Strays Like Us

by Richard Peck

  The four winds and anybody. I shook my head.

  “But it wasn’t just the drugs she needed.” The words tumbled out of me. “She needed people to like her.”

  I wasn’t enough. But I couldn’t say that where anybody else could hear.

  “That’s right.” Aunt Fay nodded. “That was Debbie. She was always hungry for someone to like her.”

  She said like, not love. Aunt Fay never said love. Some words are too dangerous to use. “Maybe someday she’ll – ”

  “Maybe,” I said. But I couldn’t go on listening for footsteps on the porch. It was like one of those games you play as a kid, and one day, all of a sudden, the game doesn’t work anymore. You’re just running in circles. Or you’re hiding and nobody’s seeking you.

  So I couldn’t be twelve now, not after tonight. I’d been twelve too long.

  “Can I stay here with you?”

  Aunt Fay jerked, like I’d come up behind her. She looked at the stove. “There’s a lot I can’t do for you,” she said. “But you’re home.”

  You notice I didn’t cry. Not that night. I’ll tell you when.

  ∨ Strays Like Us ∧

  Nine

  Christmas Eve we headed up the hill with Mrs. Voorhees’s dinner. It was sleeting and pitch-dark at five-thirty. When we pulled up to the house, lights twinkled in the overgrown living-room window.

  “Would you look at that,” Aunt Fay said. “She’s made Rose put up a tree. She’s gotten herself overstimulated. She’ll be barking at the moon all night. I’ll have to give her a saline shot.”

  “What good will that do?”

  “It won’t do anything. But it hurts worse than her B12 shot, so she likes it better.”

  When we came through the front door with the dinner, Mrs. Voorhees was at the foot of the curving stairs, posing. She was dressed in her Christmas best. It was a green taffeta that went to the floor with pearls at her neck. She was swinging a fine black-and-silver cane, pointing it to show off the Christmas tree winking in the living room.

  “Is that cane my Christmas present?” Aunt Fay said, hustling in the chicken and dumplings. “Because I’m the one with the leg.”

  Mrs. Voorhees made big eyes and pursed up her red rosebud mouth. “A woman of your weight leaning on this cane would snap it like a twig.”

  “Before you get too ornery to live,” Aunt Fay said, handing off the chicken to me, “I’m going to give you a saline shot. We’ll get that over with before we eat.”

  “A saline shot!” Mrs. Voorhees said like she’s never heard of one. “Fay, I’m not going to stump back upstairs and get on the bed dressed like this so you can use me for a pincushion.”

  “No need for that,” Aunt Fay said, moving in on her. “You can just hike them skirts and bend over the banister. Because, girl, you’ve got a shot coming.”

  It was their way of exchanging Christmas greetings, so I brought in the rest of our dinner from the car and laid it all out in the kitchen – the pan of escalloped potatoes, the green-bean-and-mushroom-soup casserole, the jar of gravy, the Waldorf salad, the crescent rolls, and the steamed pudding with hard sauce.

  We ate by candlelight, and I’d only seen people do that in pictures. Four tall white candles – tapers, Mrs. Voorhees called them – in fancy glass holders. And in the middle of the table a white poinsettia plant. I’d never seen a white poinsettia before. It didn’t look quite real, but then maybe Christmas isn’t supposed to be.

  We sat there in the candlelight, having our Christmas. At one end Mrs. Voorhees, shimmering green, was already slipping a second crescent roll out of the silver basket. Aunt Fay in her peach pantsuit was planted at the other end, and the candle flames reflected in her glasses. It was a good dinner. Even Mrs. Voorhees said so, and I remembered that line in the song Will the Little Match Boy sang: “Is this what Christmas is?”

  I decided it must be. The best part was not counting the days and waiting for Debbie anymore. Oh, I wasn’t over Debbie. I don’t mean that. You don’t just let go when you’ve been hanging on all your life. Everything felt different though, and it wasn’t just Christmas. I can’t explain it, but if somebody came in this dining room now and took a picture of us, I knew I’d be in it.

  “Just put a little dab on my plate,” Mrs. Voorhees said when we brought in the pudding. “And a dab of hard sauce. I don’t know where I’ll put that much.”

  “Beats me,” Aunt Fay muttered out in the kitchen. “If she didn’t have that panty girdle on, she’d explode. Five crescent rolls. She’s got more stomachs than a Holstein cow.”

  We’d just finished up the pudding when the phone rang. Mrs. Voorhees was chasing one final raisin around her plate with a dessert fork. Aunt Fay slipped out to answer in the kitchen.

  When I caught Mrs. Voorhees cocking an ear to hear, she said, “Well, it could be for me, you know. This is my house.”

  But Aunt Fay didn’t come back, and we heard snatches of her end of a conversation.

  “You say he’s not bringing up any phlegm?”

  “One of her other patients,” Mrs. Voorhees whispered. “Another poor sufferer.”

  There was more we couldn’t hear, but then Aunt Fay said, “Call the pharmacist and tell him you want an oxygen concentrator. Tell him I’ll pick it up on the way. No, I’ve had my dinner. It’s all right. I’ll be there directly.”

  She came up behind my chair, and Mrs. Voorhees said to her, “You don’t mean you have to – ”

  “Yes,” Aunt Fay said. “I’ve got an emergency.” Her hand fell on my shoulder. “Edith, will you have Molly to stay overnight?” She squeezed my shoulder, meaning she wanted me to play along. She wanted me to keep Mrs. Voorhees company. Because it was Christmas Eve maybe, or to keep her from barking at the moon.

  §

  It was still only a little after eight when I finished up in the kitchen. I’d been on my own in there, cleaning up from our meal. Mrs. Voorhees had gone straight upstairs, saying, “All that heavy food is the last thing a person in my condition should be eating.”

  So I had the kitchen to myself, getting the leftovers back in the Tupperware and washing up by hand. Mrs. Voorhees didn’t want her china or her crystal run through the dishwasher. Then I dried everything to a high polish, because if I left a spot on a glass, I’d hear about it.

  It wasn’t an up-to-date kitchen, not like the one at Tracy Pringle’s house. The countertops had linoleum on them, and the dinette set was old chrome. But Mrs. Voorhees wouldn’t have spent much time in here. I seemed to know things about her, how she’d always gotten other people to do for her. It was like a talent, and she was talented that way.

  I didn’t mind the work. Wasn’t I always pretending I had an apartment in some city with a kitchenette? And here I had a full kitchen. But something nagged at me, something new.

  The sleet was hitting the black kitchen window, and I kept thinking about Aunt Fay skittering down the slick hill in the Dart and having to make a stop at the pharmacy. She wasn’t that great a driver either. Before last night I hadn’t worried about her, hadn’t thought much about her when she wasn’t there. And she was in and out. But now I stewed some, wondering if she was all right. And that was new.

  I arranged some of her star-shaped sugar cookies on a plate to take up to Mrs. Voorhees for later. Then I ran a damp rag over all the countertops and behind the toaster.

  I supposed I’d better shut off the lights on the Christmas tree in the living room. They were all pink, and the glass balls were either pink or silver, and up close you could see the tree was artificial. It was the Mrs. Voorhees of trees. I sat down on a needlepoint settee to admire it. I sat there as long as I dared, watching the tree wink pink and letting some more Christmas happen. Then I pulled the plug and went on upstairs.

  Mrs. Voorhees was sitting in her bed as usual, watching the door. She wore a flannel nightgown with her hair tied up in a gauzy scarf. “You took your time,” she said. “What did you do, scrub the pattern off the plates? What
have you got there, cookies for Santa? Bring them over and put them on this bedside table where he’ll find them.”

  Oh yes, she was going to be restless tonight. As Aunt Fay said, her only ailment was lack of exercise.

  “Have you thought where you’re going to sleep?” Her voice came out of nowhere. She’d cold creamed her face, so she had no mouth or eyelashes. I thought there must be plenty of bedrooms where I could sleep.

  “You better bunk in here with me so you won’t get scared in the night.”

  “I don’t get scared in the night.”

  “You never stayed in a haunted house before.”

  “Is this place haunted?”

  She waved a little paw. “Common knowledge.”

  “Who’s haunting it?”

  “I am!” she said. “Just a joke. But you can pull that rollaway out of the back of the closet and sleep at the foot of my bed.”

  So that’s where she wanted me to be. She lent me one of her nightgowns because we were pretty nearly the same size. “I don’t have an extra toothbrush for you,” she said as I was making up the rollaway bed. “But I guess your teeth won’t drop out. And here, you might as well just finish off these cookies.”

  There were only two left, and she’d made it sound like I’d eaten all the others.

  I’d asked Aunt Fay what hospital corners were, and now I had the chance to show Mrs. Voorhees I knew. She watched my every move. She was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

  “You’ve made up that bed tighter than the envelope on a love letter,” she said. “You’ll have to tear it up to get into it.”

  But I had the feeling we weren’t near bedtime. “Are you going to be able to sleep?” I asked her.

  “Sleep?” She was astonished. “I haven’t been able to sleep since 1958. If I slept, I’d think I was in a coma. I nod off. That’s the best I can do. It’s Christmas Eve. Are you going to hang up your stocking?”

  “I’m too old for that.”

  “Then quit fiddling with that bed and bring me my jewelry box.”

  I blinked. “You wear your jewelry overnight?” I wouldn’t put it past her.

  “Just go get it.”

  It weighed a ton, and I was careful lifting it so I wouldn’t knock over the perfume bottles. I noticed the silver-framed picture of her and the doll baby wasn’t there. When I brought the box over to the bed, she was patting a place beside her where I was to put it down, and myself too.

  Raising the lid, she peered into her pirate treasure. Now our heads were close, because that much of anything amazed me. “I remember every dress I wore with this stuff,” she said. “You can poke around. Look at that sunburst. Voorhees brought that to me from Chicago when he was up there at a Masonic meeting.” It probably wasn’t diamonds, but it looked like diamonds. It was blinding. “Pearls are nice too,” she said. “Very flattering.”

  We both poked around, untangling the pearls and matching up the earrings, making an evening of it. Finally she said, “Well, don’t you see anything you like?”

  I didn’t know what she meant. I guess I liked it all. “Girls like jewelry,” she said, but I just sat there, not knowing.

  “Pick yourself out something you like. For heaven’s sake, it’s Christmas.”

  I stared at her. She wanted to give me a present. What if I picked the sunburst pin? It was bigger than my chest.

  “Never mind,” she said. “I’ll find you something.” She reached in and pulled out a gold chain, and she knew just where it was. It was so delicate, it was almost not there. On it hung a tiny ring, like a baby would wear. She held it up, and it glittered like tinsel. “Twenty-four karat,” she said.

  It was the plainest thing in the box, and the best. “Let’s try it on you, see how it looks.”

  It was so fine and light, I could hardly feel it around my neck. “That’s what we call important jewelry,” she said. “Real gold and simple enough to wear all the time. Go look at yourself in the mirror.”

  The room was full of mirrors. All her closet doors were mirrors. I didn’t like looking at myself, but I looked at the chain with the little ring on it, caught up on the collar of the flannel nightgown. “You could wear it next to your skin,” she said from the bed. “You wouldn’t ever need to take it off.”

  So I had a Christmas present this year, an important piece of jewelry I’d never have to take off. When we got settled in our beds, Mrs. Voorhees was snoring in two minutes. But I stayed awake, feeling the gold chain around my neck, feeling the baby’s ring nestled at my throat.

  §

  Rose was coming the next morning to take Mrs. Voorhees home with her, to have Christmas Day with her family. I mentioned that there were plenty of leftovers for when she got home.

  “They’ll eat their heads off all day long at Rose’s,” she said. “After that, I won’t be able to look food in the face.”

  I’d thanked her twice for the gold chain, once last night and now again this morning when I’d taken up her breakfast. She just shrugged, but said, “You can drop in any time. You don’t have to wait for Fay. I may have something else for you – I don’t know what.”

  But she didn’t have to give me things to get me to come. “What are you giving Rose for Christmas?” I said to change the subject.

  “A check for twenty-five dollars and my last year’s coat. I just as well give away all my coats. I don’t get out.” But she was already over at the closet, deciding what to wear to Rose’s all-day Christmas dinner.

  §

  I walked home, down the hill on Christmas morning, avoiding the slick spots. The sleet had coated the yards so it was almost a white Christmas. Nobody was out yet. People were indoors, opening their presents. Not a car went by all the way to the square, and there was only truck traffic on Jefferson. It was nice without anybody around. I felt like I owned the town.

  Though it was already ten-thirty when I got home, I looked over the back of the couch to make sure Aunt Fay wasn’t asleep on it. I glanced in her bedroom too, but it looked unslept in.

  Nothing warned me all the way up the attic stairs, but when I went into Arlette’s room, somebody was asleep in my bed. I jumped a foot. It was Will.

  ∨ Strays Like Us ∧

  Ten

  He sat straight up. He had on somebody else’s wool shirt, and I wondered if he was wearing anything else. His hair was in his eyes and standing up in a halo at the back of his head.

  “What time is it?”

  “Time you got out of my bed,” I said, being cool. Careful too. It felt risky to ask him why he was here. I stood by the door, fingering my invisible chain inside my puffy jacket.

  He scratched his scalp. “…Since you were at Mrs. Voorhees’s, your aunt Fay sent me over here to sleep.”

  He didn’t say why.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said, which could mean a couple of things.

  “Bathroom’s downstairs,” I said. “You wearing anything but that shirt? Should I hide my eyes?” His clothes were in a puddle on the floor next to a pair of small cowboy boots I hadn’t seen before. He threw back my covers, and he was wearing pajama bottoms.

  “I don’t have an extra toothbrush,” I said, “but I guess your teeth won’t drop out.”

  He trudged past me, sleepy and sulky, heading for the bathroom with his boots in his hand.

  I thought I’d better give him breakfast, because I didn’t know what was going on next door at the McKinneys’. I boiled water for instant oatmeal and threw in a handful of raisins. I poured out a glass of juice and fixed a plate of Christmas cookies.

  “Merry Christmas,” I said when he came into the kitchen, swaying in the boots.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  I hung around by the sink, letting him eat, not asking anything because being Will, he couldn’t keep quiet forever.

  “Your aunt Fay and my grandma kind of got into it last night.”

  “Into what?”

  “Well, they had a big disagreement, and then they sent me over
here to sleep.”

  I waited a little and then said, “That’s the shortest story I ever heard.”

  “I didn’t want to come over here,” he mumbled. “I’d sooner have stayed there. I’m not a kid.”

  “What were they fussing about? Was it about taking care of your grandpa?”

  “Yeah.” His head hung low, and his eyes were on the oilcloth. “It was your aunt Fay spouting off. She wanted to put him in the hospital.”

  “Aunt Fay doesn’t spout off,” I said. “She says what she thinks, and she’s trained.”

  “Whatever,” he said.

  “How bad is he?” I said. “Your grandpa.”

  “It’s pneumonia. He’s had it before. But they got this thing from the drugstore. It sucks in room air and blows out double the oxygen. It helps him breathe.”

  “But maybe at the hospital they could – ”

  “Don’t look at me,” Will said. “I wanted him to go.”

  There was something not real about this conversation. So I said, “New boots? Christmas?”

  He nodded. You could hear the boots creaking under the kitchen table. “They’re from my dad.”

  “He sent them to you?”

  “That’s right. I better get going.”

  He was scraping back from the table, but something made me say, “Wait a minute. I want to tell you something.”

  I came over and sat down in the other chair so he wouldn’t get up.

  “What?” he said, like he didn’t want to hear.

  “You were right.”

  “What about?”

  “About my mother. She’s not coming back for me.”

  “I never said – ”

  “I know, but remember that time you said maybe I wouldn’t be staying and maybe I would? You figured I would.”

  Will sat there, fooling with a spoon, making half-moons in the oilcloth with it.

  “Well, I’m staying,” I said.

  “That’s good,” he said. “You okay with that?”