by Laura McNeal
Clara put the clipping in her desk drawer with her camp fund and the Christmas card showing the MacKenzies beside the milk truck. Amos stared back at her, uncomfortable as always, one arm behind his back. He didn’t look like a jerk. But, as her mother liked to say, jerks don’t always wear an identification label.
Gerri dodged her all day Thursday, and that afternoon, after throwing her papers and before her father came home, Clara dialed her on the telephone. Her little brother, Kendrick, answered the phone. “It’s me, Clara. Who’s this?”
“It’s me, Kendrick, the King of All Revolting Noises, do you doubt it?”
Clara knew better than to say she did. “Not for a second,” she said. “Is your sister there?”
Clara heard the clunk of the receiver being laid down and Kendrick’s voice yelling, “Ger-ri! Ger-ri Erickson! Call for Gerri, the Hairiest Hairy One!”
Seconds passed. Nearly a minute. Finally Kendrick came back on the line. In a careful voice, he said, “She’s not in at this moment.”
Clara knew what this meant. She had seen Gerri use this trick on James Martinson when she didn’t want to talk to him. Gerri would go out on the front porch and tell Kendrick to tell James Martinson that she wasn’t in at this moment.
“Okay,” Clara said. “But could you tell Gerri that I really need to talk to her? And that it will only take a second?”
“Roger,” Kendrick said. “Over and out.”
Clara set the phone down. She only had one real question for Gerri, but it was probably the only one she could never ask and Gerri would never answer. It was, What did I do?
It was Friday when the letter from Amos arrived. She and Ham had finished their paper route and had just returned home with their empty canvas pouches. It was full dusk. Her father wasn’t home yet, so Clara checked the mailbox on her way by. She was hoping for a letter from her mother or maybe even Gerri when the smudgy envelope from Amos, with its serious, formal handwriting, came out of the box with two bills from credit card companies. Amos had neatly printed his return address in the corner. There was an oily, dime-sized stain near the bottom lefthand corner, and Amos had drawn an arrow toward it and written, Oops! Then, under that, he’d written: Neat’s-foot Oil. (Nothing gross.)
Feeling a little stunned, like she had when she was chosen for her little part in the school play, Clara carefully opened the envelope. She read the letter once fast and then again slowly. So it had all been a misunderstanding, then, and it confirmed what Bruce had been trying to tell her that day on the bus. Which meant that Amos might be as nice as she hoped after all.
Clara was still sitting in the living room staring at Amos’s neat handwriting when her father came in wearing gloves and his heavy winter coat.
“That from your mom?” he asked, nodding at the letter in her hand.
“No,” Clara said. She felt herself blush. But her father didn’t seem to notice. Once she’d said it wasn’t from her mother, he turned away and hung up his coat.
“It’s from Amos MacKenzie,” Clara said.
“Amos MacKenzie,” her father repeated. “Do I know Amos MacKenzie?”
“His father’s the milkman.”
“Oh, right. Another of our endangered species. Men in white uniforms, milk in glass bottles.” He took off his gloves and picked up the two bills.
Clara didn’t like it when her father was in the mood to make everything seem useless. “Well, his son, Amos, was hit with a bat.”
Her father mumbled, “Uh-huh” and opened the first bill.
“Some vandals threw the bat at Amos when he stopped them from doing more vandalism,” Clara said. “Amos got a concussion.”
“Hmm,” her father said while staring at the bill.
“It was really the oldest Tripp brother who did it,” Clara said. “That wasn’t in the paper, but someone told me about it at school.”
For the first time, her father paid attention. “Well, I wouldn’t believe all the gossip,” her father said. “Remember, ‘Just the facts, ma’am. We only need the facts.’”
Clara thought about telling her father that it was a fact that she’d seen Eddie and Charles Tripp together just a little while before the vandalism and assault, but she didn’t. Clara didn’t know why, but she didn’t want to think that Eddie had been involved. So she said, “Well, the facts are that Charles Tripp was arrested and hasn’t been at school.”
Her father nodded, but he’d opened the other bill and his attention was elsewhere.
“I have play practice tonight,” Clara said, remembering suddenly that she also had five chapters to read for English by Monday. And math homework.
Her father didn’t look up from the bills. “What time?”
“Seven to nine.”
“Well, I’m thinking of going to Dalton tonight. Do you think you’ll be okay walking to the school?”
Going to Dalton. To see her mother. This was even better than a note from Amos. “Sure,” she said. She waited until her father had put the credit card bills back into their envelopes. “Are you going to bring Mom home?”
“I don’t know, Polkadot. That’s up to your mother. She wanted me to take her some clothes and books, and then we’ll just have to see about the rest.”
That night, at play practice, they were just blocking their moves on the stage and getting measured for costumes. But it was pleasant in the little auditorium with the warm lights, the wooden floor, the Roaring Twenties set, and Mrs. Van Riper’s voice sailing musically over the din. “People! People! Opening night approaches and we are far far from ready!” Backstage was a bustle of clothes and good cheer, and for the first time in days, it seemed to Clara, life was a warmer, cheerier place. Gerri was still being horrible, but she’d gotten the letter from Amos, and her father was off in Dalton, maybe sitting in Aunt Marie’s guest room right now, at this very moment, listening to her mother confess that she’d made a mistake and wanted to come home and straighten everything out with everybody. That could happen. That, Clara thought, standing in front of a large cardboard speakeasy, could very easily happen.
14
CHINESE CHECKERS
It was the longest weekend Amos could remember. After Amos had sent him off, Bruce hadn’t stopped by or even called, and although Amos knew he had no right to hope that Clara Wilson might call him over the weekend, he’d hoped it anyway and been disappointed.
Amos lay on the sofa and did his makeup homework, but only halfheartedly. He watched sports events on ESPN that he could not have cared less about, and then fought with his sister when she wanted to turn the channel to some Saturday afternoon dance show. He just felt lazier and lazier and crankier and crankier. He wasn’t hungry, so he hardly ate. Even Saturday night, when his mother made pork chops and applesauce especially for him, he just picked at it. His father tried to perk him up by advising him that the Blue Jays were leading the Grapefruit League, and Amos said, “That’s only spring training, Dad. Everybody knows spring training standings don’t mean anything.” Worse, even though he knew he might’ve hurt his father’s feelings, Amos couldn’t break out of his mood enough to care.
On Sunday nights, the whole family usually watched a Perry Mason rerun and ate cheeseburgers with milk shakes, but the doctor was going to do some kind of procedure on Amos’s father the following day, and this meant that all day Sunday, his father had to drink some kind of mineral oil that cleaned out his whole body. So Liz and Amos had cheeseburgers while their mother went upstairs with their father, who’d gone to lie down. Amos turned the TV to Perry Mason at seven o’clock, but no one came into the living room until almost eight, when his mother sat down to read one of her new religious books and his father carefully laid out a board game on the coffee table in front of Amos’s sofa. Amos let him. Amos waited until he was completely done laying it out with like-colored marbles in all their colored holes. Then he said, “Dad, don’t you think I’m a little too old for a game like Chinese checkers?”
Amos knew at once that h
e shouldn’t have said it. It was rude, and he expected his father to say something sharp about his rudeness. But what happened was far worse. His father’s face turned suddenly pink, as if he’d just been slapped, and then just as suddenly it lost all its color. His father looked almost tearful, but surely that couldn’t be. He looked completely defeated, as though he had just realized something final and irreversible. Just as soon as this look came over him, his father straightened himself and walked from the room with as much dignity as he could.
All at once his mother was putting down her book, hurrying from the room, and saying, “Shame on you. Shame on you, Amos Thomas MacKenzie.”
15
SWALLOWED BY A WHALE
Clara’s weekend had been no better. On Friday night, she waited up after play practice for her father. She took a quilt with her to the couch and curled up where she could see the hall light shining. On the hope that her mother might be with her father when he returned, Clara made Ham stay on the floor, and she made sure that all the dishes were done before she lay down with her homework.
It was hard to do homework so late at night, and Clara kept popping up to do one more thing that would make the house look inviting to her mother: hanging her coat in the closet, scrubbing the kitchen sink with cleanser, dusting the mantel. Then she would do a math problem and hear a car that seemed to be slowing down outside the driveway. But the car always turned at the next street instead.
She couldn’t believe all this huge stuff was happening and she couldn’t even tell Gerri. During the course of the evening, Clara called Gerri’s number three or four times, but on all but one occasion, she hung up when the machine came on. The other time she waited for the beep and in a small voice said, “Hi, it’s me, Clara.” She waited for a few seconds, but nobody picked up. Which meant Gerri either had gone for the weekend or was out doing something with other friends or was at home not wanting to talk to Clara.
When it was almost ten and she’d finished the last five math problems, Clara pulled out the reading she was supposed to do for English. They were reading Great Expectations, and the words were so difficult that she had to have a dictionary nearby. Tonight she was too tired to get the dictionary, and it was a chapter where Pip went to an old woman’s house and was asked to lead her around and around a rotten wedding cake. On and on they circled the old cake, and when Clara woke up, her father was trying to lift her off the couch.
“Did Mom come with you?” Clara asked.
“Not this time,” he said. He sounded tired. “She’s having a good time visiting with her sister, and now they won’t have to call each other every day.”
“Oh, Dad, you didn’t fight about the phone bill again, did you? Is that why she wouldn’t come?”
“No, Polkadot,” he said in a weary voice. “We didn’t fight about anything.”
Clara wrapped the quilt around her arms and allowed herself to be steered toward the stairs. “She’s already been gone for six days,” she said miserably, almost to herself. How could her mother stay gone like that when her father wasn’t even out of town? She always complained about her father’s long trips, and now she was doing the same thing. What if she didn’t come back to see Clara in the school play?
She didn’t even know about Amos’s wonderful letter.
The worst part about going to bed every night since her mother had left was passing her parents’ bedroom. Since her mother had cleaned up after the midnight picnic and swept everything into hiding, and since her father had come home and left his suitcases standing half-emptied by the bed, it looked more like a motel room.
“Sing that song, Dad,” Clara said as she entered her own bedroom and dropped onto the bed. “The one about the teacup and the whale.”
Sit up to the breakfast table
And cry about your troubles.
Let your tears fall in a teacup
That flows into the ocean,
Where they’re swallowed by a whale.
He sang for a little while, and she pretended to fall asleep, thinking about the time she and her parents had gone to Washington, D.C., on vacation. They had driven until late into the night, and her mother had fallen asleep in the front seat while Clara slept in the back, waking only once to hear her father singing that song to himself, driving the three of them safely and snugly through the night.
In the morning, things didn’t seem snug at all, even though her father turned up the heat. He built a fire, too, and then sat in front of it without a book or any music on. Even Ham sat at a distance from his chair. It was an overcast Saturday outside, the kind of day when the clouds seemed to reach all the way down to the ground, to be everywhere and nowhere.
“You want to read your book, Dad?” Clara asked. “It’s right here.” She held up the book about the French Revolution that he’d been reading since Christmas.
“Sure,” he said, and took it from her. He opened to his bookmark, but when Clara came back to the living room dressed for play practice, he wasn’t reading.
“I’m off to play practice,” she said. “I’ll be back around noon.”
“Sure,” he said. “Noon. And what else are you doing today?”
“My papers and some errands for Mrs. Harper.” She had also thought about writing back to Amos, but she wasn’t sure. She couldn’t call him. Her mother said that if someone sent you a letter, you should write back immediately, not call, especially if they sent you a present as well. But did that rule apply to anyone besides grandparents? Did it apply to boys you didn’t know very well?
Her father looked over his book to the fireplace. The fire he’d built was consuming itself as it collapsed and hissed. A horn sounded outside, and Clara could see the headlights of a car shining weakly into the fog.
Clara’s father glanced at her and gave her a quick nod that meant, You’d better get going. Then he looked down at his book, adjusted his glasses, and lifted one page with his index finger.
“Bye, Dad,” Clara said, and the horn beeped again outside.
“So long,” her father said, and methodically turned the page.
When she came home later, Clara noted what page he was on, and though her father again seemed to be reading the book by the fire Saturday night and Sunday morning, when Clara checked his bookmark Sunday night, it hadn’t moved a page.
Living among kids wasn’t that great, Clara thought, but living among the adult human beings was worse.
16
SUFFER NO FOOLS
Monday morning, 7:15. Amos’s mother, as if totally distracted, hadn’t said a word to Amos or Liz over breakfast, which in itself seemed more than a little bit weird. No “How do you feel?” or “Are you sure you feel well enough to go to school?” In fact, she spoke only when Amos’s father entered the kitchen carrying a small overnight bag. “Got everything?” Her voice sounded hollow and almost afraid.
“Got everything for what?” Amos said, and was embarrassed when his father said, “Oh, this little procedure they’re doing today.” Which was something Amos should’ve remembered. “What exactly are they doing?” he said.
Amos’s father smiled. “First they starve you, then they put you under, and then they poke and prod. Doctors have a strange idea of fun.”
Amos glanced at Liz, who was reading the paper and didn’t look up.
“And when they’re done,” his father said, grinning, “I’m going to have me a big ol’ steak and a big ol’ baked potato.”
He said this so much like he’d say any everyday thing that it satisfied Amos that it was just an everyday thing, and before he could have second thoughts, his mother was telling him to bring his plate to the sink, get his coat on, and get moving, or he was going to be late.
His father pushed a worn leather glasses case across the table toward Amos. “Found these in a snowbank a few weeks ago while I was on my route. Thought you could use them.”
Inside the case were a pair of Carrera black aviator sunglasses.
Amos wasn’t at all sure a
bout them, but Liz, after dipping her newspaper to glance at them, said, “Hey, cool,” so Amos decided to try them on.
“A scarf and some stubble and we’ll start calling you Ace,” his sister said good-naturedly and went back to her reading.
“I just thought it might save some questions about the shiners,” his father said. “I know how kids can be at that age.”
Amos doubted that very much, but he sort of liked the glasses.
“We called the principal. He said you could wear the glasses and your hat during class for the first few days.” The hat, which his father now presented, was a new Blue Jays hat meant to hide Amos’s stitches and shaved scalp. Amos turned the cap in his hands. It looked stiff and brand-new. He wasn’t that crazy about it.
He suddenly became aware that his father was staring at him. “Thanks, Dad,” Amos said, and his father broke his gaze and stood up.
“Okay, we better scoot,” he said to Amos’s mother, but then, before leaving, he did something else weird. He put two fingers under Liz’s chin, tilting her head slightly so that he could give her a gentle kiss on the forehead. “Be good, Liz,” he said in an odd, tight voice, and then hurried out.
After their parents had gone, Liz gave Amos a look. “And they say we’re strange,” she said.
Amos pulled on his cap and coat, then, outside on the front walk, stood for a moment wrapping his scarf tight to his neck. It was funny to think he’d been away from school for a week and yet had heard nothing at all about it. No gossip, no test scores, no jokes. No half-court basketball in the gym, no girls to sneak looks at. It was almost as if school had for a time ceased to exist. The nervousness reminded Amos of how the first day of school felt when you were about to enter a new grade.
The sun was out, but you couldn’t feel it. Just snowy glare and wind. Amos, on his way to school, turned onto Teal Street just in time to see the Number Five school bus lumber away from the curb a half block ahead. Reflexively, Amos sprinted a few yards, but the aviator glasses bounced loosely on his nose and Amos saw that running was futile anyhow. He pulled up and began the long walk.
