I unrolled the paper, and my stomach got the prickly churns.
“It’s just like last year.” I sat down on the bottom of the playground slide and smoothed the paper open over my legs.
She shrugged. “Just like last year?”
I nodded. “The paper. It’s exactly the same. Word for word.”
I had memorized every letter of that paper last year, I had been so excited about it. And just then the words from the blue paper came into my mind before my eyes had even gotten to them. I was going to get another chance to read my poems, and I could feel that same tingly feeling in the front of my head that I always got when my words arranged themselves into a poem or a story.
But it was hard to push away the memory of Daddy sitting at the kitchen table with the whiskey poisoning the air around him. You’re lazy with a pen, Harper Lee. Being sloppy with your words is the worst kind of lazy. If you expect me to sign my name to this sort of garbage, you got another think coming. And then he’d put the tip of his pen on top of the “P” on the Whaley County Poetry Contest permission slip, like he might be getting ready to sign his name, anyway. But the tip of his pen had pressed down harder, and hadn’t let up until it had made a big crooked “X” over the front of my permission slip and edged over onto one of my poems.
I tried to remind myself that Daddy and his green-ink pen weren’t anywhere near me anymore.
“What’s wrong, Harper Lee?” Sarah Lynn, who was crouched down by the slide, moved in so her nose was practically touching mine.
I shrugged. “Nothing. Just thinking about the poems I’ve been working on.” But I couldn’t push that voice out of my head. It made me feel like Daddy was back with us again. He had always tried to make my poems shrivel up and seem like they weren’t anything special. Nothing that you’d read out loud at a poetry contest.
I scooted back and put the blue paper in my backpack, trying to remember his words couldn’t reach me. “Maybe you could come over and we could work on our poems this afternoon.”
“Huh-uh.” She shook her head. “You know we can just be school friends.”
A school friend was like a secret you could never share with anyone. I wanted a real best friend.
“My daddy hasn’t even lived at our house for a good solid year now,” I reminded her.
She shook her head again, slow and hard with each word. “Mama says no way am I to go to your house ever again. I’m not even allowed on your street.” She raised her eyebrows. “For heaven’s sake, Harper Lee. I’m not even supposed to be talking to you at school.”
If I had done something wrong, it would be so easy. I could say I was sorry and we could be best friends again. But it didn’t seem to work that way when you were trying to apologize for someone else. For something someone else had done.
I stood up. “Your mama could drive you and pick you up herself.”
“Not a chance.” She pressed her lips together hard.
I nodded and breathed out a long breath of air. Sarah Lynn’s mama had never gotten over the time Daddy gave Sarah Lynn a ride home from our house. Mama was at work, and Daddy had been refilling his coffee cup all afternoon. By the time he went to drive Sarah Lynn home, he’d emptied a good three-quarters of his whiskey bottle.
When he’d tried to back out of Sarah Lynn’s driveway, he’d plowed over the better portion of Mrs. Newhart’s cutting garden and sent their garbage cans skidding into the neighbor’s driveway across the street. Afterward, Daddy had had trouble making his eyes focus right and didn’t seem to care one way or the other about all the yelling Mrs. Newhart was doing. She’d called Mama at work and really let her have it. Mrs. Newhart said you could smell the whiskey in the air a good ten-foot circle around him.
I made my face like I didn’t care. “Maybe Mrs. Rodriguez will give us some time in class today.” I swung my backpack over my shoulder and went to get in line on the four-square court.
I planted my feet along a thick painted edge of a square and tried to push Daddy out of my brain. Once his whiskey smell had gotten in somewhere, it took some doing to air it out.
Sarah Lynn nudged her way behind me and bumped up against the books on my back. Her long sleeves swished against the canvas of my bag as she bent over to tie her shoe.
I looked down at her. “Could you take a couple of steps back, please?” I pointed behind me. “You’re going to squash my lunch.”
I liked Sarah Lynn and I wanted to be more than just school friends, but sometimes she just plain annoyed me. I wanted to be the kind of friends that had sleepovers and rode their bikes in each other’s driveways. There wasn’t anything so special about the flowers in her mama’s cutting garden, anyway. And I’d taken a million whiskey drives with Daddy. I was an expert at it. I’d taught Sarah Lynn how to get a good knuckle grip on the seat so you wouldn’t slide around too much in back.
Winnie Rae stepped out of line a few people ahead of me and turned around so she could get a good nosy stare going. “My mama said you shouldn’t have ripped that sign down.” Her yellow T-shirt rode up in the front, and I could see a white stripe of skin trying to fold itself over the waist of her jeans. “She doesn’t have time to be putting those things back up. She’s too busy running the motel.”
I rolled my eyes and nudged Sarah Lynn in the leg, softly, with my heel. “Winnie Rae wants us to think that her mama’s a front-desk hostess, taking people’s reservations and such.”
Sarah Lynn raised one eyebrow and looked in Winnie Rae’s direction.
I made my voice a little louder, so it carried up the line. “But anyone at all knows the truth, Sarah Lynn.”
Sarah Lynn gave a good evil eye to Winnie Rae for me.
“She might be a landlord.” I added a good evil eye of my own. “But she’s just a housekeeper. Same as my mama.” The bell was going to ring any second, so I had to move fast. I had a lot more words trying to spill out of my mouth at Winnie Rae.
“And another thing you should know, Sarah Lynn.” I stepped out of line myself, so Winnie Rae would be sure to hear me. “My mama does laundry and floors and such in people’s houses, but I know Mrs. Early to be more of a toilet-and-bathtub cleaner.”
Right when I was getting up some nice momentum, the bell rang and I had to get back in line. Which was probably a good thing, because Winnie Rae was looking like she was getting ready to come at me.
I leaned back and whispered to Sarah Lynn, “How Mrs. Early gets down low to scrub those motel toilet bowls and wipe out the tubs is beyond me.”
Sarah Lynn giggled and nudged me up the steps to the main hallway.
I breathed deep and waited for the school smell to creep in. I didn’t feel this way anywhere else. From the first time I walked through the kindergarten doors, I’d sniffed out the pencil sharpener and the stacks of new paper and I’d felt every part of my body relax.
I sat down at my desk and took out my morning journal. My pencil hardly needed any direction. I’d had something in my head since yesterday, and my pencil was practically moving on its own.
I was thinking I might like to add a short story to my poetry collection. It could maybe give me an edge over the competition. Something a little different. A little longer.
Mrs. Rodriguez walked by and put her hand on my shoulder. “Nice job on your essay, Harper.” When she smiled she had a big space between her top front teeth. Sometimes you could hear a quiet whistle coming through. “You’ve got a special gift for words.”
She set the essay down in the corner of my desk and ran her hand over my cover sketch of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. “You remind me of Eleanor, you know. You’re strong and creative, just like she was.”
I smiled at her; I did feel like that when I was breathing in those school smells. It was a good thing I took a deep whiff that morning, because it turned out I was going to need some extra to tide me over for a while.
Chapter Four
I DIDN’T KNOW how Winnie Rae had done it with all her sniffing and wheezing, but
she managed to get a good block ahead of me on the way home from school. Which meant she’d had a good block’s worth of time to see everything before I did.
She spun herself around like a runway model and wasted no time in coming back to report it all to me. She stopped in front of me with her hip cocked to one side and one hand resting on the beginnings of a fat roll. “You’re lucky it didn’t rain today, Harper Lee Morgan,” she said, “because your entire house is out on your front lawn.” She had her braggy look about her, where her top lip turns up on one side.
It was easy for the mind to play tricks on a person when they were down on their luck, especially if that person was you. And my mind was thinking how maybe all that stuff piled around on the lawn belonged to somebody else—the Earlys, maybe. But my eyes were telling me different, due to the fact that Hemingway was sitting in the middle of one of the smaller piles, holding the tiny peach sweater up by one of its fluffy baby arms.
“I found it at the bottom, Harper Lee,” he said. His eyes were all shiny and he looked as if he was getting ready to let loose with a good cry. “But I brushed it off real clean and I didn’t let any of it touch the ground again.”
“Good job, Hem.” I felt my stomach get hollow and dry.
I knew that sweater belonged to Flannery, the baby that almost was. She didn’t quite make it. Mama says she never even opened her eyes. I knew for a fact, if she would have opened just one of her eyes and seen Mama’s beautiful smile, she might have opened the other one and hung around for a while.
“Give it here, please,” I said, “before Mama sees it.”
I found the red apple crate with my poems and stories in it and tucked Flannery’s little sweater deep down into the side. It made my stomach feel better for a second, thinking that Flannery and my stories could take care of each other.
“You better get started, Harper Lee.” Winnie Rae swept her hand in a wide arc in front of her. “You got a whole lot of mess to clean up and no house to put it in.”
My eyes must have scared her, because she ran right over to her mama’s lawn chair and sat herself down without another word.
Mama came around front from the back yard. She put her hand up to her mouth when she saw me, as if I was unexpected company.
“Oh, Harper,” she said, “I’d hoped to have this whole thing straightened out and have everything back inside before you got home from school.” She looked over her shoulder at the front door. “But everything’s locked up tight as a drum.”
Her eyes fell on her favorite chair, the white rocker, tilted sideways in the garden dirt, and I wished I could have gotten home first and fixed it all back for her.
Hemingway cupped his hands wide in front of him. “They got them big old padlocks on, and the windows are shut up tight.”
Mama turned in a slow circle, her eyes making their way around to each and every pile. “We found it like this about an hour ago,” she said. Her face was red and blotchy, with the tear tracks like she used to get in the days after Daddy first left.
Hemingway bent down and pulled a plastic dinosaur out of the top of a box. “We were coming back from cleaning Miss Oakley’s kitchen, and Mama thought we took a wrong turn onto someone else’s street.”
“It’s got to be a mistake, Mama,” I said. “Look there.” I pointed to a dark blue car coming up toward the house. “Mrs. Early’s probably gotten someone to come take the locks off.”
I wanted her to feel better, even if it was only for a second. I couldn’t stand seeing her looking like all the hope had been washed out of her.
I grabbed Hem by the hand and hung back by the porch steps with Mama. I already had a plan going in my mind. The second they unhooked one of those padlocks, I was going to get me a good head start and push right past them. Then I’d refuse to come out until they put it all back right.
The lady was taking her time getting out of her car. Mainly because the driver’s side looked to be so smashed up, you couldn’t open the door.
Mama’s eyes got dark and narrow, like when the supermarket checker tried to give her the wrong change.
The lady scooted herself over to the other side and came out through the passenger door, but she still didn’t act to be in any hurry. She leaned back in and reached over the front seat, coming out with one of those zippered pouches, which she hooked around her waist.
Hemingway nodded toward her. “Maybe that’s where she keeps her lock-breaking tools.”
But she didn’t even walk in our general direction. She circled all the piles of cardboard boxes and scattered furniture, slowly, holding on to the zipper tab on her pouch.
Mama took a couple of steps forward and shaded her eyes with her hand. “May I help you?” she asked.
The lady stopped when she got to the pile of couch cushions by the front porch. She leaned over and pulled a toilet brush out of a box next to the bottom step and held it up, looking at Mama through the hole in the center of the brush. “Doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to your collection here,” she said.
“What?” Mama tilted her head to the side like she was searching for the right words.
But that lady had said out loud just exactly what was going on in my own mind. The whole yard was like the clearance bin down at the Piggly Wiggly after people had been weeding through it for a few days. Whoever Mrs. Early had gotten to take all our stuff out of the house had done it as quickly as possible, by just tossing and dragging.
Hemingway’s mattress and box spring were leaning up against the side of the front porch, and his dresser was over on its side, with the television from the living room sitting on top of it. There was a wide muddy grass stain on the very spot where Hem liked to curl up at night with his arms tucked under him. I couldn’t stop looking at that stain, and I suddenly knew a bit about how Sarah Lynn Newhart’s grandma had felt when her house burned to the ground.
Whatever could fit in boxes had been plopped into them, without any careful wrapping, or even fastening up the lids. I could see that the toilet-brush box also held Mama’s best Christmas towels and the picture of my dead great-grandma.
Mama must have seen me looking, because she touched my arm real lightly and said, “Grandma spent a lot of time primping up in the bathroom in her day, so I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.”
I liked how Mama managed to joke a little or sound hopeful, even in a bad situation. Just like how Mr. Atticus Finch always did in To Kill a Mockingbird. Except for when it came to Flannery. No one was allowed to mention the baby who almost was.
Which was why I practically flew off the porch when I saw the lady bending down toward my apple crate. I knew what she was reaching for, and it wasn’t my stories. But I had to make my way around a pile of kitchen chairs, and I couldn’t get to her in time.
Chapter Five
THE LADY HELD UP the peach sweater and unzipped her pouch with the other hand. “How much you want for this?”
I grabbed Flannery’s sweater out of her hand so quickly, I caught my fingernail across her arm. “It’s not for sale!”
I held tight to the smallest hope that Mama hadn’t seen what she was holding up, but as soon as I turned back around, I knew for sure that the peach color had soaked right into Mama’s eyes. A tiny kitten sound came out of her mouth as she sank down on the top step of the porch.
Mama pointed across the yard to the lady’s car. “You’re trespassing, and you’d better get yourself off this property before I call the police.” The words were strong, but Mama’s voice sounded as if it was going to break at any moment.
The lady made her way to her car a lot faster than when she’d come in. She shook her head and turned toward us as she opened up the door. She pointed her chin down to her chest and looked up at us from under her eyebrows with crazy eyes, like she was delivering up a curse. “You people ain’t going to sell one thing at this yard sale! No one will even set foot at this ridiculous dump!”
I wanted to go kick in the other side of that lady’s car, but I sa
w the wobbly steps Mama was taking and I kicked away a perfectly sharp rock instead.
I went over and put my hand on Mama’s shoulder and did my slow, quiet voice, like I used on Hemingway when I was reading him to sleep. “Let’s rest up here on the porch, Mama, while we figure on what to do.”
I smoothed out the sweater across my lap so the edge of the sleeve was touching Mama’s arm. She put her arm around me and leaned down on my shoulder. Just a brush stroke of that peach fuzziness made her breathing steady right up.
It worked the same with me. Only a hint of anything Flannery made my whole body relax.
I closed my eyes and I could almost smell the baby wipes I’d brought along to the hospital to help give Flannery her first bath. I had packed those in my black patent-leather pocketbook while Daddy was helping Mama into the car in the driveway. Before we’d known Flannery wasn’t going to open those eyes of hers.
You can go on in and have a look at her. Daddy had said it quietly, so Hem couldn’t hear. Just you, now, Harper Lee. Hem’s too little.
Hem wouldn’t have understood about her not waking up and all.
Then Daddy had squeezed my hand and I’d gone into Mama’s hospital room. Flannery was up close to Mama, in Mama’s bent arm, wrapped in a peach blanket Daddy had bought for her.
It’s okay to touch her. Daddy’s eyes had been shiny, as if some tears were working their way out.
I had reached next to Mama and fixed the blanket so it wasn’t so loose. It was chilly in that hospital room.
Mama had touched my hand, softly, but her eyes never left Flannery.
But then the nurse had given Mama a shot, and I couldn’t get myself to breathe in enough air. Then I’d started to cry, and Daddy had had to pull me away from Mama’s bed.
I remembered the words that kept going through my head and inching their way out of my mouth. What if she doesn’t wake up? What if she stays asleep forever, like Flannery?
Daddy had picked me up and held me close for what seemed like forever. And he’d helped to cool down the mad I’d suddenly felt at Hemingway. Because all Hem did was sit at the nurses’ station, building a Lego garage for his Hot Wheels. Just like Flannery had never happened at all.
Also Known As Harper Page 2
