Also Known As Harper (6 page)

Lorraine didn't seem as if she had lost much of
anything. From the way she looked about the eyes, I was without a doubt sure that she had plenty of words moving around inside her head.

She lifted the corner on the cover of my poetry notebook and leaned toward me with her eyebrows raised high.

I nodded. “Sure, go right ahead.” I liked to watch what people did when they read my poems, how their shoulders and their eyes moved. I wanted to know if they felt the same way when they read them as I did when I was writing the words.

She turned the pages slowly until she got to the poem I wrote last August. Back when Mama took me school shopping at the St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Store.

I watched Lorraine's eyes move across the page and I read the words in my mind.

 

Some people like things shiny and crisp
But I tend to like the things with the scraped up edges.
That way I can tell other people have liked them too.
They've torn them and spilled on them
Or broken off a corner or two
As they went about the important business
Of their day.
Something smooth and straight and new
Has an emptiness about it
Because it hasn't been important
To anyone yet.

 

Lorraine looked up at me and smoothed down her skirt that used to be bright purple. She smiled part of a smile, and I knew she was going to be my friend.

 

 

 

 

 

I WATCHED RANDALL
as he sat down on the end of the bed and opened Hemingway's handwriting book. As soon as he started moving in that direction, I knew what would happen next.

Sure enough, Hemingway pulled it quickly out of his hands. He was real private about his letters, especially his “b”s, which he sometimes got mixed up with his “d”s and “p”s. “What grade you in?” Hem asked him.

Randall wrinkled his nose. “I guess you could say I'm in the second grade.” He glanced at Lorraine. “But I never actually finished the first grade and we didn't ever get a chance to sign me up for school here.” His eyes lit on Hem's handwriting book. “Mama said we were taking our summer vacation early last year, because we're going up north. There's a special
doctor up there that's going to help Lorraine find her words.”

Lorraine's hands got shaky right down to the fingertips when he said that, and her eyebrows narrowed and scrunched together as if Randall's words made her nervous and upset, all at the same time.

Hem didn't seem to notice one little bit. His shoulders got droopy when Randall mentioned the part about going up north, as if they'd been best friends for years or something.

“So you'll be moving on in the morning, I s'pose,” Hem said.

But Randall sat back against the radiator, looking like he wasn't in any hurry at all. “We ran out of money a while back.” He put his hands out wide. “Mama said we were going to hang around here for a while.”

Hem looked toward the window. “Your mama outside?”

Randall shook his head. “She's off running her errands.” He kicked against the front of the tan metal radiator with his heel. “We're not going anywhere just yet. She said we're sitting tight here for a bit. Until she can think on what to do.”

“Just like us!” Hem acted as if waiting on money was something fun and exciting.

But I knew the truth, and I could tell by the sad worry in Lorraine's hands that she knew it, too.

She folded and unfolded her hands in front of her, as if she couldn't find the proper place for them.

I looked at Flannery's sweater, laid out on top of the three-legged stool. Everything we'd hauled with us was stacked up against the side wall. At our house, I'd never had to think about what to do with anything. Everything had a closet or a drawer.

Lorraine opened the door and leaned out, shading her eyes with her hand. She turned to Randall and motioned him toward the door with her other hand.

“Is it our turn?” Randall stuffed another graham cracker into his pocket and headed for the door.

Lorraine turned to me with her crinkly-eye smile and waved.

“Hold on.” Randall skipped back toward our bathroom.

He came out with a bar of soap and one of the little white shampoo bottles. “Can I have these?” He held them up carefully, as if they were fragile dishes. “I'll bring back the extra.”

I looked at the tiny dirt streaks about the sides of his face. Maybe Mrs. Early was getting skimpy with
the shampoo when she scrubbed out the tub in their motel room. “Wait a second.” I reached behind the chair for my soda-cracker box, where I kept the sunflower toilet water and fancy hair conditioner I'd gotten on my last birthday. I held them out to Lorraine. “Here. Use what you need and give the rest back later.”

She turned the bottles to see the labels and put her hand to the side of her face. Curling a dark brown piece of hair around her finger, she smiled at me. It was the kind that started out slow and stayed on her face for a while.

After they left, I couldn't get Hem to focus on his letters. His attention kept moving to the window. “Let's go see if they can play,” he said. “They should be done washing up by now.”

Finally, I gave up and followed Hem out the door and down the walkway. He stopped at the very end, in front of Room 12. “This is where they live. I saw them go in here.”

I could hear water running inside. “I'm not sure they're finished washing up.”

Right as Hem was raising his arm up to knock, the door swung open. A tall, skinny woman with a towel on her head and a baby on her hip held the door
open with her foot and smiled at us. “Go on in,” she said. “We're almost finished.”

I figured her to be Lorraine and Randall's mother. But before I could think on it much more, I got pushed to the side by a pointy elbow, and Hem was knocked to the ground beside me.

The pointy elbows belonged to a girl with tangled black hair that hung down practically to her behind. When she stood in front of me, we were level, eye to eye, and her two front teeth tilted up and out as if they were reaching toward me, getting ready to spear me. Those elbows of hers reminded me straightaway of Winnie Rae Early's. They looked as if they could poke themselves right through into someone's business.

She had a dirty green towel draped around her neck that had a gas-station bathroom smell to it. She must have noticed me sniffing, because she reared up her skinny chest and arched her back to try to stick it out farther, acting all big and smart, like Winnie Rae enjoyed doing. “Unh-uh,” she said. “You think you're going to cut in front of me, you two got another think coming!”

Hem's eyes were round and shiny, as if he hadn't quite decided if he was going to cry or not.

I put my hand out and pulled him to his feet.

Pointy Elbows jabbed her finger in the air over Hem's head. “You make an appointment, like everyone else.”

I dusted off Hem's backside. “That better not be Randall and Lorraine's sister.”

She ignored me and stepped inside the motel room, slamming the door.

I looked over Hem's head to where she'd pointed, and there stood the woman with the wheelchair. Her stocking cap was gone, and her wiry gray hair spun away from her head in tight swirls. The suit jacket she'd been wearing before was hanging from one of the handles of the wheelchair, and she rested her hand against the other handle, as if she was afraid of someone taking off with it.

She looked at me dead in the eye, like she knew me, and motioned for me to come over.

 

 

 

 

 

I HAD HALFWAY
decided I wasn't going anywhere near that woman, but Hem was across the parking lot before I could even try to stop him. He chatted with the wheelchair lady like she was the supermarket checkout girl that used to give him sugar cookies.

“What you got in that wheelchair?” Hem pointed at the big side wheel with his toe.

The lady shrugged. “A little of this. And a little of that.”

“Anyone ever hurt their leg and have to ride in it?” Hem leaned all his weight to one side as if he might be getting ready to have one of his injuries.

She shook her head and straightened her stocking cap. “Not lately.”

There was a chilly bite to the air, but my forehead was sweating. I bounced a little in my sneakers, in
case I might have to spring into action and grab Hem out of the wheelchair lady's clutches. But the honest truth was, she didn't seem to be going anywhere very fast in her brown step-in bedroom slippers. I moved up behind Hemingway and touched his shoulder, and I tried not to look the lady in the face.

Randall came around the corner from the back of the motel and galloped over. “Hey, Dorothy.” He picked up a clipboard that hung from a string at the back of the lady's wheelchair and handed it to Lorraine. She scribbled something on it and gave it back to the lady.

Randall didn't look to be anywhere near afraid of that wheelchair lady. He was standing right up next to her, as if he talked to her all the time.

I could see that Lorraine wasn't afraid of Dorothy, either. In fact, she had her eyes fixed on Dorothy like I think I might've looked at my grandma, if I'd ever had the chance to meet her.

“Mama says we should ask you if you have more openings toward the end of the week, on account of we might be using the pool this week,” Randall said to Dorothy.

I really wanted to see what was on that clipboard. I couldn't think what Lorraine might be signing them
up for. But Dorothy let the clipboard dangle from the handle of the wheelchair. It got to twirling, and I couldn't get my eyes around it.

Lorraine was trying to finger-comb her wet hair, and Dorothy rooted around in a green knapsack and pulled out a bright-yellow comb. She motioned for Lorraine to turn around and slowly worked at a tangled spot of hair at the back of Lorraine's neck. She patted Lorraine's head softly as she smoothed the snarl out. “Tell your mother I might have to switch some people around, but I'll see what I can do.”

Lorraine smiled up into Dorothy's face, and when I finally peeked at her face myself, I could see what Lorraine was smiling about.

Dorothy's cheeks didn't have any makeup on them, but they were the color of Flannery's sweater. The skin around her eyes had lines traveling every which way. Her eyes themselves didn't have one inch of mean, but they looked like they knew things. Things about people. Maybe things that people didn't know about their own selves.

When I stepped in closer, I could smell my sunflower toilet water. Lorraine must've heard me sniffing, because she reached into a motel laundry bag and handed me my special conditioner and toilet water.

I smiled at her. “Your hair looks pretty,” I said. “And the smell floats around you real nicely.”

“Mama said you can come by and go swimming, if you want.” Randall had a fresh name tag stuck across his shirt.

I looked around close by and off in the distance, but I didn't see a hint of a swimming pool or even a bit of lake or river.

I hadn't seen one when we'd driven in, either. And Winnie Rae had never mentioned a pool when she bragged about her mama working here, which was plain out of character for her. She was always bragging on having one thing or another, and the way she talked about it, you would've thought they owned the motel or something. Just because you clean it doesn't mean you own it.

“It's not hot yet,” Hem said. “Usually, we wait until it's time to go barefoot before we go through the sprinkler or anything.”

“If you're going to go, you got to go now.” Randall smoothed at a corner of his name tag. “You got to go after the first rains. You wait too long, it'll be too dirty.”

Dorothy looked at me and nodded. She set her clipboard on top of the pile in her wheelchair and
shuffled off in her bedroom slippers. When her eyes had looked down into mine, I could have sworn she was reading one of my poems I'd been working on in my head. And she'd stared at my right hand. My writing hand.

Then it was almost as if Dorothy had shifted some words around in my head, changing my poem for me. I wanted to get back to my notebook, right away, but Hem had his feet firmly planted in the ground by Randall, and from the sounds of it, he was dead set on going swimming in April.

“I don't even know where to look for your bathing suit,” I told him. “It's probably back in Winnie Rae Early's camping trailer.”

“He doesn't need a suit,” Randall said. “He can wear what he's got on. That's what I'm doing.” He tugged at the bottom of his blue-striped T-shirt and wiped his palms on the front of his jeans.

I looked at Lorraine, but she shrugged. Seemed Randall was like Hem. Once he got an idea in his head, there was no talking him out of it.

I breathed out a loud puff of air. “Wait here, then,” I said. I ran back to the room for my notebook and a towel. I wasn't so sure Mama would be happy about Hem going for a swim, but I wasn't going
to worry about that right then. I had enough on my mind.

I wrapped two towels around my neck, and Hem and me followed Lorraine and Randall around the corner of the end unit.

When we got out back, I didn't even see a kiddie pool. It was as if the area was long ago forgotten.

Whoever swept and picked up out front, had completely left out the area right behind the motel. We had to step carefully back there, because most of what I saw was batches of crumbled-up concrete with bits and pieces of tall grass poking through.

I kicked aside the torn scraps of a potato-chip bag and I caught a heavy smell in the air, like a stuffy closet.

“Let's swing!” Hem galloped ahead to an old red swing set.

Even before we got there, I could see that the swing parts of it were pretty much gone. Part of one hung by a long single chain. There was a good space for the other swing, but all that was left were two short chains hanging down from the bar.