Also Known As Harper (11 page)

My toes were itching to kick at her legs. They
were so close in front of me, it wouldn't be much of a reach. But I knew it might really have been Daddy I was kicking.

She finally stopped for a breath of air, and I didn't think she meant to, but she looked at me. Her eyes found mine, and her words held still in the air between us. She stared for a minute and looked as if someone had pressed her
Stop
button. After a good while, she took a sharp breath and spoke. “I wasn't going to let her sell it.”

“What?” She wasn't making any sense.

“The dresser.” Winnie Rae's shoulders hunched forward, and her voice had gotten so quiet I had to move in till we were practically sharing the same puff of air.

She bent down and unzipped the front pocket of her book bag. She held up two daisy decals, one in each hand. “I tried to save them all for you, but Mama would've noticed. The dresser wouldn't have looked right with them all peeled off.”

She held her hands out until I took the decals from her. “I knew how much you liked it.”

I almost never had trouble thinking up words for Winnie Rae Early, but my mind was having a hard time with this one. A nasty Winnie Rae was a lot
easier to deal with. And her eyebrows were raised up as if she was surprised by her own words.

But then Hem took my mind and my feet in another direction. He was up and waving his arms over his head at a white pickup. And he was a good three feet into the street.

“Hem!” I grabbed him tight around the middle and pulled him back to the side of the road. I could feel my pulse thudding on the roof of my mouth and a tingly buzzing inside my ears.

“He's slowing down!” Hem tried to wrestle himself free, but this time it was me digging my feet into the asphalt.

I had to admit, Hem had a pretty good eye. That truck was the spitting image of Daddy's. Except there was a lady driving it. And she was not the least bit smiling as she slowed down and unrolled her window.

She jabbed her finger in the air in our direction. “What's wrong with you kids? It's a good thing I was paying attention, or I could've mowed you right down!”

I didn't have a whole lot to say to that, and, luckily, neither did Hemingway. His body had gone kind of limp, and he was studying the dirt by his feet as if it was the most interesting thing in the world.

I hugged him close to me and kissed the side of his face. Breathing in his sweaty, Hemingway smell made my heart start to slow back down to normal.

The woman shook her head and mentioned something about school as she was rolling her window back up.

As I watched the woman drive off, I noticed Winnie Rae had taken the opportunity to hightail it out of there. She was a good twenty yards down the road toward the motel.

I shook my head and got a tighter grip on Hem's hand. I bent down so my eyes were staring in the dead centers of his. “Listen here, Hemingway.”

He must have heard something sharper in my voice, because he didn't look away. Not for even one second.

“Mama put me in charge of you, and you're going to have to stick close by. You hear?”

He nodded slowly.

“I know you got more sense than to be running out in front of cars,” I said. “Mama taught you that back when you were about two years old.”

“But Daddy . . .” He pointed toward the street.

“That wasn't Daddy.” I squeezed his wrist so he'd
be sure to listen. “I don't want to talk about Daddy for a while, you hear?”

He looked confused, but he nodded.

“I don't want to be thinking or talking about Daddy for the rest of today. Maybe longer.” I said it loudly, so I'd remember it, myself.

“Come on,” I said. “Let's go back and see if we can find Randall. Maybe we can do some more reading in that book of his.”

He didn't answer, but I felt him give my hand a little bit of a squeeze.

I thought about Mama out front of our old house, bone-tired, trying to sort through everything we owned. There was no way I was going to tell her about my dresser or any part of the Earlys' yard sale. I just couldn't. Mama had way too much to worry about already. I wanted to take some of that worry away and give it to Mrs. Early or Winnie Rae. Let them know what it was like, for once.

I pulled Hem farther off the road. It was harder to walk on all the loose dirt and sharp little rocks, but I wasn't taking any chances on him darting out into traffic again.

“Someone's cooking breakfast.” Hem pointed the
tip of his nose up at the sky and took a snorty breath. “Sausages, maybe.”

I glanced off to our left, but there wasn't much to see except thick clusters of trees with the new leaves partway grown in. It was a little late for breakfast, and I couldn't picture anyone cooking up some pancakes in the middle of the sticker bushes. The road dipped down into a ditch to the left of us, and this seemed to be a good place for snakes and such.

Hem must've been thinking the same thing, because his foot took a little sidestep and his hand was looking to sneak away from me. “Don't you even think about it.” I tightened my grip on his fingers.

There was a road up ahead, and as we got closer, I could see it wasn't a main one. It was just clumpy dirt. Not good for cars, but fine for people walking.

“Did you notice that road up there, Hem?” I pointed toward the start of the dirt road. “If I'm guessing right, it will take us out on the other side of the tent houses.” I picked up a rock and bent down, drawing a long line in the dirt. “See? This is the big, busy road. And this is the motel over here.” I drew a rectangle in the dirt.

Hem bent down beside me.

“We usually go around back of the motel and
down the sticker-bush path past the pool, and we come up on Randall and Lorraine's from the right.” I drew a line branching off the big road. “I'm thinking, if we take this dirt road up ahead here, we're bound to come up on the tent houses from the left.”

Hem nodded and smiled. “A shortcut.”

“You're going to have to take a run and a jump for it off this main road, though.” I pointed at the ditch. “I don't want you slogging through that snake pit.” I hadn't seen one single snake, but I had to keep Hem's legs moving.

The old road had chunks of broken-up asphalt with weeds starting to make their way up in the spaces and cracks in between. Early-spring crabgrass and moss felt soft and bumpy under our feet. Before time and weather got to it, I could see it had been a regular road.

“Keep a lookout for the tops of the tents, Hem,” I said. “If we don't see any in a while, we'll turn back and go the old way around the front of the motel.”

But what we saw wasn't tents at all.

 

 

 

 

 

THEY WERE DEFINITELY
old houses I could see peeking through the trees up ahead. But not good ones. They weren't just the used kind of old. They were the broken-up, forgotten kind of old. The kind that smelled like a closet in the basement.

The road we were on split off to the left and deadended with a sign:
Knotty Pine Luxury Cabins. Dorothy and Crawford Pine, proprietors.
That sign was painted like new, but everything around it seemed at least forty or fifty years old. All six of the cabins looked like the special eggs I'd tried to make for Hem last Easter. The ones where you get all the yolk out and the only thing left is some broken-up shell to paint. The luxury had leaked right out of the Knotty Pine cabins. All except for one of them.

The brown paint on it looked pretty new, like it
might have been done recently. The front porch was a lot like our old yard when we'd had the inside of our house dumped onto the grass. Only the porch had more order to it. The stacks of books and clothing and gadgets were neat and lined up perfectly with the sides of the porch. About a dozen tiny plastic sunflower windmills were poked into the dirt in front of the first step in a perfectly spaced line.

A wheelchair was parked up against the side of the house, and the ground was so uneven that the wheelchair was resting on only one of the big back wheels and the two tiny foot pedal wheels in front. Although it wasn't piled as high as usual with all her bits and pieces of stuff, I knew it was Dorothy's. Even before I saw Lorraine push open the screen door and come out on the porch.

She was sipping at something in a mug, and from the way she was slurping at it real quick like and licking the middle of her lips, I knew it had to be hot chocolate.

She raised her mug to me and sat down in a faded red kitchen chair. She nudged a bundled stack of magazines out of the way with her foot.

Then out came Randall, with Dorothy right behind him. Dorothy noticed the stack of magazines
right away, and fixed them back the way they had been.

Randall's hot chocolate must not have been so hot, because he wore most of it on his chin, with a long trail of it running down the front of his shirt and onto his name tag.

“Hemingway!” Randall acted as if he hadn't seen us in months.

And Hemingway was plenty glad to see him. Especially since Randall was heading over to a nice big dirt pile at the side of the house. Complete with trucks and plywood ramps.

Dorothy scooted another chair over next to the screen door, and Lorraine motioned for me to sit down. She raised one eyebrow at me and nodded toward the hot chocolate.

I looked at Dorothy and knew that Mama would have an out-and-out fit if I took anything to eat or drink from someone we didn't really know.

Like before, Dorothy's eyes were going straight through into my thoughts, and she nodded like she knew. “It's instant.” She jerked her thumb toward the box on the kitchen counter. “In individual packets.”

She had a way of saying it that made me relax, and she didn't make me embarrassed to say no.

The screen door was closed, but the door into the cabin was wide open, and I could see the stove where she had cooked up that hot chocolate. It was shiny white with a silver chrome canopy that made a nice roof hanging over the top.

Dorothy followed my eyes to the refrigerator next to it, and she smiled. “Nineteen-thirty-four GE Monitor Top refrigerating machine.” She propped the screen door open with a kitchen chair and walked over in front of the refrigerator. “Foot pedal here opens it.”

It had four legs that looked like small horse's hooves at the bottom. She stepped on a tiny foot pedal attached to one of the front hooves, and the door popped open. She patted the round white barrel on the top. “This motor has only had to be repaired once. About forty years ago. Been running ever since.” She pressed the door shut. “Sort of like me. I just keep on going.”

There was something about her that made a person feel right when they were around her. Lorraine felt it, too. I could tell by the way her shoulders relaxed and her mouth went into a half-smile.

Mama always says there's no call for rudeness, so I peeked just my head in the door to take a look at that
sparkling white kitchen. It looked like one that Mr. Atticus Finch from
To Kill a Mockingbird
might have had in his house. That housekeeper of his, Calpurnia, was like a family member, and I think she and Dorothy polished their kitchens in the same way. With love and hard work.

Only I wasn't so sure Calpurnia had all those boxes of cake mixes and cans of corn. They were in perfect stacks and rows under the kitchen window and beneath the table.

Dorothy followed my eyes with hers. “My Craw can't go without his creamed corn at dinner. And not a week goes by that Karen Lynn doesn't get a taste for one of my yellow cakes with white frosting.”

I wasn't sure who she was talking about, but I'd have to ask later. The living room off to the left had really caught my eye. The walls were all shelves. Shelves stacked with books.

My breath caught up in the back part of my throat, and I wished Mama was with me right then. I wanted her eyes to be taking in all that I was seeing. She knew what it felt like to have all those words sitting out in front of you. Just waiting for you to go get them.

Dorothy pointed her chin toward me. “You're
someone who weaves a good story, all right,” she said. “I knew it even before Randall and Lorraine told me about your poems.”

Lorraine nodded.

“I saw you sitting at the table over to the motel.” Dorothy held up her fingers like she was writing. “I could tell by the way you were looking down at your paper, there were words flowing out of you.” Her own sentences hung in the air in front of her while she looked straight through into my head again. “You have a way,” she said. “You have a way of making the right words tack on to that paper.”

She made me feel like Mrs. Rodriguez did. Like they could erase Daddy's words out of my brain and make me write new ones.

Dorothy came back out to the porch and sat down in one of the kitchen chairs. She followed my eyes from her crowded porch to her cabin sign and back again.

She smiled. “You thought I lived outside, in my wheelchair, didn't you?”

I felt my face get hot, and I knew it was bright red. She'd taken my thoughts right out of my brain.

She shook her head. “It's all right. That's what most of them think.” She waved her hand back over
her shoulder. “Most of those people around and about the motel think I'm just a crazy old woman. They think I don't hear them talking about me, but I hear what they're saying.” She laughed, but it was a sad laugh. “If folks don't like the way you look, they almost never take the time to find anything out about you. They just make up their own stories.”

I thought about that wall of books and I knew I wanted to know her. I wanted to know what she carried around in her wheelchair and inside her head. I was thinking she might be the kind of person that could help me figure out some things. Like how to get myself back to school.

I looked at her real hard in the black parts of her eyes, and I knew I wanted her to know me, too. Before I even took the time to think, I saw my hands pulling my notebook out of my backpack and holding it out to her.