Uh-oh, Summer thought as she pulled up to the curb, her recent euphoria only a memory. What now?
“Hi, babes,” she sang out with cheerful optimism, wincing as David wrenched open the car door and clambered across the back seat without answering, followed by Helen, who flounced in after him and gave the door a mighty tug that latched it on the first try Her heart sank farther as she beheld their flushed faces; the Waskowitz skin couldn’t keep a secret if lives depended on it. She turned to smile at her offspring over the back of the seat. Two pairs of eyes flicked at her like beacons, but neither was smiling. Her son’s eyes shimmered with embarrassed tears; her daughter’s were bright with fury. “Did you have a good day?” Summer asked with faint hope.
The only reply was a click, as David fastened his seat belt and turned to gaze steadily out the window. Helen scooted forward and pushed an envelope over the back of the seat, then fanny-walked herself back into place.
Summer caught the envelope and said brightly, “Oh, what’s this?”
“It’s a note from Mrs. Hamburger,” said Helen in a disgusted tone. “She wants to speak to you.”
“It’s Mrs. Hammacher,” Summer automatically corrected her, then sighed with foreboding. “Oh, honey, what did you do?”
Helen stared at her shoes and was stubbornly silent.
“David?”
He turned from the window with a look of reproach, as if, Summer thought, whatever it was was somehow all her fault. “She filled up a water pistol with grape juice,” he said in a hollow tone “During morning snack time.”
“Oh, Helen.” Summer closed her eyes. “Please tell me you didn’t actually squirt anybody with it. Grape juice?”
“Well, I did,” Helen muttered defiantly, watching her Marvin the Martian sneakers bob up and down. “I squirted Jason.”
“Jason? Jason Mott?”
“You should have seen him,” David put in eagerly. “He had on one of those neat T-shirts, you know, with the red-and navy-blue designs on them, the ones that cost about fifty bucks and you said I couldn’t have one? It was all purple, Mom.”
“Oh, Helen. Why?”
Helen’s chin, fragile-looking as a blossom and an infallible barometer of her intractability, jutted upward. “Because he was being mean to me.”
“Mean to you?” Summer’s hopes flared; here, at least, was the possibility of some mitigation. “How?”
“Well…” The shoes bobbed furiously. “He said I talk funny.”
“You do talk funny,” said her brother.
“Do not!”
“David…”
“He talks funny. And he called me a name.”
“What name?” Summer braced herself. “Come on, honey, tell me what Jason called you.”
“He…he called me a yankee,” Helen huffed. “I don’t even know what that is. Mom, what’s a yankee? It sounds nasty.” Her nose wrinkled in disgust.
All Summer could do was shake her head; she had a hand clamped tight across her mouth to hold back a gust of laughter.
“Plus, Jason told Keisha her hair looked ugly and hurt her feelings. She was crying.”
“Who’s Keisha?” Aha, this sounded better. Definitely grounds for justification.
“Keisha’s my friend, and her hair’s not ugly,” said Helen. “She has millions and millions of little tiny braids. Mom, can you do my hair like that?”
“I doubt it.” Summer looked at her daughter’s rather sparse blond curls. Both of her children had inherited the Waskowitz coloring, like their aunt Mirabella-fine red-gold hair and fair, tell-all complexions. “And don’t try and change the subject, little girl. Jason was wrong to make Keisha cry, but you still shouldn’t have squirted him with grape juice, of all things.” A delayed realization struck her. “And where did you get a water pistol, anyway? You know how we feel about toy guns of any kind.”
The two children exchanged guilty looks.
“David?”
“Don’t look at me, Mom.”
“Helen? Answer me this minute. Where did you get the water gun?”
Helen stared at the toes of her sneakers, which were no longer bobbing. Her chin sank onto her chest. “I took it.”
Oh, God. It was worse than she’d thought. This was serious stuff, in the world of childhood, a class-A felony. “Helen,” said Summer in a voice low with dread, “do you mean to tell me you stole it?” Helen’s head moved slowly up and down Her brother made a disgusted noise. “Where? Who did you steal it from, Helen? Tell me right now.”
Helen’s voice was barely audible, and seemed to come from the vicinity of her belly button. “From Jason.”
“From Jason? You mean, you…” Shot him with his own gun?
Summer put a hand over her eyes. Silence reigned in the back seat as she counted slowly to ten, then turned back around and put the car in gear. “Buckle up,” she said briskly. “Now.” There was a subdued and dutiful click from Helen’s side. Summer had just put on her blinker and was starting to pull away from the curb when she had to hit the brakes and wait for a fire engine to roar by, siren screaming. Right behind it came another one. Then another.
“Wow,” David breathed, following their progress with avid eyes, “it must be a really big fire. Can we follow them and see, Mom? Can we?”
“Don’t be silly,” said Summer, who in adulthood had developed a city-dweller’s indifference to emergency vehicles. “Hey, what do you guys want for dinner? I didn’t have time to stop at the store. You feel like pizza?”
“Aren’t we going to get Beatle and Cleo and Peggy Sue?” David asked in a worried vice. “They’ve been at Jason’s four whole days, Mom. First you said it was just for the weekend while we were at Aunt Bella’s, and then you said just till you got back from Charleston, and now-”
“I know, I know,” Summer interrupted him with a sigh. She met her son’s accusing frown in the rearview mirror. “But I’m not sure it’s such a good idea to go over to Dr. Mott’s right now, do you? After what Helen just did to Jason? Maybe we could let things cool off a little bit first?”
“Things” meaning Jason’s mother, Debbie. Debbie Mott was a former high school cheerleader and beauty queen who’d given up on getting her figure back after her third child and made up for it in the self-esteem department by being somewhat of a snob. Summer was well aware that she wasn’t Debbie’s favorite person-she had good instincts for things like that-and suspected it had something to do with the fact that she spent most of every day sharing the intimacy of a motor home with Debbie’s lean, lanky and still reasonably good looking husband. Summer didn’t really think Debbie had enough influence in such matters to get her fired over this grape juice incident, but the next meeting between them didn’t promise to be a pleasant one, and it definitely wasn’t something she felt like tackling on an empty stomach. She’d call first, she told herself. This evening, when Dr. Mott was likely to be home to referee.
She watched David’s eyes spark with understanding, then flick resentfully toward his sister. “I guess,” he said unhappily. “It’s just, I hope they don’t think we abandoned them, or something. Jason said his mom made Cleo stay on the porch because she was making so much noise. He said she says bad words. Does she, Mom? How come I never heard her say any bad words?” He sounded disappointed.
“Maybe she never felt the need to,” Summer muttered. She sought her son’s eyes in the mirror once more. “Honey, I miss the animals, too, but they’ll be fine at Dr. Mott’s for one more night, okay? I promise we’ll go get them tomorrow. Right now, let’s have something to eat-I’m starving. So how about it? Pizza sound okay to you guys?”
“Can we have tacos?” Helen piped up. “We haven’t had tacos for a million years.”
“Then we’re definitely due. What about it, Davie? Tacos okay with you?”
“Sure.” In the mirror, Summer watched him shrug and go back to staring out the window, his face somber, a vaguely depressed slope to his shoulders.
Sadness tightened he
r throat and lay heavy in her chest. Oh, sweetheart, these burdens of mine are way too big for your shoulders. Please don’t try to bear them for me. You’re only nine years old. I’ll make it up to you, she promised her son silently. We’re going to come through this all right.
Since tacos were way too messy to eat in the car, even one as decrepit as the Olds, Summer parked it and they went inside. She wasn’t particularly eager to get home, anyway, and with the animals at Dr. Mott’s, she could think of no reason to rush. It hadn’t always been so. Once, “home” had meant her nest, her haven, her place of belonging. These days, “home” was the soul-sapping bleakness of a cramped mobile home, where every rust streak and shriveled blade of grass was a reproach and a reminder of her failures. And where, more recently, the ringing of the telephone carried with it the electric shock of fear.
But, she reminded herself, at least now I have a lawyer. A good lawyer. Riley Grogan. His confidence and quietness filled her. In her mind, his eyes regarded her-cool, blue and appraising. Unexpected warmth flooded her cheeks and spread into her chest
I’ll find a way to pay him, she vowed. I know he doesn’t believe that, but I will.
Though it would be difficult, she acknowledged, since he lived so far away. Well, of course, she had no idea where he actually lived, but his law offices were in Charleston, so she had to assume he lived somewhere nearby. What must his home be like, a single man, a wealthy man, with no kids and no pets? It was hard for her to imagine. As elegant and imposing as the man himself was, probably. But godawful lonely. Maybe.
“Mom?”
She started and focused guiltily on her son, who had obviously just asked her a question of some importance. The children had been bickering over the movie monster action figures that had come in their kids’ meals when she’d tuned them out and given her mind permission to wander. But how had she gotten so far off the mommy-track?
“Yes, hon-I’m sorry. What?”
“I said, do you think Jason’s mom will still let us swim in their pool?” His red-gold hair hung slack, waving a little, as he tilted his head sideways to accommodate a bite of taco. His blue eyes regarded her somberly as he chewed, then swallowed with an audible gulp. “Mom, what am I gonna do if I can’t practice? I’ll be so out of shape, I’ll never be able to make the swim team again. And it’s all because dodo, here-” he gave his sister a fierce nudge in the side with his elbow “-just had to go and squirt grape juice all over dumb old Jason.”
“Quit it,” Helen whispered, nudging him back and fixing him with a narrow-eyed glare. “Or I’ll have my Godzilla chomp you to pieces.”
“Big deal,” said David with a shrug. “Your Godzilla is six inches tall. He couldn’t chomp a bug.”
“Yeah, well, you just wait. When I grow up I’m gonna have a real Godzilla, and he’s gonna eat your head.”
“Ooh, I’m shaking.”
“Well, you better be. Because-”
“Hey, guys,” said Summer. “You know what I think?” Two pairs of eyes regarded her, one expectant, one wary. “I think we’re going to have to do some apologizing to Jason and his mom. How ’bout you?”
“Not me, I didn’t do anything,” said David. Helen made a hideous face. “And,” he added spitefully, “I hope your face freezes like that. How’d you like that, huh?”
“It won’t!”
“Sure it will. If you don’t believe me, just ask Granny Calhoun.”
“Will not!”
“Ok-ay, time to go home,” said Summer firmly. She gathered up their trash and deposited it in the receptacle and herded the children, still nudging each other and whispering dire threats they thought she couldn’t hear, out to the car.
The sun was still high and hot at that hour of the evening in late June, and once they were in the car the children’s quarrel died of heat exhaustion Summer drove with the windows down, since there was no one to see her who was going to give a rip what shape her hair was in. Beyond the city’s outskirts, strip malls, fast-food restaurants and gas stations quickly gave way to scattered businesses housed in metal or cinder-block buildings set far back from the road. Freestanding yellow signboards on the grass along the highway advertised used-tire specials, live nudes and the redeeming power of faith in identical black-and-red block letters. Sickly petunias bloomed beside driveways in planters made from old tires, and kudzu encroached on vacant lots littered with trash and old campaign signs. Normally the sight of all that lush squalor filled Summer with a contradiction of feelings, a kind of depressed restlessness that was similar to the way she felt when she walked into her rented mobile home-a futile urge to tidy something she knew no amount of tidying was ever going to make beautiful. But this evening she saw the yellow polka dots of dandelions in the grassy verges and felt an uplift of spirits that was almost like hope. She’d taken steps. It was going to be okay.
Just as she was turning onto her street, she met two fire trucks, sirens silent, big engines grumbling, making their way back to the barn.
“Wow, look,” David cried, popping up in his seat so he could see better. “I bet those are the same ones we saw. That fire must have been right around here someplace. Can we go see it, Mom? Please?”
Summer sighed and said, “Oh, David…”
She guided the Olds around the gentle curve that marked the beginning of their residential neighborhood, a long row of mobile homes and modest houses, unfenced and widely spaced, separated by grass-pocked gravel driveways and marked by tipsy roadside mailboxes. Up ahead she could see another fire truck parked in the road, its lights still flashing.
“Mom, look.” David’s voice faded. Silence filled the car.
Summer drove slowly forward, only dimly aware that her heart had begun to pound. She saw people coming toward her now, people she didn’t know-her neighbors, walking alone with their arms folded, shaking their heads, or in twos and threes, talking among themselves, walking down the road, turning into driveways, cutting across lawns. Children on bicycles, pumping hard, racing their dogs home. The excitement, whatever it had been, was obviously over now.
Summer pulled the Olds onto the grassy shoulder and parked. A fireman in protective gear glanced at her, then went on with what he was doing, gathering up, tidying up, putting things away. She turned off the motor, opened the door and got out.
“Mom, that’s our-”
She turned, arms braced on the door frame, to face her children-Helen standing with her arms on the back of the seat in front of her, staring over it with round, avid eyes; David’s face, pale as the moon, his mouth a thin, frightened line. “Stay here,” she grated through clenched jaws. “You…stay…in…this…car.”
She slammed the car door and walked up the street toward the fire truck. Her legs felt strange, as if her knees had been hinged with rubber bands.
Someone approached her-a police officer. She hadn’t noticed the two radio patrol cars parked beyond the fire truck. “Ma’am, I’m gonna have to ask you to stay back outta the way-”
Summer shook her head. “That’s my house,” she said. “I live here.”
Chapter 4
The policeman put his hand on her elbow, at the same time gesturing with the other to someone she couldn’t see. “Uh-huh. Okay, ma’am. You want to tell me your name, please?”
“‘Yes. I’m Mrs. Robey. Summer. And this is my house.”
It was hardly true; the ugly little trailer would never be anyone’s house, ever again. Where it had stood was a blackened skeleton, a sodden, stinking, smoking gash in the landscape surrounded by yellow police ribbon. The stench of destruction was overpowering; she wanted to gag.
“May I please… I need to sit down.”
And then she was in the back of a patrol car, and someone-a policeman-was offering her something in a small paper cup. Water. She took it and drank without tasting, then murmured, “Thank you.”
A soft voice, thick and Southern, said, “Ma’am, I’m gonna need to ask you some questions, okay? You feel up to it, o
r you wanna take another minute?”
She shook her head. “No, that’s okay, I’m fine.” She focused her eyes on the policeman’s face, observing that he was young, black, and didn’t look like he was enjoying himself much.
The reason for that became clear a moment later when he cleared his throat, shifted his feet and said, “Ma’am-can you tell me if there was anybody that might’ve been…uh, in the building?” He coughed and made it simpler. “Was…anybody home?”
Summer stared at him. Bile rose in her throat She swallowed and said hurriedly, “No. No, there’s only me and my children-they’re over there, in the car. I just picked them up from day camp.” She stopped, then added as if it might be of importance, “We stopped for tacos.”
The young policeman drew himself up, looking considerably happier at that news. “Yes, ma’am, well, that’s good. I’m sure glad to hear it.” He coughed, then frowned again. “Your, uh, neighbors said they thought you folks had some pets?”
“Yes.” Funny, how she seemed not to be feeling this. As though she were in a plastic bubble, and the policeman’s words just bounced off without touching her. “They were at a friend’s house. I was away over the weekend.”
There was the soft hiss of an exhalation. “Well, ma’am, sounds like you were real lucky.” Summer looked at the officer, who gazed back at her with shadows in his eyes, the shadows, maybe, of memories of other disasters and people who hadn’t been as lucky. “Sorry for your loss,” he said in a more formal tone.
“Thank you,” said Summer. She looked down at the paper cup, which she had crumpled in her hand. “Is there anything else you need right now? I’d like to get back to my children.”
“Oh-sure.” He stood back away from the open door to make room for her, then reconsidered. “Uh…listen, do you have someplace to go? Somebody you can call? Any kinfolk in the area?” Summer shook her head. “What about friends?”
One Summer’s Knight Page 5