by Rue, Nancy
Inez closed the Bible and folded her hands neatly on top of it. “Next time,” she said.
“Hello! I’m dying here!” Mora said.
“You will not die, Mora,” Inez assured her.
Mora probably would have argued that, but a pounding on the back door lifted all three of them from their chairs and sent Marmalade skittering to try to squeeze behind the stove. With fear batting at her stomach, Lucy got to the door first and saw Mr. Auggy’s wet face smiling its small smile through the glass.
Inez had the towels ready before Lucy got the door open, but Mr. Auggy held onto the door frame like he was trying to keep from blowing away.
“Can’t stay!” he said. “I have a message from your dad.”
Lucy took a step forward, but Inez held her by the back of her T-shirt.
“He says to tell you he’s fine, but he’s stuck at the station. Can Inez stay with you?”
“Sí, sí, sí,” Inez said behind Lucy.
“Can you take me to my dad in your Jeep?” Lucy said.
Mr. Auggy’s small smile reappeared. “Even my Jeep won’t make it out here. I’m in my kayak.”
Lucy noticed for the first time that he was wearing a life jacket. That wasn’t something you saw too often in the desert. It was all way too scary.
“It’ll be all right, captain,” Mr. Auggy shouted over the wind. “You hold down the fort here, and your dad’ll be back as soon as he can.”
Why can’t you bring him home in your kayak? Lucy wanted to say. I need my Dad.
But Mr. Auggy slogged off the side of the porch without hearing the exclamation points in her head.
3
Dear God: Why This Is the Longest Night Ever
1. Because Mora is talking in her sleep. Nonstop. Just like when she’s awake, only she isn’t making any sense. Which isn’t really all that different from when she’s awake.
2. Because there’s no place for my dad to sleep at the radio station except on that lumpy couch that has springs that poke you in the behind if you sit wrong.
3. Because —
“Ow!”
Lucy reached behind her and swatted at Lollipop with her flashlight. The kitty’s claws stuck to Lucy’s T-shirt, and she protested at being shaken off. Mora just kept muttering in her dreams.
Lolli keeps jumping on me, and Artemis Hamm is growling under the bed, and Marmalade is pacing all around looking for Dad. The only cat who’s quiet is Mudge. He’s on top of the refrigerator.
Lucy shined her light on the Book of Lists again and chewed on the end of her pen. None of it would be so bad except for the fourth reason, and she didn’t want to write it down because then it would be real.
Du-uh. She was telling it to God, so it was real already.
4. Because I’m scared Dad will never come home like Mom didn’t come home from Iraq. The radio station might blow up like her hotel did — or it’ll sink into the mud or something. Then I won’t have a mom OR a dad.
Lucy shivered and was about to let the tears come that she’d been holding back ever since Mr. Auggy was there, when a light flickered across her bedroom wall.
A J.J. light.
Lucy scrambled to the window and cupped her hands around her eyes. The rain had finally stopped, but the night was inky-black without the streetlights. That made it perfect for the big Maglite J.J. was swishing around into the darkness outside his room. Lucy dug her own flashlight out from under her mattress and flicked it on and then off and then on again. J.J. answered with a figure eight and seven circles. She didn’t know what that meant, but just having J.J. in his window was enough to make it better.
She was about to sink back to her bed when J.J. shined the light right into his own face so Lucy could see his mouth. He moved it slow and big like it was a piece of rubber. She was pretty sure it said, “Soccer tomorrow.”
Okay, so it was definitely better. She finally fell asleep hugging her flashlight and her Book of Lists and listening to Mora dream of beauty treatments.
Mora was still mumbling in her sleep when Lucy opened her eyes, but she knew at once that it was the tapping of pebbles on her window that had woken her up. She didn’t even have to look out to know that J.J. was hanging out at his front fence with a handful of stones and a half-grin.
But she got to her knees and peered through the window. She was correct, of course. He was standing on top of a pile of old tires stacked against the fence, jiggling pebbles in his hand.
‘I’ll be right out,’ she motioned to him.
She hopped out of bed and over Mora and into shorts and a t-shirt. Nobody stirred, not even a kitty or Inez. Still no sign of Dad.
The sun was shining, but the world did not look cheerful when Lucy met J.J. outside her gate. The streets were caked in mud and strewn with cottonwood limbs, and most of the lighter junk from J.J.’s front yard — rags and bicycle wheels and battered hubcaps — was hanging on his caved-in fence. A telephone company truck had already pulled up to a pole across the street, and Mr. Benitez, the grocery store owner, was stabbing his finger at the worker who climbed it.
“Look, we’ll get it done as fast as we can,” the man called down. “The storm took out all the lines in town.”
“I’ve got a business to run!” Mr. Benitez snapped at him.
“Join the club,” the man snapped back.
“Let’s get outta here,” J.J. grunted to Lucy under his breath.
“Yeah, seriously.” Mr. Benitez wasn’t all that nice when he was in a good mood. This probably wasn’t going to end well.
“I just have to go tell Inez where we’re going,” Lucy said. “I’ll be right back.”
If she couldn’t hear from Dad for a while, she’d better stay busy. Another hour in the house with Mora didn’t qualify as “busy.” It qualified as “nuts.” Besides, maybe she and J.J. could go to Dad themselves . . .
Lucy had a note composed in her head when she slipped back into the kitchen, but Inez was up, slicing into bread with a knife and into Lucy with her gaze. She didn’t even have any of the crusty sleep-things in her eyes that Lucy was still picking out of hers.
“It’s okay if I go check things out with J.J., right?” Lucy said.
“What things are these?” Inez bent her head over the loaf, but Lucy knew she was seeing right into her brain.
“The soccer field?” Lucy said.
“This is a question?” Inez said,
“The soccer field. We want to see what happened to it,”
“Only there.”
Lucy felt herself sag. “Maybe we’ll also go – “
“Maybe you will also come home after.”
Inez looked up, and her eyes got soft. “Senor Ted will come home,” she said.
How Inez knew she was planning to go out to the radio station if she found her bike, Lucy didn’t know. But somehow Inez did, and that was the end of it. With a glower at the top of Inez’s head as she went back to the bread, Lucy sighed her way out the back door. By the gate, J.J. was doing some glowering of his own, at his little sister Januarie who had joined him. But then, he was always glowering at her.
“I’m going with you,” Januarie announced. She had the kind of voice a Chihuahua would have if it could talk.
“No, you’re not,” J.J. said.
Januarie’s eyes narrowed in her round face, fringed in dark hair that wouldn’t stay in its ponytails. “Who’s going to stop me?”
J,J. looked at Lucy, who shrugged. Now that Januarie was nine, she was more annoying than she’d been at eight, but they couldn’t ditch her. With her and J.J.’s dad not allowed to see them because he was so mean to J.J., and their mom “not handling it well,” as Dad put it, everybody in town had to watch over Januarie. If either she or J.J. got into any trouble at all — like if J.J. got into a fight the way his dad always did — that would mean their mom couldn’t control them, and then Winnie the State Lady would come and put them in foster care. Lucy was pretty sure that wasn’t going to happen, because J.
J. would rather put up with Januarie than be like his father.
“You have to keep up on your own then,” J.J. said to Januarie as he strode off down Granada Street. “We’re not waitin’ for ya.”
Januarie’s chubby legs went into gear beside Lucy, and she was quiet until they got to Pasco’s Café.
“I’m hungry,” she said.
“Didn’t you have any breakfast?” Lucy said.
“Like that ever made a difference.” J.J. clamped his jaw down. He was done talking, Lucy knew.
They stopped at Highway 54, and Januarie pulled the back of her hand across her sweaty forehead. “It’s hot. I wish we could ride our bikes.”
“I hope I even have a bike now,” Lucy said. If she did, she would be walking it home anyway. All the streets were layered in mud, and the broken branches had turned them into an obstacle course. They couldn’t have gone all the way out to Dad’s station even if Inez had let her. How was he supposed to get home?
And for that matter . . . Lucy stopped when they got to the other side of the highway. “How are we gonna get across the ditch?” she said. “The bridge is out, remember?”
“Jump,” J.J. said.
“What if I fall in?” Januarie said.
Lucy put her hand up. “Don’t answer that, J.J.”
As it turned out, the irrigation ditch had already shrunk to a trickle and a half, and it dug confused new paths around the hunks of fallen wood. They used them for stepping stones, though Januarie couldn’t seem to keep her feet out of the mud. She was trailing heavily behind them, wailing out complaints, as they rounded the bend to the soccer field. Once J.J. and Lucy were there, though, Januarie had no trouble catching up with them, because they could only stand and stare.
Their sign, so bright and proud the day before, was on its face in the mud, poles snapped in half. The bleachers were in splinters, scattered across their beloved field . . . or what was left of it. The center was crisscrossed in eroded rivulets. The sides had completely washed against the fence on one side and into the slivered bleachers on the other. Neither Lucy’s soccer ball nor her bike or J.J.’s was anywhere to be seen.
But the worst was the refreshment stand, which teetered at a slant like a dizzy old man. The roof was scattered in shards on the field and along the fence. Lucy imagined a giant school-yard bully, stomping through and tearing it all apart, just for spite.
“Oh — my — gosh!!!!!!”
Lucy didn’t have to turn around to know that Veronica had arrived, and she felt Dusty beside her, pawing for her hand with her own hot-chocolate-colored one.
“This is horrible,” Dusty said. Her usually creamy heart-shaped face was as pale as Inez’s porridge, and her golden-brown eyes were open so wide Lucy was sure she’d never get them closed again.
‘Horrible’ didn’t even begin to describe it, as far as Lucy was concerned, but she didn’t know what word did. Nobody else even tried to find one. When Oscar and Emanuel got there, they gnawed on their toothpicks and looked at Lucy like they always did when there was a decision to be made. But she didn’t know where to start.
Veronica’s mouth hung partway down, a sure sign she couldn’t wrap her mind around what was going on. One dark finger twirled a hunk of her thick fudge-colored hair.. “If Carla Rosa were here, she’d say, ‘Guess what? It’s ruined.’ ”
“It is,” J.J. said.
“Well, now, wait a minute.” Dusty squeezed Lucy’s hand tighter. “It could probably be fixed, right, Bolillo?”
The nickname that always made Lucy smile didn’t do the trick this time.
“Couldn’t it?” Veronica said, furrowing her forehead into caramel rows. “Our moms would paint a new sign.”
“Yeah.” Oscar looked up at skinny, bony Emanuel and poked him with a square fist for no apparent reason. “Gabe’s old man always has convicts that needs to work. They could fix them bleachers like they done before.”
Lucy didn’t say anything. Sheriff Navarro didn’t have “convicts.” He had people that needed to work off speeding tickets and stuff, but there weren’t enough lawbreakers in all of Tularosa County to rebuild those bleachers. They’d have to start over — and she was pretty sure it wasn’t going to happen before their game in two weeks.
Emanuel lifted a lanky arm and pointed toward the gate. As if he’d heard them talking about him, the sheriff pulled up in his cruiser. Through the windshield, Lucy could see his brows hooding his eyes the way they did when he was really unhappy. J.J. edged away.
As Sheriff Navarro climbed out of the car and picked his way through the mud toward them, Lucy kind of wanted to slip off, too, though not for the same reason as J.J. Even though the sheriff said he was on J.J.’s side and didn’t want him to have to leave his house and his mom, J.J. didn’t seem to believe that anymore than he believed in the Easter Bunny. It seemed like he was just waiting for the day when Sheriff Navarro would drag him off to foster care just for breathing wrong or something. Lucy’s not wanting to be around the guy was way different. About half the time he said stuff that made her want to say stuff that Dad didn’t want her saying to grown-ups — and now was probably one of those times.
“Gabe said I’d find you all here,” the sheriff said when he reached them. “He wanted to come, but I didn’t let him.”
Lucy actually felt a little bad about that. Gabe could be a creature from Rudesville sometimes — but he was part of the team, and he needed to see this.
“Sorry about your field,” Sheriff Navarro said.
Lucy studied him. Okay, his mouth did kind of droop at the corners, and the spray of sun-squinty lines around his eyes looked more sad than mad. But he still had that what-are-you-kids-trying-to-get-away-with edge in his voice. Sheriffs must learn that in police school, she thought.
“I know you’re proud of it,” he said. “Whole town’s proud of it.”
“We can fix it, can’t we?” Dusty pulled Lucy and Veronica close to her. “We’ll all help.”
The sheriff pulled his hand across his eyes, and Lucy noticed that it looked like they had backpacks under them. He must have been up late.
“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s up to the town council, and right now, we’ve got a few other things to worry about.” He narrowed his very-black eyes at the bleachers and then at what used to be the refreshment building. “This place sure took it heavier than anything else in town.”
“Figures,” J.J. said under his breath.
“Well, for now, you all need to clear out.” The sheriff waved toward the gate. “It’s not safe here until we can assess the damage.”
“What does ‘assess’ mean?” Lucy said.
“It means we have to figure out how bad it is.”
Lucy held back a grunt. She could tell them that. It was destroyed. They had to start from the beginning again, and Lucy wanted to do it right now.
But it was clear that Sheriff Navarro wasn’t letting any of them out of his sight. Lucy looked around again for her bike — and spied a twisted piece of metal stuck under one of the fallen bleacher seats. It might as well have been a scrap in J.J.’s yard. This was turning out to be the most unperfect summer ever.
Lucy could feel Sheriff Navarro watching the seven of them as they straggled away from the tumbled bleachers, but when Lucy looked back, he had shifted his focus to the leaning refreshment stand. Arms bowed out at his sides, he approached it like the cops did on TV when they were onto something.
“What, Lucy?” Dusty whispered, hugging Lucy’s arm.
“We should go,” Veronica said. “My mom doesn’t even know I’m here. If the sheriff brings me home, I am in so much trouble.”
“Busted,” Oscar said, though without his usual wicked smile.
“I’m coming,” Lucy said, but she stayed a few seconds longer. Sheriff Navarro squatted beside the refreshment stand and peered closely at the mud. He wasn’t looking at wind damage, that was for sure.
“I’m hungry!” Januarie wailed.
Luc
y didn’t see how she could even think about food. Her stomach was one giant knot. She stepped over a tangle of splintered wood and went to what was left of her bike. It was bent beyond hope, even though it was still hanging together – except for one hunk of metal that lay a few feet away.
But when Lucy leaned over to pick it up, she realized it didn’t belong to her bike at all. It was heavy and straight and looked like some kind of tool. She looked around to see where it might have come from, and her eyes snagged right on J.J. who had come up behind her. He was staring at it as if he knew it from someplace.
“What is this thing?” she said to him under her breath.
He glanced back at the others, who were almost to the road now.
“Tire iron,” he said.
“Somebody was changing a tire out here? Nah – it had to blow from someplace.” Lucy felt her eyes bulge. “That wind was stronger than I thought.”
“No, it wasn’t,” J.J. said. And from the way he clamped down his jaw, Lucy knew that was all he was going to say. Something dark passed through her. Something she couldn’t even name.
Things did brighten up a little when she got home and saw that Inez’s truck was gone, which meant a Mora-break, And — even better — she could see Dad and Mr. Auggy through the kitchen window. Lucy took the back steps two at a time, but she stopped at the door when she heard Mr. Auggy’s voice. He was using the serious tone she didn’t hear that much from him.
“I’m with you, Ted,” Mr. Auggy said. “I didn’t see any other property in town torn up like it was. I didn’t get that close a look at it because it was still dark, but at first pass — I’m thinking something more than the storm hit it.”
“Really?” Dad said.
“Maybe I’m just overreacting.”
Overreacting to what? Were they talking about what she thought they were talking about?
Lucy shoved open the door, and the smiles appeared that meant a change of subject because a kid was there. Besides, Dad had his arms open, and Lucy had to fly into them.