The Junction of Sunshine and Lucky

by Holly Schindler

  “We’re going to—no one will lose their home—I’ll—” the mayor tries, but no one’s listening. Not to him, anyway. Not now.

  As Victoria and I continue to glare at each other, it feels like suddenly, the whole world’s no longer against me and Gus. It’s like everything I’ve been fighting is now deciding to wrap its arms around me and hug me.

  A voice from the far side of the yard says, “I’m not an art dealer, but could I buy one of your sculptures?”

  “Yeah,” comes another shout. “I want one, too!”

  “I want one for Dickerson!” Ms. Byron calls out. “To highlight student talent!” She’s smiling at me, not eating any stomach pills at all.

  “Are some of those sculptures really made out of old playground equipment from Montgomery?” one of the suits standing next to Mr. Cole asks.

  Mr. Cole frowns at his fellow committee member. “What are you doing?” he hisses.

  But the suit waves him away. “I’d do anything to get a sculpture made out of a Montgomery swing,” he admits. “It’d be like getting a little piece of my childhood back!”

  Victoria shrinks as the man hurries to pick out a sculpture before they’re all spoken for.

  “Wait!” Weird Harold shouts as another House Beautification member reaches for the girl with the beret and the palette. “You can’t have that one,” he goes on, smiling from underneath a cap that says EYE OF THE BEHOLDER.

  “Why not, son?” the man asks, looking like Harold’s just slapped his hand.

  “She’s an artist,” Harold explains, staring right at me. “That one has to stay.”

  I’m still beaming when a clickety-clack sound explodes behind me. At first, I think it must be someone leaving, their hard-soled shoes clopping away. But when I turn, I see that the Reverend Chuck Taylor is clapping. And Weird Harold is whistling through his teeth, clapping, too, and shouting, “Way to go, Auggie!”

  Soon, everyone is clapping—applauding for Gus and for me, Auggie Jones.

  • • • 56 • • •

  After the art show, Gus and I go to work, making maybe fifty more people to replace the ones we sold. By now, late in the summer, girls jump hopscotch squares on our front walk. Boys play with model airplanes. A couple kisses right out in the open. A boy squats down to tie his shoelace. A full-grown man walks his dog. A bashful girl stares at her feet, her hands tucked behind her back. A woman paints her toenails.

  Every time we make a new sculpture, it’s a little bit better than the last. I can’t wait to see what we’ll be making a year from now—two years, even. Maybe ten.

  I figure by the time I’m as old as Gus, I’ll be making sculptures that are so lifelike, guys passing by on the street will stop and ask one of them for the time, then stomp off in a huff when they don’t get an answer right back.

  “Come on, Gus!” I shout as I explode through the front door, because I can’t wait to get to McGunn’s. I’m halfway down the front walk when I hear the sign on our gate rattle.

  Gus didn’t much like the idea of the sign at first. Especially since what I wanted to put on it had hurt him so much back when Victoria first said it: “The Junk-tion of Sunshine and Lucky.”

  But I insisted we spell it right: THE JUNCTION OF SUNSHINE AND LUCKY. “After all, we do live on the corner,” I reasoned. “And I want to take that awful name Victoria gave us and turn it into something pretty, just like we take anything broken or ugly and make it in to something T. Walker wants to put in his museum.”

  Since we hung that sign up, the name has really caught on. These days, when a family on vacation or somebody on business asks a waitress or a gas station worker what there is to do for fun, they’re always told, “You can’t leave town without visiting The Junction of Sunshine and Lucky.” Three times out of four, one of those visitors winds up buying a sculpture right out of our yard.

  It’s not a stranger on vacation who has just opened our gate, though. It’s Lexie.

  She drags her feet as she walks toward me, shuffling along like she’s been sent to the principal’s office. I’m beginning to wonder if she needs me to say something first when she blurts, “I wanted you to have this,” and pushes a frame into my hands.

  It’s a photo of Mom’s billboard.

  “They’re peeling her old picture off,” Lexie says softly. “It’s going to be an ad for the new community center. The one they’re going to put in Montgomery.”

  “I heard,” I say, hugging the frame to my chest.

  “So you still have something to wish on,” Lexie says, pointing at the picture.

  I realize that her hair has grown out to her chin, and that she’s got it pulled up on one side of her head with a little barrette. Her face is getting a glistening coat of sweat on it, too—and the way she fidgets tells me it’s not because of the heat.

  “You were right about Victoria,” she admits. “All of it.”

  “Yeah,” I mutter, and as we stare at each other, I start to make a new wish. Because I don’t want Lexie to feel bad anymore.

  “Auggie!” Irma Jean shouts as she races down her front steps. “You and Gus are going to McGunn’s, right?”

  Just as Lexie starts to back away, I wrap an arm around her neck. “We’re all going,” I say, making Lexie flash a smile as bright as a piece of metal glistening in the sun. That smile says my wish just came true.

  We cram ourselves into the cab of Old Glory. “You girls are giggling louder than a whole zoo of hyenas,” Gus says as he steers us down Sunshine, right past the arch we gave back to Mrs. Shoemacker. I finally did figure out how to fix it. Now, it sits at the edge of her front walk, completely covered in leaves cut from metal flashing and tied on loosely with green wire. When the breeze hits, the leaves rattle, promising that the arch will never have just one vine on it again. The noise it makes always tugs a laugh from Mr. Shoemacker—who’s finally back home—every time he picks up the paper or the mail.

  As we head toward Joy, I think of all the other projects in the works—plans we have for our neighbors in Serendipity Place. Because not all of our sculptures go in the yard. A good number go straight to T. Walker Doyle, who sells them off and sends checks back to Gus. Sure, we’ve used those checks to buy groceries and a few new dresses and even a better TV and a new Frigidaire. But we have enough to put some aside, too.

  Now that the mayor has forgiven the fines—which most folks in town swore weren’t exactly on the up and up, anyway—the entirety of our put-aside money is going to help everyone else in Serendipity Place fix up their houses in ways that say something about the people who live inside: the Shoemackers are getting a new front door with a window right in the middle, so everyone can see the warm and welcoming inside of their house. Ms. Dillbeck wants awnings on her two front windows—black ones, that look like eyelashes—to emphasize the way I’ve told her that her porch looks like a mouth smiling. And the Pikes plan on painting their house two shades of yellow, one much darker than the other, the same way a daffodil is a darker orangey-yellow in the center. Because daffodils show up in the spring, and spring is for new babies—that’s what Mrs. Pike says, anyway—and that sums them up completely.

  Gus slows down in front of the Bradshaw place, beside one of our metal sculptures—a farmer with a small motor that lets him tip a watering can to let some cellophane that looks an awful lot like water roll out, then roll back in. The farmer stands proudly right in the middle of the gardens that grow once again in their front yard. Harold grins beneath a hat that reads HOME SWEET HOME.

  Old Glory rattles to a stop, and Harold piles in, too. We’re all so squashed, it’s a little hard to breathe. Our voices get especially loud inside Old Glory as we drive by Hopewell, and I smile at the yellow construction equipment parked by the curb.

  After the mayor broke up the House Beautification Committee, jars started popping up next to cash registers all over town. People were happy to plunk their change inside, because old building and eyesore were suddenly words that didn’t fi
t together anymore. So Chuck got enough to start rebuilding Hopewell after all.

  At McGunn’s, the doors open and we tumble out. We race straight for the donation bins that are set up at the edge of the junkyard—bins where anyone can drop off their used items for me and Gus to use on our sculptures.

  “You guys got a ton of stuff!” Harold shouts, dropping to his knees as he digs through the contents. “A brake drum! A carburetor! Buttons from a Coke machine!” He always knows what every broken piece of machinery is in our donation bin. Knowing what the pieces did in their old lives helps give me new ideas for how I can use them in sculptures or even whirligigs, which is the fancy word T. Walker uses to describe some pieces Gus and I make that are powered by motors or twirl in the wind.

  “Front-row seats,” Mick says, reaching out with a hair-covered arm to pat an old refrigerator, stretched out on its side.

  The girls and I climb on top of the fridge. When Gus brings us Cokes from the McGunn soda machine, I gulp mine down so fast, the cold puts an icy stripe straight through my head.

  “School starts in a couple of weeks, doesn’t it?” Mick asks. “Any first-day jitters?”

  “A few,” Lexie admits, because here we are, looking another school year square in the face. Middle school, this time. “Lockers,” she grimaces.

  “But I bet you’ll have an incredible new hairdo,” I say, nudging her.

  “You won’t believe what I made to wear on the first day of middle school,” Irma Jean announces, her voice so loud and excited that we all laugh at the same time—me and Gus and Irma Jean and Harold and Lexie. The tones in our laughter blend into the world’s most beautiful piano chord—so big, it would take two hands to play all the notes at once.

  I watch as Gus detaches an old Pontiac from his winch, listening to the happy voices and the clink of items as Harold digs deeper into the donation box. Plans for new sculptures start swirling—so many of them, I can hardly keep up with them all. I tell myself to only focus on three—the most important three. The three that feel the closest to me:

  1. A girl made out of steel because she’s so tough—and she’s staring down a hose painted up like a copperhead snake.

  2. A girl who is so special, she has a picture frame for a face.

  3. A girl who is reaching for a star.

  Author’s Note

  When I was Auggie’s age, I started going to farm auctions with my folks. I grew up in Missouri (again, just like Auggie), in a town that was a pretty even mix of city life and rural surroundings. My childhood house, located in the third biggest city in the state, was also just a stone’s throw from a field marked off with barbed wire! We never really had to go far to find auctions on old farmland.

  I mostly spent those auctions under enormous shade trees with piles of books. Every once in a while, I’d take a break from reading to crowd-watch. The grown-ups who came to those auctions ran the gamut. They were antique dealers looking for pieces to sell, or they were collectors looking to add items to their displays, or they were rugged men in overalls who wanted cheap supplies for their own farms. Looking back now, it seems as though those dealers and collectors became the basis for T. Walker, and those crafty old farming guys who’d spent their lives in Missouri were the basis for Gus.

  Many of the treasures at farm auctions were handmade, using reinvented materials. Some had been created out of necessity: Hand-forged tools made from pieces of old machinery. Quilts with intricate patterns, sewn from old scraps of clothing. Primitive-looking furniture made from old wooden crates. Other items were used as decoration, such as small wooden dresser knickknacks made from cigar boxes, or framed needlework on old burlap feed sacks.

  The beginning of Auggie’s story came to me years after my first farm auction. Actually, I didn’t get the idea for a story as much as I got an idea for characters, and the book spiraled out after that.

  The first person I saw was Gus. I saw him as clearly as I’ve seen any real person I’ve ever met in life. It was as if I were looking through Auggie’s eyes, straight at her grampa. I knew I had to write about the kind of people who created those unique, handmade items I’d been finding at auction. But I wanted my characters to make bigger items, wilder items. Full-blown sculptures.

  My favorite part of Auggie’s story is the way she stumbles upon her talent, in the same way my family once stumbled upon items for sale at auction. I think that’s so true in life. Everybody in this world has a shine, just like Auggie. But Auggie’s original goal was to spruce up her house. She never would have guessed, in the beginning, that it would lead to her becoming a folk artist. You never know when your shine will appear . . . and sometimes, it takes a creative eye to recognize it.

  Acknowledgments

  Auggie’s story has been with me for years—the journey from first sentence to finished book has been a long and winding one—and I’m so grateful to have shared that journey with such a passionate group:

  Thanks to my ever-enthusiastic agent, Deborah Warren; to my editor, Nancy Conescu, for making sure this book is the absolute best it could be; to copyeditor Rosanne Lauer for her sharp eye and fine-toothed comb; to Lindsey Andrews for a fantastic cover concept; and to everyone at Dial Books for giving Auggie a “home.”

  Thanks to my mom, who read every single draft of The Junction of Sunshine and Lucky, and to my brother, John, who’s never missed an author event.

  . . . And I want to give a special thanks to you, my reader, who’s holding this book in your hands . . .

  About the Author

  Holly Schindler knew, when she was a little girl writing stories at her child-sized rolltop desk, that she wanted to be an author. Although her desk is bigger and she no longer delivers her stories by Big Wheel, Holly still loves writing for children of all ages. She can be found working on her next novel for young readers at her home in Springfield, Missouri. She can also be reached online at hollyschindler.com.