My One Square Inch of Alaska (9781101602850) (4 page)

When the dog finished, he looked up at me. I stared into his runny, ice-blue eyes. Groverton, Ohio, was a place of beagles and German shepherds and mutts, not huskies that looked like wolves.

I felt so sorry for the dog that I reached for him—wanting to undo the collar, unmat the fur. But at the first flicker of my hand, the dog lunged, spit flying from his snarling jowls.
As I stumbled back, my heart pounding, the dog’s mouth moved as if he were barking, but no sound came out. He had gone mute.

I shouted for Will to come away from the fence, reached for him, but before I could grab him, I felt a hand on my back.

“Honey, if that dog really wanted to get out at you, or out for any reason at all, it would get through that gap, even if it tore its body up even worse. Mr. Stedman’s been beating the poor dog because he stopped barking,” said the old woman.

I stared past the junk to the ramshackle building that was both Mr. Stedman’s business headquarters and his home.

“Don’t worry—he’s not there. I’ve been a-staying with my daughter and her young’uns the past few days—my Mary, she’s laid up with a pulled back so I brought my poultices to her—and I saw him leave last night, but he hasn’t come back.”

The dog—Trusty—finished gobbling the Marvel Puffs, box and all, and thrust his snout as far as he dared through the fence, sniffing at Will. Seeking more food? But no. Now that his hunger was sated, the dog gazed up at my brother, Trusty’s icy eyes turned soft with soulful concern. I told myself I must be imagining this, but it felt as real, as palpable, as the tension in the very air of the neighborhood.

“Oh,” I said. “Thank you for telling us. I’m Donna Lane. Nice to meet you Mrs.—” I held out my hand.

The old woman took my hand in a grip that was far firmer than her thin, twisted hand belied. “Just call me MayJune. I don’t need any other name. Will’s told me all about you.”

I looked at Will stroking the wild dog’s head. I wasn’t the only one with secrets. Will must have been going to
visit Trusty—and, I guessed, MayJune—pretty often. Enough to make the wounded, wild animal trust and care about him. Enough to befriend the oddly named woman and talk with her about me.

I took another look at her. MayJune was wearing mismatched, worn clothes—an old pink flowered blouse, a checkered blue and red skirt, a green sweater with frayed cuffs shoved up to her knobby elbows, a brown scarf tied over her head. Tufts of coarse gray hair poked out here and there from under her scarf. Her potato brown skin hung loose and wrinkled.

I felt my lips pulling together in a taut knot—and then I looked away. I was judging MayJune as surely as Mrs. Baker judged me.

She put her hand on my arm and her scent—something herblike that I couldn’t quite place, maybe sage with a dash of cinnamon—was somehow forgiving, just as her nearly toothless smile was calming. So instead of pulling away, I looked back at her.

“Yes, that dog could get out,” she was saying, “but some critters get so used to being penned in, they can’t run even when they’ve got the chance. They’ve been trained to stay put, no matter how bad their circumstance.”

The wistfulness that wove in and out of her aged, crackling voice made me think that her observation was not limited to the dog.

She let go of my arm and moved toward Will, holding something out to him. He took it—the peels from her apples. As the St. Thomas Catholic Church sounded the eight o’clock chime, I watched Will hold out the apple peels, one at a time, and Trusty gently take them between his teeth.

B
abs waited for me after all—but not in her daddy’s car, and not by herself.

She was in the backseat of Jimmy Denton’s cherry red Chevrolet, grinning at me, giggling and gesturing—
Come on, get in
—while Hank Coleman, her boyfriend, kept trying to pull her down.

Jimmy sat with his right hand loosely on the steering wheel, his left elbow on the rolled-down window, holding a cigarette in his left hand, staring ahead with a look of resigned boredom, as if he didn’t see me on the corner, didn’t notice Babs or Hank in the backseat.

It was another small-choice moment.

Someone in the car behind his honked. Jimmy casually took a drag off his cigarette, then gave me a long, hard stare:
Make up your mind. Are you coming with us or not?

And so I made my choice and got in Jimmy’s car.

He peeled away from the stop sign as if suddenly he couldn’t get out of Groverton fast enough, as though, like Babs and Hank and me, he’d lived there his whole life, instead of just a few weeks.

I stared awkwardly ahead at the town quickly giving way
to cornfields as we drove west, while Jimmy drove and fiddled with the radio. Babs managed to push Hank off of her long enough to say something about her mother and aunt having a quarrel and not going out of town but Jimmy being willing to drive, and wasn’t that a
special surprise…the four of us, almost like a double date
?

I wanted to yell at Babs—what was she thinking?

Then I shook my head—silly me. Hank was Groverton Senior High’s star quarterback. And Jimmy Denton was the one and only son of Roger Denton—the new president and CEO of Groverton Pulp & Paper. Those facts were a good enough excuse for anything in Groverton.

I stole a glance at Jimmy, just as he stubbed out his cigarette and then ran a finger around the inside of the collar of his burnt orange turtleneck, as if he were too hot, even though wind rushed into the car through the rolled-down windows. I thought,
I make him nervous.

I was used to everyone seeming a little sorry for me.
Poor Donna Lane,
I could sense even other kids thinking,
having to be like a mom to her little brother, and that daddy of hers, so sad
….

Jimmy’s Chevy hit a large rut on State Route 35 and the car’s glove box popped open, smacking my knees. Out tumbled a flashlight, a tire gauge, and a
Sterry Oil Road Atlas for the United States, Canada, and Mexico
.

“Are you all right? Sorry about not noticing that rut.”

With Babs and Hank making out in the backseat to the sounds of the Four Aces crooning “Just Squeeze Me” over WBEX, it took me a second to realize Jimmy was talking to me. I glanced at him. He looked truly concerned.

“I’m fine, thanks.” I finished reassembling the glove box contents except for the
Sterry Road Atlas
.

“You’re being awfully quiet,” Jimmy said over the wind and the radio. “Worried about sluffing off?”

I didn’t want to say,
No, actually, Babs and I have it down to a fine art
, so as I thumbed the atlas’s frayed cover and dog-eared pages, I started to say something about there being a Sterry Motor Oil on this same route except on the east end of town, but at the same time Jimmy started speaking, too, and then we both stopped talking.

Now on WBEX Perry Como was singing “Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes.”
That’s for you and me both, Babs,
I thought.

“Sorry, you go ahead.” Jimmy said it so sweetly that—even though I was still annoyed at Babs dragging Hank and Jimmy into our day—I felt something inside me warm and soften. Maybe I’d judged him too quickly.

Or maybe you’re just being silly—a money grubber like your mama was.

I tried to shake Grandma’s voice from my head, but I still stuttered when I repeated, “J-just—there’s a Sterry Motor Oil, east of Groverton on State Route 35, if you need a new road atlas.”

Dumb. Why couldn’t I think of anything smart to say?

But Jimmy’s laugh was easy, not a bit mocking. “I guess I do need a new one. I pretty much wore that one out, driving cross-country to move here.”

I turned in my seat, looked at Jimmy. He’d said that so casually, as if seventeen-year-old boys drove across the country from California to Ohio every day. “You mean that you drove cross-country with your parents?”

“No, I mean
I
drove cross-country, by myself. My parents wanted to sell my car in California—too much
trouble to move, they said. We could just buy another one here.”

Right. As if buying cars was as easy as picking up a dozen eggs at the A&P grocery.

“But I’ve gotten pretty partial to this car. Good memories.”

Like what? I wanted to ask. Making out in the backseat? Driving up and down the coast, or through the city? The thought of all that freedom made tingles dance over my skin.

“So one morning, I threw a few things in the trunk. Took off before they woke up.”

I stared down at the smiling, well-groomed mechanic on the atlas cover, thought about flipping open the atlas to the dog-eared pages to see if Jimmy had marked routes.

“…but I can see how something like that would be frightening to you,” Jimmy was saying. “It would be different for a girl to drive cross-country. Dangerous.”

Suddenly, I was mad.
Pompous ass,
after all!

“That’s ridiculous. Of course a girl could drive across the country. There were women aviators in World War Two—”

“Service planes. Not fighters.”

“Not their choice. The point is, if women can fly planes, then driving across the country should be a breeze.”

“She can’t drive at all,” Babs gasped from the backseat. I wondered how she’d been able to follow our conversation. “Even though she has a car,” Babs added, before Hank started kissing her again.

“You have a car, but you can’t drive, but you think driving across the country would be easy,” Jimmy said flatly.

It sounded ridiculous when he put it like that. But I said, “Sure, driving cross-country would be fine, if I actually had
a car, which I don’t, really.” I felt a guilty twinge—just a while before I’d thought how Will and I had never been any farther than Dayton, and how Will was ridiculous for mumbling out loud to a dog that he could take them to Alaska. But I went on. “Babs just means the convertible that my dad, well, stores in our garage.”

“Your family has a convertible that just sits in your garage?” Coming from Jimmy that sounded even more ridiculous than Will’s travel-to-Alaska-with-wild-dog fantasy.

And that made me want to lash out, to make him feel small. “Daddy bought it for Mama about a year before she got sick. Really sick—cancer. She went to a clinic in Florida. Daddy said there were some new treatments they could do to help her, but she died anyway. That was seven years ago. Daddy’s not over it, so everything stays the way it was before she died. Like a shrine to her. Including the convertible.”

Now who’s being an ass?
I thought. I wished I could take back my sob story, braced myself for some polite words of pity.

Jimmy said, “I bet the tires are sure flat by now.”

Giddy relief at his joke made something inside loosen, start to break free, like a moth inside my chest. I looked at him just as he glanced at me, and I could see that he was nervous again.

Suddenly Jimmy swerved and drove off the road toward the sharp stubs of a plowed-under cornfield. As my books spilled out of my bag at my feet, Babs screamed and Hank cursed and I thought,
We’re going right into that field
. But then Jimmy made his car skid to a stop, fast but smooth as sliding on ice, and I grinned at him, the tickly, loose feeling fluttering free once more, and I wanted to tell him,
Do that again!

But Babs was still screaming, so I turned around to see
her. Her lipstick was a magenta smear up her left cheek but her hair was still intact under her scarf. Hank lifted his hand, about to slap Babs to make her shut up. But Jimmy grabbed Hank’s arm. “Cool it,” he said.

Who is this boy, really?
I wondered.

He looked at me and said, “You’re going to drive now. Can’t be too hard—women fly planes all the time, right? And this is a straight, flat road. Couldn’t be easier. I’ll teach you.” He revved the engine twice, widened his eyes at me. “Trust me?”

He waggled his eyebrows, flirty, no longer nervous, but his look was so challenging that I had to look away, across the plowed-under cornfield.

“You’re going to shred my atlas,” he said. I looked down. My hands clutched the book so tightly that my knuckles had gone white.

I turned to Jimmy. “I really appreciate your offer.” He looked amused but I went on, even more stiffly. “However, Babs and I are eager to get to Rike’s Department Store—”

He turned off the radio, right in the middle of Patti Page singing about “That Doggie in the Window” (I bet she’d never seen a dog like Trusty) and leaned close to me. I breathed in his scent—aftershave and soap, of course, but deeper than that, something else…something a little musky, something essentially him. My face flamed as he grinned at me and said softly, “Come on. I’m a good teacher. You know you want to learn to drive, or you wouldn’t have said all of that—”

“Donna’s going to drive?” Babs called from the backseat. “Take us to Dayton, Donna! No…not Dayton. I want to go to Paris! Drive us to Paris, Donna!”

“Paris is across the ocean, you—” Hank began.

“Hank,” Jimmy warned.

“I’m not driving,” I said. “We’re not going to Paris.”

Babs leaned forward, putting her head over the top of the seat between Jimmy and me, making him move back into his seat. “Why not? Donna used to say she wanted to be a fashion designer and live in Paris! Did you know that, Jimmy?”

“Babs, just stop. We’re going to Dayton. Shopping, remember?” I looked at Jimmy, pleadingly:
Just start the car back up!

But he shrugged and smiled. “I want to hear more about you and Paris.”

“She was going to go there to study fashion, and I was going to go with her to
buy
fashion.”

Hank sneered, “Like that dress she’s wearing now? What is that, anyway?”

I stared out the window. I disliked Hank, but his comment still made my eyes sting. After all, I’d known him and Babs my whole life, and I still had memories of when we were kids and he wasn’t such a jerk.

But the dress I wore that day
was
different—a cap-sleeved, dark gray sheath with a swirl of deep cerulean blue, a color that I imagined could only come from the deepest part of the ocean (not that I’d ever been to the ocean), that started at the hem by my left knee and swirled up around my waist and ended at the back of my left shoulder. I’d thought it was brilliant when I’d pieced it together from two of Mama’s old skirts, but suddenly I knew that Hank’s reaction would have been everyone else’s if I’d gone to school that day.