“Now, now, now,” Mr. Cole says, waving his hands in a way that says he wants us all to sit down.
“We have wind chimes and stained glass,” Gus points out. “How can that be substandard? What’s wrong with that?”
“We’re in this together,” Mr. Cole insists. “Certainly, in the interest of fairness, we would be happy to look at all your homes again. Reevaluate every single one.”
This makes our groaning and clanking quiet down.
“What do you suggest we do while you reevaluate?” Mrs. Pike asks.
“Why, continue to work on your homes, of course,” Mr. Cole says. “We wouldn’t want to discourage you from that. We need to take a second look at the ordinances as well. Make sure we’re interpreting them correctly. We want you all to know that we appreciate the fact that you’re working on your homes. It’s what we want you to do. But it will take us some time to reevaluate. Until after the holidays, surely.”
When he smiles, I can’t help thinking that he’s got really long front teeth—like a wolf. I find my eyes searching for Weird Harold, wondering if he thinks it, too.
• • • 32 • • •
When we step outside, we look like we’ve just come out of a fight. Chuck’s been running his hands through his hair until it’s turned into a rumpled mess. Gus’s face is filled with so many worry wrinkles, it reminds me of the collar of a shirt that’s been inside someone’s fist.
The night has fallen, and the light from the parking lot lamp above us seems like some sort of shelter. We huddle under the light for a minute, the same way I used to rush under the eaves of Montgomery when it started to rain during recess.
“Whew,” the Widow Hollis finally says. “A reevaluation.”
Gus rubs his face, leaving behind shiny streaks of worried sweat. “But they don’t like what Auggie and I have done to the house. We’re so far into this thing,” he says. “Me and Auggie. We’ve got flowers nailed into our roof. We’ve got concrete on our porch posts. How are we ever going to undo—”
“Undo!” I exclaim, my surprise making my voice too loud. I clear my throat and try again, quieter this time. “Why would we ever undo it?”
“Because, Auggie, they already told us it was substandard,” Gus says.
“And my swing set,” Mrs. Pike moans. “They said the same thing about it, too. Said it was substandard. But my kids love that swing set. What will they play on, with no toys, no swing . . .”
“My porch,” Ms. Dillbeck chimes in. “How am I supposed to do anything to make my porch look better—other than flat out replace it? Where am I supposed to find the money to do that?”
“Why would you need—” I feel myself begging for an answer. The idea of taking down the work I’ve done with Gus makes me feel awful—like somebody’s just insisted I tear up a picture of my mom.
“They said they’d reevaluate,” I try to remind everyone. “Didn’t you hear them? We don’t have to undo our improvements.”
“Yeah,” Weird Harold says. “But the same eyes are going to take that second look.”
“So it’s up to us,” I tell him. “It’s up to us to make them see us differently. We’ve got to make sure we show off our improvements in a way that means the committee has no choice but to see our houses as beautiful. We could do that, right?”
Gus and Dillbeck and Shoemacker and Harold shuffle, look away, like they all know I’m wrong, but don’t have the guts to tell me so.
“Come on,” I plead. “When Gus and I started making our flowers out of the Bradshaw car, it wasn’t always pretty. At first, when we were taking the car apart, it was a real mess. Pieces of metal everywhere. We had to weld a whole flower together before it stopped looking like a big pile of clutter.”
“So?” Harold asks with a shrug.
I grin, because this is the first time in my life that I can see an answer that Harold can’t. “So, maybe we’re just not finished yet,” I explain. “Maybe Gus and I aren’t done sprucing up our house. Maybe you and your dad aren’t quite finished with your yard yet. Maybe the curtains in the Pikes’ front window weren’t enough. I’m sure if we all think about our houses, we could come up with new ways to really play up all the prettiest parts.”
“Swing cushions,” Irma Jean blurts. “If I sewed up some new cushions for the wooden swing, it would make the old set look better.”
“Yes!” I shout.
“We could smooth out the old gardens,” Harold admits. “Dad and I were in such a rush to get those plants in the back, we didn’t do much to smooth out the old rows in the front yard.”
“I could spiff up the porch,” Dillbeck says, “if Gus could bring me some of that free paint.”
“Chuck,” I say. “What do you think is really beautiful? Like the most beautiful thing in the whole world?”
He smiles as he thinks a minute—I’d expected him to give us an idea for decorating. But now, the look on his face has me convinced he’s thinking of a sunset or a baby, or maybe even the way Hopewell looked before the storm. After a pause, he says, “You know, what makes me stop and catch my breath, every single time I see it, is my congregation.”
“Really?”
Chuck nods. “It’s the way their faces look while I’m standing there at the pulpit. They’re all waiting for me to say something that will change everything—something that will make everything that’s bad in their lives wash away.”
I’ve got to file this away with the stories Chuck tells me about my mom, because it’s too big to decide what I think about it now. “We need to keep working,” I insist. “I swear, that’s the thing that’s going to change this whole mess. What’s going to make this bad thing go away.”
Irma Jean sticks out her hand, like she did back at Dickerson. I put my hand on top of hers, and Weird Harold follows. Slowly, after exchanging not-so-sure glances, so do Gus and Ms. Dillbeck, and Mrs. Shoemacker, and the Widow Hollis. Our huddle makes me feel packed in tight and secure, like together we’re a fist that could beat back anything.
• • • 33 • • •
The next afternoon, I plop my brown bag, filled with a meat-loaf sandwich, right down on the lunchroom table next to Irma Jean. She’s wearing a hand-me-down sweater with another pair of jeans that have white circles around the ankles. It takes her an extra long time to embroider over the circles, so the two of us still have one pair of jeans each with the special hand-done stitches around each ankle. The neck of her sweater is stretched out and sloppy. It has an especially roughed-up look—like maybe it was even worn by a couple of Pikes before it made its way into Irma Jean’s closet. I guess it would be pretty hard to cut up a sweater and stitch it back together in a new way.
“Auggie!” a voice cries out. When I turn, Victoria is waving me over. She’s acting like a super puffer fish, all blown up, I figure, after last night’s meeting. At her side, Lexie bristles.
I glance down at Irma Jean, who shrugs and motions for me to join them.
I get a worried knot in my stomach when I sit across from Victoria. She eyes my meat-loaf sandwich with pity just before opening her lunch box and peeling back the plastic lid on some prepackaged fruit.
My heart is drumming against a hard lump of anger. My legs are melting. And all I’m doing is sitting next to Victoria and my old best friend. On the opposite side of the lunchroom, Ms. Byron eyes us with her arms crossed over her chest like even she is expecting something rotten to happen.
“Auggie,” Victoria says, using a paper napkin to wipe off some of the liquid she’s splashed from her fruit cup onto her fingers. “I know you and your neighbors were upset last night, at the city council meeting. I wanted you to know that the committee’s not out to get you. They—we—are trying to show you.”
“Show me?”
Victoria cocks her head to the side and reaches out to pat my hand. I jerk away like she’s got electricity flowing through her arms and her touch shocks me painfully.
“How to take care of your things. You have t
o fix something in an acceptable way. There should be standards, right?”
“Standards?” I screech. “How to take care?”
I glance across the table at Lexie, who stares at her own ham and cheese on white. She knows my heart is breaking. Still, she doesn’t say a word.
At that moment, I remember the way my hands had looked with my neighbors’ under the parking lot light, all piled up on top of each other, a team in it together. I imagine Gus and Shoemacker and Hollis and the Bradshaws and Dillbeck and the Pikes squeezing into a tight ball all around me. I feel like they’re right here with me, all of them, nodding in agreement as I insist, “It’s my house.” When Victoria shrugs, I repeat, “It’s my house. Mine and Gus’s,” I add. “Not yours. Why should I have to paint it the same shade everybody else does? Why should I have to keep clear glass in the windows? Why can’t I reinvent my own house, if that’s what I want to do?”
“But my father—”
“Your father and his committee are going to come back out to Serendipity Place, and they’re going to see the work we’re doing, and the fines are going to disappear,” I snap.
“Auggie,” Lexie starts, but Victoria eyes her in a way that makes her shove down whatever she was about to say.
“You know something, Victoria?” I go on. “You like to remind me that my house isn’t as new as yours. Because it makes you feel good about yourself. That’s all your stupid committee does. It sticks its tongue out at everybody in my neighborhood because our houses aren’t as big or as fancy as yours.” Remembering the plans my neighbors and I made the night before, I straighten my back and blurt, “You don’t want me to work on my house, you don’t want it to be different, because then it just might turn out to be better than yours.”
“That’s really what you think, August Walter?” she asks, using my full name in a way that rubs me raw.
“That’s really what I think,” I tell her.
Lexie flinches as I snatch up my lunch and head straight back to a smiling Irma Jean. Right then, the matching white circles around our ankles don’t seem like horrible things. They feel more like friendship bracelets.
• • • 34 • • •
For the rest of the afternoon, Chuck’s words keep rolling through my head, like a song sung in a round. I keep thinking about how he told me the most beautiful thing in the world to him is a congregation. I scrawl the word over and over in big bubble letters in my notebook during reading hour. By the time Old Glory rattles up the Dickerson drive, I’ve got a plan swirling in my head about how to improve our own house.
“Sure is an ugly old patch of land,” Gus agrees when we get home.
He scratches his chin, thinking the whole thing over as he stares at our scraggly front yard. By now, we’ve got hats on along with our fluffy winter coats—just the kind of thing that Victoria didn’t think I owned on the first day—because the wind has turned mean. Wind used to be welcome, back in the miserable-hot summer months. Now, it’s got teeth, and it’s tearing at our skin like a hungry tiger.
“Imagine it,” I say. “A whole yard full.” Now that I’m talking about the plan, I’m too excited to care about the cold that’s starting to sink through my clothes.
“But—a congregation?” Gus asks. “With pews and everything?”
“Not a congregation exactly,” I say. “That was just the inspiration. More like—like a crowd, Gus. A crowd like you’d usually only find at a family reunion or a baseball game.”
“Where are we going to get the supplies we need for a project that big?”
I feel one of those Cheshire cat grins spread through my cheeks.
• • • 35 • • •
Mr. Gutz-Chong is surprised by our idea, and maybe a little unsure of it, too. At least, until Gus says, “Seems to me, that playground can’t be roped off forever. Seems you’re going to have to get someone to haul it all off—the swing sets and the slide and the jungle gyms and the teeter-totter. Something like that won’t be cheap. But we’d be happy to take all of it off your hands for free.”
At that point, Mr. Gutz-Chong’s eyes open up like a morning glory that’s blooming on fast-forward. He takes the idea to the public school administrative center and comes back the next day with a thumbs-up.
The only way to get the playground equipment on the back of Old Glory is to take it apart first—a job so big that Irma Jean takes a break from stitching up swing cushions and the Bradshaws stop decorating their front porch with their home-grown pumpkins and gourds long enough to give us a hand.
I figure if I were helping Gus get some small hauling-off fee, business as usual, my back would ache and my knees would creak like screen doors. I’d be so sore, I’d start hobbling around like the Widow Hollis. But I’m not working for pennies. I’m not working for the chance to help Gus buy a few more groceries to stick in the Frigidaire that’s older than my mom. I feel like I’m working for a chance to change minds—Victoria’s, and everybody else’s on the House Beautification Committee. Which means I’m working for a chance to change everything.
After Gus and I unload Old Glory, we start in on our version of a congregation that very Sunday afternoon.
“Look,” I say, holding up two metal sticks that had once been the bars in the Montgomery jungle gym. “Arms!”
Gus nods. “Okay, all right,” he says. “I can see where you’re going.” He tugs on his bottom lip, thinking.
I take hold of two more bars—these are connected by a big black joint. “And this,” I say, “this can be a leg.” I point at the black connecting joint. “This could even be a knee!”
Gus smiles. “You’re onto something now, Auggie.”
“And that,” I say, pointing at the metal tongue of a slide. “We could cut a big circle out of that, see, Gus? And then we could cut little slits in the circle for eyes, and a big round hole for a mouth—because this person, Gus, is laughing out loud. This one just can’t even stop. Because Irma Jean has told her a joke. So her arms have to come around so that it looks like she’s holding her stomach. It’s got to look like she’s got a cramp, she’s been laughing so long. Okay?”
The next few days, Gus and I fill our scraggly front yard with people sitting and standing, some with their arms bent and their feet apart because they’re running laps in gym class. As we build, I rely on all the things I’ve seen in Serendipity Place, at Hopewell, at Montgomery.
As Gus’s torch hisses, I think about the last story Chuck told me, about changing the world. How sometimes the world is like your house. Only, I think maybe my house could become more and more like the world. The world as I want to see it, anyway, with people who are laughing and skipping and running. In my yard, people don’t lose friends or wear jeans with circles around the ankles. In my yard, mothers don’t name their daughter after her grandfather and then dump her on a doorstep. In my yard, everyone is brave enough to stare down a snake. Only, there’s no need for bravery, because there’s not a single shred of unfairness to stand up to.
One afternoon, I hook little springs to the side of a lady’s head. “Earrings,” I say. Just the kind of enormous, fancy earrings I would wear if Gus had let me get my ears pierced.
To Gus, it’s as though I’ve challenged him: I dare you to come up with something better. So he sets about figuring out a way to bend metal to make shirt collars or rippling neckties. He winks at me as if to say, Okay, Ms. Smarty-pants, top that.
I figure the woman in our yard who has a long braid would like a ribbon at the end—the same way my braids are sometimes tied in ribbons, on special occasions. Once I add the ribbon I’ve made from wire, I cross my arms over my chest as if to say, What else you got?
Gus chuckles and rushes back to the shed, where he finds a way to balance a person on his hands so that he’s doing a handstand.
I grab a brush and start to paint makeup on ladies’ faces. Add the rouge and lipstick I’m not yet allowed to wear myself. As I paint it, I imagine what it must be like to get to wear somethin
g as grown-up as mascara.
“Okay, okay, Little Sister,” Gus says. By now, all the grocery stores in town are advertising specials on Thanksgiving turkeys and the malls are already starting to set up booths where early Christmas shoppers can get free gift wrapping. “What do you say we call it a tie?” Gus asks.
“Only because we’re getting close to the holiday season, and I’m feeling charitable,” I say.
“Oh, really?” Gus says, before twisting his face into a tease.
“Little Sister,” he adds, “did you ever notice that all our people here are grown-ups?”
“Actually, now that you mention it . . .” I say as I look around at all the people in our front yard. I’d just liked the fact that all our figures had turned out to be so big and impossible to miss.
“I think that it’s about time to expand our crowd, Auggie. Time to add some kids in here—some folks your own age.”
“Yeah,” I agree. “Time for me to have some company of my own.”
Gus chuckles. “I like that,” he admits. “Company.”
Together, we invent boy and girl figures, and this time, we use some of the broken objects from Gus’s pickups to give each one of them some sort of prop. Some little clue as to what kind of personality each one of them has. One girl—the biggest brainiac in her class—has her face completely buried in a book. Another girl—a real motormouth, who is always spreading rumors—is talking on a cell phone. A boy who dreams of taking pictures of celebrities someday is aiming an old camera with an enormous flash—a Brownie, Gus called it—getting ready to snap a picture of the girl with the phone. On the opposite side of the yard, we put up a boy who is always hungry for new music, pressing a transistor radio to his ear. We create a girl who reminds me a lot of Anna Beth Pike, holding up a mirror while putting on lipstick. We’ve even got a boy who loves cartoons, who’s stretched out on his belly in front of an old TV.
Weird Harold’s got a pretty funny look on his face, the whole time we’re working. His shirts are always buttoned wrong, and his glasses are smeared, and his hats sit at crooked tilts on the top of his head. He looks like he did at the beginning of the school year, when he got so upset about licensing bikes.
The Junction of Sunshine and Lucky Page 9