A Home for Goddesses and Dogs

by Leslie Connor

  “I thank you, and so does my cranky truck,” Eileen said.

  “I’ll dog sit,” I said, because that was what I figured they needed from me. “And I’ll check Elloroy for signs of death,” I added. I gave his shoulder a pat.

  Eileen stopped still to crow, “Huh-haw!”

  When Elloroy and Soonie retreated into his suite for their afternoon nap, I took the dog who still didn’t have a name outside on his leash. He pulled me along the front yard. I tugged him toward the pasture gate. Once inside, I unclipped him. He bolted away—while looking over his shoulder at me!

  “Go ahead and run,” I told him. “I’ve got you fenced!”

  I hung one arm over the rail and watched him nose his way along. He took leak after leak. Steam rising. Good. Less for the house. I noticed that he took squatty pees, rather than leg-lifting ones. He squirted his own front legs almost every time. His deep fur sucked it up like a sponge. I rolled my eyes.

  “Yeah, it’s dog towels and vinegar for you,” I told him. He gave me a shifty look. His hind legs kicked backward. There wasn’t much about this dog that was funny, but I laughed at that twitchy kick. He went off to sniff and sprinkle some more. I looked back toward the farmhouse. I thought about the mouse, the hole in the wall.

  I looked up to my bedroom window, then to the place where the chimney rose through the roofing. There were two ridges, one high, one low. The high one was over the main part of the house, the low one over Elloroy’s suite. He didn’t have a second floor, which meant my room kind of butted up to his ceiling. On the inside of the house the broad brick chimney rose up between my room and the bathroom. But from inside, and now from the outside too, I could see that the chimney didn’t go all the way to the end of the house. There was a space at least as wide as a person behind that wall—right where the mouse had crawled out. “Huh,” I said.

  “All right, dog-face!” I clapped my hands. “Time to go in. Come!” I called. He sat down and looked at me. If I were to name that pose, I’d call it “unimpressed and unlikely to obey.” “Come!” I called again. I reached into my pocket for some broken bits of biscuit. Well, that dog galloped, if awkwardly. He plowed into me, chin high, licking his lips, and his eyes fixed on my hand. I gave him the treat—barely avoided getting my fingers snapped. I grabbed his collar and hitched him up again. Score one for me.

  “Good boy!” That was a lie. Not-Bullet was not a good boy. But he had come when I’d called. Sort of.

  I pulled him back to the house because that was the game: pull or be pulled. In the entry I dried his legs with a towel. I held him still while I sprayed him with vinegar and wiped him down again. He did not like that, and he tried to circle away. “Ow!” My fingers got twisted up in the collar. I coaxed him to his crate and threw a treat in ahead of him. I added a gentle shove. “Yep, yep. Tough beans,” I said. I made the words sound sweeter than they were. I slid the latch. I felt pretty good. I was not a dog person, yet I’d managed Mr. Yellow this afternoon. I showed him my palms. (That’s what Aunt Brat and Eileen had decided we should do.) “Stay,” I said. He started to mewl. I didn’t wait around feeling sorry for him. Aunt Brat and Eileen would return soon. I took the stairs two at a time, careful not to stomp. I wanted a look behind that sheep poster.

  The putty was cold and hard. The poster came away from the wall easily. I tacked it up off to the side where I could grab it again quickly.

  There was that hole—the one the mouse had come through. I stuck my index finger in it. I felt air—cooler than in my room, I thought. “Hmm. But how far back?” I whispered. I went into my art box and pulled out a ruler. It wouldn’t fit in the hole—not at first. But I jammed and pried. The plasterboard crumbled, almost like it wanted to.

  I am breaking Elloroy’s house, I thought. An ache of guilt caught me in my jaw. But I wasn’t wrecking the bricks. When the hole was big enough, I fed the ruler in—back, back as far as I could slide it until I was pinching just the very end of it in my fingers. Well, it’s at least twelve inches, I thought. “But it must go all the way back to the bathroom, too,” I said. “It must.” I poked about with the ruler, learning nothing, to be honest. Then I lost my grip, and the ruler dropped into the dark unknown.

  “No!” I sat back on my heels. “Smooth move, Lydia!”

  Now I wanted two things: a look at that space and my ruler back. The answer to both problems was a bigger hole. That’s all it took for me to set to the dishonorable work of snapping off more pieces of old wallboard. Soon, I’d made a hole I could put my hand into. This was going to be a big surprise for the mouse.

  I pressed one eye up to the hole. But there was only darkness. I grabbed the flashlight and directed the beam in. I fit my face beside it and shut one eye. It was very hard to see. But just like I’d guessed, there was the back wall of the chimney to my left and the framing of the end wall on my right. The space in between looked wide enough for someone my size to stand—possibly with both hands on her hips. So, a skinny hallway to nowhere. To my right, I could see a close little roof peak, no taller than one of those pup tents, where raw boards came together. That had to be the low roof ridge over Elloroy’s suite. “Cool,” I whispered. I backed away from the hole. I’d just seen house bones, or house ribs—a place no one ever went.

  I wanted to make that hole wide enough to crawl through. I wanted to do it right that second! Trouble was, that was the same second I heard the yellow dog bark—and the same second Aunt Brat arrived home.

  14

  How to Stop a Bus

  School was one of the things Aunt Brat had talked to me about on our trip from Rochester to Chelmsford. I’d be going. I had expected that. Big change; I’d been home-schooled for two years.

  Mom had known we were not going to get as many years together as most moms and daughters. She’d made the choice not to be bitter about it. She’d focused on making sure we spent as much time as possible together. We’d always covered the lesson packets first. Then we’d spent hours at the computer “hopping topics.” One day, we’d started with a search on how cadmium-red paint gets made. That’d led us to zinc ore and zinc smelting, mining, and then sinkholes. Another day, we’d hopped from yeast (we’d been baking a harvest bread) to fermentation, to effervescence, to Prohibition and the Great Depression. I had many odd pieces of information to go with my standardized achievement.

  I’d done the work and I’d met state goals. But Chelmsford was not Rochester—not even the same state. What if some things had been taught in a different order? Or a different way? Would I be behind?

  There in Aunt Brat’s car, I’d suddenly felt adrift.

  What if I had to do a bunch of catching up—by myself?

  Oh . . . Mom. . . . This is not good. . . . Do-over!

  She would’ve said what she’d always said in this kind of moment: “We’re going to need a goddess for this!” Only there wasn’t any we now. I needed the goddess. Me. Alone. Mom had been the one who could conjure them up. I’d tried to think like her. She’d always given the goddesses titles.

  So . . . the Goddess of . . . what? A Messy Education? No, no. Be positive. The Goddess of Learning? No. That was boring, unpoetic. The Goddess of . . . Gathering a Complete Education. I’d liked that better. But how would I make her without Mom?

  “I’m inclined,” Aunt Brat had said, “to suggest they enroll you in the eighth grade. Chelmsford has its own K through eight school. Very small,” she’d noted.

  “I am thirteen,” I’d said. “That is usually eighth.”

  “Yes, it is,” Aunt Brat agreed. “And they’ll assess you.”

  Great . . . I can’t wait. . . .

  “With a November birthday, you’re close to the cutoff. You’ll be one of the youngest members of your class. I’m not so worried about that. I think it’s good that you’ll have a semester to be with a small class of kids from town—a nice transition from your years at home before you start high school. By the way, that’s a big change for all our students,” she’d said.
“Chelmsford doesn’t have its own high school. We send most of our students out to a private academy come ninth grade. . . .”

  An academy?

  Aunt Brat had probably heard me swallow. Academy sounded strict, and formal, and hard. I was worried enough about being in a classroom again after two years.

  “How do you feel about all of this?” Aunt Brat had asked.

  “I’ll be okay in the little eighth grade,” I’d said.

  Well, the Weather Goddess of Chelmsford finally figured out that it was January, at least for the time being. On a suddenly frozen Monday morning—just five days after I’d arrived and two days after the big yellow dog had moved in—Aunt Brat and Eileen put on their boots. They leashed both dogs so that all four of them could walk me down to the bus stop at the bottom of the long hill. They were going to see me off on my first day of school in Chelmsford—my first day at any school in over two years.

  I took a long breath in and let it out. I tapped my foot on the mica-thin layer of ice that had formed over one of Chelmsford’s many mud puddles and cracked it. Never mind the academics, what about the kids? Only twelve students in the eighth grade. At first, I’d been relieved. But now, I was having second thoughts. My old school had been huge, like an ocean of kids. Chelmsford was a pond, I thought. No, a puddle, like the one I was standing over, and a puddle suddenly seemed like a small thing to try to hide in.

  The bus came into view in the distance. Orange as a Cheeto on that gray band of country road, it crept slowly toward us. My sweat turned cold in my armpits. I shivered.

  “I see it!” Eileen said. “Here it comes! You sure they know, Brat? They know where to stop for her?”

  “I gave clear instructions,” Aunt Brat said.

  I glanced at my adults, then at their two dogs, one of whom was misbehaving at the end of his leash.

  Gee, this isn’t embarrassing at all, I thought.

  It was especially not embarrassing when both Aunt Brat and Eileen stretched their arms and themselves out into the road to flag the bus down.

  “Here! Right here!” Aunt Brat called. The yellow dog jumped up and boxed her with his front feet. She stumbled. “No, no! Down!” she told him. Eileen and I asked if she was all right.

  As the big bad bus drew nearer, the dog got more skittish. He hopped sideways on the end of the leash, straining and barking. He circled around my aunt and wrapped her up in the leash but good.

  Since Aunt Brat was stuck, Eileen stepped forward. “Halt!” she called. She Ei-leened herself into the road, swinging one arm over her head just in case there hadn’t been enough flagging down of that bus.

  “It’s fine,” I said as gently as I could. “The driver sees me.” I could see her looking down out of the long front windshield as she steered slowly toward us. She was concentrating—probably on how to avoid plowing over that rabble of dogs and women at the side of the road. The bus hissed to a stop. The yellow dog barked back at it. The doors opened. I stepped up and inside.

  One look down the aisle of the bus left me feeling outnumbered. Small school, sure. But stuffed bus. Maybe there was only one for the whole town. I took a tight turn to fold myself into the first open set of seats near the front. As I spun, I noted a pair of faces beaming from several seats behind me. It was just a flash. But both faces wore welcome-y looks—the kind that say, We know who you are; you’re the new girl. One of them waved a fat white mitten at me just before I turned to sit. Meanwhile, Aunt Brat and Eileen could be heard cheering. “Have a great day! Buh-bye, Lydia! Bye!” The driver closed the doors. I closed my eyes.

  I pictured that mitten. Hand knit, I thought, on circular needles, with roving woven through at the end. Mom used to make exactly that kind of mitten, years back. They were the best. The roving felted with wear, making the mittens thick and warm. I thought about the last two evenings when I’d taken the new dog outside. I’d somehow come to Chelmsford with nothing but a thin pair of stretchy gloves. Oh, I should so make myself a pair of those mittens. I had wool yarn in one of my boxes and maybe some roving too. I wasn’t a bad knitter, and if I botched up, which was likely to happen at the thumbhole, Mom could always get me out of trouble. . . .

  Oh.

  I opened my eyes and stared out at all the unfamiliar places.

  15

  Significant Facts

  I was nearly the first one off the bus. Chelmsford Public School stood before me, its entrance set off in crisp white paint centered on red bricks. There was a black clock face up above the door. Little kids zipped by me on the walkway. I might be the youngest in my class, but I was one of the oldest kids at this school. I hooked my hands into the straps of my backpack.

  Okay, Lydia Bratches-Kemp. Step up and let’s find out what you know.

  I’d barely begun to march when the two girls with the welcome-y faces ran around me and planted themselves on the path, smack in front of me.

  “Hi! We think you must be Lydia. Are we right?” The mitten girl spoke first, and she spoke fast. I blinked. Fine line between being welcomed and being accosted.

  “I am!” I forced the friendliest part of me to say it. I even put on eyes of wonder to make them think I was surprised that they knew about me.

  “Well, hi! Oops. I already said that.” The girl laughed. “I’m Sari Winkle.” She smiled and softly clapped the white mittens together. Blue eyes danced. Shiny beaded earrings peeked out from behind her spilling brown curls.

  “And I’m Raya,” the second girl said. Her voice was low and husky. She threaded her bare fingers into dark, plum-streaked bangs and swept the strands away to one side. Then she pressed both her hands into her pockets. “Raya Delatorre,” she added.

  “Oh. Nice to met you.”

  “Same,” said Raya. “So hey, we’re here for you, you know?” She raised her shoulders and dropped them again. “I mean, like, we’re designated. Appointed. Whatever you want to call it.”

  I knew it.

  Sari Winkle bumped against Raya and giggled. “We volunteered! We’re excited to get a new class member. Never happens!” Her eyebrows arched. “We’ll introduce you to everyone and show you around the school. It’s tiny. You’ll be fine.” She flapped a wool mitten.

  “Thank you.” That was all I seemed able to say.

  Students were trickling past us on either side—and by that I mean they slowed down and turned back to look at me. New girl. I shivered, partly from the cold, partly from nerves.

  “Come on, let’s go inside,” said Sari. “Office first. Then you can meet our whole class before first bell.”

  “Sure!” I chirped.

  Inside, the air was warm. I noted that dust-on-the-radiator smell, and paste and salt, too, which took me zinging right back to my old school in Rochester. At the door to the school office I caught a new scent: cinnamon and cloves. Potpourri. I was greeted by a secretary, who alerted the principal, who said things like “Welcome!” and “We were so happy to hear that we were going to get a new student.” I was given a card with my locker number and combination on it. I followed Raya Delatorre and Sari Winkle. Both of them turned back every few steps to make sure I was coming along. I was, but slowly.

  There was artwork on these walls—some by students, some by the great art masters. I walked with my head tipped back, looking up at a set of banners that hung from the ceiling, Animals of the Rain Forest, in bright geometrics. Just down the hall was a wall mural of the town, all made up of dots, like a painting by Georges Pierre Seurat.

  “Ser-rot dot.” Mom had once said that to me with a wry grin. But then she’d corrected to proper French. “Say it ‘Ser-raw,’ Lydia. But remember ‘ser-rot-dot’ anyway, because . . . how do you make a dot? With the point of a paintbrush. Point for pointillism,” she’d said. “That was Georges Pierre Seurat’s genius—his contribution to neo-impressionism.”

  Neo meant new. Impressionism meant that the art captures the feeling of the moment, less than the actual look of it. I decided I was having a neo-impressionisti
c morning.

  I followed my welcomers to the eighth-grade homeroom. Twelve kids, as promised. I envied them; they knew what they were doing. They knew where their coats went (in hallway lockers), where to sit (assigned seats), who was in charge (Mrs. Ossinger, who would also teach language arts). I have to say, I was grateful that Raya and Sari stuck by me while I fouled up the combination on my locker three times over.

  “That’s okay. Twist to the right to clear it. You’ll get it this time,” Sari said. Meanwhile, sweat broke across my brow. But then there it was: the crunchy sound of the metal latch lifting inside.

  “Boo-yah!” said Raya. She pumped her fist.

  In the eighth-grade homeroom, I sat with Raya to my left and Sari one desk in front of me. Attendance was taken. Then a horrible thing happened: I was singled out for a big introduction. All eyes on Lydia Bratches-Kemp. How can one feel anything but freakish at a moment like that? Mrs. Ossinger asked all twelve eighth graders to introduce themselves one by one—to me—and to please share a significant, memorable fact or two about themselves.

  There was a Charlotte. Her house was the one just after the broken barn on Cullen Road. (Wherever that was.) “That barn is condemned,” she said, “but my family is petitioning the town to have it restored.”

  There was an Axel. He lived with his family and a set of cousins in a farmhouse that’d been in their family for over a hundred years. “We are pig farmers and we’re proud,” Axel said. He grinned and puffed his chest.

  There was a girl named Gilly. She told me she was a competitive gymnast. “I can’t wait to get to Clover Academy next year,” she said. (The dreaded academy; the school Aunt Brat had mentioned.) “They have a really strong team.”

  Raya Delatorre’s turn came. “Well, first, hi again.” She gave me a little wave. I smiled back. “So, significant fact: I would pretty much always rather be outdoors than indoors. And if I can be beside a river, that’s the best. I already know I want to study environmental science. I want to be a part of a clean river initiative—like for the state.” A supportive sort of murmur rose in the room. Raya gave a nod in return. Then she turned her palms up and grinned. “Of course, a few things have to happen first. Like high school and college.” She sighed and our classmates laughed. “Anyway, that’s me. Okay, so the second thing—and it’s related—is about our school. Totally cool. We got two hundred trout eggs back in November.”