I stopped.
“You’re an Indian, aren’t you?” he said.
“No,” I said. Mrs. Gill was an Indian. She was born in India. Her skin was the color of toast and sometimes she came to school dressed in bright Indian tops covered in fancy stitching. I was surprised that Brandon would think I was an Indian when my clothes were so plain.
“The last kid who stayed here was an Indian,” Brandon said. “You wouldn’t believe what happened to him.”
The next morning we had oatmeal for breakfast. Mrs. Pennypacker put on the sugar for us, then took the sugar bowl away. Brandon called for more, but she wouldn’t let him have any. It wasn’t sweet enough for me, either, but the worst thing was there was something hard like a stone in it. It kept finding its way onto the spoon.
Finally I spat it out into my hand.
“Oh, Curtis!” cried Mrs. Pennypacker. “You’ve lost a tooth!”
It was the first time it had happened. I started to cry.
“Now the tooth fairy will come. Isn’t that lucky? She’ll take your tooth and leave you a dollar.”
I was glad about the dollar, but it didn’t completely cheer me up. Because I missed my mother. Because she wasn’t there to see my first tooth come out.
Mrs. Pennypacker walked us to school so she could introduce me to my new teacher. After that I always walked just with Brandon because he was nine and old enough to take me. Usually a lot of kids from the school were walking at the same time, but no one ever walked with us.
On the way home that first day, along the road under the tall dripping trees, Brandon told me that he was the one who made my tooth fall out.
“I have powers,” he said. “I can do anything. You better watch out.”
At bedtime Mrs. Pennypacker brought me my tooth wrapped in a tissue. She explained that when I was fast asleep, the tooth fairy would fly in the window, take the tooth and leave a dollar for me.
Sure enough, when I woke in the night and felt around under the pillow, my fingers closed around a coin. I clutched it in my hand to keep it safe. I figured I might be able to use it to pay somebody to take me home to my mother.
In the morning, Brandon feeling around under my pillow woke me up. He dashed across to his own bed and threw the covers over himself. When Mrs. Pennypacker came to get us up, I showed her the coin and she clapped her hands and smiled.
As we were leaving the house, Brandon asked to see my dollar.
“Nice,” he said, and handed it back.
We walked a different way to school — one that passed by a store. We went in and Brandon filled two little paper bags with penny candy. I wanted some, too, but didn’t want to spend the dollar that was going to pay for my rescue if Mom didn’t come to get me soon. I hoped Brandon would share his candy, but somehow I knew he wouldn’t. I followed him to the counter.
“Can I see your dollar again?” he asked, and I gave it to him. “Go get something, too. I’ll pay for it.” So I went back and stood for a minute trying to decide what I wanted. Finally I settled on a long red licorice whip.
Brandon had already left the store by then. He was outside in the parking lot tossing candy corns into the air and catching them in his mouth.
“If you say anything to my mom about stopping here,” he said, “I’ll make the rest of your teeth fall out.”
“It wasn’t till we got to school,” I told Artie, “that I remembered my dollar and asked for it back.”
“He spent it, didn’t he,” Artie said.
“That’s right.”
Artie sat up, gulping back tears. “He tricked you! He was mean!”
“Really mean,” I said. “The meanest kid I ever met. I just hope you never have to meet him.”
I felt awful saying that.
Because what I was doing to Artie? It was the very same thing Brandon had done to me.
6
THE NEXT NIGHT Mrs. Burt wouldn’t even answer the phone when it rang. She said, “It’s Marianne — again.”
“Who’s Marianne?” I asked.
“A big-shot lawyer in Toronto. In other words, a sharpie.” Then she added that Marianne was her daughter. I was surprised by the way she said it, the same way she said “telewhatsit.” “She wants to sell me out.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“She wants to put me in a home with a bunch of drooling old people, then sell this place. She’ll make a lot of money. Everybody else sold out. I used to have neighbors, but they all went to live in apartments. Then they tore the houses down and threw up these cheap places. There went the neighborhood. But I got my pride.”
I didn’t say anything. We were living in one of those cheap places.
“The other idea she has,” Mrs. Burt went on, “is to pay some nosy person I don’t even know to take care of me. You know what I said to her yesterday? I said I had arranged my own help, thank you very much! That’s you two boys.”
Artie beamed and started patting her on the back. But the gas stayed inside her and she finally sent him away to play in the living-room. Mrs. Burt had shelves full of china figurines — shepherd boys and girls in hoop skirts. She didn’t seem to care about them very much because she let a five-and-a-half-year-old with clumsy hands march them around on the coffee table.
I stayed in the kitchen and listened to her complain about her daughter. No wonder she was so grumpy all the time. When she finally ran out of mean things to say, I got up to do the dishes. A couple of times I glanced back and saw her sitting there with fogged-up glasses. I felt sorry for her.
“Police car!” Artie started crowing in the living-room.
It was his favorite thing, along with ambulances, fire trucks and taxis.
“They’re getting out of the car!” he sang now. Then he called, “Cur-tis! They’re going to our building!”
I ran to the living-room. Across the street, two officers were buzzing at the intercom. They could have been ringing for somebody else in the building — it sure wasn’t the first time the police had come around — but I still felt panicky.
Nobody seemed to be answering.
Then Mrs. Burt appeared and cried, “Duck, boys! Quick!”
We dropped down onto the sofa.
“Stay down,” she said. “You don’t want them to see you, do you?”
Artie started whimpering, “Are they coming for us?”
Mrs. Burt stuck her jaw in the air. “Help me, Curtis. I’m going over to see what they want.”
She went out the back door so I could help her down the steps without being seen.
“Do you think the landlord called them because the rent check bounced?” I asked.
“That’s what I’m going to find out,” she said, setting off on her own with the walker.
I went back inside. In the living-room, I stepped behind one of the drapes. Artie did the same and together we watched Mrs. Burt hobble out the ABSOLUTELY NO FLYERS! gate. She did a fake double take, like she had just noticed the police. She waved and called out something to them as she crossed the street.
One of the officers went over to her and they talked for a while. I saw Mrs. Burt’s expression change. Her glasses slid down her nose. She didn’t bother to push them up, just gave her little knitted cap a shake, as though she was sorry about something. Then she nodded to the officer and started back across the street. She didn’t look up at the window, even though she knew we were watching.
I went out the back again and waited. At last she limped around the side of the house. She was upset, I could tell, because when she gripped the stair railing and my arm, she held me as tight as that first day I found her stranded on her steps.
“What did they say?” I asked. “Is it the rent? It’s the rent, isn’t it?”
If Nelson had called the police bec
ause our check bounced, they would demand to see our mom. Then all the things I was afraid of would come true.
“Shh,” Mrs. Burt said. “I’m thinking.”
We went inside again. Slowly, leaning heavily on the walker, Mrs. Burt made it to the living-room.
“Close the drapes,” she said.
I closed them and when I turned around, she had fallen into the big armchair, hands trembling on her knees, still breathing hard.
Finally she lifted her face with the big glasses hanging on the end of her nose.
“Boys?” she said. “This is what I’m thinking. I’m thinking it might be better if you moved in.”
WE DECIDED TO wait until night for me to go over and get our things. We couldn’t take the chance that somebody would see me going over to Mrs. Burt’s.
That’s what people in our building always did when they skipped out on the rent — waited for the cover of darkness. It happened a lot. Nelson would haul away anything left behind and stack it beside the dumpster in the underground parking garage for all the rent-paying tenants to pick through. Whatever was left got tossed in the dumpster the night before garbage day. We got a lamp and some dishes that way. Mom was always hoping for a proper bedside table.
Now somebody would get our stuff.
Mrs. Burt said the police would come back because nobody had let them in this time. She advised us not to use her front door anymore and not to walk on the street at all. Maybe we shouldn’t even go back to school, she said.
“But what about Mom?” I asked. “How will she know where we are?”
“We’ll keep an eye out for her,” Mrs. Burt said. “And whatever you do, don’t leave a note. It could fall into the wrong hands.”
“The landlord, you mean?”
“Or the police. They’ll come over here and bust the door in!” She started thumping her chest, like they were already bursting in and giving her a heart attack.
When it was Artie’s bedtime, Mrs. Burt showed us two bedrooms. Artie started to cry and I explained that we slept in the same bed, which made the choice easy because there was a double bed in one of the rooms and a twin in the other. Artie still wouldn’t stop. He was scared of all the commotion, of things changing so fast.
I asked Mrs. Burt what kind of hand lotion she used, and after I explained she pointed to the bathroom and said to take what I needed.
She kept saying, “You poor dear. Oh, you little darling. I’m so sorry. I really am.”
After what had happened with the baby lotion at the Pit Stop Mart, I knew it was no use even trying with her cold cream.
Mrs. Burt thought of the figurines. It took half an hour for Artie to transfer them all from the living-room to the bedroom and get them organized the way he wanted. Then there was cookies and milk and the fun of toothbrushing with his finger.
As soon as we lay down in the strange bed, in the room that smelled like nobody had slept in it for a million years, he fell asleep. A thick curtain kept out most of the light, but around its edges I could tell it wasn’t dark yet. I didn’t feel like going out and sitting with Mrs. Burt when I was so upset. I was as upset as Artie, but too old to cry about it, though I felt like it.
The police would come back to evict us. We’d seen it happen before. Except we wouldn’t be there. We would be hiding out at Mrs. Burt’s, so they would never find out that we were on our own. They would think we’d skipped out with Mom.
And we weren’t on our own anymore anyway. We had Mrs. Burt. But what about when Mom came back? How could I let her know we were just across the street? How could I let her know we were still waiting and seven out of ten positive she still loved us?
When the outline of light around the curtain disappeared, I came out of the bedroom. Mrs. Burt had a bunch of pillowcases ready for me.
“Just take what you really want and need,” she said. “We can pick up new stuff. And don’t forget that lotion.”
I felt like a burglar.
Lights were on in most of the apartments except ours. I waited in Mrs. Burt’s yard while a few cars passed, then ran across the street.
I unlocked the lobby door and used the little key to check the mail. Flyers spilled out. I left them on the floor.
As soon as I was inside our apartment, I switched on the light and started madly stuffing school things in one pillowcase and clothes in another. I went to the bathroom and threw in our toothbrushes and the Economizer Extra-Strength Hand and Body Lotion. In Mom’s room, the silk eye mask was lying on the cardboard box. I did that thing Artie always did — I stroked my face with it — but instead of making me feel better, I felt worse. So I left it there. I lifted the cardboard box and grabbed her wallet just to have the I.D. card from the community college with her picture on it.
Then I lifted the box again, because from the corner of my eye I’d noticed something.
The ring box. The ring box that held my tooth. It was under there, too. I picked it up, and right away I knew how I could leave a message that only she could find. I knew because wherever she was, eventually she would come back, even if we weren’t here.
She would come for that tooth.
I wrote a note.
Mom, we love you. We are across the street staying with the old lady. We are waiting for you.
I tucked it inside the ring box.
The first place Mom would check would be where the tooth had been in the first place, under her cardboard box bedside table. But Nelson would clear out our stuff and somebody else would move in, so I pushed the box aside and pulled up the carpet. It came up easily. On the foam underpad, over and over so the message would be clear, I wrote: Look for the tooth.
Where do you brush your teeth?
In the bathroom, I wrote.
I taped the ring box in the cupboard under the sink. You had to either reach your hand up and feel around for it, or get on your knees and stick your head right inside the cupboard.
Who would do that? Only a person looking hard for something. Only a person looking for the single valuable thing she owned in all the world.
THAT NIGHT BRANDON Pennypacker was in my dream. It was supper at the Pennypackers and he was carrying my plate to me at the table. On the way, he stopped and turned his back. When he turned around again, there was a shiny string of spit attaching his lip to the food, like a spider web that stretched and broke as he set the plate in front of me.
It was just a bad dream, but one that had really happened in real life almost every single night.
The next day was the Wednesday of the last week of school. The smell of bacon woke me up.
At first I didn’t know where I was. Artie, though, was his old self, and bacon was one of the things his old self liked best. He bounded off to Mrs. Burt’s kitchen. I got there last.
Mrs. Burt was at the stove wearing a man’s dressing gown and, for the first time, no cap. Her white hair floated around her head like dandelion fuzz. She looked so puffy and clutched the walker so hard that I knew she’d had about as good a sleep as I had.
“Boys,” she said, settling at the table with us to drink her tea. “I have an idea. How about a day off school?” To me she said, “I think we should take turns keeping an eye out. See what happens across the street.”
“How many more sleeps till Mom comes home?” Artie asked between spoonfuls of scrambled eggs.
“Who knows?” Mrs. Burt said. “Today might be the day.” And she shot me a sideways glance to let me know she was stringing him along. “We don’t want her walking into that hornet’s nest, do we? The police casing the place. She could get into some real trouble over that rent money.”
After breakfast, I washed the dishes while Mrs. Burt got dressed and took her position at the living-room window, the drapes open just a slit. Artie was already dressed because he’d slept in his clothes. W
hile he played with Happy and the figurines on the living-room floor, he kept telling Mrs. Burt, “You should sleep in your clothes, too. Then you don’t have to get dressed in the morning!”
I came in and Mrs. Burt said, “Good. My neck’s getting stiff.” Then it was my turn for guard duty. She hobbled off to her room to lie down.
They showed up just before lunchtime while Mrs. Burt was in the kitchen making sandwiches. The police car pulled up with two officers in it. After that another car arrived and a man got out. It was Nelson, the landlord. He went over and shook hands with the officers. Then the three of them walked together to the apartment.
Mrs. Burt was suddenly right behind me with a plate in her hand.
“Oh!” she cried and dropped the plate so the sandwiches bounced onto the floor and broke open. Meat and lettuce and bread flew everywhere.
“Did they go in?”
“Yes,” I said.
Mrs. Burt handed me the empty plate and eased herself down on the coffee table. She slapped her chest twice like she was trying to bring up her words.
“Actually, boys? I’ve been thinking.” She paused to belch into her fist. “See, I have a place. A cabin. It’s quite far away and I haven’t been there for years. It’s a beautiful place on a lake.” She stopped again and I saw that her eyes had teared up behind the glasses. “Would you like to see it? I won’t force you or nothing. You can come on a little holiday with me or you can go across the street and let them know what’s up.”
“I want to go on a holiday,” Artie piped up.
Mrs. Burt’s speckled hand clutched her chest. She turned to me.
“What about you, Curtis?”
I thought about Mom and how she would find us. If we left, the note I’d written her would be useless. No one would answer the door at Mrs. Burt’s.
I turned and looked out the window again at the police car, burning white in the sun. When I shut my eyes, I could still see it taking away all our choices.
I turned back to Mrs. Burt and said we’d go with her.
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