“I’m almost out of money! I shouldn’t be telling you this, but we’re broke, I don’t have anyone to watch Jubie while I work, and I don’t have a job. I guess I need to find a social service office that can maybe help us with food stamps and rent, although I’m not sure they’ll do that when I’m not employed. Our bank account is close to empty. I thought we had more savings, what with Dash’s book business pay, but I guess not. I tried calling my parents, but they have no phone listed now. No phone and no address. Probably just as well — I can’t imagine exposing my babies to all the meanness and fighting in that household. I don’t have any other family, and you know Dash doesn’t. What’re we gonna do?” She reached for the dish towel to wipe tears away; they’d stopped buying tissues the week before.
“Sum,” Early whispered.
Her mother looked up and tilted her head. “You can talk, Jubie’s busy.” “Vroom, vroom” came from the corner.
Early blurted quickly, “I was reading one night last week when Dash came in from book business. He pulled some paper money out of his pocket and added it to an envelope hidden in one of the encyclopedia stacks. Then he saw that I saw and told me not to tell. He said it was a surprise for you and he didn’t want me to get him in trouble. I promised him, but now …” Her voice wobbled into silence.
Her mom’s face was hard to figure out. She looked partly pleased and partly shocked. “He was hiding it?” she asked.
Early shrugged, wiping her nose on the back of her hand. “We hide Christmas presents from each other every year, right?”
“Right,” said Summer, her voice sounding stronger. “And you were right to tell me. I know you promised, but that was before …” She grabbed for the dish towel again and turned away, shaking her head. “This is all such a bad dream,” Sum whispered. “Where is he?”
Early patted her mom’s back, and Sum spun around and hugged her daughter tight, resting her cheek on the top of Early’s head.
“Dash would want us to do this,” Sum said slowly, her voice flat. She pulled scissors from the kitchen drawer and Early pointed to the volume with a swell at the edge of its pages. Sum clipped the caution tape holding the stack, pulled out the book, and flipped it open. Early watched as Sum peered cautiously into the envelope, her eyes bigger by the second.
“Dear God,” she said. “What was your father up to?”
Crash
“You got money, Sum!” shouted Jubie, dropping his truck in excitement. “You! Got! Mahhhney! Let’s get some cookies! Right now!”
“Shhhh,” said Summer and Early at the same time. In the excitement over the envelope, neither had thought about hiding the discovery from Jubie.
Summer turned her back to the kids, and standing over the kitchen sink, counted the stack of bills. “Well, I’ll be,” was all she muttered. She looked out the window at the blank wall. “What on earth …”
Early, wanting to see, too, but realizing she had to distract Jubie, took him into bed to read aloud. “I’m reading tonight, Jubie,” she said, feeling suddenly like she and her mother were in a new place together. “And I’m sure you and Sum can get some yummy cookies tomorrow.”
Jubie squinted up at her. “What, you think you got big because we got money?” he asked. “Hey, Early, think Sum’ll get me a new truck with that? And hey, I want Dash to take me to pick out a truck! Only Dash!” His voice cracked suddenly, and Early hurried to open the book. It was Need a House? Call Ms. Mouse!, a book about a mouse architect who designed unique homes for all kinds of creatures.
Soon Jubie was busy studying Lizard’s house. “I like that better than Fox’s house, don’t you, Early? And look, I want a sunporch and a ladder just like that! And the pulley with the handle, and the net for catching bugs.”
After Jubie was fast asleep, Early tiptoed into the kitchen. Sum was still standing at the counter. “Early. You gotta think hard now. We need all your good memory and brains. You know how you and Dash had time in the evenings to read and stuff while I was putting Jubie to bed? What kinds of things were you guys talking about recently?”
Early sat on the counter near her mother and crossed her arms. “Well … I’m thinking. He was reading a mystery writer named Agatha Christie, and also things she said about her life. Dash put some of her ideas in the Quote Book. He said her plots were very clever, that sometimes all the clues were right in front of you but perfectly hidden. Hidden in plain sight. He also said she disappeared for a while, and no one could find her. Almost as if she stepped into one of her books, then stepped out again.”
“Huh,” said Summer. She pulled the Quote Book off the family bookshelf and thumbed through the recent pages.
“Listen,” she said. “Here are four from Agatha Christie.” Sum read the following aloud, adding comments:
“The popular idea that a child forgets easily is not an accurate one. Many people go right through life in the grip of an idea which has been impressed on them in very tender years. Hmmm …
“The best time to plan a book is while you’re doing the dishes. I love that one!
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. Oh, yes! Don’t we know it.
“Very few of us are what we seem.”
Here Summer frowned, a sudden crease crumpling the hopeful expression on her face. Neither she nor Early said anything for a moment.
Sum repeated the words slowly, and the frown lifted. “Aw, he was talking about being so much smarter than the job he was doing. I know it. He had so many creative ideas, and wasn’t able to use them all at work, not yet —” She stopped, quickly adding, “He has so much brainpower, you know? He just hasn’t had an opportunity to show the world yet. That’s all that quote meant.”
Early nodded, but both went to sleep in worried silence, a space heavy with questions and sadness. Was it really okay that she’d broken her promise to Dash? What if she and Sum were wrong? And how much money was in that envelope? She knew Sum was shocked by the amount, and wondered why … but no, she didn’t want to hear any more of Dash’s secret, no! No, no, no.
“If only Dash would walk in that door,” Summer said, into the dark.
“He will, Sum,” said Early, from the other side of the screen. “And meanwhile, he’d want us to use that money to eat, don’t you think? He’d understand that we had to ruin his surprise.”
“Of course he would, baby,” said Sum. Her tone made Early’s eyes fill with tears; it sounded the way their family always used to feel.
Crash
The next morning Summer pulled the envelope out from under her mattress, and while she made herself and Early tidy French braids, a ’do that always left them both feeling extra ready, she told her the plan.
“While you’re in school, Jubie and I will go downtown to the library and surprise them with a visit. I’ve only been back once since the day Dash disappeared, and now I’d like to ask a few careful questions.”
Early’s stomach tightened into a worried knot. A burp of breakfast cereal came back up her throat. “You telling?” she blurted. “About, you know …”
“I don’t want to. Not yet. Dash earned this extra for us by doing some smart work outside of his library job. The library may not have realized he was even doing it, and rightly so. None of their business. You know, he was so good at seeing an opportunity. He may have been on his way to earning us a home before he even got to library school!”
“But, Sum,” Early said, “you don’t think Dash got himself in trouble with — with — bad guys or anything, do you? Remember when you and Dash were talking about the book business and you were — well — kinda worried?”
“Early!” Summer spun her around. “Don’t you allow that thought into your head, and I won’t allow it into mine. Your father was way too smart and far too good for that.”
“But … where is he?”
Summer took a deep breath then slowly blew it out. “That’s why I’m going back to the library. The police don’t seem to believe us when we say that Dash wa
s not a man to run away or get himself into hot water. So Jubie and I will do a little detective work on our own.”
“Don’t you want me there?”
“Always! But one look at that sweet little face of yours and they’ll see you’re all ears! I want the staff and librarians to tell me anything that comes to mind, you know?”
Early nodded. “Will you remember it all and tell me later?”
“Absolutely.”
Early was quiet while her mom finished the braid. She thought of her dad’s note about a beat of 3s … she’d give anything for them to be a four again.
What should I do, Dash? she asked silently. Holding her breath, she waited.
The room was silent, and her head felt empty. The only sounds were her mother’s breathing, the shhhh of the brush in her hair, and the click-click of Jubie’s truck as it rolled over the linoleum tiles.
Crash
Lunchtime that day brought a surprise. Early had hurried off to the library room, wanting a book about Langston Hughes. Hungry for his company, she hoped that his words might somehow bring Dash closer. She found only an old, worn collection of Langston’s poetry, one that hadn’t been checked out for ages. She noticed inside the cover that the poet had died in 1967, almost fifty years ago. She was surprised. Dash had made him seem so alive, sharing lots of details about the man’s life and some of his got-soul, gotta-sing-it poems. Now she realized something else about Langston: He liked the word dream.
He used it a lot. So did Dash.
She wished she had the family Quote Book to write in, but opened her school notebook instead and copied down parts of poems that caught her eye. This was something that Dash had taught her was okay: You could pick out what felt surprising in a book or a poem and then save it, as long as you also wrote down the name of the person who wrote it first.
“The quote root, kind of like the word roots in a dictionary,” Early had said.
“Exactly.” Dashel had beamed. “You are one girl who’s putting down her own roots! The deeper you go, the finer you grow,” he’d said, and laughed. “Hey, like my sit-up rhyme? Maybe one day someone will quote a Pearl!”
“Yeah! Sit up!” Early had said, held in the warm rhythm of her father’s language.
The first poem Early kept that day in the library was one called “The Dream Keeper.” It was about gathering and protecting dreams, wrapping them in “blue cloud-cloth” to keep them safe from the “too-rough fingers” of the world. She wondered if a page from one of their family notebooks, a page of dreams, could find its way to the Keeper.
Then she copied a poem called “I Dream a World,” in which Langston dreamed of people of all races being able to share the riches of the earth equally, a world in which joy was like a pearl. Early swallowed hard, and kept reading.
Next she found a poem called “Dream Dust,” which Early knew her father would also treasure. Langston was saying that dream dust, drawn magically from stars, earth, clouds, storms, and splinters of hail, from good and bad times, should never be for sale.
Now she was hunting, and found a long and leafy poem, “For Russell and Rowena Jelliffe” — one that seemed to twirl and fly even as it talked of roots and trunks and dreams. Early’s favorite lines were:
And so the root
Becomes a trunk
And then a tree
And seeds of trees
And springtime sap
And summer shade
And autumn leaves
And shape of poems
And dreams —
And more than tree.
And so it is
With those who make
Of life a flower,
A tree, a dream.
These first four poems sang, soothing her heart, but Early crashed back to reality with the next. The title was simply “Dreams.” Cold and dark, far from a joyful, sit-up message, it felt more like a warning:
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
She looked out the library window. Snow was falling lightly, catching in feathery, winglike drifts on the sills of the brown-stone opposite. Each drift seemed filled with air, the edges tapering to a whisper where they met stone. But if those were wings, Early noted, their birds were in trouble.
Wing. Root. Home. Dream. All of those Langston-y words sounded like what they meant: wing almost weightless, root digging down, and dream soaring. Dreeeeeam … It had a smooth, shiny sound.
Roots + Wings + Dreams = Home, Early thought suddenly to herself, sitting up straighter in her chair. Dig down, fly high, remember where you want to go, and one day you’ll get there: Roots + Wings + Dreams = Home! That was an arithmetic sum that her Dash would approve of, she thought, with a little wriggle of pride. Having been uprooted many times as a kid, Dash didn’t take a strong beginning lightly. Neither did Langston. And language, for both, was the key to survival.
The key …
In the next moment, clear as the snap of a carrot or the clap of a closing book, she heard Dashel’s voice: You my girl, Early. Hold fast to dreams. You can do this. Not as hard as it seems.
Early froze, her pencil in the air. She looked around the library. A boy, working nearby, didn’t seem to have heard a thing. A shocked shiver made her twist quickly and look behind herself; she peeked under the table. Nothing but her legs.
She nodded. One hand over her mouth, she whispered, “I will, Dash. I promise.”
And then the thrill of hearing his voice spiraled downward into a dark pool of dread. Did that mean … She wouldn’t even allow the thought into words. She pushed it away.
Push, push, push: Dash was fine, and had somehow sent her a message. But what did he want her to do?
She glanced at her page of Langston dream quotes, the letters now blurring through tears. With Dash, life was a step-by-step adventure, one in which the colors were sharp and the path clear. Everything felt valuable. Important. Lucky. Ripe with dreams. Worth experiencing, whether it was a poem or a neighborhood — each day mattered.
Now Early realized that a light had gone out, and the three Pearls were lost.
She was late for her next class. Leaving Langston’s dreams on the table, Early ran.
Crash
When Sum and Jubie picked her up outside school that afternoon, she knew, in a dreadful thunk, that something had gone wrong. Jubie handed her two animal crackers from a box he was holding under his chin, saying, “Look, Early! My own box! Sum got it for me, and there’s hippos inside! And I also got a new blue truck! I’m keeping it safe in my pocket till we’re home, no losing for me!”
It had stopped snowing but was cruelly cold outside. Jubie’s coat was partly unzipped, and goo from his nose ran down his upper lip. Sum didn’t seem to notice, which wasn’t like her at all.
“Oh, Early!” she said. “Everything went wrong. Let’s get home.” They walked the next three blocks in silence, except for Jubie’s pleased animal chirpings. “A tiger, grrrrr … Ooh-ooh, a monkey with no head! Want that one, Early?”
“Sure,” she’d said quietly. What went wrong? She was afraid to know.
Once inside their apartment, Sum checked the lock on the door twice, and then told Jubie he could listen to a CD and also play with his new truck. She washed his hands, wiped his face, put away the box of crackers, and set him up on a pillow at the other side of the room.
She and Early stood by the kitchen sink, facing away from Jubie. Summer’s hands went out, fingers spread; her eyebrows and eyes went up; her mouth went down. She squinched her eyes in two quick blinks, but the tears rolled anyway.
“Oh, Sum!” Early hugged her mother, tucking her head into Sum’s neck. Summer was crying hard now, her chest heaving. She hugged her daughter back, a long squeeze, and turned away to grab the dish towel.
>
“Miss having tissues around here.” She tried to smile. “Oh, Early. I’m so sorry, baby. I don’t know what to do next. And I might’ve gotten us into hot water now. Really hot. People know about the money!” Her voice rose to a squeak. “Stupid of me! And I don’t think I’ve even learned anything new to help us find your father. I can’t think. I feel bad talking to you, but it wouldn’t be right not to. It’s just us three right now, and I need your help. Can’t think straight, my mind is just a mess! A mess, and Dash’s not here to make it okay!” The tears poured again.
“Tell me, Sum.” Early tried to sound calm and grown-up, but inside she was covering her ears, screaming, NO! No more! I’m just a kid!
Her mother told her.
After Summer and Jubie had left that morning, they’d gone to the neighborhood bank. Dashel had opened an account a couple of years earlier.
Not wanting to use the deposit function on a cash machine, Summer waited for a teller, Jubie next to her. She had been to the bank the day after Dashel vanished, and was surprised that the account was so low — only $110. She’d withdrawn all but ten dollars, which was needed to keep the account open. Dash had handed her an everyday-expenses envelope each week at home and they’d always paid the rent in cash, so she had no idea how low their account had gotten.
That was the first shock, but she’d explained it away. And now, standing in line, Summer wondered if there was a reason Dash hadn’t deposited that envelope of money. Why was it hidden at home?
Grabbing Jubie’s hand, she’d left the bank. But on the ride down to the public library, the envelope with cash still buried deep in her purse, she turned the bank question around in her head. What had Dashel been doing? Was he planning to put cash into his book business, believing it was going to make them lots more but not wanting to worry her? And what exactly was that business? What kind of person was in charge? And why would her dear husband hide all that information from her? Summer had never known they had any real secrets — only the happy kind. And she knew that if Dashel had hidden something from her, it was only to protect Dashsumearlyjubie. But from what?
Hold Fast (9780545510196) Page 3
