20
Uncle Hob
It gets pretty hot on the roof along about the middle of the day. Little Sister doesn’t complain. And I’m not yet of a mind to go back inside. I’m wondering if I shouldn’t get Little Sister out of the sun over there next to the chimney, although the chimney is some higher than we are now. Steeper too, that section of the roof. I’m still wondering when Uncle Hob pokes his head out the dormer window.
“Say,” he says. “You girls look like you could use a drink of water. And maybe a cheese sandwich.”
“We might,” I say. It never occurred to me to ask for such a thing. I figured we’re in enough trouble, we might as well think of ourselves as sent to our rooms without supper.
“You don’t mind if I come out and keep you company, I hope,” Uncle Hob says as he passes me a quart-size mason jar filled with chilled water. I notice he is wearing a tie. This makes me notice that he is wearing a white shirt, his Sunday-go-to-meeting shirt. Most days he likes a plaid shirt, which doesn’t need a tie.
“Little Sister,” he says, “can you take this umbrella from me?”
She does.
“Hold it there,” Uncle Hob says. “Don’t let it slide off the roof.”
He sets a picnic basket out on the roof and climbs out.
He does not stand up, but kind of squats in the little patch of shade beside the window. I see he is altogether dressed for church in his blue pants and best shoes.
“Why are you all dressed up, Uncle Hob?”
He pushes his glasses back up on his nose. “Well, now, I always dress up for special occasions.”
He reaches back inside for his guitar. But he doesn’t bring the guitar out on the roof because the sun isn’t good for the strings. He props it in the window. Now he stops and takes off his black leather shoes and peels off his black nylon socks. His feet are pasty white under those socks, and his toenails are so clean even Aunt Patty wouldn’t find fault. Then he scooches over to sit beside us, whispering, “Ooh, ouch, hot, ooh.”
Little Sister and I move aside and make room for him. It is just slightly cooler in the spot where we have been sitting. “Like sitting on a tablecloth where someone’s left the iron for too long,” he says. “How are you girls standing it?”
Little Sister shrugs. I say, “We’re used to it by now, I guess. It doesn’t seem all that hot anymore.”
Uncle Hob takes the umbrella from Little Sister and puts it behind him so it can’t roll away. Then he fills cups from the picnic basket with cold water. While we drink our fill he is getting out sandwiches that are wrapped in paper napkins. All of this without saying one word. I guess I should be wondering if this is a trick of some kind. Like, if Uncle Hob is trying to get us to come inside, he figures to do it by feeding us and softening us up some. But all that happens is we eat and drink and he holds that big black umbrella over our heads.
“It’s mighty hot up here,” he says. “Don’t reckon I ever gave much thought to sunbathing, but if’n I did, this would be the place to do it.”
“Guess so,” I say. “Had three brand-new freckles break out on my left foot since morning.” Little Sister immediately holds out her left foot to be compared.
Then I tell him how well Little Sister is coming along with her multiplication tables and how many green roofs we counted and all. And he points out the business district and says which rooftops are the drugstore and the dime store and the movie theater. Any rooftop you point out, Uncle Hob knows what store it is on top of. This, he says, is because he used to work as a roofer when school let out in summer.
“Are you too old to do that now?” I say. I used to think he was older than he is because of the glasses he wears. But now I’m older and I realize that not all grown-ups are old. It just seems that way because they’re tall.
“Oh, no,” he says, like he’s surprised at the thought. Right away I’m worried I’ve said something wrong.
“What I mean is,” I say, “why’d you quit?”
“Your aunt Patty got too nervous about me working on rooftops all day long. That’s when I took to painting houses.”
“I don’t remember you painting houses,” I say.
“Well, I don’t anymore. Patty got to worrying about whether I’d fall off of the ladder.”
“That Aunt Patty is a powerful worrier,” I say. Which reminds me that I haven’t seen her out here for a while. I’m almost missing her.
That’s a joke, that last part about missing her, the kind of joke Aunt Patty has very little appreciation for. None, to be exact. Since there isn’t much joking in Aunt Patty’s house, I don’t even know whether Uncle Hob enjoys a joke now and again. So all I say is, “Where do you think she is?”
He tells us not to worry overmuch about Aunt Patty. “She isn’t crying anymore,” he says.
“Aunt Patty cried?”
“Only for a while,” Uncle Hob says. “Then she took two aspirins and laid down with a cold cloth on her head. She’s sleeping now.”
This doesn’t make me feel any better. “I guess she’s afraid we’ll fall off the roof,” I say.
“She was afraid of that at first,” Uncle Hob says. “But when you didn’t fall off and you didn’t fall off, she got used to the idea that you could sit out here without falling off.”
“Then why did she cry?”
“Why, her feelings are hurt, Willa Jo.” Uncle Hob looks as if he is surprised I haven’t thought of this. Fact is, I haven’t. He gives a deep sigh, the way some men draw on a pipe. In fast, out slow. Then he says, “Plus she’s afraid your mother will find out and accuse her of some kind of neglect.”
“We’d tell Mom Aunt Patty didn’t neglect us,” I say.
“Not if you had fallen off the roof, you wouldn’t,” he says. And then he wobbles the umbrella he is still holding over our heads. “Then, too, sunstroke is known to hamper the powers of speech something awful.”
He holds that umbrella over our heads for the better part of an hour. I guess he would be holding it still but for the fact that the sun went behind some clouds and a little breeze picked up. A little breeze is all Uncle Hob says it is, but it feels pretty gusty up this high. It tried to take the umbrella. “We could go in if that’s what you want,” he says.
“No, I don’t think so,” I say. Little Sister shakes her head. She doesn’t want to go in either. So Uncle Hob closes the umbrella and gives it to me to hold. Then he scoots back to the window and takes out his guitar to do a little picking.
He picks out a tune I remember hearing before. It’s one of those that sound the same over, and over, like a nursery rhyme, so I hope he isn’t planning to sing it for too long. But Uncle Hob doesn’t sing the song, he sings out math problems. Of course Little Sister holds up the right number of fingers. This is more interesting than the song would have been, but after a while, we have all had enough of that. Uncle Hob stops singing and just picks. I don’t know what he is playing, but it sounds nice.
21
The Last Straw
I know that sooner or later we will get around to talking about why Little Sister and I are sitting out here on the roof all day. And whether we are ever coming back in. I don’t yet know what I will answer to either question. I mean, we have to go in sometime, but it seems more than I can think about just now. I think instead of all that happened before I climbed out here.
After supper last night, Aunt Patty made several phone calls to friends. Or maybe just to people she knew had children at home. “We must be able to find you some suitable little playmates,” she said after the third call didn’t pan out. She didn’t seem to notice that Little Sister and I were not especially eager for her to find us any little playmates.
The next calls she made, she didn’t come right out and ask anyone to come over. She asked if their little darlings were home for the summer. Little darlings, no less. Most of them were either away for a while or attending Bible school during the day. Most, because Aunt Patty did come up with one girl about Lit
tle Sister’s age. They invited us over for the evening.
“This evening?” Uncle Hob could hardly believe it. “On such short notice?”
“It’s more or less a get-to-know-you meeting. For the girls, I mean.”
“You think they want to see for themselves if the rumors of cannibalism and general terrorism are true?”
This caught me by surprise. Uncle Hob rarely jokes with Aunt Patty. At least I hoped he was joking. As usual, Aunt Patty didn’t get it. Or she ignored it. “We didn’t have any plans anyway,” Aunt Patty said.
“No, and I was looking forward to it,” Uncle Hob said. He had a new crossword magazine. He was already deep into the first puzzle.
I tried to side with Uncle Hob. “Liz is coming over later with Robbie and Isaac,” I said. “We had those plans.”
Aunt Patty acted as if I hadn’t spoken. “I think we ought to go on over there for a few minutes, just to say hello and to introduce the girls,” Aunt Patty said to Uncle Hob. “We won’t stay long.”
Uncle Hob gave in. “I warn you, I won’t stay longer than an hour and fifteen minutes. That’s neither long nor short. It’s just right. And it’s more than I want to do at all.” But he didn’t yet put his crossword puzzle down. He printed in another answer.
Little Sister looked at me. I knew that look. I said, “I sure hope she isn’t going to be like Cynthia Wainwright.”
“Just you worry about being nicer to her than you were to Cynthia Wainwright, Willa Jo,” Aunt Patty said. “Then we’ll see how things go.”
I hated to hear Aunt Patty say that. I thought she knew Cynthia Wainwright wasn’t my fault. “I was nicer to Cynthia Wainwright than she deserved,” I said.
Aunt Patty didn’t even look at me when she said, “Don’t be a smart aleck.” She was checking her hair in the mirror on the wall near the stairs. There wasn’t any bite to it, which in the end was what angered me. She was so sure she could boss us around she didn’t look at us when she did it; she didn’t raise her voice; she didn’t have to pay us any mind at all.
I was suddenly so mad at her I could have spit. I could have kicked holes in walls. I was mad enough to say something mean, but I couldn’t think of anything mean enough to say. I turned to Little Sister, who had been listening to everything. I didn’t even think about what I did next.
I slipped my fingers into the cuffs of my shorts and snapped them.
“I saw that, Willa Jo,” Aunt Patty said in a shocked voice. “Did you see that, Hob?”
Uncle Hob looked up from his crossword puzzle. “What? See what?”
“Willa Jo’s making fun of me. She snapped her shorts.”
Uncle Hob looked back down at his puzzle.
“Well, thank you very much for your support,” Aunt Patty said.
“Now, dumplin’—”
“I don’t know what you all want from me,” Aunt Patty wailed to the room at large. “My yard is overrun with Fingers. My reputation is in tatters, what with scenes at the Piggly Wiggly and whatever Lucy Wainwright had to say to her friends. To say nothing of—” She paused, sputtering like she was about to run out of gas. “Why, these children engaged in all-out combat with that Bible school teacher, never mind the ticks.”
Uncle Hob said, “Now, Patty, don’t get carried away.”
Aunt Patty’s voice rose to a near shriek. “Carried away? Have you lost your mind, Hob?”
“I might be about to,” he said, never looking up from his crossword.
“Nobody, just nobody in this house appreciates me one bit,” Aunt Patty said. She paced the living room, waving her arms about to punctuate everything she was saying. “All I’m good for is cooking and cleaning and throwing out those dead june bugs morning after morning—”
Uncle Hob looked up from his crossword.
Aunt Patty stopped and looked at Little Sister, but Little Sister was looking at me. Her eyes were dark with the meaning of Aunt Patty’s complaint. “It was only a june bug,” I said in a small voice. Not that it would do any good. Little Sister is like Mom; she wouldn’t hurt a bug.
Aunt Patty looked just as miserable. “I didn’t mean to tell you,” she said.
Little Sister turned and ran upstairs. She didn’t look back.
“Well, now I’ve done it,” Aunt Patty said. “Why couldn’t you just get in the car and go, Willa Jo?”
“Me? You think this is my fault?”
“There is not one cooperative bone in your body—”
“You don’t want someone to cooperate, Aunt Patty,” I shouted. “You just want everyone to do as they are told.”
“Do you see what I mean?” Aunt Patty said. “Willa Jo, I am just fed up with you.”
“Then send me home,” I said. I went upstairs like Little Sister, but I wouldn’t run. I stomped. I was satisfied to know that Aunt Patty watched me all the way up.
I expected to find Little Sister sitting by the window or something. Crying, maybe. But she had gone to bed. She wasn’t asleep, but she wasn’t crying either. There seemed nothing to do but get ready for bed too. By the time I lay down in the other bed, I realized I was tired enough to sleep.
The only thought I had as I fell asleep, in all her upset and pacing and all, Aunt Patty had never once stepped off those plastic carpet runners.
22
Talking Things Over
When after a while Uncle Hob doesn’t get around to asking why we are sitting on the roof, I say, “I guess you’re wondering what we’re doing out here.”
“Oh, well,” he says, with a little shrug.
I guess he knows most of it already. About Liz and Isaac, and us wanting to play with them. He knows about Cynthia and Bible school. He knows Aunt Patty is fed up. None of those things take much explanation. The thing is, it doesn’t seem right to tell Uncle Hob that Aunt Patty is a problem. So I tell him I don’t really care for brown leather sandals. That I like my dirty white tennis shoes fine. That I’d like to have them back. Plus, Little Sister has a blister on her heel, which she is obliging enough to show him right away. I’m just sorry mine has calloused over.
“Well, getting your old shoes back shouldn’t be too hard,” he says. “They’re up there in the hall closet. Nobody’s thrown a thing away”
“I’ve always worn tennis shoes,” I say to explain myself. Also because I don’t want him to be mad. Or to hurt his feelings like we’ve already done to Aunt Patty. He and Aunt Patty have been awful good to us in a lot of ways.
“We’ll see to it when we go downstairs,” Uncle Hob says. “We’ll put a Band-Aid on Little Sister’s heel.”
I’m feeling some better already but not better enough that I’m ready to go inside. So I get quiet, hoping there will be no more talk of going downstairs. In fact, there is no talk at all for maybe five minutes. So I am some relieved when he comes up with a subject. Any subject.
“Did I tell you about the summer I was turning thirteen?” he says. “And I was sent off to stay with my grandpa because my gramma had died? My folks had the idea I could be a help to him.”
“You were supposed to do the cooking and stuff?” I say. The thing that crosses my mind.right off, how lucky we were to have a garden right outside the kitchen door, and plenty of canned goods on hand. And luckier still, for me, that Mom didn’t expect much housekeeping to get done if she wasn’t the one doing it.
“Not exactly,” Uncle Hob says. “I was there to give him somebody to do for. They figured he would eat breakfast if he had to see to it that I got breakfast. You know what I mean?”
“Like, he would take good care of himself if you were there for him to take care of. I see.”
“It didn’t work out that way, though. No one had given much thought to how much I missed my gramma. What really happened was we both let things go together.”
“What do you mean?”
“We sat around singing funny, sad songs and telling sadder stories,” Uncle Hob says. “We didn’t wash or cut our hair. Grandpa didn’t shave. We ate peanu
ts and hard-boiled eggs when we got hungry. He let me drink beer. When they came to get me before the start of the school year, our hair had grown to our shoulders.”
“It must have been terrible,” I say.
Uncle Hob stares off into space, the way he does when he is working on mathematical equations.
“I say, it must have been terrible,” I say in a louder voice.
Uncle Hob looks like he is waking up. “No,” he says. “I only this minute remembered. It wasn’t terrible at all.”
23
Aunt Patty Stands Alone
“Hob?”
We hear Aunt Patty calling out the back door. Her voice is sort of distant.
“Hob?” she calls again, sounding even farther away. But she is closer, really, calling from somewhere inside the house.
I look at Uncle Hob. He looks like he has not heard a thing, not one thing, but I know that can’t be true. Little Sister is looking at me and her eyebrows are rising like bread.
“Hob?” Aunt Patty calls, and she is coming out through the garage. She looks around, then looks up like she thought of asking us if we have seen Uncle Hob.
“Hob!” Aunt Patty cries, seeing him sitting up here with us.
“Patty,” Uncle Hob says in a voice that suggests Aunt Patty is someone he bumped into on a street comer.
“Hob?” Aunt Patty is clearly hoping he will say something to explain why he is sitting on the roof with us.
“Patty,” Uncle Hob says as if she has left chocolate fingerprints on the walls.
“Hob,” Aunt Patty wails, addressing the world in general. “What am I going to do with this family? Everybody’s crazy but me.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” Uncle Hob says, a smile tugging at one comer of his mouth.
“Hob!” Aunt Patty is suddenly angry. “This is the last straw. The very last straw. What am I to do with all of you?”
Getting Near to Baby Page 11