Strays Like Us

by Richard Peck

  “Oh, I’ll be back,” Aunt Fay said. “I work for you.”

  “Just you, is that it?”

  “Just me,” Aunt Fay said.

  Mrs. Voorhees’s head began to turn, quivering a little. She looked up at me as if I’d just appeared there, and she blinked.

  “Look at the state of that sweatshirt,” she said. “You ought to cut it up for rags.”

  “Shall I skin it of?” I said.

  “Not if you don’t have a bra on underneath.” She turned on Aunt Fay. “Has it come to your attention that this girl is growing up and filling out? She needs undergarments. I have to say it, Fay. I don’t think you have the first idea of how to bring up a girl.”

  “And what do you know about it?”

  The air between them went dead. Both their profiles were carved in stone. Then Mrs. Voorhees’s hand moved up to her mouth, and her eyes started with tears. The big eyelashes she painted on her lids blurred like they’d run in the wash.

  “I had a little girl once!” she cried out, and her eyes overflowed.

  Aunt Fay still held me there with them. But she reached over to touch Mrs. Voorhees too. “I know, Edith.”

  Mrs. Voorhees’s hands slid down her face, and she looked up at me. “I had a little girl once.”

  All by itself my hand reached into the neck of my sweatshirt, and I pulled up the gold chain with the baby ring on it.

  “That’s right,” she said, and all her makeup was washing down her face. “That was hers.”

  She brought up another sob and reached around in her pocket for a handkerchief.

  “Tell her who you are, Edith,” Aunt Fay said.

  “I’m your grandmother,” she said, still looking around for her handkerchief.

  §

  The world came and went. I felt dizzy, but Aunt Fay still had me in hand.

  “How can you be?” I said. She was Mrs. Voorhees. She was this old lady we went to see in a big house at the top of the hill.

  “She married Moberly’s brother. Her and me were married to brothers at one time. He was one of her husbands.”

  “My second,” Mrs. Voorhees said behind the handkerchief. “I only had three.”

  “Tell it, Edith.”

  “And we had a little girl, and we named her Debbie.”

  It got dark then, real quick. I didn’t know where I was. When I could find some words, I said to Aunt Fay, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It wasn’t my story to tell. Did I tell you Will McKinney’s story? And I didn’t tell you Edith’s. I was waiting for her to remember.”

  “Remember?” Mrs. Voorhees balled up the handkerchief. “What do you mean, remember, Fay? I had a daughter, and I lost her. She slipped through my fingers. I tried to forget, and I couldn’t.”

  “I was waiting for you to remember what you owe your granddaughter,” Aunt Fay said. “I been waiting all year. I’m wore out waiting.”

  Mrs. Voorhees wanted to look away again. She was wet down her front and dabbed at it with the handkerchief.

  “I’m afraid of her,” she said in a frail voice.

  Of me? How could she be afraid of me?

  “Afraid you’ll lose her too?” Aunt Fay said in her new voice.

  Mrs. Voorhees nodded.

  But I couldn’t think. She was still Mrs. Voorhees.

  She swept the lace handkerchief aside and arranged her hands in her lap. She could use a manicure. I ought to give her a –

  “Well, there’ll have to be some changes made,” she said, sharpish again. “For one thing, Fay, we can’t let this girl go around looking like she’s run off from the poor farm. We’ve got to get her some decent clothes. You’d think that stuff she wears came from Marshalls. Honestly.”

  “Well, whatever you think best, Edith.” Aunt Fay climbed to her feet. We were still holding hands, and she gave mine a bone-crusher squeeze. “We’ll be back tomorrow,” she told Mrs. Voorhees, “because, girl, you’ve got a shot coming.”

  We were at the door before Mrs. Voorhees called out from the bed, “And you tell those government people to get off your case. This girl has got a grandmother, and she’s not a person they want to trifle with. You got that, Fay?”

  “I got it,” Aunt Fay said. “They could hear you downtown.” Then we left.

  §

  Out in the dark car Aunt Fay sat slumped at the wheel, wore out. I sat beside her, feeling the baby’s ring in the hollow of my throat. Once, Mrs. Voorhees had said she’d lost what Aunt Fay’d never had. She meant Debbie. The lightning bugs were out that night, and they were like my thoughts.

  “Do I have a grandpa too? Is her Moberly husband around somewhere?”

  “Oh no, he’s out in the cemetery pushing up daisies,” Aunt Fay said. “He fell off the grain elevator. Then she married Voorhees and feathered her nest.”

  So Debbie had only told me half a lie. She always said she was an orphan. That’s why I thought she’d had me sent to Aunt Fay. I didn’t know she’d just wanted to hurt her mother more. I’d thought Aunt Fay was the nearest thing to kin I had. I still thought it.

  “Do I have to go live with her?”

  “She can’t have you. You live with me. But I took you there on that day last fall when I knew Debbie wasn’t coming back. I owed you and Edith that. It was all I could do.”

  I remembered the day, and Aunt Fay saying she didn’t have time to take on another patient. She didn’t have the time because she was nursing Will’s dad. I remembered the first time we drove up to Park Place, and I’d expected Mrs. Voorhees’s house to be a ruined castle with lightning rods.

  “She’s your grandmother, though it was like pulling teeth to get her to own up. And you’re her granddaughter. She lives for the sight of you. Didn’t you see?”

  We sat in the dark. That was when the tears came, jumping out of my eyes and streaming down my face. I didn’t know that anybody had ever lived for the sight of me.

  “But don’t look to inherit her money,” Aunt Fay said. She knew I was crying. “Edith’s going to take it with her when she goes. And when she gets there, it’ll all get burned up.”

  I wiped my wet face with my terrible sweatshirt sleeve and stared at her.

  “Just a joke,” she said. “And no more secrets. That was the last of them.” She kicked the Dart into life and jerked into reverse, and we went home.

  ∨ Strays Like Us ∧

  Fifteen

  I’ve lived in this town for a year, and today I’m up in the apple tree in our backyard. It’s leafy August, and over there across the McKinneys’ fence Will is up in their tree. Mr. McKinney is out on their back porch, in the shade. Mrs. McKinney has put his chair where Will can watch Claude. And Claude can watch Fred because Will is Fred to him now, and always will be.

  We’ve been up our trees fighting the tent caterpillars. A plague of them has swept through town, and they’ve built these sticky tents full of their squirming babies all over the branches. The fork I sat in last summer is webbed with them.

  Will and I have gone up our trees with bug spray and sticks, trying to get rid of them before they eat up all the foliage. I’m halfway to fourteen now, so I’m beginning not to like bugs or getting stuff on my hands. And the caterpillar tents are disgusting – sticky and webby and weird. “Like science fiction,” Will says. “Like the Pod People.”

  A couple more weeks and we’ll be in eighth grade.

  Something’s happened to summer. It melted away before we knew. The social worker they sent to check on me and Aunt Fay has come and gone.

  She seemed satisfied with the way we were living, but Aunt Fay didn’t let her off easy. We all three went up the hill to pay a call on Mrs. – my grandmother. And she put on a real show for us. She was dressed in her best and downstairs without her cane. Her hands were heavy with diamonds, and the sunburst pin glared from her shoulder. She was high and mighty and talked down her nose to the social worker, who couldn’t wait to get away from her.

  “And don’t pu
t me through anything like that again,” Grandmother Edith told Aunt Fay afterward. “You know I’m not a well woman.”

  As the social worker was leaving, I gave her my notebook. The one with the Debbie pictures on all the pages except for the blank ones at the end where I’d done homework notes. I’d saved it, though the pictures I’d drawn weren’t that good. Ms. Lovett was just being nice. But I wanted Debbie to have it if they could get it to her. I wanted her to have the Debbie I carried with me as long as I could.

  I loved my mother, and she loved me. She loved me like a rag doll you drag around and then leave out in the rain. I still love her, but I live here.

  Will and I have done about all we can do in the war against the tent caterpillars. Now we’re taking a breather, up here where you can get some air. We’re just sitting. But then in a strange, reedy voice from last year, Will says, “Want to hear a song? I know most of ‘Achy, Breaky Heart’. Want to hear it?” And I think, Why not?

  EOF