He racked his brain. Lowen could tell that his mother and Rena were trying to come up with some, too. All were unsuccessful.
Mum looked at Rena.
“She wants to be a psychologist,” Rena said. “That is, after she’s played for the U.S. soccer team. My ambitious daughter.”
Mum gave Sami an approving look. Then she put the can down and put the cover back on. “Do you think Handy Hardware will take this back?” she asked Lowen.
Lowen shrugged.
“Who sold it to you?” asked Rena.
He described the clerk.
“Mr. Corbeau,” Rena said.
“Related to the woman who owns the Busy Bee?” asked Mum.
Rena nodded. “Husband.”
“Sami,” said Mum, “what color makes a person ravenously hungry?”
“Red,” said Sami without hesitating.
“Here you go,” said Mum, handing the cans back to Lowen. “You know what to do.”
“I’ll go with you,” said Sami, taking one of the cans from Lowen. “If the red is too pink, it will have the same effect as blue. Pink makes us think of gross stuff, like raw meat and artificial preservatives.”
Lowen wasn’t thinking about color psychology as they walked together. He was worried about returning the open can of paint. “What are we going to say?” he asked as they approached the hardware store. “What if Mr. Corbeau won’t let us return it? It was opened. And it was on sale. Sometimes things on sale can’t be returned, right?”
Sami kept walking.
Lowen swatted a mosquito that was biting his neck and looked over at her. Did she even hear his question?
Just as they arrived at Handy Hardware, Sami said, “Be confident. And don’t even say the word return. Say ‘My mother thought the color of this paint was unusual and she was wondering if you had something similar in red.’ Trust me, people who work in hardware stores love to solve other people’s problems. They’re great at it! So instead of thinking of how he’s going to turn you down, he’ll be wondering which cans of red paint he wants to get rid of.”
Lowen’s head was spinning. No way could he remember all that.
“You’re back!” said Mr. Corbeau to Lowen.
“This was a cool color,” Lowen said, “but it’s not, well, it’s not quite right.”
Sami stepped in. “Do you have a red that would be equally unique?”
“Equally unique, you say.” Mr. Corbeau looked a bit wary, but like Sami predicted, he couldn’t resist the search. “Put that open can on the counter and let’s see what we can find.”
He walked down the aisle and back up the ladder.
Lowen was giving Sami a doubtful look when Mr. Corbeau said, “I have exactly what you’re looking for.”
Lowen took the can from Mr. Corbeau and used the bottom of his T-shirt to wipe the greasy dust from the lid.
The label read RIVAL ROSE.
“Could you show us the color?” Sami asked.
Boy, this girl is brave, thought Lowen. Or bossy. He wasn’t sure which.
For a moment, Mr. Corbeau stared at Sami, and then he began to loosen the lid of the can. “Your family’s Indian, right?” he asked her.
“My parents are,” she said.
“India. I suppose that’s where all our jobs have gone.”
Sami bit her lip. “That’s not really the case, you know. Besides, I’m American, and we came here because my mom needed a better job, too.”
Brave, thought Lowen. Definitely brave.
Mr. Corbeau looked at Sami sideways. Then he went back to working the lid. “Guess there’s nothing more American than needing a job.”
The lid popped off.
Lowen leaned over to check out the paint color. It reminded him of strawberry Twizzlers. He felt a quick quivering of the snake inside him, but he pushed the unpleasant memory away. He looked to Sami to see what she thought of the color.
“We’ll take it,” she said.
Mum, Rena, Sami, and Lowen spent the morning painting the walls of the Cornish Eatery. Rena told Mum more about her pet-grooming store. “I’m especially excited about the clothing,” Rena said. “I have designs for all seasons, but around here there’s got to be a demand for warm coats and insulated boots.”
The winters in Millville were supposed to be pretty epic. Lowen recalled more than a few headlines about record-breaking snowfalls when they’d researched the town.
“You should see the outfits she’s made,” Sami added. “They’re much better than the ones in stores.”
“Well, they caught on with my friends at home,” Rena said.
“You’re too modest, Mom,” Sami said. “She’s a real artist.”
Rena came over and kissed the top of Sami’s head. “My daughter is my biggest cheerleader. The men in my life? Not so much.”
Lowen could tell from Sami’s expression that she thought her mother was oversharing. “You don’t need a man, Mom,” Sami said. “You just need more confidence.”
“Yes, well, all the confidence in the world isn’t going to make your dad more reliable,” Rena quipped. “Sami never knows when she’s going to get a phone call from her dad,” she explained with disgust in her voice.
“He texts sometimes,” Sami said. “And maybe he’d be in touch more often if he didn’t have to call your cell phone.”
Lowen pretended to be absorbed in painting. He wondered if Sami missed her dad as much as he was beginning to miss his.
By afternoon the color had done the trick: Lowen was famished! He hoped that Clem and Anneth had remembered to go to Roger’s for groceries.
“Which route home today?” Mum asked as they locked up.
Lowen chose Cedar to Church to Beech so he could walk past the Millville First Baptist Church. The minister changed the marquee often, and he usually wrote something funny.
Last week it read God answers knee-mail.
Today it read Free trip to Heaven — details inside.
Which didn’t strike Lowen as funny at all. He looked at his mother to see if she’d read it, too, but her mind appeared to be elsewhere.
Free trip to Heaven. Right. The snake slithered between his ribs. Right after the shooting, people talked a lot about Abe being in heaven. But when Lowen was in fourth grade, a kid had told him that there was a pause between living and the afterlife — limbo, she called it — where a person’s life was reviewed. If God was in your heart, you went to heaven. If not, hell.
As they walked, Lowen tried to push the Abe thoughts away, but his mind began to play the next story in his Abe comics. . . .
“What is it, honey?” Mum asked, pulling him out of his fantasy.
“Nothing,” said Lowen.
“Thinking about Abe again?” She was too good at noticing.
Lowen shrugged.
“Do you think it’s been easier here? Less sad?”
He blasted a rock from the toe of his sneaker to the other side of the road. Why talk about it? No one knows where Abe is now. Just because he imagined limbo doesn’t mean it exists.
They turned onto Beech Street and heard Clem’s and Anneth’s voices through the open windows. They were yelling.
Both Mum and Lowen broke into a jog.
Anneth was trapped in her room. Apparently she had gone in to Skype in privacy with Megan, and when she tried to come out again, the door was stuck. The knob wouldn’t turn.
Clem was barreling into the door, the way cops on TV do when they’re breaking down doors.
“Stop it, Clem!” Mum shouted. “You’ll hurt yourself.”
Clem gave the door one more bang.
Anneth screamed and then returned to talking on the phone. Lowen could tell by the shrillness of her voice that she was talking to Dad.
Mum rattled the glass doorknob. “What is it with the hardware in this house?”
“Maybe some butter would help,” said Lowen, who as a little kid had once gotten his finger stuck in the bathtub faucet and his mother had come to the
rescue with butter.
“Dad says to take the door off the hinges,” Anneth shouted through the door.
Just then Mr. Field came charging up the stairs, dressed in a three-piece suit. “Please!” he begged. “We’re having visiting hours next door. We can’t have yelling and banging. You’ve got to think of the mourners.”
Mum apologized to Mr. Field and told Anneth to freak out as quietly as possible.
As Mr. Field turned to go down the stairs, he paused to let Coach come up. (Didn’t anyone in this town ever knock?) Dylan waited at the base of the stairs. He must have been here when Anneth discovered she was trapped and gone for help.
“Hey, Lowen,” Coach said as he passed him. “Have you been practicing your mad soccer skills?”
Lowen grunted a noncommittal sound — a response, but not an answer.
Mum looked relieved to see Coach. “Can you help me take this door off its hinges?”
Coach took a moment to investigate the door. He shook his head. “Won’t work.” He explained that the doorknob had a metal mechanism that was stuck in the wooden door casing. “You need a locksmith,” he said.
Anneth shrieked. “How long is that going to take?”
“That’s enough screaming, Anneth,” said Mum. “We can hear you just fine through the door.” She turned to Coach. “Don’t tell me: the nearest locksmith is forty miles away.”
“I’m guessing that would be true,” said Coach. “But seeing how this is an emergency, he might come in a day or two.”
Another screech from Anneth was followed by loud organ music from the funeral home next door.
Mum groaned. It was a familiar groan. It was the groan she made every time she learned that the thing she needed was forty miles away.
“You folks have a ladder?” Coach asked.
Mum shook her head. “Why?”
Coach smiled broadly. “When God closes a door, He opens . . .”
“A window!” Mum finished. “Of course.”
“You’ll still need a locksmith to fix the door,” Coach pointed out. “But at least this way we can get her out sooner rather than later.”
Mum went downstairs to call a locksmith in Ranger, and Coach and Clem left to borrow a ladder. Dylan had disappeared to who-knows-where. Lowen felt weird leaving Anneth all alone, so he sat outside her door and tried to talk to her.
“So . . . what are you doing?”
“Nothing. Just like I’ve done for the past three weeks,” she added. She sounded far away, like she was sitting on her bed. “Because there’s absolutely nothing to do here.”
He wanted to say, You could help Mum with the shop, but he knew better. If Mum’s restaurant was a success, Anneth would be trapped in Millville forever.
“What’s Megan doing this summer?”
There was a pause and then: “Hanging out at the pool at the Y,” Anneth said, her voice sadder.
Lowen didn’t really like Megan. She was pushy and opinionated and Anneth always acted differently around her, as though she didn’t have any opinions of her own. But his sister obviously missed her. “I’m sorry that you had to leave your best friend,” he said, and meant it.
Anneth didn’t respond. At least she wasn’t yelling at him that this was all his fault.
“You know,” said Lowen, “there’s an outdoor pool in Millville. It’s public.”
“What, and just show up?” said Anneth. “Without knowing a soul?” She had moved off her bed and was sitting beside him on the other side of the door. The door rattled when she leaned on it.
She had a point.
“What would Megan do if she were the new one in town?” asked Lowen.
Anneth sighed. “The same thing she’s doing right now back home. She’d find a new best friend.”
Lowen was almost disappointed when Coach arrived with the ladder. Anneth was talking to him, really talking to him. It might have been the first time since the family decided to buy a dollar house. He reluctantly left his post at her door and went around to the back to watch the rescue of Anneth.
He was not alone. After they paid their last respects to the deceased next door, the curious wandered into the Grovers’ backyard to see what the screaming had been about.
“Fire?” a man with a mustache kidded.
“The girl’s trapped in her bedroom,” said Mrs. Manzo, who had come bustling out of the house next door and stood as if she had a supervisory position.
Lowen stood with Mum near the base of the ladder. Clem walked over to him and draped his arm over Lowen’s shoulder.
“Hey, Shrimp,” he said.
“Hey,” said Lowen.
“Welcome to the Grover Family Circus,” Clem muttered, and for a moment Lowen felt like his brother’s confidant. Yes, their family might appear weird, but it was their family. Lowen searched his brain for something witty to say in response, but before anything came to mind (as if anything clever would come to mind), he spotted a group of older girls standing on the other side of the lawn, watching Clem.
Oh. So Clem’s arm around him was part of the show. Still, it felt nice.
“Come out the window backward,” instructed Coach, who had gone up the ladder to guide Anneth.
Clem moved over to help Lowen hold the ladder, keeping it steady.
“My legs are shaking!” Anneth shouted, and Lowen wished he could help her. He knew that she would be entirely mortified when she reached the bottom and turned around to face the crowd that was forming.
Fortunately, she didn’t have to face the crowd all alone. The minute her foot touched the ground, two girls her age wobbled over in heels to claim her as their own.
“Your belt is so cool; did you make it?” one of the girls asked.
The other girl grabbed Anneth’s hand and examined her nails. “Where did you find mint-green nail polish?” she asked.
Before Coach left, Lowen summoned the courage to speak to him. “Coach, about soccer . . .”
“What’s up?” Coach asked.
“Would it be possible to be the scorekeeper for the team or something?”
“I’m afraid not. I really need you to be on the team. Without you, we don’t have enough registered players to be in the league.”
“Trust me, you don’t want me on your team. I don’t even know the rules!”
Coach adjusted the brim of his baseball cap. “You know, other cities sell houses for a dollar, but they don’t require that families have three kids. We do. And you know why? So we can keep our school open and our sports teams running — and, hopefully, winning. I voted for your family over all of the other applicants because I knew you kids could help us do that.”
Lowen nodded, trying to remember any question on the application that suggested he could do such a thing. And then he remembered a section that asked about their family’s interests. Mum had given consideration to all of their interests and had listed “sports.” What she didn’t say was that Clem played sports, Anneth liked running in gym, and the rest of them watched Clem. He tried to think of what to say without sounding as if Mum had lied.
“We have to work as a team, Lowen. You need to give it your best try.” Coach called Clem over. “Clem, I’d like you to help me,” he said.
“Sure, Coach. What do you need?” Lowen could tell that Clem really liked Coach. That he wanted to come through for him.
“I want you to teach your brother to play soccer.”
“Lowen?”
“Do you have another brother?” Coach asked.
“Anneth’s not so bad,” Clem said.
“I promised her the last spot on cross-country. It’s Lowen I want you to focus some extra time on.”
“Sure thing, Coach,” he said. Thought bubble above Clem’s head: This stinks.
That evening, they sat at the small kitchen table while Mum cooked and Anneth retold the experience of descending the ladder. “Wait till I tell Megan!”
“Mrs. Grover?” It was Dylan. He’d been standing nearby as usual, o
ffering to be Mum’s taste-tester, listening but not saying a word. He pointed to the glass doorknob that the locksmith, who arrived hours after Anneth’s rescue, had replaced. “Do you mind if I keep that?”
Mum laughed. “Of course not. Consider it yours.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Grover,” he said. He grabbed the knob and sprinted out the door.
Clem raised his eyebrows at Lowen — another rare moment of solidarity.
The moment made Lowen feel a little better about Clem’s reaction to Coach. “Clem,” he said, “can we play some soccer after dinner?”
“Sorry, dude,” Clem said, leaning back so his chair balanced on two legs. He only called Lowen “dude” when he was trying to get him to do — or in this case not to do — something. “I’ve got plans.”
“Clem, I’m sure you could help your brother out,” Mum said. “Give him some tips.”
Clem dropped his chair back to the floor. “Ask Dylan,” snapped Clem. “He’ll teach you.” And with that, Clem left to go upstairs. “Clem!” Mum shouted after him.
“Forget it,” Lowen said.
“You could look at videos online,” suggested Anneth. “You can learn anything online.”
Lowen gave her a weak smile. A minute ago he couldn’t wait for supper. Now he had lost his appetite. Sure, Clem didn’t spend time with him very often, but he always assumed that it was because he was busy with homework and sports and stuff. It never occurred to Lowen that his brother didn’t like hanging out with him.
“I’ll talk to him,” said Mum.
“No, don’t,” Lowen said adamantly. The last thing he needed was for Clem to start calling him Prince Lowen as well.
And as it turned out, Anneth was right: there were tons of videos on how to play soccer. There were videos that taught the techniques of dribbling, passing, and running. There were videos that taught the responsibilities of the positions and the rules. Sure, there were times when Lowen got sidetracked by videos on how to draw a soccer player in action, but for the most part he was learning the game. With each video he watched, he felt faster, smarter, more graceful.
He couldn’t wait to show Clem just how good he could be.
The Dollar Kids Page 7