by Geof Johnson
“I fixed it already, Jamie.”
“I’m gonna be Walter, and Rollie’s gonna be…I don’t know what he’s going to be, but we’re gonna go trick-or-treating and we’re gonna get lots of candy and —”
“Jamie,” Rachel said, “Rollie can’t go trick-or-treating with you.”
“Yes he can. He’s my first best friend.”
“His parents won’t let him.”
Jamie looked at his mother with a confused expression. “Why? Everybody goes.”
“Not everybody,” Carl said. “Some people don’t believe in Halloween.”
“What? Nu uh, you’re wrong. He believes in Halloween. He told me so. He does, Daddy.”
“Well, maybe he does, but his parents don’t, and they’re the ones who count.”
“Well, they don’t have to go. He can come with us.”
“His parents don’t want him to go. Not with you or anybody else. They’re going to church instead.”
“Nobody goes to church on Halloween. Not even Gramma.”
“I do if it’s on a Sunday,” Evelyn said.
“Is it on a Sunday?”
“No, Jamie,” Rachel said. “It’s just what they do. They go to church. It’s fine. You don’t have to do everything with him.”
* * *
As bad as Halloween was for Jamie without his first best friend, Thanksgiving was worse. Rollie went out of town with his parents, Gina didn’t come to visit, and it rained the whole time. It was the worst Thanksgiving of his whole long life.
Christmas, however, was the best. Rollie’s mother had to work until Christmas Eve, but Rachel was off for school break, so Rollie stayed at Jamie’s house every day until Rollie’s parents came home from work. Rollie came over every morning with a backpack full of toys — action figures — the toys of choice for little boys. And the best action figure of them all was Commander Hawk.
Rollie not only had the official Commander Hawk action figure, he had some of his many accessories, like the Commander Hawk plane and the Commander Hawk jeep. He even had the Ranger Randy action figure, but nobody wanted to play with Randy — he was a sidekick.
By the end of Christmas break, Jamie was a convert. No more Walter the Wizard. It was all about Commander Hawk.
Chapter 10
One Saturday afternoon in March, Jamie and Rollie played on the swings while their mothers sat in the gazebo and talked. Their mothers would’ve paid closer attention to the boys if they had overheard their conversation.
“I can jump out of my seat and fly all the way to that tree.” Rollie pointed.
“No you can’t,” Jamie said.
“Can too.”
“You’re too chicken. I dare you.”
“Oh yeah? Watch this!” Rollie pulled back with all of his strength on the back swing, zoomed forward and let loose. Rollie was air born.
Rollie screamed and their mothers came running.
* * *
That night, while lying in his bed, Jamie thought about his friend. Rollie didn’t come home from the hospital until almost dark, and Gramma sent over a casserole because Rollie’s parents were upset about him and didn’t want to cook. Rollie had a broken collarbone. No more outside play for a while.
Jamie felt bad about what happened, especially since he had dared Rollie to jump. Rollie acted like it hurt a lot, when he thrashed on the ground, holding his right shoulder, crying and screaming at the same time.
But Jamie was certain, right before he drifted off to sleep, that if he had jumped from the swing, he would’ve flown all the way over the house.
Chapter 11
One evening in late March, Rachel sat at the computer desk in the family room. “I just got an e-mail from Lisa. They’re moving back!”
“When?” Carl asked.
“June.” She spun her chair around to face him. “They want us to let them know if there are any houses for sale in our neighborhood.”
“How about the Blakes’ house? It’s just two doors down from Rollie’s.”
“That’s a nice place, and it’s been on the market for at least six months. I’ll bet they’re eager to sell it.” Rachel looked at Jamie, who was reading on the couch.
“Jamie, the Callahans are moving back. They have a girl your age, Grace Mary.”
To Jamie, “your age” sounded promising. The “girl” part did not.
“You met before you were born,” Rachel said.
That made no sense to him.
“I’m sure you two can be friends.”
Now she was talking crazy.
* * *
June came, and the second Saturday found Jamie and Rollie lying under the bushes at the edge of Rollie’s yard. They were on a surveillance mission. “Surveillance” was a Commander Hawk word for spying. They had their official Commander Hawk helmets on and were using their Commander Hawk binoculars. They’d had a heated argument about who got to be Commander Hawk, but decided they both could, since neither of them wanted to be Ranger Randy — he was a sidekick.
They spied on the house two doors down with the moving truck out front. “Do you see anything?” Jamie asked.
“Just boxes and stuff,” Rollie said.
“Wait, there’s a bike. It’s red.”
“I see it. Is red a boy’s color?”
“Could be,” Jamie said. “I had a red tricycle.” Just then a minivan pulled up in front of the truck.
“Somebody’s getting out of the back…I see sparkly shoes,” Rollie said.
But when they saw the kid with the curly red hair, Jamie said, “Aw, it’s a girl.”
* * *
Late that afternoon, Jamie was in the family room with his mother when the doorbell rang.
“They’re here!” Rachel said. “Come on, Jamie, let’s go let them in.”
Jamie followed her to the front door. When she opened it, he saw three people on the front porch: two grownups and the girl with the curly red hair.
“Lisa, Larry!” Rachel said, throwing her arms around them. “And you must be Grace Mary. She looked at the girl. “Aren’t you cute!”
“We call her Fred,” Lisa said.
“Oh. Well, this is Jamie.” She turned and gestured toward him.
Jamie and Fred eyed each other suspiciously.
“Come in, come in.” Rachel held the door open. “Mom! Carl! They’re here.” She led them inside. “Let’s go out back.”
On the way to the back door, Jamie said, “Fred’s a boy’s name.”
“I’m not a boy,” Fred said.
“Then why do you have a boy’s name?”
As Fred wound up to kick him, Lisa grabbed her shoulder and pulled her back, Fred’s foot narrowly missing Jamie’s shin.
“Her full nickname is Fred the Firecracker,” Lisa said. “I think you’ll be able to see why.”
Fred made a face like she smelled a fart, but when they opened the back door and she saw the playset, she said, “Wow,” and took off running.
* * *
Jamie and Fred played on the swings while their parents talked in the gazebo.
“I have a creek,” Jamie said. “It’s got snakes and frogs and stuff.”
“I wanna see a snake,” Fred said.
“We saw one, me and Mom and Rollie. It was a cottonmouth.”
“Why would a snake have cotton in its mouth?”
“They don’t, they just call it that. It’s real poisonous. It can kill you dead, just like that.”
“Let’s go find one.”
“There aren’t any in the creek right now. They went somewhere else.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do.”
Jamie was changing his opinion of this torch-headed girl. Most girls were Miss Goodie Two-Shoes Scaredy-Cats, but not this one.
“Well, then let’s see who can jump the farthest,” she said.
“From the swing? We’re not supposed to do that.”
“Why, are you chicken?”
“No,
we might get hurt.”
“Oh, you are chicken. I’m gonna jump anyway.”
“Mom,” Jamie yelled. “Fred’s gonna jump out of the swing!”
“No jumping, kids,” his mother called back from the gazebo.
“See?” Jamie said.
“Tattletale.”
“I’m not a tattletale,” Jamie said firmly. “Besides, you might get hurt like Rollie. He jumped out and broke his collarbone and had to go to the hospital and everything.”
“Who’s Rollie?”
“He my first best friend. He lives across the street.”
Fred turned her head away. Jamie suddenly worried that he might’ve hurt her feelings. “But you can be my friend, too,” he said. “You can be my second best friend.”
“I don’t want to be your second best friend.”
Jamie had to think about that. One swing. Two. “Okay, you can be my other first best friend.” After all, he reasoned, if you can have two Commander Hawks, you can have two first best friends.
“Okay.” She smiled. “You can be my first best friend, too.”
* * *
That night after dinner, Rachel and Lisa watched Jamie read to Fred. The kids sat side-by-side on the couch.
“That’s pretty amazing,” Lisa said. “How’d he pick it up so fast?”
“He just likes books. We read to him all the time. Do you read to Fred?”
“Some. It has to be something she likes, or she won’t pay attention.”
“Why don’t you try some of our books? I bet she’d like the Walter the Littlest Wizard series. Jamie loves those. God, we’ve read those a million times. They’re short, too. You can read one in about five minutes.”
“That sounds good. How ’bout if I take a couple home and see?”
* * *
The next day, Lisa came over with Fred and brought the books back. “She liked them okay,” Lisa told Rachel as she handed them to her. “She doesn’t think much of Princess Pansy.”
“She doesn’t do anything.” Fred scowled. “All she does is get saved all the time.”
Lisa rolled her eyes. “She’s our little feminist.”
“What’s a feminist?” Fred asked.
“Well, it’s a…I’ll explain later.” She gave her a little shove. “Now go find Jamie. I think he’s out in the yard.”
Chapter 12
Rachel thought Jamie’s birthday party that July was the best one yet. Since Fred’s birthday was the day before his, they decided to have a combined event, and everybody came, including Rollie’s family and Carl’s parents. The gazebo was crowded, even with the kids playing on the swings, but everybody seemed to have a good time.
For once, Pete didn’t talk about money, and Rachel decided that he could be quite charming when he didn’t. Even Carl seemed to enjoy having him there. Pete entertained them with stories of Hendersonville back in the old days.
Pete leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “You see, our family goes way back, since before the Revolutionary War. My ancestor fought for the patriots and settled here right after the war. There’s a road out off highway 64 called Campground — there’s a big cemetery there filled with Sikes, going all the way back to the 1700s — but that used to be called Rugby Road.”
He sat up straight and pointed for emphasis. “Now, back in my father’s day, there were two Rugby Roads, which sounds confusing, but it didn’t matter to the mailman. Hendersonville was so small back then, he knew everybody, so if a letter was to Bob so-and-so on Rugby Road, it didn’t matter which Rugby Road, ’cause he would’ve known Bob personally.”
“How big was the town back then?” Larry said.
“Oh, there probably weren’t but twenty thousand people in the whole county. We’re over a hundred thousand now.”
“Are those year-round people?” Garrett said.
“Mostly, I guess, but it used to fluctuate a lot. Back before everybody got air conditioning, people from Florida and South Carolina came to spend their summers here. Flat Rock was built by rich people from Charleston who wanted to get away from the heat, and the malaria, too, so they put a railroad spur out there and they built those big houses. Those folks had money. They weren’t farmers like the year-round folks.”
“Nowadays,” Larry said, “people come to see the leaves change and buy tacky knick knacks from the shops.”
“Or go to Asheville and see the Biltmore house,” Carl said.
Rachel smiled. “I remember going there.”
Her mother folded her napkin. “I took you there when you were little.”
“I’d like to see it again.”
Lisa patted her chest. “Me, too.”
“I’ve never been,” Adele said. “We should go before school starts.”
“But, as I was saying before I was interrupted,” — Pete narrowed his eyes — “things have really changed around here.”
Garrett put down his paper cup. “Where did you live before you moved out to that golf community?”
“Only about a mile from here.”
“You didn’t like it?”
“It was fine until they opened that home for the retards down the street.”
Rachel couldn’t believe he said that word in front of everybody. Pete was losing his charm.
“A what?” Lisa asked.
“You know, one of those community homes where they let a few adult retards live and one smart person lives with ’em, to help out. I think the Lutheran Church bought it and….”
Rachel didn’t want to hear anymore. She glanced at Carl and saw that he had his hand on his forehead and was looking at his feet. Rachel stood and said quietly to her mother, “I think I’ll clean up.”
“I’ll help.” Her mother stood.
Lisa got up and started helping, too. As the three of them carried armloads of stuff to the house, Lisa said, “I think I’d better go.”
Rachel furrowed her brow. “So soon? The kids are still having fun.”
“I…I need to take care of a few things.”
“Okay. Is Larry going, too?”
“I don’t think so. Will you tell him I’ll be at the house? You can send Fred home whenever you get tired of her.”
“That won’t be for a while, Lisa.” Rachel put her hand on Lisa’s arm.
Lisa forced a thin smile and left.
* * *
Jamie’s birthday present that year had to be a bike. After Fred had wowed him and Rollie with her riding prowess, nothing else would do. She could ride up and down her driveway without having to put her foot down or anything — she was that good. She ridiculed Rollie when she found out his bike still had training wheels. “Those are for babies.”
There was no way Jamie was going to tell her he still had a tricycle in the garage. He tried to talk to his father about getting rid of it. “But don’t put it by the road, Daddy,” he said. “Can’t you put it in your truck and take it to charity or something?”
Carl smiled knowingly at Rachel when he heard that. He’d seen Fred showing off on her bike in front of the boys.
“I think I’ll put it on the front porch and put a sign on it: Jamie’s trike for free.”
“Noooo, Daddy!”
* * *
In the end, the old witch just gave Renn the book.
“No, you take it.” She patted the huge leather-bound tome. “I’m sure there’s something in here that will make your mother feel better.”
She’s not my mother, he thought, just…Mother. My real mother died when I was ten.
“Would you’d like some more tea?” she asked, rising from her chair at the small round table.
“No, no, I’m fine. This is all I want, thank you.” She reminded him so much of Mother — same wispy gray hair, same half-bent posture. Same eyes.
“I can hardly read anymore, anyway. You can take more books if you like. They’re of no use to me.” Her laugh was cut short by a harsh, rattling cough. He waited patiently for her to recover.
“I think I’d better throw out some of these herbs.” She waved vaguely at a long shelf full of jars. “Before I poison myself by accident. Can’t tell what’s what.” She sat back down gingerly, easing herself into her seat.
“I need to go,” he said. “You’ve been too kind.”
She reached her shaking hand for his arm. “So soon? But you only just got here. An old lady doesn’t get much company these days from handsome young men.”
“Thank you, but I need to help Mother.”
“Please come again. We’ll have tea.”
“I will.” He opened the door. “Take care of yourself. You’ve been very helpful.”
He stepped outside, but before vanishing, he paused and stared at the distant hills. He could’ve killed her. If she had been a wizard, she’d be a smoldering pile on the floor of the small, crumbling house right now. Be he let her live. She reminded him too much of Mother.
* * *
On the Saturday, one week before the start of school, Lisa’s van was full, on its way to the Biltmore house.
“We need to figure out how we’re going to get the kids to and from school,” Lisa said.
“Is Fred going to take the bus?” Rachel asked.
Lisa adjusted her sunglasses. “We’d like her to, but it doesn’t pick up until 7:15, and Adele and I leave for work at 6:45.”
“Oh! You got the job. That’s great!”
“She sure did,” Adele said. “She’s gonna be working with me at the hospital. But Rollie’s in the same boat as Fred.”
“Can’t your husbands take them to the bus stop?”
“Garrett leaves too early.”
“And I don’t trust Larry to get her there.” Lisa gave her head a tight shake. “He takes calls from work in the morning and forgets about everything else. What’s Jamie going to do?”
“He’s going to ride in with me,”
“I wanna ride the bus with Rollie and Fred,” Jamie said from the back seat.
“I thought you weren’t listening,” Rachel said over her shoulder. “Don’t you want to ride to school with Mommy?”
“I wanna ride the bus with Rollie and Fred.”