Strays Like Us

by Richard Peck

  We three sat down at noon, and it was all new to me, the way things change here – the seasons and the frost-crisped leaves. And the way things never change. I kept thinking about what people here remembered, things like Thanksgiving and everybody’s history – how Rocky Roberts’s grandmother had to repeat fifth grade and the way Aunt Fay always talked tough. How every man in town wanted to marry Mrs. Voorhees and all the other old stories they talked out of shape.

  And I thought about the doll baby Mrs. Voorhees held in the silver-framed picture and how she hadn’t liked me looking at it.

  §

  We didn’t get away early. Aunt Fay made a tray of turkey sandwiches for Mrs. Voorhees to have later because Rose had the day off. After that, we scrubbed down the whole kitchen. “If I leave a crumb,” Aunt Fay said, “I’ll hear about it.”

  At home we had to fix the McKinneys’ dinner for Aunt Fay to carry over. I went upstairs to get out of Tracy’s blouse and skirt. When I had one leg into my jeans, a thud shuddered through the house.

  Down in the kitchen I found Aunt Fay on the floor. I could just see the frizz of her hair and the mound of her shoulder. She was almost under the table.

  “Find my glasses,” she said, grunting. “They flew off somewhere.”

  “What about you?”

  “It’s my bad leg.” I could tell she was hurting, and gasping to keep from letting on. “I come down on it wrong. It just takes one false step.”

  She always limped, but it seemed a part of her.

  “Help me up in that chair.” Somehow I got her there. When I found her glasses, she hooked them over her ears like that solved everything.

  “What if your leg’s broken?”

  “It’s not broken. I just lit on it wrong.” She tried to get up and fell back into the chair. “You’ll have to deal with the McKinneys’ dinner. I’ve got the oven on already.”

  For most of an hour she had me warming up and dishing up. I tried to fit everything in a grocery-store box I could barely budge. When she started to get up again, I saw she thought she was going to carry all this stuff over to the McKinneys herself.

  I put a hand on her shoulder to keep her still, and she said, “We could get Will to come over and – ”

  “No, I’ll take it,” I said.

  She winced and rubbed at her leg, and I hustled the big box out the back door. “Did you get the celery?” she said, and yes, I had.

  I ought to have made two trips. The gate was unlatched, which helped. Then I went in the McKinneys’ backward, dragging the box over the threshold. I turned around in the kitchen, and there Sat Mr. Claude McKinney, slumped. He didn’t look any better, but at least he was in his own kitchen. He may have smelled Thanksgiving, because he looked up, interested. Oh great, I thought. Now I have to be Ruth Ann.

  “You that little girl from next door?”

  He blinked his old pinkish eyes at me, and there was a spark of something in them. “My name’s Molly,” I said.

  “Your name’ll be mud if you didn’t bring me some supper.”

  I took out the containers, hot and cold, and lined them up on the counter, next to all the medicine bottles. I turned the oven on warm since it didn’t look like the McKinneys were ready to sit down.

  “I could go ahead and eat right out of the pan,” Mr. McKinney said.

  “You try that,” I said, “and you’ll think a tornado hit you.” I was the grown-up here. “Where is everybody?”

  “They’s all upstairs,” he said.

  A paper tablecloth with turkeys and pilgrims was on the kitchen table. “Where are your plates and silverware?” I said.

  “Just where they always are,” Mr. McKinney said, and I found them in cupboards and drawers. I set the table for him and Will and Mrs. McKinney, and he watched every move I made.

  “You’re a busy little body,” he said. “Where’s your grandpa?”

  “I don’t have one,” I said. “Never did.”

  He thought about that. “You must have. You ought to look around for him. Sometimes we get away.”

  I put the cranberry mold in the center of the table because the refrigerator was full of more medicine. I stood back to check out my work, and now Mr. McKinney was sitting at his place with a paper napkin stuck in his collar.

  Then something terrible happened. A sound tore through the McKinneys’ house, from upstairs. A voice screaming up out of somebody or something. I didn’t know if it was human. It wasn’t words. It was an awful wail that filled the house.

  Then nothing, like it hadn’t happened.

  I looked at Mr. McKinney, but he was just fiddling with his silverware, though he wasn’t deaf. I couldn’t remember being this scared before. I made a run for the back door. I wasn’t even supposed to be in this house. Aunt Fay didn’t want me here.

  But I turned back. “Mr. McKinney, don’t go near the stove because it’s hot.” Then I was out of there, into the dark, running for home like something was after me.

  I felt skinned with fear, and Aunt Fay was watching me as I plunged in through our back door. She hadn’t moved, but she’d hitched up her pant leg to rub the shin she’d fallen on. Because it was Thanksgiving, she hadn’t worn her nurse’s whites today. She was in the peach-colored pantsuit, which was her best. We looked at each other, but the ceiling light glinted on her glasses and hid her eyes.

  “You don’t just help out a little with the cooking at the McKinneys’, do you?” I said. “You do it all.”

  “Pretty nearly,” she said.

  “And you spend a lot of time there every day. You don’t just look in on Wilma McKinney.”

  “All the time I can give them,” Aunt Fay said.

  “There’s somebody else in their house. Somebody besides Will and Claude and Wilma.”

  “That’s right,” she said, in a voice so flat I didn’t know it.

  Any other kid would have nagged her to know. But I didn’t know how to nag or whine or whatever kids do. If I’d ever tried that on Debbie, she’d have turned away and gone away and not been there.

  “Don’t say anything to anybody,” Aunt Fay said. “Don’t let on. Don’t ask Will.”

  ∨ Strays Like Us ∧

  Eight

  Under the eaves in the attic, I’d found a card table and a folding chair. I could put them back when I left. But now I set the table up in Arlette’s room, below the window where Will came in that time. It was where I went since I didn’t go to the library anymore. I drew a lot, and my notebook only had a few pages to go. I was working on a picture of Debbie in a sleigh because winter was on the way. Debbie in a sleigh cape with a hood and fur around her face. A Christmas-card Debbie with her hands in an ermine muff, because I can’t do hands. I was giving Debbie till Christmas Day to come for me. I knew it was a game, but I was playing it to win.

  §

  The only Christmas I knew anything about was whatever they did at school, and in some schools they didn’t do much. But here they were making big plans.

  The mixed chorus rehearsed through December. You could hear ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ all over school. Every last one of us had it memorized. At the beginning of the school year the Kiwanis Club had donated instruments for an orchestra that tooted and sawed all month. If anybody went for tryouts, there were going to be solos and skits too. Will went.

  I tried to hold back Christmas like I’d tried to hold back the first day of school. Then Ms. Lovett called me up after class one day. Some of my notebook Debbies were beginning to look like her. I hadn’t seen my mother since summer.

  “Have you thought about the program they’ll hand out to the audience?” Ms. Lovett asked, and I just shrugged. I didn’t know where she was going with this. “It will just be a piece of plain paper folded over unless you design the cover.”

  Then I saw I was supposed to draw something because she thought I was an artist. “I may not even be here by the time – ”

  “Then stop by after school today,” she said.

  S
he was trying to get me involved. I’d run into a teacher or two like that, other places, and I could usually keep my distance. But this was Ms. Lovett, and I’d been in the same school now for three months. “Is this an assignment?”

  “Yes,” she said, and her somewhat sad eyes brightened.

  §

  The show was on the last afternoon before Christmas vacation. Several people cut out, but parents came, so the auditorium filled up. I was there wearing Tracy’s blouse and skirt, because I’d heard the rumor people were dressing up even if they weren’t on the stage. I had to hand out the programs as part of Ms. Lovett’s assignment.

  I’d done a mistletoe border and a red bow to frame the words WINTER WONDERLAND on the front page. Ms. Lovett had run off the programs on a color printer, and she’d made me sign my work. I hid my initials in among the mistletoe, but I kept looking at my handiwork as I gave out the programs. I’d never done anything that wasn’t Debbie, except for the picture of Tracy, and that didn’t count.

  Mrs. McKinney came, so I knew Aunt Fay was at the McKinneys’ house, holding the fort. She slipped into a seat at the back, keeping her coat on.

  The orchestra struck up that song about the twelve days of Christmas, though they made it sound like a month. The curtains parted for some solos. Then the mixed chorus trooped onto risers and did ‘The Holly and the Ivy’, which turned into a sing-along because we all knew it.

  Rocky Roberts was stage manager. He’d been in and out of school all month, and when he was in my vicinity, he was always looking the other way. They’d tried to involve him by putting him in charge of drawing the curtain. He’d gotten it open, but now as the mixed chorus was winding up ‘The Holly and the Ivy’, invisible Rocky pulled the wrong rope, and down came the movie screen. It thundered toward the stage like a garage door and knocked the entire back row of the mixed chorus, all boys, off the risers. They were gone in a flash.

  Some people thought we were going to have a movie, but the adults jumped up – the teachers and Mr. Russell and all the parents of the back row. It could have been a mistake. Rocky said later it was.

  So we had a long intermission. Some of the back row had to go to Miss Throckmorton’s office to have their heads looked at. But the show went on, though they had to step it up because the buses were waiting. The mixed chorus was all girls now, performing right at the front of the stage to be on the safe side.

  I knew Will had been working up something, but I didn’t know what. And he’d had to stand up to Nelson Washburn because it wasn’t cool for boys to go out for this kind of thing. Then Will strolled onto the stage.

  Where the costume came from I never knew. He was between Santa’s helper and a street person. He wore a cap with bells and a suit striped like a bumble-bee, and the toes of his boots curled up at the end. He came on ringing a big bell and carrying a box of matches, and he blinked out at the audience like he hadn’t been expecting us. This got a laugh and some hoots, and he cocked his head to hear. Then in a big soprano voice he sang a sort of song:

  “Christmas joys

  And Christmas toys

  For all the girb and all the boys –

  Is this what Christmas is?”

  He clanged his bell and looked out at us, inquiring.

  “Holy nights

  And fir-tree lights

  And voices rising to the heights –

  Old carols sung,

  Green garlands hung,

  And all the choirs giving tongue –

  Is this what Christmas is?”

  “Yes!” everybody yelled back at him, getting into it. Now he dropped onto the floor and opened his box of matches, showing us.

  “I’m a little match boy huddled in the cold,

  Begging for alms from young and old.

  Could you give me just a penny?

  Because believe me, folks, I haven’t any.

  ‘Tis the season for holly, the season for ivy,

  But personally I’m not feeling so lively –

  Is this what Christmas is?”

  Now he was on his feet.

  “I’m not sure in these hard times.

  I’m not even sure if this dumb thing rhymes.”

  He cracked the heels of his elf boots in the air and did a dance off the stage.

  It got a big round of whistling and foot stomping, though Ms. Lovett sat there, stunned. At least nobody doubted that he’d written it himself. There was no time for an encore, so we didn’t get to hear ‘Achy, Breaky Heart’.

  Will was the last act, and Mrs. McKinney went out past me saying, “I thought he done real good.” But long, long afterwards I could always get a rise out of him just by murmuring, “I’m a little match boy huddled in the cold.”

  §

  Aunt Fay tried an elastic thing on her leg to give her support, though she said it was more trouble than it was worth. In the evenings I was an extra pair of hands and legs while we cooked for Christmas. Every time I pulled a long sheet of cookies out of the oven, I hoped I wouldn’t be here to eat any.

  Later, I remembered the cinnamon smell and the heat that wavered up over Elvis’s face until we had to prop the back door open. The two of us moved from counter to stove, from table to sink, not saying much, just being together. Except in my mind I was upstairs throwing things into a suitcase, though I didn’t have a suitcase.

  I picked out nut meats and helped measure the ingredients for a pudding Aunt Fay steamed in a cheese-cloth bag. Since the brandy was down from the top shelf, she set up a row of washed medicine bottles to fill with her own cough formula: brandy and honey and some pills she ground up for it, since head-cold season was coming. She set aside some bottles for the McKinneys.

  I crossed off each night on the calendar in my mind. Then it was the night before Christmas Eve, and I was rolling out the slick dumplings. We were planning to bake two chickens to divide between Mrs. Voorhees and the McKinneys. I was wound tight from waiting for Debbie.

  The sweat was pouring off both of us. Aunt Fay wiped the steam off her glasses with the tail of her apron. “I don’t have you anything for Christmas,” she said.

  “That’s all right.” It crossed my mind that I might have made a picture as a gift for her. It didn’t have to be a Debbie. Just some drawing she could stick up on the icebox after I was gone. “Anyway, you got me the coat.”

  She got me a coat when the weather turned because I didn’t have anything for cold. I picked a puffy jacket that looked like what they wore at school.

  “Well, I wanted to get you something else,” she said. “But I haven’t had a chance to look up. And getting these groceries together like to wipe me out. I don’t know what. Maybe some nice soap.”

  She didn’t know what a girl would want for Christmas, and, really, I didn’t either. “It’s okay,” I said. “I may not be here.”

  I thought that was all right to say because I’d cost her quite a bit, and I couldn’t pay her back. When Debbie came, she wouldn’t be able to pay either because Debbie never could. Money ran through her hands and up her arms.

  But something sudden came over Aunt Fay. She fussed her glasses back onto her face and sat down in such a heavy way, I thought her leg had given out again. A second passed, like a heartbeat. Then she said, “Never mind them dumplings. Put the potatoes on the fire. Then come over here and set down.”

  I put them on to boil. We were going to make two pans of escalloped, and I hurried because there was something urgent here. When I turned back, she was sitting with one hand bunching up the oilcloth on the table.

  I hovered, not sitting. Looking at the stove, not at me, she said, “Molly, your mother isn’t coming back for you at Christmas. I know it was a deadline in your mind, and I blame myself for not saying something sooner.”

  I watched her, dry-eyed because she had more to tell.

  “Debbie isn’t in that hospital place anymore. They couldn’t keep her any longer, or she discharged herself.”

  “How do you know?”


  “They called and told me.”

  “Maybe she’s on her way here.” I looked out in the hall like I could hear a car at the curb, her footstep on the porch.

  “They called in October.”

  §

  I went a little deaf, a little blind. All I could see was that stupid calendar in my mind. Every crossed-off day had taken Debbie farther away, not brought her nearer. Had I known it all along? How much of me had known?

  “I looked for her in the days after that, in case she turned up,” Aunt Fay was saying. “You never know. I didn’t let on to you. I didn’t want you to get keyed up, but I shouldn’t have let it ride. I shouldn’t have left it till Christmas.”

  But my mind was back in the fall, framing Debbie’s face I with autumn leaves. I saw her walking out of that hospital I place, that facility, all those weeks ago with just her backpack.

  I watched her walk away, going nowhere and thinking she was free because she didn’t have anyplace to be, glad to be out of that place so she could go look for junk because she was an addict. But she wasn’t addicted to me.

  I had the back of the kitchen chair in a grip, trying to hurt my hands. If I’d wanted her enough, would she have come? Had I gotten too comfortable here? I didn’t mean to.

  I saw us tonight, the way we’d be if she’d come for me. I’d be sitting up watching Nightline if we were in a motel, waiting for Debbie to find her way home – stoned or skinned up or smiling and throwing money on the bed.

  I was crazy that night, so I had these visions. I could even jump out of my skin and look back at me. I saw me through Aunt Fay’s eyes, and it was the same me who’d washed up here last summer, stringy and hungrier than I let on and too scared to be mad. I was back where I started.

  “Was I wrong not to tell you sooner?” Aunt Fay said, her eyes finding mine, and me back in my skin again.

  I had sense enough to tell her she wasn’t wrong. I’d lost some time, dreaming the wrong dream. But what did that matter now? This was the closest we’d been, though the table was between us. “Would you have any idea where she went?” Aunt Fay said, quiet.