Making Friends with Billy Wong

by Augusta Scattergood

  This one’s for Evie, Lucy, Grant, Chase, and Jay.

  With love.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Augusta Scattergood

  Copyright

  All it took to send my summer on the road to ruin was a fancy note and a three-cent stamp. The minute that envelope showed up, Mama was packing my suitcase.

  Except for when I asked her for a pimento cheese sandwich at the Esso gas station, I didn’t talk the entire way from Texas to Arkansas. When you aren’t speaking to the person next to you, five hours and thirty-two minutes is a long, hot car ride. But my mama talked. A lot.

  “Your grandmother wants to get to know you, Azalea. She needs your help.” She turned off the highway at the sign Paris Junction Arkansas 3 miles, and she kept talking. “That’s why she wrote that sweet note. You’ll be fine.”

  I slumped down and clomped my cowboy boots against the front seat. After a while, I whispered, “You know I’m not good with new people. Why can’t you help her?”

  “You realize I’d stay if I could.”

  “I realize no such thing.” I crossed my arms and blinked hard to keep from crying.

  “My new job’s just started and your daddy’s on the road.” Mama fiddled with one gold loop earring, then with the radio dial, and didn’t say her real reasons.

  I’m not allowed to sit at home by myself while she works. Till I’m twelve. Which I will be next year.

  She’s hardly come back to Arkansas since her own daddy died.

  Every time she and my grandmother talk on the telephone, my daddy says fireworks start flying!

  “What if I miss the Tyler Elementary Back-to-School Picnic?”

  “It wouldn’t be the end of the world,” Mama said.

  “Well, it might be the end of my world.”

  Okay, I truly don’t care about meeting a bunch of sixth-grade strangers, even if my one true friend, Barbara Jean, swears the picnic will be fun. But I’m not admitting that.

  “I’d better not miss riding up front in Daddy’s big rig to the Grand Canyon. He promised I could go if I made straight As in fifth grade.”

  She ignored that and said, “You might find a friend in Paris Junction.”

  “I have a friend. She’s back in Texas.” I glanced out the window when we pulled up to #14 Ruby Street, a little blue house with a mailbox out front. “Don’t even know what to call my own grandmother! All I have is that one birthday card she sent last April.”

  “Try Grandma Clark. That’s what I called mine.” Mama smoothed down her hair and checked her lipstick in the mirror before she stepped into the hot sunshine. She was finished with talking. Finished with me.

  I gave up and stomped up the sidewalk to my grandmother’s front porch. After I slammed the car door hard enough for Daddy to hear clear to Texas.

  Dragging my suitcase up the sidewalk inch by inch, I smiled a little at the gray-haired lady in a wheelchair. She didn’t smile back. No, sir. Not one bit.

  But Mama was smiling big enough for all of us. “Look at you, sitting up so nice,” my own mama called out in a high, silly voice I didn’t recognize. She straightened my grandmother’s blue sweater, even though the sun was beating down hot as all get-out. “Sorry you hurt yourself in the garden. Here’s Azalea, though. She’s excited to help.”

  Excited, my foot. But Mama nudged me and I edged closer to my grandmother. She held her arm up to a green fern. “Haven’t seen you since you were this tall, Azalea.” The way she pronounced my name made me worry she was about to make fun of Daddy naming me after a blooming bush. Which he did when he saw the pink blossoms from the hospital-room window the day I was born.

  “Hello, Grandma Clark,” I answered, making sure I didn’t kick over a flowerpot with my new cowboy boots. Mama grabbed my fingers and my grandmother’s and smushed us all together. When the butterfly ring I’d given her dug into my hand, I pulled away, leaving Mama holding on to just my grandmother.

  After listening to how dry this summer turned out, we finally stepped into a front hall that smelled like mothballs and furniture polish, and I squeezed my arms in tight. Praying I didn’t bump into the whatnot cabinet full of china cats.

  My grandmother blotted her rouged cheeks with a lace handkerchief and looked right at me. “Appreciate you being here, but don’t expect coddling. Never coddled your mother. Don’t plan to start with you. Which I’m sure Johnny Morgan, that daddy of yours, does.”

  Mama glanced out the front window. Like she was worried our old car might crank itself up, drive away, and leave her here with Grandma Clark bossing her instead of me.

  “Sorry you hurt your foot,” I mumbled.

  She took a breath that lifted her shoulders slowly up and down. Straightening the flowered apron covering her lap, she said, “My garden’s getting away from me, especially my roses. That’s all. Can’t do much cooking, either. Don’t like to depend on neighbors. Your mother says you cook.”

  If I didn’t, we’d eat a lot of cereal and peanut butter. But I wasn’t admitting that to a grandmother I hardly knew. Instead, I answered, “Yes, ma’am, I do.”

  “Right now, the kitchen’s full of casseroles. Not up to my standards, but the neighbors mean well. Let’s find something to eat.”

  Mama answered real quick. “Wish I could, but I can’t take tomorrow off from my new job.”

  I stuffed my hands in my pockets and frowned. “You’re not staying for supper?”

  She reached out to smooth back a strand of straight hair hanging over my cheek. I pulled away. “Promised your daddy I wouldn’t be on the road all night.”

  Grandma Clark picked up her walking stick and pointed it at my suitcase like it might be escorting a family of dust bunnies into her house. “Then show Azalea your old room, JoBelle. Take the child’s valise with you.”

  Following Mama up the stairs, I slowed down by a wall of photographs. Was I kin to these frowning old people? All I knew about my family was that Mama and Daddy had taken off from Paris Junction the minute their high school principal passed around the diplomas. I touched a crooked frame and stared some more. But Mama was already to the top of the narrow steps. I followed her and shoved my suitcase—my valise!—into the little bedroom.

  I opened the closet door, then the drawers in the chest by the bed, one by one. “If you leave me here, I might discover some deep, dark secret. Something you don’t want me to know.”

  “Doubt that!” Mama laughed and straightened a picture of a dopey girl herding sheep in a fancy pink dress. “Let’s get some fresh air in here.”

  She opened the window next to the bed, then fussed around with my pedal pushers and blouses, fluffing them up and hanging them in the empty closet. But unless I’m back for the sixth
-grade picnic, I’m never wearing my new pedal pushers.

  I grabbed the blue dress she’d forced me to bring. “I can unpack myself.”

  “Sure you can! And I need to start for home. Your grandmother doesn’t need me.”

  “You’re leaving me in a place full of people I don’t know, in a house with a grandma who’s practically a stranger? I need you,” I said.

  I did not need to be dropped off in a town where everybody gossips about your business. Least that’s why Mama said she left Paris Junction.

  She reached out to hug me. “I’ll call tomorrow after five when the rates go down. Daddy and me—we’ll be back to get you as soon as your grandmother’s better. Pinkie swear.” She wiggled her finger at me, but I ignored her pinkie and turned around before Mama could so much as try to hug me again. Then she was gone.

  Pulling back the window shade—just a crack—in what was suddenly my room, I almost chewed a hole in my bottom lip biting back tears. It was hard to look at our old station wagon driving off, leaving me here.

  Mama couldn’t wait to get back to Texas.

  Me neither.

  Instead of chasing Mama down the steps, I looked closer at what was now my room. On a shelf, three china cups and saucers and the most beautiful painted plate I’d ever seen were lined up in a neat row. I spit on the edge of my blouse and cleaned the dust off the big plate, dreaming up every excuse to hide out in this room. I opened my sketchbook with Azalea Ann Morgan’s Handwriting Practice and Keep Out! Private! This Means You! written across the top. Even though I did win the school prize for Palmer penmanship, that Handwriting Practice was a trick so nobody’d discover my pictures.

  On a clean page, I wrote LEAVING ARKANSAS in perfect block letters and doodled a bluebird flying over the Grand Canyon. I tried to copy the purple from the fairies’ wings floating around the side of the plate, but there aren’t enough colored pencils in the world to match that color. I signed the drawing with a flourishy line to mark the date I came to Paris Junction.

  Azalea Ann Morgan, August 3, 1952.

  Before I finished that flourish, banging started on the banister. Wiping any sign of tears off my face and dust off my fingers, I jumped up so quick, something fell. The plate! Shattered! Could I fix it? Should I show my grandmother? Maybe if she finds out I break things and, really and truly, I don’t know a thing about prizewinning roses, she’ll send me home.

  My grandmother stopped knocking her cane against the stair post long enough to ask, “What took you so long?”

  I couldn’t confess I’d smashed her beautiful plate into a million pieces. “Unpacking,” I said quietly.

  She looked at me like I’d landed from outer space instead of riding all the way from Texas to help out. She shook her head at my boots. Frowned at my knees banged up from falling out of a tree last week. “Let’s get going before it gets too dark to see the tomatoes,” she said, turning in her wheelchair.

  I followed her to the kitchen.

  “Hand me the bread off the counter,” she ordered.

  “Bread?”

  “Stale. For the birds. Keeps them off my blackberries.”

  I grabbed the bread, and before I could say get me outta here quick, my grandmother had wheeled herself toward the back steps. Somebody’d hammered thick wooden handrails so she could get outside without falling—as long as somebody like me was holding her up. She clutched that rail and I clutched her shoulder and we struggled down the five steps.

  Way out back as far as I could see, everything shot up tall. “Wow, your garden’s really something, Grandma Clark,” I said, trying her name out loud.

  What I thought was, Who’s gonna be taking care of all this?

  She sank into a lawn chair and said, “No rain this past week. You’ll get the sprinklers out tomorrow.”

  Guess that answered my question.

  “See that? Pigweed’ll take over if you let it. Doc Wiggins told me if I so much as pull up a wayward blade of grass before this heals”—she shook the cane at the white tape winding from her ankle to her toes—“he’ll skin me alive and hang me for crow bait in my own backyard.”

  “Biggest garden I ever saw.”

  Grandma Clark pointed at a row of what looked like roses. “Most important thing to remember? My prize-winners are here, closest to the house. You do know the difference between a weed and a flower, don’t you?”

  Even though the truth was not exactly, I answered, “Yes, ma’am. Last week, Daddy and me painted two old tractor tires white and planted mums behind our duplex. You should try it. Real pretty.”

  Grandma Clark sighed, shook her head, and nodded toward the back steps. “Gloves in my gardening box. Watch out for spiderwebs. Bring the bucket for the beans and tomatoes near the side fence.”

  Scrambling under the wooden steps, I held my breath and hoped to high heaven there wasn’t a yellow-jacket nest up under there. I grabbed the gloves and bucket before a gigantic spider bit off my finger. I crawled out quick and went searching for beans by the fence. Instead of beans, I spied something else. A little white house.

  Was it a garden shed? A playhouse? Back home, my friend Barbara Jean had a shed full of broken pots and dried-up fertilizer behind her house. Grandma Clark’s had two windows covered over with thick vines that were starting to creep up the blue door, like nobody had opened it in a while. I put down the bucket and started up the twisty path to my grandmother’s chair. “What’s in that shed?” I asked. “Maybe a bike or some skates left over from my mama?”

  “Stay away from that old place. Not your concern. Nothing inside but crickets and spiders.”

  Truly, I am not crazy about spiders or crickets.

  I pulled up weeds and picked beans until daylight almost disappeared and she finally said, “Enough for now, Azalea. Help me up into the house.”

  Standing on the top step, you could see the all the way to the back fence, the alleyway, a tall tree fanning out over the garden.

  An oak tree. Where somebody was sitting. And waving.

  I squinted into the last of the evening light. “Is a boy in that tree?”

  “Why, that’s Billy Wong. His family owns Lucky Foods grocery, where some of my vegetables are sold. Since the Chinese Mission School out on the highway closed, nobody tends their school garden. The Wongs get some of mine.” Grandma Clark let go of the railing to wave and call out, “Hello, Billy!”

  Chinese school? There was a boy from China in a tree in my grandmother’s backyard?

  “Why’s he in that tree?”

  “Can’t keep the neighborhood children out of it.” Grandma Clark drew herself up tall, smiled, and waved again. “He’s recently moved to Paris Junction, but I’ve known the family forever. I suspect Billy’d make a good friend, Azalea.”

  If my grandmother really knew me or even wanted to know me like her note said, she’d understand I don’t need another friend.

  “My best friend is Barbara Jean. She’s in Texas,” I answered quietly.

  And truthfully? How could I talk to a boy who looked like he’d just moved here from China?

  Glancing back one last time, I saw him and his bright white T-shirt shinnying down the tree. Before I could say ripe red tomato three times fast, Billy Wong waved, then disappeared down the alley.

  Inside Lucky Foods Grocery

  Since I was old enough to stand on

  a wooden fruit crate and roll nickels.

  First, at my parents’ grocery. Now, at Lucky Foods.

  After school.

  Most every day.

  Weekends, too.

  I’ve worked hard.

  Now I run hard, like it’s a race, a sprint.

  All the way back to Lucky Foods.

  I push open the door.

  Stop.

  Catch my breath.

  Great Aunt waits by the cash register.

  “Sorry I’m late, Auntie.”

  “Put on your apron. Evening shoppers coming.”

  She disappears into
her kitchen behind the store.

  Smells of pork and onions drift in.

  Mix with peppermints on the counter.

  Maybe I shouldn’t climb trees

  to daydream in the clouds.

  But high on a tree branch, stories pop wide open.

  I tie the white apron around my waist

  and straighten pickle jars.

  Stories jumping.

  Popping.

  Waiting to explode

  onto the pages of the Tiger Times.

  Billy Wong, Hoping-to-Be Cub Reporter for the

  Paris Junction Tiger Times School Newspaper

  Back inside her kitchen, Grandma Clark talked about how she’d never put onions in her green bean casserole. I didn’t care much about onions or the neighbors’ casseroles. But I couldn’t stop wondering about that Chinese boy in her tree.

  “Does your garden take a lot of work?” I finally got brave enough to ask.

  She pushed her wheelchair closer to the table and fiddled with the saltshaker. “Don’t think you have to do everything. We’ll have other garden helpers. Like Billy Wong out there.”

  “Billy Wong? Other garden helpers?” I whispered, thinking How soon can I get back to Tyler, Texas?

  Somewhere on our long, boring drive to Arkansas, Mama told me I’d cook and clean. I might run errands. Pull weeds and pick tomatoes. Since I wasn’t talking, I didn’t ask questions. But honest to goodness, she never said there’d be other helpers.

  “At the end of the summer a few neighborhood children help put my garden to bed. Done it since your granddaddy passed on. I try to teach them what not to dig and how to properly clip.” My grandmother shook her head at her bandaged-up foot. “After I fell, the call went out that I needed them now.”

  “Who’s coming?” I asked quietly.

  “Billy will be here for sure.”

  “Does he speak English?”

  Grandma Clark’s head jerked up. “Of course he does.” She stared right at my face, frowning. “There’ll be others, too. Melinda, a sweet girl who means well. Don’t know who all will show up. People come when you need them in Paris Junction.”

  “Mama told me that.” Mama also said she and Daddy couldn’t wait to leave a place where everybody watches every move you make. “Back home, I don’t even know that many people.”