My mom walks Natasha’s mom to the table, and my dad takes over stirring the pot of soup on the stove and ladling it into paper bowls.
The door opens again and it’s Nestor. He’s shivering hard from the rain, so Claudia helps him out of his top layer, an oversize sweatshirt with a split zipper, and the same second that Claudia peels it from his shoulders and hangs it by the hood on the hooks in the back, I can smell the rot coming from the layers of clothes still pressed to his skin. It makes me wonder where he sleeps and when was the last time he took a shower, and a sadness rolls deep through me.
“New Rain,” he says. “You came back.”
I smile and say hi, and before he can shake the drops from his gray beard I say, “I found a way better hot chocolate.”
Frankie comes up next and says, “It’s the best in the neighborhood.”
“That’s a fact,” I say.
Nestor chuckles. “I bet I know just where you’re talking about too. La Cocina,” he says. “Emilio and Rosalie’s place. Been there forever.”
Frankie nods, and my parents come over to meet Nestor. “We’re Rain’s parents,” they say, and even though both of them raised me to put out my hand for a shake when I’m meeting someone new, neither one of them do, and I can’t help but think it’s because Nestor’s hands are cracked and caked and smeared with filth and grime right down to the fingerprints, and unlike us after a potato harvest day, he doesn’t have a garden hose to rinse the dirt right off.
Claudia runs the water in the kitchen sink and invites everyone to wash up before lunch is served. Ana bounces Natasha over piggyback, and Nestor gets last in line and when it’s his turn he washes his hands over and over, squirting a second and third glob of soap into his palms and scrubbing hard between each finger.
There are twelve people here this week, sitting and eating, resting their heads, or chatting with each other in short, tired sentences, and looking out the one small basement window and hoping the rain stops bouncing against the sidewalk outside.
“That’s really something too,” my dad says, watching them from the kitchen. And this time I know that he’s talking about how many people live hard like this. Moms and kids and old guys who should be living easy. It really is something. And it takes your breath away and makes your heart ache, just like the music from the church does. And that’s a fact.
Because in this little basement, on this one corner there are twelve people that need. And it makes me wonder who else in this neighborhood needs and who doesn’t know about this kitchen, and how many more people there are, stretching down and down toward Times Square where all the big lights flash and beyond. And what these twelve do when it’s not Sunday. And if Natasha goes to school yet, or if she will, and if she’ll have enough clothes and shoes that fit, and if other kids will be nice to her.
“Really something,” my dad says again, and shakes his head.
Frankie brings an empty plate of sandwiches into the kitchen and Dad helps her reload with more.
“You know, Mr. Andrews,” she says, “Ms. Dacie is in need of some help too.”
Dad looks up at her and then at me and kind of gives me a half smile. “So I heard.”
“She’s losing her funding and someone wants to buy her house and turn it into something else that won’t help kids at all.”
There are seven full seconds of silence as they stack sandwiches together.
“Ms. Dacie’s always been there for me when things were hard. I want to be there for her now,” Frankie says. Then she stops stacking and looks up at my dad. “We could use your help too, Mr. Andrews.”
Before he can say anything, Amelia’s there too and she’s trying her best to tell him all about the tangled gardens and how no one else knows how to weed and plant and make anything grow.
Ana piggybacks Natasha over, and I slip away with the platter of sandwiches. I walk around the tables and offer seconds to everyone. Nestor takes two and pats the seat next to him, so I sit.
“How’s that poetry going?”
“It’s OK,” I tell him.
“What are you writing about?”
“Mostly about how much I miss my friend Izzy.”
“Ah, because you’re New Rain.” Nestor sighs. “Tell me, where were you before you were new?”
I start telling him all about Vermont and Izzy’s tree house and Ms. Carol’s classroom and the library and the garden in our backyard behind the house.
“It hurts,” he tells me. And it isn’t a question, so I just let the words settle on the table between us. “I know a thing or two about loss.”
I let those words settle too and wonder about all the things he must have lost, including his deal with the Almontes at the Laundromat when it turned into the café.
“A thing or two about loss, indeed,” he repeats.
“Me too,” I say.
Nestor lets my words settle in with his. He nods and his forehead crinkles up into a hundred wrinkles and he presses his lips together tight like he knows I’m talking about something more than just a tree house, a loss deep below the surface, past where carrots grow or trains rumble.
“It hurts,” he says again.
And that’s a fact.
I’m looking at my dad with Frankie and Amelia and Ana. Amelia is nodding her head, and I can hear Ana saying how Ms. Dacie has always been there for her and her mom, through the worst times. “I don’t know where I’d be without her.”
I remember the bag of leftovers Ms. Dacie passed to Ana on the way out one day, and I wonder if it was more than just a nice gesture. I wonder if she’d passed brown bags of leftover food to Ana before. I wonder if Ana and her mom need like some of the people here need.
Now my mom is there, next to my dad, and she’s jotting something down on a Post-it and I can hear my dad say, “End of season, so we’ll have to . . .” and I know he’s in.
Frankie gives me a little thumbs-up.
Before I can give my brain two seconds to remember that Nestor has nothing to donate, I’m turning back to him and saying he should come next Saturday to Ms. Dacie’s place. We’re having a big fund-raiser and we’re renting garden plots and selling cookies and lemonade and we want to help Ms. Dacie save her house. The second I say it, I turn red and hot and wish I could take it all back. But before I can, Nestor smiles.
“I’ll be there.”
Frankie, Amelia, and Ana walk with us on the way home. It’s still raining, and we all pull up our hoods and walk two by two, weaving around people who duck under umbrellas along the sidewalk. I’m keeping pace with Ana, our heads down, faces out of the rain.
“Did you know that girl?” I ask. “Natasha?”
We keep slosh-sloshing through the puddles and shaking drops from our hoods.
“No,” she says.
“It seemed like—”
“I just know what it feels like,” she says. The rain is falling hard and muffling her voice. “Being a kid like her.”
“Oh.” It barely comes out as a whisper, and the wind carries it off fast.
A car honks and swerves around a garbage truck, and a woman struggles with an umbrella that turns inside out in the wind.
“So I guess, in a way, I kind of knew her.”
Frankie turns around and says, “Race ya!” and in one second we all four take off, leaving my parents behind, and sprint side by side by side by side up the hill to Ana’s street, then Amelia’s, then Frankie and I tear around the corner onto 152nd Street. And with each step I try to erase all the loss. Nestor and the Almontes, Ms. Dacie, and Ana, and with each stride I try to pull myself away from that night.
Chapter 30
That Night
For one second I thought that if maybe I just opened my eyes I would see him sitting on the back of an ambulance with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. The medics would tell us that he was lucky and if it had been one second sooner, or one inch to the left, he wouldn’t have survived. They’d tell us that he was OK and could go home wit
h us, and I’d curl up in my sleeping bag on his bedroom floor every night that week.
But just opening your eyes never got a heart started beating again, and that’s a fact. Not everything happens like it does in books.
Chapter 31
Brave
All I’ve done for the past two days, besides practice relay starts and handoffs, is make posters for the fund-raiser, hang fliers in store windows and slide them under apartment doors, fill a grocery cart with baking ingredients and lemons for all-day cookie baking and fresh-squeezed lemonade making, and measure the raised garden plots and divide them into equal parts that people can rent.
Since Sunday at the church, Dad has been visiting Ms. Dacie’s and taking the subway to a garden nursery on the Upper West Side and buying more seed packets and plants and extra gardening tools. The Garden box is wide open and in Ms. Dacie’s hallway, and Dad has already started weeding and working the soil. And yesterday when I got there after practice his fingernails were jammed with dirt and when he walked me home, we stopped at La Cocina for two hot chocolates to go.
Even though things are starting to feel pretty good and ready for the fund-raiser, I haven’t written one more word of poetry this week because even in English class yesterday I was busy drafting a thank-you letter that we could give to people if they donate on Saturday. Every time Mrs. Baldwin walked by my desk, I flipped back to my page of poems and tapped my eraser on my temple like I was thinking of the next perfect word, and it worked for the whole period.
But now the poetry slam is in forty-eight hours.
Kids come into English class fast and take out their notebooks and push their desks together and don’t even wait for Mrs. Baldwin to announce that today is another workday before the poetry slam and to use our time well.
“Eeny meeny miney mo,” one girl chants while tapping each of her four poems. “Catch a tiger by the—”
Then Mrs. Baldwin claps her hands three times fast and counts down from five to get our attention.
“Elena’s rendition of Eeny Meeny just reminded me that maybe I could share a hint about how to choose which of your four poems you’ll share out loud with the class,” Mrs. Baldwin announces. Everyone laughs and starts to eeny meeny miney mo their own poems, joking along with Ms. Baldwin.
Elena calls back, “Should I pick out of a hat instead? I like all my poems.”
“I don’t like any of mine,” a boy grumbles from the back of the class.
Mrs. Baldwin quiets everyone down again and says, “When you’re choosing, I want you to pick the one that makes you feel comfortable, but also makes you feel brave. We are all agreeing to be the best, most kind, and generous audience there ever was, so now is the time to do something brave.”
“Definitely going with meeny, then,” Elena says, tapping the second poem in her notebook, and Mrs. Baldwin gives her a high five.
“Now back to work.”
Kids break off into partners and keep erasing and jotting and erasing and jotting and reading beneath their breath and erasing again.
I’m not the kind of person to procrastinate because I know that’s just the brain’s way of trying to minimize uncertainty and the feeling of danger, but really it doesn’t make any of that feeling go away, and that’s a fact because my mom used to talk to Guthrie about waiting until the last minute all the time. But reading any poem in front of anyone feels a little dangerous, and I agreed to read Amelia’s too, so I just start counting the lines on my blank notebook page instead of working.
I can hear Elena reading her poem to the girl sitting next to her. She stumbles over the first line and stops and sighs and says, “Can I start again?”
Her partner nods her head and says, “You got this.”
Mrs. Baldwin is sitting with the boy in the back who said he didn’t like any of his poems and she’s running her finger down a page of his notebook and he doesn’t look like he hates the one Mrs. Baldwin has just picked out and says is beautiful. He shrugs his shoulders and says, “I guess so,” and the second she moves on to another desk group, he starts reading under his breath to himself and I’m 89 percent certain he smiles at the end.
“H-here,” Amelia says, and pushes a piece of loose-leaf paper to me. “I-if you d-don’t w-want to do it anymore—”
“I want to.”
First I read it to myself. It’s a short poem, only eight lines, and it’s about her fifth-grade graduation. She does a lot of what Mrs. Baldwin taught us about imagery, using colors and sounds and feelings so we can really feel like we’re there.
“It’s good,” I tell her.
“It’s only OK,” she says.
I spend the rest of the class practicing reading Amelia’s poem because it feels less scary than working on my own. By the end of the period, I have it almost memorized. And when the bell rings, everyone walks out standing one inch taller, like Mrs. Baldwin watered them overnight and planted them in just the right light.
Chapter 32
Memory Games
Today I can’t go to Dacie’s because I’m at the hospital in my mom’s office. She’s free on Wednesdays at four thirty, which is perfect because it’s right after practice, and we need more copies of the fliers for the fund-raiser. Mom says I can use her machine for free and she’ll even get colored paper. I choose neon green and she teaches me how to stack the paper in the trays and send our handwritten flier into the machine. It chugs and spits out perfect neon green versions with Frankie’s handwriting on top in Spanish, and mine on the bottom in English.
As the machine works and green papers pile up I look around the office. There are diagrams and posters of the brain, binders and plastic-covered reports on her wide wooden desk, and plants growing in the windowsill.
Mom catches my eye, points a finger at me, and says, “Pants. Go!”
It might sound random to anyone else, but I know exactly what we’re doing. Playing a memory game.
“Pants,” I repeat, and in less than one second my brain makes one hundred clicks and connects pants to different memories back and back and back. “Pants. Buying navy pants for the school uniform . . . when I ripped my pants in third grade and you had to come bring me a new pair . . . sneaking Guthrie’s pants out of his bottom drawer before he was ready to hand them down.”
Then my brain just stops and my eyes just fill and Mom gets up to check the copy machine. She brings over a stack of neon green fliers and tells me that she’ll help me fold them. And I know what she’s doing. She’s keeping my hands busy because physical activity helps your brain focus. That’s why she got Guthrie a guitar when he was four years old and why she marched into his middle school and told the principal her son would be chewing gum and doodling all over his notebook while the teacher talked, and maybe the teacher shouldn’t be talking so long to a group of thirteen-year-olds anyway, and if she had any questions about why he would be chewing gum and doodling, she would be happy to explain about the neurotransmitters in the brain that control focus and attention and how keeping your hands busy increases those levels. Then she hustled right out of the office.
So we fold and fold the fliers between the Spanish and English and my brain starts to click again.
“Sneaking Guthrie’s pants out of his bottom drawer before he was ready to hand them down and rolling them up and up until they didn’t drag on the ground . . . wishing on my sixth birthday cake that I could wear pants every day and never have to wear a dress again . . . pulling a denim dress over my head, getting stuck, then running to the garden. Dirt beneath my fingernails.”
“It always ends there,” Mom says. “Your first memory.”
We fold in silence for forty-five seconds before she tries a new word. “Light.”
My brain makes its clicks. “Running home after practice with Frankie, Amelia, and Ana, watching the white and red blink on the walk signals.” Then red lights flash with the beat of sirens in my head, and that remembering rises on up and tightens my throat.
Mom hands me anothe
r flier to fold, so I get my hands busy. “What’s next?” she asks.
“Guthrie’s ambulance.”
Mom folds two fliers fast and puts them in the done pile, and my brain tries to hustle past that night and on to the next memory.
“Turning on our flashlight every Christmas Eve when we creaked down the stairs and tried to catch Santa coming down the chimney . . . Izzy climbing up the tree house ladder, her headlamp bouncing light through the door and across the wall . . . The flash of the camera when Guthrie took my picture crying at the garden. The dirt beneath my nails.”
Mom and I smile.
“I know I’m the queen of hustle,” she says. We’re out of fliers, so she straightens out the pile again and again, tapping the edges against her desk. “But you don’t have to hustle past your memories with him. He’s part of who you are.”
The first thing I think is that she still hasn’t said his name, but then two seconds later I’m thinking about my mom being “the queen of hustle” and my brain’s picturing her goofy dancing across our kitchen floors like she used to.
It feels wrong to laugh right now because this is only the third time Mom’s talked about Guthrie in 363 days, but I can feel it starting in my stomach and I can’t erase the image of Mom sliding across the floor in her socks.
“Queen of hustle?” I say, and a little laugh escapes.
She looks up and even though her eyes are full of tears that look like they could spill out at any second, she laughs too. “You’ve seen my moves,” she says. And now I can tell that we’re both picturing her goofy dance.
She does a little chair dance, jolting her shoulders and jutting her chin, and we both laugh.
“But it’s true,” she says. “I’d benefit from slowing down every once in a while.”
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