As soon as the bus starts rolling, I casually tell Charlotte about getting a fake ID.
“I figure it’s one thing Lisa won’t have,” I tell her.
“That is good. She won’t have that,” Charlotte says, and stares out the window.
On the ride back from the flea market, I stare at my brand-new fake ID. It’s a good thing I need a haircut. My long bangs cover a lot of my age. I am wearing my new mascara. And I didn’t smile at all, so I think I could even pass for fifteen.
Dad calls on my cell phone, and I try my best to sound relaxed and innocent of all my crimes.
“No. No. We’re having a great time. Just doing girl stuff, you know. Talking about bras and shoes.” I throw him off by adding just the right detail.
What do you know. Events change and my plan falls apart. There will be no getting out of Dodge, as they say. Gramps fell and broke his hip. He’s in the hospital. We’ll go down to Houston tomorrow to help Grandma.
He says to just come home from Charlotte’s this afternoon, please.
“Morning, kiddo,” Dad says. I am at the computer, trying to get a new bus schedule, and I might be busted.
I turn and see him watching me. He has his #1 Dad mug of coffee. Ha-ha! What a joke that is. Why it hasn’t broken in all our moves, I have no idea.
I’m caught. There’s no magic pulley system to hoist me up through the roof. The evidence is on the computer. I feel dizzy and sit carefully in the computer chair.
“Just sending an e-mail to Lisa. She’s still at camp,” I lie. It takes, because he just nods and takes a sip of coffee as I click out of the Internet.
“Better get your bag packed.”
My bag is already packed, just for another reason.
“Is Gramps okay?”
“He will be.”
“How long will we be there?”
“However long he needs, I guess.”
Here I am, traveling a highway, the same one I thought I should be taking to my aunt’s house. I would have been halfway there by now. The first thing we were going to do was investigate the truth about Harper Lee’s life. Research was at the top of my list. Aunt Mariah would know how to do this. But no, I am not getting an adventure. In Dad’s car, the windows are rolled up, the AC is on full blast, and the radio is on some talk station featuring a host bent on making listeners as angry as him. I let my iPod wires hang by my side, have my feet up on the dash, slink down into the seat. It’s a march toward sadness. There’s no thrill waiting at the end.
I get bored of my music, even Finn’s two songs, and pick up To Kill a Mockingbird. I beg Atticus to tell me something new and wise. If this was not such a special book, I would mark sentences with my yellow highlighter. I’m waiting for the day this feels like my own copy, like it was given only to me. Then I can call her Nelle like her friends do. Her biography says Nelle is Ellen spelled backward, which is her grandmother’s name. You have to wonder if her mother expected her to be the opposite of her own mother.
Somewhere along the way I fell asleep, and now I wake to the sound of our car driving on gravel. I rub my eyes and look out the window. It’s a Dairy Queen, which Dad knows is one of my favorites. Of all the things Garland lacks, at least it has a Dairy Queen. I slide my flip-flops on and get out of the car.
“This. This makes you happy, huh?” Dad asks.
“Why? What?”
“That’s the biggest smile I’ve seen on you for a while.” Well, they do have the BeltBuster and now that I’m here, I realize how much I need a cheeseburger.
We sit in a booth near the window, a tiny white vase with a lonely flower is all there is for decoration. The table has a red-and-white-checked vinyl tablecloth of the kind you might take to a picnic. Dad goes to the men’s room, and I look around the place, spying only a few people. There’s a family at one table: a mom, dad, and two toddlers who won’t sit down. They have ice cream dripping down their chins, and their mother reaches over, catches one by the arm, and wipes it clean away.
It’s noon. After church, people start coming in, ordering their cheeseburgers and Dilly Bars. Unlike me, they will go home to lie out in the sun or watch movies. They will have simple, uncomplicated Sundays, and I am so jealous of this I could spit. I will have hospital food, Grandma fussing over my hair, wishing her hands could be folding laundry or sewing or chopping. Now that I think about it, Mrs. Dupree was happiest when she was busy cutting apples. And my mother busied her hands making paper birds. Maybe this is the kind of old woman advice they give in Good Housekeeping magazine. I could write an article. Three ways to keep your hands moving. When I am ancient and seventy, I can tell you this, my hands will be busy writing.
Dad brings our food, spreads it out across the red-and-white tablecloth.
“You’ve been having a nice time with Charlotte. And helping Mrs. Dupree so much. And reading a lot, too. I should get you something special for being so good,” he says.
I am not good. I was trying to make out with a guy and beat it out of town. And of course, my fingerprints are all over the stolen plant on Mrs. Dupree’s porch.
“You didn’t tell me about your date with Miss Broom,” I say to change the subject.
“Do you genuinely want to know?”
“Yes. Spill.”
“Spill? I thought Finn was guiding you on the better use of language.”
Who cares what Finn’s choice of words would be? But my mind does an instant search of my brain. Tell. Reveal. Impart. Inform. Divulge. Communicate.
I will be the only seventh-grade walking synonym dictionary. Maybe someday there will be a job for this.
“Disclose all.”
“There you are. It was nice. She is funny. Kind.”
“Did you kiss?” I ask. He smiles.
Then, after a moment, “No, we did not.”
“How come?”
“We’ve only gone out for lunch between our classes.”
“Did you open the door for her at the restaurant?”
“So I’m being interviewed,” he says.
“Sorry.”
“Okay, Inspector Nelson. I opened the door for her at the restaurant. We sat in a red booth. When we came out, I think there was a bird chirping in the tree. Perhaps a blue jay. Perhaps an indigenous Garland brown bird. Yes, that’s what it was. Her perfume smelled flowery. I wore the striped gray shirt you gave me, which looked quite good. Not too much cologne, as you have advised me on many occasions. She wore jeans and a brown shirt with these little gold buttons around the neck. It matched her earrings, I think. I think it did. And she enjoys old, black-and-white movies and the same kind of music I do.”
“Well, she’s the only one,” I say.
He must like her. He’s told me this much only once before, and it was about that awful Deirdre.
“Oh, and we made another date,” he says. “A date date.”
“Don’t take her to the movies.”
“Why not the movies?”
“If it’s sappy, she’ll be embarrassed; and if it’s an action-adventure, you’ll be embarrassed. Dinner is best.”
“You’re an authority, eh?”
“I’m observant. And don’t wear that shirt you got for a dollar.” If shirts had a popularity contest, this shirt would be booed off the stage. It is that awful. Still, every time he puts it on, he thinks he’s a genius because he paid only a dollar for it. Well, you get what you pay for.
“Thanks for the tip,” he says.
He could invite her to dinner, and I could make them King Ranch Casserole. Then again, maybe not. It didn’t work for Charlotte and Christopher. Sometimes ingredients don’t go together the way you planned and you end up walking through Garland in a little black dress by yourself.
Chapter 31
When people cover their mouths with one hand, you know something bad has happened. You see this all the time in cop shows and Westerns. The uniformed officers ring a bell and Wham! the woman opening the screen door draws her hand to her mouth. T
he sheriff rides out to a farm where a woman is hanging clothes on the line and Bam! she silences herself with her palm. Someone has died and nobody has to say anything. It is the universal sign of grief.
Dad has his hand to his mouth now. He walked the whole stretch of the cemetery, past thirty or forty headstones, before grief found him.
I would give anything to know what he thinks when he stares at Simon’s headstone. If he wonders what it would be like to raise a son instead of a daughter. Why I survived and not Simon. Does he feel like Finn’s mother? When he looks at me, does he think of my mother? I put my own hand to my mouth out of respect, then I place blue and white carnations along the base of Simon’s stone.
I slip my hand into Dad’s, squeeze it tight. The stormy look is there behind his eyes. One hundred percent chance of Jim Beam and Dr Pepper getting together later today. There’s a bottle in the trunk, I know it. He’s already replaced what Plant drank at home. It was behind his shoe rack, which doesn’t he know I will see because he leaves his shoes all over the place and I am the one to bring them back to the closet. It didn’t matter anyway. We were out of apple juice.
We stood there in silence, each of us thinking our own thoughts about Simon and how life should have been. I got the feeling we might have a nice conversation and a crack might open up where I could sneak in a few more questions about my mother. My brain lined up a list on mental paper. One. Two. Three.
If we weren’t ambushed by a nosy reporter, I might have gotten the chance.
This is what happened.
He’d said, “Gramps’ll be all right. Let’s go visit Simon before we go to the house.”
Well, we should have gone to the house and watched the news first, because there was something about what happened ten years ago, which was my mother’s crime. Why people want to make news of this, I have no idea. It is not like a historic date they make you remember in History class.
A pretty woman in a black suit and leopard-print headband came running up to Dad, asking him questions. “Mr. Nelson, hello. Sorry to interrupt, but could I ask you a few questions?”
Her greeting made it only worse. Even I could see she wasn’t sorry to interrupt.
“Do you visit your ex-wife? How is your daughter? Is she close to her mother? Please, this would be a dignified exclusive. Why haven’t you ever given anyone your side of the story?”
How she got to be at the cemetery, I don’t know. Was she staking it out, hoping we would be there? Did she know that Simon’s grave was one of the reasons Dad couldn’t bring himself to move out of Texas?
There were curse words sprinkled into the sentence, You have the wrong guy, which was pointless because we were at Simon’s grave and who else would we be?
A bright camera flash lit my face. Now there will be a moronic picture of me somewhere. Dad jerked me by the arm and pulled me with him. I broke free and ran back to Simon, tucking a page of Harper Lee’s novel under the flowers. I’d meant to read it to him, but now she’d spoiled it all.
Dad’s anger made him commit a crime, too, because we drove at top speed like bad guys being pursued by cops all the way to my grandparents’ house. I held tight to the door handle, wishing we were still at home, thinking this has been a bad week for the whole Nelson family and the law.
My grandmother should not see him this way. She has enough to worry about with Gramps in the hospital. Fortunately, we made it there, no one following us.
Of course, I could do nothing but eavesdrop and write out my thoughts in my real diary as they talked about Gramps and what had happened. I wrote that you would think people would come up with something more original to ask, but no, they don’t. They use the same question as a sixth-grade English teacher, only they have a big guy holding a video camera shove a microphone in your face and ask, “Why don’t you tell us in your own words, how has life been for you in the last ten years?” This is an ambush.
This is what I hear my grandmother saying in the other room.
“That’s an ambush,” she says. “They have a lot of nerve.”
Dad is pacing. When he does say something, it’s a curse word that rhymes with duck.
“Should we call your attorney?” asks my grandmother.
“What for?”
“It’s an invasion of privacy, not to mention downright insensitive.”
“Attorneys can’t do anything about insensitivity,” he shouts.
Grandma puts her hand to her neck and touches her pearl necklace. “I don’t know why we weren’t prepared for this. But how do you know what to do?”
“I knew it was a risk going out there,” Dad says. “I knew it was the anniversary, or whatever you want to call it.”
“That doesn’t give them the right to intrude.”
From what I can see from my hiding spot on the stairs, Dad’s face is about as red as a tomato. They’ve unplugged the phone and my dad has turned off his cell phone.
This is all because of the ambush. I looked it up, and it turns out, it’s an interesting word.
ambush n.: an act or instance of lying concealed so as to attack by surprise
The whole idea of an ambush sounds exciting, unless you are the person being taken by surprise.
The wooden stair step creaks as I rise and go to my room. I write down all my notes. What I decide about the whole day is this: Sometimes I think these news people need a life or at least better ideas about stories. I’d be asking questions about what will happen ten years in the future.
But I guess it’s important to the news reporter with the leopard headband. She wants to know what’s happened to us. Sure, I would love Dad to answer a few of her questions so I’d know the answers, too. But they know nothing about Tom Nelson. Asking him questions will only make him close up on the outside and explode on the inside. And besides, if they want an interesting story, why don’t they go ask my mother? She is the cause of all this drama. Go to the scene of the crime, I say. I have half a mind to take my own advice and go see her myself.
The drama is all downstairs, and the second floor is boredom city. So there’s only one option. Snoop around.
I like to look in my grandmother’s closet or in her bathroom drawers. I’ll bet she knows the moment one dust bunny shows up, the moment one Kleenex is used, which is why I have to use extreme caution.
I pull open the first drawer. It is lined with white-and-purple paper. The same liner has been there forever but still smells perfumey. She has a white divider tray inside keeping each type of makeup separate from the others. The lipsticks stand on end with their color circles turned up. They are organized from light pink to bright red. She even has a section with her false eyelashes stacked neatly in individual clear boxes. If you didn’t know, you’d think there are several faces asleep there. I love how organized this drawer is, and it makes me want to clean up my room, make some of my things special and neat.
I move into her closet. The first thing you notice is the scent of old-woman’s perfume. Baby powder plus lemons. The second thing you notice is about fifty-three shades of beige. Her clothes are arranged with the same care as her drawer, all the short-sleeved shirts together, then long-sleeved, then sweaters. It’s a beige parade.
I trail my hand along the shelves holding her shoes, also ordered from light to dark. Then, I spot a cream-colored peep-toe pump with something behind it. It’s beige, but a darker beige. I lift the shoes, careful to memorize exactly where they were sitting. It’s then I see them. A whole stack of beige books, paperbacks. I pull one of them up, not so careful this time out of my excitement. Because if this is what I think it is—OMG, it is what I think it is! My grandmother has a stash of romance novels under her beige pumps.
I put the shoes back, but keep one book. A few pages are turned down. In my room, I’m careful to conceal the book inside To Kill a Mockingbird. I open the paperback to a random page just to get the flavor of the story, see if it’s something I can imagine right away.
“Lana swept angrily into h
er bedroom and sat at her dressing table. She began brushing her long blond hair. Then she noticed the open window at the same time as a man stepped out of the shadows. She didn’t know why, but she was strangely attracted to him. Was it the light? Or perhaps it was the gentle rain, hitting the streets of London outside. Either way, she knew this would be a night she would never forget.
Then, he stepped forward and called her by name. She let out a sigh of relief for it. Perhaps he wasn’t a total stranger.”
Are you kidding me? She’s already attracted to him? He could be a psychopath? A stalker? Haven’t these people seen the Saw movies? How can my grandmother read this? I start from page one. I have to see if this makes sense somehow. I doubt it, but I am determined to know.
I wake up to my grandmother standing over me.
“Why are you sleeping on the floor?”
“Um, I fell off the bed.” I always sleep on the floor at Grandma’s house. She makes the bed so good, I don’t want to mess it up.
“Sarah, want to tell me what’s going on?” she says in a stern, clear voice I haven’t heard in a while. There are so many things I could be in trouble for.
“Well… uh… em.”
She sits at the edge of my bed.
“You know, you can ask me anything. You can look at my things anytime.”
I am silent, retracing my steps in my mind. How did she catch me? Did I leave something out of place?
“Please just ask permission first.”
Then, she places the romance book on the bedspread. “Good job concealing it behind a classic. Your father used to do this with comics.”
Sure Signs of Crazy Page 15