The Junction of Sunshine and Lucky

by Holly Schindler

  To make him feel better, I put together a boy with a giant lightbulb over his head—he’s even wearing a ball cap. I’m pretty sure that as smart as he is, Weird Harold will know he’s the inspiration behind it—the boy with the bright idea.

  Each day, we seem to have less and less of a yard, and more and more smiling faces. More mouths open with laughter. Just looking at my yard is like getting a hug.

  • • • 36 • • •

  “Forgot the secret ingredient,” Gus announces as he shrugs into his coat. He thinks I’d be grossed out by the fact that he puts oysters in his Thanksgiving Day turkey dressing, and would refuse to eat it. Little does he know, I’ve been onto his secret ingredient since the second grade.

  “Better hurry,” I warn him. “The Super Saver closes early for the holiday.”

  Gus is still trying to keep those oysters under wraps, so I don’t even ask if I can come along. I follow him only as far as the front porch and wave as Old Glory chugs down the street.

  “Dear Mom,” I scrawl in the first page of my notebook, after plopping down on the first step. I lift my head, staring at the billboard looming in the distance as I try to figure out how to tell Mom about the metal flowers and the wind chimes and the company, how to describe the special way the outside of the house makes me feel.

  A smile spreads as I imagine it—that face on the billboard finally stepping back through the front gate. I’ll never give up hoping Mom will come back, the same way I’ll never give up hoping the House Beautification Committee will change its mind.

  I might catch a mini tongue-lashing from Gus when he comes home and realizes that I’ve spent his whole shopping trip outside—it is late November, after all—but the sun is bright and I love the noise and the look of our yard. The figures Gus and I keep adding to our yard give me comfort, the same way I figure Hopewell gives Chuck maybe a little more comfort than the rest of us, since it’s a little bit more his church than anybody’s.

  I trace the “Dear Mom” at the top of my page with the tip of my finger, unsure how to go on with the rest of my letter, when a strange man shows up, out of nowhere. Even though he’s at a distance, leaning against our fence, I can tell he’s staring at some of the figures in our yard.

  He opens up our gate and walks right in, like it’s public property—maybe a park, and everyone is welcome. He slowly starts to make his way down the front walk, eyeing the last figure Gus and I made—the one I like the most right now. When Gus brought home an old sewing machine and table from one of his pickups, I knew we had to twist playground equipment into a figure that looked like Irma Jean so we could sit her hunched down behind it, her tongue stuck out in concentration as she sewed.

  He gets close enough to lean forward and sniff the bachelor’s buttons, snapdragons, and lilies in our flower beds, which were all made out of Burton’s broken waffle iron and turntable and ice crusher and griddle.

  When he pauses by the porch posts that Gus and I have covered in QUIKRETE and Ms. Dillbeck’s broken pottery, I realize he’s the kind of man who looks like he dresses up every day—like he wears church slacks on Tuesday. Same as Mr. Cole or Victoria. But there’s a softness about him, too—a sort of gentle feeling I’ve never gotten from either of the Coles.

  He adjusts his glasses when he sees me on the porch. “Did you make all this?” he asks, pointing at the house, the yard.

  “It was my idea to make it all. And I came up with some suggestions about how the flowers and the figures would all go together. But my grampa, Gus, is the one who knows how to use the cutting and welding torches. He lets me help cut pieces apart and stick them together every once in a while—but only when he’s around.”

  “My name’s T. Walker Doyle,” the man finally says, extending his hand.

  It’s the first time anyone’s ever offered to shake my hand—and it honestly seems a pretty strange thing to do, until he adds, “Ms. Dillbeck’s nephew.”

  “The art buyer,” I say, remembering all the pictures in Ms. Dillbeck’s house.

  “Museum owner,” he corrects.

  “I’m Auggie,” I say, giving his arm a few good, strong pumps.

  “Quite a handshake you’ve got there, Auggie,” T. Walker says. I’m pretty sure it’s a little rude to think of him by anything other than Mr. Doyle, but T. Walker has such a neat ring to it, I instantly latch onto it.

  “You don’t have the same kind of pictures hanging up in your museum that you send to your aunt, do you?” I ask, remembering the funny drawings.

  “Of course I do,” T. Walker tells me.

  When I feel my face scrunching up, he asks, “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “They’re kind of—not so good,” I tell him.

  “Good’s a pretty funny word,” T. Walker says. “Never seems to have the same meaning to any two people.”

  While I try to think this over, he goes on, “The artists in my museum have never had any kind of formal training. They’ve never been taught how to paint like some of the famous artists you see in other museums. But that’s why I love them. Their art feels more honest to me because it’s not coming out of their heads, it’s coming out of their hearts.”

  That’s an awful lot to try to cram into my mind all at once. I’m going to have to think on it a while before I really know how I feel about what T. Walker’s just said. So I switch up the subject a little when I say, “I think these old pieces of pottery were yours,” and point at the post beside me.

  “That’s part of the reason I stopped by,” T. Walker says. “My aunt told me that everyone in the neighborhood was working to improve their houses. She’s spiffed up her own place with a nice new welcome mat and some additions to her rock garden. But when she told me about your house, I had to use Thanksgiving to come for a visit—my first visit to my aunt’s house in years. I had to see it for myself. I have to say that your house is just . . .”

  I hold my breath a minute, waiting for him to finish.

  “Incredible, actually. I’m really impressed with you, Auggie. Best house in all of Serendipity Place.”

  I get a grin that shines brighter than a searchlight. Now, I know exactly what I want to put in my letter to Mom.

  *

  I tell Gus all about T. Walker as soon as he gets back from the store, my voice bouncing around excitedly like a girl playing hopscotch. I follow him into the kitchen, pretending not to look when he pulls the oysters out of the brown paper sack.

  “T. Walker’s got me thinking about leftovers,” I admit.

  “Leftovers?” Gus asks. “Little Sister, we haven’t even cooked dinner yet.”

  “We always have leftovers,” I remind him. “I bet Ms. Dillbeck and her nephew will, too, since it’s just the two of them.”

  I bring Gus to our window, and point through a pane of fuchsia straight toward Mrs. Shoemacker’s house. Then I point to the Widow Hollis’s house. “Not a single car of visitors,” I point out. “And I bet Harold and his dad are eating by themselves tonight, too. The only people around here who have a bunch of visitors are the Pikes—two extra cars from two sets of grandparents. So they’re taken care of. They won’t even have so much as a single green bean left over, I bet. But here we are, a couple of people who are getting ready to have a ton of leftovers. Same as the Bradshaws, and the widow, and Dillbeck . . .”

  Gus winks at me, because he knows I already have a plan. I race into the street, which is filled with fire-colored leaves raining onto the sidewalks and the earthy-sweet smell of chimney smoke and compost.

  I make the rounds in our neighborhood, extending invitations. Nobody wants to come empty-handed, and it turns out everyone has the supplies right there in their pantries to whip up their specialties—since they were planning on making them for their own Thanksgiving suppers, anyway. When the Widow Hollis tells me she can stir up sweet potatoes until they’re as smooth as whipped cream, I almost start slobbering right there on her front door.

  The only one who doesn’t really have a special di
sh is Mrs. Shoemacker.

  “But you’ve got a dining room, right?” I remind her, which makes her face open up like it did when she saw me and Irma Jean bringing the roll of screen to her house.

  We gather in Mrs. Shoemacker’s dining room, filled with all the new silver and china that were gifts at her wedding and that she’s never had a chance to use yet. Gus and I bring turkey and dressing, and the Widow Hollis brings her great-grandson and her sweet potatoes and her homemade rolls. Ms. Dillbeck brings the pies she’d already baked for herself and her nephew—pumpkin and pecan—and Weird Harold and his dad bring all sorts of vegetables—green beans and zucchini and Brussels sprouts and radishes and carrots and peppers—grown right in their yard. Some of their vegetables have been pickled, and some come in steaming dishes.

  “Grab a seat, grab a seat,” Mrs. Shoemacker shouts, which makes the china and the silver and the dining room and our Sunday best feel a little less formal. We all jump into action, throwing back chairs, plopping napkins into laps, snatching up serving spoons.

  “You have to try the dressing,” I insist. “You’ll never guess what Gus puts in it!”

  His shocked face makes the dining room burst open with more laughter than I’ve ever heard in the cafeteria at Dickerson. It feels good to have brought all the happy voices to Mrs. Shoemacker’s house, tangled up like the vines she’d once hoped would grow on her arch.

  “T. Walker?” I ask, once everyone’s started to reach for serving bowls. He’s sitting in a chair next to his aunt, staring through Mrs. Shoemacker’s front window. I wave the bowl of dressing at him. “Don’t you want to try it?”

  He finally pulls his eyes away, smiles as he grabs the spoon standing at attention in the mound of Gus’s stuffing. When I glance through Mrs. Shoemacker’s window and realize he’s been staring right at the “company” in my yard, I feel like I’ve been given an extra helping of happiness.

  • • • 37 • • •

  Gus doesn’t have any pickups during the holiday weekend, so he spends every morning taking an extra-long time with the paper, sucking on his grapefruit halves, and sipping a whole pot of coffee. It makes me giggle a couple of times, the way he acts like a king during long holidays like this one, almost like he’s pretending to be some rich guy who has nothing to do but wait for somebody else to come clean up after him.

  “Isn’t this the girl in your class, Auggie?” Gus says, sliding the paper across the table.

  Victoria is splashed across the front of the Local page. My stomach sinks in on itself as I read about how Victoria is a junior House Beautification member, and how special she is. How she takes pictures of houses and brings them back to her father and the committee, how interested she is in the whole process of making her town beautiful.

  I start to feel small. My skin starts looking like mud all over again.

  I think about the driveways all over town—and beyond. I wonder how far the paper could go. All over the world, surely. Anybody who wants to read it could, I figure. Not just the town of Willow Grove. I wonder if Mom subscribes to find out what’s going on in her old hometown. All the warm feelings I got from earlier in the weekend are suddenly behind my shoulder, like an item far away, in Old Glory’s rearview mirror.

  “I’ll show you, Victoria,” I mutter viciously as I pace through the house, trying to think of something new to add. Something that will really blow everyone away. I head to the welding shed, where Gus and I are storing Mrs. Shoemacker’s arch. But the just-right idea for what I can do to make that arch new is playing hide-and-seek with me, doing a good job of staying hidden.

  Besides, I think as I head back inside, to make the house look really special, really different, I need some brand-new materials.

  I grab hold of the hall closet door handle and yank so hard, I think I could snap my fingers into dozens of tiny little pieces. Gus never locks any of the rooms inside our house. Not even the bathroom. So for this closet to have always been locked, I figure there must be something really incredible inside it. Something that needs protection, the same way Gus protects the two of us at night by twisting the dead bolt on our front door.

  But it’s locked up tight. Same as always. The tarnished knob doesn’t even so much as wiggle. I drop down to my knees and try to squint into the keyhole. But all I see on the other side is darkness.

  “Little Sister!” Gus shouts. His voice sounds like an alarm I’ve just tripped.

  I jump about four feet into the air.

  “I was looking for new supplies,” I stammer, shrinking away from Gus’s angry tone. “Better supplies. Supplies that don’t look like playground equipment.”

  “Why?”

  “Because—we have to have something special, Gus. Something important.”

  “What’s bringing this on?” Gus’s annoyance at finding me by the closet door is still making his face look as rough to the touch as concrete.

  “The article. In the paper. About Victoria,” I confess.

  This softens Gus right up—turns him into a regular baby blanket.

  “Come on,” he says. “I think I know where we can get what you’re looking for.”

  Gus and I head to the Widow Hollis’s house. His knock brings her dandelion-seed head to the doorway.

  “I already gave my best stuff to Chuck, for the rummage sale,” she admits as we follow her slow limp around the corner of her house, straight for the garage in the backyard. “But if there’s anything in here you want for your renovations,” she adds as she unlocks the door, “it’s yours.”

  The garage is packed with old dressers and bed rails and antique oil cans and picture frames and tennis rackets and clothing and dishes and jewelry and wire skeletons of old lamp shades. Porcelain-faced dolls and wooden pull toys and old tires.

  “Widow Hollis, there sure is a whole lot of life out here,” Gus says, looking about the garage.

  “I know it—that’s the problem,” she says. “Too much life behind me, not enough in front. After a while, you don’t want to think that way anymore. I’d rather have something to look forward to. Know what I mean?” she asks as she stares at Noah, her great-grandson, who is wiggling through the stacks in the garage like a mouse looking for a place to build a nest.

  She looks at Noah with so many wishes in her eyes that I feel myself melting a little inside.

  “It’ll take us an awful long time to empty this place out. Not sure where Auggie and I would store all the things we could use,” Gus says as I pick up some sort of tiny little motor, all rusted shut, from a shelf on an old metal cabinet.

  “Oh, don’t worry about it,” she answers, tossing her hand at Gus. “You can come peel me off anytime you need some new supplies. Long as I can get a few jobs done here and there in return.”

  My eyes dart up at Gus. He smiles back at me. He knows that looking at the supplies has already given me a dozen ideas for new projects.

  • • • 38 • • •

  “Gus!” I shout, racing toward the house with the old motor in my hand. “Can you make this thing work again? Think about how it could make our company come to life!”

  While Gus is busy trying to figure out how to make the Widow Hollis’s old motors—gas and electric motors, from lawn mowers and vacuum cleaners and carousel microwaves and Weedwackers—cough back into working order, I use springs from her garage to add leaves to flowers and antennae to a giant new monarch butterfly that both ripple when the winter wind skips past.

  We’re attaching the butterfly to the bouquet on the chimney when Lexie and Victoria ride by, their bicycle tires making gravel pop. When Victoria and Lexie pause to eyeball our latest additions, I remember that we’re getting deep into December, closer to the reevaluation the House Beautification Committee promised. And I feel like the time I have left to work on my house is too small—like a crowded elevator, filled with hard walls and elbows and umbrellas that jab your ribs if you’re not careful.

  As soon as Gus lets out a triumphant whoop, announcing tha
t he’s figured out how to raise the Widow Hollis’s motors back from the dead, I jump at the chance to start dreaming up new figures—powered by far more than just the wind, this time.

  Together, we make a girl who’s wearing a wig as silky and straight and perfect as Victoria’s hair, and her little motor allows her to constantly twirl her hair around her finger. We make a man sitting on an old bicycle—like Weird Harold’s dad—and hook up a motor that makes his feet turn the pedals. We make two people with napkins tucked into the tops of their shirts, who are fighting over a wishbone; motors make their arms shift back and forth in their struggle.

  My favorite of all our moving people are the three girls who are jumping rope, because looking at them reminds me of recess. Two girls are holding the ends of the long rope, and their motors constantly raise their arms up and down while the third girl waits for the perfect moment to come racing in. I can almost hear the songs they’d chant while jumping.

  As time marches still closer to Christmas, Gus and I add white lights to the railing on our porch and a wreath with a red bow to the gate on our fence. The rest of the neighbors stop sprucing up their own houses long enough to light candles in their windows. They put down hammers and drills and pick up knitting needles in order to make mufflers for gifts. They pick up whisks to stir cookies, glue guns to make ornaments.

  Irma Jean sews about twenty red felt hats, like the one Santa wears. When I eye her, confused, she says, “For the figures in your yard,” in a way that lets me and Gus both know how much she’s been enjoying watching our yard come to life.

  On Christmas Eve, I put on Mom’s latest gift—a red velvet dress with long sleeves and a plaid sash—and Gus and I head to Montgomery, where the all-purpose room is completely decked out for the service. Chuck has even gone so far as to put up a Christmas tree, decorated with red ribbons and white lights. The smell of pine fills the room—it’s almost the same smell as paint, I think. Like Montgomery has been fixed up, even though the school board said it would take too much money.