Free Verse

by Sarah Dooley

  Still, I pace.

  Once the sun is up and the birds are singing right at their loudest, Mikey comes out on his porch. He looks like he just tumbled out of bed: mussed-up hair and sleepy eyes. His glasses are crooked. His shoes are on the wrong feet.

  I raise a hand to wave at Mikey like I do to his father. He waves back. Then he begins pacing his porch and I go back to pacing mine. We haven’t stared at each other through the window since we started actually talking, but today there isn’t much to say. There’s not one speck of humidity, and the porch is warm in the sun and cold in the shade. I stop pacing and sit on the warm part. I worry.

  • • •

  “Can we cook something?” Mikey appears at the porch railing. “I was thinking cake. It doesn’t have to be finger-bone cake.”

  “It’s not even nine yet,” I tell him. “Phyllis won’t let us do cake for breakfast.” He looks irritated. “But we can ask Phyllis if we can make more muffins,” I offer. “That sounds breakfasty. And then we can put lots of chocolate chips in them.”

  Phyllis doesn’t seem as disapproving of Mikey since he slept on her rug, hugging her dog.

  “But we’re out of chocolate chips,” she says. “If you want chocolate chip muffins, you’ll have to go to the store first.” She is elbow-deep in a skein of yarn, her knitting needles barely visible. I know there’s no chance she’ll be going to the store with us. It’ll just be me and my cousin. The unexpected freedom sounds like the perfect thing for a Saturday.

  “Okay,” I say. “We’ll go.”

  “Take some money from the change jar. And ask Shirley first.”

  We cross to the Harless house to ask Shirley, who’s at the computer. Her hair is up under a blue scarf, and the earrings that dangle below it are a matching shade of blue. I think it’s funny that she’s got her hair put up and her earrings on but she’s wearing green plaid pajama pants and flip-flops.

  “Can we go to the store?” Mikey asks Shirley.

  “I’m busy.”

  “No, I mean we.” He points between himself and me.

  Shirley turns in her chair, her full attention on us for the first time. She looks from me to Mikey and back to me.

  “Can you handle him?” she asks me.

  I have no idea, but I nod. “Sure.”

  “Be back in an hour or I’ll worry.” Her gaze has already strayed to the screen.

  A lot can happen in an hour. But I only say, “All right.”

  We leave the Harless house and walk through the spring morning with its clean-scrubbed air. Mikey’s shoes are still on the wrong feet. I’ve covered my bare feet with a pair of Phyllis’s gardening clogs. We walk up West Lane toward Town Center, Mikey walking slower than I’m used to. I shorten my stride. A few minutes later, I shorten it again. I busy my fidgety feet kicking gravel. It sloshes into puddles of dark yellow mud-water.

  “So how come everybody says you’re a handful?” I ask him as we pass the caboose and its flowers, which have scattered across the park in the wind.

  He shrugs.

  “Shirley asked if I can handle you. How come?”

  He shrugs.

  “I already know you stay up late at night.”

  “So do you.”

  “Do you get in trouble at school?”

  He shrugs.

  “Do you break stuff? Do you run away?” I list my own crimes.

  He shrugs.

  “You’re a man of many words,” I comment.

  “I want chocolate,” he says.

  “Where do you think we’re going?”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “You’re just changing the subject, is what you’re doing.”

  He shrugs.

  • • •

  I point out my apartment as we pass.

  “That was mine. Mine with the other Michael Harless.”

  “The one that died,” Mikey says.

  I shrug.

  • • •

  The chocolate chip muffins taste even better when we don’t put anything but chocolate chips in them. We eat sitting on the porch rail with our feet dangling, watching cars occasionally glide up Route 10. Right in front of Phyllis’s porch, there’s a pothole. About half the cars swerve and the other half lurch suddenly. When there are no cars, Chip fetches the stick we keep throwing for him. He’s a low-slung dog with stubby legs and crooked ears, but he can catch that stick midair almost with his eyes closed.

  Every now and then, he lopes toward the road for a drink of water out of the puddle that has formed in the pothole. A group of girls, who walk past in shorts too short for May, look sideways at the dog, like he might bite them. I can catch bits and pieces of their conversation: “I don’t know, what do you think?” “It’s your hair, Tania.” “But what do you think?” Underneath, I can hear the wind gathering and releasing the treetops in the woods behind town. This is the busiest time of day in Caboose.

  We throw more sticks for Chip and snack on chocolate chip muffins right down into the evening hours. We don’t talk a whole lot. When Mikey talks, it’s mostly about gruesome things: how creepy is it that human beings are just skeletons covered in guts covered in skin? And if zombies eat brains, how come they’re so dumb? When I talk, Mikey tilts his head at me like he can’t work out what language I’m speaking. We don’t do well together talking-wise, but we bake three batches of muffins, and by the third, I know how to preheat the oven and grease the pan and even how to use a pot holder safely.

  We sit on the porch rail till Hubert comes home from work. His truck grinds into the deeper gravel of the road’s shoulder. His door squeaks open. I hurl myself off the porch railing so quick I scratch my knees in the bushes. I dart across both yards to Hubert. I fling my arms around him. Even I have not expected me to do this. He almost falls backward and has to steady himself against the truck door. It squeaks again.

  “What’s that for?” he asks.

  “I thought you might die.”

  He makes a noise somewhere in his throat, like he’s got to clear it, and then he tugs me back into a one-armed hug. He smells like dirt and rocks, and I know I’m going to be streaked black when he lets go.

  “Jesus, kid,” he says, shaking his head, eyebrows disappearing under heavy curls of black hair. “Nah, I’m okay. We’re okay.”

  Mikey sidles up and slips under Hubert’s other arm like it’s the most natural thing in the world, and the three of us head for the Harless house. For a minute, I feel kinship the way the dictionary defines it, not just shared blood but an actual family. The way I did with Michael and Ben, and maybe even Judy once. Hubert and Mikey are my kin. I still have kin.

  “We’re okay,” I repeat, liking how it sounds.

  12

  On Sunday it is pouring down sun. The kind of sun you can’t get away from even if you want to; it’s so bright, like orange juice, and it splashes into everything.

  Mikey and I lie on our stomachs on the porch boards with our chins hanging over the edge. He’s drawing in the dirt with a stick. I’m trying to figure out how to multiply unlike fractions. Stella’s chosen the small of my back as her perch. She’s vibrating her happiness, and I am beginning to get sleepy, even though it isn’t even nine a.m.

  “We should do something.” I feel guilty wasting gallons of orange sunshine.

  “What do you want to do?” Mikey asks.

  I shrug half a shoulder. Stella murmurs her disapproval. “I’m supposed to help your dad clean out the storage shed.”

  He snorts. I take this as a no.

  “We could go to the pawnshop,” I suggest.

  “Why? What’s at the pawnshop?”

  “Something I want.”

  He twists his head to look over at me. “Something top secret, or you going to tell me?”

  “Something top secret.”


  “You going to tell me when we get there?”

  “No.”

  “Then forget it.”

  We stay draped on the porch. The sun keeps moving.

  • • •

  “Sasha?”

  Mikey’s voice catches me off guard. I pull my face off my algebra book, and Stella murmurs another warning.

  “I was sleeping,” I say.

  “Sorry.”

  “What?”

  “I said I’m sorry,” he repeats.

  “No, I mean, you said ‘Sasha.’ So I’m saying ‘what.’”

  “Oh. Let’s clean the storage shed.”

  • • •

  There’s a lot of junk in the storage shed. Some of it is boring stuff: extra extension cords and broken roof shingles and boxes of Christmas lights. Some of it is more interesting. There are stacks of papers arranged loosely on the tops of boxes, like somebody brought them in quickly and stuck them in the first available space, like that person didn’t really want to deal with them. They need to be gathered and put into some of the empty boxes along the back.

  At first, Mikey stacks things quickly, but after a while, he notices me scanning the papers and separating them into piles to box. Mikey starts scanning, too, like he didn’t realize he could do that before.

  The top layer of papers is boring. Water bills. Electric bills. Internet bills. Underneath, where the postmarks start getting older, things get more interesting.

  • • •

  After we find the box, Mikey freaks out and breaks a window. I yank him back by the shoulders before he can step on the glass in his flip-flops and get cut. I can’t let Mikey step in the glass. He’s not even ten. I’m supposed to watch out for him.

  Mikey pulls himself from my grip and darts out of the shed. He runs across his yard, across the road, and between two houses on the other side. He disappears from view.

  The cousin in me thinks I ought to run after him. But the employee in me thinks I ought to clean up the glass before Hubert sees it, or I might never get Phyllis a GUI-tar.

  Actually, the cousin in me sort of thinks I ought to clean up the glass before Hubert sees it, too. I can tell Shirley and Mikey barely get along. I want to keep him out of trouble as much as possible.

  I’m not exactly sure how to clean up glass. It’s scattered all over the rough wood floor of the shed. I know not to pick it up with my hands, but it’s going to be tough to clean it up without touching it.

  I think I know where Phyllis keeps the broom. It takes some sneaking to get the broom and the dustpan and make it back without anybody asking questions about what I’m doing. Then it takes some figuring to work out how to get the dustpan to hold still while I sweep into it. Nobody ever taught me anything. I feel ashamed and mad all at once. I sweep up the glass, and it makes the softest crunch-crunch-crunch as it slides into the dustpan.

  Now I’ve got a dustpan full of broken window and a hand full of broom and a shed that is still not clean and a cousin on the run. The day itself is still pretty, but the stuff inside it isn’t.

  I hide the broom behind some boxes. I put the dustpan and glass on a shelf. I put the thing away in its box. I close the box. I put it neatly on the shelf in front of the dustpan.

  • • •

  “Sasha?”

  Phyllis appears in my doorway. I’m writing haiku. Not for English class but just because. It turns out swearing off poetry doesn’t work the way swearing off lima beans does. I swore off lima beans in third grade and it worked. I swore off poetry less than a week ago and here I am.

  “Hi, Phyllis.”

  “Homework?” she asks.

  “We learned how to write haiku at school.” This is true. It’s just not an answer to her question.

  “Wow, haiku. I never understood all those forms and patterns. A poem’s like kudzu. It’s going to grow in the direction it wants. Like a kid.”

  “I have a poem about plants,” I say. I hand it to her.

  She reads aloud:

  “Someday I will plant

  flowers from West Virginia

  in other places.”

  She smiles. “That’s a good haiku.”

  “I don’t have any haiku about kids.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Do you know my English teacher?”

  “No, I can’t say I do.”

  “She invited me to poetry club. But I would have to stay after until four fifteen, so I said no.”

  She makes a mouth noise of disapproval. “Sasha, I can pick you up at four fifteen once in a while. What day is poetry club?”

  “Thursday.”

  “You should have asked me, sweetie.”

  “I didn’t want to interrupt your work.”

  “Pssh.”

  We get quiet a minute, but she doesn’t leave and she doesn’t hum, so I wait.

  “Sasha,” Phyllis says, “I came up here to ask you a question.”

  I wait some more.

  “Did you break Hubert’s shed window?”

  I think of how I urged Mikey to help me clean the shed.

  “It was an accident,” I tell her, which is not a lie.

  “Oh, Sasha.” She slumps like the air has gone out of her. “Why? Why did you break Hubert’s window?”

  “There was something in a box,” I say.

  Phyllis shakes her head. “What box? What do you mean?”

  “I wish it didn’t happen,” I tell her.

  She looks so sad that I feel sadder myself. “Sasha, you’ll have to pay Hubert for the window,” she says, her voice thick with guilt.

  I hurt. In my head I hear the final clash of notes the guitar let loose when I threw it against the window.

  I pull the suitcase out from under my bed. It doesn’t look like a lot of money, the wadded-up bills dried stiff from being damp in my pockets. Phyllis looks from me to the money and back at me with a strange expression.

  “Here,” I say. “If that’s not enough, I’ll get more.”

  Now I’ll have to start over. I’m so busy thinking about that, it takes me a minute to realize how much more sad Phyllis looks now that I’ve given her the money.

  13

  Phyllis looks and looks for her broom. Because she doesn’t ask me, I never have to lie. She never suspects me. She already caught on that I am the last person to check with for cleaning supplies.

  Mikey doesn’t come over on Monday. He doesn’t come over on Tuesday. By Wednesday, it’s warmer than it’s been all spring, and Mikey appears next to me.

  “Sorry,” he says, without saying about what. “I been in trouble for running off.”

  I’m walking circles in the backyard, letting Chip trail me. I scoot toward the center of the yard so Mikey’s got room next to me.

  “Me too.”

  “You’re not in trouble no more,” Mikey says. “I told my daddy it was me.”

  I look at him.

  “He told Phyllis. And he give back your window money.” He talks like his dad. He never says gave, always give. I like how it sounds, soft like when Hubert described the fallen-out between my father’s side of the family and his. “I got to pay for it with my next million allowances. I don’t think he remembers we haven’t done allowance in a year. He brought her broom over, but he couldn’t find the dustpan. Why’d you leave the dustpan in the shed?”

  I squeeze his hand in thanks. I hear guitar music in my head. I answer his question: “I didn’t know what to do with the glass.”

  • • •

  Phyllis finds me at four a.m., back in our old spot, sitting on the porch. She’s holding a plate of egg salad sandwiches. She must have sensed how I’d be feeling.

  “You didn’t come to dinner last night,” she says.

  “I ate,” I say quickly, thinking, too late,
of how Phyllis was probably worried. Guilt makes me itch. I keep doing things that make Phyllis feel bad. I don’t mean to, and I can’t always tell that’s what I’m doing until it’s too late.

  “I know you did,” she says. “I saw your crumbs on the counter. Didn’t think you even liked my corn bread.”

  “Sorry.”

  She shakes her head. “No, don’t apologize for crumbs, honey. I was just missing you at dinner.”

  “I figured you had questions.”

  “I did,” she confirms.

  “Didn’t figure I had answers.”

  Her mouth tightens, almost like she’s keeping in a laugh. She holds out the plate to me, and I take a triangle.

  “I get why you took the blame for the window,” she says. “You were trying to protect your cousin.”

  I lean back on the boards, letting my feet hang over the edge of the porch so they can reach the dirt. I eat the egg salad quickly, before it can drip out of the sandwich. A little bit of it falls in my hair.

  “The thing is,” Phyllis tells me, “if Mikey’s breaking windows, he’s got some stuff going on. And telling his father, well . . . that lets Hubert help him. So telling the truth is another way of protecting your cousin.”

  Her logic makes sense, but something still feels wrong, talking about Mikey behind his back. I reach for another half sandwich without sitting up, and she leans down to where I can get to the plate.

  “He saw something in a box,” I tell Phyllis. “He got so sad.”

  “I know. Hubert told me a little of . . . well. There’s some family business there. He didn’t think you’d have Mikey with you when you were working in the shed. And he didn’t expect you to open the boxes.”

  “It fell open.” I’m quick to explain away my snooping. “I wasn’t going to open it, but it fell.”

  “Well, shoot. Meant to be, I guess,” Phyllis says. “Now the truth is out, Mikey can deal with it.”

  “He’s only little,” I say.

  “I know.” I notice she hasn’t eaten a bite.

  “There’s so much sad,” I say.