“Tupelo Honey?” Marmalade yelled from the front yard.
“I’m coming,” I shouted.
“Come on,” I said to Moochi. “Let’s go get my stuff.”
I filled every backpack, duffel bag, and plastic tote I could find with my shoes and socks and books. My little suitcase was still under my bed. The creepy dollhouse leered at me from the corner. My dirty clothes were draped over the side. From where I was standing I could see the dark, empty rooms. It seemed so weird to finally be able to leave its perfect rooms behind.
I grabbed a glass from my beside table and raised it in a toast to Hank and Sadie.
“We’ll always have Paris,” I said, wistfully. I’d heard someone say that in a movie once.
Then I dragged all my bags to the front door. While Marmalade put my stuff in the taxi, I walked through the house one last time. At the back door I stopped, looking out across the dusty brown yard. In that moment I realized I’d never played out back, never even set foot out there. How could it be that I lived in a house where I never even played in the backyard?
Moochi thumped his foot.
“We’re on our own,” I said.
He nodded.
“Are you okay with that?”
He nodded again.
We walked out front and closed the door.
Forever.
Chapter 21
I was sure Thursgood would never come back so I snuck down into the alley and scouted out the best place to dump his clothes. Moochi helped me stuff them in a neighbor’s trashcan. We dusted our hands off when we were done.
Instead of running back to Marmalade’s house, I ran down the alley to Preston’s. I found him sitting on the edge of the sandbox as I rounded the corner to his garage.
“Hey,” I said, catching my breath from my full sprint. “Whacha doing?”
“Thinking about camp.”
I walked out into the cool grass and took a seat. It smelled wet and clean. “What about it?”
He carved pictures in the sand that I couldn’t see from my angle. I just saw his arm moving and heard the shhhh of the sand. Finally, he sighed big and loud and said, “I have to go to church camp again.”
“Maybe God could write you a note,” I offered.
“Very funny.”
“It’s something to do. I mean, it can’t be that bad.”
“It is.”
“Did you talk to God?”
“God isn’t the problem. Ned Bender is the problem. He threatens to beat me up every year, and most of the time he does it more than once.”
A cool chill moved across the yard as the sun fell below the rooftops. I looked over at my friend sitting on the edge of the sandbox. His glasses held the last glimmer of evening sun. His brown hair tumbled down into his eyes.
I’d known him my entire life.
I pushed myself up from the grass and blurted out, “You’re my best friend.”
“Duh.” He smiled.
“I mean it,” I said, wedging myself down on the edge next to him. “Maybe if we start a business together then your father won’t make you go away to camp and get beat up by God’s followers.”
“Very funny.”
Preston sighed, weaving his fingers together like he was praying. “Has your Mom called?”
I shook my head again.
“I’m sorry I brought it up then. It’s just been a long time and I thought she might have called by now.”
“Marmalade doesn’t think she’s coming back. We have to go to court and talk to a judge.”
“Maybe that’s okay,” he said, looking on the bright side. “You never seemed to spend much time with her anyway. Besides, now I see you every day instead of just on weekends.”
Mrs. Brown appeared at the back door. “Preston, it’s time for evening prayer.”
Preston looked up at his mother. “Okay.” Then he turned to me, “I gotta go. Call me later if you’re bored.”
I pushed off from the sandbox. “Give my best to the Holy Ghost.”
I saw him tuck his head into his chest and smile so his mother couldn’t see.
I walked back home in the fading light. The rich smell of moist grass and fresh dirt rose up from every single yard I passed. It was going to rain.
Randall was pacing and listening to his radio program when I got back. I passed by Marmalade’s room and saw that she was napping. Tomorrow was Sunday. If it only rained through the night then maybe we could go to the zoo tomorrow. Passing through the kitchen I caught sight of my reflection in the window. Next week was my birthday. I would be twelve years old.
Upstairs I loafed around, digging through Grand Daddy’s old closet to find things to decorate my room. Big raindrops splattered against the bedroom windows. Outside, the street lamps clicked on. From where I was standing I could see straight out the window at the rain slanting down through the light like thousands of diamonds hurling toward earth. It was so quiet inside that the steady drumming of drops on the roof made me feel less alone.
I dug through the closet, stopping to admire an old shaving kit or cuff links or tie clips. Grand Daddy had been dead almost my whole life, and his pajamas were still wrapped in plastic, unopened, on a shelf. No one ever talked about him.
Moochi walked in from the hall.
“Hey.” I looked up at him.
He thumped his foot and the fur on his ears flopped down into his face.
“What are you doing?”
He shrugged his shoulders, holding out big, empty paws.
“Gosh,” I said, stuffing everything back into the closet. “Grand Daddy still has so much stuff up here. Everything has his name or initials on it. I held up a monogrammed handkerchief. It had “Herbert Royale” sewn across the front in cursive letters.
“Herbert,” I whispered. “What a fuddy-duddy name.”
Moochi wanted ice cream so we walked back downstairs. I dug chunks of frozen peaches out and ate them as we listened to the steady drumming of raindrops. For some reason all the peace and tranquility made me really hungry. I found the can opener and ate an entire can of ravioli, cold.
When Moochi went outside to snoop around on the back porch I went upstairs to read my book. Halfway up the stairs I had an attack of the yawns so intense I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.
The next morning a cold gray light filled my room. Randall was perched directly over me like a vulture. He’d shaved and put on clean clothes. “Hey,” he said, “You wanna go to the zoo ?”
Chapter 22
Because it was still raining on and off all day, we were the only people inside the Monkey House and hung out until it slowed to a drizzle. On the way home we got fried chicken boxes.
The house was so quiet when we walked in that I immediately became suspicious. Quiet houses were beginning to bug me. I sat my chicken box with its greasy stain on the living room table and walked into the hall. From where I was standing I could see into my grandmother’s room perfectly. She was in the exact same position she’d been the night before.
“Randall?”
“Yeah,” he said, digging into his box.
“Can you come here?”
I turned just in time to see the smile wash off of his face. “What’s wrong?”
“Just come here.”
One. Two. Three. Four . . . his footsteps echoed in the hall, and even though he only had to walk about thirteen steps it took a lifetime. He stopped next to me, looking into her room.
“She’s napping,” he said.
“For two days?”
He looked up at the ceiling. Then his eyes wandered all around searching for an answer. “Has it been two days since she was up? No . . . ”
“Yes.” Tears began to fill my eyes. I could see now that she wasn’t breathing. She was so quiet. I knew. I just knew. I walked into the room and lay my hand on her leg, “Marmalade, it’s me, Tupelo Honey. We brought you a chicken box.”
Her leg was cold. My knees started to give, and I sort of tumbled
forward, falling across the bed. Tears burned hot in my eyes. When I finally opened my eyes I saw that Randall was still standing in the hall, mouth open, eyes wide.
I bunched up her blankets in my hands and cried. “No . . . no . . . no, please don’t leave us now. Please . . . someone help us.” I started shaking her.
Behind me I heard the chicken box hit the floor. Randall ran into the room. “Mother . . . Mother, wake up.” When she didn’t move or answer he shook her and raised his voice. “Mother. Mother, wake up and eat some dinner with me and Tupelo Honey.” He tried to lift her into a sitting position. “Mother,” he yelled. “Wake up.”
It was so horrible. Her arms were stiff. Her fingers didn’t move. A big yellow stain of urine had dried on the sheets.
“Please wake up,” I sputtered weakly.
Randall accidentally knocked me into the wall, trying to get around close enough to pull her out of bed. I hit my head hard and pushed off the wall, annoyed. “Stop,” I yelled.
He kept pulling and yelled, “Mother, wake up.”
“Randall,” I grabbed him by the arm, forcing back bile and soda in my throat. “Randall, please stop. She’s gone.”
“She’s right here,” he screamed with such a frantic, high pitch voice it sent chills vibrating down my spine. “Mother.”
Then he collapsed onto the floor. “Oh, God,” he whispered.
My whole body began trembling. I had no idea what to do, so I reached for her hand. It felt like bones covered in paper. I wrapped both of my hands around hers, blowing on it with my warm breath. I noticed she had combed her hair before she went to bed.
The choked, gurgling of Randall crying filled the space around us.
That’s when I saw it. All around the bed and on the bedside table and even on the pillow next to her she had arranged my homemade gifts. There was the pasta holder and the vase covered in hearts and a jar I’d covered with paper maché and paper flowers. An ornament I’d made at school with a picture of myself glued to a sparkly silver ball and the Christmas card I’d just made for her were on the pillow next to her. Nearly every other object I’d ever made for her was placed somewhere close by. She’d taken it all out and surrounded herself with it.
Randall wailed so loud it scared me. I picked up a Christmas card I’d made for her a few years ago. It had a terrible drawing of Santa Claus on the front. I opened it up and on the inside it read: Merry Xmas Grandma. I love you so much (more than ice cream) Love, love love your Granddawter, Tupelo Honey.
I’d misspelled the word Granddaughter.
Her stuff was everywhere. Laid out for the world to see. She was right in front of me. Still. Completely still.
There was a notepad and pencil on the bedside table. I grabbed it.
“Okay,” I said, real loud. “This is what we’re going to do. Alright . . . ” I wrote down the days of the week on the notepad, barely able to see through my tears. “Alright, I’ll take the bus to school during the week. Then on Tuesdays, no, I mean Mondays, we’ll go to the store and buy food. On Tuesdays we’ll clean up the house together. On Wednesdays we’ll take the bus over and get fried chicken . . . ”
“What are we going to do without Mother?” Randall interrupted. The front of his shirt was wet with tears.
“We’ll just have to do everything ourselves.”
“I don’t want to,” he choked, burying his face into the side of the mattress.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll do the schedule, but we’ve got to do some stuff. We’ve got to get someone to help us. She can’t just stay here.”
Randall didn’t say anything. I stood up, watching his back shake and tremble from crying. I walked out into the hall.
Think. Think. Think. What can we do?
Nash.
I ran up to my room and dug through my dresser until I found his old beeper number. I dragged the phone from the hall over to the stairs so I could sit down and I dialed. Beep Beep. Please leave the number you are calling from, a mechanical voice informed. I did.
Okay. My hands were shaking so bad and I couldn’t stop crying. I stared at the phone. Please call back. Please call back. I had no way of knowing how much time had passed and I didn’t want to call Time and Temperature because what if he called back at that exact minute. So I waited. I was so dizzy and sick to my stomach that I leaned over and laid my head on the floor.
The phone did not ring.
Finally, I heard Randall moving around downstairs. I didn’t want him to be alone so I walked back down. He was standing in the hall, next to the chicken box he’d dropped on the floor.
Tears streamed down his face. “Tupelo Honey,” he said. “Mother’s dead.”
The word slapped me in the face. “Don’t say that. We love her. Right?”
He nodded, more tears pushing their way down his cheeks.
“We’re going to be okay,” I said, not convinced I would ever be anything, much less okay.
“What are we going to do?” he whispered.
“I don’t know,” I said, biting my lip. “I called Nash. He’ll know what to do. We’ve got money. We’ll be okay.”
“The money. You have to go and get all of the money in the house, Tupelo Honey. If people come to get Mother they might take it.” Randall looked almost lucid. “Go. Go and get it.”
I was still shaking so hard I could barely breathe. I kept glancing at the phone on the gossip bench, willing it to ring.
“Go get the purse and whatever else you can find.” Randall was almost taking charge.
Happy to have a goal to focus on, I ran off to get the key to the closet. Just get the valuables, I kept telling myself. Just get the valuables. I found the key and took it to the closet. It was so terrible. My arm was shaking so bad I could barely get the key in the lock. Finally I did, and the lock clicked open. There I was, all alone in the hall, staring at a dark closet. I dug around for the purse and pulled it out. Everything smelled like mothballs. Finally, I decided to turn on the light and check to see if anything else had been left in there. For my entire life my grandmother had loved to hide things in coat pockets. It had been her secret. As I stood there I began to rummage through the pockets of Grand Daddy’s old coats. The first three held nothing, but the fourth one had a fat paper envelope like they give you at the bank. I pulled open the flap. It was stuffed with money.
I set the purse on the floor at my feet, along with the envelope, and began frantically digging through every pocket trying to find all of the valuables. I found a diamond ring I had never seen my entire life. I held it up to the light.
“That was her wedding ring,” Randall said behind me.
My heart jumped out of my chest. “God, don’t sneak up on me.”
“I didn’t. She took that ring off after Daddy died.”
“What do I do with it?”
“Put it all together. Let’s get everything and put it somewhere safe.”
I turned back to the closet, stuffing my hand down into another coat pocket. Nothing. Then another. Nothing. Then I pulled at an old velvet coat, stuffing my hand into its deep pocket. The feeling of paper rubbed against my fingertips. I gripped all of it, pulling it out.
“I think she hid money everywhere.” I stared at the wad of cash in my hand.
We moved from room to room, robots in search of anything we believed we should keep safe. Money, old jewelry, a pearl necklace no one knew was real or not, old coins. Somehow we were ensuring our survival by proving to ourselves that we would have money to buy food and keep the lights on, because neither one of us had a job. I purposely tried not to even glance in the direction of her room as I went up and down the hall searching every room. Still, once I didn’t look away fast enough and caught sight of her feet at the end of her bed. It stunned me into stopping right there. I looked at her feet, right there, where I’d seen them a thousand times. I loved those feet. I wanted them to stand up and walk over and give me a hug. I felt my face pulling tight and the hot tears. I picked up Randall’s ch
icken box and went back to making sure we had everything.
Finally, when we had searched every conceivable place, I went and stood in front of the pile we’d collected on the sofa. “We need a suitcase.”
“There’s some in the garage,” he said.
He was gone a long time. I sat on his bed wondering what to do in a house with a dead person. It was awful. After a while I heard him creaking up the back porch steps. The morning birds started to sing.
“It took me awhile to find one with a lock,” he said.
It was old and poo-poo brown, with a pebbled plastic outside. In all of my years of snooping I’d never come across this suitcase. “Where did you get this?”
Randall fished the key out of an inside pocket. “It was Daddy’s.”
A deep, dark blue spilled across the sky outside the windows. I thought about what the minister had said about heaven. I thought about chariots and golden apples and the stories of angels. “Do you think Marmalade and Grand Daddy are together up there?”
He stood straight up. “I reckon. That still don’t make it right.”
Together we piled all of the valuables into the suitcase. I put my jade donkey on top and locked it tight. Randall gave me the key to hold on to.
“What are we going to do with it?”
“We need to hide it.”
“We could bury it like Nash used to bury the money . . . ” But my words trailed off when I remembered that he’d never returned my beep.
“Nah, the rain and worms will ruin it. Just stick tight to it for now.”
I was too exhausted to argue. I sat down on the floor, leaning my back against the sofa. Randall handed me a blanket. It had been so long since I’d felt warm. My eyelids were heavy. My arms drooped at my sides. Randall lay down on the sofa behind me and put his hand on my shoulder. I fell asleep crying.
Chapter 23
The sound of the mail lady opening the box on the front porch woke me up. Sunlight flooded the room. I wanted to run outside and ask her what to do. I wanted to throw open the door and say, “Could you come here for a minute?”
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