The Seventh Most Important Thing

by Shelley Pearsall

  He wasn’t sure why helping Mr. Hampton make angel wings the next Saturday reminded him of building the Pinewood Derby car with his dad, but it did.

  Squeak couldn’t come along—a violin concert, he said—so it was just Arthur and Mr. Hampton working in the garage.

  “We’re short on wings,” he said when Arthur walked in. “You can help me with wings today.”

  Arthur was surprised to see that Mr. Hampton looked pretty good again. He wondered if maybe Officer Billie had been mistaken about the cancer. He couldn’t see anything wrong with the guy, other than the fact that he was wearing the same holey brown cardigan sweater as the last Saturday and he didn’t get up from his rolling chair when Arthur walked in—just used his feet to turn himself partway around.

  “You can work over there at the table.” Mr. Hampton pointed to one of the rickety sawhorse tables in a far corner of the garage. “I need you to draw two sets of angel wings about, oh”—he glanced toward his creation, as if trying to visualize where they’d go—“about thirty-six inches across.”

  Arthur had no idea how to draw angel wings.

  “Do you have something I could copy from?” he asked Mr. Hampton, who was starting to glue a row of foil decorations along the edge of a table.

  “What?” He turned.

  “Do you have any pictures of angel wings I could trace or copy?” Arthur repeated.

  “Just use what you’ve seen.” Mr. Hampton went back to his work.

  Arthur wasn’t sure what the guy meant. Did he really think he’d seen real angel wings?

  “Uh, do you mean real ones?” Arthur said. “Or ones in, uh, books and stuff?”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake!” The old man glared at Arthur as he got up from his chair. “I’ll do them myself.”

  Arthur noticed that Mr. Hampton moved slowly as he came toward the worktable, but maybe he had always walked that way. It was hard not to notice every little thing now and worry that it might be a sign of something being wrong.

  After pausing to catch his breath for a minute, Mr. Hampton took the pencil from Arthur’s hand. “Here, I’ll draw one. Angel wings are like bird wings, right?”

  “Sure.” Arthur nodded.

  Mr. Hampton glanced at him oddly. “Of course they are. Only larger, depending on the angel. Two wings per angel. No two are the same. Every pattern is different. Colors and iridescence are different. Some angels are like peacocks. Others are less flashy. Like city pigeons.”

  Arthur had never pictured angels as city pigeons.

  “Watch. You draw them like this.” His hands trembling ever so slightly, Mr. Hampton began sketching a pair of wings on a large piece of cardboard. Arthur noticed it was a flattened grocery carton. Probably one he had collected.

  When he was done, he handed the design to Arthur. “There. Now you cut them out.”

  After Arthur cut out the wings, the rough cardboard edges had to be sanded smooth. Then the wings were covered in gold or silver foil. Hampton wanted each wing to be made of four or five layers of foil-wrapped cardboard. He liked to alternate gold and silver layers—with a little purple paper sometimes—so the wings looked sort of three-dimensional when they were finished.

  Arthur spent most of his four hours working on only one wing.

  “Anything of value takes time,” Hampton declared.

  As they worked, Arthur kept thinking about his dad and the Pinewood Derby car. Maybe it was the smell of the glue making him delirious, but if he closed his eyes, he could almost picture being in their garage at home, with his dad standing beside him as they sanded and painted the race car.

  “I used to work on stuff with my dad,” he heard himself saying to Hampton, and then instantly regretted it. Mr. Hampton didn’t know his dad. Or care, probably. Plus, talking about his dad always made his voice do embarrassing things.

  “Did you?” Hampton didn’t look up from the wing he was gluing and wrapping. “Tell me more about him.”

  Arthur studied Hampton’s face. Was he just saying that to be polite? Or did he really want to know?

  Arthur couldn’t decide.

  He figured Mr. Hampton might like hearing the story about the Pinewood Derby car, since it made his dad sound like an average guy who built cars with his kid. But the whole time he was talking about making the car—the special paint they used, how they tested it, and how they came in second to a kid who had won three years in a row with the same car—Mr. Hampton didn’t look up from his work or seem interested in a thing.

  When he was done, Arthur felt stupid for having babbled on so long about his dad. “Anyhow, that’s one of the main things I remember about him,” he finished.

  “Do you still have it?” Mr. Hampton asked finally.

  “Have what?”

  “The car.”

  Arthur really hoped he didn’t want it for his masterpiece. He wouldn’t give up the car for anything. Not even for heaven.

  “Yeah, I’ve got it somewhere, I think,” he replied vaguely, even though he knew exactly where it was. He kept it in a box in the back of his closet with the warning Don’t Open or You’ll Die scrawled across the top. Just in case his sister got any ideas about borrowing it for her Barbies.

  “Well, you should keep it. Your father sounds like he was a good man.” Mr. Hampton nodded as he drew another small wing. “And he wore those angel wings on his hat. So he must have been a good man.”

  Arthur’s eyes darted toward Mr. Hampton. He couldn’t tell if the guy was serious about the wings or joking.

  “The wings were for motorcycles,” he tried to explain, since Mr. Hampton didn’t seem to know what they were. “It’s a logo. You know, Harley-Davidson. They didn’t mean anything. He rode motorcycles.”

  “Oh yes.” The old man pressed his lips together and nodded solemnly. “That’s what I thought.” Then he shrugged and smiled a little. “But you never know about angels, right?” He pointed at a bottle of glue near Arthur. “Hand me some glue, young man. I’m just about finished with this piece.”

  Arthur passed the glue to him. “Really, my dad wasn’t an angel.”

  Mr. Hampton chuckled to himself. “None of us are.”

  “But he wasn’t all bad,” he added quickly, just in case his dad might be listening, wherever he was.

  “I’m sure he wasn’t. Tell me some more of the good stuff.”

  This was the point when Arthur definitely wished he’d never opened his big mouth. He could feel a lump already rising in his throat. He really wanted to change the subject. “There’s not much else to say about him,” he mumbled. “That’s it.”

  “Food…what’d your dad like to eat?” the old man inquired as he put a careful line of glue around the edge of the wing he was finishing. “He a big eater or not?”

  In spite of himself, Arthur smiled. “Yeah, he loved burgers and fries. And chili. He made killer chili. Every January, or whenever it got cold, he used to cook a big pot for all the guys at work. There’d be ingredients strewn all over our kitchen when he was done. My mom would have a fit. But everybody at the shop loved his chili. The hotter, the better.”

  “Me too.” Mr. Hampton nodded. “Give me a big pot of chili with a slab of warm corn bread in the middle of winter. Nothing better than that.” He pressed a piece of foil onto the glue. “What else? He play music or sing or anything?”

  Arthur shook his head. “No, but he listened to the radio all the time. He liked Johnny Cash, anything by Johnny Cash. And he always watched The Price Is Right on Friday nights if he wasn’t out with his buddies. Nobody—not even my little sister—was allowed to bug him during The Price Is Right. He’d throw a pillow at you if you interrupted his show.”

  Mr. Hampton laughed. “Yeah, I like that one too.”

  They kept talking about Arthur’s dad for a while longer, in between gluing and wrapping more wings. They chatted about what kind of work his dad did. How he got started as a mechanic. His favorite cars. Arthur even told Mr. Hampton about his dad putting up the
Christmas tree every year—how there couldn’t be any dark spots or black holes. Mr. Hampton loved that story.

  “Don’t want any black holes in my masterpiece either,” he said, nodding. “I want the whole garage filled up with gold and silver. No space left at all.”

  Arthur couldn’t help asking, “How will you know when you’re done?”

  In an instant, Mr. Hampton’s expression changed and he glared at Arthur. “A saint’s work is never finished, young man.”

  “Okay, yeah. Sorry.” Arthur shut up and went back to wrapping foil around another scrap of cardboard. Sometimes he couldn’t understand Mr. Hampton. One minute, he would seem perfectly normal, and then the next minute, he’d say something crazy about angel wings or being a saint and you’d wonder what the heck he was talking about.

  But he was the first person in months who had asked about his dad’s life instead of his death—Arthur had to give him credit for that. Almost nobody else cared that his dad had made great chili and listened to Johnny Cash and watched The Price Is Right. All most people wanted to know was why he’d been drinking and racing his motorcycle in the rain.

  Arthur shook his head. Life was strange. Who could have guessed that the person who would be the most interested in his dad’s life would be the Junk Man who had taken his stuff?

  FORTY

  The next week, Barbara got chicken pox and Arthur got sick with the flu that was going around, so he missed his last Saturday of probation in February. Squeak volunteered to do his hours instead, but Arthur knew Officer Billie would never agree to that, so he didn’t even bother to ask.

  In March, the weather was mostly gray and damp. Arthur got used to slogging around Seventh Street in the rain. When it was too miserable outside, he would help Mr. Hampton with gluing foil and making wings. One Saturday, Mr. Hampton sent him to the library to research pictures of crowns for the display. “What kinds of crowns?” he asked Mr. Hampton before he left.

  “Heavenly ones, what else?” the old man said impatiently.

  Arthur knew better than to ask the librarians for help with finding heavenly crowns. He looked up crowns in The World Book Encyclopedia and did sketches of some famous ones for Mr. Hampton.

  —

  Fortunately, the month of April finally brought some sunshine and color back into the world. At first it was just a few patches here and there, but then the color spread out to cover everything else.

  Squeak came to help on a couple of the Saturdays in April. One afternoon, they cut stars out of cardboard for Mr. Hampton to use as decoration on some of his pieces.

  “You’re a lot better at making things now,” Squeak noticed as Arthur was working an eight-pointed star with little balls of foil on each point. Arthur showed him how he’d come up with designs for different stars and wings in his school notebooks.

  “I do a lot of these in class,” he said, holding up one of his notebooks. “I’ve got pages full of them.”

  Squeak shook his head. “You should be paying attention in class.”

  Arthur rolled his eyes. “Please.”

  —

  When they weren’t working in the garage, Squeak and Arthur took the grocery cart around the neighborhood to collect the usual stuff on Mr. Hampton’s list. Arthur had a routine now. He knew where to get a lot of the things without having to search around too much.

  The body shop down the street saved lightbulbs, busted car mirrors, and coffee cans for him. The small grocery store across from Groovy Jim’s always had cardboard boxes and empty bottles. Foil was harder to find, but a week’s worth of foil from Squeak’s lunches did add up. Tossed-out furniture was plentiful on almost every curb in April.

  “Spring-cleaning,” Hampton told Arthur. “You’ll find a lot of good stuff now.”

  He was right. Arthur couldn’t believe what people threw away. Sometimes it was hard to focus on the Seven Most Important Things with all of the other great things people were pitching out.

  On their treks through the neighborhood, Squeak and Arthur found rusty bicycles leaning against garbage cans. A cracked skateboard. A kid’s red wagon with one missing wheel. A telescope with a broken stand. Old birdcages. Discarded fish tanks.

  Surprisingly enough, Roger the Carpenter turned out to be useful for something after all.

  He could fix things.

  The skateboard—which Arthur kept for himself—had a hairline crack at one end of the board.

  “No problem,” Roger said when Arthur showed it to him after another Friday dinner. (The dinners had become a regular thing.) “I’ll get right on it.”

  By the next Friday, Arthur had an almost-new skateboard.

  Eventually, Squeak got a telescope with an almost-new stand. Barbara got an almost-new wagon and bike. Arthur kept a fish tank and birdcage for himself in case he decided to get a pet someday. He’d never had a pet.

  When Arthur’s mom asked where everything was coming from, he told her they were helping James Hampton and his neighbors clean out their garages. “Spring-cleaning,” he said. It wasn’t a complete lie.

  THE FIFTH IMPORTANT THING

  The first Saturday in May was a perfect kind of day.

  The turquoise sky reminded Arthur of the teardrop lamp he’d collected for Mr. Hampton way back in December. The warm air made it feel like the start of summer. It was the kind of day when his dad would have taken his motorcycle out for a spin, Arthur thought. (And then he wished he hadn’t thought about it.)

  It was so nice outside that Arthur would have liked to stay home and shoot some baskets in the driveway instead of going to work for Mr. Hampton all day.

  But the end of his probation was still a long way off. If he’d done the math right, he wouldn’t be done until the middle of July. (And then he wished he hadn’t figured that out.)

  —

  Surprisingly, Mr. Hampton was sitting outside in his office chair when Arthur finally arrived. He had no idea how the guy had managed to roll his chair across the gravel and weeds by himself, but there he was, in a small square of sunlight outside the garage, with his eyes closed and his hands folded in his lap.

  Of course, Arthur’s first panicked thought was that something bad had happened to him again. He kicked the gravel in the alley as he hurried toward the guy, hoping the sound might wake him up.

  Thankfully, Hampton’s eyes opened as he got closer. Arthur tried not to let him see his big sigh of relief.

  “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” Mr. Hampton said, waving a shaky hand at the sky. “Thought you might not want to show up today because it’s so nice.”

  “No, I’m here,” Arthur replied, doing his best to hide the fact that the old man had guessed right. He pointed toward the garage. “So what are we working on today?”

  “Well, first, I was hoping you’d go and buy me an orange soda over at the grocery across the street.” Mr. Hampton pulled a crumpled dollar bill from his gray sweater pocket. Arthur couldn’t imagine how the guy could stand to be wearing a sweater in the hot sunshine. No wonder he needed a drink. “I’ve got such a taste for an orange soda this morning,” he said.

  “Sure,” Arthur answered, taking the money. “I can get that for you. Any certain kind?”

  Mr. Hampton nodded. “Nesbitt’s, if they have it. That’s what I always used to drink. Buy one for yourself too. And don’t worry about bringing me back the change,” he called out as Arthur left.

  Luckily, the shop across the street had plenty of bottles on ice. Arthur brought back three, letting his shirt get soaked as he carried them. It felt good.

  Mr. Hampton watched him as he returned. “You got three bottles with you? Who’s going to drink all that?”

  “It’s a warm day,” Arthur said as he handed an open bottle to Mr. Hampton.

  “Well, yes, I suppose you’re right.” Hampton nodded.

  Arthur pulled another chair out of the garage, sat down, and picked up a bottle for himself. He tilted the soda back and took a big gulp. He’d never tried Nesbitt’s be
fore, but it wasn’t bad. However, Mr. Hampton only took a tiny sip, he noticed.

  “Something wrong with it?”

  “Just enjoying it, that’s all.” The old man put down the bottle and closed his eyes again. Something about the scene seemed odd to Arthur. The guy was sitting in the sunshine in a heavy sweater, not looking warm at all. He’d only taken a small sip of the nice cold soda. Then he’d tucked the bottle carefully beside him in the chair.

  “You feeling okay?”

  “Much better now, thank you.” Mr. Hampton pretended to smile—although Arthur wasn’t really convinced—and then he changed the subject. “You know, I used to catch crawdads to buy soda pop when I was your age. You know what crawdads are?”

  Arthur shook his head. He was a city kid. He’d never seen a crawdad.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter.” The old man waved one hand. “Where I grew up in the South, people used to eat them. They were a delicacy. So I’d catch a whole bucketful of crawdads in the river and take them to the fellow who ran the market in town. He’d give me a free soda pop for every bucketful. Then he’d sell those crawdads for three times what I got. But it wasn’t a bad deal.” He chuckled. “Not for the time. Not for a kid.”

  Arthur kept looking at the old guy hunched in the office chair in front of him, trying to imagine what he might have been like as a kid. It was almost impossible. He wondered what Mr. Hampton’s family had been like. Did he have any brothers and sisters? What sort of place had he grown up in?

  “You polished off that bottle pretty quick, young man,” Hampton said, interrupting Arthur’s thoughts. He pointed to the almost-empty Nesbitt’s bottle Arthur was holding.

  “Yeah, I guess,” Arthur agreed, wishing he hadn’t finished it so fast, since he didn’t think it would be polite to burp in front of Mr. Hampton.

  “What you should do now is go and stick your empty bottle on that tree over there.” The old man nodded in the direction of a straggly shrub next to the garage.

  “What?” Arthur turned to squint at it over his shoulder.

  “That’s what we used to do when I was a kid,” Mr. Hampton continued. “Every spring, my mother used to have each of us—my sister and my brothers and me—stick a soda bottle on a tree we had in the backyard. I don’t know if it was a Southern thing or a family tradition or what. My mother always said it was a way to empty out the things we weren’t proud of from the year before. Bad grades or lying or being prideful or whatever it was. You put the bottle on the end of a branch in the springtime, she used to say, and everything you’d been bottling up inside you would pour out onto the ground and disappear forever.”