Prettiest Doll

by Gina Willner-Pardo

  Mama was already in the car when I found her. “Well, where you been?” she asked. She was in a good mood from Trudy and all the food.

  “I took a walk,” I said.

  “Are your shoes muddy?” She craned her neck to look down at my feet, her good mood evaporating. “ ’Cause you know I don’t like mud in my car, Olivia Jane.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “You take ’em off on the front steps, just to be sure,” she said, pulling away from the curb. “I don’t want that mud on my carpets.”

  I nodded, too tired to say anything, thinking how, all my life, there’d be shoes I’d have to check, mud I’d have to scrape off, carpets I’d have to vacuum. So much effort to be clean and pretty and new-looking. Just thinking about it wore me out.

  six

  I managed to get out of the house by telling Mama I was going for a jog. “So I’ll look toned for Prettiest Doll,” I said.

  “What do you need a backpack for?” she asked, running a knife around the inside of a cake pan she’d just pulled out of the oven. The kitchen smelled vanilla-y.

  “Extra weight. Books,” I lied. “Miss Denise says extra weight is good for toning.”

  “You just watch that mud,” she said. “And the puddles.”

  The sky was still thick with clouds, but every once in a while there was a hole and you could see past all the gray to blue. I love that—the way the blue is always there, even if you can’t see it. I kept looking up, heading up Mound Street, forgetting all about the puddles, hoping for a glimpse of blue.

  Danny was sitting on a downed shagbark hickory where the basketball courts give way to woods. His hair was wet and slick, with comb marks running through it.

  “You look clean,” I said.

  “I washed up at the gas station,” he said. “And I washed some clothes in the sink.”

  “How are they going to dry?” I asked and then saw behind him how he’d hung them over some low-hanging boughs. Two shirts and two pairs of underwear. I looked back at him.

  “I bet you were in Scouts,” I said, trying not to let my embarrassment about the underwear show.

  “No, I hate that stuff. I just brought Woolite and a hair dryer from home. I used the hair dryer in the bathroom to get most of the water out. They can air-dry till morning.”

  I sat down on the log and let the backpack slide off my shoulders. “I can’t believe you thought of that. The hair dryer, I mean.” I pulled the backpack around to my lap. “I probably would have just gone to a laundromat.”

  “Laundromats cost money.”

  He said it as if I was acting all superior, as if going to a laundromat was the same thing as going to Buckingham’s for barbecue every night of the week.

  “It’s not like we’re rich,” I said. “I told you my mom works two jobs.”

  “What about your dad?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Sorry,” he said. He looked as though he really was. “My dad’s just an asshole.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I know a lot of kids whose parents are divorced. Some of them like their dads; some of them don’t. I just let people say how they feel and don’t say what I really think, which is At least your dad’s not dead.

  “You go to all those pageants, though,” Danny said. “Those things cost money.”

  “Hey,” I said. “I know that. You think I don’t know that? You think my mom works two jobs for fun?”

  “Okay, okay. Sorry. Jeez.”

  I hugged the backpack close.

  “Now maybe I’m sorry I brought you food,” I said. “Maybe you’re just going to think, Oh, this rich girl’s showing off how much food she has.”

  Actually, I had worried about giving him our food when we had to be so careful about money. I talked myself into it by saying that that’s what Jesus would do. But it got on my nerves, the way Danny was acting all judgmental about pageants. It wasn’t his business how Mama spent our money.

  “No. I won’t think that. Really,” he said.

  He had long eyelashes, which I hadn’t noticed before. Sitting this close, I couldn’t stop looking. If he were a girl and did pageants, he wouldn’t even need false ones.

  “Really,” he said again, and then looked at me hard and deep, until I felt myself believing him.

  “Well, okay,” I said.

  “So what did you bring?”

  I handed over the backpack and he unzipped it fast.

  “It’s just cold cuts and bread and a couple of stale doughnuts,” I said. “One of my mom’s jobs is at a bakery and she gets to take the day-old stuff home.”

  “Chocolate glazed are my favorites,” he said, pulling out the plastic grocery bags I’d stuffed almost full. I thought he’d eat one right then, but he zipped the backpack up and held it out to me. “Thanks. This is great. This’ll get me through till tomorrow.”

  I remembered then that he was leaving in the morning. I realized that I’d never said goodbye to someone I’d never see again, except my dad, who didn’t really count because when I said goodbye to him I was four. Also, I didn’t know he was going to end up dead on the 475.

  “Do you know anybody in Chicago?” I asked.

  “Not really.”

  “So it’s just because you think it looks nice?”

  “It’ll have snow. I’ve never seen snow.”

  “Missouri has snow. You’ve never seen it, really?”

  He shook his head.

  “It’s not that great,” I said. “It’s pretty when it first falls and sticks, but then it gets gray and slushy.”

  “I just want to see it,” he said. “Sometimes, you just want something different, even if it isn’t better.”

  “I guess I get that.”

  “I’m sick of southern accents. And rodeos. I hate the rodeos,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t you want to go somewhere with a beach?”

  “I don’t know. Not really.”

  “No one hates the beach,” I said. I wasn’t sure about that, because I’ve never actually been to a beach, or at least not a beach with an ocean attached to it. I’d gone to Table Rock Lake with my grandpa once, but we just rented a boat at the marina near Lunker Landing and fished for striper.

  “Beaches just aren’t my thing,” he said.

  He did look pasty.

  “I think it’d be nice,” I said, “sitting on a towel, getting tan, watching the waves. Your skin smelling like coconuts. Maybe it’d be like on TV, where waiters bring you pop in glasses on a tray. Maybe it’s not really like that, but that’s how I like to think of it.” I rubbed my hands up and down my arms, trying to get warm. “Just one time, I’d like to order a Shirley Temple on the beach. And not worry about how it’s really just 7-Up and the restaurant is giving it a fancy name so they can charge more.”

  “It figures you’d like the beach,” Danny said.

  “Why? ’Cause I want to lie in the sun? ’Cause I want someone to bring me a Shirley Temple for once?”

  Danny looked at the ground and dug his toe into the soft, wet dirt. “I’ve got better things to do than just lie around,” he said. “And anyway, all that sun gives you skin cancer.”

  We sat without talking for a bit. I thought how we had nothing in common. He played chess, like Richard Androtti, who smells like benzoyl peroxide and the inside of an old suitcase. And Danny was kind of nasty, the way he made comments about how I looked. I was used to it—people always think that if you do pageants and are pretty, you must be a jerk or stupid—but I usually stay away from people who think things like that.

  Still, I didn’t like the idea of never seeing him again.

  “I know someone in Chicago,” I said. “You could stay with him. He wouldn’t mind. He loves helping kids.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “I’m used to being on my own.” He grabbed a dead hickory leaf and rolled the stem between two fingers. “Who do you know?”

  “ Uncle Bread.”

  “ Uncle who?”

  “I
t’s Fred, really, but when I was little I called him Uncle Bread and he liked it so much I kept doing it. He lives in Chicago. In an apartment. On the third floor.”

  “I don’t know,” Danny said. “I don’t even know him.”

  “He’s a teacher. He teaches fourth grade. He cares about kids. Really cares about them. Even the ones the other teachers don’t pay attention to, who read indoors at recess, or have only one friend, or maybe none. The ones who would rather play video games than basketball. The ones who don’t stand out enough and get ignored or left behind. All of them. He would really like you,” I added.

  “I wish I had a teacher like that.”

  “The kids love him. Everybody loves Uncle Bread,” I said proudly. “Except Mama. Uncle Bread doesn’t believe in pageants, which gets her all riled up. And she doesn’t like that he moved to Chicago to teach poor kids in the ghetto when there are plenty of Missouri kids who need help. And also, she’s not crazy about his being gay. She says there are classes he could go to, pastors who could pray it right out of him.”

  Danny laughed. “Don’t tell that to my gay uncle. He’s a lieutenant in the Houston Fire Department. Nobody messes with him.”

  I felt a flare of jealousy that Danny’s uncle lived in the same city with him.

  “Wouldn’t your uncle ask me about my parents?” Danny asked. “He would probably call the police if he knew I’d run away.”

  “No, he wouldn’t. Not if I told him not to,” I said.

  Actually, I wasn’t sure about this.

  “I don’t know, Liv. I think teachers have to tell. I can’t take the chance that he’d report me. I’d have to go back,” he said.

  I felt a shiver, hearing him say my name.

  “You don’t have to say you ran away. You can say you’re seventeen and a high school graduate. Seventeen’s only two years older than fifteen.”

  “He’s not going to believe I’m seventeen. He’s not going to believe I’m fifteen,” Danny said.

  “Maybe he would,” I said.

  Danny pulled something crumpled from his jacket pocket and smoothed it out against the hickory log. It was a bus schedule. I watched him study it. I wondered if the lines in his forehead really did make him look taller, or if that was just me wishing.

  “The bus to Chicago leaves tomorrow at six forty a.m.,” he said. “It gets to Chicago at seven fourteen p.m.” He was quiet for a while, thinking. “Would your uncle mind if I got there at night?”

  “He wouldn’t like you walking around,” I said. “He’d want to meet you at the station.”

  “What’s his last name? I’m not calling him Bread.”

  “Tatum, same as me. Fred Tatum. You can call him Fred.”

  “Mr. Tatum,” Danny said. He stuffed the bus schedule back in his jacket pocket. Then he sat, a little hunched over, his hands dangling above the leaf-covered mud. “It would be nice to have a place to stay until, well, until...”

  “His apartment’s really nice,” I said. “I’ve never been there, but he sent me pictures. His front window looks out over the street, and there’s a tree that grows up from the sidewalk, and in the spring he can see the new green leaves up close. And there are two fireplaces: one in the living room and one in the bedroom. They don’t work, so he put stuffed gorillas in them. He has a thing about gorillas.”

  “I didn’t say I was definitely going,” Danny said. “That’s kind of weird, a grown man who collects stuffed animals.”

  “What’s weird about it?” I asked, even though I knew. “Don’t say he’s weird.” I was afraid I might cry. “Don’t ever say a mean thing about him.”

  “Sorry.” Danny looked over at me and then back down at the ground. The dead hickory leaves looked like shattered pieces of frosted glass. “I’m sorry.”

  “He’s my daddy’s brother. Was.” I blinked hard. “He’s all of my daddy I got left.”

  Danny didn’t say anything more, but I could tell he was thinking Sorry again and meaning it.

  “After my daddy died, Uncle Bread wrote me a letter a day. He knew I liked getting mail. I kept every one of those letters,” I said.

  “Wow.”

  “A hundred and twenty-three, I think. I sent him drawings and then some letters, after I learned to write. He stopped writing after a while. But I keep every one of those letters in my treasure box, tied with a blue ribbon.”

  He stopped writing when I stopped writing back. I didn’t feel like telling Danny that it was too hard, that I was too angry.

  “I never get letters,” Danny said. “I get e-mails. But letters would be nice.”

  I was quiet. My anger about Danny saying Uncle Bread was weird was getting all mixed up with the anger about Uncle Bread leaving Luthers Bridge. I tried to sort it all out until it just got too complicated and I stopped.

  “It must be hard not having a computer,” I said finally.

  “I miss virtual chess,” he said. “And YouTube.”

  “The thing is,” I said, and then stopped. Mama always says I’m a worrywart and not to borrow trouble. But I couldn’t help it. “Let’s say you get to Chicago, and you don’t call him. Then what?”

  “I haven’t thought that far ahead.”

  “I don’t believe you.” That was when I realized he was going to Chicago for a reason that he wasn’t telling.

  When he didn’t say anything, I said, “Playing chess is all about thinking ahead, isn’t it?”

  “Okay, so I’ve thought about it. I just haven’t decided yet. But I’ll figure it out.”

  “You won’t have a computer or a phone.” I didn’t say that people would notice him, thinking he was a little kid cutting school.

  He sat up straight to look at me. “I’ve been doing all right so far, haven’t I?”

  “Don’t be mad.” Almost without thinking, I reached out and let my hand rest on his arm. I felt it then: all my insides rearranging themselves, making room for this new thing.

  In your head, you think it’s going to be a kiss on a beach at sunset, the sky lit in red and purple streaks. Or maybe in a fancy restaurant and he reaches across the table to grab your hands, and the candles throw up a flickering light so you can see his eyes are wet.

  You don’t think it’s going to be on the basketball courts at Dale Hickey Junior High, with his underwear flapping in the breeze behind you.

  “I’m not mad,” he said.

  My phone rang just then, making it so we had to look away from each other. When I answered, Mama said, “You been running all this time, Olivia Jane?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Pretty much.”

  Anger, shoving at me from the inside, pooling under my skin.

  “You don’t sound very out of breath,” she said.

  “I’m taking a break,” I said. “Those weights are heavy.”

  Danny and I looked at each other, and he smiled, like it was both of us lying instead of just me.

  “Where are you, honey?” Mama asked.

  “Near the school.”

  “You want me to drive over and pick you up? Sky looks awful dark.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  “Well, all right. You remember what I said about muddy shoes?”

  “I remember.”

  “I don’t like that, Olivia Jane.”

  “Sorry.” I rolled my eyes at Danny, not wanting him to think that I was really sorry, willing him to forget that thirteen is two years younger than fifteen. “I’ll be right there.” I snapped my phone closed. Looking up, I saw that Mama was right: the clouds were low and looked full to bursting. A wind rustled through the woods around us. The trees shook themselves, whispering Hurry.

  “You got a pen?” I asked.

  Danny fumbled in his jacket pocket. When he handed me a pen, I grabbed the bus schedule and started writing in one corner.

  “This is Uncle Bread’s number, just in case you do end up in Chicago. Tell him you’re my friend. And this is my cell phone number, so you can
call me when you get to wherever you end up. Just so I know. I won’t tell anyone. I promise.”

  He stared at the number. “I know.”

  I stood up. “I’ve got to get back.”

  He nodded. “I’m going to stay here awhile. Just until my jeans dry a little.”

  “Good luck,” I said. “If you do decide to call Uncle Bread, he’ll take good care of you. Even if you don’t need taking care of,” I added, knowing he would want to start an argument.

  When I turned toward the schoolyard, I felt the first drops. I wanted to ask him wouldn’t his jeans just get wet all over again in the rain, but I knew if I did that, he would know that I didn’t want to leave—didn’t want him to leave—so I forced myself to be still and just start running.

  seven

  IT rained all night. I know because I didn’t sleep. I lay in bed listening to the sound of the drops on the metal awning, wondering if Danny had gone back to the church shed or if he’d just stuck it out in the woods behind the school, thinking maybe the trees would keep him dry. I figured he’d gone back to the church: maybe he’d left things, assuming he’d sleep there. Also, it would be risky to camp out in the woods so close to a school, where kids showing up in the morning might wonder who he was and report him.

  I wondered about a lot of things, lying there. I thought about Luthers Bridge, the ramshackle, mismatched shops on Mound Street, church bells ringing on Sundays. Sweet corn in summer, prairie king snakes smelling of musk, sliding through the downed fall leaves, the first snow glittering on the patchy lawns. Mrs. Hayes keeping her stretch of sidewalk clean. Mrs. Fogelson. Imogene at the barn, nudging Honey with her knees, neither of them minding the flies and the dust. Mama. It was everything I knew, the whole world, except for the world out past the hills, where Danny was heading. Danny, who thought I was smart.

  And Uncle Bread, in Chicago.

  The anger came and went.

  Some people never get farther than where they start from, never find out what else there is, or ask questions, or get answers. Cal Burney, who works behind the counter at Nine Lives Pets and Feed, told Imogene and me he’d never been anywhere he couldn’t ride his horse to. Don’t you ever think about Paris? Imogene asked, or Rome? And Cal said no, he never did.