Wreath (10 page)

A
feeling of freedom washed over Wreath, a sense of joy she had not felt since Frankie had gotten sick. She hummed one of the country songs that had been on the radio in the furniture store, music her mama loved so much.

She had earned the bike.

Wreath’s legs trembled, and the bike wobbled as she headed down the street, thankful to put space between her and her second day at Durham’s Fine Furnishings. She pedaled harder, riding through the town, which still looked like Wreath felt—worn out but in decent shape. The ride home was definitely an improvement over the walk, although she was more tired than she’d anticipated. Her workday had been short, and she didn’t want to think about Mrs. Faye Durham and how oddly the woman acted, nor the possibility that the job wouldn’t last.

Hiding the bike behind a thorny bush in the junkyard, she tiptoed through an examination of her camp, half holding her breath as usual until she was certain no one was near. Listening nervously to various chirps, croaks, and a squealing noise that sounded like a broken radio, she fixed peanut butter and crackers for supper and settled into the Tiger Van.

Restlessness swept over her. She tried to blame it on her boss, a woman who reminded her of shrews she had studied in junior-year English class. But she knew Law and Clarice were the ones who had stirred her up. Law was what her mother would have called a “looker.” Wreath appreciated the fact that he worked and was thankful in a warped way that he wasn’t rich. She had hoped to run into him again today, but knew it was for the best that she hadn’t.

Clarice had made Wreath think about reading, and she wished for a new series to start or one of her old favorites to reread. Some of the best stories she had read three or four times, but she had left all the books she owned in Lucky. Books were too heavy to carry when your load needed to be light.

Instead, she had listed them in her notebook, the little library she’d left behind, mostly books from garage sales or thrown out from the school library because the covers were beat up or someone had scribbled in them or torn a page or scratched their initials into the cover. Wreath couldn’t understand people who spoiled books for other people. She handled books carefully, the way she might a puppy or Frankie’s fragile glass vase.

The night now totally black, she took her flashlight out of its hiding place under a sack of clothes in the back and fished the journal from the pack. She picked the old pen up from the seat of the Tiger Van and tried to remember titles she’d seen at the library the day before. Maybe she should take a chance and try to get a library card. She jotted a few novels to read. Clarice was a fan of
To Kill a Mockingbird
, and her English teacher in Lucky had liked it a lot, too. Wreath definitely needed to read that one.

Swatting mosquitoes and sweating, she read through her book list, remembering what she liked most about various stories and reminiscing about what was going on in her life when she had read each of the books. A good story took away the loneliness when her grandma died and Frankie started moving around. Books kept her from having to talk to kids she didn’t know when she went to a new school.

Someday she was going to have a nice house full of books. When she finished college and had a good job, making lots of money, she would have one of those rooms lined with shelves and a ladder on wheels.

She had shown a picture of one of those rooms to Frankie, who smiled and said, “You’ll fill that up in no time.” Her mama always said Wreath got her love of books from her daddy’s daddy. “That man could sit for hours with his nose in a book.”

Wreath didn’t know her father, so she certainly didn’t know his father. She thought instead Grandma Willis had instilled the love of reading in her, and Frankie agreed that was possible. “She started every day reading the Bible and after that read everything she could get her hands on whenever she could grab a minute,” Frankie had said.

Until Wreath checked books out, she could read books she had found around the junkyard, many of them mildewed with a slightly distasteful smell but still intact. As the long summer evening grew darker, Wreath started a horror novel she had found in one of the junked cars, a scary, dark drawing on the cover. Its pages were brittle with age and began to fall apart before she finished the first chapter.

She was kind of glad to put it down, the story adding to her anxiety as the night noises got louder, the van stuffier, and her imagination jumpier with fear.

She fell asleep with thoughts of snarling dogs and mean men and a dark jumbled place where evil skulked. She dreamed of a kind woman who helped poor children, and the sight of the woman made her feel safe. She reached out, thinking it was Frankie. When she got closer, she saw it was a beautiful angel, dressed in white, but it wasn’t her mama.

Wreath awoke, stiff, as usual, from the hard floor of the van. Except this morning she felt better. Happier.

The thoughts about being found weren’t as close as usual. Nor was she worried about school … or the need to turn herself in to some faceless official. Those thoughts, as stuck to her as the hot, humid weather, had shrunk.

On this morning, an odd feeling of peace and tension mixed up inside of her. She knew she had to do a few more things to make her campsite livable.

Wandering through the old cars, she remembered her first glimpse of the place, back in the winter, when the trees were bare and the area deserted, coming out of Landry with her mother and Big Fun. Although she never had much use for Big Fun, she owed him for helping her stumble upon the junkyard, the only good thing to come out of the trip.

Her mother had insisted they drive through the little town “for old times’ sake.” Even though Big Fun had grumbled, he did so, her mother occasionally pointing to this building or that, not saying much at first. “That’s the house we lived in before I quit school,” she said, pointing to a small frame home on a street lined with trees.

“I thought you lived up near Texarkana,” Wreath said. “Where Grandma lived.”

“We moved there right before you were born,” she said so softly Wreath could barely hear over Big Fun’s radio. “Your grandmother wanted to be closer to her brother and sister. It’s hard to believe they’re all gone now.”

Frankie twisted in the seat to look back where Wreath sat. “Enjoy life, sweetheart, because it goes fast. Faster than you can imagine.” She stretched her arm to pat Wreath’s knee, the movement seeming to tire her mama. Wreath drank in every word her mother spoke.

Big Fun had interrupted the moment, laying down on the horn when a scrawny dog ambled out. “I was happy to see the last of this place,” he said. “Nothing here but white trash and junk.”

As Big Fun said the
word junk
, Wreath saw the overgrown sign for the junkyard, a handful of vehicles in sight and not a house around.

The seed was planted, and Wreath filed away details of the towns they passed through, knowing in her gut it would not be long till she needed a place of her own.

“Stop!” her mother yelled suddenly, and Big Fun slammed on the brakes.

“What in the world is the matter with you, woman?” he shouted.

Frankie seemed to shrink into the seat. “This train crossing is dangerous. I don’t want anything to happen to Wreath.”

“There’s not a train in sight, Mama.” Wreath rubbed her mother’s hair. “Everything’s going to be fine.” She couldn’t quite believe how fast her mother had declined after that day. Frankie went so fast, almost as though the illness
were
a speeding train about to mow her down.

Trying to stay a step ahead of the sadness that wanted to overtake her, Wreath peered every day into smashed cars, sat in the driver’s seat of the ancient school bus, pretended to scold the kids behind her, and poked around in overgrown travel trailers, wondering if their owners had ever gone somewhere exciting.

She thought of the van as home, the one place in the whole world that was hers. Each morning Wreath climbed out of the van, nervous about what she might find. The homestead was different, but the feeling was not unlike that at the run-down house where she and Frankie had lived for the past year.

She made herself walk throughout the junkyard both morning and evening, checking for clues that others might have been there, but all seemed well.

Using tricks she had read in a detective novel in seventh grade, she set up traps to let her know if anyone came around when she was gone or sleeping. As she went, she noted the tricks in her journal one morning before work.

Even compiling the list made her nervous, and she quickly dressed.

She collected a few items from trailers, amazed at what people left behind, and silently thanked the previous owners for their generosity, from mismatched dishes to a heavy iron pot that would come in handy if she ever decided to build a fire and cook.

She picked up three tattered books and a handful of T-shirts that had not decayed, but walked away from rotted things that fell apart when she touched them.

The scattered stuff reminded her of the things she had abandoned at the shabby house in Lucky. She could almost see low-life neighbors pawing through them, a lot more concerned about her hand-me-down clothes than they were about her.

Her favorite find on this morning was an assortment of photographs that she lined up on the van’s dashboard, next to one of the pictures of her mom she had carefully saved. The children in the found photos would be older than she was by now, she thought, and some of the hippies were probably dead, just like Frankie. Wreath made up stories about their lives, wondering if life had dumped something unexpected on them, too.

Every day she made herself examine at least one different vehicle, and today she added five to her list. They were old and smelly and full of a history that Wreath couldn’t understand. She found faded photo after faded photo, greeting cards, cracked dishes, and odd pieces of clothing, some still in good shape even after years in the Louisiana heat and humidity.

The cars and trailers and RVs
were
alive—not with people but with bugs and mice and lizards and something that looked like an oversized gummy worm.

Life here felt much the way it did in the weeks before Frankie died. Wreath felt as though something hung over her head, waiting to drop on her.

Chapter 10

T
he pavement was hot, but Julia loved the way it felt to hit the road. She headed out to the state park, her favorite route in any season. Thick green trees came up close to the road, providing enough shade to make her feel cooler. Scraggly wildflowers bloomed along the ditch, and she saw a box turtle trying to make it across the road.

During the sweaty run, she usually sketched pictures in her mind. Today the thought of her art turned her brain back to a subject that was never far from her mind—whether it was time to get out of Landry.