Scared Stiff (2 page)

“Somebody asking for directions, probably,” I said, shifting the heavy stuff because my arm was beginning to ache.

At first Ma didn't stop, though she turned her head when the driver of the car spoke to her. They were too far away, and the light reflected off the windshield, so I couldn't see what he looked like, or if there was more than one person in the car.

Ma kept walking, and the car drove very slowly beside her. I wished she'd hurry up, so she could help carry my stuff before my arms dropped off.

“I bet she's going to stop at Willie's,” Kenny said. “She said she didn't have anything to cook for supper. Maybe she'll buy hot dogs,” he added hopefully.

“She won't,” I said positively. Pa was the only one who ever bought hot dogs. Ma said
they were full of fat and not good for you. She was the only one who was kind of plump and needed to diet, but she was always worrying about what the rest of us ate.

The car kept coming, very slowly, along the curb on the side where no parking was allowed. Ma suddenly stopped and stood there, and the car stopped, too.

They were closer now, but there was still sun shining off the windshield and I didn't recognize the driver, though I thought it was a man.

When Kenny called to her, she turned toward us, and Kenny started to run.

“Ma! Can we have hot dogs tonight? Please?”

She glanced quickly at whoever was in the car, then took a few steps toward us, opening her purse. “All right. Here, get the hot dogs and the rest of what's on my list,” she said, handing over the paper and several bills.

I stared at her in dismay. “We can't carry any groceries besides what we've already got,” I protested.

“Then give me that stuff, and you get the
groceries,” she said, and reached for my notebook and papers. “I'll meet you back home in a few minutes.”

I felt uneasy right then, though I couldn't have said why. Maybe it was only because she'd so easily agreed to hot dogs, because that probably meant she wasn't thinking about what Kenny had asked for.

Still, there wasn't any reason not to do what she said. I handed over my stuff and headed for the side street where Willie's Grocery & Deli was. Kenny was going to stay with her, but Ma said sharply, “No, go on with Rick, honey.”

So we went around the corner, leaving Ma there talking to the guy in the car. I looked back at the last minute and caught a glimpse of him: dark and bulky, the driver was, and wearing glasses with gold rims that glinted where the sun hit them when he leaned out the window.

“I told you she'd let us have hot dogs,” Kenny said happily, skipping to keep up with me. “Let's get the kind that swell all up when you cook 'em, okay, Rick?”

We got the stuff on her list and paid Willie. When we came out of the side street, I looked for Ma, thinking we'd probably walk the rest of the way home together, across the street, but she was already gone.

“I'm going to have just ketchup on my hot dogs,” Kenny said, as if I didn't know he didn't like mustard, the way the rest of us did. “I wish I'd asked if we could have potato chips, too.”

“They're fried in grease,” I reminded him. “She'd have said no.”

There was more traffic now, in the street and on the sidewalk. A bunch of people got off another bus and were on the way home. I could smell frying potatoes and maybe pork chops. It smelled good, anyway, and I was glad hot dogs cooked fast.

Going up the steps to the apartment house, I paused. “Looks like Ma dropped my notebook,” I said, frowning. “Somebody walked all over it and got it dirty. Can you pick it up, Kenny? It's the one with my frog sketches in it. I got an
A+
on them.”

Kenny retrieved the notebook, and I jiggled stuff around to get at my key, and we let ourselves
into the little lobby. I squinted through the slit in the mailbox, but it was empty. Nothing from Pa. Of course, maybe Ma had already gotten it.

Usually our front door was locked and I had to use a key for that, too, but today it wasn't even quite closed. Well, Ma had expected us to be right behind her and had left it open for us, I thought. I called to her as soon as we were inside the apartment, but there was no answer. We walked through to the kitchen, and I put the grocery bag on the table and called again.

Nothing. A fly buzzed on the windowsill, but that was all. Upstairs I heard Mrs. Prather fixing supper; her walker thumped every time she moved.

“Where's Ma?” Kenny wanted to know.

She wasn't in the bathroom nor in her bedroom. She wasn't in the apartment at all, though she'd been there. The stuff she was carrying for me was there on the front-hall table, some of it spilling off onto the floor on top of the sweatshirt I'd dropped there yesterday. Ma was always after me to hang up something, I thought guiltily as I kicked it out of the way.

Maybe she'd gone across the hall to borrow something from Sally Pope. I went over there to see, but Sally shook her head. “Haven't seen her today,” she said.

There wasn't anybody else in the building Ma would be visiting. She wouldn't even have gone to Sally's this close to suppertime unless she needed something she'd forgotten from the store.

So where was she, then?

I picked up the stuff that had fallen on the floor, added the notebook she'd dropped outside, and dumped it all on my bed.

“I'm hungry,” Kenny said, almost whining.

“Yeah, me too,” I agreed. “Let's go ahead and start fixing supper. Ma'll come back in a few minutes, I guess.”

But she didn't.

We heated the hot dogs until they were fat and juicy, and I opened a can of corn and warmed up the buns. Ma would have made salad, but I wasn't very good at that and I figured one meal without it wouldn't hurt too much.

Kenny turned the burner off under the hot dogs and looked at me uncertainly.

“What do we do now? Where's Ma?”

“I don't know. I guess we better eat without her. She must have been delayed somewhere,” I said.

So we ate, but my appetite wasn't as good as it had been earlier. I was getting worried, because Ma had never done this before.

When I thought of Billy Cowan, my stomach suddenly cramped. Billy wasn't in sixth grade, only in fifth, so I didn't know him too well, but everybody in school knew what had happened to him.

He'd been worried because his folks were fighting and he was afraid they were going to get a divorce, but he wasn't prepared for what they actually did. One day he came home and found everything gone out of the apartment except the stuff in his own room. His mother and dad had split, and each of them thought the other one would take Billy, but they didn't wait to see. They moved out, separately, and never bothered to check on Billy. They just abandoned him.

Mrs. Ratzloff, the school nurse, saw him crying on the front steps and stopped to find
out what was the matter. Billy's in a foster home now, and he likes it okay, but he's always afraid his foster parents will get tired of him, too.

Pa wasn't tired of Kenny and me, I thought, but I guessed he was tired of Ma. Anyway, he left all three of us. What if Ma left, too?

She wouldn't, I thought, my chest aching so it was painful to breathe. Not ever.

But I jumped up from the table and went to her room and threw open the closet door, just in case.

All her dresses were still there. I jerked open a dresser drawer, and it was still full of underwear.

So we hadn't been abandoned.

But where was Ma?

We didn't clean up the food from the table, thinking surely Ma would be there any minute, starving, not minding that we hadn't made salad. She'd want to eat right away.

But she didn't come, and it got dark enough so we turned on the lights in the living room. Kenny turned on the TV, too, but I didn't pay any attention to what was on.

Finally it was time for Kenny to go to bed, and there was still no sign of Ma.

I didn't know what to do. I couldn't think of anybody to call. If Pa was here, he'd know what to do, I thought, and I began to be angry. It was his job to take care of us, so why wasn't he here?

I made Kenny take his bath and put on his pj's, and I read him a chapter from
Nothing's Fair in Fifth Grade
and then put him to bed.

He looked up at me gravely. “Rick, why isn't Ma here?”

“I don't know, but she'll come,” I told him.

“Soon?”

I covered up the teddy bear he always slept with. “Soon,” I promised, but I didn't believe it.

If something hadn't happened, she'd have been here a long time ago.

I went out and sat in the empty living room and waited, but nobody came.

Should I call the police? My heart pounded as I thought about it. Finally I got up and went to the telephone. You dialed 911, I knew, and they would send a police officer. If he didn't figure out right away where Ma was, would he
take Kenny and me away, as an officer had done with Billy?

But we weren't abandoned, I told myself fiercely. Ma would never do that. Once, right after Pa left, I'd started to cry, just a little bit. And Ma hugged me and assured me we'd be all right, the three of us, even if Pa didn't come back.

“I don't see how he could do it,” I said. “He always said he loved us!”

“He still loves you and Kenny,” she told me softly, giving me a handkerchief to blow my nose. “It's only me he doesn't want to deal with anymore.”

“But he used to love you too! Did
you
stop loving
him
? How can you stop loving someone?”

She hugged me again. “It happens sometimes, honey. Nobody wants it to happen, but sometimes it does. I don't know yet if I've stopped loving your pa or not. But Rick, I'm still here, and I'll always be here for you and Kenny. I promise.”

Something happened to her, I thought. But what?

There was a pad beside the telephone, and
what Ma had written on it jumped out at me before I lifted the receiver.

Uncle Henry
, Ma had written, and there was a number after his name.
Message, Mrs. Biggers.

Uncle Henry, I thought. Yes, he was the one to call. He was about the only relative we had, except for my snooty Aunt Susan, who lives in Philadelphia. She's Ma's sister, but she married a rich lawyer that neither Ma or Pa could ever stand, and I only saw them twice. Both times they acted like we weren't good enough for them, Pa said.

Uncle Henry didn't have a telephone of his own. He lived in a remodeled school bus, Ma told us. Uncle Henry was old, and crotchety sometimes, but he was nicer than Aunt Susan, and he lived a lot closer, too, right in our same town in Indiana.

My fingers were shaking as I dialed the number on the pad.

Mrs. Biggers was brusque when she told me Uncle Henry wasn't there. “He works as a night watchman, you know.”

“Oh.” I must have sounded as forlorn as I felt.

“You want me to give him a message?” she asked.

I swallowed and hesitated. Should I wait until morning to reach Uncle Henry, or should I call the police tonight?

“Is it important?” she asked. And then, sounding more kind, “An emergency?”

I gulped. “Yes. It's an emergency. Tell him . . . tell him Rick called. My mom . . . my mom's disappeared. I think . . . I think something bad has happened to her,” I said.

It wasn't like on TV, where a whole bunch of cops come with their lights flashing and the sirens going.

Only one officer came up the stairs. He had a notebook and he asked questions and wrote down the answers, but he didn't seem to think anything really bad had happened to Ma.

“She may just be visiting a friend,” he suggested.

I swallowed so hard it hurt. “Her only friend in the building is Sally, across the hall. She hasn't been there.”

“A friend outside the building,” the cop said. He sounded bored, as if this kind of thing happened all the time and it was never important.

The door behind him was pushed further
open, and Uncle Henry stuck his head in. “What's going on?” he wanted to know.

Uncle Henry is pretty old. He has thin white hair and faded blue eyes, and a lot of wrinkles in his face. I guessed Mrs. Biggers had managed to get hold of him somehow, and I felt better immediately. He'd know what to do.

I told the story again, and once more the cop said, “She's probably visiting a friend.” He looked at me and added, “Outside the building. Maybe she went with this guy you saw her talking to, in the car.”

“She didn't,” I said desperately. “She came home. We know that, because she brought my school stuff and put it on the table. And it was suppertime. She always cooks supper. And the only time she ever leaves us alone in the apartment is right after school. And not for more than an hour.”

“Who was the man in the car?” Uncle Henry wanted to know.

“I don't know. I never saw him before. And . . .” I hesitated, because I was only guessing, and then I blurted, “I don't think she liked him,
whoever he was. I could tell by her face. He was sort of making her talk to him, driving along beside her so slow, but she would never have gone anywhere with him. Besides, she came home. She brought my stuff.”

The officer closed his notebook and put his pen back in his pocket. “You, sir, you're the boys' uncle?”

“Great-uncle,” Uncle Henry corrected him. “You're going to look for my niece, aren't you? Rick is right. This isn't like Sophie. She wouldn't go off and leave her kids alone.”

“Well, if she doesn't show up in the morning, I'd suggest you come down to headquarters and file a missing-persons report. She probably went off on her own, and she'll come back when she's ready.”

My eyes stung. It wasn't true. Ma would never have gone off and left us.

And then I remembered. Pa had.