"Good. So do I. This evening you bring your family on down to my house for supper. We're two blocks up Chinqua Penn that way, turn right on Wally- that's a street, not a bum in the road -- and we're five doors down on the right."
"I really couldn't put you out for supper- my kitchen is put together now, so-"
"I'm sure you're really looking forward to thinking up some kind of supper and stopping your unpacking long enough to prepare it," said Jenny.
DeAnne couldn't pretend that Jenny wasn't right, and besides, her mind was still back on what Jenny had said before. "That woman whose little boy was missing. Did they find him?"
"I don't know," said Jenny. "I never heard. By the way, in case you're wondering, I don't cook southern, I cook western. That means that there won't be nothin' deep- fried or even pan- fried. And I cook western ranch, not western Mormon, which means you won't be getting some tuna casserole and a jello salad, it'll be an oven roast and baked potatoes and gravy, and I already bought enough for your whole crew so don't make it go to waste, just say yes and show up at six."
That was that. Jenny finished the box, called her kids, plunged out the door, and the kids straggled along behind her. DeAnne felt invigorated by Jenny's visit. Even better, she felt at home, because she knew somebody now, she had a friend.
She looked at her watch. It was two-thirteen. She was sup posed to be at school to pick Stevie up in two minutes.
She bustled into the bedroom and dragged the kids out of bed-Robbie was actually asleep, today of all days- made them carry their shoes and socks out to the car and managed to get to that parking lot on the top of the bluff overlooking the school by twenty after. There were still a billion cars and parents there, or anyway more than the parking lot was designed to handle, and tons of children around-but no Stevie. He must have come up the hill and looked around and then, following her instructions, headed back down to wait for her in the principal's office.
She managed to get both of Elizabeth's shoes on her at the same time, and Robbie got his own on with the velcro straps fastened down-thank heaven for velcro. It was almost two-thirty when she finally herded the children into the front of the school. The last of the buses was just pulling away. Stevie was sitting in Dr.
Mariner's office. The second he saw her, he was on his feet and heading out the door.
"Just a moment, Mrs. Fletcher," said the secretary.
DeAnne turned back to face her.
"If you aren't able to pick up your child on time, may I suggest that you have him ride the bus? Or arrange for the after-school program?"
"I'll be on time from now on," said DeAnne. "Or we'll set him up for the bus."
"Because this room is not a holding area for children, it's a working office," said the secretary.
"Yes, I'm sorry," said DeAnne. "It won't happen again."
"We like children very much here," said the secretary, "but we must reserve this area for adult business, and we appreciate it when our parents are thoughtful enough not to-"
"Yes," said DeAnne, "I can promise you that the only way I'll be late to pick him up again is if I'm dead.
Thank you very much." Seething inside, she left the office, Elizabeth on her hip and Robbie in tow. Stevie was waiting at the front door of the school.
"I wasn't very late," said DeAnne. "But I thought that maybe your class hadn't gotten out yet, so I waited at the top of the hill."
Stevie nodded, saying nothing. As soon as she caught up with him he walked briskly on ahead, leading the way to the stairs up the hill.
Robbie broke free of DeAnne's grip and caught up with Stevie, but his relentless conversation couldn't penetrate Stevie's silence. He must be really angry with me, thought DeAnne. Usually Robbie could pull him out of a sulk in thirty seconds flat.
When they got to the car, DeAnne apologized again for being late, but Stevie said nothing, just got into the front passenger seat while she was belting the kids into their seats in back. "Is Stevie mad at me?" whispered Robbie at the top of his voice.
"I think he's mad at me," said DeAnne. "Don't worry."
She got into the car and backed out of the parking place, navigated a narrow road among a small stand of trees, and finally pulled out on a main road. Only then could she glance down at Stevie. "Please don't be mad at me, Stevie. It'll never happen again."
He shook his head and a silver tear flew from his eye, catching a glint of sunlight before it disappeared onto the floor. He wasn't sulking, he was crying.
She reached out and caught his left hand, held it. "Oh, Stevie, what's wrong, honey? Was it really so bad?"
Again he shook his head; he didn't want to talk about it yet. But he didn't take his hand away, either. So he didn't hate her for being late, and when he was able to he'd tell her what happened and he'd accept wha tever comfort she could give. She held his hand all the way home.
He didn't want a snack-he headed straight for his room. She kept Robbie out, though it took practically nailing his feet to the kitchen floor to do it. She ended up giving Robbie and Elizabeth their snacks, and then decided that they needed a walk outside. They'd been cooped up in the house all day, and even though it was the first week of March it had been a warm winter, not a flake of snow even in Indiana, and almost balmy ever since they got to Steuben. They could walk down and make sure they knew which house was the Cowpers'
while it was still daylight.
She leaned into Stevie's room. He was lying on his bed, facing away from the door. "Stevie, honey, we're going to take a walk. Want to come?"
He mumbled no.
"I'm going to lock the doors. I'll only be gone a few minutes, OK? But if there's a problem, we'll be out in front somewhere, we won't go out of sight, OK?"
He nodded.
Out on the street, she realized for the first time that there weren't any sidewalks. They couldn't even walk on the grass-people planted hedges right down to the street. How completely stupid, how unsafe! Where do children rollerskate? Where do you teach children to walk so they'll be safe? Maybe people in Steuben haven't noticed yet that cars sometimes run over children in the road.
It made her feel trapped again, as if she had found out that they would have to live in a house with no hot water or no indoor toilets. I had no business bringing my children to this uncivilized place. In Utah I could have kept them on the sidewalk and they would have been fine.
In Utah.
Is that what I am? One of those Mormons who think that anything that is different from Utah is wrong? She mentally shook herself and began giving the kids a revised version of the sidewalk lecture. "Stay close to the curb and walk on the lawns wherever you can."
Robbie was bouncing his red ball in the gutter as they walked. It was one of those hollow rubber ones about four inches across, small enough for a small child to handle it but big enough that it wasn't always getting lost.
"I wish you hadn't brought that, Robbie," said DeAnne.
"You told me it was an outside toy, and we're outside."
"Well, if it bounces into the street, you can't chase it, you have to wait for it to roll to one side or the other, all right?"
Robbie nodded hugely-and then kept on nodding, not so much to annoy his mother as because nodding with such exaggerated movement was fun. "Look, Mom, the whole world is going up and down!"
Of course, he had not stopped bouncing the ball, and at this point the inevitable happened- it bounced off his toe and careened down the gutter away from them, rolling into the road and then drifting back to the curb, where it disappeared.
"My ball!" cried Robbie. "It went down that hole!"
Sure enough, the ball had, with unerring aim, found a storm drain and rolled right in. This was the first time DeAnne had really noticed what the drains were like, and again she was appalled. They were huge gaps in the curb, and the gutter sloped sharply down to guide the flow of water into them. The effect was that any object that came anywhere near them would inevitably be sucked inside. And the gap was
large enough that a small child could easily fit into the drain. Naturally the people who designed roads without sidewalks would think nothing of creating storm drains that children could fit into.
"Mom, get it out!"
DeAnne sighed and set Elizabeth down on the neighbor's lawn. "Stay right by your sister and don't let her go anywhere, Robbie."
Of course, this meant that Robbie grabbed hold of Elizabeth's arm and Elizabeth began to scream. "I didn't mean tackle her and pin her to the grass, Robbie."
"She was going to go into the street," said Robbie. "She's really stupid, Mom."
"She isn't stupid, Robbie, she's two."
"Did I go in the street when I was two?"
Elizabeth had stopped screaming and was tearing grass out of the neighbor's lawn.
"No, Robbie. You were too scared that a motorcycle might come by. You had this thing about motorcycles.
You used to dream that they were coming to get you and eat you. So you never went into the street because that's where the Motorman was."
In the meantime, DeAnne was down on her hands and knees, trying to see anything at all in the storm drain.
It was too dark.
"I can't see anything," DeAnne said. "I'm sorry, Robbie. I wish you hadn't brought the ball on this walk."
"You mean you aren't going to reach in and hunt for it?"
"Robbie, no, I'm not," said DeAnne. "I can't see in there. Anything could be down in that hole."
Suddenly he looked terrified. "Like what?"
"I meant that I just don't know what's in there and I'm not going to go reaching around for it. For all we know it's eight feet down, or the ball might have already rolled halfway to Hickey's Chapel Road." She gathered up Elizabeth and took Robbie's hand and they walked on toward the street where the Cowpers lived.
"Stevie said this was a bad place."
"Stevie said what?"
"A bad place," said Robbie, enunciating clearly, as if his mother were deaf.
What could Stevie have meant by saying such a thing to Robbie? Did he mean the house? The neighborhood? School? Steuben?
Robbie looked over his shoulder again toward the drain. "Do you think that someday they'll find my ball down there?"
"Since the ball isn't biodegradable, it will probably still be there for the Second Coming."
Robbie was still trying to extract meaning from that last statement when they got to the second corner.
DeAnne stopped there and counted down five houses on the right. The Cowpers' was a one-story brick house with a station wagon in the driveway, with two kids climbing all over the top of it. DeAnne would never let her kids climb on the car. They could fall off. They could damage something. The hood of the wagon was up, and as she watched, she saw Jenny emerge from the hood, where apparently she had been fixing something in the car. Jenny stretched her back, looked around, and saw DeAnne. She waved the grey doughnut-shaped thing she was holding. DeAnne waved back.
Jenny yelled something, but DeAnne couldn't hear her, and it embarrassed her to have somebody yelling to her on the street. So she waved aga in, as if to say yes to whatever Jenny said-which was probably something like, See you at six, or, Nice weather we're having-and then turned and herded her little flock back toward home.
"Kitty!" shouted Elizabeth right in DeAnne's ear. "Kitty! Kitty!"
A jet-black kitten scurried across the road just as a car came speeding by. The cat dodged out of the way; the car made no effort to slow down or stop. DeAnne's fears about the dangers of the street in front of their house were all confirmed.
"Wow," said Robbie. "We almost had a kitty pizza."
Another Step- ism.
The cat headed straight for the storm drain and disappeared.
"Mom!" screamed Robbie. "The yucky hole got him!"
Robbie ran a few dozen steps toward the hole. Then he realized that he was not in the protection of his mother and started to run back. But he could not bring himself to leave the kitty, and so he stood there beating his fists against his hips, demanding that his mother hurry, hurry!
"Honey, the kitty probably goes down into that hole all the time and plays there."
But Robbie wasn't hearing anything she had to say. "The snake got him, Mom! You got to save him, you got to!"
Of course Robbie would imagine a snake down there. Step had taken them to a science museum and they had watched a snake eating a mouse. Robbie couldn't let go of the memory. Snakes had replaced the Motorman.
She knelt by him and put her arm around him to calm him. "Robbie, I promise you, there is no snake down there. Whenever it rains here, the water all rushes down into that drain, and if there were any snakes living down there they would have been washed out to the ocean years ago."
"The yucky hole hooks up to the ocean?" asked Robbie.
"Everything does," said DeAnne.
"Wow, cool."
Robbie took a wide berth around the drain, and as DeAnne stood at the front door, fumbling in her purse to find her keys, he stayed at the curb, looking back toward the yucky hole.
"What if it rains while the kitty's down there, Mom?" he asked.
"It isn't going to rain for days, and the cat will get hungry and go home long before then," said DeAnne.
She got the door open. "Come on inside, Robbie."
"Do you think the kitty's playing with my ball down there?" he asked as he came through the door.
"Kitty," said Elizabeth. "Yucky hole, all gone."
"That's the story," said DeAnne. "Looks like we can't keep anything from you, Elizabeth."
"Drink," said Elizabeth.
Robbie had already rushed ahead to the room he shared with Stevie, shouting out the story about the ball and the kitty and the yucky hole long before he got to the room. DeAnne smiled as she took Elizabeth into the kitchen to get a drink. If anybody could get Stevie out of his blue funk, it was Robbie.
A moment later, Robbie was in the kitchen, looking mournful. "Mommy," he said. "Stevie told me to shut up and die."
"What?" asked DeAnne.
"He doesn't want a little brother anymore, Mommy," said Robbie.
DeAnne set Elizabeth down on the kitchen floor. "Stay with your sister for a minute, would you?"
"Can I turn on the TV?"
"The cable isn't hooked up yet so there's hardly anything to watch," she said, "but suit yourself."
She found Stevie lying right. where she had left him before going on the walk. "Son," she said.
"Yeah?" he mumbled.
"Son, sit up and look at me please," she said.
He sat up and looked at her.
"Please don't ever say anything so terrible to your brother again."
"I'm sorry," said Stevie.
"Did you really tell him to shut up and die?"
Stevie shook his head. "Not exactly."
"What did you say, then?"
"I told him to shut up, and when he just kept yelling about a snake eating a kitty I just told him to drop dead."
"Where did you ever hear an expression like that?"
"Everybody said it back at my old school, Mom. It doesn't really mean that I want him to die."
"Well, Robbie doesn't understand that, Stevie. You can't say things like that, even joking. Not to your own brother."
"I'm sorry."
He looked so miserable. And DeAnne could understand how, after years of sharing a room with Robbie, the dedicated extravert, Stevie could have moments of complete exasperation, for once Robbie thought of something he wanted to say, he would say it, even if you begged him for silence. He simply could not leave a thought unspoken. The miracle was that Stevie was usually so patient with his brother.
"I'm sorry, too," said DeAnne. "I shouldn't have told you off like that." She sat down beside him on the edge of his bed and put her arm around him. "You've had a tough day, and here I am, no help at all."
"I'm fine, Mom."
"Can't you tell me what happened?"
"Nothing happened," said
Stevie.
"Did you make any friends?"
"No!" he said, so vehemently that she knew there was far more to the story than he was telling.
"Were they mean to you?"
"No," he said.
"Is Mrs. Jones a nice teacher?"
He nodded, then shrugged.
"Did you have any homework?"
He shook his head.
"Do you just want me to leave you alone for a while longer?"
He nodded.
She felt so useless. "I love you, Stevie," she said.
He murmured something that might have been "love you too" and then, as she got up, he rolled back over, curled up on his bed.
She left his room, feeling deeply depressed. As she walked down the hall she could hear the television in the other room. Robbie was switching from channel to channel, so it alternated between loud hissing and very fuzzy reception on the local channels. For just a moment she couldn't bring herself to go into the same room with her children. She was supposed to know what they needed and provide it for them, and she was going to let them down because she didn't have a clue.
She went to the front door, opened it and stepped out onto the porch. Then, in spite of the scoffing of her rational mind, she had to leave the porch and walk across the lawn and stand at the curb and look at the storm drain up the street. The yucky hole. Just to see if the kitten had come out.
Of course it had probably come out while she was in the house and so it was absurd to stand here, watching. She would go back inside. Right now. This was foolish.
A movement in the corner of her eye caught her attention. She turned toward the house, and there in the side yard between the house and the neighbors' fence was a grey rabbit. Robbie had told her he had seen one, but she hadn't believed that a wild rabbi could really be living in their neighborhood. It looked at he steadily for a moment, then loped off into the back yard.
She followed it, hoping to see where it went. Rabbits might cute and furry, but they were rodents, like rats and mice, and the could carry diseases. She had to get some idea where it lived or least where it came from. But when she got to the back yard it was gone.
She walked the wood-slat fence, to see where it might have gone under, but she couldn't see any rabbit-sized gaps. She also examined the latticework skirting around the base of the house, though the thought that the rabbit might live under her own house made her shudder. She hated the way that southerners built their houses up off the ground instead of putting in a massive concrete basement the way houses were supposed to be built. Anything could get in under the house- it must be filled with spiderwebs and beetles and who knows what other disgusting creatures, right there where all the waterpipes and wiring and heating ducts were. It made her feel naked, to know that her house was completely exposed on its soft underbelly.
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