The Dollar Kids

by Jennifer Richard Jacobson

  At the next house, they secured a bag of high-heeled shoes, and at the one after that, they received two whole bags of baby clothes. They made their way back to Restored Riches to empty the wheelbarrow, then headed out again.

  “We make a good team,” said Lowen as he took a turn pushing the wheelbarrow.

  Sami smiled and nodded in agreement. “We do. Don’t we, Dave? Dave?”

  Lowen laughed.

  “Yup,” said Sami. “A good team. You, me, and the bandwagon effect.”

  Lowen thought for a moment. “OK, I think I know what that is.”

  Sami shifted Lowen’s messenger bag on her shoulder. “So what is it?”

  “First, you make sure to tell people that their neighbors have already donated clothes.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, if their neighbors are doing it, it’s probably an OK thing to do. And that probably makes them want to do it, too. They don’t want to miss out on an opportunity.” He looked at Sami, waiting for her response. “It’s like a big parade float that everyone suddenly wants to hop on.”

  She smiled.

  “I’m right, aren’t I? See, I’m not that stupid.” Lowen tried to steer the wheelbarrow straight up the next hilly street, but it was hard to keep it going in the right direction when it was empty.

  “I never said —”

  “Do you want to skip this house?” Lowen asked. They had arrived at Mr. Avery’s perfectly manicured home. There wasn’t a single leaf anywhere on his lawn.

  “Why?” asked Sami.

  “Don’t you remember the last time we ran into Mr. Avery? At the river?

  “Keep pushing,” said Sami. “He’s old. He probably won’t even remember that it was us. Besides, this is where Dylan lives, right? Let’s say hi.”

  Lowen sighed. “You go first.”

  Sami confidently rang the doorbell and waited. They could hear the volume on the TV being lowered, someone’s footsteps approaching.

  “My grandson isn’t here,” Mr. Avery said when he opened the door.

  “That’s OK, Mr. Avery. We’d like to talk with you. I’m Sami Doshi.”

  “I know who you are.”

  Sami smiled, undaunted. “Then you may know that my mother is opening a consignment shop in town.”

  “I had heard that, yes.”

  “Well, many of your neighbors have decided to sell their clothes at Restored Riches.”

  “Have they, now?” He looked at Lowen. “And are you simply helping this young lady, or do you have something you’d like to talk me into as well?”

  Lowen didn’t know if Mr. Avery was being harsh, or encouraging him to give his sales pitch — he hoped it was the latter. He pulled out a menu. “I’d like to convince you to try the pasties at the Cornish Eatery. Many of your neighbors —”

  Mr. Avery held his hand up. “And have any of my neighbors told you that you’re breaking the law? That the fine folks of Millville don’t wish to be annoyed by door-to-door salesmen, or saleswomen, or saleskids for that matter, telling them what their neighbors have or have not done. That’s why they passed a no soliciting ordinance.”

  Harsh. Definitely harsh.

  Sami shifted her weight. “But we’re just trying to —”

  “I suggest,” Mr. Avery continued, “that the two of you take your wheelbarrow and your menus back to your mothers’ places of business before I have them — and you — fined for disobeying town law.”

  And with that, he shut the door.

  Lowen and Sami couldn’t push the wheelbarrow fast enough to the Cornish Eatery, where they were quite certain to find both their mothers at this time of day.

  “You won’t believe —” Lowen started as they burst into the shop, but he stopped short.

  For once the Cornish Eatery wasn’t empty. Ms. Duffey was at the counter talking with Rena and Mum. “We’ve done a fine job of mixing things up here a bit. But we’ve got to do more than just fill houses,” she was saying. “Towns that make a comeback invite small local businesses: coffee shops, bookstores, restaurants — like this one — and spaces for the arts! Believe it or not, music and storytelling and art can bring back a town.”

  Additionally, Dave, of Isn’t that right, Dave? was sitting at the table eating a classic Cornish pasty — presumably with gluten-free crust. He must have called right after they left his house. And a young couple whom Lowen and Sami had met on their second trip was studying the menu.

  While Sami moved to the back of the counter to tell their moms what had happened at Mr. Avery’s, Lowen headed to the cooler to get them some drinks.

  Just then, the bell above the door jangled and Coach walked in.

  “What can I get you, Coach?” Mum asked, looking distracted. No doubt she was fretting over their encounter with Mr. Avery.

  “Actually, I’m here to recruit Lowen,” he said, and motioned for Lowen to sit down with him at the table, which Dave was in the process of vacating.

  “Great pie!” Dave said, and waved on his way out.

  Coach leaned toward Lowen. “I’d like to give you some private lessons in basketball. The season’s coming up and I could really use someone on the team with your height.”

  Lowen didn’t know what to say. Being on the soccer team hadn’t been as bad as he’d feared, but that was because he mostly got to sit on the bench. It sounded like Coach expected him to actually play on the basketball team, though.

  No doubt reading Lowen’s expression, Coach continued. “I’ll be honest — unlike with soccer, we have enough kids without you to qualify as a team. But we could really use someone with your height, and if we can make you a strong player in middle school, you’ll be a real asset to our high-school team. Have you ever played basketball before?”

  “Well, I —” He was about to tell Coach that he’d played a little in gym class when he was in the second grade, but Mum interrupted.

  “Are you sure I can’t get you a pasty?” she asked.

  “No, really,” said Coach. “I thought you were closed by four — that’s why I came in at this time.”

  “We usually do close by four, but today, thanks to Lowen and Sami, we had a bunch of customers who all poured in during the last hour.” She ruffled Lowen’s hair. “I’ll get you something.”

  Of course! Customers had arrived as soon as the Busy Bee closed. It was the opposite of the bandwagon theory — instead of everyone in town talking about how they were giving the Cornish Eatery a try, they were visiting in secret, when Virginia Corbeau was least likely to find out about it. Rutabaga-loving Dave probably wasn’t even going to tell his wife that he had come. How could his mother fight that?

  And then Lowen knew — he knew exactly how he could help break this pattern. He waited until after Coach told him all about the importance of basketball to the town of Millville: the need for restored faith in their teams, the likelihood that he’d play center, his chances of being a hometown hero. But mostly, Lowen waited until Coach took his first bite of Mum’s chicken pot pasty and said, “Wow.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” said Lowen, leaning forward in his chair so only Coach could hear him. “I’ll learn how to play basketball under one condition.”

  Coach finished chewing before speaking. “Sounds like extortion, but I’m intrigued. What’s your condition?”

  Lowen took a breath. “You have to promise to eat lunch here at least two times a week until basketball season is over.”

  Coach nearly spewed a mouthful of pasty across the room. “Seriously? That’s your condition?”

  Lowen nodded.

  Coach finished his pasty in silence, clearly mulling things over. “Do you know that the Corbeaus, the ones who own the Busy Bee, are the biggest donors to the sports teams in town?”

  Lowen chose his words carefully. “Will there still be sports teams if the Dollar Kids can’t stay?”

  “Good point. But, the Corbeaus supported the Dollar Program until . . .”

  “Until my mother opened a take-o
ut restaurant.”

  Coach nodded. “It was an unfortunate choice of business.”

  “But —”

  “I know,” said Coach. “The Busy Bee didn’t offer lunch then.”

  Mum and Dad were right. Running a successful business in a small town was a lot trickier than it looked. Unless something changed, it seemed unlikely that his mother’s shop would ever take off.

  And it was equally unlikely that Lowen would play basketball, but that, he thought, was probably a blessing.

  “OK,” said Coach.

  “Huh?”

  “If you’ll play basketball, I’ll eat here two days a week.”

  “You will?”

  “I wanted to bring you kids here to Millville. It wouldn’t be right if I didn’t support you.”

  Lowen smiled.

  “Actually,” said Coach, “I’m doing it because your mom’s pasties are so darn good.”

  Lowen didn’t want to get out of bed. It was the first morning he was supposed to meet Coach at the gym for a basketball lesson. Beneath his covers was warmth — warmth and the figments of pleasant dreams, though the specifics of those dreams were already drifting away. Outside his covers, cold loomed like scattered pins.

  Each new day here in Millville got colder than the last, but with Mum’s shop still not turning a profit, the Grovers couldn’t afford to turn the heat up high enough to make the house comfortable — especially at night. So Lowen curled under several old quilts that Mum had bought from Rena’s store.

  Despite Mum’s patronage, Restored Riches wasn’t doing any better than the Cornish Eatery. It wasn’t that Millvillians stayed away — they didn’t feel that Rena was competing with any other store in town — but they never bought anything when they did visit. Lowen had seen this firsthand. He was delivering a pasty Mum had made for Rena when he overheard two women gabbing by a dress rack.

  WOMAN 1: “Look! This is the dress that Deborah wore to our twentieth reunion!”

  WOMAN 2: “And this is the one you wore!”

  WOMAN 1: “I remember this white dress, too! Gracie wore it to her baby’s christening.”

  WOMAN 2: “Which baby was that? Which reminds me, have you checked out the kids’ clothes here?”

  WOMAN 1: “Absolutely not. Times are hard, but I still won’t let my kids wear hand-me-downs.”

  Rena had been listening to the women, too. “Their kids wear hand-me-downs,” she said after they left empty-handed. “Only they travel to Ranger and buy from the thrift store there.”

  “Maybe families in Ranger will travel here to buy from your store,” Lowen had offered.

  Rena just shook her head.

  Even the Dollar Families who wanted to help Rena didn’t want to buy the secondhand clothing that everyone else in town would easily recognize. So they bought a few household items (household items that would otherwise have mysteriously appeared on the front lawns of dollar homes) and tucked them away.

  Lowen crawled out from under his mound of quilts and got dressed as quickly as possible, then walked up to the high-school gym for his first basketball lesson. Frost crackled beneath his sneakers and his breath lingered in the air.

  Coach was shooting baskets when Lowen arrived. He moved in for a layup and scored. “You’re a man of your word,” he called out to Lowen.

  Lowen smiled. Coach had kept his promise, too, regularly eating lunch at Mum’s shop and even sitting at the table by the window to be sure folks passing by would see him in there enjoying one of Mum’s “mean pies,” as he called them.

  “So, we’ll wait a couple more minutes,” said Coach, moving in for another layup. Lowen didn’t know what they were waiting for, but he was happy to put off the inevitable embarrassment as long as possible.

  Turns out they were waiting for Dylan, who came in wearing basketball shorts and basketball shoes — unlike Lowen, who had shown up in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt.

  For once, the sight of Dylan didn’t annoy Lowen. The more he got to know Mr. Avery, the more Lowen felt sorry for him. Was Dylan’s grandfather always that angry — and mean?

  “I thought it might be useful to have Dylan join us,” Coach explained.

  And it was.

  For a while.

  Coach asked Dylan to model some ball skills: finger grabs, slaps, and finger tipping, that sort of thing. It was soon clear that Dylan was as good at basketball as he was at soccer — maybe even better.

  Tipping was not as easy as Dylan made it look. “Keep your elbows straight,” he counseled when Lowen tried it for the first time.

  After a half hour of working with the ball, Coach suggested that Lowen and Dylan play a little one-on-one while he went down the hall to his office to work on scheduling.

  Dylan shrugged and tossed the ball to Lowen, who did his best to dribble it toward the basket.

  It wasn’t a real match, of course. Dylan easily stole the ball from Lowen and rarely missed an open shot, whereas most of Lowen’s shots ricocheted off the rim. Lowen’s height helped, though, and he got better at blocking Dylan’s attempts.

  “So,” said Lowen, when he got tired of chasing Dylan around the court, “you live in that white house with the windmill.”

  “Yup,” said Dylan, taking an unobstructed shot.

  “Do your parents live there, too?” Lowen asked, catching the ball on the rebound.

  “Don’t you think you would have met my parents by now if they did?”

  Lowen let the tone roll off him. “So where do they live?”

  Dylan stole the ball.

  “I already told you my dad lives in Buchanan.” Dylan maneuvered his body away from Lowen and shot. This time the ball bounced off the backboard.

  “How ’bout your mother?” He sounded like Abe, asking any old question that came to mind no matter how rude or intrusive.

  “Gone,” said Dylan as he shot again. It hit the rim but didn’t bounce in.

  Lowen was quiet, hoping Dylan would explain.

  Instead, Dylan stopped shooting and pounded the ball against the gym floor — each bounce causing a thump, followed by an echoing ping. “Heard your friend was killed in a random shooting,” he said.

  Lowen lunged for the ball, but Dylan rolled it to his other hand. “Who told you that?” He was pretty sure that Mr. Avery wasn’t supposed to share confidential details from their application — but maybe Dylan had overheard something?

  Ping. Ping. Ping. “Anneth,” Dylan said.

  Of course. He avoided talking to Dylan while he was hanging out at the Albatross, but his siblings didn’t.

  “What’d Anneth tell you, exactly?”

  “She said you guys were always together. That he was always around the house. That sometimes he’d take things.”

  Anneth had a big mouth. Lowen reached out and grabbed the ball from Dylan’s hands. He tried to dribble but kicked it away on the first bounce.

  “Said he stole money from her, and he took her Valentine’s candy,” Dylan called out.

  “So what?” said Lowen, scooping up the ball. Really. So he took some of Anneth’s candy. He was nine years old, for Pete’s sake. Nine years old and dead, by the way.

  Dylan swooped in and stole the ball. Ping. Ping. Ping. “So do you think something like that keeps you out of heaven? Stealing, I mean?”

  “He was a kid,” Lowen snapped as he grabbed the ball away from Dylan. Again he tried to control his dribble, but the ball bobbed away.

  “Yeah, but the guy who shot him was a kid, too, right? Just ’cause you’re a kid doesn’t mean you automatically get a free pass to heaven.”

  It wasn’t like Lowen hadn’t thought of these things. He’d already drawn the cartoon. . . .

  Lowen dribbled the ball in place a couple times and then whipped it at the backboard.

  The ball hit the glass and banked in.

  “Ha! Lucky shot,” said Dylan, catching it on the rebound. He dribbled it back to the foul line.

  Lowen threw himself down on the floo
r. He was tired and sweaty from running around the court in jeans. “Anyway, there’s no such thing as heaven.”

  Really, how could there be? He’d looked up the requirements for heaven online, and what he’d found were all these conflicting laws. (Is it OK for a soldier to murder? How about the death penalty?) There were even stages of sins that looked like a rubric his teacher might use: might be pardonable, sometimes pardonable, occasionally pardonable, unlikely to be pardonable. Who decided? God? If so, how did He (or She) ever have time to do anything but judge the lives of the newly dead? It boggled the mind.

  “Why would you say that?” Dylan’s voice had a razor’s edge. Ping. Ping. Ping. He dribbled aggressively, moving closer to Lowen’s head with each bounce.

  Lowen flinched. “Think about it,” he said. “Heaven’s supposed to be this place where everything is perfect. But what if you love harp playing and I hate harp playing? Then how can it be heaven for both of us?”

  Dylan stopped dribbling and shook his head. “There’s a heaven,” he said firmly.

  “Says who?” asked Lowen.

  Dylan shook his head. “If you weren’t so pathetic, you’d know that.” He dropped the ball and walked out of the gym.

  “Sure, walk away!” Lowen shouted. “You always do.”

  He lay back on the floor and stared up at the ceiling. The roof was a long way up. Metal beams, with crisscross latticework, looked like ladders to nowhere.

  As he stood to leave the gym, Lowen noticed Coach standing by the locker room doors, watching him.

  “Believe it or not, Grover, you’ve improved already,” he said.

  Lowen shrugged. “I’ve got to get to the shop. Mum’s expecting me.” Another bold-faced lie. Looks like he wouldn’t be getting into Dylan’s heaven either.

  “I’ll walk with you,” Coach said. “There’s something I want to talk to your mother about.”

  The restaurant was empty when they walked in, but a lack of customers early in the day no longer worried Mum. Ever since Coach had started eating there, she’d had an increase in customers — customers who showed up after the Busy Bee was closed.

  “What a pleasant surprise!” said Mum. “How were the lessons?”