by Lisa Wingate
Considering that backyard pools in this neighborhood were about as likely as icicles in July, that didn’t make any sense. “Uhhhh . . . We . . . ummm . . . brought you some cookies,” I muttered. “We live across the street. Just moved in last week.”
She took the cookies and smiled. “Oh, lovely! Crumpets.”
We all stood there for about a half a sec, having one of those awkward silences, and then something inside the house crashed and broke, two little boys hollered potty words at each other, a baby cried, a kid screamed so high the fillings in my teeth rattled, and some lady screeched, “Leave things alone! Do you see what you’ve done?” Then I heard laughing and what sounded like a herd of wild buffalo running through the house. Something toppled—a stack of boxes maybe—and a million tiny pieces of plastic hit the floor and scattered. LEGOs, just guessing. We had some wild times in our house, but nothing like what was going on in this place. A door slammed, and the mom roared like she was going to kill the first kid she could catch.
Benji’s eyes got wide, and him and Ty slid behind me. Ty’s arm slipped around my knee, and I tried to decide whether to say something, or act like I couldn’t hear the commotion.
The lady in the bathrobe didn’t even flinch. She pushed the burglar bars partway closed, just as calm as can be, and said, “Please accept our gratitude for the lovely crumpets. I believe we’d best be heading for the water now.” Pushing the bars closed far enough that only her face was sticking out, she whispered, “The natives are restless.” The boys peeked around my legs, watching the door slowly swing shut as she disappeared into the house, her pink robe floating behind her. The knob latched just as a kid inside screamed so high and so loud it probably shattered windows for a half mile.
“Whoa,” I muttered, and Benji agreed.
“Whoa,” he whispered. I grabbed the boys’ hands and we hustled back over to our side of the street. For the rest of the afternoon, I painted the red wall, caulked trim, and watched the blue house. No one came in or out. While the boys were napping, I went outside and hung around the front lawn, digging up dandelions, and . . . well . . . snooping. By the time Cody came home, I was ready to trade theories about the new neighbors, but Cody showed up tired and in a bad mood and down about the academy. The physical side of the program was no problem for him, but the bookwork side was eating his lunch. Even after spending two nights at a study group with guys from his class, he’d botched a test on juvenile law. Somehow, that was my fault, because the boys were noisy and wouldn’t leave him alone in the evenings. On top of that, he’d checked the bank account on the way home, and we were down to a hundred and sixty bucks until his next paycheck. He blamed it on the money I’d spent on the house, but the truth was, it was just as much his fault for grabbing convenience store food every day instead of taking something from home.
“You can take a sandwich, Cody,” I told him. “It’s not like we can quit working on the house. We’ve got to have it ready before Dell comes, and things need to be safe for the boys, besides.”
Right about then, he sprang it on me that a buddy of his could get him a couple weeks’ work doing a second- shift job at a parking garage downtown. All Cody’d have to do would be sit in the booth and take money. It was quiet there, and he could study his academy stuff, and pick up a few extra bucks at the same time.
“Why don’t you come watch the kids, and I’ll go get a job in the evenings?” I shot back.
He rolled his eyes like I was an idiot. “Yeah, right. And how am I gonna study with Benji and Ty climbing all over me? If I don’t do something, I’m not gonna make it through the bookwork. This isn’t the Push County sheriff’s department, Shasta. The academy’s tough. The parking garage job’ll help us out all the way around. It’s perfect.”
“Perfect for you,” I grumbled, but I knew his mind was already made up. Unless I threw a fit, he was gonna take that job.
He moped around for the next two evenings, grouching at the kids and slamming his books down whenever anybody made any noise, and pretty soon we were all on one another’s nerves. On top of stewing about what it’d be like to be stuck home by myself every evening, I was watching the blue house and wondering if I oughta turn the neighbors in for child abuse. The more time that went by without the kids across the street showing up outside, the more my mind invented twisted possibilities, like something you’d read in one of those cheap paperback thrillers.
I pounced on Cody the minute he hit the front porch on the third day. “I think we should call somebody about those people in the blue house. Sometimes you can hear the kids screaming from all the way across the street,” I told him, and he rolled his eyes, letting me know he didn’t want to talk, or work on the house, or keep the boys busy tonight. He just wanted to sit in front of the TV with a blank look on his face, or stick his nose in a book.
I’d put up with the silent treatment for three days now, and I was sick of it, so I followed him into the living room, even though I knew it’d probably start another fight. “All right, geez, take the stupid job if you want to.” I was surprised to hear those words come out of my mouth, but right now I’d of sent him off to a job cleaning sewers, if someone offered it.
He looked as shocked as I was, and then for a half a sec, he looked like he felt guilty. “It’s just for a few weeks. What’d you say about the people in the blue house?” All of a sudden he wanted to talk. Amazing how nice he could be when he got what he wanted.
“This morning, one of the kids was screaming so loud, he might as well of been on our front porch.”
He crossed the room and parked himself on the sofa. “Our kids are loud. It doesn’t make us child beaters.”
“I’m just saying, maybe if you went over there . . . like, with your academy T-shirt on, just, like, to say hi. Maybe you could get a look at the kids and make sure they’re all right. Normal people don’t keep their kids locked in the house, Cody.”
Rubbing his eyes, he picked up the remote, probably hoping he could turn me off with it. “You watch too much TV.”
That crawled all over me like fire ants, and I was mad before I even knew what was happening. “You know what, Cody? I haven’t turned on the TV in days. I’ve been working on the house, which is more than I can say for you. Dell’s coming the first week of August, and once she makes it up to Oklahoma, Mama and everybody’s gonna know we went and bought a house, and then they’ll show up here to see what we’ve gotten ourselves into this time, and the place’ll still be looking like junk.”
“Junk!” Cody’s good mood went right out the window. He smacked the remote down on the coffee table, so that we could end up having to buy a new one along with everything else we needed. “I’m working my butt off to pay for this place. I thought once we moved out of the apartment, you were gonna stop griping all the time.”
“I thought you were gonna help me with the house, instead of going and getting some stupid night job!” My whole body hurt from climbing ladders, hauling boxes, regrouting tile, pushing furniture around so I could fix the scratches in the dining room floor, and trying to repair the window weights in windows that hadn’t been opened since, like, before air-conditioning was invented. And I’d been dodging phone calls from home forever, and lying in e-mails, because once we actually talked, they’d want to chat with the boys, and the boys would spill about the house, and the family back home would go ballistic, thinking we were on the downward debt spiral again. On top of that, I was pregnant and starting to feel sick in the mornings, and I kept thinking I’d tell Cody once things were settled in the house, but the house bills and the house projects kept piling up, including a leak under the bathroom faucet I hadn’t even told him about. My next big job was to get on the Internet and figure out how to do plumbing.
The pregnant part of me popped to the surface, and the next thing I knew, I was crying like the front row at a funeral, sobbing out words that ran together in a stream of blabber. “You just don’t listen to . . . I’m stuck here all day in this hou
se, and . . . and . . . you don’t . . . you just want to sit there with your face, with your face plastered-in-a-book-and-your-stupid-job-is-all-you . . . you don’t even care if the house looks like junk, and Benji batted the Nerf ball over the fence today, and there’s poison ivy in the creek, and we can’t go, and nobody mows it, and that stupid oleander bush is . . . is dangerous, and . . .” The meltdown was so total, I couldn’t even put together a whole thought that made sense. I wanted to run out the door and get in the car, start driving, and never come back.
Cody swung his leg around and dragged himself off the couch, throwing his hands in the air like a suspect trying to keep from getting shot. “All right. All right, already, I’m off the couch. Geez, cut out the waterworks. I’ll put in a bunch of time on the house this weekend, I promise.”
Even though he was giving in, I felt like I was sinking inside. When Benji and Ty were on the way, I cried over stupid things like peanut butter, Cody’s socks on the bathroom floor, an extra ten dollars on the electric bill. You name it, I cried about it. If Cody’d been paying attention, he would of figured out by now that I was pregnant again. I wanted him to. I wanted it to just dawn on him, instead of me having to make a big announcement. My mother always said men only think about what suits them—like how to get a car running, or how to trade in an old lawn mower for a new .22 rifle, or how to leave behind a wife and kids for the skinny little girl at the bank.
Of course, considering my daddy, Mama didn’t have a real high opinion of men. She couldn’t ever accept that Cody and me might be different—that Cody was the type of guy who’d get up in the middle of the night to rescue a friend stuck on the side of the road, or put his last five dollars in the collection plate at church. He was doing everything he could to get through the police academy so he could give his family a better life.
All of a sudden, I felt guilty for chewing on him. I didn’t want to fight. I didn’t want to end up like my mama and daddy.
“Sorry,” I whispered. “I’m just tired.”
“Don’t work so hard,” he said, like it was that simple; then he took a drink of his Dr Pepper and set it back on the table.
“I have to work hard. It’s not like I can keep Mama away forever. I don’t want the family to see this house until it’s done. You know they don’t think we can make our own life here. They just want to see us tuck tail and run home, so we can live under their thumbs forever.”
Cody frowned like he’d just bitten into something with a bad taste. “Who cares what your mom thinks? She doesn’t have a choice in it. That’s why we moved down here, right? To get everyone off our backs and out of our business.”
“We can’t keep your mom and dad away forever, either,” I pointed out, and Cody swallowed hard.
“Yeah,” he muttered. “I’m gonna go work on the yard.”
Something in the bushes outside caught my eye just as Cody walked past me on his way to the kitchen. He turned like he saw it, too.
“What was that?” I asked.
Cody shrugged. “The wind, I guess.”
“I swear somebody’s out there sometimes.” Chill bumps ran over my shoulders and made me shudder.
Cody’s sour look came back. “Don’t start up about the green-pants lady again, all right? Nobody’s out there.”
I rubbed my hands up and down my arms and checked the window. “Wait, wait, Cody, wait!” The door was opening across the street. “Someone’s coming out of the blue house. Look, look, look!”
Stopping in the doorway, Cody rolled a glance back over his shoulder. “Wooo, call in the National Guard.”
“I haven’t seen anybody come out of there in three days. Not since the morning after they moved in. The girl went somewhere for a little while, and then she came back, and since then, nothing. Oh, look, it’s the girl. Oh, oh, and the lady.”
Cody pinched his T-shirt between his fingers and pulled the fabric over his mouth. “Dispatch, dispatch, this is Williams. Ten-sixty-six on a girl and a lady in the driveway on Red Bird. I need backup. Repeat, need backup. Have a girl and a lady. Repeat, girl and a lady.”
“You’re such a jerk,” I said, but I couldn’t help laughing. Cody could always make me laugh. “You think that’s her daughter? Because that lady doesn’t look old enough—”
“I don’t know.” Which translated to, I couldn’t care less.
“Well, come look and see what you think.”
“I’m not going to come look.”
“No, really, Cody, she’s . . . Oh, my gosh, wait. I think they’ve got a flat tire on their car.” I was vaguely aware that I was hopping up and down in the doorway, and if the neighbors looked over here, they’d think I was a loony tune. “Come look.”
Cody wandered back across the room, huffing out a big breath, like I was on his nerves. I could tell that, considering a car was involved now, he was more interested.
Across the street, the woman and the girl were squatted down beside the tire.
“Yup, looks like a flat,” Cody agreed. “I’m gonna head on out and mow.”
“Don’t you dare.” Snapping a hand out, I caught his shirt. “Go over there and see if they need help.”
“They’ve probably got it under control.”
I smacked him in the stomach, because I knew he was just messing with me. No way Cody would go mow the yard while there were a couple women across the street with a flat tire. “Come on, Cody, do they look like they know how to change a tire?”
“They don’t even look like they know what neighborhood they’re in.”
“There’s no man over there, either. Just those two, the three boys that were tearing the house down the other day, a baby, and the grandmother I gave the cookies to. Not exactly sure, but I think she’s nuts.”
“Was she wearing green pants?”
“Cod-eee!”
He rested his hands on my shoulders. “So, we’ve got two blondes, a crazy lady, three wild boys, and a baby?”
“Yes . . . right. And a cat.” The women were opening the back of the Escalade now—looking for tools, I guessed.
“Sounds like a knock-knock joke. Knock-knock. Who’s there? Two blondes, three wild boys, a grandma, and a baby . . .”
“Cod-eee.”
“And we’re getting involved why?” he asked, but he was laughing, and before he went out the door, he glanced back at me and winked, his eyes glittering like shiny black beads. When Cody looked at me like that, I totally remembered why I fell for him in high school. He could be so cute when he wanted to.
The boys came out of their bedroom while he was jogging across the street. “Where Daddy go?” Ty wanted to know.
“Daddy’s going to see if the people over there need help with their flat tire.”
“The weirdo people?” Benji asked.
“Benji! That’s not nice! You don’t call people weird.”
Benjamin looked up at me with his eyebrows pinched in his forehead, as in, I got that from you.
The three of us stood watching through the glass while Cody introduced himself to the neighbors. Both women backed a few steps away, like they were scared of him. Only the younger one shook his hand. They talked about the tire for a minute; then Cody went around to the hatch to look for the jack and lug wrench. The older blonde went back in the house and the younger one stayed with Cody. A minute later, the crazy grandma came out, carrying the baby girl. Two of the boys followed her.
Ty perked up. “There’sa boys!”
“I wanna go,” Benji chimed in.
“You guys grab your shoes.” After watching these people for days, I was dying to get up close and personal—do a little private investigation, so to speak.
Walking across the street, I started to think maybe I should of minded my own business. The girl looked like the type who’d go around with her nose in the air. She was dressed like one of those models giving a preview of cute summer looks on the morning show. Her T-shirt had some kind of designer label on it, and she was wearing a sh
ort, pleated skirt, kneesocks, and tennis shoes, her legs long and smooth, a light caramel color—the kind of tan you paid for, not the kind you were born with, like mine. She looked young and hip.
The closer I got, the more disgustingly cute she was. I had a mental flash of how I probably looked—old Hugo football T-shirt that used to be Cody’s, jeans with holes in the knees and red paint dribbled down one leg, a sloppy ponytail with pieces of straight black hair flying in the wind. All of a sudden I felt like somebody’s frumpy old mommy.
“It’s Annah Mon-nanna!” Ty pointed at the girl, his body jittering as we stepped over the curb.
I felt even worse, if that was possible. “She’s not Hannah Montana,” I whispered out the side of my mouth. Although, come to think of it, she did look like Hannah. “And, Benji, no calling anybody weird, you hear me?” I muttered as we started up the driveway. Hannah was still occupied with Cody and the tire, but the crazy lady and the boys saw us coming. The boys slid around behind their grandma and hid in the folds of her bright-colored Hawaiian dress. She had some kind of scarf wrapped and twisted on her head, so that she looked like the Chiquita banana lady. “Greetings.” She held up a hand.
“Hi,” I answered. “We met the other day. We live across the street. The cookies . . . we dropped off . . . cookies?” I looked toward the house, and a bedsheet that was tacked over one of the windows flipped back into place, which meant someone was watching us from inside. I introduced the boys, and the baby girl reached toward me, trying to push out of her grandma’s arms. The grandmother handed her off like it was an everyday thing to give a baby to someone you didn’t even know.
The baby smiled, and babbled at me, and looked up at me with big blue eyes. I bounced her on my hip and talked nonsense, and she gave me a smile that was toothless, except for the bottom two in the center. In about two and a half seconds, I was in love. Baby love. She smelled like Johnson’s shampoo and powder, and that smell pulled at me like nothing else could. I missed having a baby in the house. I missed having someone who needed me and thought I was the center of the universe. The boys were already starting to find their own lives, but a baby girl would always be mine. As she grew up, we’d do all the special things mothers and daughters do.