I doubled over my knees to catch my breath. My heart banged in my chest from the running and the thought of what I knew, I just knew!—was true. Charles Dickens himself might have written it! I stood and took a big deep breath.
Oh, Dear Ripley’s, I bet anything Joe Viola is my father.
Evidence
Grandpa!”
“Shhhhh.” Grandpa was sitting at the picnic table, surrounded by furry friends.
I wanted to sit down—my legs were wobbly and my head felt light. I wanted to ask Grandpa all my questions.
“You ever wonder,” he said softly to me, “how they remember where to find all those nuts they hide away in secret?”
I didn’t have an answer. But I did have a new appreciation for things hidden away in secret. Or I should say for things hidden in plain sight! I left Grandpa and went inside. I walked straight into the den and to the shelf with the plaques and the pictures. There he was in the red plastic heart-shaped frame, as Brillo–haired like me under that cap as the Pope is Catholic.
I picked up the heart and blew off the dust. I undid the tiny little prongs that held the easel-back in place. I pulled the frame apart and for the first time in my life I saw the back of Number 23’s baseball card. In Sharpie was written a romantic message: You stole my heart XOXO JV
I knew it, I just knew it!
Another Visit to the Bank
According to Mrs. Blyth-Barrow, I needed $2,400. I couldn’t let Joe Viola, my own real father, rot in prison. No. I would bail him out, so he could bail us out. He would help, I just knew it, the way you know the sun will rise and birds will sing. The way squirrels know where they’ve stored all the nuts. (Though I strongly dislike bringing them into my big moment!) The way Winky Wheaton knows his bat will hit the ball. (That’s better!) For the sake of those X’s and O’s on the back of that baseball card, he’d help.
If this wasn’t a rainy day, I don’t know what is, I figured. I got the Keds box from under my bed and counted the rainy-day money I’d kept. Eighty-four dollars, mostly singles.
I would have talked to Grandpa, I really would have, but he was out, probably sitting on a stool at the Loyal Order of the Chickadee, and I knew better than to turn up there. Leonard probably had the Child Protective Services number taped up by the telephone. So I went straight to the bank to drain the account and bail Joe Viola out of jail.
My mind raced faster than my feet. I tripped on a square of uneven sidewalk and fell down hard, scraping up both knees. I got up and kept on going.
Even though I was hustling down the sidewalk on the outside, inside I felt like I do when The Happy Painter comes on TV, wicked calm and peaceful, with an enjoyable tingling on my scalp. It all seemed… to fit.
It was not Mrs. Gagne who was pleased to serve me, this time, but Mr. Beebe.
“Certainly not,” he said when I asked to make a withdrawal.
“But just the other day, not even two weeks ago, Mrs. Gagne let me make a deposit.” The balance in the account at the time had been a whopping $2,614!
“A deposit is one thing,” said Mr. Beebe. “A withdrawal is quite another thing.” Mr. Beebe stared at me with narrowed eyes, like he thought I was a criminal. Which I was. My stomach urped and my armpits dampened. My eyes raced around honeycomb tile patterns while I tried to think of how I could get at Grandpa’s money.
“Besides,” said Mr. Beebe, “the account doesn’t have sufficient funds to cover such a withdrawal. I shouldn’t say it, but your grandfather has only just been here, and he made a withdrawal himself.”
I swallowed noisily. “How much?” Was there enough left to pay the bail, anyway, even if I could get at it?
“Oh, that’s private information. I can’t say,” said Mr. Beebe. “Already I’ve said too much. I simply cannot say.”
It seemed like that was his final word on the subject, so I turned to go.
“Tsk-tsk,” said Mr. Beebe, “but he’s a regular at the Anchor Bank. The money goes in, and, more often, the money goes out. And on a fixed income too.” His puffy cheeks trembled. “The elderly. Such a shame. And yet, I will say he always has a respectful salute for the humble bank teller.” Mr. Beebe lowered his eyes and put a humble hand to his heart.
Well, this was no good. No good at all. How was my father supposed to bail us out if I couldn’t bail him out? I headed for the county courthouse with all the money I had. It would have to be enough to make something good happen. I just needed to convince Joe Viola of the truth.
Strike Two
I want you to own up to your responsibility,” I announced, repeating my line from the first visit I’d paid him earlier in the day.
“Responsibility?” Joe Viola squinted as though he’d never heard of it. Again.
“Fatherhood.”
“Fatherhood?” Also apparently unfamiliar.
“Eleven years ago on April twelfth,” I explained, “you had a baby girl, me, only you didn’t know it.”
“Eleven years ago?”
“Yes.”
“April twelfth?”
“Yes.”
Really, he looked like he wasn’t all that swift. He actually scratched his head. “How could that be?” he said.
I took a deep breath and began to explain what I’d learned about reproduction in health class. “When a man and a woman—”
“Never mind!” he said, in a big hurry.
“Look again!” I demanded, pointing. I’d given him the heart-shaped frame first thing, and calmly explained that he was my father, but so far he didn’t seem to understand what I’d been telling him. He peered at the picture in the frame.
“No, no, no, no, no,” he said. He jabbed the frame with his finger. “That there is a fifteen-cent baseball card available in a million packs of Topps gum. In a cheap frame.” He thrust the heart back through the bars and I took it.
“But—”
He held up a stop-sign hand. “You’re telling me a couple of X’s and O’s on a bubble gum card’s your proof I’m your father? Kid. I sign a lot of cards, every one of ’em suitable for framing. Check the shelves of other ladies in the tri-state area! Come on. That’s just—laughable. Haw, haw, haw.”
“Well, what about this!” I shoved the commemorative keepsake from Maine Medical through the bars. I’d found it in Mom’s scrapbook, where she keeps important things like old Believers programs!
He glanced at the card. “Yeah, so what? You were born. I agree. Obviously you were born. Nobody’s disputing you were born.”
I pointed through the bars at the tiny handwriting at the bottom of the card. “What’s that say.”
He squinted. “Josephine Violet Bloom. So what?” he said again.
“So what? So what?” I grabbed a bar in each hand and spoke slowly and clearly. “Your name is Joseph Viola.” I thumped my chest. “My name is Josephine Violet.”
Joe Viola went very quiet. He went a little pale. Then, he opened his mouth, and he said, “That is thin. That is wafer-thin.”
“Mandy McGhee was my mother!” I said, making two fists and stamping my feet.
“Says right here your mother was Cynthia Bloom.”
“But she used to tell me bedtime stories about a girl called Mandy!”
“So what? My momma told me stories too, doesn’t mean my pop’s Rip Van Winkle!”
I grabbed two fistfuls of my own hair and yanked. I breathed deeply. “Listen to me, you—you felon!”
He shrugged. “I’m kind of a captive audience, here.”
I breathed deeply again. “My mother ran away to find herself when she was eighteen years old. She was away for eight weeks, and then she came home and then nine months later I was born.”
He picked at his thumbnail.
“And she used to tell me bedtime stories about a girl called Amanda Mandolin, who traveled to exotic places and had lots of adventures that always ended happily.”
“Happy endings,” Joe said, “well, there’s the proof there’s no connection to me.”<
br />
“You were married to my mother, Cynthia—” I stood.
“Kid—”
“And she had a baby but didn’t tell you.”
“Kid—”
“She must have wanted to be someone else, to be Mandy—”
“Kid—”
“Because she told me Amanda Mandolin was a real character, a girl who traveled widely and had lots of adven—”
“Kid! Stop! Stop it stop stop stop!”
I stopped, not because he told me to but because I was out of breath.
He was shaking his head slowly, as if it was very heavy and full of something that went side to side, such as sand, or oil, or a Magic 8 Ball. “Believe me,” he said, “I was never married to any Cynthia woman.”
“But—”
“I never had any kid.”
“But—” I ran out of things to say. The face of Joe Viola was so blank, so confuzzled, as Grandpa would say. Was he a drinker? I’d heard of people having blackouts, where they lose entire blocks of time.…
“Look at me,” he said. “Do I look like anybody’s father?”
“Plenty of fathers are incarcerated,” I said, “don’t be snobbish. Plenty of fathers burn things down and pay the price for their—their passion!”
Joe Viola sighed like a soap opera star and dropped down onto his bunk.
I held up the red plastic heart-shaped frame, with his younger self wearing Number 23. “I don’t know what you think the game of baseball is all about,” I said to him through, yes, a blur of tears, “but Winky Wheaton says it’s about connecting. The eye and the ball and the bat and the heart.” I banged fist to chest two beats, right where it hurt. “That’s right, Joe Viola, you arsonist,” I said, “the heart.”
“Oh, I know all about the heart,” said Joe Viola. He sprang up from his bed and strode to the bars and gripped them in knuckled fists. “I loved her with all my heart,” he said, a moan really, while looking me straight in the eye. Oh! Here it was at last! The truth! “I loved her!”
“My—my mother?” I blubbed.
Joe’s face went all twisty with sorrow. “No, not your mother,” he said. (Okay, not sorrow, then.) “For the last time, kid, I never heard of any Cynthia Bloom, let alone in any scenario with me wearing a monkey suit and going on a honeymoon in Vegas!”
“Atlantic City!”
“No!”
“Liar!”
“Whatever!” He thrust a hand through the bars and Mr. Pike half rose from his orange plastic chair down the hall, but sat again when Joe Viola withdrew his hand. But there was his face up against the bars, looking every bit the mug shot.
I would have asked my mother why she ever married such a liar and all-around insensitive person as Joe Viola in the first place, but, of course, I couldn’t. I reached into my sweatshirt pocket.
“Well, I guess you won’t be needing this from your daughter,” I declared, and flapped a stack of Grandpa’s money under his nose. It wasn’t anywhere near the full $2,400 bail, but he sure got the idea. He brightened right up. A look of love came over his face, but I knew it was only for the money.
“Forget it!” I said, flapping the bills again before stuffing them back in my pocket.
“Kid!” he called after me, but I was already gone.
“I’m not your kid, according to you!” I hollered over my shoulder.
Winky Does Not Believe It
I called Winky. So what if he was mad at me and thought I’d put the stink on his sports hero and ruined them both for baseball. I needed my friend.
I explained everything. Winky didn’t say anything, but I felt his friendship and understanding very strongly through the phone line.
“So I think he may be in shock,” I told him. “Heck! He didn’t know!” I said. “It’s perfectly understandable he finds it hard to accept that he’s a dad, my dad, and with his own recent and very public heartbreak, plus his near-death experience at the House of Harmony Church…”
I reached into my pocket and wrapped my hand around the bail money. “It makes a lot of sense that he doesn’t understand what I’m telling him. And we don’t look all that much alike, really, other than the hair and the freckles. Do you think? I think it’s mostly in the eyes.” I stopped talking and the line was quiet.
Winky finally spoke. I wished he hadn’t. “Josie,” he said, “it’s a stretch.”
* * *
I hung up on Winky Wheaton. Then I banged the phone a couple more times for good measure. Then I kicked the phone table and hurt my foot.
I hobbled up to my room. I flopped on my bed and buried my face in the pillow and imagined being dead till I had to lift my head and take a gasping breath. I sat up and looked at the little red plastic heart-shaped frame on my bedside table. There was my father’s—my father’s—XOXO, framed there in that heart, the way they say in love songs on the radio it was written on my mother’s heart, on my heart. Maybe the reason I felt so bad was more than needing help. Maybe it was more than needing money.
And Winky Wheaton! How could he not believe me? How could he do that to me? Winky, of all people, my best friend. I flopped on my tummy again and buried my face in the pillow again and imagined being dead again. Then I fell asleep.
Some time later, I woke with a start. Grandpa was home—I could tell from the lively game show noises clanging and ringing from the TV downstairs. I sat up. I had to try again. Just like Mrs. Blyth-Barrow had told me to. (She was talking about my poor grades and absence of homework and my ennui, whatever that is, but still.)
I would try again. I would make Joe Viola believe me. I would march right back there with my good-faith money and make him believe the truth. Because once he believed me that he was my father, then all my problems—Grandpa, the money, the old folks’ home, the orphanage—all my worries, well they’d go right up in smoke, the magic kind, not the cigarette or arson kind. Poof!
Three Strikes
I bounded down the stairs to tell Grandpa the big, big news. I hoped it wouldn’t give him a heart attack.
“I have something to tell you,” I said to Grandpa. Luckily, he was already sitting down. Not luckily, it was his reclining chair, and he was wicked involved in a TV game show.
“Shhhh,” he said, without even looking at me. “If this gal answers correctly, the money is hers!”
Well, I didn’t have time to wait around.
I said goodbye over the clangs and gongs of The Money Is Mine! Then for the third time that day, I went to the county courthouse.
By now it was near four o’clock, and the sky was heavy with summer heat. Clouds were as big and messy and billowy as my hair.
I marched straight to the courthouse door and gave it a good push. Nothing happened. Then I remembered to pull. I marched down the hall, since Officer Pike was not at his station. As I neared the corner where I’d turn to go down the hall to the jail cells, I heard voices (mumble-mumble four-seamed fastball!) and then laughter (haw-haw-haw!).
I rounded the corner and saw Winky Wheaton sitting on the edge of his seat (my folding chair!) outside Joe Viola’s cell. Asa Pike was leaning against the wall, his arms crossed over his chest and looking like he’d just chuckled. All three of them stopped and stared at me.
“What are you doing here?” I said to Winky.
“Well, you went to see him, and I got to thinking I owed it to myself to ask him what I wanted to know. I asked him what went wrong, how could he throw it all away, the great game? And he said he’d made bad choices.” Here Winky turned to Joe Viola, who lowered his head and lifted his hand like he was the Pope. It was an obnoxious display of pure fakery. Bad choices? I told him that. “He’s humble,” Winky said. “I gotta respect that.”
I rolled my eyes. Then I got back on track with the line I’d planned on opening with, before I got thrown off by Winky being there. “Well, I am here to visit my father!”
Asa Pike chuckled, Joe Viola groaned, and Winky Wheaton turned bright red, as well he should have.
&nbs
p; Viola said, “For the last time, kid, I’m not who you want me to be! I’m sorry—”
“You sure are sorry!” I said at the top of my lungs—
Joe Viola shrugged. Then he yawned.
“Oh, you’re bored?” I said.
“Yeah! This is unbelievably boring!”
“No, you’re boring! You just mope around in here feeling sorry for yourself!”
Asa Pike cleared his throat.
“It doesn’t make any sense!” Joe Viola said.
“It makes perfect sense!” I said.
Winky touched my arm and said, “Josie.”
“Don’t you touch my arm, Winky Wheaton,” I said. I turned on him. “You’re stupid!” How could he sit there and touch my arm and leave me hanging out to dry like that! I thought my head would explode like that lizard I read about in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Reptiles Edition. (It grew back!) “Nothing could be stupider than a blind kid being in love with a game he can’t even see! What a waste!”
I reached into my backpack, pulled out all the good faith bail money, and threw the wad in Winky’s lap. “Here!” I said. “Waste it on the stupid playoffs!”
Winky studied the stack of cash, turning it over in his hands and holding it close to his face to get a good look. “But you just said nothing could be stupider than a blind kid being in love with baseball. You just said, big waste of money.”
“I can think of a bigger one,” I said, glaring at Joe Viola.
Already I was regretting my show of defiance and generosity. (The two are not natural partners.) The truth is, I didn’t really want to give Wink the money. I needed it. I needed to bail out Joe Viola so he could, as my real father, keep me out of the orphanage and take care of everything. I couldn’t do it. I needed things I didn’t even know I needed. Would the bank take our house? Mr. Beebe had all but told me Grandpa’s broke!
“This money smells bad,” Winky said. He sniffed. “Fishy.” He held the money out to me. “Smell it.”
I saw my chance and took it. “You don’t want my stinking money? Fine!” And I yanked it right out of his hands. “I think I’ve made my point!” I hadn’t made any point, but at least I’d got back the money. “Goodbye!” I said bravely.
Josie Bloom and the Emergency of Life Page 10