“Would it have made any difference?”
I didn’t answer.
“What in God’s name were you thinking? I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life. I can only hope they don’t kick us out for what you did…”
I saw myself again, standing in front of the townspeople in my underwear, my spastic curls like cotton candy gone wild. The more I played the scene in my head, the more ashamed I became. “I just thought if I listened to a little bit of my old music…”
“They had music back in the 1800s, Brooke. Your generation didn’t invent it.”
“I know.”
“Where’s your iPod now?”
“In the eaves.”
“Get rid of it.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway. The battery’s almost dead and I forgot to bring a charger.”
In my head I laughed, realizing how silly my last statement was, considering there wasn’t any electricity to charge a charger with.
“Keep it out of sight,” Dad said. “There’s a lot at stake here.”
“Don’t you lose money by skipping work for four months? Isn’t it sort of a tradeoff?” A moment of silence crept by. “Dad?”
When he started speaking, and the words floated along the trickle of light between our beds, the words didn’t belong to him. They belonged to the night; had snuck into the room through a crack in the logs. “We’re broke,” he said.
I let out a snicker. “How can we be broke? We go on trips…you bought me a new car…”
“Brooke…”
“…and what about private school? And all our—”
“Listen to me.” He let out a long stream of air, and I grew nervous. “We’re in trouble, Brooke.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“We may lose our house.”
I sat up, barely hearing the scratching of a tiny critter nesting somewhere close by. “What are you talking about?”
“Your mother,” Dad said. “When she was sick. All those experimental treatments. They weren’t covered by insurance. The hospital bills were massive.”
“But your job, Dad. You have a cool boss. Can’t he give you, like, an advance or something? Can’t we—” I didn’t have the words to describe it, but I knew if you were about to lose your house, there were ways to save it.
“There is no job,” he said.
“You quit your job to come out here?”
“I got laid off.”
“When?”
Another pause, this one longer than the first.
“When, Dad?”
“Last March.”
I swallowed, but there was no spit to go down, and I let out a little choking cough.
“I wanted to give you girls everything after your mother died. I wanted to…fill the empty space.”
Tears rolled down my cheeks. I wiped them away and saw my wet fingers in the moonlight.
“You had such a difficult time after she died,” Dad said. “I just wanted you to be happy again. I just wanted you…” He stopped. When he spoke again, his voice trembled. “I looked for a job every day, but without moving us to another city…well, I couldn’t just up and move you.”
“But you did up and move me. You moved all of us.”
“Only temporarily. It was the lesser of evils.”
“You made me think this was all because of me…that dragging us out to Bumfreaking Nowhere was my fault. How could you do that? How could you make me think that?”
“You were the deciding factor, Brooke. You were falling apart back in New Bern, whether you realize it or not. I wanted to give you this opportunity to get back on track. I truly believed…and still believe…it was a good decision. For all of us.”
“What about Rebecca Lynn? Was what happened to her worth it?”
“I knew living this way would be difficult, but losing our home would be harder. Brooke, if we leave now, we may not have a home to go back to. Do you see why I brought you out here? Do you see how important this is?”
I nodded in the dark. I did see. He didn’t say it out loud, and he didn’t have to: Whether we kept our house or not was up to me. If I did anything else to make us un-nineteenth-century-like, we would get kicked off the show, go back to New Bern, pack up the house, and then what? Live in my SUV if repo man didn’t come and take it away?
I suddenly pictured the producers poring over the video of my personal coming-out party, my crazy curls and bare feet. I saw them rewinding it, then fast-forwarding it, playing it over and over again, deciding which parts to put on the air, which scene was the ultimate clincher of our expulsion.
Then I figured that maybe coming out here was my fault to begin with. If I’d done better in school, if I’d listened more, spent less time at Libby’s, less time partying, maybe I’d have seen enough to put the pieces together. Maybe Dad would have told me the truth sooner. I could have found a job. I could have helped. We wouldn’t be sharing a bedroom in a one-hundred-degree attic the size of a closet if it weren’t for me. A doctor wouldn’t have had to sew up a slash in my sister’s leg.
“If we don’t win, we’ll only be able to keep the house until Thanksgiving,” Dad said. “Coming up with the money to pay off the bank is my goal. All I want is a chance. I’m tapped out, Brooke. Dry. Your daddy is an empty tank.”
I was crying hard now.
“Your sister doesn’t know about the house,” Dad said. “And I plan to keep it that way.”
“What do we have to do to win?”
“What I’ve asked you to do all along: acclimate. Convince the producers you are a mid-nineteenth-century girl; that we will do what it takes to be the best backcountry family.”
I pictured the townspeople and how they all seemed like they were born and bred in Sweet Sugar Gap. Backcountry folk, just like the early settlers. There was Prudence, twirling around in her pretty dress, curling her hair and sipping tea in that palace. I thought about Wendell and how convincing he was as a simple country boy working in his father’s mercantile. And even though he was pretty convincing as a boy who liked me as much as I liked him, I still had my doubts about his motives.
‘I want to make things easier for you,’ he had told me. Would he have said those words if a camera hadn’t been there as witness?
I felt a bit of the old Brooke seeping through—the one before Mom got sick—who loved to kick ass in the women’s hurdles, scored third to the highest in her sophomore class on the PSAT, and got accepted into the School of Science and Math. Of course, I never went, because everything in my life had turned upside down…
“My eyebrow hoop,” I whispered in the dark. “I took it from Mom’s jewelry box. It didn’t have a mate. It’s the only thing I have out here that reminds me of her.” We were silent for a few moments before I said, with complete conviction, “I’ll help us keep our house, Dad. I’ll help us win.”
Dad said, as he rolled over in his bed, facing away from me, “That’s good, Brooke. Because we really don’t have a choice.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Nearly every waking second was spent wondering if the hatchet would come down on our family. Had the tape already been sent to the producers? Had we been voted off the show, and they were just waiting for an interesting live-action time to tell us, like during a church picnic, or while washing dirty socks?
I spent the additional seconds trying not to think about Wendell, waiting for him to call on me, worried whether his affections were real or bogus. I wondered how I would compete with him, while at the same time crushing on him, and that thought led me to wonder how on earth two people dated back in the old days. An entire day was taken up by chores. And I was hardly the picture of romance. I didn’t wear makeup anymore, and I kept my hair hidden under a bonnet. Was it possible he was actually attracted to me this way?
I became obsessed, wondering if he was for real or not, if he planned to come back to “court” me. I went out on the porch every morning to shake out the bed linens, clean the bottoms of our boots, o
r sweep the porch steps, just so I could keep an eye on the road in front of our cabin. In and out I went. I got a lot done those days, and the cabin nearly sparkled—at least as much as an old rickety cabin can. But no one ever came up the road.
A few days after the infamous picnic, I found a large sack behind one of the rockers on the porch. I opened it up and smiled. It was filled with scraps of colorful material.
“From Nanny?” Rebecca Lynn asked as I sat on a rocker like an old married woman. I nodded and took the pink dress Prudence had given me, opened my sewing box, and slowly made my way around the hem with a long piece of dark green material. The contrast made the edge of the dress pop. At the bottom of the bag was a handful of white lace, which I carefully sewed around the cuffs and attached fake lace pockets to the hips. By the time I was done, it had turned into the perfect first-date dress.
Now all I needed was a place to show it off. And a date.
Stepping in muck and having hay stick to my shoes no longer bothered me. All of my tasks I did by rote, like eating or breathing or taking a wiz. I was waking up before Clyde began to crow. “Quit your day job,” I told Cuckoo Bird as I cut some roses for the breakfast table. While Rusty followed me around like an overfed zombie, I milked Gretchen and groomed Willow. I helped my sister collect eggs and feed the chickens. Even fat pig Bambi got a little of my attention, snorting with happiness when I stopped to pat her head, mostly out of sympathy.
Saturday morning, Shopping Day, as I hung the coffee pot on the hook over the fire, the pot started shaking. Coffee sputtered and dripped into the embers. I stood up. The shelves were shaking, too. The whole cabin was rattling. I grabbed the only two mixing bowls I owned and placed them on the table so they wouldn’t crash to the floor.
Dad and Rebecca Lynn hurried down the ladder. Pulling his dirty pants up over his long underwear, Dad ran to the front door and swung it wide. Dust flew into the cabin. Rebecca Lynn and I followed Dad onto the porch.
“Is it a stampede?” I asked as the multitude of horses come over the Eastern rise and sped past the house.
Dad pointed to a wagon with the name “Horely Family Circus” scrolled in bright red letters across the side.
“A circus,” I breathed.
We stood and watched as six wagons, some with covers, some carrying bundles a mile high, raced past our cabin. Across the road, Rusty stood with his camera, filming the parade.
“They had circuses back then?” Rebecca Lynn asked.
“Since the beginning of time,” Dad said.
I could barely make out a grin underneath all that facial hair.
A man steering one of the wagons tossed a piece of paper into the air as they flew by. The paper floated onto the grass. Clyde pecked at it.
Dad jumped off the porch and grabbed it. He held it up and read: “‘Come One, Come All! The Horley Brothers Circus: A Truly Spectacular Show to astound and mesmerize even the most intelligent being! Come and witness Gregory, the fastest juggler east of the Appalachians; Lady Regina, the razor-sharp tightrope walker; Bernard, the incomparable sword-and-fire eater, and many more acts made to thrill!’” Dad laughed. “This is fantastic!”
The flyer told us the performance was the following Wednesday evening, at six pm in the schoolyard. Price of admission: ten cents.
By the time the train of wagons had disappeared, our cabin was surrounded by a thick haze of dust. Rusty joined us as we went back inside.
“Can we go, Daddy?” Rebecca Lynn asked.
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Neither would I, I thought, as my stomach flipped with excitement.
As we readied Willow for our trip into town, I made up different scenarios in my head as to how Wendell would react when he saw me, if he would remember what he had said the other night, or if I should just chalk it up to show business. Either way, I was a nervous wreck.
On the way to town, we stopped by Doctor Hensel’s to get Rebecca Lynn’s stitches out. For being such a trooper, he gave her a ham bone for Sully, which drew flies to the back of the wagon all the way to town.
We passed the white circus tent next to the schoolhouse, a red flag at the very top waving in the wind. The tent was smaller than the ones I’d been to in Modern Land, but that didn’t ruin the excitement. Circus people in the school yard milled about, sitting on little stools, cooking on open fires, dogs running around.
In town, we were barely parked when I jumped out of the wagon and sped into Murphy & Sons. Rusty tried to keep up with me as I ran through the store. I spotted Wendell stocking canteens in a cabinet. He smiled and waved, like an ordinary guy crushing on an ordinary girl, not like he was going to win something by doing it. Relieved, I smiled back and took my basket around the store, pretending to take inventory of all the goodies instead of staring at the back of Wendell’s head.
Rebecca Lynn came up behind me. “Daddy says we can’t buy anything today, especially if we’re going to the circus.”
I knew the real reason was because of the doctor bill. I nodded, not caring if I ever bought anything again. The circus was in town.
Rebecca Lynn stared at the sweets like a penny candy addict. I looked at the pretty hoop skirts and gloves. I checked out the toys beneath the case to see if anything new had been added. I spotted a collection of oval brass belt buckles with eleven stars around the outside and the letters “C.S.” in the center. Next to the case on top of the empty table was a tented sign: Men’s Boots Temporarily Sold Out. All Future Orders for Soldiers Only.
I overheard Dad talking to Mr. Murphy. “My crops will be up soon, and I can trade you then. In the meantime, can I at least get some necessities besides the chicken feed? Maybe some salt? And some ham? We only have enough for one more meal.”
When Wendell was through stocking canteens, he came over to me. My stomach rolled with waves and I tried to keep my knees from knocking. I pushed my bonnet back a little.
“Not buying anything today?” he asked, noticing my empty basket.
“Not unless you want to sell me that guitar for a few pennies,” I said laughing. I glanced up at the shelf, but my smile vanished. The shelf was empty. “Where is it?”
Wendell said, “Sold it.”
“Who bought it? Maybe I could get them to sell it to me.”
“I doubt it.”
“Well, maybe I can order one from your wish book.”
This conversation was a waste of time, because even if I did order one, I didn’t have the money to pay for it.
“We’re only ordering necessities right now,” Wendell said. “I’m sorry. Guitars aren’t on the list.”
“Why not?”
He grabbed me by the arm and pulled me toward the back. He whispered, “Because of the war.”
“But there is no war.”
“Well, the producers say there is.” He raised his voice again, and Rusty turned his camera in our direction. “Anyway, I have a feeling the second we get supplies in, they’ll be gone. Soldiers are cleaning us out.”
Dad came up to us. “I’ve placed my order. You and your sister want to wander with me up the street?”
“Can we stop by the bakery?” Rebecca Lynn asked.
“‘Fraid not.”
“I’ll come anyway.”
I smiled at Wendell. “I’ll stay here.”
As Rusty followed Dad and Rebecca Lynn, I said, “I think this war thing is stupid.”
Wendell shrugged. “A contract is a contract. The show can do whatever it wants.”
“But faking a war…”
If a war could be faked, then other things could be faked as well. Like a boy’s feelings.
The cameras in the corners of the store were watching our every move, like a department store looking for shoplifters. But I didn’t care. If I was going to stick this out until the end, I had the right to know.
“Do you really like me?” I asked Wendell, not bothering to whisper. “Really?”
“Of course.”
Mr.
Murphy stopped what he was doing behind the counter and looked in our direction.
“Prove it,” I said.
He touched my arm, briefly, causing goose flesh to move over my shoulders, down my back, and along my legs. “Did you hear about the circus?”
I nodded.
“Go with me.”
“Alright. But what about before the circus? It’s still days away.”
“Are you inviting me to dinner?”
“Um…sure.”
“When?”
“I don’t know…”
“How about tonight?”
“Oh. Okay.”
“What time?”
I ran through the limited recipes in my head, thinking about what to cook, and how long it would take. “Six o’clock?”
“Pa?” he called. “Can I go to the Deckers’ house for dinner tonight?”
“As long as the stock is put away.”
“There,” Wendell said. “Dinner tonight, six o’clock, your house.”
My stomach moved in spasms, but I kept my voice smooth. “What will we do after?”
“Take a walk. Look at the stars. Talk.”
“About what?” I couldn’t imagine what there would be to talk about in such a strange world.
“We could talk about fire-eaters.”
“And tightrope walkers?”
“Sure. And jugglers.”
We laughed together as I shoved all thoughts of fake wars and expensive guitars and pretending to fall in love for money way in the back of my brain where they belonged. There were more important things to think about: like what to cook for dinner when your guest of honor is the cutest boy in Sweet Sugar Gap.
Back home in Modern Land, Wendell and I would have met up at the DQ, or at Union Point Park down by the river. We would have eaten alone, had a private conversation, and made out afterward if I was lucky.
But in Yesterday World, dinner was a family affair.
I hoped Wendell wasn’t picky. I prepared Dutch oven cornmeal biscuits and split pea soup with ham chunks. Our tiny cabin held onto the delicious smells, and for a while it seemed more like a restaurant than a musty cabin with a chicken coop nearby. By the time I heard the horse’s hooves out front, my stomach was so infested I could have started a butterfly museum.
Upside Down in a Laura Ingalls Town Page 17