Here Lies Linc (6 page)

I didn’t give Lottie a chance to answer. I didn’t even look at her as I stood up and stalked back and forth in the narrow alleyway of space between the bed and my desk, between the jagged peaks rising up along my walls.

“Sometimes I hear kids talking at school, and I feel like—like we’re back in the Dark Ages or something, with the way we’ve been living in our own little bubble, just the two of us for so long. I mean, nobody can believe it when I tell them we don’t have a TV. Sure, I understand how you thought it might be a bad influence on me when I was little. But I’m almost in high school now, and I’m still having to ask for permission to use
your
computer!”

I flailed my hands up at Mount Everest on my ceiling. “It’s not that I want a bunch of stuff. Heck, I’d be happy if we had a vacuum cleaner that works.” I coughed out a bitter laugh. “I mean, that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about, Lottie. We’ve been sweeping our rugs with a broom for a
whole year
, ever since the vacuum broke down. Don’t you ever want to get it fixed so we can really clean this place up once in a while?” My voice rose higher. “Don’t you?”

I whipped around and stood over my mother like a prosecutor in a courtroom, breathing hard, ready to hear some answers at last. But Lottie didn’t say a word. She just kept staring down at her palms, open in her lap. She looked like a rag doll, perched there on the edge of my bed with her shoulders slumped and her sock feet barely touching the floor.

I lowered myself into the chair at my desk again, feeling weak and sick to my stomach. The afternoon had been horrible enough already, and now I had gone and made things a hundred times worse. There was another heavy stretch of quiet before Lottie finally raised her head. She lifted her arms a little and let them flop back to her sides. “This is just who I am,” she whispered. But then I realized: Lottie wasn’t looking at me. She was gazing at the picture on my nightstand. And her eyes were round and moist, as if she were trying to explain something to Dad, who grinned back at her from the photo, holding that drippy chocolate ice cream cone.

I opened my mouth to apologize. But before I could think of what to say, anything to make her feel better, Lottie was rising to her feet and heading toward the door. She turned in the hallway, her face carved by the slivers of light seeping through the blinds. “I need to go in to work for a while and catch up on a few things,” she said quietly.

I nodded as she disappeared down the stairs. By now I had learned to recognize that frozen tone in her voice and the way she stiffened her shoulders before getting on with things.

I rushed to the doorway. “What time will you be home?” I called.

But Lottie was already down in the kitchen, grabbing her keys, letting the screen door slam behind her. I stood still for a while longer, listening to the chug of the Dodge Dart’s tired engine as she pulled out of our driveway. Then my bedroom went silent.

I shouldn’t have glanced toward the window. Suddenly the old geezers down in the graveyard were at it again, all grumbling and scolding me at once, trying to get their digs in edgewise.

Shame on you, boy. How could you treat your own mother that way?

Have you got any idea how tough it is being a single parent these days?

You know she’s never gotten over losing your dad
.

And here you go rubbing salt in the wounds. And where does that get you?

They were right, of course. I wished I could take it all back. Without Lottie, all there was … was me.

The assignment sheet, along with my muddy notebook, was propped against the pile of mail in the middle of the kitchen table. I had almost forgotten. Mr. Oliver had warned us that he’d be giving out details of a new project during the field trip. He must have asked Lottie to deliver my copy of the instructions. I spotted the words “DUE IN CLASS TOMORROW” and felt my shoulders sag. The last thing I wanted to do that afternoon was go back into the cemetery.

C.B. cocked his head and let out one of his grumbly moans, waiting for me to unglue my feet from the kitchen floor and take him on his afternoon outing. My neighbor Mr. Krasny would be waiting too. He had hired me to exercise his Boston terrier every afternoon. He paid only ten dollars a week, averaging me a measly $1.42 per day. But I hadn’t been able to say no that summer when he stopped me on one of my walks with C.B. to ask if I’d mind taking Spunky along. Mr. Krasny told me he was ninety-three and his joints weren’t cooperating like they used to.
Obviously
. I had seen him hobbling past our house to visit his wife’s grave in Oakland. There was no way he could handle a leash-yanker like Spunky.

Lately, though, I had started to appreciate my job a little more—ever since I’d decided to kill two birds with one stone and use my sessions with Spunky as a way to get better at running. When I jogged, Spunky never had a chance to yank on his leash, and maybe if I kept it up, I’d be ready to join the cross-country team by the time eighth grade rolled around. I was glad I had eleven more months to prepare. So far I could hardly run five blocks without getting winded.

I sighed and bent down to tighten up my shoelaces. Of course my year-old sneakers and baggy sweatpants weren’t doing much to improve my stamina. But I had promised myself I wouldn’t ask Lottie for new running shoes or any other gear until I could jog for at least twenty minutes without stopping.

C.B. gnawed impatiently at an itch between his long toenails. I folded up Mr. Oliver’s project assignment sheet and tucked it into the front pocket of my sweatshirt, along with a stubby pencil. “Come on, buddy,” I said, grabbing C.B.’s leash from the hook by the back door. “Time for another field trip.”

Just as I expected, Mr. Krasny was on his front porch waiting for me. Even though it was only October, with barely a chill in the air, he looked like he was ready for a snowstorm in his wool overcoat, rubber boots, and plaid hat with dangling earflaps. Spunky darted back and forth around his toothpick legs while Mr. Krasny fumbled with the leash, trying to keep his feet from being tangled in the snare.

“Excellent, Linc,” he said when I came hurrying up his walkway with C.B. “You’re here. Spunky’s getting restless.” Mr. Krasny always talked like that—in urgent little bursts as if he were calling out answers on a game show with only two seconds left before the buzzer went off.

“We might be gone a little longer today,” I said, reaching for Spunky’s leash. “I’d like to take the dogs a different way than usual, if it’s okay with you.”

“Certainly!” he said. “My land, he needs a good romp. Been standing at the window all afternoon. Waiting for his fine friend C.B.”

That’s another thing Mr. Krasny always did, talked about our pets as if they were old buddies who couldn’t wait to share each other’s company every day. The truth was that C.B. couldn’t stand Spunky. Spunky was one of those pesky kinds of dogs, constantly trotting over to bump noses with C.B. or sniff whatever he sniffed or pee wherever he peed. Even when C.B. showed his teeth or let out a little growl, Spunky didn’t get the hint. He just wagged his backside with its nub of a tail and shoved his smushed-up nose in for another good whiff.

We said goodbye to Mr. Krasny and backtracked along Claiborne Street toward the side gate of Oakland, just past my house. I was planning on starting out at a slow jog. But Spunky was so excited to be heading in a new direction, opposite of our normal route to the neighborhood park around the corner, that he dragged C.B. and me at a dead run into the cemetery—straight past the
ALL PETS MUST BE CONFINED IN VEHICLE
sign. Luckily, Jeeter and his boss, old Mr.
Nicknish, the cemetery superintendent, had never seemed to mind people walking their dogs through the grounds, especially if they were regulars from the neighborhood. Plus, visitors to Oakland were scarce on weekday afternoons. Most people waited for Sundays and holidays to pay their respects. So after scanning the distance to make sure we were alone, I unclipped the dogs’ leashes and stuffed them into the pocket of my sweatshirt.

With C.B. and Spunky darting in and out of the rows of graves nearby, I jogged along the driveway for a while. Whenever I came to a hill and felt like stopping, I just thought of the wicked smile on Mellecker’s face as he added another flourish to his Lottie cartoon, and a new burst of angry energy carried me to the top of the next rise. As I circled back to the old part of the cemetery, I was surprised at how much better I felt. Although I was heaving for breath, with drips of sweat sliding down my temples, even the Adopt-a-Grave Project didn’t seem quite so terrible anymore.

Soon I was wandering among the tall oaks and leaning headstones, waiting for a grave to grab my attention, to send me some sort of message
—Pick me. Pick me
. But like Mr. Oliver had warned, lots of the epitaphs were too hard to read, with the letters covered in moss or worn smooth through the years. Hundreds of other stones had clear markings, but they were too plain to be special—nothing besides names and dates carved in gray granite. I was standing there, wishing I could find an epitaph nearly half as interesting as some of the ones I had collected in my journal, when I heard a rustle of leaves behind me.

I swung around to find Jeeter grinning at me with his arms crossed over his chest. “Well, well, well, Lincoln Log. I was beginning to take this personally. You been avoidin’ me?”

“Hey there, Jeeter!” I cried. I almost hugged him. I had forgotten how much I missed Jeeter. “Wow, I like your beard. Or whatever that is.”

He rubbed his hand across the short scruff of reddish whiskers on his chin. “This here’s a goatee, Lincoln Log!” He shook his head, chuckling at himself. “I thought it might make me look sophisticated. Help with the ladies.”

I laughed. I couldn’t imagine any lady thinking Jeeter was
sophisticated
. When I was little, Lottie had taken me to a special showing of
The Wizard of Oz
over at the university, and as soon as the Scarecrow came on, I had shouted, “It’s Jeeter!” The way the Scarecrow listened to Dorothy’s troubles and wrinkled his brow when he thought hard and loped along that Yellow Brick Road—that was Jeeter to a T.

“Well, you still haven’t answered my question yet,” Jeeter said. “Where you been? I haven’t seen hide nor hair of you since the beginning of the summer. You got yourself a girlfriend or something?”

I rolled my eyes. Huh. Fat chance. “No, it’s nothing like that,” I said. “I haven’t had much free time lately. I go to Plainview now. You know, the junior high?”

Jeeter’s eyebrows flew up. “Junior high, huh? That must be pretty different from your old school. What was that one kid’s name who you used to pal around with? The one who used to wear knee pads whenever he rode his bike?”

I smiled forlornly. “You mean Sebastian. He’s still with
the Ho-Hos. I don’t see him much anymore.” It was sad. I had called Sebastian to hang out with me a couple of times since school started, but things hadn’t gone so well. He kept interrogating me about what we were studying at Plainview.

“What about science?” he had demanded the last time we got together.

“Um, I think we’re starting a unit on levers and pulleys soon,” I told him.

“You’re kidding,” he had said, eyeing me with disdain. “Vladka and I are designing our own microchips.”

Now Jeeter was the one giving me the eye. “I think you’ve grown an inch or two over the summer. You’re starting to look a lot like your father, you know.”

“You think so?”

Jeeter nodded as he finished sizing me up. “You got your mom’s eyes, but the rest of you? Looks like your dad’s genes got the upper hand.” I smiled. Jeeter and my father hadn’t had a chance to be friends for very long, but they had liked each other from the start. Since Jeeter was about ten years younger, Dad had treated him like the little brother he never had, showering him with lots of teasing and advice. A few days after Dad’s heart attack, Jeeter had shown up at our front door with a huge mayonnaise jar full of wildflowers for Lottie and a bag of bite-size Hershey bars for me.

“Are you here to visit your dad?”

I shook my head with a twinge of guilt rising in my chest. With his ashes buried so close by, there was no excuse for not visiting. But somehow it always seemed too depressing, the
thought of standing in front of that big black wall, with all those other names of dead people crowding in.