Free Spirits

by Julia Watts

  When Isabella’s brother Javier takes our drink orders, we have to scream to be heard and he yells back, “Does anybody want to try the Cinco de Mayo special?” The band lets up long enough for Javier to explain that the special is a tamale, an enchilada and a tostada served with rice and beans.

  “That’s a lot of food,” Mom says.

  “It’s a lot of food for a little money,” Javier says, smiling. “That’s why it’s special.”

  We all choose the special just in time for the band to tune up again. When our food comes, Paolo helps Javier serve. Paolo smiles and wiggles his thumb in front of Granny to show that his wart is cured.

  With our food in front of us, we don’t miss talking because we’re too busy eating. In a break between songs, Dr. So says, “It’s so delicious, but it’s so bad for you. The lard in these beans alone…”

  Mrs. So playfully clamps her hand over her husband’s mouth. “Never eat Mexican food with a cardiologist,” she says. “Nobody wants to hear about clogged arteries while they’re enjoying their enchiladas.”

  “My mother ate lard every day of her life and lived to be a hundred,” Granny says.

  “Well, of course, there are also genetic factors,” Dr. So says, but before he can get any deeper in his scientific explanation, the band starts up again.

  I look around the table and smile. Food, friends, family and music. It’s a happy evening.

  But this morning I’m not happy at all. Nobody could be after the night I had. I don’t want to wallow in the details, so let’s just say more of my night was spent in the bathroom than the bedroom. And now, downstairs in the kitchen, Granny and Mom are still in their nightgowns, looking as pale and miserable as I feel.

  “I know you were up sick last night,” Mom says. “And I kept wanting to go up and check on you, but I couldn’t stay out of the downstairs bathroom myself.”

  “I know you’uns make fun of me for keeping an outhouse just in case,” Granny says. “But last night with you’uns in both the indoor bathrooms, I was plenty grateful for my outdoor one.”

  “Well,” Mom says, “I always wondered what you meant by ‘just in case.’ Now I know. But I wish I didn’t.”

  “What do you think caused this?” I say, flopping down into a chair.

  “Coulda been food poisoning, I reckon,” Granny says. “But it don’t usually set in that quick.”

  “No, and everything tasted good,” Mom says, “though that’s not always an indicator. Maybe we all just came down with a bug at the same time. Or maybe we made such pigs of ourselves that we upset our stomachs.” Standing beside me, she strokes my hair. “At any rate, I think you should stay home from school today, Miranda, and get some rest.”

  “And I’ve got some comfrey tea brewing,” Granny says, going over to the stove. “That’ll get our guts settled.”

  I take my tea up to bed and sip it slowly. Then I lie back on the pillow and the next thing I’m aware of is Mom saying my name.

  My pillow is wet with drool. “What time is it?” I say. “How long was I asleep?”

  “It’s almost four o’clock, so let’s see…about seven hours. The only reason I’m waking you now is that Adam’s downstairs. He came to check on you.”

  My brain is starting to unfog. “Tell him I need a minute to get dressed, okay?”

  Looking in the mirror, I realize I need way more than a minute. My eyes are puffy, and my hair is sweaty and matted where I slept on it. I pull on a T-shirt and a peasant skirt and yank my hair back in a ponytail. It’ll have to do. Besides, it’s not like Adam’s my boyfriend or anything.

  He’s sitting on the couch wearing a yellow Hawaiian shirt with blue parrots on it. “I would’ve called, but your granny doesn’t believe in telephones.”

  Adam thinks it’s hilarious that Granny won’t have a phone in the house. He always says, “How can you not believe in a telephone? It’s not like it’s the Tooth Fairy or something.”

  “I guess you noticed I wasn’t in school today,” I say, sitting down in the purple wingbacked chair.

  “I would’ve noticed if I’d been there myself,” Adam says. “I didn’t go because I was up all night sick as a dog. So was Dad. So was Mom. It’s a good thing our bathroom’s not haunted anymore.”

  “So it had to be the Mexican food,” I say.

  “Yep,” Adam says. “Dad dragged himself into work today even though he felt rotten, and his nurse told him that last night the ER was full of people with stomach cramps and diarrhea. Every single one of them ate dinner at El Mariachi.”

  “Wow,” I say, “if word gets out, it’ll be a shame for Isabella and her family.”

  “If word gets out? In Wilder? Word is already out. It’ll be bad for business, especially when people here are already suspicious of Mexicans and their food.”

  “Well, it could’ve happened just as easily at the Burger Buddy or the Whippy Dip.” The Burger Buddy and the Whippy Dip are the only other restaurants in Wilder. The Burger Buddy is a combination greasy spoon and pool hall downtown. The Whippy Dip is a little metal building on the outskirts of town, only open in the warm months, that sells soft-serve ice cream and chili dogs.

  “Yeah, well, people probably get sick every day from eating at the Burger Buddy,” Adam says. “That place is nasty. The difference is, if people get the trots from eating at Burger Buddy they’re not going to blame the owner the same way they’ll blame the Ramirezes because what’s-his-name at the Burger Buddy—”

  “Big Ed Dobson?”

  “Yeah, because Big Ed Dobson is an American serving American food, even if it is gross American food. Wilder people who’ve gotten sick at El Mariachi will blame the Ramirezes because they’re foreigners who have invaded our town so they can serve us scary foreign food.”

  I shake my head, knowing that Adam’s right but wishing he weren’t. “You know what? Sometimes people make me sick to my stomach.”

  Chapter 7

  Adam and I are sitting at our table in the cafeteria. I’m feeling well enough to be in school but not well enough to be excited about eating my peanut butter and honey sandwich. Adam, too, is looking at his food instead of eating it.

  Isabella sits down across from us. “Can I talk to you guys?” she says.

  “Sure,” I say. “But I’m afraid we’re not any closer to figuring out who the mystery sprayer is.”

  “A little spray paint seems like nothing now.” Isabella isn’t eating her lunch either. “Do you know that not one person showed up to eat at the restaurant yesterday, not even any of the regulars that work at the meat packing plant? And then we got a call from the health department saying there’d been complaints. They’re coming to do an inspection today.”

  “Dad said all the patients who came into the ER night before last tested negative for foodborne illness,” Adam says.

  This is what I can’t figure out.“But if it wasn’t food poisoning, how could so many people get sick after eating in the same restaurant?”

  “I think I have the answer to that question,” Isabella says. She unzips her backpack, takes out a stack of white packages, and sets them on the table. “Javier found these in the Dumpster when he was taking the garbage out night before last.”

  I look down at a package and see a familiar label: Ex-Lax. “Somebody put laxatives in the food.”

  “Oh, dude, that is so evil!” Adam says.

  “Maybe it’s the guy with the spray paint, or maybe it’s somebody different,” Isabella says. “Either way, at least one person wants our business to fail and is willing to hurt people to make it happen.”

  “Did your parents call the police?” I ask.

  Isabella rolls her eyes. “Yeah, and they sent the same guy that came about the spray painting. He filled out a report, but when he saw the Ex-Lax he couldn’t stop laughing. I guess it’s funny to him but it’s not funny to my family.” She looks close to tears.

  “I’m sorry, Isabella.” I reach out and put my hand on hers. As soon as I do, I
’m in her mind, and it’s full of fear. Fear that the person who tampered with the food might do something worse next time. Fear that her family will lose their business. Fear that her grandparents in Mexico, who depend on their son sending money, will be out on the streets. Tears fill my eyes, and then I’m back in myself, looking across the table at Isabella, whose eyes are full of tears, too.

  “I’m sympathetic and everything,” Adam says, “but you aren’t going to start crying for real, are you? ’Cause that weirds me out.”

  Isabella smiles a little and blinks back her tears. “You non-Latin guys are so unemotional!” She runs her fingers under her eyes. “I didn’t mean to get upset. I just thought I’d ask you to see if you could find anything out.”

  “Well, six boxes of Ex-Lax isn’t much to go on, but we’ll see what we can do,” Adam promises.

  After the bell rings, Adam and I sit under a tree by the school building, staring at the empty Ex-Lax boxes like they’re going to start talking to us. “So those boxes don’t say anything to you?” Adam says.

  They don’t. Sometimes if one person has touched something I can get some kind of vibe off it, but too many people have handled these boxes. I glance at the label. “They say ‘relieves constipation’—the same thing they say to you.”

  “Well,after the other night,you can’t say it’s false advertising,” Adam says.

  An idea pops into my head. “You think we should walk down to the drugstore and see if anybody came in and bought a whole bunch of laxatives?”

  “It seems like a place to start,” Adam agrees. “And I’m all for anything that gets us away from sitting outside the school staring at laxative packages. People are gonna start thinking we’re weirder than they already do.”

  “Well, we definitely don’t need that.” I stuff the Ex-Lax packages in my backpack, and we start walking toward downtown.

  The City Drug has been a part of downtown Wilder since way before Mom was born. And probably some of the stuff that’s on its shelves has been in there since way before Mom was born. Does anybody use hair tonic or tooth powder anymore? Mr. Henderson, the pharmacist who owns the store, is a sweet old man who’s an archdeacon in the Methodist church. Granny, though, looks at him as her arch enemy because she says the “snake oil” he sells at his store is nowhere near as safe and effective as the herbal cures she makes.

  When the bell on the door of the City Drug jingles, Mr. Henderson looks up at us over his half glasses.The store is empty, and he’s sitting behind the counter working a crossword puzzle. “Hello, young people,” he says like he’s glad for the company. “Stop in for a Coke on your way home from school?”

  I’m about to say “no sir” when Adam says “yes sir” and makes a beeline for the cooler. Unlike me, Adam always has pocket money. He grabs two Cokes, and I decide this is a good idea even though Mom and Granny don’t like me drinking soda. If we’re going to pester Mr. Henderson with questions, we should at least buy something from him.

  “Two Cokes,” Mr. Henderson says when Adam sets them down. Mr. Henderson smiles strangely when he looks at the bottles, and just like that I’m in his mind. He’s remembering the days Mom and Granny have told me about—when the City Drug was twice as big as it is now and had a counter where you could order a soda or ice cream or a sandwich and there was a jukebox that played all the hit songs and kids would come after school to drink milkshakes and listen to records and the store was full of music and laughter. And now poor Mr. Henderson sits in an empty store with only his crosswords for company.

  I come back into myself because Adam is elbowing me, not too gently, in the ribs. He doesn’t like to ask adults questions, so he lets me (or in this case, makes me) do the talking. “Mr. Henderson,” I say. “We came by because we wanted to ask you something kind of strange.”

  He smiles, and it lights up his blue-gray eyes. “Well, pharmacists get asked all kinds of strange questions, so go right ahead.”

  “We were wondering…do you remember anybody coming into the store and buying a large amount of Ex-Lax?”

  He chuckles a little. “Now that is a strange question. Why do you want to know?”

  “It’s because of a prank somebody played,”Adam says.“We’re trying to figure out who did it.” Adam may not be as good as I am at asking adults questions, but he’s way better at answering questions adults ask, without exactly lying or giving too much away.

  “Kids and laxatives, that’s a dangerous combination, all right.” Mr. Henderson chuckles. “Well, I guess I could check the receipts for you.”

  “Would you? That would be great,” I say. “It would be from May fifth or maybe a couple of weeks before.”

  Mr. Henderson goes to the back of the store and comes back about five minutes later, shaking his head. “Didn’t find anything,” he says. “Maybe your culprit bought everything at the Wal-Mart in Morgan. Goodness knows that’s what most people do.”

  “Well, thank you very much for checking,” I say, disappointed.

  “You’re welcome,” Mr. Henderson says. “That’s definitely the most interesting question I’ve been asked all day.”

  Outside, I say, “So much for that idea.”

  “Yep,” Adam says, twisting the top off his Coke. “And when you think about it, we have no way of knowing that our guy even bought all the laxatives at the same time. He could’ve been stockpiling them over months, buying a box here and a box there so nobody would get suspicious.”

  I sigh. “So basically, what we’ve got is nothing.”

  “That’s what we’ve got.” Adam takes a swig of his Coke. “But unlike the police, at least we’re trying.”

  Chapter 8

  Mom’s car sputters and wheezes as she starts it. “I don’t like the sound of that,” she says. “I keep putting off taking it to the shop because I’m afraid of what they might say.”

  “Like Dad’s patients who have cardiac symptoms for years but have been too scared to go to the doctor,” Adam says.

  “Exactly like that,” Mom says.

  Adam’s riding shotgun and I’m in the backseat, holding the hand mirror with Abigail in it so she can see outside. Abigail is as excited as I’ve ever seen her because we’re taking her out for pizza and a movie.

  Morgan, the next town over, is about three times the size of Wilder, which, Adam is always reminding me, means it’s still really small. “Just because it’s big enough to have a McDonald’s and a Pizza Hut doesn’t make it a major city,” he says.

  It seems kind of cruel to take Abigail to Pizza Hut when she can’t eat anything, but she wants to have a regular kids’ night out and that includes pizza, even if all she can do is look at it.

  Once we’re seated in the restaurant, I move the mirror around so Abigail can see. “Oh, I love the checked tablecloths,” she croons. “And the little candles on the table are so romantic.”

  “She says it’s romantic here,” I say to Mom and Adam.

  “Well, she doesn’t get out much,” Adam says.

  When our pizza (half pepperoni for Adam, half mushroom for Mom and me) arrives, I hold the mirror over it. “Well, you can’t taste it or smell it, but at least you can see it.” I move my arm around over the steaming pizza so she can get the full view.

  A gray-haired, heavyset woman stops her walk past our table to stare at me open-mouthed. And no wonder. Who wouldn’t stare at a person who, for no apparent reason, is waving an antique hand mirror over a pizza?

  Adam smiles at the woman, then nods his head in my direction. “She doesn’t get out much,” he says.

  It’s a lot easier to make Abigail a part of the moviegoing experience without attracting attention. After we choose our seats, I prop the mirror up on my lap so she can see the screen. It’s too dark for anybody to see how strange I look.

  The movie is really kind of babyish for Adam and me, but there are only two movies to choose from in this theatre, and the other one is rated R. This is one of those live-action kids’ movies where they use
real animals but animate their mouths so it looks like they’re talking. In this movie, the talking animals are all dogs. It’s cute, but it’s not much on plot, and my mind wanders.

  I hop into Adam’s mind long enough to know he wishes it were a horror movie instead. But I knew that anyway. I move into Mom’s mind and find that she’s thinking about Dad, about a time they sat together in the dark of a theatre, and he put his arm around her and leaned in for a kiss. Hi, Miranda, Mom says silently. Get out of my head and watch the movie.

  I do.

  Abigail is the only one of us whose attention doesn’t wander. She laughs hysterically at every little slapstick gag on the screen. Sometimes she squeals with delight.

  Once the movie’s over and we’re back in the car, I ask, “So did you have a good time, Abigail?”

  “It was wonderful,” she says, “utterly astonishing. What I want to know, though, is when was it discovered that dogs can talk?”

  Adam and I laugh, but I can tell that like me, he’s trying not to laugh so hard that Abigail will feel like we’re making fun of her. Finally, once we’ve gotten our breaths and answered Mom’s questions about what’s so funny, Adam launches into an explanation of how the dogs’ mouths are animated through computer graphics and actors’ voices are dubbed in. It’s a long, drawn-out explanation, which is not surprising since Adam will talk forever about anything that’s technical.

  When at last he finishes, Abigail says, “Well, call it what you like, but it’s still magic.” Then she says, “Miranda, could you ask your mother if we could stop by the river? I’d like to see if those spirits are still there.”