by L. N. Cronk
Shrug.
“I bet you’d look just like her with your hair in a ponytail.”
She looked at me and blinked.
“Hey! You know what?” I asked her. “I might have one of my little girl’s ponytail holders in my pocket. Let me see.”
I fished around for the ponytail holder I’d stolen off of Lily’s dresser that morning. “Yep! I do. You wanna try it and see if you look like J. K. Rowling?”
She blinked at me again and gave me a tiny nod.
“Here,” I said. “Do you know how to put it in?”
She took it from me and proceeded to pull her hair back.
Much better.
“Wow!” I said. “I think you really look like J. K. Rowling! That looks great! You should wear your hair like that every day! I think it looks very pretty.”
She blinked at me again.
“You wanna keep this?” I asked, holding the picture toward her. Amber nodded.
“You can keep the ponytail holder too, if you want.”
Thank you, she signed.
“You’re welcome,” I said. “You know, you write such good stories, I really do think you’re gonna be a famous author yourself one day! You might as well start looking like one.”
I think I almost got a smile from her.
“You ready to get typing?”
Yes.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s get going.”
After Amber had typed for about fifteen minutes, I sent her back to her desk and told her to work on some of her illustrations. Then I called Mariah over and worked on a new story with her until Mrs. Spell told them to line up for recess.
I told my group to have a great Thanksgiving and everyone started scrambling around, putting their stories and drawings in their desks. I pulled on my jacket and then I said goodbye to Dorito. I was headed to the door when I felt a tug on my jacket. Amber had appeared at my side with a piece of paper. She held it up to me.
“What’s this?” I asked, taking it from her. She pointed at me.
“This is for me?”
She nodded.
“Well, thank you!” I said, squatting down next to her. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”
It was a picture of two people – a big person and a little person.
“Who is this?” I asked, pointing to the big person. She pointed at me.
“Me? Wow, that looks just like me. You did a good job. Look at that – his shoes are the same as mine and everything. Okay, who’s this? Is this you?”
She nodded.
“Wow!” I said. “A picture of you and me. I love it! Thank you, Amber! I’m going to hang this on my refrigerator as soon as I get home so I can look at it every day!”
It was then that she rewarded me with my very first, small smile.
Then Amber bit her lip and pointed to the picture again, this time to the little person’s hand.
“What?” I asked. “Is she holding something?”
Amber shook her head and I looked again.
“Umm–”
Amber held her own hand up in the “I Love You” sign.
“Oh!” I said, seeing it now. “She’s saying ‘I love you!’”
Amber nodded.
“Oh!” I said again. “That’s fantastic. I like it even more now!”
She started to turn away.
“Hey, wait! Amber?”
She stepped back to me.
“I love you, too,” I whispered, and then she darted off.
At lunch, I was handing Lily a slice of cheese out of the fridge when my phone rang. She attacked the cheese with a cookie cutter as I looked at the display on my phone. It was Scott.
“Vacation’s over, buddy.”
“What happened?”
“Apparently someone added Aqua-Naught,” he said. Aqua-Naught was an additive used to make concrete dry faster than it would with just plain water. “I guess they didn’t know that it had calcium chloride in it.”
Calcium chloride was corrosive. Calcium chloride was not on the list of approved materials for construction with steel support beams and steel cables.
“So, whose idea was that?” I asked.
“You mean it wasn’t yours?”
“Not funny, Scott.”
“They’re still investigating,” he chuckled, “and I have no doubt we’re gonna get sued along with everyone else who ever worked on it, but we know we’re not responsible. Now get back to work.”
“I’m kind of gonna need my computer,” I said.
“They’re keeping it . . . it’s still evidence,” Scott explained. “A whole new set-up should be there by Monday.”
“So, technically my vacation’s not quite over yet?”
“Enjoy your Thanksgiving, but come Monday you’d better start burning the midnight oil.”
“Actually, I can’t wait to get back to it,” I said.
“Thanks for hanging in there, Dave,” Scott said, seriously. “I know it hasn’t been easy.”
“No problem,” I said, spying the picture from Amber on the fridge. “It hasn’t been all bad.”
~ ~ ~
“I’M GONNA KEEP on volunteering,” I told Laci.
“But . . . I thought you said you were supposed to start back to work Monday!” she said.
“I am,” I answered, “but I figure I can just work a little later in the evenings and not take so long for lunch and stuff.”
“Okay,” she said, hesitantly.
“What’s the matter?” I asked “I thought you wanted me to volunteer.”
“I did, but I–”
“It was your idea in the first place!” I reminded her.
“I know,” she said, “and that’s fine if you want to keep on doing it. I’m just surprised, that’s all. I thought you’d quit once you started working again.”
“I can’t just walk away now when Amber’s making so much progress!”
Laci smiled at me.
“You’re totally smitten with her, aren’t you?” she asked.
“No, I’m not,” I said. “I just want to help her.”
“Like you wanted to help Dorito when he had rickets?”
“I guess.”
“And you weren’t smitten with him?” she asked, still smiling.
I didn’t say anything for a moment.
“She smiled at me today,” I finally said.
“What?”
“I’ve never, ever seen her smile before,” I explained. “But she smiled at me today.”
“Oh, yeah,” Laci said, nodding. “You’re completely smitten.”
It was our turn to have Thanksgiving dinner at our house. Laci’s parent’s came, my parents, my sister Jessica and her family, and of course, Charlotte and Mrs. White.
Jessica and her husband, Chris were talking all about their new house that they were building just outside of town and were showing us blueprints and pictures.
“We’re gonna have a pond in the backyard,” my nephew CJ told Dorito.
“With fish in it?” Dorito asked.
“Of course,” Chris answered.
“I want a pond!” Dorito exclaimed.
“Yeah, right,” Jessica laughed. “Like your daddy’s ever gonna move out of this neighborhood.”
“Why would I ever want to move out of this neighborhood?” I asked.
“So we can have a POND!” Dorito cried.
“Aw,” I said, dismissing him with my hand. “Who needs a little ol’ pond? We’ll get ourselves a vacation house on Cross Lake instead.”
“REALLY?” Dorito shouted
“Oh, brother,” Laci said, looking at Chris. “Now see what you’ve done?”
“My lake’s gonna be bigger than their pond,” I said.
I was glad to see Amber when I got back to school on Monday. When I returned home, I found that all of my office equipment had arrived. By lunchtime, I had everything set up and was ready to go.
“Feel good?” Laci asked me, sticking her head in my office
door after I’d been working for a couple of hours.
“Feels great!” I said, grinning at her.
“You still think you’re gonna be able to tear yourself away every morning to go volunteer?”
“Pretty sure,” I nodded.
The next morning, I was busy stapling Drake’s story together while Christian and Mariah worked on their illustrations and Amber typed on the computer. I glanced over at her and she beckoned to me, so I set the stapler down and walked up to her. She motioned for me to come closer, so I leaned down and she cupped her hands to my ear.
“How do you spell clock?” she whispered.
She had never spoken to me before.
How do you spell clock?
I realized two things after I heard her say those words. First, I knew I would never forget the sound of her voice. Second, I realized that Laci had been absolutely right . . . I was completely smitten.
Mom called Wednesday evening.
“We need you to clean your stuff out of your room.”
“What? Why?”
“Well,” she said, “because we’re going to have company, and they’re going to be staying in your room.”
“Why can’t they stay in Jessica’s room?”
“Because there’s no bed in Jessica’s room,” she reminded me. They’d turned it into an office a few years earlier.
“Well, can’t they just sleep in there the way it is, like Grandpa does?”
“Is there a reason you can’t get your stuff out of here?” she asked. “I mean . . . you’re almost twenty-nine years old. It’s about time to leave the nest.”
“I’ve left the nest!” I protested. “I just don’t see why someone can’t just stay there with it the way it is.”
“Well, for one thing,” she said, “they might be staying here for several weeks and I thought it would be nice if they could unpack and make themselves at home.”
“Who is it?”
“No one you know.”
“Well, who is it?”
“It’s . . . it’s someone who needs a place to stay for a while.”
“Someone who needs a place to stay?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“It’s . . . it’s complicated, David. We found out through someone at church that there’s someone who needs a place to stay, and we offered to help out.”
“Like a homeless person?”
“No, they’re not homeless.”
“Well, who is it?”
“It’s no one you know,” she said again.
“Well, tell me about them,” I said. “Are they old? Young? Male? Female?”
“It’s a young man,” she said reluctantly.
“A young man?”
“Yes.”
“How young?” I asked, envisioning a teenaged druggie hacking my parents to death while they slept.
“He’s a little bit older than you.”
“It’s a grown man?” I asked. “Have you even met him?”
“Not yet.”
“You’re letting some strange man into your house?”
“Don’t start overreacting.”
“They could be a serial killer or something!”
“I’m glad you’re not overreacting,” Mom said.
“Okay,” I admitted, “I might be overreacting a little bit, but is this a safe thing to do? I mean, do you really think it’s a good idea?”
“I think it will be fine,” she said.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” I said.
“I didn’t ask you what you thought,” Mom said, and I could tell she was through trying to placate me. “I asked you if you’d come over here and get your stuff out of your room.”
“Fine,” I said. “When’s he coming?”
“Not for a couple of weeks, but I’d like to do some cleaning and have time to get things ready, so I’d appreciate it if you could get your stuff out of here pretty quick.”
“It would’ve been nice if you’d asked me to do this last week when I was still on suspension,” I told her.
“Well, I’m sorry,” she replied, not sounding sorry at all. “I didn’t know about it then.”
I was too busy catching up on all the work that I’d missed to put much thought into going over to Mom and Dad’s. Saturday morning, Laci took the kids to run some errands and when they returned, Dorito told me that they’d seen Grandma at the library.
“She told me to tell you to get over there and get your stuff cleaned out of your room,” Laci said.
“I know,” I sighed. “I forgot.”
“She said if you don’t get over there pretty soon, she’s not going to be responsible for what happens.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“It means,” she said, “that you need to stop clinging to your childhood and get over there and clean your stuff out of your bedroom. This guy’s gonna be here in a couple of weeks!”
“I’m not clinging to my childhood!”
“Oh, please!” she cried. “Walking into your old bedroom is like entering a time warp! It’s like a shrine in there! Everything’s exactly the way it was before Greg died. All you gotta do is walk in there and suddenly you’re seventeen again!”
“What’s a shrine?” Dorito asked.
“I’ve been busy, Laci!”
“For ten years?”
“Yes! For ten years! I was at college for the first four years and then you dragged me down to Mexico–”
“And what have you been doing for the past two years?” she asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, waving my hand around the room. “Working maybe? Providing for my family?”
“What’s a shrine?” Dorito asked again.
“Your daddy’s old bedroom is a shrine,” Laci told him with a smile.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll call Scott and tell him I’m taking another week off so I can go clean up my room.”
“It’s going to take you a week?” she asked.
“Probably,” I said. “And I’m probably going to get fired.”
“What’s fired mean?” Dorito wanted to know.
“It means we won’t be able to live here anymore and we’ll all have to move in to my old room at Grandma and Grandpa’s,” I explained sadly.
“Why don’t you go over there and do it this afternoon?” she asked.
“It’s my day off!” I protested.
“You just had four weeks off!”
“We’re going to move in with Grandma and Grandpa?” Dorito asked happily.
“In your daddy’s dreams,” Laci laughed.
I set off to my parents’ house and let myself in, dragging empty cardboard boxes behind me. Mom was out, but Dad was lying on the couch, watching football.
“Need some help?” he asked.
“No, thanks,” I said. “I think I wanna do it myself.”
He nodded, understanding.
I stopped in the doorway of my bedroom and looked around before I went in.
My schedule from my senior year in high school was still stapled to a faded bulletin board over my desk and my baseball hat from my junior year was hanging on the headboard of my bed. My soccer cleats and shin guards were in the corner near my closet and on my desk I could see some blueprints I’d once worked on in Advanced Drafting.
I walked over to my desk. On top of the blueprints were some ticket stubs to a concert that Laci and Greg and I had gone to together and some unused graph paper. I opened my top desk drawer. Inside was an old take-out menu from Hunter’s and the magnifying glass that Greg had given me.
I sighed. Laci was right . . . my room was a shrine.
I sat down in the desk chair and opened the bottom drawer. Inside, I found the yearbook from our senior year in high school, still encased in shrink-wrap.
I tore the plastic off and opened it up, only having to turn a few pages before I found the dedication to Greg and his dad that I knew would be there. They’d given it more space t
han I’d imagined . . . apparently I wasn’t the only one they’d had a big impact on.
The first two pages were a collage of pictures of them both. Some of them together; many of Greg with his friends. Not surprisingly, I was in a lot of them . . . so was Laci. I turned the page and found letters written to Greg by his classmates and turned it again to find ones written to Mr. White by his students. Of course, there was nothing on either page from me.
I’d been a mess that whole first year after they’d died and everything was pretty much a blur. I was sure, however, that if someone from the yearbook committee had dared to approach me to ask if I’d wanted to contribute something, I’d probably have walked away without answering.
But that was a long time ago. Now I looked at the pictures, and I read all the letters . . . it took me a long time. When I finally finished, I stood over my desk and scrounged around until I found a pen that worked and then I flopped back down on the floor next to the yearbook.
I found some space under a picture of Greg and his dad holding a rocket (I remembered we’d set it off later that day). I wrote:
I miss you both more than you’ll ever know, but I’m sure you wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ll be seeing you relatively soon - love, Dave
And Laci thought I was clinging to my childhood.
~ ~ ~
LACI WAS DISMAYED when I came home empty-handed.
“What were you doing all that time?” she wailed.
“I’ll have you know,” I informed her, “that I’m pretty much
done. I’ve got a few boxes left in my room that I have to bring back here, but I didn’t have room for them in my car because it was so slam-packed full of stuff to go to the Salvation Army.”
“And did you actually go to the Salvation Army?” she asked doubtfully, “or is everything still in your car?”
“No,” I said proudly. “You’ll be glad to know my childhood is totally gone . . . soon to be distributed amongst the less fortunate people of Cavendish. I am completely living in the present.”
“Right,” she laughed. “I’ll believe that until you tackle someone on the street after you’ve spotted them wearing your swim championship t-shirt or something.”