A Place to Call Home

by Deborah Smith

  I blinked, scrubbed my face, and rose on one elbow. Huddled at the table, bleary-eyed, Roanie propped his head up on one hand and looked at Grandma. “I’m so sleepy I can’t even find Park Place anymore,” he croaked. “Give it up, Miz Dottie. You can’t beat me.”

  “One more game.” She crouched at the table, her brindled red hair raked into wild rows.

  “I’m sorry. I just can’t do it.”

  “I’ll fix some coffee. You’re a fair businessman, Roanie Sullivan. Don’t begrudge me one more rematch. Okay, here’s my deal. If you keep playing, I’ll explain high-yield bonds again.”

  His head bobbed. “Okay,” he murmured.

  She staggered out of the living room. “Y’all are nuts,” I announced. “Pretty soon Marvin’s gonna try to hide y’all in the cushions.” Roanie dragged himself out of the chair, sat down on the floor next to me, and leaned heavily against the couch with his eyes shut. “Just tell her you’re pooped,” I said. “She’ll understand. Sort of.”

  He yawned. “She promised she’d teach me about the stock market. I want to … know.” His head lolled against General Patton. He breathed slowly, sound asleep.

  I glanced around furtively, then stroked his hair with my fingertips so he wouldn’t feel it. Roanie had an avid interest in money. That was the Irish in him, Daddy said. He’d already opened his own savings account at the bank. Every week he divided the money he earned into three stacks—one that he put in an envelope and stuck in his daddy’s mailbox at the Hollow, one he took to the bank, and a very small one he kept for himself.

  Grandma came back soon and woke him up. She made him drink two cups of coffee. They played Monopoly until Grandpa woke up and we had to go back outside to feed everything again. Then she made Roanie play Monopoly some more.

  When Mama and Daddy and the Old Grannies got home that afternoon, they found Roanie asleep on the living-room floor and Grandma asleep on the couch. Both of them were clutching Monopoly money.

  We all agreed: Anybody who shut out Grandma Maloney at Monopoly was destined for great things.

  I was destined for greatness too, I decided. I planned a great leap forward into the publishing world beyond my small fame as the 4-H Club correspondent for the Dunderry Weekly Shamrock.

  “We Want Your Hometown Stories,” said the headline in one of Mama’s ladies’ magazines, the kind that told ladies how to make a perfect custard and have shapely thighs, and had Mary Tyler Moore on the cover as a role model for ladies who wanted to star in a TV show but still be a nice person, too.

  The magazine offered fifty bucks for hometown stories. Fifty bucks! Why, I was full of stories. Driven by the urgency of confidence, I secretly tapped out five pages, single-spaced, on my new typewriter. Using grand metaphors and as many adjectives as I could find in the big leather-bound thesaurus in the living room, I related how Roanie shot a deer to pay Uncle Cully. I threw in lots of asides about Grandpa shooting Japanese soldiers and Daddy shooting my beloved Herbert. My theme, I decided, was that people in my hometown felt sad every time they shot something. Therefore we were nice people, like Mary Tyler Moore.

  I was very professional. I circled my typos and winnowed them down to only a couple dozen or so in the second draft I typed. I composed a cover letter that said, essentially, I know you’ll love this. Please send cash, and signed it, Yours Most Truly, Claire K. Maloney, at the bottom in red ink. Then I folded the finished masterpiece into a sharply creased five-by-four-inch wad and put it in a pink notecard envelope embossed with my return address in gold ink.

  The magazine’s offices were in New York. I wrote the address in gold ink, too. Those people in New York would be impressed. Two stamps, for extra insurance, and then I furtively stuck the envelope in our mailbox while I was waiting for the school bus one cold morning.

  And the answer came right back. A stern, flat letter in a stern beige business envelope. Thank goodness I retrieved the mail that day as I had on every day since I mailed my story, so no one knew.

  Dear Miss/Ms./Mrs. Maloney:

  Your writing lacks maturity and polish. The single-spaced format and numerous typing errors made your submission nearly unreadable. Your story was more than twice the stated word limit. I cannot return your submission, as you did not include an SASE. Most of all, as a person of Japanese descent, I found your analogy regarding Japanese soldiers and cows somewhat offensive. Best of luck with your future projects.

  Jane Takahashi, Editorial Assistant

  I was flattened. I tore up the rough drafts of my story and burned the pieces. Either Roanie smelled the smoke or sensed my misery. He found me huddled behind a chicken house with ashes scattered on my jeans and my face swollen from crying.

  “What’s the matter, peep?” he asked anxiously, squatting beside me with his arms propped on his knees.

  “Nothing.” Professional humiliation required solitude.

  He squinted. “I’ll just hang around and see what you set fire to next.”

  “No, go away. I’m thinking.”

  He sat down regardless. “Why don’t you think out loud? Pretend I ain’t here.”

  “Am not here. I can’t pretend that well. I can’t … pretend at all.” I let out one of those involuntary huh-huh-huh sounds of a stifled sob. And then, heartbroken, I poured out the whole, devastating tale as he listened somberly. “I can’t type like a real writer,” I moaned. “I’ve got no taste. I insulted a Japanese lady. I didn’t know I was supposed to send a SASSY. I don’t even know what a SASSY is.”

  “You wrote about me?” he asked.

  I wiped my eyes. “Well, yeah, but don’t worry. I changed your name. I changed all the names.”

  “What name did you give me?”

  “Dirk DeBlane.” His brows shot up. I cringed. It had sounded romantic at the time. Like one of the knights in Mama’s romance novels. “You hate it,” I said sadly.

  “Nah. I, uh, I like it. Nobody ever wrote a story about me before.” He mused over the name, nodding. “Why’d you write about me that way?”

  “Because it’s … romantic.” My face burned. “I’m almost ten. Mama says I can start dating boys when I’m sixteen. So you only have to wait six years to go out on a date with me. But we can be romantic now.”

  “Why, thanks,” he said drily.

  “Well, you’ll be busy anyhow. You’ll go to college.”

  “Maybe. Haven’t made up my mind about college.”

  “Of course you’ll go. And then I’ll go to college, and after I get out, we’ll go off and see the world together. Like my cousin Lisa. She went to England for a year.”

  “Whatever you say, peep.” Sometimes he could be so old, so patient and serious, that I felt like a fly buzzing around him.

  I ducked my head and scrutinized him from under my brows. “But I guess we’ll have to get married then. So we can save money on hotel rooms.”

  “I plan to make a lot of money,” he said, raising a determined gaze to me. But one corner of his lips crooked up. “We could afford two rooms. We wouldn’t have to get married.”

  “I guess that’d be okay. As long as you don’t marry anybody else.”

  “Don’t plan to.”

  “So you don’t need any girlfriends, right? I mean, you’ve already got me.”

  “Cool off. I’m not gonna ask no girls out anytime soon. That takes money. And a car. Girls ain’t easy to fool with.”

  “Girls aren’t easy to fool with,” I corrected sternly. “That’s right.” He laughed.

  “Look, I’m not stupid. I watch how you look at the girls who hang around Hop and Evan. I watch how they look back. I’ve noticed. They’ve got boobs and I haven’t. But I will get some. You just wait.”

  He scowled. “You ain’t—you aren’t—a girl. You’re Claire.”

  “Why do you have to look at them?”

  “They’re fun to watch. But too much trouble.” He emphasized trouble.

  “Yeah. I’m not any trouble. And I’m a lot of fun.”r />
  “It’s not the same.” His eyes narrowed. “There’s some things you and me ain’t gonna talk about. This is one of ’em. Don’t go around tellin’ people I’m your boyfriend. It’s not that way, and you’ll get me in trouble.”

  “What way is it?”

  He studied me for a minute, very still, absorbing me. “You know what you are?” he said softly. “You’re everything good I can imagine.”

  “What?” I leaned toward him, warm inside, dry behind the eyes, distracted.

  “You don’t see things the way other people do. You gave me a chance when nobody else would. People will listen to what you’ve got to say someday. Maybe not them people at that magazine, but people who know what’s worth listening to. Don’t you give up. You keep writin’. The rest of us don’t have a voice unless you talk for us.”

  I nearly burst with fledgling, adoring hope. I burrowed my head on his shoulder and cried some more. He put his arm around me. “When you’re old enough I’ll try to live up to ol’ Dirk,” he said.

  “Look at him,” I heard Aunt Lucille whisper to Mama one Friday night. They were seated at a table in the high school cafeteria. The band was holding its first spaghetti supper of the year to raise money for new uniforms. Aunt Lucille and Mama didn’t know I was standing behind them. “He’s just a square peg in a round hole, Marybeth. Look. There he goes. Fixes his plate, takes it outside, sits in the cold by himself.”

  “He’s just shy,” Mama told her.

  “When y’all bring him with you to my house, he wanders off alone. Same at Irene’s. Same at Jane’s. Same everywhere he goes. Then Claire traipses off after him and they huddle like two old hens on the same nest. The family comes to visit y’all, he’s nowhere to be seen. And neither is Claire. What in the world do those two do together?”

  “We work on his talkin’,” I announced. They turned around in their chairs and looked at me. “I’m teachin’ him to congregate his verbs.”

  “Conjugate,” Mama corrected.

  “Well, that’s very nice of you,” Aunt Lucille said with some exasperation and not much sincerity, I thought. “But maybe Hop and Evan could do that, so you could spend more time with your own friends.”

  “I don’t mind. I like conjugating.”

  “Roanie needs to make some friends his own age, Claire. You know, you’re like a little sister to him. Before long he won’t have time for you. He’ll be going out on dates. He’ll have girlfriends.”

  That wouldn’t happen. I just wouldn’t stand for it. It was unthinkable. “I don’t see why,” I told her. “He won’t conjugate with anybody but me.”

  Aunt Lucille made a sputtering sound and looked at Mama. “Claire,” Mama said.

  Aunt Lucille smiled nervously. “Claire, you save a nickel for every boy you like between now and the time you settle on one to marry and you’ll be rich. I promise.”

  “If I’m rich, I won’t get married.”

  “Oh, yes, you will.”

  “Well, then, I’ll just marry Roanie.”

  Aunt Lucille stared at me. Mama shut her eyes with a kind of resigned effort, then waved me outside.

  I went gladly. I didn’t realize it yet, but I had a knack for putting the kibosh on conversations about Roanie. At least the ones that took place where I could hear them.

  Roanie’s fifteenth birthday was on the last day of March. Nobody’d ever celebrated his birthday before. We only heard about it because he mentioned the upcoming date to Grandpa.

  Grandpa was the official driving honcho for my brothers, coaching them for their driver’s tests and seeing that they got their licenses. He’d taken Evan to get a learner’s permit in September; since then, Evan had backed Mama’s Thunderbird into Grandma’s station wagon, sideswiped a stop sign with Daddy’s truck, and run over the lilac bush in Aunt Irene’s front yard. Then he backed up and hit her birdbath, too.

  Grandpa had just recently recovered his sense of humor as a driving tutor.

  “Roanie says he turns fifteen on Saturday,” I heard Grandpa tell Daddy. “I told him I’d take him to the state patrol next week to get his learner’s permit.” Grandpa chortled. “We need another chauffeur around here. Even the Old Grannies won’t ride with Evan.”

  Fifteen. Birthday.

  I conferred with Mama. “Oh, my lord,” Mama said sadly. “Your daddy and I should have remembered.” They’d been on hand, of course, when poor, struggling Jenny Sullivan gave birth.

  Fired with regrets and determination, Mama made a huge layer cake covered with white icing and blooming with blue sugar roses and fifteen blue candles. I had to make an artistic contribution, I told her, so she filled one of her cake-decorating cones with green icing and I wrote, Happy Birthday, Roanie, across the top of the cake.

  My icing script looked like the work of a tipsy garden snail. Mama said, kindly, that it gave the cake a certain character, but she turned Roanie into Roan with a dab of white icing. “He’s getting too old to go by Roanie,” she explained.

  I didn’t want him to get that old. I had no corresponding name change to look forward to. If I dropped the e off Claire, it would still sound the same.

  I’d never seen a look on Roanie’s face like the one I saw when I carried that birthday cake, candles blazing, out of the pantry and set it in front of him on the breakfast table. Not just surprise or gratitude, but the slow, dawning glow of understanding. This was what families were all about—a whole bunch of people who showed you they were glad you’d been born.

  “Make a wish and blow out the candles, Roan,” Mama instructed.

  “Wish for a fire extinguisher,” Hop interjected. “Man, if you lean any closer to those candles, you’re gonna lose your eyebrows.”

  “Wish for things to stop getting in the way of my wheels,” Evan said glumly.

  “No, wish for an early spring,” Grandpa said. “That’s our only hope for gettin’ one.”

  “Wish for extra rain this summer,” Daddy added.

  “Wish for my tennis elbow to stop aching,” Grandma Dottie told Roanie, smiling.

  “I know precisely what I would wish for,” Grandmother Elizabeth said, darting a smug look at Great-Gran.

  “I wish you’d lay down and die, too,” Great-Gran shot back.

  “She was special, wasn’t she,” Roanie said suddenly.

  Puzzled silence. “Who?” I asked in a hushed tone.

  His somber gaze moved around the table, then stopped on Mama and Daddy. “My … my mama. I mean, she didn’t hurt nobody—anybody. She would have been a real lady if she’d had a chance. Wouldn’t she?”

  More silence. Fragile, delicate, like paper-thin glass in our hands. Grandma Maloney raised her fingertips to her lips to catch a soft, sad sound. Mama blinked hard. Daddy and Grandpa got the funny look men get when they don’t want anybody to see their feelings. Hop and Evan looked as if they’d been asked to recite a love poem in front of girls. Not comfortable.

  “Sure,” I said quickly. “She got married and everything. She was a lady.”

  Mama cleared her throat. “Roan, she was a sweet girl, and she loved you dearly. She did the best she could. She was a lady. And I know she’d be proud of you.”

  After a moment of stillness, his solemn face dappled with the flickering light cast up by fifteen years of uncertainty, he nodded and blew out the candles.

  “Did you make a wish?” I asked fervently.

  “I forgot.”

  “Make one quick! Before the candles stop smoking!”

  “I, uh, I wish—”

  “Not out loud! If you say it out loud it won’t come true!”

  Hop snorted. “Claire knows all the wishing rules. She’s some kind of leprechaun.”

  “I am not!”

  “Tooth fairy,” Evan deadpanned. “Elf, troll—” Roanie blew on the smoking candles. I stared at him. “Did you make a wish?”

  “Yep.”

  “Good. Let me know when it comes true.”

  “I will,” he said quiet
ly.

  The spell of the sad mood was broken. Carried away on the smoke. Relief. Movement. I galloped into the pantry and came back with my arms full of presents. He gaped at them. I had to prod him on one arm to make him start unwrapping the boxes.

  Mama had orchestrated the gifts with practical matters in mind—a nice leather belt, new socks, a pair of cufflinks, things like that. But I’d persuaded her to let me give him good stuff. He unwrapped my gift and examined it with a slight, pleased smile. It was one of those bulky red Swiss Army knives. He pried each section open until it bristled with blades and bottle opener and corkscrew and scissors. It wasn’t just a pocketknife to me, it was a symbol. We’d come a long way in five years since the time he’d threatened to cut Carlton’s throat. He wouldn’t poke a knife at anybody else, but at least if he did, it’d be a nice knife.

  “Look,” I said. I plucked a metal toothpick from one end of the knife. I cast a dark look toward Hop and Evan. “This is a leprechaun sword.” I tapped Roanie on each shoulder. “Now you’re Sir Roan. You can kill dragons for King Arthur and go over the rainbow to the Emerald City.”

  “Oh, Sir Roan!” Grandmother Elizabeth said, and applauded lightly. “Bold knight! Dragonslayer!”

  “You’ve got leprechauns mixed in with Camelot and The Wizard of Oz,” Mama told me.

  Well, I knew that.

  “Yeah, she’s the Wizard of Odd,” Evan teased. I sighed. Roanie looked at me carefully. “You bring on the dragon, Claire. I’ll clean his teeth.” Everyone laughed. Even me.

  My tenth birthday, in May, was, above all, a milestone. Roanie left a dozen red carnations outside my door that morning and I thought I’d die from happiness.

  I can’t quite describe what I must have been to him—innocence, loyalty, acceptance—a bossy little girl he could tease and protect and talk with on some safe level that existed nowhere else in his life. The difference in our ages and our dreams was invisible to me then, because I loved him from a child’s viewpoint, without the influence of grim reality or raging hormones.

  I’ll never know how that might have changed as we grew older. I read Wuthering Heights when I was a girl and hated Cathy for her snobbish cruelty toward Heathcliff; I read the book again, years later, and morbidly decided they’d been doomed from the start.