And with those words, Ware saw a complete side-flank strategy open up in the Greek Market battle, simple and Jolene-proof. “I’ll get some,” he offered casually. “There’s a place near the Rec.”
His mother dug a couple of twenties from her wallet. “No junk.”
Ware scrubbed his hands, then sat and watched as she shook some crackers onto a plate and sliced some cheddar. “Where is this rehab place?” he asked when she joined him at the table. “Can I go see her?”
“‘May,’ not ‘can.’ It’s downtown. You could take the bus after Rec, I suppose. I can’t take you. I have zero free time. I’ll stop in on my way home from work sometimes, but . . .” She dropped her head to her hands. “There’s so much to figure out. Insurance. What to do about her furniture if she needs to move. The whole mess.”
Ware put down his cracker. If something had happened to Big Deal, something about her condition, something he hadn’t defended her from, that caused her to fall, then the whole mess was his fault.
“Well, it’s nothing for you to worry about. Your uncle Cy and I will figure it out.”
He swallowed hard. “No, Mom. You have to tell me about stuff like that.”
They both startled at a soft thud of distant thunder. Ware glanced out the window. The sky looked bumpy and yellow, like the cantaloupes Jolene had tossed on her compost pile yesterday. Thunderstorm coming, right on schedule.
“I’m not kidding, Mom. You and Dad have to tell me things. I’m not some little kid anymore.”
“Hey, watch it. You’re not some little kid. You’re my little kid. The only one I’ve got.”
Ware didn’t answer. His mother said that a lot. Always before, it made him feel treasured. But today it felt as if she’d wrapped a blanket over his face.
She reached over and ran a thumb around his forehead at the hairline. “You’re filthy. What have you been doing?”
“So . . . we’re gardening.”
“We? Who’s we?” she asked, brightening in such a hopeful way that Ware’s heart fell.
“Mom, don’t worry about me.”
“Well, I do. Because . . .” She picked her napkin from her lap and folded it into a neat triangle. “When I was young, I was—”
“I know. Class president, a million friends. And Dad played three sports. I know.”
“I just want you to be happy.”
He thought about telling her that sometimes he was happy spending time alone. But no matter how many times he tried, she would never understand. He’d learned this the evening before his eighth birthday, when she had come barging into his room.
“Didn’t you hear me calling you?” she’d asked, eyes panicked.
Ware scrambled to his feet, confused. He’d done something wrong, but what? “Sorry, I was . . .”
His mother charged around the room, snapping on his two lamps, the overhead light. Erasing the dramatic shadows that the low winter rays were casting on his ceiling. “Lying on the floor all alone in the dark? Why didn’t you hear me? Do you know how worried I was? What were you doing?”
Her questions were coming too fast, or maybe his brain had slowed. “I was . . . thinking about eights.”
“What?”
“Looking,” he’d corrected himself. “Looking at how eights are really circles on circles.” He hoped he’d gotten the right answer, the one that would ease the anxiety on his mother’s face.
He hadn’t.
“Looking isn’t doing, Ware. What were you doing?”
“I was doing in my mind.” He pointed to the ceiling, tried to show her how the swirls of plaster made an infinity of vertical infinity signs. “See?”
“Oh, Ware,” she said, sinking onto the bed with her head in her hands. “I just want you to be happy.”
Which had only confused him more. Lying on the floor, he’d actually been aware of the physical presence of happiness. It felt as if he’d swallowed a glowing seed. But his mother’s face was so very sad.
“I’ll try, Mom,” he’d promised, meaning it. “I’ll try more.”
Three and a half years later, apparently he still hadn’t tried enough.
“Do you think people can ever get a redo?” he asked. “If something’s wrong with them, can they start over, like brand-new?”
“Oh. No, I’m afraid not. Your grandmother’s prognosis is very good, but she won’t be like new.”
Ware suddenly felt alone. Not the peaceful kind of alone, the lonely kind. He got up and brought his plate to the sink.
His mother rose, too. She went to the calendar. “Six more weeks until we own this house,” she said.
They both jumped at a crack of thunder, close by. Ware went to the window. Black clouds were tum-bling in.
His mother joined him. “It’s going to be fine,” she said, head pressed to the glass spattered with sudden rain.
Ware couldn’t tell if she was talking to herself or to him. “It’s going to be fine,” she said again, as if whoever it was needed extra reassurance.
Ware thought about the new notice, his impossible vow, his grandmother falling on his watch.
“It’s going to be okay.”
He wasn’t so sure.
Thirty-One
The next day, Ware lay on his side watching Jolene swing the sledgehammer in a storm of concrete dust. He had stuck close to her all morning, afraid she was going to abandon the lot again. But she had worked hard hoeing a new trench, and Ware understood that the hoeing was a message: she’d decided to trust him. This felt like a miracle, and the miracle made him feel both relieved and anxious at the same time.
“Don’t you think this lot should feel different?” he asked. He’d been wondering again about what made water holy, which was a thing he kept secret from Jolene, of course—they might not be enemies, but his plan to get reborn still felt too feathery and brave to risk sharing—when the question had expanded. “I mean, it was a church. Don’t you think it should still feel different here?”
“I told you.” Jolene slammed the hammer down. “They took all the holy with them.”
“But what does holy even feel like? Do you think we’d notice if it came back?”
Above, the queen palms rustled a warning. Ware sat up. He heard the tight hiss of a bike braking and the clang of it tossed against the construction fencing.
He and Jolene watched Ashley drop down over the fencing and shake herself into composure. Her cool evaporated when she saw the operation in the parking lot. She hurried over.
“You can leave,” Jolene said, leaning in threateningly. Her safety glasses made her look like a giant bug surveying a meal. “We’re covering the pavement. With water. No more danger for those birds. So, bye.”
Ashley looked skeptical.
Jolene dropped the hammer and yanked off the goggles.
Ware stepped between them. “It’s true. We’re building a wall around the foundation. We’re making a moat.”
“A moat? Like around a castle? That’s, um, ridiculous?”
Ware turned away, face burning. Moats weren’t ridiculous. Most people thought they only protected castles from ground-level approaches, but tunneling ambushes were much more dangerous, and a moat made those impossible.
“You want to be a knight in shining armor, big hero, chivalry and all that stuff?” Ashley went on.
Ware had to step away at that. Knights were brave, they were loyal, they administered justice, he recited to himself, stomping up the back steps. On top of that, they practically invented leading purpose-driven lives. From age seven their purpose was to train for knighthood. After they were knighted, it was to serve their liege lords.
The problem, he had to admit when he had climbed to the top of the tower, was the chivalry part.
Ware remembered the evening he’d handed his mother his report. “What a crock!” she’d sputtered.
Ware, sitting on the floor beside her chair as she read, had been crestfallen. “Mrs. Sprague didn’t think it was a crock. I got an A.”
>
“Oh, not your report. Your report is very good. But here?” She pointed to page eleven. “This business of protecting fair damsels? If the men hadn’t deprived the women of their rights in the first place, they wouldn’t need to go showing off about how chivalrous they were! What a crock.”
Her words had left him dismayed for days. If the Knights’ Code no longer applied in today’s world, that meant that he himself would never have a chance to exemplify its standards. To live a life of honor, of service to a liege lord. Most importantly, to come to the rescue of those in need.
Ware had stockpiled numerous imaginary scenarios for coming to the rescue of those in need. Due to his temporary lack of muscles, he populated them with people from the extreme ends of the age range: babies crawling into oncoming tidal waves; old people too weak to finish crossing the street. In each, he’d swoop in—chin up, chest out, advancing boldly—to pluck them from disaster’s brink.
When he’d thought about it more rationally, he’d realized that it was only that one part about damsels that didn’t apply. Nowadays, girls didn’t need special treatment as if they were weaker—in fact, nowadays they’d be knights, too. All the rest of the code was still okay.
No, the real disappointment was that he never would be a knight. He hadn’t even protected his own grandmother when she’d needed it. He’d promised to save a papaya garden from a bank but didn’t have a clue how.
Now, everywhere he looked he saw the ridiculousness of his dreams reflected back at him. Even the queen palms seemed to be working hard to hold down a laugh.
Him, hero material?
What a crock.
Jolene’s voice floated up. “You don’t tell one single person about this place. Not one single word.”
And then it struck him. He flew down the stairs, ran back to the girls.
“That’s the whole deal?” Ashley was asking. “All I have to do is not tell anyone, and you’ll actually cover all this pavement with water?”
“Yep,” said Jolene.
“Nope,” said Ware.
Both girls spun to him.
“You’re going to do one more thing.”
“Oh? What’s that?” Ashley said.
“Get your father to order the bank not to auction this place.”
“Please. I don’t think so.”
Ware grabbed his thigh and grimaced. “All those broken crane legs . . .”
Ashley crossed her arms. “Fine. You actually make a moat here and I’ll talk to my father.” She walked off, ponytail swinging.
Jolene’s eyebrows took a hike up above her sunglasses.
And in their mirrors, Ware saw himself again. A kid who was not quite so pathetic after all.
Thirty-Two
Ware had never seen the Greek Market before, because it faced Second Street and his mother had determined that First Street was the most efficient route downtown, and once she’d determined the most efficient route anywhere, she never wavered.
When Ware grew up, he’d take a different route every time he went somewhere.
Anyway, there it was right next door behind the east wooden fence. A sign over the awning announced Greek Market in gold letters, in case he’d missed it, but he wouldn’t have. For a moment, he could only stand outside on the sidewalk and stare.
As Ware headed into kindergarten, his parents had staggered him with a superdeluxe box of 128 crayons. All those colors displaying themselves in a rainbow of promise, all for him.
He felt the same joy of abundance now. Fruits and vegetables burst out of their bins, so bright they seemed to be lit from within. You see that? Wow! he would have said. Except as always, who could he show?
Ware had left only ten minutes after Jolene, but she was nowhere in sight. Probably she was grabbing stuff from the dumpster. The question was, what did she do after that? She was never back by the time Ware left, so where did she spend the afternoons, dragging a bag of garbage?
Ware shook his head—he had an actual job to do here in the forbidden Greek Market—and stepped inside.
He picked up a basket and tossed in a package of blueberries and a head of lettuce, then carrots, tomatoes, bananas, and plums, then headed for the register.
“Hot one out there,” he said to the checkout lady. Ware appreciated that for six months of the year, that was the greeting everyone gave whenever they went anywhere in Florida. It made things easier not to have to come up with an original opening line.
“Hot one out there, yes indeed,” the lady agreed.
Ware placed his basket on the counter. Beside him, a crate of what looked like lumpy footballs, mottled green and orange, caught his attention.
He reached out to touch one, felt the leathery skin.
The sign on the bin had fallen over. Curious, he flipped it up: PAPAYAS, $1.99 a pound.
Papayas. Ware lifted one, felt its surprising weight.
“I know some papaya plants,” he told the checkout lady, although he hadn’t planned to add anything after the “hot one out there” opening. “They’re pretty spindly.”
“That so?” the checkout lady said.
Ware looked down doubtfully at the heavy fruit in his hand. “I don’t know how they’ll hold fifty of these.”
“Things generally grow into what’s needed of them,” she said. “That is what they do.”
“Do you really think so?”
“That has been my experience, yes, indeed.” She took the papaya from him. As she leaned to the scale to weigh it, Ware glimpsed an open door behind her.
Outside was a garden. A woman with white-streaked hair piled on her head stood beside a table under an arbor of vines. She wore a flowered blouse and baggy trousers belted with twine. A girl with stringy yellow hair falling over faded overalls perched at the table.
Ware watched Jolene drink from a glass of purple juice and dig into a plate heaped with food.
The checkout lady straightened, blocking his view. Ware leaned to see around her.
“That’ll be twenty-three twenty,” the checkout lady said, thumping his purchases into a paper bag.
Ware craned his neck. The woman in the garden—Mrs. Stavros, it had to be—was pointing to the grapes above her head, and Jolene was nodding.
“Twenty-three twenty,” the cashier repeated, one hand out, the other on her hip, teapot-style.
Ware rose on his toes, the closest he had to a watchtower. Mrs. Stavros dished more food onto Jolene’s plate with a hand on her shoulder, and Jolene threw her head back and out came a sound Ware had never heard before.
It was a nice sound—gurgly and soft, like water bubbling out of a fountain. A real surprise coming from someone with such sharp elbows and knees. Someone with arrow-slit eyes.
If he’d been in an actual watchtower he might have toppled out. He hadn’t known Jolene could laugh.
Thirty-Three
When Ware lowered himself from the oak limb that afternoon and saw the man at the bus stop, he nearly dropped the groceries.
It was the man’s hair. Dark brown like his mother’s, rippled and close-cut like his own.
He took a quick step behind the tree, but the man turned.
“Ware,” he called, lifting his hand. “There you are.”
Ware walked over on legs that suddenly didn’t feel quite solid. “Uncle Cy. What are you doing here?”
Uncle Cy wagged a finger. “Wrong question, little man,” he said with the kind of laugh that meant things weren’t funny. At all. “The right question is, what are you doing not in there?” He nodded to the community center.
Ware opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
“I’ll start.” Uncle Cy patted the bench and Ware sank down. “Your mom asked me to pick you up. Imagine my surprise when I went inside and couldn’t find my nephew.”
Ware could imagine, all right. He dropped his head to his hands. “Did you ask?”
“I did. Some teenager. He pointed me to the sign-in sheet. No nephew today. No nephew all week.”
/>
Ware groaned. He peeked between his fingers. “You reported me? Missing, or something?”
“No. I almost called your mother, but then I remembered she said you took the three forty-five bus home each day. I thought: Hmm. She drops you off, you don’t go in but you take the bus home. So I decided to wait here.”
Ware raised his head. “I can’t stand it, Uncle Cy. It’s awful.”
“Well, I saw that. When I was your age, I would have ditched that place, too. But hiding behind a tree all day long? That’s not good, little man.”
“I don’t do that.”
“I saw you, Ware. You came out from behind that big oak.” Uncle Cy’s voice was gentle but sad.
Ware stood up, hoisted the bag. “Come with me,” he said. “I’ll show you where I go.”
Thirty-Four
Uncle Cy pulled a beer from the fridge and hopped onto the counter. He moved like a cat, lanky and cool.
Ware put the groceries away and poured himself some orange juice. “Are you going to tell them?” He stole a sideways glance at his uncle.
Uncle Cy rested his head on the cupboard. “What do you think?”
“No. Maybe. But please don’t.” Ware lifted himself onto the counter beside his uncle. He cupped his glass with both hands, hiding the silly seahorses that pranced around the rim. “My mom thinks I need more”—he lifted air-quote fingers from the cup—“Meaningful Social Interaction.”
Uncle Cy sighed. “It’s what she does, my little sister. Fixes things. Even things that don’t need fixing. You don’t seem like you need fixing to me.”
The unexpected kindness of the words undid Ware. He didn’t seem like he needed fixing. He felt himself on the verge of tears. “Unless she’s right. Maybe there’s something wrong with me.”
Uncle Cy put down his beer. He took off his glasses and polished them on the belly of his shirt, then put them back on and looked at Ware expectantly.
And Ware surprised himself. He told his uncle all of it. How he felt different from other kids, kids who tumbled through life in packs, who jumped into the middle of whatever was going on. How he liked to watch from the edges for a while, do reconnaissance from the watchtower. And how he could spend hours by himself, making things or just thinking, and not be bored.
Here in the Real World Page 7
