Summer of Joy (6 page)

Zella looked up and out the window at her rose garden. Some leaves still clung to the vines, but they were shriveled and brown. After the terrible summer they’d had when the whole town had practically dried up and blown away, they hadn’t put on their usual beautiful fall blooming show. She was worried about them making it through the winter. Her mother had planted most of them, and Zella considered it her duty to keep them alive and healthy.

Just as it had been her duty to find out the truth about Wesley when it looked as if he might really pass on into eternity. His family would have needed to know then. His real family and not just David and Jocelyn who claimed Wesley was the same as family. But now that he didn’t appear to be in any immediate danger of expiring unless he caught his death of something from being so stubborn about being baptized in Redbone River instead of at First Baptist, she wasn’t sure what to do. She started reading again.

I am hoping to make a trip to Hollyhill as soon as I have a break from my studies. Could you send me directions to your house so that I might talk to you about the Wesley Green you know? I wouldn’t want to show up on his doorstep without warning and cause him to have a health relapse of any kind from the surprise. As far as I know, he doesn’t know I exist.

I think this man could really be my grandfather. I don’t know why. I’m sure there are many Wesley Greens in this world, but I have a feeling about the Wesley Green in your town. I am very anxious to find out if that feeling turns out to be correct. Please respond to my letter at your earliest convenience.

Respectfully yours,

Robert Wesley Green II

Zella folded the letter and stuck it back in the envelope. The boy had even sent a self-addressed stamped envelope. As if she wouldn’t answer if she had to buy her own stamp. She didn’t know why he thought that. She’d bought the first stamp that had plummeted her into this dilemma.

Zella put on her slightly damp shoes and got her coat out of the closet. She’d think about writing him when she got home from church. She could tell him to wait a few more months while she found a way to tell Wesley about him. She could say that the shock might be too much for Wesley if she didn’t have time to properly prepare him, and that it could be she’d made a terrible mistake and this Wesley Green wasn’t the boy’s grandfather at all.

But that wouldn’t be true. The boy had sent a school picture along with his letter. No mistake about it. Wesley’s eyes had stared out of the photograph at her. Younger, happier eyes, but Wesley’s eyes nevertheless.

As she went out the door, she was glad she’d gone to see David baptize Wesley even if it did mean she’d have to buy new shoes months before she might have had to do normally. Wesley was a Christian now. She’d seen proof of it. And Christians had to forgive one another.

Not that she had done anything that needed all that much forgiveness. She’d just done what needed to be done. What Wesley should have done himself years ago. And she’d tell him so just as soon as she figured out how.

7

B
ut why does everything always have to be the same every year?” Jocie asked Wes on Monday afternoon as they blocked out the ads for that week’s
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issue. “Even these ads. Same every week. Why even bother with ads if everything’s going to be the same? Everybody already knows a loaf of bread costs twenty-nine cents.”

Wes looked up from the composing table. “But it’s not twenty-nine cents this week. It’s four loaves for a dollar.”

“Four cents. Whoopee!”

“A penny saved is a penny earned,” Wes said.

“You sound like Aunt Love.”

“That’s not in the Bible, is it?” Wes looked up at her with a little frown. “I thought old Abe or maybe Ben Franklin said that.”

“I didn’t say it was in the Bible. Aunt Love quotes stuff besides Bible verses sometimes. She’s been doing that ‘penny saved, penny earned’ a bunch lately since the refrigerator died on us and
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sales have been down. Do you really believe it’s because of Stephen Lee, like Zella says? Not the refrigerator but people canceling their subscriptions.”

Wes made a clicking noise out of the side of his mouth before he said, “Hard to believe for sure, but then old Zell usually has a finger on the pulse of what’s happening in Hollyhill.”

“But that’s just so silly.” Jocie stepped back from the composing table and threw out her hands. “Daddy didn’t have anything to do with Tabitha falling in love with that guy out in California or at least thinking she was in love with him. She says now that she must not have known what real love was and now she probably never will.”

“Why’s that?” Wes turned to look at her. He leaned back against the table and waited for her to answer.

“Because of Stephen Lee, she says.”

“Poor little tyke. He seems to be getting blamed for a lot not to be no bigger than he is. How old is he now?”

“Three months this weekend. He’s trying to turn over. We can’t lay him on the couch anymore. He might just plop right off on the floor if somebody isn’t holding on to him.” Jocie almost smiled thinking about Stephen Lee.

“How about that? Next thing you know he’ll be crawling.” Wes did smile with a little shake of his head. “He seems a happy little fellow every time I see him. Chewing on his fingers and drooling all over himself. I guess he doesn’t know he’s causing problems all around.”

“He’s just a baby. It’s everybody else that has the problem.” Jocie frowned and sat down on a pile of newsprint paper. “I mean, even as much as they act like they love him out at church, I thought some of them were going to faint when I suggested he could be baby Jesus in the Christmas manger scene. Just because they’d never used a real baby before didn’t mean they couldn’t this year. The doll they have doesn’t even look real.”

“Could be they thought a baby might be too real. Afraid he might exercise his lungs at the wrong time.”

“Yeah, well, I still thought it was a good idea even if Aunt Love says nobody, not even an innocent little baby, can play Jesus. It looks like we could do something different. Anything different.”

“You aren’t paying attention if you don’t think anything’s different out there, Jo. Your daddy preaching every Sunday. Me sitting in one of the pews. Myra Hearndon leading the singing. That church out there has been floating on the sea of change for months now.”

“I guess.” Jocie put her elbows on her knees and stared down at the floor. “Maybe it’s just me, Wes. Maybe there’s something wrong with me. Sometimes I feel like I’ve got a bunch of spiders inside me making me feel all jumpy and weird.”

“Spiders, huh?” Wes stepped over closer to her.

“Spiders. Or maybe hummingbirds fluttering their wings.”

“That sounds better than spiders spinning webs on your rib cage. ’Cept for their pointy beaks.”

“I guess.” Jocie didn’t smile.

Wes put his hand on her head for a second. “It’s just an age problem, Jo. All them crawly legs and fluttering wings just mean you’re growing up.”

“Well, I don’t like it. It’s almost Christmas. I’m always happy at Christmas.”

“You’re not happy?” Wes asked. “You could have fooled me yesterday.”

“I was happy yesterday.”

“And you must have prayed the no-pneumonia prayer and the Lord must have heard you, because I’m here without sneeze one and your daddy looked in fine fettle when he left out of here to take his watch to be cleaned.” Wes sat down in his chair and put his foot up on a box.

“That’s good, I guess,” Jocie said.

“Of course it’s good. If your daddy’s watch isn’t working, then we might have to depend on my Jupiter sense of time and never meet the paper deadlines.”

Jocie knew Wes expected her to pick up on the Jupiter talk, that he was probably ready to spin some wild story about how Jupiter days were a year long or something. But instead she just sighed and wished she could open her mouth real wide and let those hummingbirds fly out of her insides so she could go back to being happy all the time. But that was before this year. Before she started high school. Before some of the kids started taunting her because she was friends with Charissa and Noah. Before she had to have Mr. Hammond for her English teacher. Before Charissa had called her moody.

Charissa was supposed to understand. Charissa was a preacher’s kid too. But Charissa didn’t let it bother her when somebody was being mean to her. She just turned her dark brown eyes on whoever was picking on her and stared holes into him until the other kid suddenly remembered he was late for class or whatever. Jocie had tried to do the same thing, had even practiced her glare in the mirror at home, but it never worked for her at school.

Her father had told her to pray about it. To pray every morning before she walked into the school, and she’d done that. Short and to the point prayers.
All right, Lord, I’m going
into the school. If Sammy Sparrow is in the hall, make him trip
on his shoelaces before he can say anything mean to me.

But so far Sammy Sparrow hadn’t tripped on his shoelaces once, even though he never tied his sneakers. She really wasn’t all that worried about Sammy Sparrow and what he said, although it would be great if he fell down so everybody would laugh at him for a change. Still, she could just walk away from Sammy Sparrow and whatever he was saying.

She couldn’t walk away from English class. She had to go in there every day and sit through a whole hour of Mr. Hammond. She’d never had a teacher who didn’t like her. She’d had some who told her she talked too much and that she should pay more attention. But they’d never put her name on their bad list and left it there the way Mr. Hammond was doing. Jocie didn’t just pray before she went into English class. She circled a little prayer constantly inside her head.
Lord, let me be invisible today.

It wasn’t one of the prayers the Lord had decided to answer for her. At least not with a yes answer. Her father said no was an answer too, or not yet, and that they had to trust the Lord to pick the right answer for each of their prayers, even if it wasn’t the answer they wanted.

Jocie wasn’t complaining about that. She’d probably had her share of prayers answered this year already anyway, what with finding Zeb out in the woods to answer her dog prayer and Tabitha coming home from California to answer her sister prayer and Wes throwing away his crutches to answer her let-Wes-walk-again prayer. And that was just a few of the prayers.

When she thought about it, she’d kept the Lord pretty busy all year helping her out of first one mess and then another. So if the Lord decided she should find her own way out of the mess English class had become, then she couldn’t really complain. Not after he’d kept her safe during the tornado and had helped her find a way out of Miss Sally’s burning house.

English class wasn’t going to kill her. It might make her unhappy. No “might” about it. It
was
making her unhappy. But Aunt Love was always telling her that nobody had to be happy all the time. That rain fell in everybody’s life. Something like that was in the Bible somewhere. Of course at the end of last summer everybody had been praying for rain to fall on them in Hollyhill. Everything had been drying up.

But that was the good kind of rain. The rain Aunt Love was talking about was troubles, and there was plenty about troubles in the Bible. Everybody had troubles. Even King David. Jocie’s father had preached on that just a couple of weeks ago. And King David had been a man after the Lord’s own heart. If the Lord let him have troubles, then Jocie shouldn’t expect not to have things go wrong for her now and again. Or lately every day she had to go to school.

Beside her, Wes was being so quiet that Jocie thought maybe he’d dozed off in his chair, but when she peeked up at him, he was just sitting there waiting for her to be ready to talk again. “You think Daddy would let me quit school? Not forever. Just for a few weeks?” she asked.

“It’s not likely,” Wes said. “You want to talk about it? Tell me what the teacher from Neptune did today that’s got you so low?”

Wes always knew. Some kind of invisible thought line ran between them. That’s how Wes had found her when the tornado was coming. That’s why she could talk to Wes about almost anything.

“I guess it really wasn’t all that bad. He just made me stand in front of the class and repeat ten times that I’d quit daydreaming and pay attention.” Jocie’s face felt hot just thinking about it. “I wasn’t daydreaming. I heard every word he said. I just wasn’t looking at him.”

“But that didn’t keep him from seeing you.”

“No.” Jocie looked down at her hands. “Everybody laughed at me. Even Charissa.” After class, Charissa had told Jocie she was sorry, but that it was just so funny she couldn’t help it. Jocie hadn’t cried then. She’d been too mad. But now a few tears pushed out of the corners of her eyes.

“You want me to go to school with you tomorrow and give him a Jupiter sock in the nose?” Wes asked.

“Yes. No. Maybe.” Jocie imagined Wes going into the school and cornering Mr. Hammond in his room and popping the man in the nose. “He wears glasses.”

“I’ll make him take them off,” Wes said.

“He’s bigger than you.”

“That don’t matter to me. No Neptunian could ever hold his own against a Jupiterian.”

Jocie couldn’t keep from smiling. “But you’ve forgotten. You’ve been earthed, remember? And not just that. You’ve joined the church. Become a card-carrying Christian. You have to turn the other cheek now.”

“My cheek. Not yours.”

Jocie got up and hugged Wes. “Thanks, Wes. I’m the luckiest girl in the world to have a granddaddy like you.”

“Yeah. One who can still fight.” He stood up and moved over to shadowbox the press. He stumbled over a pile of papers and almost fell down.

Jocie laughed as she reached out to steady him. “Maybe you better be careful about picking your battles.”

“Okay. So Betsy Lou won that round.” Wes patted the side of the press. “But I’ll win the next one.”

“Shh.” Jocie put her finger against her lips. “She might hear you and throw a cog on purpose, and then we’ll never get the paper out on time.”