Strays Like Us

by Richard Peck

  ♦

  I carried the bundle up through the empty house. In my room I stepped out of the skirt and pulled my sweatshirt over my head to get the blouse off. Then I dressed again in my; own clothes, as if I’d never been to the Pringles’. Trying to use her mother’s own graceful gestures, my hands arranged all Tracy’s blouses and skirts in a dresser drawer on top of Arlette’s bobby pins. There was something else I needed to know. Until I knew, I’d keep them here. I wasn’t exactly hiding them.

  But I jumped when the front door opened. I went out in the attic to the top of the stairs, and Aunt Fay was at the bottom, looking up. I didn’t know why she was home now. But living with Debbie had taught me not to expect anything regular from adults. Aunt Fay was looking up at me, looking me over in a way she never did.

  “I’m going to run up to Edith Voorhees’s,” she said. “You come.”

  This was only my second visit to Mrs. Voorhees. After the first time, I’d thought maybe Aunt Fay was going to take me with her every time she went, to keep an eye on me. But she hadn’t.

  This second visit was almost the same: the old lady in the bed with her face all painted up, a little cranky. This time she sent me off on errands all over the house, mostly looking for things I couldn’t find, things she probably didn’t even want.

  The house was like a furniture store, everything nice but too much of it, so it was hard to find anything. Besides, the rooms were all dim even after you switched on a light. Aunt Fay gave her a shot in her behind, and Mrs. Voorhees yowled like a baby.

  On the way home I said, “Doesn’t she ever get up? Is she bedfast?”

  “Edith?” Aunt Fay said. “She’s up and dressed like Mrs. Astor’s pet pony three mornings a week to go to the beauty parlor. If Rose can’t take her, she calls a cab. I’m nearer bedfast than she is.”

  So I kept learning how old people act, and it was all new to me.

  Will had bagged all the leaves from two yards. It was dark by now, but we saw him up on the McKinney’s front-porch roof framed in the light, trying to hang a storm window.

  “Puts me in mind of the night before school started,” Aunt Fay remarked, “when he come in your room off the back-porch roof.”

  Which made me jump, but she just kept busy, aiming the car.

  Even Aunt Fay had combination screens and storms on her windows. But Will was wrestling with a big old wood storm window that made him stagger on the slant of the roof.

  “Roll off,” I’d told him the night he climbed up to my window, and now he looked like he might.

  “Is Mrs. McKinney poor?” I asked, meaning the clunky old storm window, and the paint peeling off the house.

  “Poor as Job’s turkey,” Aunt Fay said, “and getting poorer. They’ve got their Social Security, and that’s about the size of it.” She must have heard me thinking Mrs. McKinney was getting poorer since she had to feed Will, because she said, “He’s good help for her. He’s got a mouth on him, and he’ll be a handful later. But he’s a good boy.”

  When she’d swung around to the garage, she said she was going to look in on Wilma McKinney, so I went on up to the house. I took it for granted that I’d never get inside the McKinneys’ house, and I guessed that was just the way some old people were.

  It was pitch-dark when I came in our back door, but I didn’t flip on the kitchen light. I was halfway across the room when I knew I wasn’t alone. I don’t know what told me. But there was something extra in the room.

  I looked toward the kitchen table, and a dark figure sat slumped in one of the chairs.

  I wasn’t a screamer, but I came close.

  ∨ Strays Like Us ∧

  Six

  My sneaker shrieked on the linoleum when I spun around. Instead of bolting outdoors like a sane person, I grabbed the wall to find the light switch. I guess I had to know.

  I looked back in the dazzling light, and it was an old man, maybe the oldest man I’d ever seen. He didn’t move. Maybe he couldn’t, but that didn’t help. I kept swallowing my heart.

  He was slumped in the chair with his jaw dropped. He could be dead. He could be a dead body somebody left here. The door was never locked. But then something made him stir, maybe the light, maybe me. His eyes opened, and he looked up under the shock of white hair.

  His neck shrank back from the buttoned collar on his work shirt. He wasn’t dirty or anything, but he looked terrible, and he was looking at me. My mind whirled, but I had to know who he was. Was he one of those people who came to Aunt Fay because she was cheaper than a doctor’s appointment? That had to be it, and it looked like he’d waited too late: I could hear him breathing, and it didn’t sound good.

  “Ruth Ann?” he said in a voice that echoed in the kitchen.

  I felt the screen door at my back. I wanted to slide out into the night, but I edged into the room. One of his hands was on the table, loose like it didn’t belong to him. His fingers were curled. The nails on them were thick and thorny. He needed a manicure bad. “Do you want to see Aunt Fay? Mrs. Moberly?”

  “I want my supper is what I want.” His voice was mushy, and you could see his teeth were false. They wobbled all over his mouth. “Where’d everybody go?” He looked around the empty kitchen. “It’s suppertime. Look out the window, Ruth Ann. It’s already as dark as the inside of a hog.”

  Now I was as near as the other kitchen chair, gripping the back of it. I was Ruth Ann, and he wanted his supper, and I didn’t know what to do.

  But then Aunt Fay’s shoe hit the bottom porch step hard. She pounded up on the porch and banged the screen door open.

  “Claude,” she said, looking right at the old man.

  Did he know her? He looked up, somewhat interested.

  “Who is it?” I was still clinging to the chair back.

  “It’s Claude McKinney,” Aunt Fay said. “Will’s grandpa.” Then her voice dropped a mile. “He don’t know where he is a lot of the time.” She strode around behind him and gripped him under his arms. “Claude, you had Wilma worried to death. She thought you was in the bed. You don’t want to run around the neighborhood like that.”

  He made little moans as she hoisted him out of the chair. I had the screen door open when she steered him outside. “Where’s my supper?” He reared back to give her an injured look. “Ruth Ann don’t want to give me any.”

  “You’ve had your supper, Claude,” she said. “Oyster stew and corn bread.”

  “Well, if I had it, I didn’t know it,” he said.

  Now we were crossing the backyard and going through the McKinneys’ gate. I was trying to get around them on the steps to open the screen door, but Aunt Fay said, “No, you wait outside.”

  Mrs. McKinney came up to the screen door and held it open. “It’s all right. Let her come in,” she said, meaning me. “Where was he?”

  “He was in my kitchen.”

  “Oh law,” Mrs. McKinney said. She wasn’t in her nightgown. She was wearing a sweatsuit with the sleeves pushed up, and her hairnet. “Oh law.”

  “It could have been worse,” Aunt Fay said. “He could have gotten out in traffic.” Between them, they put him on a chair. The McKinneys’ kitchen was about the same as Aunt Fay’s except for all the medicine bottles on the drainboard. And the fact that Aunt Fay had a framed picture of Elvis on her kitchen wall, and Mrs. McKinney only had calendars. I looked up, and Will was in the door to the front hall. He stood there with his hands braced on both sides of the door, watching. He didn’t say anything, and neither did I. I thought Mrs. McKinney was trying to overlook me. But once they got Mr. McKinney settled, she glanced down at me and said, “Honey, did he give you a scare?”

  “Not too bad,” I said. “Who’s Ruth Ann?”

  She shook her head. “Oh well, that was his sister. That goes way back.”

  We left then. It was time to. Still, Will hung in the doorway to their front hall. I could feel his eyes on us as we left. When we were going out the door, Mr. McKinney said behind us, “Did I eat
?”

  Aunt Fay reached out for me as we made our way across the yards in the dark. Her hand felt heavy on my bony shoulder.

  “That’s why you go over to the McKinneys’ a lot,” I said.

  “That’s right. I go over to spell Wilma. She’s got her hands full.”

  “It’s not a job. You don’t get paid.”

  “I wouldn’t take pay from Wilma. And she’d be the same if it was the other way around. My man was sick before he died. Moberly. Wilma was right there for me. Anyway, her and me go way back. And Claude too. We had us some times when we was all young and hopeful.” Her voice sounded different in the dark.

  We went on in the house then, and she rusded us up some supper. Oyster stew and corn bread. So that’s why Will and I had the same lunch on the first day of school. Aunt Fay cooked for the McKinneys some because Mrs. McKinney had her hands full. Oh yes, I thought I knew everything then.

  Only one thing lingered in my mind, hung there like a cobweb. When I’d come in the dark kitchen to find the figure at the table, I hadn’t once thought it might be Debbie – Debbie come back to get me. It never crossed my mind, and that worried me.

  §

  I sat through school all that next Monday, not hearing a word said. All my thoughts galloped ahead to the last bell when I could run down to the library.

  No car was idling outside when I got there, and my throat wasn’t tight. I even took my time climbing the smoothed steps up to the front entrance. I didn’t look ahead to see if Tracy was in the reading room. I was in no hurry to know.

  She wasn’t there, and the half of me that knew she wouldn’t be felt smug and hard. I flopped down at the table anyway, scraping the chair. Would she be late? No, she never was. She wasn’t coming, but I opened my homework and stared holes in it just to prove I wasn’t there for Tracy.

  Of course she hadn’t come. Her mother wouldn’t let her. Tracy had made a friend, a stray like me, so even the library wasn’t safe for her. Now her mother would let her come to the library only during school hours, for safety’s sake. I pictured the two of them sitting at their dining-room table this minute, Tracy in the kind of school clothes nobody really wore to school, doing her mother’s assignments. I made myself sit in the reading room twenty-five minutes more before I let myself go home.

  §

  Aunt Fay and I had fallen into the habit of having supper together, late, after she came back from the McKinneys’. She even taught me a little about cooking, not much. It was mostly rooting around in her big deep freeze to take out things in time to thaw. She didn’t have a microwave. She said it might cook her hand.

  That Monday night after supper, I went up to Arlette’s room and dug out all the clothes that Tracy’s mother had given me. I carried them down to the kitchen where Aunt Fay was having a second cup of instant. She sat with her legs crossed in her way, with the ankle of one on the knee of the other and her ankle bracelet glittering. She’d put a sweet potato casserole in the oven, and it was beginning to smell good. She cooked whenever she could.

  When I walked in with the pile of Tracy’s clothes, Aunt Fay’s eyebrows climbed up over her glasses. But she didn’t say anything. I put the pile down on the kitchen table, but she just bided her time. Pretty soon she reached over and fingered the collar of a blouse. “What’s this all about?”

  “A lady gave them to me. Mrs. Pringle. I met her daughter at the library, but she won’t let her come there anymore.”

  “You could get some wear out of them.” Aunt Fay felt one of the skirts. “They’re better than what I could give you.”

  “They’re not the kind of skirts they wear at school.”

  “But that one was a good fit on you.”

  That made me look up at her, and she was glancing my way. “I was over at Wilma McKinney’s, and I seen you out of their upstairs window. You got out of that big car and sashayed past Will with all your skirttails twitching. Put me in mind of somebody.”

  “Who?”

  “Edith Voorhees, when she was young.”

  We sat there with the clothes between us. “Tracy’s mother only gave them to me to get rid of me.”

  “Are you too proud to take charity?” Aunt Fay looked around the room, away from me.

  “No. I’ve taken charity before. You bought me about the first new clothes I ever owned. I’m used to castoffs. But I thought I’d made a friend, and I hadn’t.”

  Aunt Fay nodded, but not at me.

  Then after one of her long silent spells, she said, “Tell you what. Keep a skirt and a blouse to wear over to Edith Voorhees’s. And we’ll give the rest to Goodwill.”

  I looked at her, and something was happening to her mouth. It could have been a smile. “We’ll give them to the poor,” she said.

  ∨ Strays Like Us ∧

  Seven

  The poem on Ms. Lovett’s blackboard was called ‘November Night’.

  Listen…

  With faint dry sound

  Like steps of passing ghosts,

  The leaves, frost-crisped, break from the trees

  And fall.

  It was by a poet named Adelaide Crapsey, and I drew a Debbie in my notebook with autumn leaves caught in her hair.

  Thanksgiving was coming, and Aunt Fay cooked around the clock in every spare minute. Cooking and baking and grating and freezing. I did some of it in an apron that swept the floor.

  I supposed she was cooking for the McKinneys too. She was making enough for thrashers, as people said around here: a twenty-two-pound turkey and four pies. But then she said she was taking a Thanksgiving dinner to Mrs. Voorhees too. “She don’t have anybody to eat with.”

  “Doesn’t she have any friends?”

  Aunt Fay turned over a floury hand. “You see how she is.”

  She cooked half the night before. Thanksgiving, making up containers of dinner for everybody. Aunt Fay was the Queen of Tupperware.

  When we got to Mrs. Voorhees’s house the next morning, she sent me upstairs while she pulled the dinner together in the kitchen. I rapped on the bedroom door in Aunt Fay’s way. When I went in wearing my Tracy blouse and skirt, Mrs. Voorhees squinted at me from the bed.

  “Get out of here,” she said. “I don’t know you.” When I was beside her, she said, “Oh, it’s you. That’s more like it. I suspected from the first day you were a girl.” She meant the skirt, so I did a little twirl that she noticed. Then she put out her small paw to show me she hadn’t been chipping away at her nail polish. “Are you wearing a bra yet?”

  I thought that was too personal, but she said, “I wanted to wear a bra to first grade.”

  And I didn’t doubt it.

  Aunt Fay lumbered into the room. “Edith, I’m not hauling your Thanksgiving dinner up them stairs. You’re not having it in bed. You can come downstairs in your wrapper.”

  “I wouldn’t come downstairs in my wrapper if there was a tornado,” she said.

  “You’ll think a tornado hit you if you don’t get up off that bed and come down for your dinner.” Aunt Fay started away, but Mrs. Voorhees liked having the last word.

  “What about my shot?”

  “You had your vitamin B12 shot already this month. You’re not due.”

  And I was glad. I didn’t even want to be in the room when Mrs. Voorhees got a shot. I didn’t want to see the blood back up in the syringe. I’d seen that too often. I’d seen Debbie do that to herself.

  “Well, I think I’m due for a shot,” Mrs. Voorhees whimpered.

  “You start losing track of time, and we’ll have to make other arrangements for you,” Aunt Fay said, and sailed out of the room.

  Mrs. Voorhees glanced over at me. “She always did talk tough.”

  She sent me into her closet, and she had more clothes than Tracy Pringle. I hauled out every dress, winter and summer, before she found one that would do. For her stockings she pointed me to a chest of drawers. But at least she’d thrown back her covers and had both feet on the floor, fishing around for her b
edroom slippers, which she called mules.

  “Find my panty girdle.”

  A girdle? “But you’re not fat,” I said.

  “It keeps everything in place,” she said, so she was beginning to show some enthusiasm. She wanted a certain pin shaped like a gold leaf to wear on her dress. Her big white leather jewelry box stood on the top of the chest with bottles of perfume called Tabu and White Shoulders, names like that. There were several different framed pictures of several different men too.

  The jewelry box was like buried treasure, everything tangled up in pearls and chains. Then I felt Mrs. Voorhees’s eyes on me. Not her own. But behind the jewelry box was a silver-framed picture of herself taken long ago. You could see it was her, looking at me. Every hair was in place, and she was almost young, and as pretty as I figured. I lowered the lid to see, and she was holding a baby in her arms. A little baby dressed like a doll.

  “Never mind about the pin if you can’t find it,” she said from across the room, snappish.

  I didn’t know where to look when she pulled the nightgown over her head and I had to hand her all her underclothes. “You should have seen my figure when I was twenty,” she said.

  Then she was dressed, reaching up to her shoulder where the gold pin should be, and up to touch her head. “My hair’s a mess. Don’t look at it.” But I thought there were some other things I shouldn’t have been looking at.

  She was in her bathroom twenty minutes, and I could smell the hair spray from here. When she came out, she was dressed and painted up like Mrs. Astor’s pet pony.

  She held on to my arm when we were going downstairs. We were the same height. “But you didn’t put on shoes,” I said. “You’re wearing your mules.”

  “For heaven’s sake,” she said. “There’s nobody here but Fay.”

  Aunt Fay had warmed up everything and arranged it on the dining-room table, using Mrs. Voorhees’s fine china: the candied yams, the cranberry mold, everything in a pattern on a lace tablecloth and only the white meat of the turkey.