“Right, sure.” Jolene scowled, but she followed him to the backyard.
For a good ten seconds, she stood frozen, like a stop-motion frame. And then she fell on her knees in front of the ChipNutz cans and brushed her fingertips over the papaya plants, looking as if she wanted to hug each one. “They’re all here? All hundred fourteen?”
“All hundred fourteen.”
She ran to the compost piles, turned to him.
“Ashley helped. And your tools are in the shed.”
“All this . . . ?”
Ware joined her. “It’s yours. You’ll have to start over, but I’ll help.”
“It’s mine?”
“My parents gave it to me, and I’m giving it to you.”
She pointed to the sandwich board. “‘The Real World,’” she read out loud, her eyebrows lifted into questions.
“Because you’re right. Bad stuff happens. But the real world is also all the things we do about the bad stuff. We’re the real world, too.”
Jolene took off her sunglasses. And in her eyes, Ware saw himself reflected. A kid who was maybe a little bit of an actual hero.
Seventy-Three
When Ware heard the car drive in at five, he raised a thumb to Jolene. He had prepared for everything.
A few seconds later, his mother stepped out the back door. “No more second shifts!” she said with a dramatic hand thrown over her forehead. She looked around. “What’s all this?”
“You gave me the backyard,” Ware reminded her.
“Of course. But I wasn’t expecting . . .”
“Papayas!” Ware launched into his speech. “Jolene says we can have as many as we want.”
His mother seemed to notice Jolene for the first time. A smile blossomed on her face. “Jolene?”
“My friend from this summer. Now, papayas are good for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.”
His mother’s smile grew broader. “Your friend. How nice. From the Rec.”
Too late, Ware saw that actually, he had not prepared for everything. He had omitted a crucial detail. He tried to signal Jolene, but she had already dropped her shovel and was brushing off her hands.
“No, ma’am,” she said, all sweet politeness. “I met Ware at the lot.”
“Papayas,” Ware tried, “are excellent in smoothies!”
“At the lot?” his mother asked, ignoring the diversion.
Jolene nodded. “Right. After he quit Rec.”
Ware stepped between them. “They’re loaded with vitamins. Vitamins, Mom!”
His mother leaned around him. “After he . . . excuse me? Quit Rec?”
“Yes. You know,” Jolene said, sounding a little nervous now. “When we built the moat? You know. Ma’am.”
“The moat? I know . . . ?” Ware’s mother pinched the bridge of her nose. She raised her other hand, as if asking the world to slow down. “You come inside, Ware. We’re going to have a conversation.” Then she disappeared, shaking her head.
Ware and Jolene darted to the picnic table. The crossbars cramped the space. Still, Under the Table was the right place for a huddle.
“You said they didn’t care,” Jolene hissed. “You said they were happy you weren’t alone and had stuff to do. You said they didn’t care.”
“I meant they wouldn’t care. If they knew, they wouldn’t care.”
“Well, extra information: your mother cares.”
Seventy-Four
“I think you should tell me about your summer.” Ware’s mother drummed the table. Her voice was oddly calm, but dangerously high-pitched. “Apparently I missed something.”
“Okay, sure,” Ware said. “My summer. Well . . .” He pulled the Rec brochure from the refrigerator door and consulted its offerings. “I had many Diverse Enrichment Opportunities and built my Real-Life Skills. I made a stained-glass window. I learned how to grow things and built a moat. You should see all the birds that came. I stopped going to Rec. My summer was great!”
“Excuse me?”
“I said my summer was great.”
“Not that part.” His mother leaned in and cupped her ear. “About you not going to Rec.”
“Well, right, I had all those valuable experiences instead of Rec. And my summer was great. I made a film with Uncle Cy’s camera. And the film went—”
“Not once? Every day all summer I dropped you off, and you . . . you never went inside?”
“Of course I went inside. A few times. In the beginning. And I brought the film to the Rec. That’s what I’m trying to tell—”
“Over five hundred dollars, and you skipped?”
“I offered to pay you. Twice as much, remember? You would have made money!”
She couldn’t argue that point, but Ware could see she was regrouping for a side-flank assault. He seized the advantage. “I had Meaningful Social Interactions every day, just like you wanted. With other kids, with Walter, with—”
“Who is Walter?”
“So . . .” He shouldn’t have mentioned Walter. “You’d like him. He listens to people and helps them solve their problems.” He edged the Rec brochure across the table. “And now Ms. Sanchez wants me to—”
“I don’t think I know a social worker named Walter. Where did you say he practices?”
Why had he mentioned Walter? “Uh . . . near the community center. And here’s the best part: I’m going back to Rec. Ms. Sanchez invited me. And this time you don’t have to pay!”
That threw her off the Walter track, at least. “No? How’s that?”
Ware explained about the film club. When he finished, he dropped his shoulders and spread his arms wide. “That’s all I’ve got, Mom. I’m trying to be normal, but this is as close as I get.”
“What do you mean, trying to be normal?”
“I know you wish you had a normal kid.” He felt a dangerous prick behind his eyes. “I heard you.”
“I would never say something like that.”
“The first day of Rec. You told Dad that I tried to buy my way out of it. You called me antisocial.”
“What? No. You misheard.”
“I didn’t mishear. You asked Dad, ‘Why can’t we have a normal kid?’”
“I said that?” Her eyes filled. “I was so stressed then. With your grandmother, with the extra shifts. It’s not an excuse—I should never have said that. I didn’t mean it, and I’m so sorry you heard it.” She wiped the tears from her eyes and leaned back. “All the time, I was protecting you so you wouldn’t get hurt—I know, I know, overprotecting you!—and it turns out I’m the one who . . .” She got up and wrapped her arms around him. For a moment, relief flooded through him.
“I’ve only ever wanted you to be happy.”
He pulled away. “But I’m not you, Mom. Sometimes I’m happy doing stuff by myself. Uncle Cy says he’s that way, too. He says being like that is normal. For an artist.”
“Cyrus was trying to tell me that. I think I was trying not to listen.” She picked up the Rec brochure, tore it in half, and threw the pieces in the trash.
Just then, Ware’s dad’s walked in the front door. Ware held his head in his hands as he listened to his mother tell him what she’d just learned.
“Let me get this right, son,” his dad said when he’d heard the whole thing. “You asked for the backyard, just to give it away?”
Ware looked up. His dad wore the baffled, cotton-ball expression again. He hung his head and nodded.
“Your big reward for the summer, which your mother said seemed really important to you. You just gave it away?”
Ware’s head sank to his chest. He spread his hands in apology. “Jolene needed it more.”
His dad wrapped an arm around Ware’s shoulder and squeezed. “You’re a real team player,” he said. “I am so proud of you.”
His mother rose. “I think you ought to show us this film that got so much attention.”
Ware sat between his parents and opened the film. While it ran—six minutes and three secon
ds—he watched their eyes. For six minutes and three seconds they never left the screen.
At the end, his mom sat quietly for a minute. “I think Cyrus is right.”
Ware felt himself swell. “You think I’m an artist?”
“That, of course,” she said. “But I meant he’s right that it makes us lucky.”
Late that night, after they’d gone for pizza and shopped for a thousand things for school, which did include black jeans and a black T-shirt but did not include ear piercing, Ware lay in bed looking up at the ceiling plaster whorls. Tonight they looked like smiles on top of smiles inside smiles.
Seventy-Five
Jolene took the three-forty-five bus to Ware’s house every day after school, bringing along a garbage bag full of old fruit and vegetables from the Greek Market, and took the five-ten bus home.
One day, she stayed a little later than usual. They were inside drinking lemonade when Ware’s mother came in from the living room.
“I notice there’s a pile of garbage out back” was the first thing she said.
Ware hurried to intercede. “We’ll move it behind the shed. Or cover it.”
His mother gave him a puzzled look, then smiled at Jolene. “We’ll start saving our scraps for your compost. I’ll leave them in a can by the back door.”
“Your scraps? You’ll give me your scraps?” Jolene asked, the way a normal person might ask, “Your gold? You’ll give me your gold?” Then she had to say, “Thank you, ma’am” about a dozen times, until finally Ware went to the door and nodded meaningfully to the waiting garden.
But his mother wasn’t finished. “You know, people drop produce off at the food pantry. Sometimes it’s past its prime, and we have to throw it out. I’ll bring it home from now on, add it to the pile.”
Jolene about fell on her knees thanking her for that.
“We should get back outside,” Ware tried.
But his mother held up a finger. She opened the drawer under the desk and drew out the fresh red school-year planner she’d bought for Ware. Each morning, she’d left it by his backpack, and each morning he’d put it back in the drawer.
He groaned. “Mom, she doesn’t want—”
His mother waved him off. She flipped open the planner in front of Jolene. “There’s a calendar up front. We can mark planting dates, harvest dates—things like that. There’s a section for notes and see, here in the back, there’s a spreadsheet. We’ll keep track of what you get per pound, profit and expenses.”
Ware tried to catch Jolene’s eye, to mime to her that she could just ditch the planner. But Jolene lifted it as reverently as if it were sewn together of butterfly wings. “We?” she asked. “You’ll help me? And I can keep this?”
And Ware realized: He had just gotten his sibling wish. Half of it, anyway.
Just then, Ware’s father stuck his head in from the living room, smiling in pride. “Garbage, a planner, and some help,” he confirmed what his miracle of a wife had organized. “A hat trick.”
Jolene spun to him, clutching the planner to her chest. “You know hockey?” she asked, breathless with hope.
Ware’s dad clapped his hands together and rubbed them. “The season opener is in three weeks. Save you a spot on the couch?”
Seventy-Six
Jolene didn’t change the message on the sandwich board, even after Ware showed her the bag of letters in the shed. He’d also told her she could get rid of the picnic table, make room for more plants, but she’d kept that, too. Crouched Under the Table, knees touching, they said whatever had to be said.
“Walter got the bill,” Jolene said the first time. “Apparently water’s not free.”
“So . . . do we have to pay him back?”
Jolene laughed, a thing she did so often now Ware was getting used to the sound. “He says I have to flatten boxes for him for the rest of my life. He says you have to help, too.”
It took Ware another week to get up the courage to ask what had to be asked. “Did they clear the lot?” He wrapped his arms, bracing himself.
“Nope. They worked in the front for a couple of days, but then the police came and made them stop.”
Ware straightened so fast he hit his head. “The police? How come?”
“Wink.”
“Sir Wink? The turtle?”
“Nuh-uh. Tortoise. Apparently, Wink is a gopher tortoise.”
“Well, so?”
“So Ashley showed your film to her Audubon group. One of the bird ladies jumped off the couch when she saw Wink and shouted, ‘Whoa, whoa, hold it right there, that’s a gopher tortoise!’ The good thing about them is they’re on the threatened and endangered species list.”
“How is that good?”
“Well, it’s not good for Wink, obviously. But it meant they had to stop clearing the lot until they could get a wildlife expert to come out. The bulldozer guy was not happy.”
“Wow. So . . . maybe the lot could be a refuge. Maybe the community center could still have some of it.” He would rename his film Saved by a Tortoise. They could—
“Nope. Still here in the real world, remember? It took a while to get someone there—these wildlife experts, pretty busy, I guess. Anyway, they’re going to ‘relocate’ Wink next week. Then they’ll have to find his burrow and protect that, since hundreds of other species camp out in gopher tortoise burrows, too. That will take a while. It didn’t save the lot, though. Eventually, they’ll clear it. But still.”
But still. Uncle Cy had been right. You never knew who would see your film, or what would happen when they did.
“I heard about the lady recognizing Wink,” Ware said when Ashley answered her phone. “Any other things they mentioned about my film?”
“They liked the bird parts best, of course,” Ashley said. “They loved the parakeets in the palms.”
“But about my filming? More about that?”
“No, sorry. Except Mrs. Watson said, ‘That boy sure likes that girl’s hands’ about a dozen times. They all laughed about that.”
“Okay, never mind. Tell me about the lady who recognized Wink. All the details.”
“Well, um . . . she’s pretty old? I never saw her move like that before. She jumped right off the couch. We were all kind of worried about her.”
“I mean, tell me what she said about me.”
“Oh. She couldn’t believe you were only eleven.”
“I’m eleven and a half. No, wait. Eleven and three-quarters.”
“She kept saying, ‘He’s only eleven? That young man is going somewhere!’”
“Eleven and three-quarters. Did she say where? Where I was going?” Over the phone, Ware imagined Ashley recalling a list of exotic places: Morocco, Hong Kong, Calcutta. Somehow the twirling sounded as if she was recalling a long list of exotic places. Morocco, Hong Kong, Calcutta. Because kids like him turned into grown-up filmmakers like his uncle.
“No,” she said. “Just ‘somewhere.’ ‘That young man is going somewhere. And he’s only eleven,’ she kept saying.”
Ware sighed. “And three-quarters.”
Then he gave Ashley his number. “Call me if you remember anything else the Audubon ladies said. You can call me anytime.”
“Um . . . I think I remembered everything already?”
“Just in case,” he said. “Anytime.”
Seventy-Seven
Two months later, on a Sunday afternoon when his whole family had gathered for Big Deal’s birthday, Ashley did call. “The cranes are on their way.” She was so excited she didn’t even turn it into a question. “Let’s watch from the lot.”
Um . . . YES?!
He ran to the living room. “Come to the lot at seven. I have a surprise,” he told everyone.
“I’ll bring my camera,” his uncle said.
Big Deal winked. “Will the little skulker be there?”
Unbelievable. His own grandmother.
“I’m going to get her now,” he called, and then he took off on his bike. He p
ulled up in front of the Grotto Bar, panting. He could really use the usual—maybe a double—but he headed straight up the stairs to Jolene’s apartment and banged on the door.
Catching his breath on the landing, he looked down over the lot. The moat was only half full now, and suspiciously green, but it glinted in a contented manner.
On Friday, Jolene had told him the wildlife people had finished protecting Wink’s burrow. The bulldozers were coming back Monday to finish.
Monday, tomorrow. Tomorrow they’d smash the walls, spill the water, scrape the land to bone.
The thought made his chest hurt. He was grateful when he heard steps shuffling to the door.
The woman who opened it had the yellowest hair he’d ever seen. It sprang out of her head like a crown. The center was black.
A bunch of answers fell into place, none of them good. He remembered the worried look on Walter’s face as he scanned the booths, and how he’d sent Jolene away. The things Jolene had said about her aunt. He remembered how her face had hardened when he’d joked about Sunflower’s name, and about how maybe she’d been drunk.
Ware felt his face redden. How mean he must have sounded. How much wanton offense he had given.
Jolene came sliding into the hall. She dashed past Ware onto the landing into the neon light flashing from the endlessly thirsty flamingo.
“I’m sorry,” Ware whispered.
“I know.” She sighed. “Me too.”
Seventy-Eight
“They looked like saints coming up the drawbridge,” Ware voice-overed as he filmed.
It wasn’t his imagination, either—the visitors all did look like saints. First, because a camera lens reveals how special people are, even people who appear ordinary. Also, because the streetlight above made halos around their heads. Ware had scooped a case of light sticks from his father’s truck, so the drawbridge glowed like a runway, lighting people mysteriously from below, too.
Here in the Real World Page 15