by Lisa Wingate
“You do. Eighty-seven, Brother Baker said. That’s what I was calling about, actually. I’d like to make it eighty-eight.” Crossing my fingers, I plunged in. “If I knew of an extraordinarily talented kid who had missed signing up for the program, do you think you could get her in? I know there’s an application process, but do you think it would be possible?” He didn’t answer right away, and my hopes slid downward. I was probably putting him in a difficult position. Now he’d have to tell me that rules were rules and so on. “I’m sorry to ask, Keiler, but you just can’t imagine. She’s my sister’s twelve-year-old neighbor. I sat down with her at the piano, and in an hour she was playing things most people can’t learn in a year. She can pick out the melody to almost any TV theme song. She has a beautiful singing voice. Keiler, please, she really deserves this chance. Is there anything you can do?”
“Well . . .” he said slowly, contemplatively. “Ordinarily, I’d say probably not . . . but . . . right now . . . it’s the monkeys running the zoo around here with Shirley gone. If you bring me this girl’s application and I put it in the stack, who’ll know the difference? Just don’t say anything to anyone. You know how people can be sometimes.”
I let out a long, slow sigh of relief. “I won’t say a word. Thank you, Keiler. I promise you won’t be sorry. We’ll see you Monday morning.”
“All right. See you Monday,” he replied, and then we said good-bye.
Dropping my cell phone into my purse, I yanked open the door just as a gigantic squeal started somewhere in my stomach, whizzed like a rocket up my windpipe, and burst from my mouth in a gigantic “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
Kate and Joshua were standing outside the door. They stared at me with their mouths open.
“Long story,” I said, sliding past them, smiling ear to ear and trying to suppress a giddy giggle.
Kate glanced after me, then started into the bathroom with Joshua, who asked, “Did Aunt Ka-wen make a poo-poo in the potty?”
No doubt, the only reason he could imagine for such exuberance while exiting the bathroom.
Chapter 12
As we were gathering our things to leave the café, I started thinking about getting the signature on Dell’s Jumpkids permission form. If Brother Baker was so downbeat about the possibility, this was going to be a difficult job. Brother Baker was usually an optimist.
Following Kate and the kids out the door, I waited on the sidewalk as Joshua and Dell took Jenilee to see the historical marker in the park.
“So I guess you’re heading back to the airport,” Kate said, sounding a little down. This visit hadn’t been all she’d hoped for. She glanced at the envelope in my hands with an expression that said, What could Brother Baker possibly be giving to Karen?
I pretended to be occupied with watching the kids, but in reality I was trying to decide what to tell Kate. I wasn’t up for another round of discouraging stories about Dell’s grandmother, and then there was the whole issue of why I wasn’t heading off to the airport as planned, and why I didn’t have to rush back to work on Monday.
“Actually, I’m not heading home just yet,” I said, noticing that she drew back in mild astonishment. “There’s a little . . . project I’m working on . . . with Brother Baker. It may keep me here a day or two.”
My sister looked pleased, then confused. “Don’t you have to get back to work?”
“No.” I was struck again by how wrong it was that I hadn’t told Kate about my job. She could see that something was going on. “I can spare some time.” Actually, as of last week, I had nothing but time.
Kate cocked her head to one side, smiling. Shifting Rose to her other hip, she looked at the envelope. “So what’s this project? Not that we’re not glad to have you stay, because we are, but nothing’s ever convinced you to stick around Hindsville for a couple extra days.”
I chuckled at her observation. In the past, I would have taken it as Kate pointing out that she was much more connected to our homeplace than I. Now it didn’t seem to matter. I felt a connection here, too. “I’m trying to get Dell into the Jumpkids camp.” I held up a hand, in case she was going to start on the nay-saying. “Please don’t rattle off all Brother Baker’s reasons why it isn’t a good idea.” I felt surprisingly sure of myself. Considering that I’d been on uneven ground all weekend, it was a pleasant sensation, a little like being the old Karen who knew what she wanted and how to get it. “It is a good idea. The program is made for kids like her, and you can bet that not one kid there will be more talented than she is.”
Kate shot a glance toward the children, who had paused in a dandelion patch at the edge of the park. “Did you ask her, because I’ve tried to get her interested in things like this before, and she absolutely refused. I signed her up for a 4-H pet show with her dog last spring, and she almost had a panic attack. She wouldn’t go, no matter how I tried to convince her, and she really loves that dog. I know she wanted to show him at the pet show, but the idea of getting up in front of people was too terrifying.”
“I already asked her about the Jumpkids camp.” Obviously, Kate thought that as usual, I was trying to bulldoze my way through. “It took some convincing to get her to say yes. I promised I’d stay around and go with her the first few days.”
“I can do it,” Kate offered quickly, too quickly, because it came out sounding like she didn’t want me to stay. “I’m sorry.” She paused for a minute to disentangle Rose’s pacifier from her purse strap. “I think it’s great that you and Dell have found this thing in common, I really do. . . . But I’m a little worried that, in her mind, you’re going to stay here and be her piano teacher forever. I’m afraid that when you go home, she’ll be crushed the way she was when we lost Grandma Rose. Dell kept insisting that Grandma Rose wasn’t going to die. She had this fantasy that Grandma was going to get better, even after she was really sick, and when Grandma died, Dell couldn’t deal with it. Two years later, she’s still walking around convinced that she’s getting beyond-the-grave messages from Grandma.”
“I’m not going to die, Kate.” The words fell to the pit of my stomach like a chunk of lead. What if? What if Dr. Conner did find cancer? What if it was something really serious this time?
Kate drew back, surprised. “I know that. But you have a busy life and you’re going back to it, and Dell doesn’t want to face that. Last night she tried to tell me that you weren’t going back to work.”
Fortunately, Kate was occupied with untwisting Rose’s pacifier, so she didn’t catch my reaction to that statement. Had Dell somehow figured things out? “I really think it’ll be all right.” Why was I keeping up this masquerade with Kate? Why didn’t I tell her? “Let’s just take things one step at a time, all right? First of all, I have to get her grandmother to sign the permission form.”
Kate grimaced. “That’s not going to be easy. Do you want me to try?”
Smoothing my fingers along the edge of the envelope, I tried to decide which method was most likely to work. Some divine whispering inside me said that I would have a better chance. “No, let me. Brother Baker was worried that her grandmother might get suspicious of someone coming around with forms to be signed. I wouldn’t want her to get suspicious of you and quit letting Dell come over.”
Kate nodded, visibly relieved. “I hate to sound like a wimp, but when I’ve talked to Dell’s grandmother, things have not gone well. She’s very paranoid that we’re trying to take Dell away from her, so I’ve tried to play it low-key.”
“Low-key it is, then. I’ll soft pitch my proposal as much as I can.”
Kate smiled at me as the guys finished up in the café and the kids came back across the street with Jenilee. “Good luck.”
“Thanks,” I replied. “I’ll probably need it.”
Twenty minutes later, as Dell and I turned onto Mulberry Road, I wondered if luck was going to do it. Driving through Dell’s neck of the woods, I felt like I needed more than luck—maybe a bodyguard and a shotgun. On both sides of the road, the ditc
hes were littered with trash, old furniture, and the forgotten carcasses of rotting mattresses. Tiny houses and decaying trailers squatted here and there, the yards strewn with rusted cars, old school buses, broken lawn chairs, cast-off toys, and bits of trash. Dogs, chained to turned-over barrels, barked as we passed, and their owners eyed us suspiciously from decaying front-porch sofas. The shiny rental car looked out of place as it passed through what had once been a small community of sharecroppers and farm laborers. It didn’t look like there was much ongoing labor in Mulberry these days. There was only a sense of quiet disinterest in life.
Gazing at the roadsides, I tried to reconcile the place with the little girl beside me. It was hard to believe that only a mile or so upriver, on the opposite shore, lay Grandma Rose’s farm, where the fences were always neatly painted and the flower beds manicured. Even the wildflowers seemed to have given up on Mulberry Road, leaving behind only tall stands of last year’s fescue sagging over the road like funeral palls, so that even in the middle of the day, the place was gray with shadow.
I glanced at Dell, sitting in the seat beside me with her bare feet braced on the dashboard, her dark eyes only skimming the landscape, her body not reacting as the dogs jumped at their chains, snarling as the car passed. All of this seemed perfectly normal to her. She didn’t feel the need to be appalled by it or to rail against it. This was life. This was all she could expect.
I had a sudden sense of gratitude for my own life, for my workaholic parents, the upscale school where success was life and death, for my father and his thinly veiled criticism, my perfect little sister to whom everything came easily. There were worse problems to have. My family may have been disconnected, stressed, busy, but we knew where our next meal was coming from. We lived in a house that was large and airy, where the bills were always paid and the cupboards were magically restocked each week. We played in Boston Garden, and roller-skated on paved sidewalks, and rode our bikes down clean streets, where there were no growling pit bulls on chains, threatening to break free.
It was that very life, that easy life, that taught us to believe we should have more, that we deserved more, that we should have it all. Perfect home, perfect parents, perfect family. Enough of everything. At least enough, and maybe a little more than enough. Without it, life was wrong; it was not everything we had a right to expect.
Dell couldn’t even imagine such an expectation. To her, this was fine. It was all she had a right to. There was nothing better, no sense of perfect right around the corner, waiting to be grabbed. No belief that things would ever, could ever, get better.
The idea filled me with sadness, but more than that, with determination to help her see a broader possibility for herself. My soul expanded with the idea, and I felt lighter, more filled with energy than I had been in years. How long since I’d done something strictly for someone else, fought for a cause just because it was right?
She pointed to a house ahead, nearly hidden behind a fence made of loosely wired wooden pallets and chain-link. “It’s that one. Right before the bend.”
“All right,” I said as we rounded the corner and the driveway came into view.
“Uncle Bobby’s here.” She pointed to his truck. Almost before I’d stopped the car, she opened the door and held out her hand. “I can take the paper inside and ask Granny.”
“That’s all right. I’ll go in with you.” I put the car in park and killed the engine, noticing someone working on the truck in the driveway. It looked like I’d have to go through Uncle Bobby to get to Dell’s grandmother.
“I can do it,” Dell protested as I grabbed the envelope and opened my door.
“Don’t worry,” I said, even though I was worried. Did the skills you learned in Dale Carnegie class work in places like this? “I’m good at talking people into things. That’s what I do for a living back in Boston.”
She tipped her head to one side, eyeing me quizzically as we walked to the yard fence. “What kind of stuff do you talk people into?”
“Well, mostly into buying computer systems.”
Dell sagged. “Well, Granny don’t know anything about computers.”
Laying a hand on her hair, I guided her through the yard gate before me. “People are people, and sales is sales. It really doesn’t matter what you’re trying to persuade people to do. The principles are all the same. Don’t worry.”
“ ’K,” she said doubtfully, jerking sideways as the dog barked, straining against his chain beside the house.
Uncle Bobby glanced up from beneath the truck hood, pointing at the dog. “You better make sure that damned dog of yours don’t get off his chain. It comes after me again, I’m gonna shoot it.”
Dell’s face washed white with sudden panic, and she turned quickly, scolding the dog. “Rowdy, hush.”
Rowdy barked once more, then obediently lay down and rested his head on his paws, eyes following us intently as we moved toward the door. I found myself reluctantly agreeing with Uncle Bobby. I hoped the dog didn’t get off his chain. He looked like he was part German shepherd and part God knows what, wolfhound or something else capable of quickly tackling and eating ladies in pumps and church clothes.
Uncle Bobby set down his wrench and crossed to the driveway side of the fence, eyeing me narrowly as he wiped his hands on a grease rag, then smoothed stray strands of sweaty salt-and-pepper brown hair into his ponytail. “You want somethin’?” I was glad to see that in contrast to our last meeting, he seemed relatively sober this time. Sober, but not friendly.
I realized how strange I must have looked, standing there in an expensive silk suit. “I stopped by to talk to Dell’s grandmother.” I tried to sound casual and at ease, in spite of the fact that I was way out of my element. “It’ll only take a minute. I know she’s not feeling too well.”
He scoffed, curling his lip to reveal an uneven row of lower teeth peppered with dark bits of chewing tobacco. “She’s had one too many of them Darvocet pills, if that’s what you mean. She ain’t feelin’ nothin’ right now. She’s smooth out on the couch.” Bracing his elbows on the top of the fence, he grinned and leaned closer to me, probably just to see if I would back up, which I didn’t. “Guess you gotta talk to me.” Glancing at Dell, he reached into his pocket, pulled out a pack of Life Savers and tossed them to her. “You been makin’ a pain in the butt of yourself again?”
Dell shook her head, looking down at the Life Savers, not at him. “Huh-uh.” Unwrapping a piece of candy, she popped it into her mouth.
Uncle Bobby returned his attention to me. “You a Jehovah’s Witness or somethin’?”
I smiled with my best sales smile and said, “No. Did you want me to be?”
The joke actually won a bit of a laugh, and he relaxed his posture, bracing one boot on an overturned log by the fence. “You’re a funny lady.” Pulling a tobacco can from his jeans pocket, he took a pinch and crammed it in his lower lip. “You with the welfare?”
“You know those government people don’t work on Sunday.”
“Ain’t that the truth?” He liked me better already. We were, as we say in sales, building a rapport. “What was it you said you come for?”
I rested one hand on the fence, standing close enough to smell a mixture of tobacco, grease, sweat, and stale beer. “To get a permission form signed for Dell. There’s a kids’ day camp in town next week, and I was hoping she could come.”
“It cost anything?”
“No.” My hopes crept up. He was leaning forward, nodding—all the signs of a client about to take the bait. “It’s not a big deal or anything. Just kids from around the area and some volunteer teachers. They’ll learn some songs and dances for a couple weeks, then do a performance at the end.”
Scoffing, he wiped a stray drop of tobacco. “Sounds like one of them ignorant do-gooder things. What good is singin’ and dancin’ gonna do kids out here? Kids around here got plenty of work to do.” He pointed at Dell. “She needs to get her butt in there and clean up all them dirty di
shes.”
Dell squirmed and took a step toward the house, and Uncle Bobby straightened away from the fence. I could feel the rapport breaking down. So could Dell. She looked ready to give up and go wash dishes.
“I can help her do that,” I heard myself say. “Maybe by the time we’re done, her grandmother will wake up, and I can ask her about day camp.”
I took a step backward, starting toward the door with Dell, wondering what Uncle Bobby’s reaction would be. He didn’t seem to want me going into the house. He vacillated a moment, then stuck his hand across the fence so quickly that I drew back out of reflex. “Give me the thing and I’ll sign it.”
I didn’t ask whether he was legally able to sign Dell’s form; I just handed it to him and smiled. “Great, thanks. You’ve really helped me out a bunch.”
Snatching the paper, he flipped through the pages, then searched his pockets for a pen. I handed him one from my purse, and he found the signature line, talking to Dell as he signed. “What about you, girl? You really want to spend two weeks at kiddie camp, singin’ and dancin’ with a bunch of little butt-heads from town?”
Dell didn’t answer, just stared at her toes. For a mortifying instant, I thought that here in this dingy yard, under the scrutiny of Uncle Bobby, she was going to say no. Her cheeks went flush as he glanced up from the paper and pulled his pen away. “I asked you a question, little girl. You wanna go sing and dance with the white folks, or don’t ya?”
“Uh-huh.” Her voice was little more than a whisper, a choked sound she could barely force from her throat. She was afraid to say yes.
“Fine by me,” he muttered, then finished signing the paper and handed it to me. “There ya go. She’s all yours.” He slanted a narrow look at Dell. “Now, tell your friend good-bye and git your butt in there and wash them dishes. There ain’t any clean plates left.” The log on which his foot was braced tumbled over, and he kicked it irritably, ready for me to leave.