Father to Be (21 page)

Susan blew a bubble with her pink gum, then made it pop loudly. “Maybe not. Maybe he was cute before. The way he acted at school, who could tell? He was always so mean and hateful.”

“He was never hateful to me,” Alanna remarked, resting her arms on her knees, her chin in her hands. But that wasn’t really true. Caleb had been mean to everybody.

After all, if he didn’t care what the kids said, then what they said couldn’t hurt him. At least, that was what he’d pretended.

But some of the things the kids said
had
hurt him, had hurt his pride—and pride, she’d overheard the teacher say once, was all Caleb had. He had too much of it as far as she could tell. He didn’t like anybody, didn’t trust anybody, and didn’t want anybody around.

Especially her, because last week she’d hurt his feelings. She’d tried to apologize on the way to Sunday school that morning, but he’d walked away from her, and when she’d followed, he’d gone out the side door. He’d spent the whole Sunday-school time sitting outside on a bench, looking like he hated the whole world, including—and maybe most especially—her. At dinner, when Dr. J.D. had asked him how class was, he’d said fine, and then he’d glared at her as though daring her to tell the truth.

She hadn’t. But that hadn’t made him stop glaring.

She sighed heavily, and Susan looked at her. “Whatsamatter?”

“Nothing.”

Susan kept looking at her, then got real serious. “You hear from your mother?”

Alanna shook her head.

“Are you worried about her? You don’t think she’s—” Susan stopped herself and looked away quickly, but Alanna knew what she’d been about to say.
You don’t think she’s in trouble or dead or anything, do you
? She’d asked it before. So had their other friends, and a couple of times Alanna had asked Aunt Emilie or Uncle Nathan the same thing. They’d tried to reassure her, but there wasn’t much they could say. Lots of times drug addicts and alcoholics and women who went home with strange men died. Unless her mama straightened up once and for all,
she
could die. Alanna had understood that since she was five years old.

No, she wasn’t worrying about anything important like that. She was just wondering if Caleb would ever quit being mad at her. But she couldn’t tell Susan that. Her best friend in the whole world didn’t know she had a crush on Caleb, a silly little one, the kind Susan had every week on a different boy. It was her own private secret.

He sat across the street in the glider under Miss Corinna’s tree. Brendan and Gracie were inside helping the sisters bake bread, and Josie and his brothers were playing around him, but Caleb had a book open and hardly ever looked up from it. She wondered if he was really reading. A couple of times the teacher had asked him to read out loud in class—she made everyone do it—and he’d had a hard time. He’d missed easy words, and some of the kids had snickered.

Alanna had trouble reading too when she’d first come to Bethlehem, but Miss Agatha and Miss Corinna had helped her. Now she read better than anyone else in her class. Maybe they were helping him too. Still, she wished he’d put the book down and look their way once in a while.

“Lannie and Caleb, sittin’ in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g,” Susan sang near her ear.

Alanna’s face turned red, and she poked her elbow into Susan. “Be quiet.”

“Well, it’s the only thing I said that got through to you. You’re so busy looking at him like he’s your boyfriend that you’re not even listening to me. Do you like him?”

“Susan …”

“
Do
you? Tell me. I won’t tell anyone, cross my heart and hope to die.
Do
you?”

Alanna looked at him, then looked at Susan, gave a great sigh, and nodded.

Grabbing her arm, Susan squealed, “Oh, my gosh! I can’t believe it. You’ve never liked
any
boy! Does he
know? Have you told him? Does he like you too? Has he
kissed
you?” Then suddenly all the excitement disappeared and her voice dropped to a whisper. “Do your aunt and uncle know?”

“I don’t know. I don’t guess so. Why?”

“Because he’s, well, Lannie, he’s Caleb Brown. He’s not … not …”

Alanna’s excitement disappeared too. She scrambled to her feet and stared down at Susan. “Not what?”

Susan stood up too and brushed the seat of her shorts. “He’s … him and his brothers and sister, they’re not like us.”

“Like us how?”

“Well, they don’t live in a nice house. And they don’t come to school all the time. And they don’t have any money. And they look hungry. My aunt Francine says they’re not respectable. She says if ever a saying was tailor-made for a family, the saying is poor white trash and the family is the Browns. She says—”

“It’s not Caleb’s fault that they’re poor or that his mama ran off or his daddy disappeared.
We
were poor when we came here. We were homeless, and Aunt Emilie had only seventy-six dollars to get us home to Georgia, and she was getting ready to turn herself in to the police so we wouldn’t have to sleep in the car and freeze to death in the blizzard, when she found the house and the key and the firewood! Did your aunt Francine say
we
were poor white trash too? Did she say
we
weren’t respectable, that you shouldn’t be friends with
me
’cause we weren’t like you?”

“No, but that was different. You were just broke for a while ’cause your aunt lost her job. The Browns have always been poor and always will be, and Aunt Francine says that’s ’cause they’re trash.”

“Your aunt Francine is
stupid,
and
you’re
stupid for listening to her!”

“I am not stupid! I’m as smart as you are, smarter even!
I
didn’t have to have someone help me learn to read in the fourth grade!”

Alanna shoved her hands into her pockets. “You can go home now,” she said angrily. “I don’t want to be friends with you today.”

“Well, maybe I don’t want to be friends with you at all!” Susan stomped across the yard to the sidewalk, then turned back. “Why don’t you go and be friends with ol’ dumb Caleb? The two of you can be dumb together!”

Alanna watched her go. Part of her wanted to yell at her to come back, to say she was sorry and did too want to be friends. Part of her wanted to yell, “Good riddance!” at Susan’s back. And part of her just wanted to pout.

When Susan turned the corner, Alanna crossed the street, then went up the driveway on the other side. She climbed the steps at the end of the porch and walked all the way to the other end, then leaned over the rail, watching as her shadow stretched out over the grass.

She was sorry she’d been mean. Susan was her best friend in the whole world. When they’d first come to Bethlehem, she’d been scared to leave the house and even more scared to go to school, but on her very first day Susan had walked up to her and said they would be best friends and, sure enough, they were. She’d needed a best friend more than almost anything, and now she’d told her she was stupid and Susan had called her dumb and all because of Caleb, who probably thought she was dumb too. Now she’d have to come up with another apology, when she still hadn’t gotten Caleb to take his, and she just wished—

“Who lives here?”

Looking between the spindles, she saw an upside-down version of Caleb at the other end of the porch. Slowly, she straightened, then turned to face him. “Nobody.”

He stopped about in the middle and leaned against the rail. She leaned against it where she stood. “When we first came here, we sort of borrowed the house, but after a while we got caught and had to move out. We lived with the sisters for a while, then Aunt Emilie married Uncle Nathan and we moved into his house.”

“How do you borrow a house?”

“We just sort of took it. Aunt Emilie was desperate for a place to stay ’cause there was a blizzard, and the house was just sitting here all empty, and she prayed that it was all right for us to use it just for a little while and just like that she found the key. It was a miracle.”

He snorted. “Lots of people hide keys to their houses where they can be found. That’s not a miracle. It’s dumb.”

“It was too a miracle, because we got to stay here and Aunt Emilie met Uncle Nathan and they fell in love and got married and she didn’t have to go to prison for kidnapping us and we didn’t have to go to foster homes. Instead, we have a real family.”

“You can’t have a real family without your mother or father.”

“Yes, you can. We’re a real family. And maybe if your dad doesn’t come back, you’ll get to be a real family with someone else too.”

The mocking look disappeared from his face, and he got very serious. “My dad’s coming back for us.”

She wanted to pretend she believed him, but she had more experience with a parent leaving than he did.

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

She inched closer to him, finally stopping when there was only one section of porch railing between them. “Sometimes kids are just more than parents can handle. It doesn’t mean they don’t love us. It just means there are other things going on.”

He snorted again. “That sounds like
him
talking.”

“Dr. J.D.’s a smart man. He knows practically everything about why people do what they do.” After a moment she asked hopefully, “Don’t you like him a little better now?”

“No. I hate him, and he hates me.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“Yes, he does. I’ve seen the way he looks at me.”

“How?” She’d known Dr. J.D. practically since he came to Bethlehem. He liked kids better than any other grown-up she’d met. He was always nice to them and listened to them as if what they had to say was important.

“Like he wishes I was gone. Like just looking at me makes him kinda mad.”

She shook her head hard enough to make her hair swing. “You’re wrong. Dr. J.D. likes everybody, and everybody likes him back. You just want him not to like you so you don’t have to like him.”

Caleb shook his head too, convinced he was right. She walked back to the end of the porch, stared out into the yard, and took a deep breath. “For whatever it’s worth, Caleb—”

A creak at the other end made her spin around. He was crossing the driveway, walking fast, as though he needed to get back to Miss Agatha’s right away. She watched until he disappeared around the hedge, then sadly finished her sentence. “I like you.” For whatever it was worth, which apparently was nothing.

A
s they began their ninth full day together, J.D. realized they’d fallen into a fairly regular routine. Mrs. Larrabee stayed with the kids while he ran; he returned to shower, then woke them. While they got dressed, he headed for the kitchen, where he cooked breakfast, but only for himself. All the kids required was
bowls, spoons, and glasses, a pitcher of milk, and however many boxes of cereal the pantry held. By the time breakfast was done, they had a few seconds for last-minute details, like shoes and anything they wanted to take to the baby-sitter’s with them, and then he was off to work. Off to feeling like his old self again.

Tuesday morning, though, the routine got interrupted. He’d just sat down at the table with his breakfast—fried ham drizzled with maple syrup and Harry’s hash brown casserole—when Gracie looked at his plate. “Them ’tatoes smell good, Dr. J.D.,” she said, taking an extra deep breath for effect.

He stilled in the act of reaching for the salt and looked at her. “What did you say?”

“Them ’tatoes smell good.”

Dr. J.D.
She’d added that. For nine full days and half of another she’d avoided calling him anything but
the man
, and that only when she thought he couldn’t hear. He wouldn’t even have bet that she
knew
his name, certainly never would have thought that she’d use it. But she had, and so naturally that it hadn’t even registered with her.

But it had with Caleb. At the opposite end of the table he was scowling so hard that milk sloshed from the spoonful of cereal he was gripping in midair.

J.D. decided that paying any more attention to the moment wouldn’t be a good idea, so instead he focused on what Gracie considered to be the important part of her comment. “You want some of this, Gracie?”

Wearing a broad grin, she nodded. As he pushed his chair back from the table, Noah looked up anxiously. “I ain’t never had ’tatoes like that before.”

“I’ll get you a plate too, Noah. Jacob? Caleb?”

His mouth full of chocolate-flavored cereal, Jacob shook his head. Caleb simply glared.

J.D. served one plate to each of the two kids. Gracie
pronounced them the “goodest” potatoes she’d ever had except for French fries. Noah inhaled them, then returned to his cereal.

It was a small step forward, J.D. reminded himself as they ate in relative silence. With kids like these, success came only in small steps, and every one was sweet.

As soon as breakfast was finished, they all carried their dishes into the kitchen. “Get your shoes on and grab your things,” he directed as he rinsed the dishes, then stacked them on the counter. “We’ve got to be out of here in five minutes.”

Gracie ran to get her favorite storybook so Miss Agatha could read it to her for the dozenth time. Jacob got a book of his own, a history of baseball, picked up when Mrs. Larrabee had taken them to the library the day before, and Noah went searching for his shoes.

Caleb waited sullenly by the front door. J.D. had done laundry over the weekend, so Caleb was back to wearing his own shabby clothes. Each of the last two mornings when he’d come from their room, his hostile expression had dared J.D. to comment on the clothes. He hadn’t. There were so many more important things for them to fight about.

“My shoe comed untied,” Noah announced as he came down the hall, dangling his tennis shoe by the laces.

J.D. and Caleb turned at the same time. “Let me see—” J.D. broke off as Caleb said loudly, “I’ll tie it for you.”

Noah looked from one to the other, bit his lip, then eased into the kitchen and brought the offending shoe to J.D. Muttering something better left unheard, Caleb went outside. The door slammed behind him.

J.D. lifted the boy onto the counter, then slid the shoe onto his foot. “Do you know how to tie your shoes, Noah?”