by Lisa Wingate
“I’m calling Uncle Boone.” With my mother out of touch on her mission in Central America, Uncle Boone was the only one we could turn to. “We can’t just sit here and wait to see what happens tomorrow morning.” My head was a swirl of words as I searched through my cell directory for his number. It was impossible to know what to say at a time like this.
Aunt Lute returned with her bowl. The doorbell rang. Barbie didn’t move. Aunt Lute disappeared down the entryway. The bells chimed on the wall as she opened the door, then chimed again as she closed it and returned to the kitchen.
“It’s best to avoid the front entrance,” Aunt Lute advised as she rinsed her hands in the sink, then dried them on a towel while checking her purple fingernail polish. “A man out there came bearing a camera. I gave them what was left of the fruit, and he made a film of me.”
“He . . . what?” Sliding off my stool, I closed the phone, then crossed the kitchen and the foyer to check the entry hall. Shadows moved outside the door, pressing close, trying to peer through the swirls of frosted glass. Someone knocked, then rang the bell incessantly.
“Hello?” A voice echoed through the wood. “This is Garth Culver with Channel Eight news.”
“Don’t open it,” Aunt Lute whispered. “He’ll think we’ve gone out.” She winked one foggy violet eye before disappearing in the direction of the utility stairs and her room.
Backing away, I dialed Uncle Boone’s number again, and this time he answered. He was on his way home from the lake with some girl giggling in the car. When I told him what had happened, his answer was a string of expletives, followed by a long sigh. “Guess the Postman got caught with his pants down this time. I told him this was gonna happen.”
The girl in his car stopped giggling. I could hear her asking, “What’s wrong, honey?”
What’s wrong? There wasn’t enough time between here and Lake Ray Hubbard to even begin to answer that question.
Within an hour, Uncle Boone was at our house, minus the girl. He forced the reporters off our lawn and back to the public domain of the sidewalk. The chimes on the doorbell finally stopped their insane ringing, and Jewel quit wailing. When Boone came in, Barbie deposited Jewel in the bouncy seat and said to no one in particular, “Take her down to the playroom. She likes to watch the boys.”
I stared at Barbie, wondering what planet she was living on. Could she not hear the boys tearing down the playroom walls? Jewel wouldn’t last five minutes there before someone tipped over her bouncy seat or whacked her with something. But after an hour of nonstop noise, I was willing to do almost anything to keep the baby quiet, so I picked up the carrier and went looking for Aunt Lute. I found her in her apartment over the garage, serenely reading a copy of Lord of the Flies.
Tucking the book cover under her chin, she smiled at me. “Have you seen this novel? It’s very good.”
“Aunt Lute, can you watch Jewel for a few minutes?” I stood in the doorway with the bouncer propped on my hip. Normally, the sibs were strictly forbidden from Aunt Lute’s room—too many prescription bottles, tubes of oil paint, containers of solvent, and hoarded treasures she’d been unwilling to leave behind at her old house. “Uncle Boone’s here. We’re trying to figure out what’s going on.”
“Certainly,” Aunt Lute agreed, smiling as if today were nothing out of the ordinary. “I’ll take her downstairs again, if she requires her mother.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Is there a problem?” Aunt Lute gave me a lucid look, and for the first time today I had the sense that she wasn’t as unaware of our situation as she often seemed.
“I think so,” I admitted, walking into the room and setting the bouncer on the coffee table in front of Aunt Lute’s small sofa. “I think Dad’s really in trouble.”
She nodded gravely. “We lost the farm once. If a man from the bank comes, don’t let the mother leave.” Frowning at Jewel, she stretched out a hand, her fingers crooked and trembling as she pressed a knuckle to Jewel’s foot and lifted it. “Tell her a mother must stay.”
More than once over the years, I’d sat at banquets where my father was the celebrity speaker. I’d heard him blithely tell the story of my grandfather losing the family farm, and the family’s downward spiral into poverty and dysfunction. After a few months, my mother just packed her suitcase and left, the story went. There were seven of us, and my father worked long hours. My oldest sister, Lutia, took on the raising of us as much as she could, but Lute had to work, too, which left us with a lot of time to run the streets. Luckily for us, that first apartment in the city was right down the road from the Boys and Girls Club. . . .
Dad’s “One Thing Can Make All the Difference” speech went on to chronicle the descent into gang life of my father’s eldest brother, the death of a sister in an alcohol-related teenage accident, the gang-related shooting that killed one brother and left another in a wheelchair. Even Aunt Lute, who by my father’s definition had been a brilliant, creative girl, had become trapped in the shadow of the neighborhood, working a mindless factory job while caring for her father and invalid brother. Out of seven siblings, Dad was the only one who’d pried loose the grip of poverty and alcoholism and left his old life behind. He was a poster child for community intervention into the lives of struggling kids. He’d climbed from the ghetto to grab the brass ring.
Sometimes I wondered if, underneath all the hype, there was still the frightened nine-year-old boy who’d wandered the streets alone, locking the world outside, angry at everyone, until a coach at a community sports program lured him into a game of flag football and found a way in.
“Nobody’s leaving,” I told Aunt Lute. As much as the sibs drove me crazy, they were still my family. I knew what it felt like to have the people who were supposed to take care of you decide to move on. My father knew that feeling, too. How could he just take off for Mexico and leave us behind?
When I came back downstairs, Barbie was wrapped around Uncle Boone, her arms interlaced over his broad shoulders, her head buried against his T-shirt, her long blond hair trailing pale and golden against his coffee-and-cream skin. He was patting her shoulder with one hand and trying to dial his cell phone with the other.
I heard a crash down the hall, and one of the sibs—Daniel, I thought—let out an ear-piercing scream.
Barbie lifted her head, trembling as she wiped a mascara-stained cheek. “Can you go get him?” she whimpered.
“Why don’t you?” I snapped.
“Tam . . .” Nothing irked me more than when Barbie tried to use the mom voice on me. She only did it when we were in front of people—so that she’d look like the perfect, parental stepmom, and I’d look like some teenage spoiled brat.
Right now, I didn’t care. “You know what, Barbara? The boys are not my problem. You’re their mother. You’re not my mother, thank God, but you’re their mother. Why don’t you take care of them?”
Barbie’s blue eyes narrowed and turned icy. She disentangled herself from Uncle Boone so she could point a long, French-manicured fingernail in my direction. “Why don’t you stop acting like it’s your world, and we’re just living in it, Tam? Why don’t you just—”
“Me?” Anger and frustration and hatred for Barbie exploded inside me like a land mine. “Me? You’re the one who—”
“All right, all right. Just a minute!” Stepping out of Barbie’s reach, Boone held up his hands like a referee calling time. “You two going at it ain’t gonna help any.” Even after years in the city, and with the big diamond stud in his ear, Uncle Boone was still as country as dirt. “Both of you siddown. We need to talk. There’s a lot bigger problem here than whether the two of you like each other or not.”
By the time Boone finished explaining what he already knew, and what he’d been able to piece together about my father’s financial situation, Barbie was the least of my worries. The fact was that my father was embroiled in a financial scandal that was as large as Ross Burten, who, along with the company’s chief financia
l officer, stood accused not only of bribing city officials, but also of siphoning huge amounts of investor money out of the athletic park project and various real estate developments to support lavish trips, a professional sailing team and boat, several estates and vacation homes, and Ross’s $1.5 million wedding to his third wife. Unfortunately for him, his second wife had tipped off the feds.
The question now was how much my father knew, when he knew it, and whether he’d shared in the ill-gotten windfall. Burten’s ex-wife, who knew my mother and had a particular disdain for middle-aged men with young replacement wives, had implicated my father along with Burten and the rest of the company’s financial management.
Given my father’s current financial state, and the fact that he’d fled to Mexico, the prognosis didn’t look good—for him, or for us. By noon tomorrow, Barbie, the sibs, and I would be out on the street. The new owners of the house didn’t want to talk to us—they just wanted us out. Immediately. Uncle Boone had already tried calling them, and they weren’t budging—especially not for a homeowner facing a federal investigation.
“I told Paul he needed to come clean with it all,” Uncle Boone finished. “I told him he was only gonna dig this thing so wide and deep even Superman couldn’t get out.”
“But he said things were fine,” Barbie protested. “This morning, he said . . . he said he knew the bank account was dry, but it was all a mistake.”
Uncle Boone shook his head. “He was jus’ hoping he could still find a way out. He’s Superman, you know? He jus’ couldn’t buy that it was really gonna come down and everybody’d find out what’s been goin’ on.”
Barbie’s lips trembled. The edges, normally perfect, were smeared where she’d been pinching her mouth with her fingers. “You’re wrong!” She sobbed. “Paul wouldn’t . . . he wouldn’t do those things. You’re wrong!” The rising panic in her eyes said that even she was beginning to understand the nightmare was real.
“I wish I was,” Uncle Boone answered quietly. “I wish I was.”
Barbie stood up abruptly. “Get out!” she hissed. “Just get out!” Spinning around, she flung a hand toward the door and disappeared down the hall, her stilettos tapping a rapid tattoo on the tile.
Uncle Boone’s eyes fell closed. “Man,” he whispered, slowly shaking his head. He looked toward the playroom, where the thumping had started again. Barbie was yelling at the sibs and sobbing at the same time, half ordering them to behave and half pleading with them to be quiet before she went crazy.
“What now?” I whispered. “What do we need to do?” I could get my stuff together, load it in my car, and call Emity—tell her I need a place to stay. Her mom would let me. Maybe we could just . . . head for Europe early.
Where would I get the money? There was nothing in my wallet but a Visa card that apparently wasn’t good anymore and a debit card for the overdrawn household account.
“Pack up everything you can.” Uncle Boone’s voice broke into my thoughts. “The important stuff, the stuff the kids need. The stuff you don’t wanna lose. I’ll bring one of my construction trucks over here in the mornin’. You think you can find some boxes?”
“I guess so,” I muttered, thinking, This can’t be happening. It can’t. I have a golf lesson in the morning. . . .
My head reeled, tears stinging the backs of my eyes. I wasn’t going to cry. I wasn’t. Barbie was the weepy, helpless one. I wasn’t like her. No matter what, I wasn’t like her.
“Where are we going . . . when the truck comes?”
Uncle Boone stood up. “I’ll figure out somethin’. You just work on gettin’ things together—the stuff you need, all the important papers, medicine, diapers . . . all that stuff.” He nodded toward the ongoing commotion of Barbie yelling and the sibs destroying the toy room. “And talk some sense into her.”
Chapter 8
Sesay
If I wait for the young mother to put out her boxes each day, I cannot walk to the mission before the line is too long. You can stand in it, but the rooms will be gone before you reach the door.
I am not bothered by this. I have been watching the family in the yellow house for four days now—checking their boxes. The weather is warm and dry, so nothing is ruined. If I help with cleaning at the Summer Kitchen, the woman there—her name is SandraKaye, but the children call her Mrs. Kaye—will give me a sandwich in a bag, and then Teddy, who tends the church garden, will smile shyly and offer a flower to me. I will trade a bird, or a horse, or a dolphin, if I have one in my pocket. He will laugh and hold it up to twirl in the sun. He is not a normal boy, Teddy. He is the size of a man, but he has the mind of a boy. I can never be invisible to him. He calls my name and waves each time he sees me. He leaves the lock open on the storage barn behind the church. I can sleep in there now, and I am safe for the night.
I bring Teddy good things I have found in the boxes from the new yellow house—a flowerpot that looks like a frog, the handle from a broom, and a little statue of an angel with a broken wing. He placed the angel in the garden and used the broom handle to support a tomato plant behind the church. I am still waiting to see what he will do with the frog.
Each day, MJ at the Book Basket talks about the reading class. “It’ll be starting week after next, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in the evenings,” she says. “Six o’clock. There’s a signup sheet in the Summer Kitchen during lunch.”
“I have watched the family in the yellow house,” I tell her. “In the evenings, the father comes home. The Indian chief stopped to visit them. They were eating supper.”
“They’re relatives—cousins of some kind. I asked him about it.” MJ gives me a crooked look. “You shouldn’t be hanging around looking in people’s windows, Sesay,” she says.
“They cannot see me,” I tell her. “I found some branches they had cut from their bushes. I carved a turtle and a fish. Today, I have a fat little toad. I carved him of pecan wood.” I bring out the little toad that’s made of a knot of wood from their clippings, and I lay it on the counter.
“Looks like it needs a string yet,” MJ notices.
“God will bring one,” I say. “He leaves bits of string everywhere. For the birds.”
MJ smiles and takes a roll of heavy black thread from under the counter. “You can trade me for a story. Come over to the Summer Kitchen for lunch, and you can share a story with the kids after they eat.”
“I may go,” I tell her, cutting the string with my knife and threading it through the toad, then tying it. Next, I cut a second one, because there’s a little lying-down horse in my pocket, as well. “I think we will soon have another yellow house. Across the street from the last one. I have been watching it.”
“I hope not.”
“I think so. I saw the big man with the ponytail—the black man with the hair like mine. Have you seen him? His workers are busy repairing the house.” When the big man and his workers fix a house, they always paint it yellow. Then new people move in. If they do not last long in the house, which usually is so, the big man comes with more workers and a large truck, and they take away what was left in the house, and then repair it for another family to come in.
“Boone,” MJ grumbles. “He’s nothing but a henchman for Householders. I hope you’re wrong about the house. That would make six on Red Bird, now. A few more and they’ll be trying to force everyone out so they can tear the houses down and build condominiums.”
Six, I think, and count the houses in my mind. “I think they will paint the house soon. Yellow.” I imagine the wet paint and wonder how my horse or the fat toad would look in yellow. The horse, perhaps, I decide, but not the toad. The toad should be brown. Perhaps the Indian chief will use brown paint today. Lately, he lays a painting palette by the door, and if I go two steps into the room, I can swipe my finger across and have any color that is there. He does not see me when I come and go, even if he is inside working. “I will share a story after lunch today. For the children,” I tell MJ, and then, “I am going to see the
house now.” If they paint the house yellow, someone new will move in, and there will be more boxes. The family in the last yellow house has fewer boxes now.
I trade for a new book, and MJ gives me my doughnut, and then I slip around the corner to eat it. The Indian chief is painting again. After a bit, he sets one palette by the door and picks up another one. He does not see me, so I slip in to rub a bit of brown on my toad. There is white, too. The Indian chief has painted a rider—a warrior on a horse. The horse is spotted white and brown like a dog. I put white on one finger and brown on another, thinking I will color my horse the same. This horse is for the Indian chief. When paint is on the floor, you can take it. It will dry up anyway. But on a palette, it would be stealing if you did not pay for it. They will cut off your hand for stealing.
“I left a brush there for you,” he says, as I move two steps past the door. He says this without turning around. “It’ll probably work better than your fingers. You can clean it in the cup when you’re done.”
I look around to see who he is speaking to, but there is no one other than me. On the chair by the palette, a brush and a small cup of liquid rest on a square of newspaper. I wipe my fingers on the newspaper, then squat beside the chair, and set down the little horse, and paint it.
I can do much better with the brush. I remember that my grandfather had brushes. He kept them in a small leather pouch. He’d made them from horsehair, and twigs, and a tiny bit of metal from a cracker tin, which he pinched into place to hold the bristles. He carved beads, and painted them, and traded them to a man who came with a donkey and a wagon. My grandfather’s beads were beautiful, but they were never the valuable color. Too many red beads, the man would say. Everyone has red beads today, but I suppose I’ll take them anyway. Then he would do the favor of taking the beads. The next time he came, there would be too many blue beads, or green, or carved ones painted to look like birds or fish. You could never know ahead of time which beads were too many.