Jelly Bean Summer

by Joyce Magnin

  “Hey,” she says without looking up.

  “They fighting again?”

  “What do I look like?” Elaine asks. “A war correspondent?”

  I open my dresser and pull out a clean shirt, which I change into.

  “You’re gonna need a bra soon,” Elaine says, looking straight at me now.

  I glance at my chest. “Am not. I’m fine.”

  “You’re such a tomboy.”

  “So how come they’re fighting?”

  “It’s stupid as usual.” Elaine sets her drawing pad down. “Something about Mrs. Lynch. Dad’s all mad because Mom won’t charge Mrs. Lynch for hemming her dresses or fixing her collars and stuff. Mom says it’s her way to bless Mrs. Lynch. Makes her feel good. Like she’s doing something worthwhile.”

  “So what?”

  “So Dad says Mrs. Lynch has plenty to spare and we can use it.”

  “Well, he is right about that,” I say. “But Dad keeps letting customers pay him with brownies and Phillies tickets.”

  “His choice.”

  I didn’t see why Mom hemming dresses for God was any different than him unclogging toilets for a pound of fudge.

  “Come on,” I say. “Mom’s making French toast.”

  When Mrs. Lynch was a girl, she was in a fire and got burned all over her face and neck and arms and legs. Mom fixes her dresses with high collars and long sleeves and hems that are long enough to cover most of the scars. Except you can still see them. Like wrinkles. Thick patches on her cheeks and near her ears. Sometimes, they can be hard to look at because they make me feel sad and I wonder what it was like to get burned like that.

  “Dad should let her do it,” I say on the way down the steps.

  “Yeah, I know,” Elaine says. “I’m gonna get Jelly Bean.”

  Dad is already gone when I get to the kitchen. I hear the truck start in the driveway.

  “How many slices do you want?” Mom asks.

  “Four, I guess.”

  Mom sets our plates of French toast on the table, and then she sits. She isn’t eating—probably already did—but she has a cup of coffee. Mom always has coffee. Morning, noon, night. Doesn’t matter. She always has a pot ready. She stares into the cup of pale-brown liquid and then at Bud’s spot at the table. She has that faraway look. I watch her, and my chest aches. Ever since the news, no matter what happens around our house, it somehow has Bud on the fringes. Like every upset leads to him. I don’t know why that is, but it is.

  “Go on,” Mom says. “Eat.”

  Elaine shows up at the table and takes her seat.

  “Did you put Jelly Bean back in her cage?” Mom asks.

  Elaine nods. She spreads butter and syrup on her toast and digs in like she hasn’t eaten in days.

  “I’ll be home in plenty of time to make supper,” Mom says. “Make sure you get lunch and”—she looks straight at me—“you be careful up there today.”

  I nod as I chew, knowing full well that I am about to embark on a clandestine adventure that involves a boy I met on the roof and his truck.

  Mom is wearing her blue paisley dress. Her hair is already combed neatly, and she smells like Vanilla Fields—her favorite perfume. The fragrance reminds me of sugar cookies. She’s ready to go. I glance at the clock. Eight thirty.

  “Sac and I are going to the mall today,” Elaine says. “She needs a new pair of shoes.”

  Sac is the daughter of two church missionaries. She’s staying with the Rolandses while her parents are traveling around signing up people and churches to pay for them to work in Africa.

  “Do you have bus fare?”

  The bus stops down the block, right in front of Doctor Cherry’s house on the opposite end of our row.

  “Mrs. Rolands is driving us.”

  “Take a couple of quarters out of the jar in case Mrs. Rolands takes you to Kresge’s for lunch. I don’t want to owe that woman.”

  “Can I take five? I need an eraser.”

  Mom nods. “I guess Sac will be going back to Africa soon.”

  “Sometime in August,” Elaine says.

  Sac’s family is only here for what my dad calls a furlough, like they are in the army. Mrs. Rolands says they are in the army—God’s army. Although I don’t know why God needs an army.

  I think Elaine is going to miss Sac when she leaves, and I really, truly feel sad for her. Then I smile because I realize that even the word missionary had the word miss inside it. Guess it goes with the territory.

  Mom sets her coffee cup in the sink and fills a small galvanized can so she can water her plants.

  Elaine stares into her plate. The amber-colored syrup and butter swirl like the paisleys on Mom’s dress. Maybe like the thoughts and pictures in Elaine’s head.

  “Sorry about Sac,” I say. “That she has to go back to Africa.”

  Elaine doesn’t say anything. But she looks at me, and she doesn’t call me creep or dummy or anything, so I figure her just looking at me is a good enough way of saying thanks.

  Six

  I couldn’t have been a luckier duck if I’d planned it. With Mom heading to Mrs. Lynch’s and Elaine going to the mall with Sac, I have it made. All I need to do is wait for them both to leave and then zip over to Brian’s house.

  Mom waters her African violets. She keeps them on a wrought-iron plant stand with four levels that’s under the dining room window. Mom is a member of the African Violet Society, although I never see her go to any of the meetings—if they even have meetings. But she once entered one of the plants in a contest and came home with a red ribbon for second place. The ribbon is still attached to the pot. I watch her pull two dead leaves from one of the small plants.

  I still have some French toast on my plate, and it’s so good that I want to finish it before getting ready to go to Brian’s. So I eat while Mom hums to her plants. But then she says, “So what do you have planned for the day? The playground? Bikes with Linda?”

  I swallow a piece of toast sideways and have to wash it down with milk. “No…um… I mean, I don’t know yet. Maybe.” I’m lying. Mom always knows when I’m lying.

  “Just behave yourself,” she says. She has her back to me, which I figure is a good thing because if she looks me in the eyes, she’ll know for sure I’m lying.

  “OK,” I say, gulping milk. Then I dash away from the table and head upstairs, leaving a perfectly good piece of French toast swimming in a tiny pool of syrup.

  Elaine sits on her bed with Jelly Bean while she waits for Mrs. Rolands. I swear she loves that pig more than life itself sometimes. She coos and talks to Jelly Bean like she is a person or a dog. And Jelly Bean makes sweet noises back at her. Which is kind of weird, except I guess I treat Polly the same way. Sometimes, Elaine holds the pig up to her face and they nuzzle noses. Sometimes, Jelly Bean rides on Polly’s back around the house or out in the yard. And she loves black licorice. Weird, I know.

  Finally, twenty minutes after Mom heads off to Mrs. Lynch’s house, Mrs. Rolands arrives for Elaine.

  “Your chariot has arrived,” I say when I hear a car horn beep.

  Elaine sets Jelly Bean in her cage. “You be a good girl.” She gives the pig a scratch on the back.

  What does she think the pig will do? Tunnel out of her cage? Then I have an image of Jelly Bean meeting up with other guinea pigs in the alley and plotting some rodent crime.

  I stand on the front stoop and wave good-bye. Once they turn the corner down Palmer Mill, Polly and I set off for Crestview Drive.

  I don’t have any trouble finding Brian’s house. His isn’t on the end, so I head around back to the alley and see him standing near an old beat-up truck that has the front end lifted up on cinder blocks.

  “Yo,” he calls. He wipes his hands on a rag, which he stuffs into his back jeans pocket.

  “Hey,” I
call as I walk closer. Polly dances ahead, her tail wagging.

  I stand a few feet from Brian and try to make the butterflies in my stomach fly away. I am not having much success. “Is that your truck?” I ask, ignoring the flutter.

  “Ain’t she a beaut?” Brian says. “She’s a 1952 Ford. ’Course she needs a lot of work. But I’ll get her running.” He pats the fender like the truck is his friend or something. “Have to,” he says with a dreamy look in his eyes. It’s like Brian’s truck is his Jelly Bean.

  I move a little closer and run my hand over the driver’s side fender. It’s hard to tell what color it is—not just the fender but the whole truck. The hood is blue, like a blueberry, with patches of gray and rust, and the door is gray like most of the rest of the truck. But the back part that hauls things is blue like the fender. “It reminds me of a picture my dad showed me of one of his old trucks. He used to fix them up too.”

  Brian moves around to the front and peers into the engine. “Come see. She’s got a six-cylinder, overhead valve engine with a hundred and one horses of power.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” I say, not wanting to sound like I know absolutely nothing about truck engines, which of course I don’t.

  “Sure is,” he says with a grin that seems to bubble up from someplace deep inside. “She’s a beauty. And as soon as I get her running, I’m gonna take her around the neighborhood and show her off.”

  “Yeah?” I say. “Does she need much work?”

  Brian scratches his head. “Kinda. She was a real mess when we first got her. My brother found her in a junkyard and towed her home behind my father’s Chevy truck. He let me steer this truck while he drove the Chevy.”

  Polly lets out a bark. Brian gives her a quick pat on the head with his nearly black hand. Then he leans into the engine and taps something with his wrench.

  “Whatcha doing now?” I ask.

  “Gotta replace all the belts and wires and get a new carburetor before she’ll run.”

  “How come your brother ain’t working on the truck with you?”

  “He can’t,” Brian says. “He’s dead.”

  I take a step back. “What? No, you’re lying to me.”

  “No I ain’t. He got killed in Vietnam.” Brian never takes his eyes off the engine while he says it. It’s like he is saying something as simple as the answer to two plus two. It also makes me think of Bud for an instant. Just an instant because I can’t stand the thought of Bud being dead like Brian’s brother.

  “Really? But you just got the truck here. How could—”

  “Look,” Brian says. “It’s no big deal, OK? He came home for a little while, we got the truck, and he started fixing it. Then he went back for another tour and got clobbered two days later.”

  Not a big deal? I think it’s a bigger deal than Brian is letting on.

  I give Polly a quick scratch behind the ears. “My brother’s over there now, except not fighting. He got… He went missing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We got a telegram one day that said he had been reported MIA.”

  “That stinks.” Brian finally looks away from the engine. “Mike said it’s rough over there.”

  I swallow. “So when do you figure?”

  “Figure what?”

  “Figure you’ll have her done?”

  Brian shrugs. “Gotta be done by July the fifteenth.”

  “How come?”

  “Mike’s birthday. I said a promise that I would, and I ain’t going back on my promise and…” He looks straight at me. “Then I got somethin’ else I gotta do.”

  I open the driver’s side door and climb inside. It isn’t very comfortable. The steering wheel is big, and there is a rip in the passenger seat that exposes some yucky-looking foam and cottony stuff. It smells a little like a wet catcher’s mitt.

  “What do you gotta do?” I ask.

  Brian walks around to the window and leans inside. “I’m heading west. Leaving town. I’m gonna drive Mike’s truck cross-country to Arizona. Gonna live there for a while.”

  “Wow,” I say. “How come you wanna do that?”

  “On account of my dad. He says it will be best for me to finish up high school out there. Gonna live with my aunt Natalie.” He taps the door. “But first, I gotta make Mike’s truck roadworthy. That’s what Mike called it—roadworthy.”

  I lean my head out of the window. “You old enough to drive?”

  “Almost, but I don’t care. I’m doing it anyway. I know how to drive, and that’s what counts. Mike taught me. My dad’s giving me a hard time about it. But I’ll talk him into it.”

  “Least your brother taught you stuff. All my sister does is play with her guinea pig and see flying saucers.”

  Brian lifts his chin toward me. “Yeah? UFOs? You mean real UFOs?”

  I laugh a little. “Yeah, Elaine sees them all the time. But she sees small ones. And everybody knows spaceships are huge.”

  Brian laughs. “I guess so. I never saw one, even though you hear about them all the time.”

  “Aw, they’re all just fakes,” I say. “Right?”

  Brian shrugs. “Who knows? People all over the world claim to see them.”

  “But why would aliens from outer space come to Westbrook Park?” I shake my head. “Sheesh.”

  “Why do they go anywhere?”

  “So you believe in them?”

  “Not really. I’m just saying a lot of people do. Guess your sister is one of them.”

  I guess, but I still think she is seeing things.

  I poke my head into the engine. “What’s that?”

  “That’s where the carburetor goes, if I can ever get the money to buy one.”

  “Why can’t your dad get you one?”

  “He would if he could, but I told him I wanna try to do the whole thing myself.”

  “Maybe you can get your mom to ask him. That’s what I do sometimes.”

  Brian kicks the tire again. “Dead too. Long time ago.”

  And in that second, I feel a ton of red bricks fall from the sky and pile on top of me. I don’t know whether to breathe or not because I never knew anyone before who had a mother die.

  “So why’s he sending you away? Doesn’t he want you around?”

  Brian took a deep breath. “He just can’t take care of me anymore. I think we’re doing OK. But he thinks I’ll do better with my aunt because he’s always gone. He works two jobs and doesn’t make much money…just enough.” Brian wipes a wrench with the dirty rag he had in his back pocket. “If I can’t get the truck running, he’s gonna put me on a Greyhound bus bound for Arizona.”

  I look into the engine. I don’t know about trucks, but from the looks of it, I figure it needs a lot of work. “Maybe the bus would be better.”

  Brian looks at me and then at his sneakers. “No it wouldn’t. I want to drive Mike’s truck…just somethin’ I gotta do.”

  And in that instant, I understand. Driving the truck will help keep Mike alive—like Brian hasn’t lost all of him. Kind of like being on the roof makes me feel closer to Bud, even though I hadn’t planned on that happening. I just wanted to get away from Elaine and the pig and the sadness. I wanted to sit closer to the stars and lean my head back and try to figure out just where the heck Orion was hiding. But then I noticed that if I didn’t look away from the sky, I could feel Bud sitting right next to me—closer than the stars.

  Seven

  “Now what?”

  “Now what, what?” Brian looks me in the eye.

  “What do you do now? With the truck, I mean.” I lean over the engine as far as I can, not wanting to think about dead or missing brothers anymore.

  “Gotta get a carburetor. Rebuilt one will do, but they cost money.”

  “How much money?”

  “More tha
n I got. I might be able to pull one from a wreck at the junkyard for cheap. But I gotta get there.”

  “Why not ask your dad to take you to the junkyard?”

  Brian tosses his rag on the ground. And then he laughs. “Nah, he doesn’t have the time these days.”

  I think about it for a second. It’s one thing to not have time to go to some faraway junkyard. But another thing to send your kid away.

  “How come he says he can’t take care of you?”

  Brian takes a deep breath and then lets it out his nose like a bull. “He says it’s for my own good—to have a female influence—someone who’s home all day and can cook and stuff.”

  I stare into the engine, straight at the place where the carburetor goes. “Still doesn’t give him the right.”

  “What right?”

  “To send you away—unless it’s what you want.”

  “Yeah, I guess I do, sometimes. And not being by myself so much would be nice.” He looks toward the house and then back at the engine. “I got the new plugs in and even set the gaps myself.”

  “Good going,” I say, even though I don’t know what in tarnation he means by setting the gaps. Truck talk. But I can still say good going because I can tell it was something that made Brian proud.

  “Yeah, but without a carburetor, she ain’t going anywhere.”

  Polly ambles near me and rubs her head on my knee.

  “I like your dog,” Brian says.

  “Yeah, she’s a good dog.”

  “So will ya be on the roof later?”

  “Probably on account of I live there now…well, mostly.”

  “The roof’s a good place. Nobody to bother you.”

  “Yeah, I’ll say.”

  Brian tinkers with the engine a little more while I watch. Once, he asks me to hand him a wrench. And it reminds me of how Bud used to get me to hand him stuff or get him a soda from the downstairs fridge.

  “I better get home,” I say after a while. “I’ll see you on the roof.”