Oh, Nonnie. If I knew what mothers and daughters said to each other, wouldn’t I tell you? How should I know?
“She’ll think I’ve gotten terribly old. My hair was quite dark when she left.”
“Yeah?” She tried to put Courtney’s hair on Nonnie’s head. It didn’t work.
“Would you think it was very silly of me to get a rinse?”
“A rinse?”
“Just to cover a little of the gray?”
Nonnie a Clairol girl? “Why not?”
“Let’s do it!” So while Nonnie was rinsed and curled, Gilly was cut and blown.
“You look lovely, my dear.”
Nonnie looked totally unnatural, but then Gilly had never seen her with black hair before. Maybe she’d look great to Courtney. “You look nice, too,” she lied.
Money, though not as scarce as at Trotter’s, was hardly in the supply hinted at in the letters to W.E. Nevertheless, Nonnie seemed determined to prepare royally for Courtney’s return. They bought a Christmas tree that would touch the high ceiling of the living room and had to hire a neighbor’s boy to carry it from the back of the old station wagon into the house and help them set it up.
Every ornament they hung had a family history, and Gilly half listened as Nonnie recounted each tale. She was too excited to concentrate fully, but she did grasp that the lopsided pasteboard star was one that Chadwell had made in the third grade. Most of the glued-on glitter had long departed. There was a yarn snowman that Courtney had made when a Brownie, it was gray now, and beginning to ravel. And there were yards of tattered paper chains. “You sure you want to put these chains on?” Gilly asked Nonnie.
“Oh, we have to have the chains. We always had the chains.”
So Gilly glued the chains together as best she could and hung them. The whole effect was appalling—a pile of junk. But then she put on three boxes of tinsel, one strand at a time, so that the entire tree was under a silver veil. In a dark room with only the Christmas tree lighted, it wasn’t bad. Not a department-store display, but not bad.
Nonnie slipped her glasses on and off her nose, trying to take in the sight, and finally let them hang on the ribbon around her neck while she clapped her hands like a little girl. “I can’t remember ever before having such a lovely tree,” she said.
Neither, after she thought about it, could Gilly.
December 20
Dear Gilly,
So your Mom is coming to see you? You must be real excited. Mr. Randolph, William Ernest, and me wishes you lots of luck.
By the way, William Ernest come home yesterday with a bloody nose. You know me, I like to die, but he was prouder than a punch-drunk pickle. Mr. Evans call me up to complain about my kid fighting at school but took to laughing too hard to finish. What do you think about that?
Sincerely, your friend,
Maime M. Trotter
Pow! That’s what she thought of that.
HOMECOMING
The plane was late. It seemed to Gilly that everything in this world that you can’t stand to wait one extra minute for is always late. Her stomach was pretzeled with eagerness and anxiety. She stood sweating in the chill of the huge waiting room, the perspiration pouring down the sleeves of her new blouse. She’d probably ruin it and stink besides.
Then, suddenly, when she’d almost stopped straining her eyes with looking at it, the door opened, and people began to come off the motor lounge into the airport. All kinds of people, all sizes, all colors, all of them rushing. Many looking about for family or friends, finding them with little cries of joy and hugs. Tired fussy babies, children dragging on their mothers. Businessmen, heads down, swinging neat thin leather briefcases. Grandparents laden with shopping bags of Christmas presents. But no Courtney.
The pretzel turned to stone. It was all a lie. She would never come. The door blurred. Gilly wanted to leave. She didn’t want to cry in the stupid airport, but just at that moment she heard Nonnie say in a quavering voice, “Courtney.”
“Hello, Nonnie.”
But this person wasn’t Courtney. It couldn’t be Courtney! Courtney was tall and willowy and gorgeous. The woman who stood before them was no taller than Nonnie and just as plump, although she wore a long cape, so it was hard to make out her real shape. Her hair was long, but it was dull and stringy—a dark version of Agnes Stokes’s, which had always needed washing. A flower child gone to seed. Gilly immediately pushed aside the disloyal thought.
Nonnie had sort of put her hand on the younger woman’s arm in a timid embrace, but there was a huge embroidered shoulder bag between the two of them. “This is Galadriel, Courtney.”
For a second, the smile, the one engraved on Gilly’s soul, flashed out. The teeth were perfect. She was face to face with Courtney Rutherford Hopkins. She could no longer doubt it. “Hi.” The word almost didn’t come out. She wondered what she was supposed to do. Should she try to kiss Courtney or something?
At this point Courtney hugged her, pressing the huge bag into Gilly’s chest and stomach and saying across her shoulder to Nonnie, “She’s as tall as I am,” sounding a little as though Gilly weren’t there.
“She’s a lovely girl,” said Nonnie.
“Well, of course, she is,” Courtney stepped back and smiled her gorgeous heart-shattering smile. “She’s mine, isn’t she?”
Nonnie smiled back, rather more weakly than her daughter had. “Maybe we should get your luggage.”
“I’ve got it,” said Courtney, slapping her shoulder bag. “It’s all right here.”
Nonnie looked a little as though she’d been smacked in the face. “But—” she began and stopped.
“How many clothes can you wear in two days?”
Two days? Then Courtney had come to get her after all.
“I told you on the phone that I’d come for Christmas and see for myself how the kid was doing….”
“But when I sent you the money…”
Courtney’s face was hard and set with lines between the brows. “Look. I came, didn’t I? Don’t start pushing me before I’m hardly off the plane. My god, I’ve been gone thirteen years, and you still think you can tell me what to do.” She slung the bag behind her back. “Let’s get out of here.”
Nonnie shot Gilly a look of pain. “Courtney—”
She hadn’t come because she wanted to. She’d come because Nonnie had paid her to. And she wasn’t going to stay. And she wasn’t going to take Gilly back with her. “I will always love you.” It was a lie. Gilly had thrown away her whole life for a stinking lie.
“I gotta go to the bathroom,” Gilly said to Nonnie. She prayed they wouldn’t follow her there, because the first thing she was going to do was vomit, and the second was run away.
She tried to vomit, but nothing happened. She was still shaking from the effort when she dropped her coins in the pay telephone beside the restroom and dialed. It rang four times.
“Hello.”
“Trotter, it’s me, Gilly.” God, don’t let me break down like a baby.
“Gilly, honey. Where are you?”
“Nowhere. It doesn’t matter. I’m coming home.”
She could hear Trotter’s heavy breathing at the other end of the line. “What’s the matter, baby? Your mom didn’t show?”
“No, she came.”
“Oh, my poor baby.”
Gilly was crying now. She couldn’t help herself. “Trotter, it’s all wrong. Nothing turned out the way it’s supposed to.”
“How you mean supposed to? Life ain’t supposed to be nothing, ’cept maybe tough.”
“But I always thought that when my mother came….”
“My sweet baby, ain’t no one ever told you yet? I reckon I thought you had that all figured out.”
“What?”
“That all that stuff about happy endings is lies. The only ending in this world is death. Now that might or might not be happy, but either way, you ain’t ready to die, are you?”
“Trotter, I’m not talking about d
ying. I’m talking about coming home.”
But Trotter seemed to ignore her. “Sometimes in this world things come easy, and you tend to lean back and say, ‘Well, finally, happy ending. This is the way things is supposed to be.’ Like life owed you good things.”
“Trotter—”
“And there is lots of good things, baby. Like you coming to be with us here this fall. That was a mighty good thing for me and William Ernest. But you just fool yourself if you expect good things all the time. They ain’t what’s regular—don’t nobody owe ’em to you.”
“If life is so bad, how come you’re so happy?”
“Did I say bad? I said it was tough. Nothing to make you happy like doing good on a tough job, now is there?”
“Trotter, stop preaching at me. I want to come home.”
“You’re home, baby. Your grandma is home.”
“I want to be with you and William Ernest and Mr. Randolph.”
“And leave her all alone? Could you do that?”
“Dammit, Trotter. Don’t try to make a stinking Christian out of me.”
“I wouldn’t try to make nothing out of you.” There was a quiet at the other end of the line. “Me and William Ernest and Mr. Randolph kinda like you the way you are.”
“Go to hell, Trotter,” Gilly said softly.
A sigh. “Well, I don’t know about that. I had planned on settling permanently somewheres else.”
“Trotter”—She couldn’t push the word hard enough to keep the squeak out—“I love you.”
“I know, baby. I love you, too.”
She put the phone gently on the hook and went back into the bathroom. There she blew her nose on toilet tissue and washed her face.
By the time she got back to an impatient Courtney and a stricken Nonnie, she had herself well under control.
“Sorry to make you wait,” Gilly said. “I’m ready to go home now.” No clouds of glory, perhaps, but Trotter would be proud.
About the Author
KATHERINE PATERSON was born in China, where she spent part of her childhood. After her education in China and the American South, she spent four years in Japan, the setting for her first three novels. Ms. Paterson has received numerous awards for her writing, including National Book Awards for THE MASTER PUPPETEER and THE GREAT GILLY HOPKINS as well as Newbery Medals for JACOB HAVE I LOVED and BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA. Ms. Paterson lives with her husband in Vermont. They have four grown children.
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Also by Katherine Paterson
The Sign of the Chrysanthemum
Of Nightingales That Weep
The Master Puppeteer
Bridge to Terabithia
The Great Gilly Hopkins
Angels and Other Strangers
Jacob Have I Loved
The Field of the Dogs
The Same Stuff as Stars
Credits
Cover art © 2004 by Chris Sheban
Cover design by Karin Paprocki
Cover © 2004 by HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
Copyright
THE GREAT GILLY HOPKINS. Copyright © 1978 by Katherine Paterson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2009 ISBN: 9780061975172
Version 06212013
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