“Jaguar, who on earth is here?” a woman’s voice calls from upstairs.
“Ms. Washington,” Jaguar answers.
Mrs. Burroughs is down the stairs in a flash, dressed for work but with her hair still done up in pink rollers.
“Good morning, Charlene,” Auntie says, smiling and nodding. “Why don’t the three of you have a seat?” She gestures to the couch across from ours, inviting the Burroughses to sit down in their own house.
Mrs. Burroughs nudges Jaguar, who slinks over and sits down across from us. Her mother joins her. Pastor Burroughs stays on his feet.
“Now, I don’t believe all of you have met my grandnieces from up north.”
Pastor Burroughs narrows his eyes. “Is that what all this is about?” he demands to know.
“All what is about?” says Mrs. Burroughs.
“That girl there”—he points at me—“is the one who attacked Jaguar at camp, and now Ms. Washington is here talking nonsense. What is this? Blackmail? Extortion?” Pastor Burroughs is gearing up for full-on preaching mode.
Jaguar’s mother looks lost. Jaguar looks at the floor.
“It ain’t blackmail or extortion. I’m here for one thing and one thing only: to right a wrong. Your daughter came into my store and wrecked my shelves, knockin’ candy all over the place.”
The room goes quiet. “Prove it,” Mrs. Burroughs says.
Auntie holds up her tape. Her blank tape. I swallow hard. Auntie points at the label with last Sunday’s date, written in Tiffany’s shaky, seven-year-old handwriting. “You got a VCR?” she asks.
They do. Mrs. Burroughs pulls open the doors of their entertainment unit. She holds out her hand for the tape. Auntie hands it to her, but just as Mrs. Burroughs reaches for it, Auntie snatches it back.
“Are you sure you want to watch this? Do you really want to bear witness to Jungle Cat here—”
“Jaguar,” Pastor Burroughs cuts in.
“My apologies. Do you really want to bear witness to Jaguar destroyin’ an old woman’s property? She is your baby girl, after all, isn’t she?” Auntie clears her throat. “My, my, I sure could use a glass of water with a slice of lemon,” she says.
No one moves.
“I want to see the tape,” Pastor Burroughs spits out.
“Are you sure?” Auntie asks. “Can your heart take it, Pastor, watchin’ your daughter behave like a hooligan?” She turns to Jaguar. “Why not spare your parents, girl, and tell them every drop of the truth.”
Jaguar looks down at her clenched hands. Her knuckles have gone white.
“The tape, Ms. Washington. I want to see it now.”
“No!” Jaguar shouts, jumping up. “I did mess up her store that day.” She locks eyes with Auntie. “And I’m really, really sorry about it, okay?”
“No, ma’am, it’s not. You gonna pay your debt to me.”
“What do you want?” Mrs. Burroughs asks, fear creeping into her voice.
“Firstly, I’ll be needing a pitcher of water for me and my grandnieces to wet our whistle. Don’t let a slice of lemon or two kill you.”
Mrs. Burroughs sends Jaguar into the kitchen to fetch a pitcher of ice water—she doesn’t tell her to add lemon—and three glasses. Auntie doesn’t say another word until her whistle is wet.
“So is it money you want?” Pastor Burroughs asks. “Because we can pay for any merchandise Jaguar damaged, but we expect you to be, um . . . discreet about all this.”
Auntie looks to me. “Discreet?”
“He means he wants you to keep Jaguar’s nasty ways on the down low so as not to tarnish his outstanding reputation.”
Pastor Burroughs fixes me with a hot glare, while Auntie takes another long and thoughtful sip of water. “I’ll agree to be discreet, as you say, but it ain’t money I want. It’s time.”
“Time?” says Jaguar.
“Yes, time, girl. You see, my grandniece here is real good and tired of cleanin’ shelves at my store, so I’m gonna be needin’ someone to relieve her of this duty. I reckon you’ll be a right good fit for the job.”
Jaguar shakes her head. “You can’t make me clean shelves. Mommy, Daddy, do something!”
“There’s nothing can be done,” Auntie says. “This discreetness your daddy is after comes at a price, girl, unless of course that price is too high for y’all to pay . . . ”
“It’s not,” Mrs. Burroughs says quickly. Pastor Burroughs doesn’t say a word. He can’t take his eyes off of Auntie, even as she stands and indicates that Tiffany and I should do the same.
“Lovely seeing all of you,” she says, waving gaily and setting her empty glass down. I’ve never seen her so close to cheerful. “We ought to do this more often.” And to Jaguar, she adds, “I’ll let you know when I’m ready for you to get to work, girl, and don’t you dare think about not showin’ up.”
We let ourselves out.
Twenty-Nine
MR. Brown said he would call me by today but I don’t want to wait. We’ve only just gotten from Jaguar’s house to Goodies—it’s a little after nine—so I’ll give Mr. Brown some time to get settled in at his desk before I call. I go out to the front and sit behind the counter with Auntie and Tiffany, and we pick up where we left off on the walk over here, laughing about Jaguar and the shelves and Byron and all his women. Auntie lets us have free candy today, though she tells us not to go expecting it all the time.
Yesterday evening, when we got back from Grace’s Goodies, Auntie did what she calls cleaning. “Can’t have Ms. Drama over here, havin’ another asthma attack,” she said. She mostly just dusted some things and moved other things around. Her clutter remained everywhere and on top of everything. Books, magazines, figurines. She must’ve lived at 9 Iron Horse Road forever to fill those rooms up the way she has. Most of the places we’ve lived were so bare and empty of pictures and knickknacks, you’d never know that four people were staying there. They weren’t homes like Auntie’s, but pit stops on a journey that never seems to end. I close my eyes and imagine the odd smell of Auntie’s house with its mixture of spicy, smoky, and sweet. It’s warm and familiar.
My eyes snap open. Moving Rule Number Four: Don’t get attached to the place.
I slide off the stool between Auntie and Tiffany and go back to the stockroom. I pick up the phone and hold it until it starts barking that off-the-hook sound at me. I put it back, then pick it up again and dial. Mr. Brown’s secretary answers and places me on hold.
Then Mr. Brown says, “Right on time, kid.”
“Yeah.”
“Good thing you called. I’m about to leave for a week in the Poconos with my old lady.” Mr. Brown pauses.
“That sounds nice,” I say.
“To you, yeah, but that’s because you don’t know my wife. Anyway, I checked the mail yesterday and found a letter from your father in your box. What you want me to do with it, kid? You want me to read it to you? Give you the return address? What?”
My hands are shaking. I can scarcely breathe.
“Hey, kid, you there? I don’t have all—”
“Read it to me, please, and tell me the return address.”
Mr. Brown sighs. I hear him rip the envelope open. “It says, ‘I’m sorry. I love you all.’ Seriously? Is that it?”
“What’s the return address?” I ask, my voice trembling.
“Sixteen forty-one Brewer Street, Cranford, North Carolina. You got that, kid?”
I repeat the address in my head again and again. “Yes, I got it.”
“Good.” He pauses. “I hope everything works out for you,” he says, and hangs up.
I sit down on the cold stockroom floor. Dad wrote to us. Six words. He’s been gone almost three months and he wrote us six words. But we have an address now. We can go there and—
“Girl, what you doin’ down on the floor?”
I look up to find Auntie peering at me from the doorway.
“I know where Dad is,” I say, and my voice sounds strange. Flat. Jo
yless. Not excited, the way I imagined it would when I found out something—anything—about Dad.
“Is that right?” Auntie says softly. “Where’s he at?”
I recite the address in the same flat voice.
“So he’s still in North Carolina, then,” Auntie says. “Guess you’d better call your mama and tell her.”
“Right now?” I ask.
Auntie nods. She takes the phone off the hook and holds it out to me.
I climb to my feet and take it from her. She waits until I dial Mom’s number before she walks away. Jane said happiness doesn’t come easy, and she’s right.
Mom answers the phone. “I still can’t find him,” she says, before I even say hello. Her voice breaks. “I even drove all the way back to Delaware last night. No trace of him. What are we going to do now?”
We could stay here in Black Lake, I say in my mind.
Mom sucks in her breath, and I realize that she’s crying. “He can’t just leave us like this. We need him. I need him.”
Guilt fills up every inch of me. Jane said happiness is about making sacrifices. “I know where Dad is.”
Mom sniffles. “What? How?”
I tell her all about my phone call to Mr. Brown and about the letter and the return address.
“Christ, I can’t believe Mr. Brown gave you any information at all, with his evil self. What did the letter say?”
“‘I’m sorry. I love you all.’”
Mom’s silent for a long time. “The important thing is that we know where he is.”
“And what are going to do when he’s standing in front of us?” I ask.
“We’re gonna make him come back. Then we lay down the law. Tell him he can’t ever do this again. We’ll find a new place to live, a permanent place, and—”
And what if it doesn’t work? What if he runs away again or we have to keep moving from place to place?
“I don’t understand why you don’t sound happy about this,” Mom says suddenly. “You told us all to keep having hope, and we did, and now we found him.”
I shake my questions from my head. We found Dad. Together we’re going to go get him and bring him back and then we will be an aggregate again.
“I am happy,” I say, forcing my voice up an octave.
“Good. I’ll be there tomorrow afternoon. Do me a favor and put your sister on the phone.”
I call Tiffany from the front of the store, where she’s interrogating Auntie about why she doesn’t sell sour-punch straws. Tiffany delivers the excitement Mom is looking for. She screams and shrieks and carries on when Mom tells her how soon she’ll be here to get us, and when she hangs up the phone, she runs back out to the front of the store. I follow slowly and watch as Tiffany climbs into the stool beside Auntie and engulfs her in a hug.
“We’re going to the perfect place,” she says.
“I hope so,” Auntie says.
“Are you gonna miss us?” Tiffany asks her, resting her head on Auntie’s shoulder.
“You mean your cryin’ and your sister’s talkin’ back? Not one bit. Like I told you, I ain’t one for company.”
Auntie nudges Tiffany off of her and goes around the counter to straighten the racks of candy. Tiffany comes over to where I’m standing in the entrance to the stockroom and slips her arm around my waist.
“I think I’ll miss Auntie,” she says. “Even if she won’t miss us.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
Tiffany returns to her stool and proceeds to spin around and around on it like a maniac. I go back into the stockroom and sit down on the floor, pretending I can see the future like Jane. But what I see is in the past: eating Hershey’s Kisses with Auntie, walking home from Camp Jesus Saves with Terrance.
“You all right, girl?”
I open my eyes at the sound of Auntie’s voice.
“Yeah.”
“Good.” She points to a middle shelf across from me. “Out of Kit Kats,” she mutters, not meeting my eyes.
When she leaves and I’m alone in the stockroom again, I get up and start scrubbing shelves. I scrub until my shoulders are sore, trying to erase the idea of staying in Black Lake. That’s not what the future holds.
Thirty
THE doorbell rings the next morning. Terrance is standing on the other side of the screen door, nervously rocking his weight from foot to foot.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
We stand there, looking at everything but each other, until he says, “Can I come in?”
“It’s ‘May I,’ and yes.”
Terrance’s face breaks into a smile as he steps inside. “You haven’t changed a bit.” He joins me in Auntie’s living room, where he stops and looks at her furnishings. “So,” he says, his eyes on her antique clock, “I haven’t seen you around camp lately. Did Ms. Eunetta suspend you?”
“No. I’m just not going back.”
“That’s too bad,” Terrance says. He starts walking around and ends up in the kitchen. I’m right behind him. He jumps, as though he’s startled to see Auntie in her own house, putting the orange juice back in the fridge. “Good morning, Ms. Washington.”
“Mornin’, Terrance,” Auntie replies, not turning around. “You eat?”
“Yes. I had three Pop-Tarts before I left my grandmother’s house.”
Terrance still has the crumbs on his shirt and in the corner of his mouth to prove it. Auntie turns to where Tiffany is plopped at the kitchen table and says, “Come on outside with me. I want to show you something in the back.”
“All you have in the back is dead people,” Tiffany whines.
“Girl, just come on,” Auntie snaps.
Tiffany hops to her feet, and the two of them hurry out the back door, leaving me alone with Terrance. He goes over to the kitchen window and peeks outside.
“You know, I heard you guys caught the thief.”
“You heard right.”
“Serves Byron right. Seriously, how many girlfriends does one guy need?”
“At least three, apparently.”
I tell Terrance all about our trip to Jaguar’s house yesterday, and how she’s going to have to clean the shelves at Grace’s Goodies on account of her wrecking Auntie’s store.
“Dang,” Terrance says. “Cleaning those shelves is rough.”
“Yeah, I kind of feel bad for her,” I say.
“Really?”
“No. I was just being facetious.” Terrance stares at me blankly. “It means I was joking.”
“You’re gonna have to write that word down for me too.”
“Sure.”
“Cool. I should get going. I just stopped by to see if you were coming back to camp,” Terrance says. He heads for the front door, then stops suddenly, his hand hovering above the door handle. “Do you want to hang out after church tomorrow?”
“Um . . .”
“As, like, associates.”
I won’t be here tomorrow. “What about today? Right now?”
Terrance’s eyes go wide. “O-kay, I guess. If it’s all right with Ms. Washington.”
I go out back to ask her. She and Tiffany are looking up at something in the tree above Auntie’s parents’ graves.
“It’s not a nest,” Tiffany is saying.
“It is, girl. Use your eyes,” Auntie replies impatiently.
I clear my throat to get Auntie’s attention. When I have it, I ask if it would be all right if I hung out with Terrance for a while.
“I reckon so. We’ll just be hangin’ around here, waitin’ on your mama.”
Ever since Mom called last night, I’ve been checking for signs that Auntie cares about us leaving, that she’ll miss us even a tiny bit. I don’t see anything. But then her face doesn’t ever change much.
Terrance is waiting for me at the edge of Auntie’s lawn.
“Do you mind if we go for a walk?” I ask him. “A short one.”
“Okay. Cool. Where do you want to go?”
I reach into my pocket a
nd finger the last of the emergency money Mom gave me. The sun is butter-yellow and scorching. “All over.” I think of Auntie. “I’ve got thangs to do.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes.”
We stop at Jane’s first. The restaurant is a mess of plastic tables and chairs and gauzy curtains. She is wiping down the counter when we enter. “Well, well, what brings you here today, little miss?” she says, straightening. She eyes Terrance. “And you are . . . ?”
“Terrance Gall. I moved here a few months ago from Mississippi.”
“I see. You plan on being some kind of scientist one day, huh?”
“I do.” Terrance shuffles from foot to foot. “Was that a prediction?”
“You’d better hope not, ’cause predictions cost five dollars. Speaking of which . . .” Jane’s eyes find me. Her lids are coated in purple and gold eye shadow. I pull the money out of my pocket before she can blink. She stuffs it in her ample cleavage, where it disappears completely. Terrance stares, mesmerized.
“Well, thanks for telling me my future,” I say.
“You’re welcome.” We turn to go. “Tell me, girl, did you find that happiness yet?”
I think about staying up and eating Hershey’s Kisses with Auntie, about her demanding that Jaguar clean the shelves at Grace’s Goodies, about sharing words with Terrance. But what I’m feeling is guilt. Thinking about being together with Dad again should be making me happy, but it’s not.
“No. Not yet,” I say.
“Well, it’s coming soon, girl, so don’t stop waiting on it.”
The door chimes as we leave.
“Where to next?” Terrance asks.
“What about the lake?”
“It’s more of a reservoir, but okay.”
As we walk, Terrance fills me in on what I’ve missed at camp. Jaguar and Pamela haven’t bothered him too much lately. In fact, he’s not sure the two of them are even speaking to each other these days.
We come to the woods and slip through the opening in the trees. “What happened?” I ask.
“Who knows? Girls are weird. No offense.”
“None taken.”
We walk silently through the woods, and it’s just as peaceful and beautiful as I remember, and the lake just as gross. We stand on the shore and watch the waves push the algae around until I catch sight of a figure a little farther along, tossing stones in the water.
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