“I wish I had one just like him,” Aunt Charlene said.
I wish you did, too, I thought. In fact, I’ll give you Mr. Joe Hughes himself.
Mirabelle called a few minutes later, and Mama set up a schedule for Tommy and me to work at the church with her for the next couple of weeks. That was part of our punishment.
“You’re due there at ten,” Mama said after hanging up the telephone. “I hear anything about you giving Mirabelle a hard time, there’ll be hell to pay. You got that?” She stared at me with the same frown she’d been wearing last night.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
Mama raised her eyebrows; I guess she wasn’t used to not getting an argument from me. I didn’t dare say anything, though, because I didn’t want her starting in on what’d happened yesterday.
“May I be excused?” I said, carrying my breakfast dish to the sink.
“Billie, is there anything you’d like to tell me?”
“No,” I said, because there wasn’t the first thing Mama could do to help me, even if I spilled my guts. The way it was looking now, I’d never find Daddy before the cops did. I’d never have a chance to talk him into anything.
A long sigh escaped her mouth. “We’ll talk about this later,” she said, then left for the diner. Daddy Joe took Carla to the ball diamond to look for Popsicle sticks under the bleachers—she liked to glue them together and make things—and I headed for the church.
Mirabelle had a bucket of vinegar water ready for Tommy and me. She made us wash windows, my least favorite job in the world. The way my day was going so far, I might as well have been in the Pendleton Penitentiary myself.
Tommy wasn’t his talkative self, either. Usually he would’ve tried to tell me the best way to wash windows, like he was an expert at it, but this morning he just did whatever I said. I worried he’d changed his mind about keeping our secret, but I didn’t get a chance to ask him until Mirabelle went after rinse water.
“I ain’t going to tell,” he said. “I already swore it. I just don’t want to stay home all summer, that’s all. And I heard my mom telling Castor Oil last night that when I wasn’t working here, I’d have to go to Miss Mona’s with her. Man, I hate that place.”
“Castor Oil came over?” The hairs on my arms tingled. “Did he say anything about our dads?”
“Naw, he just said a bunch of stupid stuff to my mom, about how he liked her perfume and her new hair color, that’s all.”
I was supposed to work at the diner that afternoon, but Mama had instructed me to go home for lunch first. Daddy Joe started right in on me when I got there, too. I hadn’t been home but a minute when he told me to quit swigging out of the milk carton.
“It’s impolite,” he said.
Well of course it was impolite. Who didn’t know that? But some people, like my real daddy, for example, didn’t make a big stink over it. Daddy let us drink from the milk carton all the time. In fact, he swigged out of it himself when Mama wasn’t looking.
“You set the table,” Daddy Joe told me. And then he made lunch, if you want to call it that. He smeared half a cup of tuna fish salad between two pieces of rye bread and set it on my plate, alongside carrot sticks and peas.
I muffled a groan. Why couldn’t he ever make good lunches, like my real daddy did? Daddy never made us eat stuff like peas and carrots. Most of the time me and him had fried bologna and potato chips, and Carla ate straight from the peanut butter jar with her finger.
Daddy didn’t even care if we filled up on Twinkies, like that one Saturday he’d been playing cards with his brothers, right before he left for California.
“Carla won’t eat the bologna,” I’d yelled at Daddy from the kitchen. He was sitting at a card table in the living room with my uncles, deep into a game of poker.
“Give her the peanut butter jar,” he answered.
“We’re out of it,” I said. By then Carla was bawling about being so hungry her tummy hurt. I stood at the living room door, not knowing what to do.
“Shoot! Be right back,” Daddy told his brothers. He’d raced all around the kitchen, throwing every cabinet door open until he found some Twinkie packages. “How does this look, kitten?” he’d asked Carla.
The only problem was that Mama waltzed in the door right as Carla finished her fourth Twinkie. I was only on my second, but after Mama saw all the wrappers and the cream smeared on Carla’s face, she had a conniption fit. I didn’t get what the big deal was. Daddy had given us Twinkies plenty of times for lunch, and we’d never gotten sick over them, but Mama marched straight into the living room and interrupted his poker game.
“What’re you thinking, Earl Wisher?” she’d yelled. “I leave you in charge of lunch twice a week, and you can’t even see to it these kids get a decent meal.”
Daddy tried some fast talking to get out of that one. It didn’t work, though, not that time, especially when Mama noticed the mess my uncles had made—cigar butts and empty Coca-Cola bottles everywhere. And then Daddy got mad at her, too, because my uncles had left before he’d had a chance to win his money back.
But today, with good old Joe Hughes running our lunchtime, there wasn’t a Twinkie in sight. Carla pouted and pushed her plate away. “I don’t want tuna fish, Daddy Joe,” she said. “It gives me a bad stomachache. Billie don’t like it, either. She said so. She said you’re always making us eat stinking tuna fish, and she’s stinking tired of it. Didn’t you say that, Billie?”
I took a bite of my sandwich, not daring to look up.
“Is that right, Billie?” Daddy Joe asked. “You’re stinking tired of tuna?”
“Go ahead, tell him, Billie,” Carla said. She took a swig of her milk. “Can I have peanut butter instead of tuna fish, Daddy Joe?”
“Guess I can arrange that,” he said. “But you’ll still need to eat those peas and carrots. What about you, Billie?”
“Tuna’s fine,” I muttered, even though I wished I could spit it down the sink. I kept quiet and stared at my plate through the rest of lunch, while Carla about chattered my head off. I was going to have to talk to that girl, teach her the things she should never blab to grown-ups.
“Come on,” I said to her after we’d cleared the table. “Mama wants you to walk with me to the diner. She’s going to have Aunt Charlene cut your hair.”
We followed the alleys all the way downtown. I didn’t want to run into anyone, so I told Carla we couldn’t go on the sidewalks. “We’re playing spies,” I said. “We have to sneak all the way to Main Street.”
The only person I felt like talking to was Ernestine, but her mom had answered their telephone when I’d tried calling early that morning. I’d hung up without saying anything.
We made it downtown without anyone seeing us. I thought we were safe. And everything would’ve been fine—I could’ve run across Main Street straight to Mama’s diner—if it weren’t for the penny Carla had begged off Daddy Joe.
Chapter 18
Carla and I were two doors down from Clarksons’. “I’m going to get a bubble gum,” she said, pulling the penny from her pocket.
“Not now,” I said. I’d just seen two of Ada Jane’s Sunday school friends—Lou Ann Riggs and Rhonda Jackson—walk out of Clarksons’ with hula hoops. They stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and started spinning the hoops around their waists. I was sure they’d heard about the stolen church money by now; they’d probably even been at the church when Tommy and I got taken away in Bud Castor’s car.
“Daddy Joe said we had to go straight to the diner,” I told Carla.
She stomped her foot. “That ain’t so! He said I could buy a bubble gum.”
“Hush up,” I said, taking her hand.
She pulled away from me and headed straight toward Clarksons’. “Daddy Joe said I could,” she yelled over her shoulder. “I’m gonna tell him if you don’t let me.”
Lou Ann giggled and put her hand over her mouth, whispering something to Rhonda. My body tensed with dread. I had to fa
ce them; I didn’t have a choice. If I didn’t let Carla spend her penny, I’d be in even bigger trouble with Mama. I gritted my teeth and followed her, wishing I could yank those pigtails right off her head.
I sped around Lou Ann and Rhonda and headed for the open store door, but Carla stopped in her tracks. She cupped her hands around her eyes and stood quiet as her shadow, staring at the two-foot-tall Kimmy doll in the window. It was like that doll had placed a spell on her.
“I’m gonna get Daddy Joe to buy me one of them,” she said, her voice breathless with excitement. “I betcha anything he will, don’t you think so, Billie?”
Lou Ann spun her hula hoop around her waist and giggled again. “Why don’t you get Billie to buy it? She’s the one with all the money.”
Carla shook her head. “Nuh-uh. Billie don’t have no money.”
“Oh, yes, she does,” Rhonda said. “Her and Tommy stole it from the church.”
“You’re a big fat liar,” Carla yelled. “Billie didn’t steal. She said so.”
“You’d better quit calling me a liar. It’s your family that tells lies.”
“And robs banks, too,” Lou Ann said.
A tear trickled down Carla’s cheek. She stuck her thumb in her mouth, and my blood began to boil. I pushed on Lou Ann’s hula hoop. “Leave my sister alone.”
I took Carla’s hand and headed inside the door, right in time to hear Mrs. Clarkson mutter to her husband, “Watch that candy counter, Ralph. It’s those Wisher kids.”
When we got to the diner, the first thing I did was run in the kitchen and call Ernestine. I hung up for the second time that day when her mother answered.
Later I was scrubbing the floor around the kitchen sink when Mama interrupted me. “I want you to take Carla for her haircut,” she said, poking her head in the kitchen. “It’s too busy for me to get away.”
“Can’t she go by herself? I’ve got this whole dirty floor to take care of.”
Mama narrowed her eyes at me. “Now that’s a new one. I’ve never known you to enjoy scrubbing the kitchen.”
I shrugged, turning my attention to a sticky spot by my knee.
“Why don’t you tell me the real reason you don’t want to go?” she said.
The goo wouldn’t come up. I sprinkled scouring powder on my sponge and went at it again, hoping Mama would go back to her customers and forget about the haircut. I dreaded the thought of going into the beauty parlor, of everyone staring at me.
Mama stepped into the kitchen and leaned against the counter. “Okay, Billie, what’s going on? Joe and I aren’t swallowing your story about the money. We think there’s something you’re not telling us.”
“Who cares what he thinks?”
I shouldn’t have said it; I knew that the second it came out of my mouth. Mama shot across the kitchen and whisked me and my sponge right up off the floor. “I’ll tell you what I care about, young lady. I care about the truth. And I care about you showing respect. I want to know what really happened Saturday, and I aim to find out.”
“I already told you the truth. We didn’t steal any money. Tommy and I found the envelope under Mrs. Sumner’s tree. Someone else must’ve dropped it there.”
She didn’t believe me, I could tell, but I was saved by Fuzzy Hilton, one of Mama’s lunch regulars. “You got some hungry folks out here,” he called from the diner.
“I’ll talk to you later,” Mama said to me through tight lips. “Right now, you take Carla for her haircut.”
On the way to Miss Mona’s I found out why Ernestine hadn’t answered her phone: It’s because she was riding bikes with Ada Jane. They whizzed right by Carla and me like we weren’t even there, then threw their bikes down and disappeared into Clarksons’. I hurried Carla down another alley so we wouldn’t have to see them come back out. I’d rather have had another measles vaccination than watch Ada Jane steal my best friend.
That night, after Mama had grilled me about the money and I’d stuck to my story for the hundredth time, I was straightening Carla’s and my room. I checked my drawer for the five-dollar bill Daddy had sent me. I stared at it for a while, thinking how it’d been five days since the bank robbery. Five whole days, and nobody knew where they were. Not even the cops.
Carla was lining her dolls up on her side of the bed. She had at least ten of them, but she still hadn’t stopped talking about the Kimmy doll. “Daddy Joe said no, he won’t buy it yet,” she complained. “He said I have to be real good and do all my chores for one month, and then he’ll think about it.”
She started brushing her Jenny doll’s hair with Mama’s best brush, but I didn’t tell her not to. I pushed my five-dollar bill to the back of the drawer, where she wouldn’t find it, then dusted the top of our dresser.
“Do you think our real daddy would buy me that Kimmy doll?” Carla asked. Her eyes were wide and curious.
“Sure he would, but he ain’t here, so there’s no use thinking about it.”
“Where is he?” Carla’s voice turned so soft I could barely hear her. “Mama said he ain’t caught yet, but she says he will be soon. Do you think he’ll get caught, Billie?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, almost choking on the words. “But whatever happens, he’ll be fine. Don’t you worry, okay?”
After clearing Carla’s dolls off the bed, I helped her into pajamas and tucked her in for the night. I snuggled up next to her as she hummed herself to sleep. I couldn’t quit thinking about everything that’d happened, how all our summer plans with Daddy were ruined. If things had gone right, we’d be out doing everything he’d promised, fun stuff, like fishing and swimming and going to the county fair. “We’ll have a blast this summer—just you, me, and Carla,” Daddy had said only a month ago.
But things hadn’t gone right. Daddy had messed everything up by robbing that bank, and now I didn’t even know if he was still alive.
Chapter 19
Three more days dragged by, each of them oozing into the next so slow I thought I’d die of boredom. It was Friday, and I still hadn’t talked to Ernestine. I hadn’t seen her around town, either. I’d called her house a bunch of times, but no one ever answered the telephone.
Tommy had started acting mad at me, like it was my fault he couldn’t leave his trailer except to go to the church or Miss Mona’s Beauty Parlor. He must’ve complained a hundred times about how he’d be stuck at home until school started back up in August.
“We’re never going to find our dads,” he said while we dusted church pews that morning. “I think we should go ahead and tell the truth about the money.” He kept his voice low, because Mirabelle was just a few feet away from us, polishing her organ.
“No one will believe us if we change our story now,” I said, trying to stay calm, to reason with him. “They’ll think we’re making it up.”
“But you’ve got that note your dad wrote for proof, don’t you? You said you went back to Mrs. Sumner’s and got it.”
I moved down the aisle, flicking my duster faster than a cat’s tail. I was scared to tell him the truth. I’d gone back to get the note, all right, but the paper had been all wet and blurry, and I couldn’t read a word it said. It must’ve gotten drenched by the thunderstorm that hit on my birthday.
He followed me, whispering over my shoulder, “Don’t you? Don’t you have the note? You said you found it.”
I spotted a dust ball under the pew and darted after it.
“You’d better tell me right now if you have that note,” Tommy said. His voice squeaked again, like he was starting to panic.
“Shh!” I jerked my head toward Mirabelle and whispered, “You know who might hear.”
All of a sudden a loud, sour blast from Mirabelle’s organ filled the sanctuary. She started pounding out her favorite hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” and you couldn’t have heard a train whistle over the music. Now I didn’t have any excuse not to answer Tommy.
“Just tell me. You’d better tell me you got that note,” he sa
id.
“Okay, okay. I got it,” I said. “I went back and found it, but it must’ve got wet or something. The ink’s all smeared. You can’t read it.”
“Oh, man. We’re done for. We’re dead. We’ll never be able to prove we didn’t swipe that money now.”
“Why don’t you just shut up? We don’t need that note anyway. We know what it said; Daddy told Old Man Hinshaw they’d be back at the cabin in a couple of weeks. That means we only have a week left.”
“The note said a lot more than that,” Tommy said. “It proves it was the bank money we had, not the church money. No one will ever believe us without it. Man! I can’t believe you let it get drenched. Jeez.”
“What do you mean, I let it get drenched?” My voice rose louder as Mirabelle’s music blared around us. “How come you didn’t get the stupid note yourself if you were so worried about it?”
“Because I ain’t allowed out of the house, that’s why.”
“Well, I ain’t allowed out, either. So it’s not all my fault. At least my daddy will come back and tell the truth once we find them. He’ll tell everyone it wasn’t us who stole that money. And that’s more than I can say for your pukey dad.” I shook my duster over his face and stomped out of the sanctuary.
I headed straight to the diner without telling Mirabelle where I was going, so it wasn’t five minutes before Mama got the call that I’d run out. I was already boiling eggs for egg salad when the phone rang. Mama beat me to it. “Uh-huh. Yes. She’s here, Mirabelle.” Mama tapped her foot and held the receiver a good ten inches from her ear, and I could hear Mirabelle ranting all the way over by the stove. “Yes. I understand. I’ll talk to her. Thank you,” Mama said. Her voice sounded clipped and impatient, like she had a salesman hounding her.
I fiddled with the flame on the stove, trying to get it just right so the water wouldn’t boil over.
“What’s that about?” Mama said. “Mirabelle tells me you left early.”
Tracking Daddy Down Page 9