Also Known As Harper

by Ann Haywood Leal

  I LOOKED DOWN the porch steps at Hem. He was busy finding all his plastic dinosaurs and lining them up on the edge of the coffee table. “We having a yard sale, Mama?” He picked up his biggest dinosaur and squinted at the underbelly of it. “How much you think I could get for this one?”

  I gave him my hush-up look and set to work searching out Mama’s special book. As soon as I pulled it out of the laundry hamper, she seemed to perk right up.

  I turned to her favorite chapter, which wasn’t too hard. The book was creased open so good at that particular spot that when you set the book down, it automatically flopped open to that page.

  It was the part where Scout finally gets to see their hermit neighbor, Boo Radley. It’s where she realizes what her daddy’s been trying to tell her all along. That people aren’t always what they seem from the outside. You got to give them a chance and figure them out for your own self.

  Hem piled the cushions back on the couch and we all sat down together in our living room in the yard.

  But Mama wasn’t reading like she usually did, leaned back with her eyes closed. She bent over the book in her lap, her finger tracking under the words, slowly, so Hem and me could let the story sink into our bones.

  Hemingway hummed quietly to himself and held his dinosaurs so they made long shadows on the grass.

  I nudged Mama softly with my shoulder. “That word is ‘embarrassment,’ Mama. Scout was embarrassed, not excited.”

  She nodded and hugged my arm. “I must’ve just looked wrong.” The tops of her cheeks got all pink and blotchy, and she handed the book to me. “You read, Harper,” she said. “I can’t think right.”

  I took the book from her. Lately, she’d been having me read more. I’d noticed she read better with the lights out when we were going to bed at night. She tended to mix up the words here and there when she did it the other way.

  I smoothed my hand over the page and took up where she left off. But after a couple of pages, I could tell Mama wasn’t paying much attention. Her eyes kept traveling over the piles on our lawn.

  Finally, she tapped her pointer finger on the cover of the book and pushed herself up off the couch. “We need to be good thinkers and problem solvers like Mr. Atticus Finch, and get this mess cleaned up before it gets dark on us. We’ll find what we need for tonight and put it in the car.”

  Mr. Atticus Finch pretty much always knew what was what.

  Mama looked at the light brown sedan parked up next to the house, and I thought how all my clothes would smell like old lady. We had gotten that car all the way from Mississippi when my grandma died. That old lady never gave me the time of day, Mama had told Daddy when we were driving him to the bus station. She never even laid eyes on my children, and now we’re paying more than the cost of that decrepit car for you to go on out and get it.

  Hem and I had poked around in Daddy’s mama’s car for a couple of days when Daddy got back, hoping we could sniff out some gold or diamonds or something she might have hidden in there, but all we smelled was stale old lady. Kind of a mixture of fried onions and a closet that hadn’t been aired out in a while. And that smell held on, too. Every time I took even a little ride in that car, I could smell it on me for a good two hours after.

  I pointed at a box of kitchen bowls with some toilet-tissue rolls spilling over the top. “I say we try to organize by room.” I picked up a toilet-tissue roll and tucked it under my arm. “Like this here.” I tilted the box so Hem could see. “It’s mostly kitchen bowls. So we just ignore the toilet paper and put the whole box in the kitchen section.”

  “That’s a good idea, Harper Lee.” Mama nudged one of Hem’s dresser drawers with her toe. “Then we can figure out what to take with us tonight.”

  “We can’t get all this in the car, can we?” I imagined my bed and the big mirror from Mama’s vanity balanced on the top of Daddy’s mama’s car. If only Daddy hadn’t driven away in the big white pickup last year, we might have had something to work with.

  Mama’s eyes went from the car to the yard, and she shook her head. Her eyebrows wrinkled up tight, like they did when she was paging through the back of her checkbook. “I haven’t yet thought what to do with it all. I guess we’ll just have to get what we can for tonight and come back tomorrow.”

  I wanted to ask her where we were going to come back from, but she had that closed-up look on her face, like she got when she was done with people bothering her for the day.

  Hem helped for a while, until he found a box with food from the kitchen and settled down on the couch with it.

  Mama looked over from the bathroom pile. “He’s not nibbling on any raw meat or anything from the fridge, is he, Harper Lee? I had a chicken defrosting before I left this morning.”

  I squinted my eyes up at him. “Naw, it looks like a couple of graham crackers is all.”

  I’d started to go over and get a better look at what he was gnawing on when I caught sight of something over my right shoulder, and it was stinking like Winnie Rae.

  “You just go on back where you came from, Winnie Rae Early.” I held up a long box of fireplace matches, like I might be getting ready to fling them at her.

  “And that’s just like you, isn’t it, Harper?” Winnie Rae stood next to a Radio Flyer wagon. She peeled at flecks of black paint along the handle. “Here I come offering up my assistance, and you’re your mean old self. My mama pointed out to me just today that you can have a bite like a venomous viper snake.”

  Anyone in her right mind knew that Winnie Rae Early never offered up anything just for the sake of niceness. There was a price of some sort rolling around in that Radio Flyer of hers. There always was.

  “Mrs. Morgan.” She gave up on me and turned her handle toward Mama. “We got a nice old shed out to the side of the house. Mama said you could maybe use our big rolling cart with the fold-down ramp and put some of your stuff out there. She said you could store some of your things that aren’t too heavy out in the camper.”

  I noticed no one offered to let us stay out in that camper. Just a few things that didn’t weigh too much. I guessed that left Mrs. Early out of the camping trailer, which meant she was one less person trying to rifle through our personal belongings.

  But when I thought about it that way, it made it a whole lot easier to sort and pack things away. Big things like furniture went into the shed, things I couldn’t bear to have come in contact with anything Early went into the car, and everything that I didn’t care much about, or could have the Early washed off of, went into the camper up next to their house.

  “Oh, yeah.” Winnie Rae pointed at the front porch behind us. “Mama said to make sure no one tries to put anything back up on the porch. She doesn’t want Grandma’s house looking like some junky old eyesore from the road.”

  She always talked about her grandmother as if she was getting ready to come walking across the yard at any time and take our home back. But we all knew her grandmother hadn’t been doing any walking for quite some time now. She’d been long dead, since way before Winnie Rae was even born.

  I was thinking on all sorts of mean things I could say in return, but I noticed that as Winnie Rae was taking herself home across the grass, she looked back with her eye on my green dresser with the blue flower decals. And I erased that coveting thought right out of her mind with a good evil eye to the middle of her forehead.

  When we’d finally packed ourselves into the car, I sat on top of Mama’s best antique lace towels from her mama and held tightly to Hemingway, so he wouldn’t slide off the three-legged stool that Mama’s daddy had built when he was sixteen years old.

  I could see Winnie Rae to the side of her shed. The sunlight was almost completely gone for the day, but I could still see the outline of her, crouched like a chubby little animal, watching us.

  I knew Winnie Rae to keep her bicycle and her antique-doll collection out in that shed, and I wanted Mama to drive right through the closest wall and see how Winnie Rae liked seeing her own things
spilling around in the dirt.

  Hemingway had one eye on the car window to the side of him. He wasn’t used to riding up that high, and with every little turn of the steering wheel, his hand squeezed my arm, as if he was worried he was going to crash on through the glass.

  “Sit tight, now.” Mama put her right hand around me, her elbow touching the back of the seat where I’d set out Flannery’s little peach sweater.

  I looked up in Mama’s rearview mirror, but the house was blocked by all of our piles. I wondered if Daddy’d had anything blocking his way when he left in his pickup. But then I remembered to ignore my thoughts of him, and I made my mind toss them in the pile beside our old house where we’d left what was broken or used up.

  Chapter Six

  A MOTOR HOTEL sounds downright fancy on a big lit-up sign, but I knew the Knotty Pine Deluxe Motor Hotel to be where Mrs. Ione Early worked, and there was nothing fancy about it.

  I ran the tips of my fingers up and down the slick wood paneling on the walls. Someone had scratched Leona in perfect cursive above one of the beds. Hemingway took a running start from the door and dived onto the first bed. He sat up and took a couple of handfuls of the rusty orange bedspread and got himself a good bounce going.

  Mama looked at him, but I could tell she was too tired to get him to stop. “Keep an eye on your brother, Harper,” she said. “I need to bring some things in from the car.”

  I flipped on the overhead light, and it made a spidery orange glow in the middle of the ceiling.

  Hemingway grabbed on to the tan wooden headboard and pulled himself up on his knees. “I love horses. They’re almost as fast as dinosaurs.” He pressed his nose up against the painting on the wall above the bed and bounced his knees on the pillow. “These horses feel like your Christmas dress.”

  “It’s velvet,” I said. “The artist painted right on the velvet.”

  He leaned back a little and got a better bounce going.

  “Watch yourself, Hemingway.” I put my hand out next to the orange ceramic lamp. The base of the lamp looked like the bumpy round squash Mama bought for her special casserole around Thanksgiving time. “There’s breakable stuff in here.”

  Mama carried in a cardboard box and set it down against the wall across from the foot of Hem’s bed. She held her arms out wide and walked in a straight line along the side wall. “We can stack quite a few things here against the wall, but we need to be sure to leave a walkway.”

  I saw the pointy ear of my favorite stuffed animal sticking out of the top of the box. My gray cat had sat on my pillow since I had learned to make my own bed. But it looked so out of place on the motel bedspread, and I wished I was back in my own bed, looking at the green crayon letters Hemingway had drawn on my light blue walls.

  I stood with my back to the side of the wide front window and rested my hand on a little round table. I pointed to my left. “We should leave this clear, too. So we can get into the bathroom.”

  The door to the bathroom hung from the top of the doorframe and folded up to one side when you opened it, like an accordion fan.

  Hemingway followed me inside.

  “Looks like Mrs. Early missed a few spots on this one.” I moved a tiny shampoo bottle and sat on the edge of the tub. I leaned forward onto the side of the sink next to me and rested my chin on my arms. I tried not to think of anything Early touching the tub that I was going to be using.

  Hem put down the lid on the toilet on the other side of the sink and made himself comfortable. “Maybe that baby got in the way.” He arched his back and pushed his stomach out hard.

  “Hush, now, you two,” Mama said. She held her hand to the side of her mouth, as if she was trying not to smile. “She was nice enough to give us these two-for-one coupons, and heaven knows we can use all the help we can get.”

  A plastic tray on the back of the toilet held four glasses and an empty plastic ice bucket, made to look like it was brown wood. I grabbed one of the drinking glasses and picked at a loose end of the cellophane, unwrapping the glass from its crinkly plastic cocoon.

  “What’s it say on the glass there, Harper Lee?” Hem tilted his head to the side and looked to be trying to get his mouth around the sounds of the letters on the side of the glass.

  I held it up to the light and made out the faded green letters. “Says here Knotty Pine Luxury Cabins.” I turned on the faucet and waited for the water to get cold. “These don’t seem like cabins to me.” I filled up my glass and took a long drink. “I always thought cabins to be standing alone in some trees all by themselves.” I listened to the toilet flush on the other side of our bathroom wall.

  “These rooms are stuck together tight.” Hem reached back and flushed the toilet, as if he was trying to answer the people next door. “Anyway, I thought this was the Knotty Pine Deluxe Motor Hotel.” He said “de-luxe” as if it was two separate words.

  “People can make anything fancy with the right words,” I said. “Hand me my blue notebook, would you, Hem?”

  I sat back down on the edge of the tub and leaned forward onto the sink. Maybe if I thought about my stories or poems it would seem more like home.

  I could see Mama through the doorway, sitting cross-legged on one of the double beds. She had a white tablet on her lap, and she looked to be doing some figuring of her own.

  Hem tossed me my notebook and sat down next to Mama with his crayons. “Can we still have school at home if this isn’t my real home?”

  Mama tilted her head but kept her eyes on her tablet, like she wasn’t really listening.

  “Mama,” I said, “you ought to think on letting Hemingway go to the regular old kindergarten.”

  She turned the tablet over on her lap and looked across at me. “You know that wouldn’t work out, Harper Lee. Kindergarten’s only half a day. I can’t be leaving work to take him back and forth.”

  I stood in the doorway. “He could walk home on his own and take care of himself for a few hours, Mama. Just until I get home.”

  She took a deep breath. “One of these days, things will be different. When I get you and Hem all the way through school, maybe I can take my own self back to school.” She sat up against the headboard. “My mother always did want me to finish high school.”

  She made her voice all slow, and cut her words off like she did when she was imitating her mama’s Louisiana talk. “Girl that reads and makes up stories as much as you, ought to finish up her school.”

  I finished the story for her like I always did. “But she was sick and you had to take care of her. You spent your high school taking care of your brothers and sisters.”

  She nodded. “No way my father knew how to take care of a sick wife and a whole ream of children. He could barely take care of himself.”

  I thought about how I’d feel if I was trying to do my homework or write a poem and I had that ream of brothers and sisters climbing all over me.

  Then I thought of something she’d never really talked about. “Who took care of that ream of children after my daddy came and rescued you?”

  She looked out the window as if she was searching out someone way far off. “My mama died right before your daddy started coming around. The day after the funeral, my father shipped all six of those kids off deeper down into the Louisiana bayou to live with my mama’s sisters.”

  I looked over at Hem. I sure wouldn’t want him shipped off anywhere.

  “It’s been a very long day, Harper.” Mama flopped back on the bed and covered her face with her arms. “I can’t talk about all this right now.”

  And even though I didn’t think she meant to, she fell asleep right then and there.

  I tucked my notebook under my arm and rinsed out my Knotty Pine Luxury Cabins water glass. “Come here, Hem.” I picked up the shampoo bottle. “Your hair could use a good washing.”

  I ran warm water into the tub and tipped out some of the shampoo under the spout.

  I helped him get his shirt over his head and put my arm out to steady
him as he climbed into the tub.

  “Make lots of bubbles, Harper Lee. I like lots of bubbles.” He scooted to the back of the tub. He’d been afraid of the drain for as long as I could remember. He wouldn’t even put his toes near it.

  “I know, Hem.” I picked up the ice bucket and dipped it into the bath water. “Now tip your head down and close your eyes.”

  I pushed the faucet off with my elbow and poured the sudsy water over his brown curls. The water straightened them out against his neck in long waves, just like mine. He favored me in the eyes, too. Green and wide and sad in the deep-down parts. They had rivers and roads jutting out from the centers, where everything had sunk itself in. The roads of worry were the Mama part of him.

  I rubbed the washcloth at his neck and he twisted away from me. “Not so hard, Harper Lee.”

  “You got a ring of dirt around your neck a thumb wide, Hem.” I dabbed under his chin. “You don’t want people thinking there’s no one taking care of you.” I tilted his chin up and put the washcloth in his hand. “You do it, then.” I sat on the edge of the tub and waited. Every bit of the mixed-up anger and sadness from the day was creeping into my arms and legs, all of a sudden like, and I knew I could fall asleep without trying, just like Mama. I tried to push aside the picture in my mind of the Earlys, marching through our house and rifling through our personal things.

  “Okay. Clean enough.” I pulled Hem out of the tub and wrapped him in a long towel. “If you get your teeth brushed right now, we’ll still have time to read a quick story.”

  I tossed him one of Mama’s working T-shirts. It was perfect for sleeping. All soft and stretchy from being so worn. But he set it down and pulled his usual pajamas out of his pillowcase—a sleeveless cotton undershirt of Daddy’s. I was kind of hoping it had gotten lost in the front-yard mess. Every time I laid eyes on it, I tried to think of it as Hemingway’s. But that low, whiskey voice always seemed to pour out of one of the side seams and aim itself at my blue writing notebook.