Promise

by Judy Young

  PROMISE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2015 Judy Young

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Young, Judy, 1956-

  Promise / written by Judy Young.

  pages cm

  Summary: Eleven-year-old Kaden, a boy who lives with his grandmother outside the small town of Promise, learns, just when he is starting middle school, that the father he has never known was released from prison.

  ISBN 978-1-58536-914-0 (hard cover : alk. paper) -- ISBN

  978-1-58536-915-7 (paper back : alk. paper)

  [1. Conduct of life--Fiction. 2. Fathers and sons--Fiction. 3. Ex-convicts--Fiction. 4. Middle schools--Fiction. 5. Schools--Fiction. 6. Grandmothers--Fiction. 7. Crows as pets--Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.Y8664Pro 2015

  [Fic]--dc23

  2015003515

  ISBN 978-1-58536-914-0 (case)

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  ISBN 978-1-58536-915-7

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Printed in the United States.

  Sleeping Bear Press™

  2395 South Huron Parkway, Suite 200

  Ann Arbor, MI 48104

  © 2015 Sleeping Bear Press

  visit us at sleepingbearpress.com

  Contents

  Friday, August 26

  Chapter One: The Fire Tower

  Monday, August 22

  Chapter Two: Four Days Earlier

  Friday, August 26

  Chapter Three: The Truck

  Chapter Four: Salt and Pepper

  Chapter Five: Not Ready

  Monday, August 29

  Chapter Six: The Exit Plan

  Chapter Seven: A-Team

  Chapter Eight: The Stowaway

  Chapter Nine: Surprises

  Tuesday, August 30

  Chapter Ten: Accepted

  Saturday, September 3

  Chapter Eleven: All Figured Out

  Sunday, September 4

  Chapter Twelve: Allies

  Monday, September 5

  Chapter Thirteen: Cabin Five

  Chapter Fourteen: Secrets

  Tuesday, September 6

  Chapter Fifteen: Trumpets

  Wednesday, September 7

  Chapter Sixteen: All Riled Up

  Thursday, September 8

  Chapter Seventeen: Home Alone

  Friday, September 9

  Chapter Eighteen: The Sign

  Chapter Nineteen: Friendship Rock

  Saturday, September 10

  Chapter Twenty: Unexpected Visit

  Chapter Twenty-One: Ready

  Chapter Twenty-Two: The Meeting

  Sunday, September 11

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Like A Normal Family

  Monday, September 12

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Town Crier

  Chapter Twenty-Five: School Beautification

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Sharing Music

  Tuesday, September 13

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Framed

  Wednesday, September 14

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Paying the Price

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Still Strangers

  Chapter Thirty: Under A Yellow Moon

  Thursday, September 15

  Chapter Thirty-One: The Plan

  Friday, September 16

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Homework

  Chapter Thirty-Three: A Little Stirring Up

  Saturday, September 17

  Chapter Thirty-Four: Not Amused

  Chapter Thirty-Five: In Trouble

  Sunday, September 18

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Confrontation

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: Forgiving

  Monday, September 19

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: A New Day

  Judy Young

  For Ross

  and his brethren, the crow.

  Love, Judy

  Any day with a crow in it is full of promise.

  —Crows, Candace Savage

  Friday, August 26

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE FIRE TOWER

  If Kaden had gotten the dog he wanted for his eleventh birthday, it would have barked when the man walked up the narrow path from the road. The man would have wondered how a dog got trapped in the top of an abandoned fire tower. He would have tried to rescue it, and Kaden’s secret hiding spot would have been discovered instantly. But the man took no notice of a crow cawing incessantly from the window of the fire tower. Kubla was much better than a watchdog if you really wanted no one to notice you. And that was exactly what Kaden wanted. No one to notice.

  Kaden should have easily gone through life unnoticed. He was very average. Average height and weight. Unnoticeable brown hair and eyes. Made average grades. But in the small town of Promise, Kaden felt he stood out like a crow against snow. He was the kid whose father was in prison.

  When Kaden first heard the vehicle, he picked up the binoculars. Not many cars turned onto the rutted, nearly undriveable dirt road leading up to the fire tower. On the first warm days of spring or when the color changed in the fall, a few hikers might come from Chapston City, forty miles to the north. They would park at the log barricade and wander up the weedy path to the tower. There, they’d be disappointed to discover the bottom set of stairs was gone.

  But this was a scorching August Friday. Hikers rarely came in the summer, discouraged not only by the heat but also by ticks and jungles of poison ivy. Kaden put the binoculars to his eyes. He focused on the spot where a small piece of road showed through the trees. Kubla sat on his shoulder. The vehicle soon passed through the open spot: an old white pickup with a big plastic cargo carrier taking up most of the bed.

  When the truck disappeared under layers of leaves, Kaden sat down out of sight from anyone below and waited. Kubla waited, too, chattering in Kaden’s ear and pulling at strands of his hair. He pestered Kaden whenever he wanted to play, but now Kaden gently pushed the bird off his shoulder. It wasn’t long before the truck pulled up at the log barricade. Music drifted from its open windows. Then the engine turned off and the music quit. A door squeaked open and slammed shut. There was no talking.

  Just one hiker, Kaden thought. He was tempted to take a quick peek but was afraid he’d be seen. People always looked up when they first approached the fire tower.

  Kubla darted out one of the paneless windows, making a racket of harsh warning caws. Kaden knew the hiker was making the usual inspection of the tower and surrounding area. When Kubla perched on his favorite limb near the edge of the clearing and quieted to just a few grunts, Kaden knew the hiker was heading back toward the truck.

  Kaden quietly peeked out. A man in blue jeans, a T-shirt, and a cowboy hat was stepping over the log barricade, his back to the tower. He didn’t look like the typical hiker. No daypack. No canteen hanging from his belt.

  Kaden ducked back out of sight until he heard the truck start up. Once again, he picked up the binoculars. In the summer it was hard, but if he got at just the right angle, he could see where the dirt road met the main road. Kaden wanted to see which way the truck turned.

  If the truck turned right, it would go around the bend past the five stone cabins where Kaden lived with Gram. Disappointed hikers frequently stopped there to ask where the trailhead was. Gram always had a grumpy lecture waiting for Kaden if hikers stopped.

  “A worthless lot,” she’d say. “They’ve got too m
uch time on their hands if they can just go tromping aimlessly through the woods all day. What they need are jobs, but not one even offered to help. It’s obvious the place could use some fixin’ up.”

  Not that Gram would accept help from strangers, and she certainly wouldn’t pay anyone. She had Kaden, and when hikers bothered Gram, Kaden could expect extra chores to satisfy Gram’s fight against laziness.

  Kaden kept his binoculars aimed at the little spot of road. If the truck turned left, it would curve down the hill and drive by Emmett’s. Emmett Adams was the only other person who lived this side of Promise. You couldn’t see his house from the cabins, but the old man was their only neighbor.

  Unlike Gram, Emmett enjoyed company and had hand-painted signs lined up by the road inviting people to stop. One had a horse’s head with a cartoon bubble saying “Be Neigh . . . borly! Pull on in and have a chat.” Another had a dog saying “Come on in, I don’t bite.” On a third was a stick figure in a T-shirt, shorts, and big hiking boots saying “Hike on in—FREE DRINKS.” Not many stopped but when someone did, Emmett loved it.

  “There’s no hiking trail at the tower,” Emmett would say, “but there’s the promise of a good time right down the hill.”

  The hikers would politely chuckle at his lame joke but Emmett knew the hikers were good for business at the Big Apple Grocery Store and Pillie’s Purple Cow.

  Now Kaden saw the truck slow to a stop at the main road.

  “Good, he turned left,” Kaden told Kubla, who had flown back to the tower and was now strutting around the floor, proud he had run off another intruder. “Gram’s been grouchy enough lately without strangers irritating her.” Even as he said this, he wasn’t convinced the man in the white truck was really a stranger, though.

  Kaden put down the binoculars and looked absently at the vast view of the late summer forest that spread in all directions below him. Normally, he would have been dreading returning to school. This year should have been especially worrisome. He would be starting middle school. But today, the last Friday of summer vacation, all Kaden could think about was the letter. It had been four days since the letter arrived. Four days of being able to think of nothing else.

  Monday, August 22

  CHAPTER TWO

  FOUR DAYS EARLIER

  “Walk down to Emmett’s and see if we got any mail over the weekend,” Gram said after lunch.

  Their mailbox was in front of Emmett’s, the result of one of Gram’s irrational fights. Gram didn’t want her mailbox on the side of the road. It was constantly being bashed in by teenagers with baseball bats. So she moved the mailbox next to her porch steps. But Mr. Schmerz, the mailman, refused to pull through the circle drive that curved in front of the cabins. A feud started between Gram and Mr. Schmerz. Knowing Gram could not win against the U.S. Postal Service, Emmett stepped in with a solution. Gram’s mail would be delivered at Emmett’s. Emmett had welded odd pieces of heavy steel from old cars and tractors around his mailbox. It looked like a rusty piece of abstract art. Emmett called it the arm breaker and boasted he was never awakened by the sound of a bat hitting metal.

  “It’s too hot and we never get anything anyway,” Kaden told Gram. “Besides, you haven’t seen Emmett for a couple of days.”

  If there was any mail, Emmett would take an evening stroll to deliver it to Gram’s door. Emmett was the only company Gram ever had.

  “Well, you can’t be loafing around here all day,” Gram replied. “There’s wash to hang out.”

  So instead of mail duty, Kaden got laundry duty. And Gram didn’t believe in dryers.

  “Why pay for something the sun can do for free?” Gram said.

  Sweating out in the hot sun, Kaden hung shirts and pants on the clothesline. When the line could hold no more, he carried the rest to the porch, where he draped socks and underwear over the rails. Then he quickly went inside, grabbed a book, and spent the rest of the afternoon reading in the shade of the porch. He knew Gram wouldn’t interrupt reading with more chores. Reading was about the only thing she deemed more important.

  Just before supper, Gram called out, “Those clothes ought to be dry by now.”

  Kaden went to the clothesline with two baskets, one for Gram’s clothes, one for his. When the clothesline was empty, he moved to the porch. He rolled two socks together and tossed them into his basket. Gram sat opposite him on the old metal glider, husking corn. She looked at the spine of the book sitting next to her.

  “I see you had letter ‘G’ out again. Can’t you read about anything besides Genghis Khan?” Gram asked.

  Kaden knew Gram would quiz him and had an answer ready. “As a matter of fact, I read about gingko. It’s a tree that grows in China and has leaves like little fans. It says the fruit smells putrid.”

  Kaden pictured hurling a gingko fruit at Luke when school started, but he knew even if he had one, he’d never have the guts to plaster Luke with it. As Kaden rolled another ball of socks, Emmett sauntered up the circle drive.

  “Mail call,” Emmett announced.

  Climbing the squeaky porch steps, Emmett shoved a flyer announcing back-to-school sales into Kaden’s hands.

  “Look through this and circle what you’ll need,” he stated. Then he handed Kaden another envelope. “This one’s from the school. Probably has your class schedule in it.”

  Emmett stepped past Kaden and handed Gram an envelope.

  “It’s from the Center,” he whispered, but Kaden heard anyway.

  Gram opened the letter and quickly read the contents to herself.

  “Is it from Dad?” Kaden asked. “What’s it say?”

  “Nothing important,” Gram answered. She got up and went in the cabin. Kaden heard her dresser drawer being pulled open, then closed shut.

  “You need any squash, Emmett?” Gram said when she returned.

  “I could do with a couple,” Emmett answered.

  Kaden knew if the letter were nothing important, Gram would have just thrown it away. He also knew Emmett didn’t need any vegetables. He had his own garden behind his shop. Gram always used the vegetable garden as a chance to talk to Emmett in private, and the only time she talked in private was when something was important.

  “I’ll help,” Kaden volunteered, hoping to hear the conversation.

  “No,” Gram said, “go put away your clothes and wash up for supper.”

  Kaden picked up his laundry basket and jumped off the porch. The porch was part of Gram’s cabin, not his. Gram’s was Cabin Three, the biggest of the five. It was the only one with two rooms, if not counting the bathroom. It was also the only cabin with three windows, one on each side of the front door and one in back, in Gram’s bedroom.

  The front room was both living room and kitchen. A little table with a bright yellow tablecloth was pushed against the wall under the kitchen window. The living room had an easy chair, a couch, and a bookcase filled with a set of old encyclopedias. Two intercoms sat on the top of the bookcase, both with a dot of red light shining.

  Kaden carried his clothes to the cabin next door. That was his cabin. Cabin Two. There was no porch on Kaden’s cabin, and except for the small bathroom that had only a toilet and a sink, Kaden’s cabin had only one room and one window. Kaden put the flyer and his schedule on his desk next to another set of intercoms. Both red lights on these intercoms were also lit.

  When Kaden turned ten, Gram let him move into Cabin Two. Until then he had slept on the hide-a-bed couch in Gram’s cabin. But part of the deal was there would be two sets of intercoms and they would both be permanently left on. From one, Kaden could always hear Gram as she puttered about in her living room–kitchen. From the other, Gram could always hear Kaden, and the two could talk to each other just like people talking from two different rooms in a normal house.

  Kaden turned up the volume on one of the intercoms and put his ear close. Other than the hum of Gram’s fan, there was no sound. Rushing back to Gram’s cabin, he quietly entered her room and opened the dresser draw
er. There lay the opened envelope. It was addressed to Gram. In the upper left-hand corner, in scrawly handwriting, it said, Dennis McCrory, #27665. Below that was the preprinted return address of the Chapston City State Correctional Center.

  Kaden pulled the letter out of the envelope but was only able to read the first few words before he heard the porch steps squeak. He stuffed the letter in the envelope, put it back in the dresser, and quietly pushed the drawer shut. Darting from the room, Kaden plopped into the easy chair and watched through the screen door as Gram waved good-bye to Emmett from the top of the porch steps.

  “What did the letter say?” Kaden asked again when Gram came in.

  “Nothing that concerns you,” Gram said.

  “But—” When Kaden started to protest, Gram interrupted.

  “I sure wish this heat wave would break,” she said, and Kaden knew there would be no more discussion about the letter.

  After dinner, Kaden automatically went to the sink and turned on the water. Unless he was sick, there was no getting around washing the dishes every evening. The screen door banged shut behind him and the springs on the porch chair moaned as Gram sat down. Soon Gram’s humming came through the kitchen window. She did that when something weighed on her mind. Not a musical hum. More of a grumbly, muttering hum that almost sounded like words. A blurring of “I don’t know” and “maybe if,” which slid into low guttural gratings. It reminded Kaden of Kubla’s mutterings.

  The grumbling hum stopped and the porch steps squeaked. Footsteps crunched across the gravel of the circle drive. Kaden looked out the window and saw Gram walking away from the cabin. Quickly, he sneaked back to Gram’s bedroom. He knew it was wrong but he wanted to know what the letter said. After all, it was from his father. He quietly opened the drawer, but the letter was gone.

  Kaden sighed and went back to the dishes. He knew the letter was curling to ash in the stone fireplace that sat like a monument on the crescent-shaped lawn. That was the place all letters went that had Chapston City State Correctional Center in the upper left-hand corner. But Kaden had seen some of the words in this letter and they were distinctly burned into his mind.