by Lisa Wingate
“Pppfff!” From the corner of my eye I saw Shasta’s hand flutter. “The boys think we’ve got Hannah Montana living across the street. Wait until they find out you’re a future TV star. You’ll be, like, their favorite celebrity.”
“I’m not a celebrity.” I didn’t want to be anyone’s celebrity. I just wanted to go back to life the way it had been.
Tears stung the back of my nose, the floor blurred, and I felt my mind and body coming in for a crash landing—vulnerable, out of alignment, none of the instruments reading correctly. I blinked hard, pretended to rub my eyes because they were tired. “I should go home.” My voice broke. The words trembled.
I heard Shasta cross the floor, felt her touch my shoulder. “Hey, I’m sorry. Sometimes you’ve just got to ignore me the way you’d ignore one of those pocket poodles that barks too much. I’ve got a big mouth. I’ve always had a big mouth. Stay for a cup of cocoa, all right? I won’t be able to sleep now, anyway. Cody’ll be home in less than an hour, and he can walk you back across the street.”
Shasta didn’t wait for an answer, but opened a cabinet, took out two cups, and filled them with water. “Ummm . . . by the way. Cody doesn’t exactly know about the baby yet, so don’t say anything, all right? I’m kind of waiting for a good time to break the news.” Frowning, she smoothed her T-shirt. “There’s a lot of stress right now, with the house, and the police academy, and bills, and everything. It’s complicated, sort of.”
She slipped the cups into the microwave, and then stood drumming her fingers on the counter, watching the countdown on the microwave instead of looking at me.
After the cocoa was ready, we moved to the dining room and sat at an antique wooden table with climbing roses painted underneath a layer of varnish. When I complimented the artwork, Shasta ran a hand over it. “We picked the table up at a yard sale right before we moved in. I thought I could make it look a little better with a paint job—spruce it up before Cody’s mom comes to visit. Lord knows she’s never bought anything at a yard sale in her life.”
I took a sip of cocoa, letting it soothe the lump in my throat. “Nothing wrong with recycling. In the pre-Barbie days, my mom loved to bring home flea-market finds, polish them, and use them in the house. She got a thrill when people came for parties and asked who her decorator was.”
Shasta rested her chin on her hand. “Really? I never pictured y’all for the flea-market type.”
“Barbie’s a lot different from my mom.”
“I kinda figured.” Shasta poked at a marshmallow floating in her cocoa. “It’s weird, the whole blended-family thing, huh? My dad left when I was eleven. Took off with the girl from the bank. I’ve got half sisters I haven’t ever met. I don’t miss it, really. I just don’t, like, think of them as my sisters.”
Something in the words struck a chord in me. I’d never thought of the sibs as anything more than a nuisance—a middle-aged whim my father had inflicted upon my life. The chance to move away and leave them behind couldn’t come soon enough, as far as I was concerned. Until the past two weeks, I’d never felt a tie to them, never considered that they weren’t just Barbie’s little toys. They were my brothers and my sister, and they always would be. Whether I liked Barbie or not, I did love them, and if Barbie wouldn’t take care of them, I’d have to find a way to do it.
The possibility scared me to death.
Without intending to, I admitted that to Shasta, and we fell into a conversation about my life, her life, the reasons we’d moved to the neighborhood. Even though it felt good to finally open up and talk to someone, I knew better than to tell her too much. If she found out my father was the man on the Householders commercials, the one who was now frighteningly close to the center of the Rosburten financial scandal, our friendship would probably be over. I wondered if she’d even seen the reports about Rosburten, and if she knew that Householders was connected, but I wasn’t about to ask. I settled for explaining that my father had some business troubles, and we’d lost our house. The economy being what it was, that seemed enough of an explanation.
“That’s happening a lot of places.” Shasta cast a sympathetic look across the table. “So where’s your dad now?”
“Trying to work things out.” The answer was intentionally vague, emotionless. I didn’t know how to feel about my father. I hated him, and yet, I needed him. He’d left us twisting in the wind, but I wanted him to be our Superman again.
“Is he coming back?” Shasta seemed to have read my thoughts.
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Pushing her empty cocoa cup aside, Shasta turned an ear to the sound of a car in the driveway. “That must be hard,” she said quietly, and we watched as the glow of headlights pressed through the doorway. I wondered what Shasta’s husband would think when he walked in, tired after working two jobs, and saw me sitting in his dining room in the wee hours of the morning.
Standing up, I took my cup, and we walked to the kitchen.
“This was fun.” Shasta smiled at me as we stood washing our cocoa cups. “So, we’re on for the bookstore, lunch, and story time tomorrow?”
I considered the question. It seemed strange to be making plans after so many days of drifting in limbo, waiting for the pattern of life to suddenly morph into something that made sense. Adopting a schedule here, in this place, seemed like an admission that we were moving to a new kind of normal. On the other hand, the alternative was to continue wandering in denial, and with Barbie in the house, we had enough denial already. “Sure. All right. Come over about eleven, and we’ll go to the bookstore first.”
“Sounds good,” she said. “What about the thing with the volunteer tutors—the info session tomorrow night? Volunteering might work out, if we did it together. I think I’m too chicken to go by myself.”
“I’ll give it some thought,” I said, wondering if I was ready for a kind of normal that included homeless people and adults who couldn’t read.
“I think you’d be good at it,” Shasta said as we met her husband at the carport door.
“Shas, how come all the lights are . . .” Stumbling off the bottom step, he gave me a surprised look.
“We got caught up visiting,” Shasta explained, and we smiled privately at each other, the secrets between us forming the first fragile bonds of a friendship.
I had a feeling she needed it as much as I did.
Chapter 20
Sesay
For seven days, I have stayed in the parking garage five streets from the Broadberry Mission. A whisper in my head tells me it is time to gather my pack and walk on, find a new place. When I close my eyes, I hear the mother in the yellow house shouting, I’ll call the police! If she sends the police to find me, they’ll tell him. So I must keep away from all the normal places. I should walk on, go to a new place, but I’m weary of all this coming and going. I like to be here. I like telling my stories at the Summer Kitchen, and getting my doughnut at the Book Basket, and painting with the Indian chief, and listening to Michael at his Crossings Church underneath the bridge.
But the police could be waiting in those places. He could be waiting there. If you run away without paying what you owe, he will find you. And you always owe, he says in my mind. You people owe me for everything. You show up on a boat, half-starved, half-dead. I take you in, give you work, let you stay on my place. If it weren’t for me, you’d all be dead. The police would put you on a boat and send you right back, and then what do you think would happen? If the ocean doesn’t get you, the guerrillas will. I’m all you people’ve got. Your only friend in the world . . .
Wretched, ungrateful scum . . .
Think you’re too good to cut cane?
He talks in my head so often now. More than usual. I cannot stay here in the parking garage any longer, alone with him. And there is no food here. I had a bit in my pack, but it is gone. I must either walk on to a new place or go back to the places I know, so I gather up my pack and say a prayer before I step onto the street.
/> Does God answer the prayers of a thief, a wretched one like me?
He is always mindful of us, Father Michael promises in my mind. He has done all these things so that we might look for him, and reach out, and one day find him. He is never far from any of us.
Does God wish me to find Him?
Or will He find me?
I let my feet carry me into the sunlight, and I hope that Father God walks with me. He is never far from any of us. Acts 17:27. I have remembered it from one of Michael’s many books.
Michael is surprised when he finds me standing in line at the Glory Wagon. “I was afraid you’d moved on.” In his eyes, there is a soft sigh, as a man gives when a child he’d feared for comes walking along the path, safely home. He was not afraid I had walked on. He was afraid I lay dead somewhere. The streets down here are dangerous at night.
I tell him that I thought I might walk on, but I have walked here instead. “Father God led me this way. He is never far from any of us,” I say, and Michael smiles, and this pleases me, and then I am worried again. I wonder if the mother of Root and Berry will bring the police and Michael will tell them I have been here.
“MJ from the bookstore came looking for you. She said she hadn’t seen you in a week,” Michael says. “The kids missed you during story time at the Summer Kitchen, too. Mrs. Kaye and Cass down there asked about you. They’ve gotten used to seeing you with the regulars.”
They’ve gotten used to seeing you. It’s dangerous, I know, but a bright feeling comes with it, like light shining in a window. Someone watches for me to come. No one has ever watched for me before. “Sometimes I go about in different places,” I say. “Sometimes it’s safer to be in a different place.”
Michael only frowns and shakes his head, because he cannot understand the ones like me, the ones who must wander. “You got anything for me?” he asks. “I’m all out of your carvings in the mission store. A volunteer from Grand Prairie bought the whole stock to give to her Sunday-school kids.”
“Just these,” I say, and take two small Jesus crosses from my pocket and hold them out to him. They are on a green string from the barrier at the edge of a children’s playing field in the park. “Only two.”
“Only two?” Michael repeats. “After all this time?”
“Are two enough for my meal?” I ask, and look toward the wagon, where the line is growing smaller, like the tail of a snake disappearing through a hole in the wall.
Michael laughs and takes the crosses and admires them. “Of course two are enough.”
“Then I have two,” I say, but my pocket is heavy, and Michael can see this.
“So you’re holding out on me now?”
“I must bring some to the Indian chief. The one who paints behind the Book Basket.”
Michael’s lips part, and his teeth are straight and white. His teeth are beautiful. “Oh, Terence,” he says, and I tell him yes. “He’s a good guy. He stayed with us at the mission for a while when he got out of prison. We used to sell his stuff in the mission store. That was years ago, and he’s big-time now, of course.”
I try to imagine that the Indian chief, with his large building and his many colors of paint, once stood in line at the mission. How can this be? “Have you gone to the Book Basket?” I ask. How long might the police look for me? I wonder. Will they find me if I visit the Indian chief? It troubles me that I have told him I will bring more carvings, but I haven’t come. I am a thief, but I do not tell lies.
The voice inside continues to whisper that no place is safe. You must gather your things and run, the voice says. But when I am walking, there is no time to carve. There is only the walking. The journey is lonely, and it is more difficult now. My legs are not so young. The new places are difficult to learn.
I have hummingbirds, large ones, and other things in my pocket, and in a new place, there will be no paint for them.
“You should go down and see MJ today,” Michael tells me, as if he knows I am walking in my mind. “Everyone’s been asking about you. You’re missed.”
Missed? I think about the good thing to say now. If so many people know of me, he will surely hear. “Have men come around?” I ask, and Michael presses his lips together, so that the bottom one sticks out, as if he is a child confused by the middle of a story, so I explain, “New men? A different type of men?”
A bell rings on a church steeple somewhere out of sight, and Michael turns an ear toward the music, but he watches me, as if he would crack me open like a book and know my story. “Some new families, I think, but it’s pretty much the same people around there. What kind of men are you worried about?”
“Bad men.”
Michael laughs and lays a hand on my shoulder, and I feel the comfort, the holiness of him. It comes out of him and travels into me. “No worse than here.” He steers me forward in the food line, then walks away, but he leaves a chain of words behind. “There are no bad men. Just the lost looking to be found, sister.”
Near the Glory Wagon, a girl is handing out pieces of blue paper and talking about the reading class at the Summer Kitchen. “There’s a beginning session tonight,” she tells a woman with two children on her skirts.
I think about the cane fields burning.
Then I think that when the ashes cool and the hunters go away, even the rabbits must return.
Chapter 21
Shasta Reid-Williams
I hadn’t ever pictured myself as a teacher. Honestly, I hadn’t ever thought of myself as anything but Daddy’s girl, and then the girl my daddy didn’t want anymore. After that, all I could think about was getting a boyfriend to love me the way my daddy didn’t, and then finally being in love with Cody, getting married, and starting my own family to replace the broken one I grew up in. All my life, I was part of somebody else—somebody’s girl, because that’s what I needed to be. Now I was Benji and Ty’s mama and Cody’s wife, but it never crossed my mind to wonder what else I could be—until the day we were supposed to start tutoring students in the reading class.
I stood looking at myself in the mirror—just stood there in my bra and panties with fifteen outfits piled on the bed. I’d tried every one of them on and yanked them back off, because I couldn’t decide what somebody’s reading tutor oughta wear. It didn’t matter what I put on. I still looked like a total poser that nobody would want for a reading tutor. A week of training doesn’t turn you into someone totally different, like Cinderella heading to the ball. The Literacy Here Group can put you in a class and show you how to use the curriculum materials and teach you ways to relate to adult learners and send you home with videos where other tutors talk about their experiences and their methods. They can try every way in the world to get you ready, but they can’t give you confidence in yourself. Deep down, after all the training, you’re still the same raggedy girl. Whoever ended up with me for a tutor was gonna take one look and laugh their head off.
The phone rang, and I knew it’d be Tam. She was probably out in the driveway waiting for me. She probably looked like Hannah Montana, headed to Beverly Hills 90210.
I picked up the phone and said, “Yeah, hey, I’m almost ready. I couldn’t decide what to wear.” As soon as I said it, I wished I wouldn’t’ve. Someone like Tam probably never had trouble deciding what to wear.
She laughed on the other end of the phone. “T-shirt and jeans,” she said. “Remember, they said not to show up in anything that looked too intimidating. By intimidating, I think they mean expensive.”
“Do you own anything that doesn’t look expensive?” I asked, and she scoffed.
“Just get dressed, all right? We’d better be going. Barbie took off with Fawn again, so I’m taking the sibs with me, and you know how that usually turns out. Prepare yourself.”
“She’s gone again?” For the past week, Tam’s stepmother’d either been passed out in bed, or partying with her friend Fawn. We’d had to drag the kids along to training every single day. Barbie just walked out the door whenever she felt like
it, and figured somebody was gonna look after her babies. I couldn’t imagine doing that to kids, especially after their daddy’d just left them. When my daddy left, at least I had my mama, and Nana Jo, and Grandpa, and my aunts and uncles.
Even though I felt sorry for Tam’s little brothers and Jewel, I really didn’t want to mess with the wild bunch tonight, when my nerves were already shot. “You sure you can’t, like, plug in a movie and leave them home with Aunt Lute? We’ll just be gone a little over two hours.” Moving those kids from place to place was like trying to take guppies for a walk. They just darted off whenever they felt like it. They made my boys look like angels.
“I think that would be child endangerment.” Tam sounded beat, like it’d been a long day already, and she didn’t feel like going anywhere.
“You need to kick your stepmother in the butt and tell her to watch after her kids, or else. She’ll do it if she has to.”
“I wish.” Tam’s voice trembled, and I was sorry I’d griped. I was being selfish because I was stressed about the reading class.
“Hey,” I said. “Hang in there, all right? It’s gonna be okay. This reading class’ll give us something else to think about—like the video said, ‘a higher calling.’ ”
Her sigh fluttered like laundry on a clothesline. “I shouldn’t be starting this. Everything’s so up in the air right now. . . .” Her voice faded at the end, and I knew she was trying to think of how to tell me she didn’t want to do the reading tutoring thing at all.
“C’mon, don’t whiff on me the first day. Think free child care.”
She sighed again. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll be there in a minute.”
She was honking out front almost before I could dig a T-shirt and jeans out of the pile and get them on. I glanced one more time at the impostor in the mirror. She looked fat in the loose T-shirt, and her hair was hanging dark and stringy around her face. If Daddy’s little princess or a reading tutor was in there anywhere, I couldn’t see her.