Wreath

by Judy Christie

  MORE LESSONS, she wrote.

  1. New last name is “Williams.” Forget “Willis.”

  2. Make up an address.

  3. Get a library card. (Okay, that isn’t a lesson, but I want a library card.)

  4. Take a trash sack at all times for possible summer storms. (Use as poncho as needed.)

  Maybe one day she could afford one of those snazzy raincoats with the bright boots that went with them. Maybe when she finished college or law school or got her PhD or became a doctor. She might buy Miss Clarice a pair, too, just for being so nice. Wreath flinched when she heard footsteps. Someone had walked out of the ratty trailer with the door propped open. Trying to figure out how not to look like a loiterer, she picked up her awkward accumulation of items, brushed the dirt off her shorts, and took two steps.

  She was stunned.

  Sitting on the steps of the trailer was the boy from the state park. He was drinking a canned Coke and reading. He set the soft drink down, ran his fingers through his black hair, and acted like he was playing a short song on an invisible guitar.

  A moment passed before he looked up and saw Wreath. He quickly quit pretending to play an unseen musical instrument, picked the Coke back up, and stood. His expression was a combination of embarrassment, delight, and confusion. They stared at each other for a moment, the way strangers do when sizing each other up.

  He broke the silence. “Hiking girl, right?”

  Wreath nodded and tried to figure out what to do.

  “You moved into one of these palaces?” The boy pointed to the short row of pitiful metal rectangles, grassless yards, a car up on blocks.

  Wreath didn’t reply. She adjusted her pack and sacks of supplies and decided she had been wrong about the boy being rich. His home didn’t look all that different from the Rusted Estates, although it appeared to have electricity.

  “You’re really not much of a talker, are you?” he said.

  Wreath shook her head. Her instincts told her to walk away, but loneliness, dread of the walk to the junkyard, and this guy made her want to stay.

  “I’m not real sure why you’re standing in my front yard,” he said after a minute. “Since you don’t seem all that happy to see me, I guess you didn’t come to visit.”

  Wreath shook her head again. The random spot where Clarice dropped her would turn out to be the home of the cutest boy she’d ever seen. And she was acting like a dweeb.

  “Ranger boy?” she blurted out, thunder sounding in the distance.

  He nodded, a small smile coming to his face, and took a swallow of the soft drink. She noticed he’d been reading a book of guitar music.

  “My name’s Law,” he said.

  “Law?” She laughed. “I’ve never heard that name before.”

  “It’s short for Lawson,” he mumbled. “A great-uncle’s name or something. You going to tell me your name or just stand there making fun of mine?”

  “I didn’t mean to make fun. I like unusual names.” She glanced at the book of music. “Sounds like someone in a band or something. You play the guitar?”

  He groaned. “You saw me playing air guitar, didn’t you? I was so hoping you didn’t see that.”

  She nodded.

  Law shook his bangs out of his eyes. “I’m saving up to buy one. I’ve taken a few lessons and am trying to teach myself the rest.”

  “I’ve always wanted to learn to play the drums,” Wreath said. She had never admitted that to anyone, not even Frankie.

  “So you don’t like talking, but you like to make noise, huh?” When Law smiled, he made Wreath’s heart flutter. He was good-looking enough, for sure, to be in a band.

  “I’ve got to go,” Wreath said, suddenly uncomfortable. “My friend dropped me off here by mistake.”

  “That’s strange,” Law said.

  “I’m new around here. I got the addresses mixed up.” He tilted his head. “So you live around here?” By now Wreath was backing up, her pace picking up. “Down the road,” she said and turned almost at a run. “Wait!”

  Wreath was elated and scared when she heard his footsteps drawing near.

  “You never told me your name,” he said, falling into step beside her.

  “Wreath.”

  “Wreath.” He made her name sound like the title of a poem or a song. “No wonder you like unusual names. You want me to carry that stuff home for you?”

  “Oh no!” Wreath said and then tried to give her voice a calmer sound. “It’s not far. I’ve got it. I’d better get going.”

  “I hope to see you around,” he said.

  She walked away, wishing she could stay and visit or ask him to walk her home. She was eager to talk with Law and almost as sure she needed nothing to do with him.

  “Wreath!” he yelled.

  She paused and looked over her shoulder. “I like your name!”

  A few raindrops began to fall, but she didn’t care. She smiled all the way to the junkyard.

  Chapter 8

  Unlocking the furniture store door from the inside, Faye Durham stepped outside and jumped. Wreath stood silently next to the building.

  “Why are you leaning on that wall?” Faye snapped.

  The girl looked equally surprised, not expecting her boss to come from inside. “You told me to come back at 1:00 p.m. today. To start my job. Remember?”

  “Of course I remember,” Faye said. “I didn’t think you’d actually be back. Now I have to figure out what I’m going to do with you. Stand up straight. You look slouchy.”

  Wreath straightened her T-shirt and wiped the palms of her hands on her shorts. She glanced over at the bicycle, still propped out front.

  She had to have a job, and she needed that bike, even if it meant putting up with Mrs. Faye Durham.

  “Thank you for the flashlight and the lantern,” she said. “They work great.”

  The woman, who wore grouchy like a second skin, did not respond.

  That was tolerable. Wreath could handle hateful. She’d done it before.

  Mrs. Durham stared her in the eye. Wreath stared back.

  “You’re Holly, right?” the woman growled, still holding the door open.

  “Wreath,” she said, softly but firmly. “Wreath Williams.”

  “Might as well come in.” Faye pulled the OUT FOR LUNCH sign off the outside of the door, ignoring the piece of tape left on the window.

  Wreath looked around. Faye’s eyes followed hers as they scanned the big old space, more like a warehouse than a retail establishment. Water had seeped through the pressed tin ceiling; a lightbulb was burned out in back, making the rear of the store dreary; and a jumble of furniture and cardboard boxes were piled in a back corner.

  An unpleasant odor hit Wreath’s nostrils and seemed to settle under her skin, and she wondered about the skimpy furniture and high price tags on out-of-style pieces. The old wood floors were covered with dust, in every visible corner and on each surface of woods that looked like oak and pecan and mahogany.

  “Follow me,” Mrs. Durham said in a commanding voice.

  Wreath didn’t speak as they went to a small room in the back of the store, with a refrigerator, a sink, and a small table, plus more piles of old merchandise and a few cleaning supplies on a counter.

  “Sweep,” Faye said, turning to look at Wreath. “Then sweep again. Once won’t cut it. Dust, too. Everything. You will be responsible for keeping the store clean. Don’t break anything.”

  Wreath nodded.

  “Here.” Faye grabbed a broom and dustpan from the corner. “Make yourself useful.”

  Wreath took the broom, thankful. Sweeping was an assignment she could handle. “Where would you like me to start?” she asked.

  “If you can’t figure that out, you’re not going to work out,” Faye said. “Start wherever you like, and don’t nick the furniture.”

  Wreath slowly swept her way through the store, getting down on her hands and knees to reach under the paltry furniture and taking in the haphazard
way things were displayed. The woman returned to her desk, turned the radio up a notch, and shuffled a stack of papers on the desk.

  Methodically covering the store, front to back, left to right, Wreath finished back in the workroom. She was surprised at how quickly she had made the store look better.

  She wondered what she was supposed to do next. Her new boss had not spoken since handing her the broom. She wiped off the countertop, caught a whiff of something spoiled, and pulled the trash bag out of its can, noticing a handful of empty tuna cans.

  Wreath walked out with the sack. “Do you have a cat?” she asked.

  “A cat? Of course not. I’m not a pet person,” Faye said, walking toward the girl. “Put that trash in the alley.” She motioned to a door with a large bolt in place and walked back to her desk, watching.

  Wreath pushed and pulled on the bolt until her face was red. “Darn,” she muttered and disappeared back into the workroom. She rummaged around in the cabinets, opening and closing doors and wondering if she was being tested. Wouldn’t any normal person have helped her?

  She danced a little jig when she came across a small hammer and a can of WD-40 that looked like it had been sitting there for years. Within minutes she had the door open and stepped out into the alley.

  Wreath wiped her hands on her shorts, wrinkling her nose. “You sure someone hasn’t been feeding a cat around here? There must have been a half dozen tuna cans in that sack. I’ll empty that more often from now on.”

  “That’ll be fine,” Faye said in a waspish tone.

  Twisting the cap off a bottle of lemon oil, Wreath inhaled the smell. She dug out a soft cloth from under a counter and wiped the top of a table. A glow replaced a layer of dust.

  “What would you like me to do now?” Wreath asked, stepping back in with a smile.

  “Now?” Faye looked at the neon clock hanging on the back wall, an advertisement for a line of furniture. “That’s it for today.”

  Wreath followed her gaze. “But I’ve only been here an hour. I thought you were going to let me earn the bike.”

  “Take the bike,” Faye said.

  “I want to work,” Wreath said. “I need a job.”

  “I don’t have any more work for you.” Faye spoke in the tired voice Frankie had sometimes used.

  Wreath looked around, feeling wild and desperate. She might be poor, but she was not pitiful. She dug in her pocket, pulled out a five-dollar bill, and laid it on Faye’s desk. “If you’ll hold the bike for me, I’ll come back when I have more money.”

  “I said take the bike,” Faye said. She picked up a merchandise catalog from her desk.

  “It wouldn’t be right,” Wreath said. She paused on her way to the door, straightened an area rug, and adjusted the angle of a chair and end table. “Thanks again for the flashlight.”

  The woman glanced at the rug and back at Wreath. “Be back tomorrow at one, but I don’t intend to hold your hand. Take the bike.”

  Chapter 9

  A feeling of freedom washed over Wreath, a sense of joy she had not felt since Frankie had gotten sick. She hummed one of the country songs that had been on the radio in the furniture store, music her mama loved so much.

  She had earned the bike.

  Wreath’s legs trembled, and the bike wobbled as she headed down the street, thankful to put space between her and her second day at Durham’s Fine Furnishings. She pedaled harder, riding through the town, which still looked like Wreath felt—worn out but in decent shape. The ride home was definitely an improvement over the walk, although she was more tired than she’d anticipated. Her workday had been short, and she didn’t want to think about Mrs. Faye Durham and how oddly the woman acted, nor the possibility that the job wouldn’t last.

  Hiding the bike behind a thorny bush in the junkyard, she tiptoed through an examination of her camp, half holding her breath as usual until she was certain no one was near. Listening nervously to various chirps, croaks, and a squealing noise that sounded like a broken radio, she fixed peanut butter and crackers for supper and settled into the Tiger Van.

  Restlessness swept over her. She tried to blame it on her boss, a woman who reminded her of shrews she had studied in junior-year English class. But she knew Law and Clarice were the ones who had stirred her up. Law was what her mother would have called a “looker.” Wreath appreciated the fact that he worked and was thankful in a warped way that he wasn’t rich. She had hoped to run into him again today, but knew it was for the best that she hadn’t.

  Clarice had made Wreath think about reading, and she wished for a new series to start or one of her old favorites to reread. Some of the best stories she had read three or four times, but she had left all the books she owned in Lucky. Books were too heavy to carry when your load needed to be light.

  Instead, she had listed them in her notebook, the little library she’d left behind, mostly books from garage sales or thrown out from the school library because the covers were beat up or someone had scribbled in them or torn a page or scratched their initials into the cover. Wreath couldn’t understand people who spoiled books for other people. She handled books carefully, the way she might a puppy or Frankie’s fragile glass vase.

  The night now totally black, she took her flashlight out of its hiding place under a sack of clothes in the back and fished the journal from the pack. She picked the old pen up from the seat of the Tiger Van and tried to remember titles she’d seen at the library the day before. Maybe she should take a chance and try to get a library card. She jotted a few novels to read. Clarice was a fan of To Kill a Mockingbird, and her English teacher in Lucky had liked it a lot, too. Wreath definitely needed to read that one.

  Swatting mosquitoes and sweating, she read through her book list, remembering what she liked most about various stories and reminiscing about what was going on in her life when she had read each of the books. A good story took away the loneliness when her grandma died and Frankie started moving around. Books kept her from having to talk to kids she didn’t know when she went to a new school.

  Someday she was going to have a nice house full of books. When she finished college and had a good job, making lots of money, she would have one of those rooms lined with shelves and a ladder on wheels.

  She had shown a picture of one of those rooms to Frankie, who smiled and said, “You’ll fill that up in no time.” Her mama always said Wreath got her love of books from her daddy’s daddy. “That man could sit for hours with his nose in a book.”

  Wreath didn’t know her father, so she certainly didn’t know his father. She thought instead Grandma Willis had instilled the love of reading in her, and Frankie agreed that was possible. “She started every day reading the Bible and after that read everything she could get her hands on whenever she could grab a minute,” Frankie had said.

  Until Wreath checked books out, she could read books she had found around the junkyard, many of them mildewed with a slightly distasteful smell but still intact. As the long summer evening grew darker, Wreath started a horror novel she had found in one of the junked cars, a scary, dark drawing on the cover. Its pages were brittle with age and began to fall apart before she finished the first chapter.

  She was kind of glad to put it down, the story adding to her anxiety as the night noises got louder, the van stuffier, and her imagination jumpier with fear.

  She fell asleep with thoughts of snarling dogs and mean men and a dark jumbled place where evil skulked. She dreamed of a kind woman who helped poor children, and the sight of the woman made her feel safe. She reached out, thinking it was Frankie. When she got closer, she saw it was a beautiful angel, dressed in white, but it wasn’t her mama.

  Wreath awoke, stiff, as usual, from the hard floor of the van. Except this morning she felt better. Happier.

  The thoughts about being found weren’t as close as usual. Nor was she worried about school … or the need to turn herself in to some faceless official. Those thoughts, as stuck to her as the hot, humid weather, had sh
runk.

  On this morning, an odd feeling of peace and tension mixed up inside of her. She knew she had to do a few more things to make her campsite livable.

  Wandering through the old cars, she remembered her first glimpse of the place, back in the winter, when the trees were bare and the area deserted, coming out of Landry with her mother and Big Fun. Although she never had much use for Big Fun, she owed him for helping her stumble upon the junkyard, the only good thing to come out of the trip.

  Her mother had insisted they drive through the little town “for old times’ sake.” Even though Big Fun had grumbled, he did so, her mother occasionally pointing to this building or that, not saying much at first. “That’s the house we lived in before I quit school,” she said, pointing to a small frame home on a street lined with trees.

  “I thought you lived up near Texarkana,” Wreath said. “Where Grandma lived.”

  “We moved there right before you were born,” she said so softly Wreath could barely hear over Big Fun’s radio. “Your grandmother wanted to be closer to her brother and sister. It’s hard to believe they’re all gone now.”

  Frankie twisted in the seat to look back where Wreath sat. “Enjoy life, sweetheart, because it goes fast. Faster than you can imagine.” She stretched her arm to pat Wreath’s knee, the movement seeming to tire her mama. Wreath drank in every word her mother spoke.

  Big Fun had interrupted the moment, laying down on the horn when a scrawny dog ambled out. “I was happy to see the last of this place,” he said. “Nothing here but white trash and junk.”

  As Big Fun said the word junk, Wreath saw the overgrown sign for the junkyard, a handful of vehicles in sight and not a house around.

  The seed was planted, and Wreath filed away details of the towns they passed through, knowing in her gut it would not be long till she needed a place of her own.

  “Stop!” her mother yelled suddenly, and Big Fun slammed on the brakes.

  “What in the world is the matter with you, woman?” he shouted.

  Frankie seemed to shrink into the seat. “This train crossing is dangerous. I don’t want anything to happen to Wreath.”