I pointed to a faded picture tacked down with little silver triangles. “Who’s that funny-looking man?”
“Your friend Frankie’s grandfather, when he was young. See there? He owned the first car in town and decorated it up for July Fourth.” Miss Bloom turned the scrapbook’s crumbly black pages.
“Stupid Frankie says his daddy won’t let him play with me anymore because of Laura.” I looked at the picture of his grandfather sitting in that old car. I thought about Frankie. And about Laura, and Jesslyn. How some friends seem born into your life and others just pop up when you need them. But shouldn’t a sister be both kinds of friends? Jesslyn used to be both, but I was starting to wonder.
Now Miss Bloom turned to a picture of the swimming races from a long time ago. “What’s wrong with our pool?” I asked. “You think it will open by July Fourth?”
“Some people are unhappy that it’s closed. And probably just as many think it ought to stay that way,” Miss Bloom said. “A few of our citizens would like to see our town shut down tight — even the library — or at least go back to the way it was in Frankie’s grandfather’s day,” she said. “But that’s not going to happen.”
I reached under the desk to pet her cat, Bobbsey. I felt like climbing under there to curl up in the coolness next to Bobbsey. “There’s nothing wrong with the pool, is there?”
“I don’t think so, Glory. At least nothing that can be fixed with cement. Hanging Moss is all mixed up about a lot of things. We have to figure this out, work together. But if you’re worried about the pool, maybe you can do something,” she said.
“Oh, sure. Me, eleven years old, get people like Frankie’s hateful daddy to open it and let everybody in town swim.” I kicked at the desk in time to the cat purring.
“Gloriana, it’s not just Frankie’s father who counts. First of all, there’s the law. Believe me, if the law says the Community Pool stays open, sooner or later it will be open.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t understand that. The law and all.”
“Look here.” Miss Bloom turned to a row of newspapers hanging on a rack of wooden rods. She opened the Hanging Moss Tribune to a page of letters. “See these?”
“Are those what people send to the editor of the paper? Daddy told us about those letters. I wanted to see them, but Jesslyn claims I’m too young to read them.”
“Hogwash. You read whatever you want to. If you’ve a mind to, I do believe you could write a letter yourself.” Miss Bloom handed me the newspaper.
I sat up straighter. I turned the paper toward me. Dear Editor, one started. I am writing to express my displeasure at the way the Hanging Moss Town Council has responded to the recent upheavals in our community.
That was sure a heap of words saying nothing. “Can I borrow some stationery, Miss Bloom?” I asked. “I can write a better letter than that.”
I caught my breath from running down the street. I pushed open my front door. I raced through the house, making enough noise to get some attention.
Emma was outside hanging Daddy’s shirts on the clothesline. “Calm down, Glory. What’s the matter?”
I held up my letter with about a million words crossed out. “Guess what this is, Emma. I’m writing to the Hanging Moss Tribune newspaper. I’m telling the editor that somebody in this town needs to figure out what’s wrong with our pool. And fix it.”
Emma poked a clothespin at a shirt to hang it. She did the same thing with another, then another, till a line of stiff white shirts floated upside down in the sunshine. Finally, she picked up the laundry basket and looked at me.
“Gloriana, you sure you know what you’re doing?”
I didn’t stop to answer, just turned around and went looking for more paper. I found today’s Tribune, a writing tablet, a pencil, and envelopes on Daddy’s desk. I brought these to the kitchen table and spread them out. Emma came to sit with her sack of snap beans in her lap.
“I’m writing my own letter. Miss Bloom thinks I can.” I opened up the tablet.
“What you got to say to that newspaper?” she asked, snapping green beans without even looking at the bowl.
“Plenty.” I started to read.
Dear Editor,
Closing down our pool in the middle hottest time of the summer is the dumbest worst idea on earth. It stinks that you’re closing our pool. Please open it soon now!
I looked up at Emma.
“Sounds like messing in something you don’t know a thing about. You might want to tell Brother Joe this first,” she said, snapping beans faster and faster.
“I’m not telling anybody. I don’t want to be making any nosy church people mad, thinking he helped me. Or Jesslyn saying I don’t write big enough words. And I sure don’t want Frankie worrying I’m giving away any of his stupid secrets.”
Emma stopped snapping beans and looked straight at me. “A fish that never opens his mouth won’t get caught.”
I put down my pencil. “What’s that mean?”
“Means if you keep your mouth closed, you don’t make trouble. Watch out you don’t get us all in trouble.”
“Don’t worry, Emma. I know what I’m doing.” I opened a clean sheet of paper and started over.
Dear Tribune Editor,
Do you know how hot it is in the summer? All the children of Hanging Moss want someplace to swim.
Words buzzed around my head like a mosquito that needed swatting. Emma shook her head slowly. “If you’re bound and determined to write this letter, at least think hard about saying the right thing.”
“I’m trying. Shoot. This letter writing is harder than I thought.” I ripped my paper to shreds and stomped out of the kitchen. Emma followed me into the dining room.
“Come back here, Glory. Sit down.” She patted the back of the high wooden chair. She handed me the paper and pencil. “Take this and begin again. Always a good idea to start with saying something nice. Leave your vinegar till the end.” She smiled and put her hand over mine, and I remembered our hands together, like Daddy’s statue. I took a deep breath.
“I might need some help saying It stinks that our pool closed in a nicer way.”
“Try thinking about what really matters to you about your pool,” Emma said. “And not just your birthday party. You can do this.” She laughed when I wrinkled my nose up at her, then she disappeared into the kitchen.
I chewed on the pencil. Thought some more. Crossed parts out. Tore up the whole thing and started over. I looked it over one last time.
“Emma, come here please,” I called out. “I’m ready!”
When she finished reading, Emma shook her head and said quietly, “What have you done now, Glory? What have you done?”
“I meant every word of it,” I said. “Every single word.” I jerked my letter away from her.
“Then I guess I’m proud of you, baby, even if you do get us all in a whole lot of trouble.”
I felt my shoulders loosen for the first time all day.
I sealed up the envelope. I memorized the address I’d written on the outside in my best script. Then I put the letter in my back pocket, real careful, and headed across to 233 East Main Street. I looked in the big glass window with Hanging Moss Tribune painted in fancy letters across the front. Still open.
Wait a dang minute! Was that my neighbor Mrs. Simpson with her green-tinged hair all done up in a fat bun, inside the Tribune’s office, typing away at a desk right by the door? What was she doing here?
I tapped on the window, smiled, and waved. Mrs. Simpson glanced up, paying me as much attention as she does when she’s playing the piano at Daddy’s church. I took a deep breath to stop my heart from pounding. Then I marched right in.
“Hello, Mrs. Simpson,” I said, polite as a preacher’s kid. The air conditioner in the window was making such a racket I wasn’t sure she’d heard me. “Hello, Mrs. Simpson,” I said again, shivering in the cold office.
“Gloriana Hemphill. What brings you to the Tribune?” She smiled in that gr
own-up way that means people don’t care about hearing the answer.
“A letter. I have a letter to the newspaper editor.” I reached in my pocket and handed it across the desk. My heart was pounding. I tried to picture Mrs. Simpson in her big flowered bathing suit with the skirt billowing out, swimming with those Esthers at the Community Pool instead of sitting behind that newspaper desk looking like a hawk ready to pounce on a baby bird.
“What a sweet thing to do.” She hardly glanced up from her typewriter. “What’s your little letter about, dearie?”
“It’s about the pool,” I said. “I don’t think it’s right to close it. Or to keep people out just because they aren’t white.”
“Oh.” Mrs. Simpson’s mouth made the letter O when she spoke. “I’ll see that the editor gets this.” Mrs. Simpson looked like she’d just smelled rotten eggs. She held my letter by one corner and dropped it in her desk drawer. I peered over her desk just as she banged the drawer shut.
“When will my letter be in the paper?” I asked.
“As soon as there’s room on the Letters to the Editor page. And, of course, we have to check for grammatical mistakes. And be sure the writer composed the letter him- or herself.” Mrs. Simpson moved toward the front door. “I hope Brother Joe is aware of your letter writing,” she said, holding the door open.
“Yes, he is,” I lied. When I stepped outside, a blast of heat made me want to sink down on the sidewalk to catch my breath. But I kept moving. “And for your information I composed that letter myself,” I yelled into the hot, empty air. “Every single word!”
But Mrs. Simpson slammed the door and turned the sign to Closed, trapping the cold inside.
I ran all the way to my front steps without stopping, and plunked onto the porch swing. My head was spinning thinking about mean Old Lady Simpson, but I wasn’t gonna tell what I’d done. I kicked off my sneakers to push the swing back and forth with my bare feet, catching my breath under the ceiling fan.
Pretty soon, here came Jesslyn gliding up the sidewalk. She didn’t say a single thing, just floated up the stairs to our room. I followed her and opened my newest Nancy Drew book to chapter eleven, all the time thinking about the letter I’d just delivered to Mrs. Simpson.
Jesslyn leaned across her bed and reached under it. Was that her shoe box she was after? I was hopeful.
“Wanna play Junk Poker?” I asked. But she had already pushed the box back under her bed and was heading down the stairs.
“I told you, that’s a baby game,” she called back. “I cleaned out my box.”
But I’d seen Jesslyn slip something inside. As soon as she was gone, I peeked down the hall to be sure she wasn’t coming back. I shut our bedroom door, then sneaked out her Junk Poker shoe box. I held my breath, hoping my big sister hadn’t forgotten something. I untied her box’s ribbon, ignoring the Keep Out and Private, This Means You notes taped to the top.
Yep. She’d dumped her old junk out all right. But she’d saved a library card with Robert Aaron Fox’s name on it — big as life and stamped today, June 26, 1964.
My heart was beating like nobody’s business when I put Robbie’s library card back and quickly shoved the shoe box under the bed. I marched downstairs, sat myself on the sofa, and pretended to read Jesslyn’s movie magazine. No one seemed to notice me.
“I’ll be back before dark,” Jesslyn was saying to our daddy. “Mary Louise wants me to go to Memphis to shop tomorrow. Her cousin’s driving us.”
“Can’t you find what you need here in town? The idea of you going off to Memphis.” His voice drifted off, and he stared out the window across to the church. Looked to me like he wished he was someplace else. Someplace he could turn to the Good Book for advice and not worry about his daughter wanting to spend tomorrow shopping for fire batons, bathing suits, and party favors in Memphis, Tennessee.
“Can I go with you?” I asked.
“You’re not invited, Glory,” Jesslyn said, clamping her teeth together.
“I’ve never been anywhere. I need a new bathing suit, too. Can’t I come?” I asked.
“Glory, you may not go to Memphis,” our daddy said. “That’s that.” Then he looked hard and long at Jesslyn. “And you, young lady, I’ll think about letting you go if you’ll be home before dark.”
“Yes, sir.” Jesslyn smiled at Daddy, then gave me one of her looks.
But I wasn’t giving up that easy. “If you let me go, Jesslyn and Mary Louise could help me get things for my birthday party. In case the pool opens back up. You know, it is my birthday on July Fourth, eight days away. In case y’all have forgotten.”
Nobody paid a bit of attention to me.
Jesslyn was smiling sweetly at Daddy.
“We’ll be careful. And we’ll be back before dark. Memphis is only an hour away. Can I please go with Mary Louise? Her cousin is a very good driver.”
And since I was the only living soul who knew a thing about a new boy in town asking Jesslyn to ride someplace all by herself in his car with him, our daddy thought for only a minute longer before he said yes.
By eleven o’clock the next day, Jesslyn had been up and down the stairs all morning, turning this way and that at the front hall mirror, ignoring me. I was in the kitchen with Emma where it felt like a zillion degrees. Too hot to be cooking turnip greens and frying pork chops, but that’s what Emma did in the middle of most every day. I waited for her to put the corn bread in the oven and sit with me.
“Guess what, Emma. I delivered our letter to the newspaper.” I smiled and reached for her hand.
“Don’t be calling that our letter.” She pulled her hand back and picked up a stack of napkins to fold. “Just ’cause I helped you with a few words.” She shook her head. “I sure hope you don’t get your daddy in trouble. Now this mess with Jesslyn going to Memphis. Shopping, humph.” Emma stood up and started banging pots and pans and singing about gathering at the river, a sure sign she suspected something.
“Is Daddy coming home to eat with us?” I asked.
“Brother Joe’s over at the church, been there since after breakfast working on his sermon. I suspect he won’t come back for his usual noontime meal and nap today.”
“You aren’t gonna tell him about my letter, are you?”
“I’m not mentioning that letter to anybody,” Emma said. “But I’m worried about your sister. She needs to be careful running all over God’s green earth like that. Especially now, this summer, with people all riled up about outsiders and Northerners and pools closing.”
I shut up about my letter and pretty soon, here came Jesslyn, dressed for her fake shopping trip. Emma pointed her wooden spoon at Jesslyn’s skirt. “You going out of the house in that?”
“It’s the style and I like it.” Jesslyn spread a huge napkin over her new plaid skirt and picked at a piece of hot corn bread. I sat at the other end of the kitchen table, pretending to read every single word on page forty-six of The Secret in the Old Attic.
Emma said, “That style is almost hiked up to your underpants for the whole world to see — you need to find something else to wear.”
Jesslyn didn’t talk back to Emma, but she didn’t go upstairs and change, either.
“Watch yourself today is all I’m saying. Memphis is a big place.” Emma started washing and drying her glass measuring cups. She was pressing on them so hard, I thought they’d break.
Jesslyn smiled, holding her lips together. “Don’t worry. I’m old enough to take care of myself. Besides, I’ll be back before dark.” She fiddled with the bracelet she’d just clasped around her wrist, then flipped it toward me like she knew how much I’d love my own silver bracelet filled with little charms. After she set her dish and iced tea glass in the sink, she dabbed at her bright lipstick. Then she shut the front door and half skipped down the sidewalk toward wherever it was she claimed she was going.
Emma called after Jesslyn, “Watch yourself, girly!”
But Jesslyn was long gone.
“So
mething not right with this so-called shopping trip,” Emma said. “That child’s been acting strange lately.”
It wasn’t easy to get anything past Emma. That’s why the lie I was about to tell came out of my mouth slowly, carefully.
“Emma, I forgot to tell you. Miss Bloom asked me and Laura to help with the little kids’ story program over at the library,” I said. “All afternoon.”
Emma put her hand on my shoulder to stop me from running off the way Jesslyn had just done. She was looking at me hard. She must’ve still been thinking about Jesslyn — and Jesslyn’s skirt.
“Just a minute, young lady. All afternoon?”
When I looked right back at Emma, I didn’t blink. It was hard to lie and not blink.
“Miss Bloom needs me. Plus, I have to drop my book off.” I took a deep breath and told my heart to stop beating so fast. I shook loose from Emma’s hand. She’d never come looking for me at the library. Come to think of it, Emma had never set foot in our library.
“Gotta go.” The screen door slammed behind me. “Sorry about the door,” I yelled back.
Whew. I’d escaped without Emma figuring out I was not going to be spending the day at the library.
I looked up and down Church Street. No Jesslyn. Then I caught a glimpse of a red plaid skirt sashaying down the shady side street by the library. Jesslyn was prissing like she owned the world. I ducked behind a wide pecan tree and watched a gold Plymouth station wagon stop in front of her. A black wavy ducktail haircut and an arm hanging out the window told me what I already suspected.
Jesslyn was running off with Robbie Fox!
He opened the car door, big as you please. But something must’ve changed his mind because the next thing I knew they’d disappeared into the Piggly Wiggly grocery store across the street. I raced to that station wagon and peered in the back window. A picnic cooler, a blanket, an old football jersey, and the spare tire were inside.
When I heard Jesslyn back on the sidewalk, yakking nonstop, I didn’t have but a minute to decide.
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