His voice came out soft and small. “That might be Daddy’s new car.”
The toy truck in his hand tumbled slowly to the ground, and he started to head in the direction of the front porch, but I grabbed his arm.
He tried to shake me off. “Daddy’s inside.” He said it all quiet, as if he was afraid he might wake Daddy from a nap.
“Hem . . . Hemingway . . .” I tried to block his way, but he was plenty quick.
I saw his eyes getting wide and glassy and a little like a crazed animal as he ran to the front steps. “Daddy’s inside . . . Daddy’s inside. . . .” He kept repeating it over and over again, getting louder each time.
Seeing as Winnie Rae’s aunt wasn’t half as enormous as her sister, she got to the front door before Hem, and she grabbed him by the shoulders. “I have no idea what you’re ranting about, boy, but you need to take all that crazy talk back down my stairs and leave me and my son alone!”
I would’ve been perfectly fine with her just blocking his way, but seeing her grab him by the shoulders sent loose the crazy part of me.
“Mama! That boy had his dirty hands on my truck! He bent back my finger!” Winnie Rae’s cousin was trying to make it up those steps carrying a couple of Hem’s biggest trucks and show his mama his pointer finger at the same time. So he wasn’t too hard to push to the side when I went to rescue Hem.
I made straight for Winnie Rae’s aunt. “Nobody’s going to grab on to Hem like that except me!” I told it to her good and hard, because it definitely looked as if she was capable of digging in with her fingernails. There was nothing worse than a fingernail grabber.
Which was why I had to step on her toe with the heel of my sneaker.
She gave out a sound that came straight from her belly and sounded as if someone had pumped a chunk of air out of her.
I had a backup plan that involved her knee, but luckily she let go of Hem after one stomp.
He had started whimpering, and he didn’t put up a fight when I led him down the stairs and out to the curb.
Mrs. Early’s sister was speeding up her swears, but her boy was screaming louder than everybody.
“Get him, Mama! Get them both!” He was holding a skinned elbow, so I figured she probably wouldn’t bother coming after me.
Sure enough, she scooped him up and hauled him on into the house, with barely a look back.
I sat on the curb and pulled Hemingway down on my lap and rubbed his back like Mama sometimes did for me. I closed my eyes and made my breath trickle out slowly. When Hem’s whimpering got quieter, I scooted him next to me. “You understand that’s not our house anymore, right?” I said it quietly, but with a strong voice, so he’d listen and believe me.
He looked me in the eye and took a few quick, shaky gulps of air, but he didn’t say anything.
“Daddy couldn’t be inside, because he doesn’t know those people, right?” I nodded toward our old house.
“He had my trucks.” Hem took another shaky gulp of air. “That kid had my trucks.”
I patted his back. “I know, Hem. I know.” I got up and went over to the garbage can.
I kicked the yard sale sign to the ground and looked around on the grass.
The yard sale itself was over, because all that was left were the broken pieces. The parts that had been stepped on or ignored. Everything was tossed in a long pile, waiting for the trash collector to come by and haul it away. I had never had a fire like Lorraine, but this seemed worse somehow. The fire had been an accident, but everything here had been on purpose, and it made me feel sick inside to see the bits and pieces of our life all torn up and scattered.
Hem walked toward the back of the pile and pulled out our old ceramic towel rack from the bathroom. He ran his hand along the purple forget-me-nots I’d painted on one end. “How come they’re throwing away our stuff?”
I thought about my green dresser with the daisy decals and I shook my head. “I think they were selling it.” I remembered Winnie Rae Early coming across the lawn with her Radio Flyer wagon and I wondered if she’d already had the price tags made out.
All of a sudden, I was dog-tired, and the only thing I wanted to do was see Mama and sit down with my pen.
Hem didn’t say much on the way home, which was good, because there was a poem writing itself out in my mind the whole way back.
Dear Flannery
It’s a good thing you aren’t around
To see this, Flannery.
I’m glad you can’t see someone else
Sitting around on our front porch
And digging through our dirt pile.
That would have been
Your very own dirt pile in a couple of years.
I would’ve helped you make roads with your fingers
And haul water for the lakes
In the middle.
And when you got old enough,
That green dresser with the daisy decals
Would have been yours, too.
Chapter Seventeen
WE WERE ONLY about five minutes away from the motel when Hem started up with his whining again. I just wanted to get back and work on my school plan, so I held tightly around his wrist and pulled him along behind me, trying to block out the sound.
But when we got to the next bend in the road, he stopped dead still and seemed to bury his heels right into the asphalt.
“Come on, Hem.” I pulled a little harder, but all it did was put him off-balance.
He rocked forward and back on the balls of his feet a few times and dug his heels in hard. “I’m tired and my legs are done walking.”
There was only one thing that would get him moving again. “It’s almost time to do your waiting,” I said. “It’s just about time to do your waiting for Daddy.”
He shook his head, because he knew I was wrong. “I got three or four hours still.” His inside clock never failed. “Besides,” he said, “it’s even better to be out here. I can see all the cars that go by.” He kicked over a wide curve of old tire that had blown off a truck and sat down on it.
It was big enough for the both of us, so I breathed out a long puff of air and sat down next to him. I had to admit, I was tired of walking, too. And my stomach was letting me know it was past lunchtime. I pulled the peanut-butter sandwich out of my backpack and unfolded the washcloth.
“Here.” I handed the squished part to Hem, because I knew he wouldn’t notice. Sure enough, he pointed it in the direction of his mouth and took a bite.
I was starting to wish for something to wash it down with when I saw her. The last person in the world I wanted to see standing in front of me.
“Not in school again, I noticed.” Winnie Rae Early walked herself on over, without one hint of an invitation. “The school nurse has been calling your house,” she said. “But I told Mrs. Rodriguez you’re not sick. You just don’t live there no more.”
The thing was, I felt like I was sick right then. I was imagining Mrs. Rodriguez giving my desk away. Or emptying it out and putting it in the hallway, for the custodian to drag off.
Winnie Rae kept right on talking, not stopping for any rest breaks. That’s what guilty people did, I’d noticed. They kept the words coming, so you didn’t get a chance to accuse them.
“I got permission to ride the morning kindergarten bus to the motel.” She was talking as if I cared one ounce about what she did with her day. “Mama told the school I had an important doctor’s appointment and she didn’t have a car to pick me up.” She talked out of the side of her mouth, like she was sharing some big secret with Hem and me. “But really she’s getting off work early and taking me to her hairdresser to get my hair permed. We are trying out a new hairstyle. If we don’t like it, we still have plenty of time to switch to something different. She wants me to look nice at the hospital when the new baby comes.”
I raised one eyebrow at her, because who cared about what she looked like, anyway? Her enormous mother was having the baby.
She fluffed the f
rizzy tuft of hair at the side of her head. “Miss Cynthia didn’t have any more evening appointments, so Mama took me out of school.” She looked me dead in the eye with those beady pig eyes of hers. “I didn’t leave till after Mrs. Rodriguez had me practice reading my poems in front of the class.” The left corner of her mouth always got to twitching to the side when she was lying. “She said I read better than anyone she’d heard in all her years of teaching school.”
I knew Mrs. Rodriguez hadn’t said any of that, I knew it in my heart. But my mind was asking, what if she had? Maybe Daddy was right. Maybe my words really didn’t matter to anyone.
I’d had enough. Winnie Rae was getting to me so bad, my fingers were tightening themselves into hard fists. Those daisy decals were swimming around in my head, and I hated Winnie Rae Early more than a person ought to hate someone. I stood up so the toes of my sneakers were getting ready to bump up against hers.
“You stole my dresser.” I said the words slowly, and evenly, so she wouldn’t miss one bit of what I was saying. “You took it and sold it and it wasn’t yours to be selling.”
She took a step back and looked to be gathering herself up to leave. But then she leaned in again so I could smell her lying Early breath. “My mama says we had plenty of right to it.” Her evil eyes were pinholes. “She said we could consider it as a tiny drop in the big bucket of rent your daddy owes.”
She had torn open the Daddy wound, but somehow all I felt was a strong, sad anger at Daddy for giving Winnie Rae a good reason. He had made it all right for the Earlys to do what they did. And he’d gotten off free of charge. He’d taken everything he cared about with him, so it was all safe from the Earlys’ thieving hands.
And then, even though Winnie Rae knew she had me with that one, she had to keep on with her venomous viper words. “Besides,” she said, “I needed to get my daddy a birthday present. I needed some quick cash. He works long hours driving across the entire United States of America in his eighteen-wheeler.” She shrugged. “You got plenty of dresser drawers at the motel, anyway. What would you be needing that ratty old green dresser for?”
My toes were itching to kick at her legs. They were so close in front of me, it wouldn’t be much of a reach. But I knew it might really have been Daddy I was kicking.
She finally stopped for a breath of air, and I didn’t think she meant to, but she looked at me. Her eyes found mine, and her words held still in the air between us. She stared for a minute and looked as if someone had pressed her Stop button. After a good while, she took a sharp breath and spoke. “I wasn’t going to let her sell it.”
“What?” She wasn’t making any sense.
“The dresser.” Winnie Rae’s shoulders hunched forward, and her voice had gotten so quiet I had to move in till we were practically sharing the same puff of air.
She bent down and unzipped the front pocket of her book bag. She held up two daisy decals, one in each hand. “I tried to save them all for you, but Mama would’ve noticed. The dresser wouldn’t have looked right with them all peeled off.”
She held her hands out until I took the decals from her. “I knew how much you liked it.”
I almost never had trouble thinking up words for Winnie Rae Early, but my mind was having a hard time with this one. A nasty Winnie Rae was a lot easier to deal with. And her eyebrows were raised up as if she was surprised by her own words.
But then Hem took my mind and my feet in another direction. He was up and waving his arms over his head at a white pickup. And he was a good three feet into the street.
“Hem!” I grabbed him tight around the middle and pulled him back to the side of the road. I could feel my pulse thudding on the roof of my mouth and a tingly buzzing inside my ears.
“He’s slowing down!” Hem tried to wrestle himself free, but this time it was me digging my feet into the asphalt.
I had to admit, Hem had a pretty good eye. That truck was the spitting image of Daddy’s. Except there was a lady driving it. And she was not the least bit smiling as she slowed down and unrolled her window.
She jabbed her finger in the air in our direction. “What’s wrong with you kids? It’s a good thing I was paying attention, or I could’ve mowed you right down!”
I didn’t have a whole lot to say to that, and, luckily, neither did Hemingway. His body had gone kind of limp, and he was studying the dirt by his feet as if it was the most interesting thing in the world.
I hugged him close to me and kissed the side of his face. Breathing in his sweaty, Hemingway smell made my heart start to slow back down to normal.
The woman shook her head and mentioned something about school as she was rolling her window back up.
As I watched the woman drive off, I noticed Winnie Rae had taken the opportunity to hightail it out of there. She was a good twenty yards down the road toward the motel.
I shook my head and got a tighter grip on Hem’s hand. I bent down so my eyes were staring in the dead centers of his. “Listen here, Hemingway.”
He must have heard something sharper in my voice, because he didn’t look away. Not for even one second.
“Mama put me in charge of you, and you’re going to have to stick close by. You hear?”
He nodded slowly.
“I know you got more sense than to be running out in front of cars,” I said. “Mama taught you that back when you were about two years old.”
“But Daddy . . .” He pointed toward the street.
“That wasn’t Daddy.” I squeezed his wrist so he’d be sure to listen. “I don’t want to talk about Daddy for a while, you hear?”
He looked confused, but he nodded.
“I don’t want to be thinking or talking about Daddy for the rest of today. Maybe longer.” I said it loudly, so I’d remember it, myself.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go back and see if we can find Randall. Maybe we can do some more reading in that book of his.”
He didn’t answer, but I felt him give my hand a little bit of a squeeze.
I thought about Mama out front of our old house, bone-tired, trying to sort through everything we owned. There was no way I was going to tell her about my dresser or any part of the Earlys’ yard sale. I just couldn’t. Mama had way too much to worry about already. I wanted to take some of that worry away and give it to Mrs. Early or Winnie Rae. Let them know what it was like, for once.
I pulled Hem farther off the road. It was harder to walk on all the loose dirt and sharp little rocks, but I wasn’t taking any chances on him darting out into traffic again.
“Someone’s cooking breakfast.” Hem pointed the tip of his nose up at the sky and took a snorty breath. “Sausages, maybe.”
I glanced off to our left, but there wasn’t much to see except thick clusters of trees with the new leaves partway grown in. It was a little late for breakfast, and I couldn’t picture anyone cooking up some pancakes in the middle of the sticker bushes. The road dipped down into a ditch to the left of us, and this seemed to be a good place for snakes and such.
Hem must’ve been thinking the same thing, because his foot took a little sidestep and his hand was looking to sneak away from me. “Don’t you even think about it.” I tightened my grip on his fingers.
There was a road up ahead, and as we got closer, I could see it wasn’t a main one. It was just clumpy dirt. Not good for cars, but fine for people walking.
“Did you notice that road up there, Hem?” I pointed toward the start of the dirt road. “If I’m guessing right, it will take us out on the other side of the tent houses.” I picked up a rock and bent down, drawing a long line in the dirt. “See? This is the big, busy road. And this is the motel over here.” I drew a rectangle in the dirt.
Hem bent down beside me.
“We usually go around back of the motel and down the sticker-bush path past the pool, and we come up on Randall and Lorraine’s from the right.” I drew a line branching off the big road. “I’m thinking, if we take this dirt road up ahead here, we’re b
ound to come up on the tent houses from the left.”
Hem nodded and smiled. “A shortcut.”
“You’re going to have to take a run and a jump for it off this main road, though.” I pointed at the ditch. “I don’t want you slogging through that snake pit.” I hadn’t seen one single snake, but I had to keep Hem’s legs moving.
The old road had chunks of broken-up asphalt with weeds starting to make their way up in the spaces and cracks in between. Early-spring crabgrass and moss felt soft and bumpy under our feet. Before time and weather got to it, I could see it had been a regular road.
“Keep a lookout for the tops of the tents, Hem,” I said. “If we don’t see any in a while, we’ll turn back and go the old way around the front of the motel.”
But what we saw wasn’t tents at all.
Chapter Eighteen
THEY WERE DEFINITELY old houses I could see peeking through the trees up ahead. But not good ones. They weren’t just the used kind of old. They were the broken-up, forgotten kind of old. The kind that smelled like a closet in the basement.
The road we were on split off to the left and deadended with a sign: Knotty Pine Luxury Cabins. Dorothy and Crawford Pine, proprietors. That sign was painted like new, but everything around it seemed at least forty or fifty years old. All six of the cabins looked like the special eggs I’d tried to make for Hem last Easter. The ones where you get all the yolk out and the only thing left is some broken-up shell to paint. The luxury had leaked right out of the Knotty Pine cabins. All except for one of them.
The brown paint on it looked pretty new, like it might have been done recently. The front porch was a lot like our old yard when we’d had the inside of our house dumped onto the grass. Only the porch had more order to it. The stacks of books and clothing and gadgets were neat and lined up perfectly with the sides of the porch. About a dozen tiny plastic sunflower windmills were poked into the dirt in front of the first step in a perfectly spaced line.
Also Known As Harper Page 8
