When she showed it to Mama, Mama’s eyes got big, and she said, “Geraldine Murlock, you take that off. Whatever would your mother say if you went to the beach looking like that? On the church picnic, too!”
When we were ready to head home, we three piled into the back seat together, Reba Lu in the middle, as usual, and pulled our suits out of the shopping bags so we could admire them.
Geraldine’s was flowered. It had two triangles cut out of the midriff, which showed a little skin and was as close as she was going to get to a two-piecer. Reba Lu’s suit was red with white stripes on one side. She thought it made her look slimmer.
“That’s a pretty blue,” she said, looking at mine. “Blue is Charles’s favorite color.” She squinted her eyes at me and asked, “Didn’t I already tell you that?”
I didn’t have to answer because Mama gave a gasp and slammed on the brakes. She forgot to put in the clutch, so the car bucked, the engine died, and the car behind us started honking.
“Jehoshaphat!” she exclaimed. She pushed in the clutch with her left foot and pressed the starter button on the floor with her right. The car coughed once and died. She waited a few seconds and tried again. When the engine was running good, she put it in gear and edged out of the traffic toward the sidewalk.
Walking along the side of Meridian, the main road between San Andreas and Messina, was Mr. Jefferson Clement. He had one hand on his hip and was limping along worse than usual. He would take a couple of steps and rest, then start out again. It was almost like he was doing a little two-step and couldn’t quite decide which foot to put down next.
Geraldine leaned over and whispered to Reba Lu and me, “He doesn’t look much like a war hero to me.”
Mama heard her. She turned around and gave us one of her looks. “Geraldine Murlock, I’m surprised at you, making a joke of somebody who served our country and got injured doing it. That man is in pain.”
Still, she didn’t seem in a hurry to catch up to him. She sighed. “I don’t have any choice, do I?”
I saw Geraldine open her mouth to answer and gave her a poke. I knew Mama wasn’t asking a question. She was thinking out loud. She revved the engine a little, to keep it going, then slowly pulled up alongside Mr. Clement. This time, she kept the clutch in when she put on the brake. She leaned over and rolled down the passenger window.
“Jefferson … Jefferson Clement,” she called. “What are you doing walking along this busy street so far from home?”
He glanced over toward our car. At first he looked surprised, but then he gave Mama a big smile.
“Well, if it isn’t Sally Wallace. You are an angel. A sign from heaven in my distress! I went to San Andreas to … attend to some business. Wouldn’t you know it? I missed the bus back.”
Mama began drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. “Well, Jeff, I can’t just leave you here, can I? The next bus won’t be along till after dark. You could get run over by a car, and your family would have to pay for a funeral.”
“Well, I—,” he began. But he didn’t get a chance to finish.
“Get yourself in this car, Jeff. We’re holding up traffic.”
I groaned and leaned over the front seat to whisper in Mama’s ear. “Mama, do you have to give him a ride?”
She turned around and gave me the same kind of look she had just given Geraldine.
“If he’s getting in, I’m getting out,” Geraldine whispered. Reba Lu’s head went up and down in agreement. But they didn’t get out. They scooched as far back in the seat with me as they could and got ready to listen.
Mr. Clement got in and slammed the door. “It isn’t often I get a ride with such a pretty lady,” he said. He turned around and looked in the back seat. “And three lovely young girls.”
I wondered what my father would say to that if he heard him.
“Don’t you ‘pretty lady’ me,” Mama told him. “Just roll down your window. Artie Longmire must have spilled the whole bottle of aftershave on you!”
Mr. Clement just laughed. “Yes, indeed. Artie likes his customers to smell sweet.”
Mama didn’t answer. Just made a choking sound and rolled down her window. We did the same. The breeze blew in from the dairy we were passing. It smelled of manure and the sweet grass the farmer fed his cows. We girls took deep breaths just to cover up the smell of Mr. Clement. We must have made some noisy breathing sounds because Mama twisted her head around, even in traffic, and looked over the seat at us, one at a time. I knew that look. It meant business.
“You have plenty to talk about back there,” she told us.
I grabbed hold of Reba Lu’s hand, and she got a grip on Geraldine. Even though Mr. Clement was up in the front seat with Mama, I got the creeps having him in the same car. I could see that Reba Lu and Geraldine did, too. We began to whisper as soft as we could among ourselves. I was glad our car was old and made so many coughing sounds.
“It was him, Angie, wasn’t it?” Geraldine barely moved her lips. “He tried to get in our tent. Let’s tell your mama to let us out, and we’ll take the bus home.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Reba Lu hissed, but her voice was shaky. “He won’t try anything with Angie’s mama right here with us.” She leaned over and looked a question at me. “Will he, Angie?”
“Mama wouldn’t have picked him up if she didn’t think she could handle him,” I said.
Privately, I wasn’t so sure. I knew Mama was doing this for Mrs. Clement’s sake, but if it had been me at the wheel, I’d have driven right by and left him in the dust.
“Anyway, it’s too late now,” I said, for Mama had her foot almost to the floorboard. I hoped we wouldn’t get a ticket.
“Well, as long as we’re trapped here …,” Reba Lu said, “we might as well not miss anything.” So we hunched way down and leaned forward so our heads were touching the front seat.
“Why in the world did you come back to Messina, anyway?” Mama asked him. “You never liked it here.”
He looked at her sideways. “No place else to go.” Then he laughed. “Everyone but you seems glad enough to see me. Some people have even asked me to run for mayor in the next election.”
Mama didn’t answer him. She didn’t even turn her head in his direction.
Reba Lu put one arm around Geraldine and the other around me and pulled us close so our heads were touching. “I didn’t say anything about this before,” she whispered, “but I scratched Mr. Clement’s name off our list of people to love.”
“What took you so long?” Geraldine asked.
I didn’t say anything. I was remembering how we had planned to help Mr. Clement get a hobby. Like collecting stamps. It seemed to me that he already had a hobby. I shivered, thinking about what he might have planned to do if he had gotten into our tent.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
When we got home, Mama pulled up in front of the Clements’ house. Mr. Clement made a great to-do about getting out of the car and thanking her. But he didn’t call her “pretty lady” again. Just tipped his straw hat and limped up the steps to his front door.
We girls went straight to my bedroom. “What a horrible man!” I exclaimed. “Did you see the way he moves like his backside hurts?”
“Probably from his war wound,” Reba Lu said.
Geraldine and I put our hands on our hips and stared at her until she turned pink and said, “Well, that could be the reason.”
“The trouble with you,” Geraldine said, “is you have a goody-goody streak. I just wish Buster had taken a bigger bite.”
For a moment, it was Geraldine and me, just like we used to be. Then I noticed how Reba Lu was turning more red than pink and I started feeling sorry for her.
“At least he’s off our list,” I said. Then, before Geraldine could get started telling us what she thought of that list, I added, “Let’s try on our new suits.”
We did and admired ourselves in the three-paneled mirror on my little dressing table. The two side panels swung forward or backward so we could
see how we looked from the side and the front at the same time.
“I’ll bet Dodie doesn’t even have a bathing suit,” I said. “We should have invited her to come shopping with us today.”
Nobody said anything for a minute. “She wasn’t very nice to us when we invited her to camp out with us,” Geraldine reminded me.
Reba Lu sighed. “We have to try harder. I’ll let her use my old bathing suit.”
“But you said it’s raggedy and has a saggy seat,” I reminded her.
“She could have mine, I guess,” Geraldine said, “but she’s so skinny it would hang loose on her.” They both looked at me.
“I could give her mine,” I told them. “I’ll never wear it again now that I have this new one.”
“That sounds real gracious,” Reba Lu said.
She was right, and I felt ashamed. We didn’t ask Dodie to share our fun that day, but we were willing to give her our leftovers. I wondered how I would feel if I were in Dodie’s place, and nobody liked me because I was poor, or didn’t want to be around me because my mother was a drunk. I tried to imagine how I would feel if folks just gave me things they didn’t want for themselves. I felt real sorry for Dodie. It wasn’t her fault she got born into the Crumper family. Then I thought maybe Dodie wasn’t looking for sympathy. What was she looking for?
I remembered how we had linked little fingers and shared secrets and made promises. Could I have trusted Geraldine and Reba Lu the way I had trusted Dodie?
Geraldine interrupted my thoughts. “Even if we had invited her, she might not even want to go to the picnic.” Geraldine always explained things so that she didn’t have to feel guilty. She could go right on with life without looking back.
“Let’s go out on your front porch,” she said now. “We can sit on your steps and work on our tans.”
I borrowed Mama’s bottle of Johnson’s baby oil from the medicine cabinet. She used it for soft elbows, but we intended to rub it all over ourselves. Geraldine wanted to add a few drops of iodine so we would look brown faster, but we were afraid we would stain our new suits.
The three of us sat on the steps and rubbed oil on each other’s backs until we felt sticky all over and left grease marks on the cement where our legs touched it. Mama came out the front door carrying a grocery sack rolled up under her arm. “I’ll be back in a bit,” she said and headed up the street. We tried to stretch out on the steps, but it was too crowded.
“Let’s go over to my house and lie on the grass,” Reba Lu said.
The parsonage had the biggest front lawn on Palm Avenue. It looked like a cool green blanket and felt like one, too, for about five minutes. Then we began to itch. “I feel like bugs are crawling on me,” Reba Lu said.
“They are,” I told her. “You’ve got a couple on your neck right now.”
She jumped up and started brushing at herself, scattering bits of fresh-mown grass over Geraldine and me. The thin green blades stuck to the oil on our skin, and we were trying to pick them off each other when the water hit us.
The twins, Violet and Rose, ran out in their bathing suits and started running around in circles as the lawn sprinkler sprayed them and us. “We got you!” they cried.
We sputtered a bit, but the water felt good, and we didn’t itch anymore. We leaped all over the front yard and must have made a good deal of noise. The screen door banged open, and Mrs. Adams came out on the porch. She crooked her finger and beckoned to us.
“Not you,” she told the twins as they started to grumble. “You go on and play.” She handed a pile of bath towels to Reba Lu. “You girls are too old to prance around the front yard in your bathing suits.”
“We were working on our tans,” Reba Lu said.
“That’s a real good idea. You can work on your tans in the backyard.”
“You’re not sending the twins to the backyard!”
“The twins are five years old. You girls do not look like five-year-olds.”
We wrapped the beach towels around us till we got to the backyard, then spread them out on the grass and stretched out on our stomachs. We propped up on our elbows so we could talk.
“Nobody cares if we prance around at the beach in our bathing suits,” Geraldine said.
“That’s the beach,” Reba Lu told her. “Bathing suits are acceptable at the beach.”
“But not in the front yard?”
“I guess not. I guess when you get older, you can’t do certain things anymore.”
“That’s a peculiar idea,” Geraldine said. “I thought when you grew up you could do anything you wanted.”
Reba Lu turned over and sat up. “My conscience is hurting me,” she said. “We ought to go invite Dodie to the picnic.”
“We?” Geraldine asked.
“We’re in this together.”
“She told us to leave her alone,” Geraldine reminded her.
“She didn’t mean it. She was mad about something.” Reba Lu stopped and stared over our heads toward the house next door. “What’s Mr. Clement doing?”
Geraldine and I sat up. Mr. Clement had a pair of binoculars, and he was pointing them right at us. I put my arms around myself. I felt like my bathing suit didn’t cover enough of my skin. “I wonder how long he’s been out there,” I said.
“Not very long.” It was Charles. He came out the back door and sat on the steps. “I just noticed him from the back porch. A few minutes after you spread your towels on the grass, he came limping outside with those binoculars.”
“Brrrr! He gives me the shivers,” Reba Lu said.
“Me, too,” Geraldine agreed.
Charles and I looked at each other. Then I began scratching at a mosquito bite.
“Angie, do you know something you haven’t told?” he asked.
I didn’t answer him right away. I glanced over at Reba Lu, who nodded at me. I guessed it was time to come clean about what I’d figured out.
“It’s about that day when Mr. Clement came tearing out of Dodie’s house. When he passed me, I smelled something kind of spicy. Like a man’s aftershave lotion. Then I smelled it again when someone tried to get in our tent and when Mama gave him a lift in the car. I don’t think he wears it all the time. Only when … when …”
“When he’s going visiting?” Charles finished my sentence for me.
Geraldine and Reba Lu and I looked at each other. Charles had put Jefferson Clement’s sneaky behavior into words that everybody could understand.
“You need to tell your dad about this,” Charles said.
I nodded. I would tell him, but not right now. I needed to think about it first. Mr. Clement made me feel uneasy … in a scary kind of way. If he ever found out I was accusing him, I didn’t know what he’d do. I didn’t want to find out.
“Uh-oh. He’s honing in on you girls again.”
Hot as it was, we wrapped the beach towels around us and headed for my house, where we had left our clothes. As we walked down the driveway, I looked over my shoulder. Charles raised one hand, and I stopped and gave him a wave.
I knew Geraldine and Reba Lu were watching, but I didn’t care. I liked talking to Charles. And I had liked it when he roasted the weenie for my hot dog at the campfire. It felt different to have a boy for a friend for a change. It was the first time that had happened to me, except for boy cousins. And cousins were different kinds of friends. Family friends. Not boy-girl friends.
I turned back around and caught up with Reba Lu and Geraldine. They were grinning. I could see that the two of them couldn’t leave it alone.
“Your face is red,” Geraldine said. “You must have got too much sun.” She poked Reba Lu, and Reba Lu nudged her back. I ignored their little smiles.
“That’s good,” I said. “I’ll have a tan by the time we go to the beach.”
Speaking of the beach reminded me of Dodie. “We need to invite Dodie to the picnic,” I said. “She might not even know about it.”
“She doesn’t go to church,” Geraldine remind
ed us. It made me mad the way she said it, as though Dodie wasn’t good enough to be invited.
“That’s not important,” Reba Lu told her. “Loving a sinner doesn’t have a lot of rules. You just show your love, and God takes care of the rest.”
“Yeah, right,” Geraldine said, which meant she thought Reba Lu was carrying this loving thing too far. But I knew she would go along with it anyway, at least for now.
As soon as we had changed into shorts and blouses, we started up the street. “I guess we’d better figure out what to say,” Geraldine said.
“We don’t have to figure anything!” Reba Lu exclaimed. “We just ask her, that’s all.” I could tell that Reba Lu was getting irritated with Geraldine. So was I, to tell the truth, but it made me feel kind of good to see the two of them getting testy with each other. I was sick of the way they had been pairing off.
As we walked up the street to see Dodie, I glanced over at the Clement house. It had all the shades drawn against the afternoon heat. Even so, I could imagine Mr. Clement standing behind one of the windows, pushing the shade a little to one side and putting his binoculars up against the crack.
“We’d best keep our distance from that man,” I said without even mentioning his name.
“I won’t even say good morning from now on,” Reba Lu promised.
“I wonder what he did at Dodie’s house to make her mother so mad,” I said.
“Use your imagination,” Geraldine said.
“I’m trying, but I don’t know what to imagine,” I said. “I don’t want Mr. Jefferson Clement inside my head.”
But he was there, just the same. I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened. As we walked along the street, I kept seeing Mr. Clement sneaking around, trying to get into our tent. I was pretty sure he did it. Who else would have done such a thing? Then I had a thought: suppose Buster hadn’t been with us? I could feel my heart beating faster.
We walked slowly, three across, with our arms linked. Nobody answered when we rang Dodie’s doorbell, so we went around back, expecting to see her hanging out laundry. Instead, she was sitting on the back stoop, cradling a mangy old cat. “Poor kitty,” she crooned, and stroked it gently.
When the Crickets Stopped Singing Page 10
