Gilbert had taken a plate to his grandmother and I could see them outside in folding chairs watching the sunset like other people watch cable TV. The picnic table had been cleaned up, and Mrs. Rodriguez had made a big deal out of taking the flower arrangement I’d put together inside. “I’m going to set it in the middle of the kitchen table so we can enjoy it with breakfast!”
It felt a little bit like I belonged here. That maybe things weren’t perfect, but surely something good was still around the bend for me.
Then I noticed all the cars and trucks parked haphazardly in front of the house.
Other than Zane, Hoyt’s mouth-breathing best friend, we never had visitors. I slowly opened the door and crept down the hallway. The living room was packed with strangers and country music was blaring from the radio.
Samantha Rose sat on the love seat next to a worn-out woman who looked like she’d robbed the makeup counter at Sears and put everything on at once. In a chair next to them was a brunette wearing cutoff jean shorts and a skimpy tank top. Two men in Appalachian Mining jackets were having a heated argument about Dale Jr. while Uncle Philson leaned back in the recliner almost horizontal. He was staring at a brand-new big-screen TV.
Samantha Rose motioned for me to come into the room. “It’s the girl of the hour.” She lifted a red cup in a toast. “To Wavie!”
The shorts lady laughed, then put a hand over her mouth as if it would hide the fact she was missing teeth.
“I was just going to my room.”
“While you’re up,” Samantha Rose said, “hand me those pretzels.”
The coffee table was littered with small bowls of tortilla chips, pretzels and popcorn. I passed the pretzels over and snagged a chip.
“I saw that,” Samantha Rose said. “Aw, go ahead, have a handful. You might as well since you bought them.” She doubled over with laughter. “Oh, Lord, you should see the look on your face!”
“Drink!” Uncle Philson yelled.
Samantha Rose scooted forward and heaved herself upright. “Who else needs a refill?” She collected the empty cups and looked at me. “Come help me. I only got two hands.”
I followed her back to the kitchen. “Where’s Hoyt?”
She shrugged. “Out with no-brain Zane, where else? As long as they stay away from the law, I don’t care.” She poured herself a drink. “I swear, when you frown it’s like Ronelda’s come back from the dead to rain on my parade again.” She smirked. “She wasn’t always Saint Ronelda, you know.”
I put on my best fake smile. “I bet. Did she have a lot of friends in Conley Holler?” I asked.
She lifted the cup to her lips. “I don’t know, the usual amount I guess.”
“Drink!” Uncle Philson yelled from the other room.
“I heard you the first time!” Samantha Rose answered. “Lord, he’s getting more impatient every day.” She pulled a bottle out of the fridge. “Ronelda didn’t have time for too many people ’round here.”
She mixed a drink and took a sip. “Mmm, that’s good. Why you asking about Ro’s friends?”
I looked down at my hands. “She got a get-well card from somebody right before she died,” I lied. “I didn’t recognize the name.”
“Well, I doubt it was from anyone around here or in Farley. Nobody was crying when she left ’cept Mama, and she’d been gone for years by the time Ro died.”
I tried again. “Weird. So she didn’t have any friends around here named Bowman?”
Samantha Rose coughed, spewing liquid on the countertop. “Did you say Bowman?”
I nodded.
“Those aren’t friends. That’s for darn sure. You should have thrown that straight in the trash.”
“Why?” I asked. “Who are they?”
“Your saintly mama didn’t tell you?” She wiped Ale-8 off her chin and smirked. “That’s them fancy folks adopted you.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Samantha Rose mentioned me being adopted like she was discussing whether it was going to rain later.
“What?” I asked.
She stared with glassy eyes. “Your mama was so proud she was gonna get you a better life with those fancy people, and all that bull hockey.” She took another sip of her drink. “Lasted eight days. I about split my gut laughing when that all fell through, I’ll tell you that.”
Everything she said was muffled and sounded like it was coming from far away. The music and laugher swirled around me like a cyclone. I spun out of the kitchen, down the hallway, ricocheting back and forth off the walls as I made it to my bedroom.
I leaned my head against the window and stared into the dark. The moon gave off a tiny bit of light and I could see my face, pale and stricken in the reflection. I didn’t care about the Social Security money, having no dad, the horrible house, none of it mattered. I just really needed Mama and my old life and I was never going to have it again.
I wrapped myself in Mama’s blanket and rocked back and forth on my bed, chanting, “Please let this be a dream, please let this be a dream, please let this all be a dream,” until long after I heard the party end.
• • •
THE ROOM WAS bathed in early-morning light. I lay under the blanket that still smelled like Mama’s lotion.
My mom was gone.
My mom was not coming back.
My mom gave me away.
It wasn’t just that Mama had tried to get rid of me, which was bad enough; it was also that she hadn’t told me a thing about it. We had shared everything. Wavie and Mama against the world! But no, she’d been taking money from this Bowman person for years and hadn’t thought to mention it. She did not tell me that I was almost adopted. She did not tell me that they were sending money. And now she was not around to tell me why. The not of Mama was forming into a dark, hard ball in my stomach, and I could feel it spreading, turning my limbs numb.
• • •
MY STOMACH GROWLED, and I lay there debating whether to move. I didn’t want to see Samantha Rose’s ugly pie face ever again, but I was starving and I’d left my backpack of food in the kitchen. If I didn’t hide a few things in my room before Hoyt got to it, it’d all be gone.
I swung out of bed and listened. Everything was quiet. The radio that played country music all day hadn’t been turned on yet. I opened the door and tiptoed down the hallway.
The remains of the party were everywhere. Paper plates, empty bottles and red cups were scattered across the coffee table and the floor. The whole room smelled like an ashtray.
I walked to the kitchen and was so focused on getting my backpack that I was halfway across the room before I noticed my uncle sitting at the table. He was wearing a stained T-shirt and a milk mustache. Hunched over his bowl, he looked like an old, pale turtle.
“Cereal?” he whispered.
In all the time I’d been there, we hadn’t exchanged two words, and these were the first I’d heard him speak that weren’t at full volume. Apparently, he didn’t have any interest in waking Samantha Rose either.
I was about to say no thanks, since I got enough of watching him chew at dinner, but then he said, “You look like your mama.”
Mama. The hard ball in my stomach moved to my throat. Almost adopted? It couldn’t be real. Maybe Samantha Rose was a no-good liar who just wanted to keep me away from my dad. I pulled out the metal folding chair and sat down.
“You knew her when she lived here?”
Uncle Philson wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Everybody knows everybody ’round here.”
I poured a heaping mound of cereal into a bowl. Let Samantha Rose wake up and see that! Being brave was a whole lot easier with nothing to lose. “Did you know my daddy?”
His head bobbed up and down. “Yup.”
I ate slowly. “Is he alive?”
His mouth stopped in mid-chew. “Jud? Nah. L
ong gone.”
I slumped down in the chair. “Samantha Rose said I was almost adopted. I guess she was telling the truth.”
He shrugged and went back to chewing. “That’s the way I heard it, too.”
My cereal bowl blurred. I cleared my place and got my backpack and went back to bed. My mom was dead and there’d be no dad to swoop in and take me from Convict Holler.
I only left my room once more on Saturday. I planted Mama’s peony deep in the dark soil by the front steps.
I wasn’t going anywhere.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“I need orange juice, and toilet paper, and a scratch-off lottery ticket,” Samantha Rose told me on Sunday morning. “If there’s anybody in the store, Robby Billingsly will tell you that you’re too young to buy one, so just nod and hand him the five. He’ll bring it out by the ice machine when everybody leaves.”
I didn’t want to go to the store for Samantha Rose. I didn’t want to get out of bed, period, but there was the matter of the lack of toilet paper to contend with, and Samantha Rose was not going to be the one to get it, thank you very much.
Camille had gone to church with her family, and Gilbert had boarded the Farley Methodist Church van. I’d been invited to attend by Gilbert via the bedroom window, but even the promise of cookies and cherry Kool-Aid couldn’t tempt me to go.
Almost adopted. I would have never known my own mother. I felt like the trees were closing in on me, making it hard to breathe.
I limped down the highway. The blister on my heel rubbed against the back of my sneaker with every step. I loosened the laces and tried walking on the front of my foot as much as possible, but it didn’t help.
Almost adopted—until my mom changed her mind. Or the Bowmans changed theirs. Almost someone else’s daughter. My feet shuffled against the asphalt, putting rhythm to my thoughts. Al-most, al-most, al-most.
The Farley Get-N-Go was about a mile ahead on the right. I’d seen it on the morning drives to school, but I’d never been inside.
I heard the door ding as I walked in, and a large man sat perched on a thin bar stool behind the counter. He looked up briefly before going back to his Truck Trader.
I walked up and down the aisles, touching the brightly colored packages of chips and cookies. It seemed like a hundred years ago that I’d had a mom and a cookie jar full of my favorites.
Frank and Beans’s mom was standing in the next aisle looking at medicine. I’d only seen glimpses of her standing outside when the boys got home from school. Up close she was nothing but sharp angles. Her elbows looked pointy enough to cut right through the sweater she wore, and her hands were thin, with long bony fingers. She set the medicine box down and picked up another, then traded them out again, before heading toward the counter.
“I thought you said he had a fever,” the man behind the counter said to her. “This is for constipation!”
“Oh,” Mrs. Barnes said in a small voice. “I must-a grabbed the wrong one.”
“That would have been a messy mistake,” he said, chuckling.
Mrs. Barnes turned pink and wrung her thin hands.
I set the orange juice and large package of toilet paper I had tucked under my armpit on the floor. “I’ll get it.” I walked back to the medicine aisle. Neither one of the two medicines that Mrs. Barnes had been debating over were for fever. It only took me a second to find the right one and take it to the counter.
“Thank you,” Mrs. Barnes said as she gathered her coins and left.
I handed over the money for the items and the lottery ticket.
Standing on the tips of my toes, I watched her out the window as she walked, head down, back toward Convict Holler.
• • •
CAMILLE SET HER lunch tray down on the table. “In Kentucky, the birth mom, that’s what they call it, birth mom, has ten days to change her mind before the adoption becomes final,” she said. “I looked it up while Mrs. Winn was on her phone.”
“I told you I don’t care,” I said.
Gilbert hunched over his food. “I bet that’s why these Bowman folks were sending you money. They were trying to buy you back.”
I crossed my arms and stared at the crumbs on my napkin. “I told y’all. It doesn’t matter either way.”
“Wavie,” Camille said. “I didn’t know your mom, but I think I get it. Didn’t Samantha Rose say your mom was bragging about how awesome those folks were? Your mom must have wanted you to have a better life.”
“I guess.”
“I wonder what happened,” Gilbert said.
“Isn’t it obvious? I can barely let go of a really good library book,” Camille said. “Imagine how it must have felt giving away her baby. Your mom must have changed her mind before the ten days were up. But there’s a way to find out for sure.”
I shook my head. “I am not asking Samantha Rose anything else. Ever.”
Camille tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I wasn’t talking about her. I think you should find the Bowmans.”
“Yeah,” Gilbert said. “Give ’em your new address. You might be getting two hundred dollars a year for the rest of your life!” He grinned. “I reckon that might be a lot of dollars by the time you turn eighteen.”
Camille slammed her milk carton onto the table. “You know good and well, Gilbert F. Miller, that seven times two hundred is fourteen hundred. Stop pretending to be as dumb as you look.”
Gilbert frowned. “Why should I?”
“So you can make something out of yourself and get out of Convict Holler?”
“Hey, how’d we get on me? I thought we were talking about Wavie.”
“Well, now it’s your turn. You are a big fat phony.”
“Say what now?”
Camille pointed her straw at Gilbert’s chest. “I know that you don’t care a thing about basketball. You only tried out for the team last year because Punk Masters did.”
“I do too like basketball,” Gilbert said. “Everybody knows that.”
“Really?” Camille smirked. “How’d the Wildcats do last season?”
Gilbert pulled at his shirt collar. “I don’t remember. TV was out a lot back then.”
“I bet. Why do you take a book when you go fishing? I’ve never seen you come back with anything but a sunburn.”
“Charles Dickens isn’t noisy,” Gilbert said. “What should I do while I wait, play the trombone?”
“Would you two stop fighting?” I said. “You both have giant superbrains. You should both go to college. And maybe I can get a job at the mine.”
“I’ll be right there with you,” Gilbert said. “Gran ain’t got the money to pay for college.” He stood up and picked up his tray. “And studying won’t make a lick of difference.” He marched off toward the trash cans.
“You have to admit he’s right,” I said. “Gilbert’s got the brains and no money. Samantha Rose is taking my money, and even if she didn’t, I don’t have the brains. We’re as stuck as day-old eggs on a cast-iron skillet.”
“You do the dishes again this morning?” Camille asked.
I snorted. “Who else? Hoyt?”
“So you’re saying there’s no hope for people like us?” Camille asked.
“I’m saying if there’s hope in the Holler, it’s on an extended vacation! I know it, Gilbert knows it, even Frank and Beans know it.” I grabbed my tray and stood up. “The only one who doesn’t know it is you.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I was afraid that Camille would be mad at me for yelling, but she’d acted sad more than anything else. In fact, the whole bus had seemed depressed that afternoon. There was the same old laughing at goofy jokes, and the singing of “Frank and Beans, good for the heart, the more you eat, the more you fart,” but the closer I’d looked the less sincere it all seemed. Punk Masters grinned, but it was more feral than hap
py, and even Mr. Vic’s hearty “Hello!” had sounded tired.
I’d watched Gilbert tease Martha Poston and they both had the same faded look about them that screamed, We are poor.
Maybe it was because we all had raggedy backpacks at our feet, empty now of donated food, reminding us that we were the have-nots. Even Camille, with her daddy and his restaurant, stood in line for the Shame-A-Lot food. Not one person on that bus had what Hannah and I had called Backpack Parents.
Hannah. It felt like years since we’d been in school together, whispering about the kids who had parents who bought them new backpacks every year and filled them with all the items on the school list, not just paper and pens.
• • •
I LOOKED AT my desk. The yearbook Mama had insisted on buying me was hiding under a pile of old homework, and I pulled it out. I set it on my lap and flipped through the pages. Marlena Spears had Backpack Parents; we’d watched her daddy carry her backpack into school on her first day like she was too pretty and delicate to handle it herself.
Christie Lee had Backpack Parents, too, and so did Melanie McDermid, and Katherine Shelby. I studied their pictures. There was something shiny about them all. You could tell just by looking at them that they didn’t ever worry about how long they could make a pair of jeans or sneakers last. And they probably never ate spaghetti and ketchup for dinner.
My picture was on the right side of the page. There was nothing shiny about me for sure. My hair was parted straight down the middle and wet. I’d been up with Mama all night. She’d thrown up for hours, so I’d overslept and barely had time to get out of the shower and to the bus on time. It didn’t look wet in the picture; it looked greasy. The photographer had told me to tuck my chin in, which only made me look like a Flat Stanley drawing.
I slammed the book shut and tossed it on the bed. The only thing shiny about me had been Mama. If she’d been so insistent for me to have a life, she shouldn’t have left.
Camille wanted me to find the Bowmans. For what? I grabbed a sheet of paper out of my notebook and a pen. A-D-O-P-T-E-D—DEAD, DOPE, TOAD, DAD. I crumbled up the paper and threw it on the floor. Even if I found them, what would I say?
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