Middle of Nowhere

by Caroline Adderson

  When I got back, she was still there hanging onto the walker.

  “Could you take it into the house? Put it on the kitchen table.”

  I did. I went up the steps and inside. The kitchen was straight ahead. When I came back out she asked if I’d take her in, too, which I did.

  “Don’t forget the thingie,” she said, waving to it.

  She kept one freckled hand on the stair railing, the other on my arm. Inside the door, I set the walker down, making sure she was gripping it before I let her go.

  I tried to give her change back. I really did.

  AS SOON AS I got in our apartment, I dropped the groceries on the floor and went over to the wall and stood on my head. Once, in art class, Mr. Bryant showed us how copying a drawing upside down makes it come out better. You look at it in a different way, I guess. So I stood on my head and looked differently at that awful question.

  Who was dead?

  Now everything in the room was upside down. What a mess. Did I need to be upside down to notice the hideaway bed was not hiding and not made? That dirty breakfast dishes were still on the table and damp laundry draped all over the chairs? It was a one-bedroom apartment. Mom got the bedroom because she slept during the day. Artie and I shared the hideaway bed. We didn’t dare leave the bed open with Mom around. Artie would never bounce a ball against the wall if she was there.

  If somebody ever suspected Artie and I were on our own, they would come straight over and the mess would give us away. Obviously, there wasn’t a mother for miles around here.

  The blood drained from my feet and the hotdogs slid out of my pocket and bounced on the carpet. I stayed upside down for as long as I could. Then I kicked off the wall and landed on the floor in a ball. When I tried to sit up again, I toppled right over on my side.

  That was probably how the old lady felt. Dizzy. Dizzy and scared. But after a minute, I got up fine on my own.

  I never did see an answer to my question.

  UNTIL IT WAS time to get Artie, I spent the rest of Friday cleaning the apartment. The vacuum cleaner was broken so I had to pick the dirt off the carpet, go around collecting little bits of stuff with my fingers. I did a good job because as soon as we got in, Artie went running to Mom’s bedroom, calling, “You’re back! You’re back!”

  Then he pitched another one.

  Economizer Extra-Strength Hand and Body Lotion — it’s great for fits!

  They should put that on the label.

  ARTIE’S AFRAID OF lots of things. The old lady across the street. Dogs. Men with beards. But his most annoying fear is of falling in the toilet.

  Last year, when he was four and a half, he woke up in the middle of the night and went to the bathroom half asleep. He didn’t notice the seat was up. Screams! Mom and I went running and there he was, arms and legs waving in the air.

  “Help! I’m going down! I’m going down!” Ever since, there’s no convincing him that he’s way too big to be flushed away. And even now he needs somebody to hold his hand if he has to sit down.

  Those were the times I really, really wished Mom was back. Saturday morning, Sunday morning, standing there holding his hand and gagging and wishing he would hurry up.

  Still, we survived the whole weekend on the old lady’s five dollars and the change from the twenty she gave me. Hotdogs for breakfast, hotdogs for lunch, hotdogs for supper. On Sunday morning I went back to the Pit Stop Mart and spent the rest on cereal for a little variety in our diet.

  I took a shower and when I came out, Artie was rolling around on the floor with the phone tucked under his chin, chattering away, the way he did when Mom called from her class to say goodnight.

  I snatched it from him.

  “Mom?”

  “On a scale of one to ten, ten being the most likely — ” the woman on the other end of the line was saying, “ — how likely would you be to choose a sugar-free soft drink over a regular soft drink, regardless of the brand?”

  ON A SCALE of one to ten, ten being the most likely, I would have ranked Mom being there when we got home from school on Monday as a ten. Maybe a nine, but no lower than that. She’d been gone a week.

  We always wake her when we get home from school. Her shift at Pay-N-Save started at eleven at night, so she had to leave the apartment by ten to catch the bus, unless she had a class. If she had a class, she left after supper and went to work from school. She got home in the morning in time to eat breakfast with us and make our lunches and see us off. After school, Artie would come and lie on top of her and bury his nose in her neck. When that didn’t work, he’d steal her earplugs and lift the satiny edge of her eye mask and growl.

  Anyway, she wasn’t there so I poured out some dry cereal for Artie and put him in front of the TV. Then I sat in the window and watched the house across the street. I hadn’t seen the old lady all weekend, but the drapes had opened and closed and the lights went on at night and the TV colored her living-room blue. She would run out of food sooner or later, just like us. Or maybe she had somebody she could call — grown-up kids or grandkids.

  Then I thought of something else. It was right in front of my eyes, but for some reason I didn’t see it until that moment.

  The next morning on the way to school, I took Artie across the street to look at the old lady’s garden. Before her ambulance ride, she used to be out there all the time, watering her plants and not saying hi to us. I didn’t know anything about plants, but they looked thirsty to me. I was going to offer to do the watering for her because I hoped she might pay me.

  Artie pulled on my hand.

  “Come on, Curtis. She’s in the window.”

  That was what I wanted. I pretended not to see her or notice when she stepped away from the window.

  “Let’s go!”

  I needed to give her enough time to hobble to the door. It took forever. She moved so slowly with that thing. Finally she bashed her way out onto the step, holding the screen with one hand, clutching the walker with the other, scowling at us from under the knitted cap. Artie nearly fainted on the spot.

  “Do you need any help?” I called.

  “Do you?” she called back.

  I thought she meant that she’d been watching our place at the same time I’d been watching hers. That she’d noticed a twelve-year-old going out with his five-and-a-half-year-old brother. That an adult never came out with them. Not once for a whole week.

  I grabbed Artie and we took off.

  It wasn’t a good day after that. At school I found it hard to concentrate. Mr. Bryant asked me if everything was okay and I told him yes. But at that exact moment my stomach let rip the loudest gurgle you ever heard. It sounded like a flushing toilet. Mr. Bryant dropped his eyes to where the sound came from, as though I had a wild animal stuffed under my shirt. Or maybe he was looking at my shirt, which was one of the ones Artie had washed in the bathtub. It didn’t look too clean, even though he’d stomped all over it.

  Great, I thought. Now two people are suspicious.

  Maybe Mrs. Gill was, too, because instead of a lunch, I’d packed Artie the penny candy I’d bought on Friday.

  But I wasn’t out of ideas yet. I had a few and one was bottles, so after school Artie and I went down to the creepy underground parking garage and checked the recycling.

  It turned out I wasn’t the only one to think of this. Margarine tubs and dirty ravioli cans spilled out of the bin, but they weren’t anything we could cash in at the store. The beer cans and liquor bottles had already been scooped up.

  So after the last Mr. Noodle split between us, I got the credit card from mom’s wallet under the cardboard box in her bedroom. While Artie drew a picture, I practiced copying Debbie Schlanka over and over off the back of the card. She had a pretty easy-to-forge signature. It didn’t look that different from how I wrote Curtis Schlanka.
I realized this was because she never got that far in school. She only made it to grade nine before she quit.

  My son Curtis Schlanka has permission to use this card. Best wishes.

  I held it up. The “best wishes” looked dumb. It wasn’t a birthday card! I wrote it again without any closing.

  Using a credit card with a forged permission note was pretty much the same as stealing. If we were caught, the Pit Stop Mart clerk would call the police. Then Social Services would get involved. Most foster families only take in one kid at a time. They have their own kids like Mrs. and Mr. Pennypacker had Brandon. I could look after myself, but what about Artie?

  The clerk with the gold front tooth was working at the Pit Stop again. He lifted his face out of a magazine as we came in and watched me take a basket. My heart started thumping.

  Artie made straight for the candy.

  “No,” I said, dragging him to the cooler at the back where the milk was. I wanted to fill the basket with food, but thought it would look suspicious if we bought too many groceries at the Pit Stop Mart, even though it was where I’d been buying everything because the supermarket was a bus ride away. I put in milk, apples, carrots, bread, sandwich meat, cheese spread, cans of fruit, packages of soup.

  Artie didn’t want carrots. He wanted a Slushie.

  “No Slushie,” I said.

  “I want candy. I want candy for lunch like you gave me today.”

  “Shh. You were supposed to trade it for some real food. Remember? Did you?”

  He crinkled his nose.

  “Well, you can’t have more candy. You’ll get sick. You’ll get rickets.”

  “What’s rickets?”

  “It’s a disease. Your legs bow out and get so weak you can’t walk. You get it from eating too much candy.”

  I shushed him again as we got close to the counter. Somebody else had come in and was buying cigarettes and lottery tickets. On his way out, he tossed the cigarette wrapper on the floor. The clerk glared after him, then kept on glaring as I heaved our basket onto the counter. He started scanning our stuff as though we had thrown the wrapper down. I took the credit card from my pocket. The note was folded around it and my fingers stuck to the paper as I handed it to him.

  He looked at it with one eyebrow lifted. Then he looked at me the same way and my face got hot. I thought we were goners except just then, Artie reached up with the cigarette wrapper and put it on the counter where it unballed in slow motion.

  “He littered,” Artie said.

  And the clerk smiled. He showed his gold tooth to us, then snatched up the wrapper and tossed it in the garbage.

  “Anything else? Scratch and win?” he asked, all friendly now.

  “Okay,” I said.

  He swiped the credit card and handed me a pen to sign the receipt.

  “Should I sign my name or my mom’s name?” I asked.

  “Your name.” He passed the groceries over the counter in two bulging bags. “Good luck.”

  I think he meant the lottery ticket. We scratched it outside the store, and even though we didn’t win anything, I still felt lucky.

  BEFORE BED WE treated ourselves to bread and canned peaches, the bread dipped in the syrup and all soppy with it. It should have been easy to get to sleep because my stomach was finally full. Mom hadn’t come back yet or even called but I was still ten out of ten positive she would be back. Because that was what she promised a long time ago when I was living with the Pennypackers. That she would never leave me again.

  Also, our problems were solved. Our one problem, really. All I had to do was wave the credit card and the door of the Pit Stop Mart would swing open. Food was as good as free now.

  I was too excited to sleep. While Artie snored beside me, I lay thinking of everything else we could buy. Things like clothes or a new toy for Artie. Or a skateboard, not for Artie. I wondered why Mom was always saying we couldn’t afford things when we had this magic card.

  But the next morning, the excited feeling was gone. I woke up remembering back when I was in kindergarten, waiting for Mom to pick me up. That day Mrs. Gill gave me an alphabet puzzle to do. Mom still hadn’t come by the time I finished it, so Mrs. Gill asked if I wanted to help her.

  Did I? I loved helping but hardly ever got the chance. Everybody wanted to be her helper. Now I was the only one there and I hoped so hard that Mom wouldn’t show up before I finished helping.

  My job was to go around the room with a bag of cotton balls. I felt very important taking out a fistful of the soft balls and leaving them on each table.

  “We’re going to make Santas for Christmas,” Mrs. Gill told me.

  Mom didn’t show up and I was glad except that there was nothing else to do after that. Mrs. Gill was writing something in her lesson book so I went over and climbed in her lap. She put the pencil down. It was raining and water was dribbling down the windowpanes. We sat together, watching the drips make patterns on the glass.

  After a few minutes she said, “Curtis, I think we’d better call her.”

  We phoned from the office. Mom didn’t answer. I had the key around my neck in case of emergency and I showed it to Mrs. Gill. She said she would drive me home and wait with me until my mom came back. We lived in a different apartment then and it was a much longer walk to school so I was happy to drive in a car, especially in the rain.

  On the way Mrs. Gill asked me questions. Had my mother ever forgotten me like this before? No. Was there somebody else who was supposed to pick me up? I said Gerry sometimes did. Who was Gerry? He was my mom’s friend. Was he my father? No.

  At the apartment, I unlocked the door and we went inside. Mrs. Gill put on her sad face. That was a game we played at circle time. She would put on a huge fake smile and ask, “What face is this?” “Your happy face!” we would call. Sad face. Mad face. Thinking face. “I don’t see any thinking faces,” she would say when we weren’t paying attention.

  The sad face was about the bottles on the table.

  While we waited, Mrs. Gill sat with me on the couch and took a book out of her purse.

  “I always carry a book with me, Curtis. Just in case.” It was about a frog who rode a motorcycle. After she finished reading it to me, she checked her watch and asked if I was hungry. In her purse was a granola bar.

  “Also just in case,” she said, putting on her happy face. Then she left me looking at the pictures of the motorcycling frog while she stepped into the hall to make some calls.

  I tucked the granola bar down the back of the couch. Just in case there wasn’t any supper that night.

  I knew why Mom wasn’t coming home. She wasn’t coming home because I had hoped so hard that she wouldn’t while I was helping Mrs. Gill with the cotton balls for Santa. But now I did want her home.

  Mrs. Gill came back in. Did I know anybody in the building? No. Did I have relatives in town? No. Who was this Gerry person who was listed in the office as my emergency contact? Where did he live?

  “Here,” I said and got up and led her to the bedroom to show her Gerry’s stuff. His clothes lying all over the floor — his jeans and dirty socks and the T-shirts with the sleeves ripped off. Gerry’s guitar in the stickered case in the corner.

  But everything was gone.

  Gerry had left, I found out later. He’d left and Mom had gone after him.

  3

  CAN YOU GO TO THE STORE FOR ME?

  It was taped to the front window, written in big letters so I could read it from the street. I went through the gate with the ABSOLUTELY NO FLYERS! sign and up the steps to ring the doorbell. Artie waited at the bottom, his knees practically knocking together in fear.

  I wasn’t afraid of her anymore. We had the credit card.

  “I’m coming!” I heard her call from inside. “Don’t run off on me again!”

&n
bsp; Finally she opened the door, pink and cranky, before she remembered to put on her happy face.

  Her teeth were brown. Maybe that was why she looked so sour all the time, because she was hiding her bad teeth.

  “You saw my sign?” she asked, and I nodded. “Why’d you run off so fast yesterday?”

  “You seemed mad.”

  “I was mad! You would be, too, if you had to pick up and set down this contraption every time you took a step!” Then she noticed Artie hovering at the bottom of the steps. Her face went soft like ice cream.

  “Hello!” she called. “What’s your name?”

  Artie drew his lips into his mouth, making a tight line.

  “Artie,” I answered for him.

  “Artie? I’m Mrs. Burt.”

  She didn’t ask my name. She said, “Boys, it’s a catastrophe. I’m out of tea.”

  We were on our way to school. She said she would probably survive if we brought the tea after school, being as she had already gone without for nearly twenty-four hours. “You may as well pick up a few other things at the same time. Milk and eggs. And cottage cheese. Should I write it down?”

  “I’ll remember,” I said.

  “You’re sharp.” She gave me another twenty-dollar bill. “And if there’s anything left, get a treat for Artie and yourself.”

  “We don’t need it.”

  “I’m sure you don’t, but take it anyway.”

  THE REST OF the day went much faster. I had a sandwich in my stomach, as well as toast and milk from breakfast. Also the school year was winding down and not even the teachers were that serious anymore. It felt like one big art project now.

  I picked up Artie at three and even stopped to chat with Mrs. Gill for a few minutes in case she wondered about his candy lunch the day before. She asked me how Mom was and I told her in a completely normal voice that she was great.

  We bought the old lady’s groceries. The same clerk was there and he flashed his gold tooth at us.