(with anchovies and green peppers)
and we ate it right out of the box so it’d stay hot,
’cause it wouldn’t fit inside our oven.
Then Daddy carried in a cake
he’d been hiding in the closet, but when he
uncovered it, he got mad
because a heat vent was right next to it
and the icing around the edges melted
and the “Happy Birthday” ran all
over the middle until it looked like
a big pink puddle.
But I didn’t mind. Last year
he forgot my birthday altogether until
he saw the mail and the annual
$20 bill from Great-Uncle Doug in Atlanta.
The cake was good—chocolate with chocolate icing.
I had seconds and Daddy did, too, and I know
you would’ve joined us.
Afterward, I went through the mail and I
got a card and the $20 bill from Gre
at-Uncle Doug.
The card had a clown and balloons and was really made
for a little kid, but still,
it was nice of him to remember.
Daddy gave me those jeans I’d seen in the Army Navy Store,
a new pair of shoes,
and a “blank inside” card like he always does,
one with a flower on the front, same as always,
and his big, slanted lettering inside:
Georgia—
Happy Birthday.
Daddy
Can I tell you something, Momma?
Every year since you died, I’ve been waiting for him
to write Love, Daddy inside,
but after all this time
I think I should wake up and stop
my dreaming.
3.
Today when the bus let me off at the end of the lane,
I pulled the mail out of the split
wooden box that says “Kesey/McCoy”
and still has the “19 Slipstream Road” I painted on it
when The Oaks development went up beside us
and all of a sudden
even those of us who’d been here for years
got assigned new numbers. (We still live in our same trailer,
but not long after you died, Daddy decided
to move us out of the trailer park,
where there were lots of good people but also
a few of the other kind. Now we live on a sixty-acre horse farm
near Longwood, where it’s a lot safer for me
to stay alone when he’s working.)
Anyway, in the mailbox there was a long cream-colored
envelope addressed to Miss Georgia McCoy
and up in the left-hand corner, in dark brown ink:
The Brandywine River Museum, Route 1, Chadds Ford, PA 19317.
I thought maybe it was
a mistake. Not counting Great-Uncle Doug’s birthday card
and the postcard I get every August from school
with my new bus number on it, I get exactly
zero mail. But there was nothing else
written on it. I flipped it over a few times, read
my name and address again, then
opened it.
Inside, there was this strange
formal letter, all typed up and neat, that said:
Dear Miss McCoy:
Enclosed please find your annual membership card, which entitles you to all privileges listed below and which expires one year from date of purchase.
The letter said I was entitled to
free admission anytime the museum was open, plus
“a ten percent discount to the museum shop.”
At the bottom, it said:
This Brandywine gift is from:___________
And on that blank line, someone had typed
anonymous.
I put it in my backpack, but all afternoon,
while I took Blake for a long run in the field,
and walked up to buy milk and cereal at the convenience store,
and watched Mr. Fitz, one of the horse boarders, try to
catch his mare in the pasture, and started to look up
stuff on the computer for my English paper,
I kept wondering who
anonymous was.
Well, it’s surely not Daddy. He won’t talk about
my sketching and drawing. He doesn’t try
to stop me or anything, but I can tell
he wishes I’d find something else I like to do better.
After all this time, Momma, he still doesn’t like anything
that reminds him
of you.
It’s not my art teacher, Miss Benedetto. Teachers aren’t allowed
to give gifts to students.
There’s Great-Uncle Doug in Atlanta. I’ve never met him,
but you told me once how you were his
favorite niece (I imagine him tall and slim
with a slow smile and big blue eyes).
But I don’t think he knows I like to draw, or anything at all about me,
and anyway, he already
sent my birthday money.
I don’t have any other relatives except
your folks,
who have never sent me anything,
and I suppose they don’t even know
where we live.
I was going to show the letter to Daddy before dinner, but he was
worn-out when he got home. He and his crew
are working at a new construction site out in Lancaster County.
He leaves about 5:30 in the morning
and doesn’t get back until 7:00 at night. He says
the houses are selling as fast as they can build them,
and with spring coming,
they’re putting them up quick.
He brought me a photo of the model home,
and I could not believe
how huge it was. It was even bigger than
my friend Tiffany’s house. (She lives in the development
next to us, where the houses are large enough for four families
and you have to be real careful you go into
your own front door ’cause each house
has the same driveway, the same lawn, the same
scraggly trees out front,
and mostly the same kinds of cars in the garage.)
Daddy and me—we don’t
talk much anyway, but when he’s that tired, we
hardly talk at all.
It’s not that we don’t get along. I mean, we don’t
fight or anything. But you know how quiet Daddy was even
when you were here?
Well, he’s even quieter now.
And since I’ve started growing up a little, you know,
“exhibiting the early signs of puberty”
(that’s straight out of our seventh-grade health book, Chapter 11),
it’s like suddenly I’m from a different country
even though we’ve been living in this little trailer,
just the two of us—
and your crazy dog, Blake, of course—
for the past six years.
Anyway, I decided it was not a good night
to bring up that membership. I’m gonna wait
until tomorrow—I’m sure that’ll be
a much better time.
4.
In art class, we saw slides
of oil paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe. Miss Benedetto told us
how the artist grew up on a farm in Wisconsin
and then moved to Virginia
(and later her mother died there, too)
and then to Texas, where she fell in love with
all that open space (she especially loved the thunderstorms),
and then to New York, where she painted the Hudson River
and skyscrapers as dark and tall as canyon walls,
but the place she loved best
was the wide, dry desert and red clay hills
of New Mexico.
Most of the slides were of flowers—really big ones—
like lilies and peonies and orchids.
Michael Stitt, who sits behind me,
kept whispering about the center of the flowers looking like
our health class handouts for “The Male Anatomy,”
and everybody started giggling until Miss Benedetto told him
he’d have to stay in for detention
and draw some just like that
unless he shut up fast.
I thought the flowers were good, but I liked
the bone paintings best. All those skulls and hips and ribs—
she painted them so smooth and clean, it made me
want to touch them.
Miss B. let us look at a bunch of Georgia O’Keeffe books
that she brought from home
with more paintings of mons
ter-size flowers,
bones and skulls, and sometimes flowers and bones together.
There was one of a cow’s skull
that reminded me of a page in your sketchbook—
the one with with your name, Tamara Speare,
stamped in gold on the front—
that Daddy keeps in his truck.
There was another picture, of black pears in a bowl,
and one of a cottonwood tree,
and I know you sketched those, too.
All this time I thought you and Daddy named me
for the state you were both born and raised in,
but when I looked in those books
and remembered your sketches, I wondered
if maybe you named me Georgia
for the artist who painted flowers and bones
so that you see them fresh,
like they are secret worlds you can lose yourself inside
if the real one gets too bad.
Momma, I am sure
that’s the very first thing I’d ask,
if you were here.
5.
The Oaks is the development next to us
where Tiffany lives. The builders named it for
the grove of giant trees that used to grow there before
the bulldozers mowed them down.
Last spring, when Tiffany moved in with her family,
there was no one else in the whole development.
We met by the pond, when she was wandering around
and I was trying to sketch the old icehouse
and the water with the geese drifting
like slow white ghosts among the lilies.
She sat right down next to me and started talking, telling me
all about where she’d lived (five different states,
and for one year in Mexico)
and how she was almost thirteen—
older than most kids in sixth grade—
and how she was going to try out for all the sports teams at school
and asking did I know of any place where she could buy
a new lacrosse stick
and what kind of horses were grazing in the field
