The Silver Star (3 page)

Liz read it first, then handed it to me and went to sit in the butterfly chair at the picture window.

I joined Liz at the window and she squeezed my hand.

“Is she coming back?” I asked.

“Of course,” Liz said.

“But when? She didn’t say when.”

“I don’t think she knows.”

Two hundred dollars buys you a lot of chicken potpies. We got them at Spinelli’s grocery, over on Balsam Street, an air-conditioned place with a wood floor and a big
freezer in the back where the pies were stored. Mr. Spinelli, a dark-eyed man with hairy forearms who was always flirting with Mom, sometimes put them on sale. When he did, we could get eight for a
dollar, and then we really stocked up.

We ate our pies in the evening at the red Formica table, but we didn’t much feel like playing Chew-and-Spew—or the Lying Game—so after dinner, we just cleaned up, did our
homework, and went to bed. We’d looked after ourselves before when Mom was away, but thinking she might be away for days and days somehow made us take our responsibilities more seriously.
When Mom was home, she sometimes let us stay up late, but without her around, we always went to bed on time. Since she wasn’t there to write excuses, we were never late to school and never
skipped a day, which she sometimes let us do. We never left dirty dishes in the sink, and we flossed our teeth.

Liz had been doing some babysitting, but after Mom had been gone a week, she decided to take on extra work, and I got a job delivering
Grit,
a newspaper with useful stories about, say,
keeping squirrels from eating the wires in your car’s engine by putting mothballs in an old pair of panty hose and hanging them under the hood. For the time being, money wasn’t a
problem, and while the bills were piling up, Mom was always late paying them anyway. Still, we knew we couldn’t live this way forever, and every day, turning down the block on the way home
from school, I looked up the driveway, hoping to see the brown Dart parked beside the bungalow.

One day after Mom had been gone almost two weeks, I went to Spinelli’s after school to stock up on chicken potpies. I thought I’d never get tired of chicken
potpies, but I had to admit they were sort of wearing on me, particularly because we’d been eating them for breakfast, too. A couple of times, we bought beef potpies, but they were hardly
ever on sale, and Liz said you needed a magnifying glass to see the meat.

Mr. Spinelli had a grill behind the counter where he made hamburgers and hot dogs, wrapping them in tinfoil and keeping them under the red warming light, which steamed the buns until they were
nice and soggy. They sure smelled good, but they were beyond our budget. I loaded up on more chicken potpies.

“Haven’t seen your mom in a while, Miss Bean,” Mr. Spinelli said. “What’s she been up to?”

I froze up, then said, “She broke her leg.”

“That’s a shame,” he said. “Tell you what. Get yourself an icecream sandwich. On me.”

That night Liz and I were doing our homework at the Formica table when there was a knock at the door. Liz opened it, and Mr. Spinelli stood outside, holding a brown paper bag with a loaf of
bread sticking out the top.

“This is for your mother,” he said. “I came to see how she’s doing.”

“She’s not here,” Liz said. “She’s in Los Angeles.”

“Bean said she broke her leg.”

Liz and Mr. Spinelli looked over at me, and I started glancing around, avoiding their eyes, acting, I knew, about as guilty as the hound dog who stole the hambone.

“She broke her leg in Los Angeles,” Liz said smoothly. She was always quick on her feet. “But it’s not serious. A friend’s bringing her back in a few
days.”

“Good,” Mr. Spinelli said. “I’ll come see her then.” He held out the groceries to Liz. “Here, you take these.”

“What are we going to do now?” I asked Liz once Mr. Spinelli had left.

“I’m thinking,” Liz said.

“Is Mr. Spinelli going to send the bandersnatches after us?”

“He might.”

“Bandersnatches” was the word Liz took from
Through the Looking Glass
—her favorite book—for the do-gooding government busybodies who snooped around making sure
that kids had the sort of families the busybodies thought they should have. Last year in Pasadena, a few months before we moved to Lost Lake, a bandersnatch had come poking around when the school
principal got the idea that Mom was negligent in her parenting after I told a teacher our electricity got turned off because Mom forgot to pay the bill. Mom hit the ceiling. She said the principal
was just another meddling do-gooder, and she warned us never to discuss our home life at school.

If the bandersnatches did come after us, Liz said, they might put the two of us in a foster home or juvenile delinquent center. They might separate us. They might throw Mom in jail for
abandoning her kids. Mom hadn’t abandoned us, she just needed a little break. We could handle the situation fine if the bandersnatches would only leave us alone. It was their meddling that
would create the problems.

“But I’ve been thinking,” Liz said. “If we have to, we can go to Virginia.”

Mom had come from a small town in Virginia called Byler, where her father had owned a cotton mill that made stuff like towels, socks, and underwear. Mom’s brother, our Uncle Tinsley, had
sold the mill a few years ago, but he still lived in Byler with his wife, Martha, in a big old house called Mayfield. Mom had grown up in the house but had left twelve years ago, when she was
twenty-three, driving off that night with me on the roof. She hadn’t had much to do with her family since she left, not returning even when her parents died, but we knew Uncle Tinsley still
lived at Mayfield because from time to time Mom complained it was unfair that he’d inherited it just because he was older and a guy. It would be hers if anything ever happened to Uncle
Tinsley, and she’d sell it in a heartbeat, because the place had nothing but bad memories for her.

Since I was only a few months old when we left, I didn’t remember either Mayfield or Mom’s family. Liz had some memories, and they weren’t bad at all. In fact, they were sort
of magical. She remembered a white house on a hill surrounded by huge trees and bright flowers. She remembered Aunt Martha and Uncle Tinsley playing duets on a grand piano in a room with French
doors that were opened to the sun. Uncle Tinsley was a tall, laughing man who held her hands while he swung her around and lifted her up to pick peaches from a tree.

“How are we going to get there?” I asked.

“We’ll take the bus.” Liz had called the depot to find out about the fares to Virginia. They weren’t cheap, she said, but we had enough money for two cross-country
tickets. “If it comes to that,” she added.

The next day, when I turned down the block on my way home from school, I saw a squad car parked outside the bungalow. A policeman in a blue uniform was cupping his hands around
his eyes and peering through the picture window. That Mr. Spinelli had ratted us out after all. Trying to think what Liz would do in the same situation, I slapped my head to show anyone who
happened to be watching that I had forgotten something. “I left my homework in my desk!” I cried out for good measure, turned around, and headed back up the block.

I was waiting outside the high school when Liz came down the steps. “What are you so bug-eyed about?” she asked.

“Cops,” I whispered.

Liz pulled me away from the other students streaming past, and I told her about the policeman peering through the window.

“That’s it,” Liz said. “Beaner, we’re going to Virginia.”

Liz always carried our money under the lining in her shoe, so we went straight to the bus depot. Since the school year was almost over, Liz said, none of our teachers would miss us. After all,
we’d shown up in the middle of the year. Also, it was high picking season for strawberries, apricots, and peaches, and the teachers were used to the way the migrant families were always
coming and going at harvest time.

I stayed outside the depot, studying the silver sign of the running greyhound on the roof, while Liz bought the tickets. It was early June, the streets were quiet, and the sky was pure
California blue. After a couple of minutes, Liz came back out. We’d been afraid that the clerk might raise questions about a kid buying tickets, but Liz said the woman had slid them across
the counter without batting an eye. Some grown-ups, at least, knew how to mind their own business.

The bus left at six forty-five the following morning. “Shouldn’t we call Uncle Tinsley?” I asked.

“I think it’s better if we just show up,” Liz said. “That way, he can’t say no.”

That night, after finishing off our chicken potpies, Liz and I got out the suitcases left from what Mom called her deb days. They were a matching set in a sort of tweedy tan
with dark brown crocodile trim and straps, and brass hinges and locks. They were monogrammed with Mom’s initials: CAH, for Charlotte Anne Holladay.

“What should we take?” I asked.

“Clothes but no stuff,” Liz said.

“What about Fido?”

“Leave him here,” Liz said, “with extra food and water. He’ll be fine until Mom comes back.”

“What if Mom doesn’t come back?”

“She’ll be back. She’s not abandoning us.”

“And I don’t want to abandon Fido.”

What could Liz say to that? She sighed and shook her head. Fido was coming to Virginia.

Packing those deb-days suitcases got me to thinking about all the other times we’d picked up and moved on short notice. That was what Mom did whenever she got fed up with
the way things were going. “We’re in a rut,” she’d announce, or “This town is full of losers,” or “The air has gone stale here,” or
“We’ve hit a dead end.” Sometimes it was arguments with neighbors, sometimes it was boyfriends who took a powder. Sometimes the place we’d moved to didn’t meet her
expectations, and sometimes she simply seemed to get bored with her own life. Whatever the case, she would announce that it was time for a fresh start.

Over the years, we’d moved to Venice Beach, Taos, San Jose, Tucson, plus these smaller places most folks had never heard of, like Bisbee and Lost Lake. Before moving to Pasadena,
we’d moved to Seattle because Mom thought that living on a houseboat on the Sound would get her creative juices flowing. Once we got there, we discovered that houseboats were more expensive
than you’d think, and we ended up in a moldy apartment with Mom constantly complaining about the rain. Three months later we were gone.

While Liz and I had been on our own plenty of times, we’d never taken a trip without Mom. That didn’t seem like such a big deal, but I kept wondering what to expect once we got to
Virginia. Mom never had anything good to say about the place. She was always going on about the backward-thinking lintheads who drove cars with duct-taped fenders, and also about the mint-julep set
who lived in the big old houses, selling off ancestor portraits to pay their taxes and feed their foxhounds, all the while reminiscing about the days when the coloreds knew their place. That was a
long time ago, when Mom was growing up. Things had changed a lot since then, and I figured Byler must have, too.

After turning off the lights, Liz and I lay side by side. I’d been sharing a bed with Liz for as long as I could remember. It started after we left Virginia when I was a baby, and Mom
found that putting me in with Liz made me stop crying. Later on, we sometimes lived for pretty long stretches in motels with only two beds or in furnished apartments with a pull-down Murphy bed. In
Lost Lake, we shared a bed so small we had to face the same direction, the person behind wrapping her arms around the person in front, because otherwise we’d end up pulling the covers off
each other. If my arm was going numb, I’d gently nudge Liz, even asleep, and we’d both roll over simultaneously. Most kids had their own beds, and some people might have thought
sleeping with your sister was peculiar—not to mention crowded—but I loved it. You never felt lonely at night, and you always had someone to talk to. In fact, that was when you had your
best conversations, lying spoon-style in the dark, talking just above a whisper.

“Do you think we’ll like Virginia?”

I asked. “You’ll like it, Bean.”

“Mom hated it.”

“Mom has found something wrong with every place we’ve ever lived.”

I fell asleep quickly, like I usually did, but even though it was still dark when my eyes popped open, I felt completely awake and charged up, the way you do when you’ve
got to jump out of bed and get cracking because you have a big day ahead with no time to waste.

Liz was up, too. She turned on the light and sat down at the kitchen table. “We have to write Mom a letter,” she said.

While I heated up our chicken potpies and poured out the last of the orange juice, Liz worked on the letter. She said she had to write it in such a way that Mom would understand it but no one
else would.

The letter was classic Liz.