What Happened on Fox Street (3 page)

“B
UT YOU KEPT YOUR FINGERS CROSSED
, right?” Mo demanded.

“Of course! What kind of traitor do you think I am?”

“So it doesn't count!”

Mercedes threw her hands over her eyes as if she couldn't bear looking at Mo a second longer. “You insist on searching for a bright side, no matter what.”

Mo shrank back like a poked pill bug. “Something wrong with that?”

“You don't get it!” Exasperation zapped Mercedes's voice. “Sometimes there
is
no bright side. Okay? Da's
getting old! Understand? She's only got six toes.”

“But…but she gets around fine on those…” “Stumps” stuck in Mo's throat.

“Sugar's a treacherous disease,” Mercedes lectured. “You can lose your leg if you're not careful.”

A bad taste rose in the back of Mo's mouth. A taste that, if it had a color, would be greenish black.

“Monette says Da shouldn't be on her own anymore. Her pension's not big, and she's got too much to worry about between her health and taking care of the house.” Mercedes waved her hands in the air. “Not that I agree, but my bedroom? Monster water stains down the walls. It even kind of…smells. You know how Da is about cleanliness! That leak in her roof must have gotten bigger. If it rains…”

“It's not going to,” the Wild Child said soothingly. “Daddy says it's a freaking trout.”

“Drought!”

Mercedes sank her poor head into her hands. “It feels like everything's falling apart here.”

“Feels!”
Mo was on her feet. “Another measly word, just like ‘looks'! Nothing to do with the real, actual truth!”

“Go ahead,” said Mercedes from behind her hands. “Philosophize away. Be my guest.”

“Let me think.”

Mo concentrated. She fed a chip crumb to a passing ant, who immediately began dragging it home to share.
Share
. A meteor shower lit up her mind.

“Your mom can move up here!” Mo cried. “Three-C's got oodles of money—let him fix up Da's house. He's a lawyer—he can get a job here easy. And your mom can go to Cleveland State, and we'll all live here together. You and I will be in the same class at school!” Shooting stars,
zing, zing!
“Just like we always wished, Merce! Sleepovers every weekend! You and me, twenty-four seven! It's been nice to know you, Greyhound bus!”

Dottie bent her knees and pretended to stir a big pot. “The dance of victory!” she proclaimed.

But Mercedes shook her head. “Don't you think I already tried that?”

The stars began to fade.

“Monette will never come back. She said good-bye to Fox Street because she'd made a mistake—namely, getting pregnant with me.”

“That doesn't make any sense,” Mo protested. “Nobody thinks you're a mistake. Not anymore.”

Mercedes smiled. “Thanks, Mo.”

“It's true! Why does Monette have to be like that? It's too dumb!”

“When she lived here, everybody was so proud of her. After they got over their witless shock at a black family moving onto the street, everybody acknowledged she was brilliant, and stellar, and so excellent at so many things—”

“Like you.”

Mercedes smiled again. Mo knew all the stories about Monette—how people predicted she'd go to Harvard, or Hollywood, or who knows.

“Everyone pinned their hopes on her,” Mercedes went on. “Well, maybe not Starchbutt. As if she counts.” Mercedes bit her lip. “I'd run out of fingers and toes if I tried to count the number of times circumstances have gotten really, really low and I said, ‘You know, Monette, we could always move back in with Da.' She always tells me, ‘No, we can't. Retreating to Fox Street would be a giant step backward.'”

“I can walk backward. Want to see?” Dottie demonstrated.

Heavyhearted, Mo closed the toolbox and snapped shut the combination lock. They trudged back up the hill. On Fox Street, Ms. Hugg, the piano teacher, perched on her pink steps, painting her
toenails the same purple as the streak in her hair. The younger Baggott boys were tearing around the A.O.L. (Absolutely Off Limits) House, machine gunning one another with sticks. As the girls approached, Pi Baggott executed a perfect 180 across the Crater.

“That was for your benefit, Mo,” said Mercedes, striding on. “That boy is stupefied with love.”

Mo tripped over her own feet.

“Shows what you know, Mercedes Walcott.”

“Unless he's stupefied, period.”

“All he loves is his skateboard!”

“A blind man could see it.”

Mo snuck a glance over her shoulder. Pi stood on the edge of the pothole, and when their eyes met, his lips curved. Those lips! They were the one soft thing in that long skinny face. It was as if Pi Baggott had another, gentler side he couldn't manage to keep secret.

Not that Mo liked secrets.

Up on Mrs. Petrone's porch, the hair trimmer hummed like a bee in your worst nightmare. Mrs. P was giving her boy Nickie his summer buzz cut and waved as they went by.

“Welcome home, Mercedes! Nice hairstyle!”

By now Mercedes's long legs had carried her far ahead of Mo, and she wasn't slowing down. Mo
fixed her eyes on her friend's arrow-straight spine. Mercedes was no traitor—she was caught between a rock and a hard place, that was all. Mo dug her fists into the pockets of her shorts. There could be absolutely, positively, without a shadow of a doubt, no question where Mercedes's loyalty lay.

Fox Street without Da and Mercedes? The only thing harder to imagine was Fox Street without the Wrens.

T
HE WATER MAIN BREAK
turned out to be a lollapalooza. Mr. Wren still wasn't home by ten that night, so Mo had to let her sister climb in bed with her, which was the only way she'd ever go to sleep. After her bath Dot smelled truly, purely sweet, not her usual artificial-flavoring sweet. Mo had the window open, and that sweetness mingled with the fragrance of Mrs. Steinbott's roses, perfuming the room.

But Mo did not sleep well. She dreamed of a family of foxes in grave danger. Something large and formless stalked them—no sooner did they settle down in their cozy den than they had to flee for their lives,
threading between the dark trees, hunting for a safer place. The mother fox stayed far ahead, running so fast the kits kept losing sight of her and the father—where was he? He'd disappeared,
poof!
The small foxes huddled, unsure which way to go.

Her pounding heart woke her. Her sister lay with her arms flung up over her head as if she'd been dropped from the sky. Outside it was middle-of-the night quiet. Mo ran down the hall.

Her father's bed was empty.

She ran down the stairs, stepping on the beer bottle Dottie had left on the bottom step so someone could break their neck. Mo landed on all fours, her heart in her mouth. She stumbled into the living room.

There he was. On the couch, sound asleep, still wearing his water department uniform. A streak of mud shot across his forehead like a comet.

Mo cupped a hand over her sprinting heart.
Home
. He'd always come home. Always be there. He'd promised her, a hundred times. A thousand times.

Gently, she tugged off his work boots. How heavy they were, soles and laces caked with yellow clay. Mr. Wren stirred, then began to snore with a little
putt-putt
noise, like a boat on a calm sea. Mo went back to bed, and this time she fell sound asleep.

 

Sundays were quiet on Fox Street. Mercedes had to spend most of the day at church with Da, who couldn't wait to show her off. When Mr. Wren finally got up, he was very grumpy, but Mo talked him into cooking them what he called a restaurant breakfast—eggs, home fries, bacon, a stack of toast drenched in butter. When he owned his own place, breakfast would be on the menu all day long. Afterward he and Mo went out into the backyard to throw the ball around. But the yard was small, and the plum tree got in the way, and though she wanted to keep his spirits up, Mo found playing catch boring. She wasn't sorry when he said he thought he'd join a pickup game over by the middle school, and that Mo and Dottie should meet him at the Tortilla Feliz, up on Paradise, later. They'd get a table out back and order their favorite, the Burro Burrito.

So Mo unkinked the green hose and gave the plum tree a hearty drink. A shiny-winged blackbird, high in its branches, eyed her with approval. Then Mo settled on the front steps while Dottie crouched in the dirt beneath the bushes and held a funeral for a housefly. Mo watched Mrs. Baggott push Baby Baggott in the stroller and wondered how it could be
that Mrs. Baggott's flip-flops only went
flop
, not
flip
. Mr. Duong mended a bicycle on his front lawn. The summer sun ricocheted off the roofs of the parked cars and winked in the diamond-paned windows of Da's yellow house. Mrs. Steinbott was clipping the grass around her roses.
Snipsnipsnip,
rhythmic as a heart's beat.

This was the spot where Mo's mother would sit, waiting for Mo to come home from school. As soon as she turned the corner and passed the Kowalskis' hedge, she'd spy her mother's wild, rusty red hair and start to run. In those days, her backpack held maybe one piece of paper and her crayons. It was empty and light. A little kid's burden.

The Kowalskis had moved away a long time ago. The people who lived there now worked the night shift somewhere and slept all day, and nobody ever saw them. Their front windows still said
MERRY XMAS
in spray-on snow.

“I now pronounce you dead,” said Dottie, smoothing the dirt and sprinkling it with dandelions. “Rest in peas, almonds.”

Mo flattened her hands on the warm wooden step. The sun was sliding down the sky. A ray slanted onto Mrs. Steinbott's clippers and made them gleam.
Clipclipclip.
Everything's going to be okay, Mo told herself. Things will all work out.

Still, she wished she didn't feel so alone. What she needed was a sign. Something real, with a weight she could feel in her hand. Something to anchor her the way, when you did a headstand or a cartwheel, you found a spot on the wall to focus your eyes, so you could keep up, up and down, down.

T
HE VERY NEXT DAY,
the Wrens received the Letter. Bernard, the mailman, a handsome older man with dreads, delivered it. It was the kind of official mail requiring a signature, and he let Mo sign, since Mr. Wren was at work.

No sooner had she read it than like a pebble from a slingshot, she was across the street and up on Da's porch, where Mercedes sat fanning herself.

“Read this!” Mo commanded.

Mercedes laid down the paper fan, which advertised Mrs. Petrone's funeral parlor.
O GRAVE, WHERE IS THY VICTORY?
it asked.

“Let me take a moment to introduce myself,” Mercedes read aloud. “My name is Robert J. Buckman, and it is my understanding that your property on Fox Street may be available for purchase…midst the current economic turmoil, when real estate is so difficult to sell…” Mercedes was a speed reader. Her eyes flew down the page faster than her mouth could keep up. “Prepared to make a generous offer…”

“I don't get it.”

“…in a position to buy your property in as-is condition…” Mercedes narrowed her eyes. “…can close the sale quickly…am prepared to pay one hundred percent cash…”

“I don't get it.”

“Unfortunately, I do.” Mercedes tossed the letter aside. “One time, a landlord sold our place right out from under us. Monette and I were out on the street”—she snapped her fingers—“just like that.”

The normally cool porch grew hotter by the second. Mo's mouth was Sahara dry.

“I don't get it,” she rasped, as if saying the same thing three times might break the evil spell.

“A neighborhood goes downhill, and some sleazoid sees his chance to make money.” Mercedes started fanning herself like someone single-handedly trying
to extinguish a forest fire. “He buys up houses for next to nothing, throws a little paint on them, then resells them for a profit.”

“But…but why would he send it to my dad? Of all people?”

Mercedes stopped her fanning. She studied Mo. “You might want to ask
him
that question.”

Mo did not care for the tone of her best friend's voice. She snatched the letter back and reread it. Phrases like “generous offer” and “one hundred percent cash” leaped out like neon signs.

“If my father saw this, that scum-bucket Buckman would be history!” She crumpled the letter in her fist.

Just then Da shuffled out onto the porch, leaning on her cane, a three-pronged contraption that looked designed to support a light or a fan, not a human being. Mercedes hustled to put a pillow behind her and drag over a stool for her feet. When Da plopped down with a small grunt, Mo worked hard not to picture what was inside those shoes.

“Mo Wren! There is no music in the nightingale. Why do you look so upset?”

“I'm not!” Mo shot Mercedes a look that said, No need to worry Da, right?

“We feared a lethal gas attack,” Mercedes replied,
cool as can be. “But it was only dear sweet Mrs. Steinbott.”

Three heads swiveled to look across the street, where Mrs. Steinbott was spraying her roses from a yellow canister that was nearly as big as she was.

“Those poor bugs.” Da gave her head a small shake. “They don't stand a chance.”

“Me either,” Mercedes said. “Every time I pass her house, I feel her watching me. It creeps me out. I feel like she's counting the hairs on my head. I mean, if there were any hairs.”

“Don't be silly.” But Da, who'd always taught them how rude it was to stare, in turn regarded Mrs. Steinbott for a long time.

“When Mr. Walcott and I first moved here,” she said at last, “Gertrude and I used to sweep our sidewalks every evening. Now, being the first people of color, we Walcotts weren't particularly welcomed. That, my children, is what you call an understatement.”

Under normal circumstances, there was nothing Mo loved better than sitting on this porch listening to Da's tales about the old days on Fox Street. Da was big on history. “If you don't know where you're going,” she liked to lecture, “you'd best know where you're coming from.” Not that Mo planned on going
anywhere. Da's Fox Street tales were her tales, too. Sitting on this cool, creaky porch, she loved slipping back to the time when Fox Street was paved with bricks, and the neighborhood was so young, someone else lived in the Wren house. The thought of that made her brain cartwheel.

Now a completely new and previously unthought thought gripped Mo. A thought that was terrible and yet so obvious, so undeniable, it yanked her upright in her chair.

If someone had lived in the Wren house before them, someone else could live there after them.

“Gertrude and I would be out there wielding our brooms, and she wouldn't so much as look at me. Mr. Walcott and I were going to be the ruination of the neighborhood, after all! A month went by, and then another, and by then Mr. Walcott and his green thumb had transformed this front yard into the neighborhood Garden of Eden.” She raised her eyes to heaven. “Forgive me, James, for the sorry condition it's in now.” Taking the fan from Mercedes, she waved it slowly, wafting memories around.

“By then, all the other neighbors were dropping by to borrow a rake, or investigate that good smell coming from my kitchen, or ask how in the world had I
taught Monette to read when she was only three. But not Gertrude. Tidy as she was, with all her life arranged in nice, orderly columns, it seems she couldn't figure out where to classify us Walcotts. So there the two of us were, night after night, keeping to our own sides of Fox Street, for all the world as if we lived on the banks of a crocodile-infested river. Well. One night, didn't she up and nod. And the next, go so far as to call out good evening. Finally Gertrude actually crossed Fox Street to inform me boiling water poured in the sidewalk cracks would kill the ants. It was the first and last complete sentence I ever heard the woman speak.”

Da rearranged her toe coffins. Her look grew faintly puzzled, as if a student had written her a good essay but left off the last lines.

“Neither one of us is the warm fuzzy kind,” Da said. “There was never a chance we'd be best friends.”

Across the street, Mrs. Steinbott thumped her big yellow canister down on the porch.

“I'll never forget the night I went upstairs and found that devil Monette luxuriating in a rose-petal bath, like a princess in one of those fairy tales she loved. The perfume about knocked me over!
She'd snipped off an armload of Gertrude's American Beautys and carried them home. I chased her, naked as a jaybird, all around the house.” Da's fan paddled the air. “When she told me Gertrude's son, Walter, egged her on and told her to take as many flowers as she wanted, I had to scold her all over again. I knew Gertrude didn't like those two playing together.”

All at once, she'd commanded Mo's attention.

“Mrs. Steinbott had a son?”

Da raised her eyebrows. “Why, I'm disappointed in you, Mo Wren. I thought you were the historian of Fox Street!”

“I know she had a husband. Who got killed in some kind of terrible accident at some kind of factory.” Fell into a vat of boiling sauce at the Chef Boyardee tomato sauce plant. Or doused in molten ore at Republic Steel. Or, if you asked the Baggott boys, it was no accident at all—he was poisoned at his own dinner table, a pinch of arsenic in his mashed potatoes every night, till he keeled over onto the floor and she collected his million-dollar life insurance policy.

“In fact,” said Da, “it was a car accident.”

Mo sank back in her chair.

“Overnight she became a widow alone with a baby
boy. Walter Henry Junior. His eyes were like little chips of sky. Next to Monette, he was the smartest child on the street.”

Da chuckled, but then her fanning slowed. Across the street, Starchbutt had sat down in one of her porch chairs and folded her hands in her lap. She couldn't possibly hear what Da was saying, yet she stared as if mesmerized. As if she couldn't wait to hear the end of the story, either.

“After her husband died, Gertrude started getting seriously peculiar. People stayed away from her.” Da raised her fan like she wished she had something to swat. “Walter Junior was such a good son! I can't tell you how many black eyes and bloody noses that boy endured, sticking up for his mother when other kids made fun of her.”

“But…how come her son never visits Starch…Mrs. Steinbott?”

“He joined the military directly out of high school.” Da pressed
O GRAVE, WHERE IS THY VICTORY?
to her heart. “He wasn't there but two months before he was killed in a training exercise. Lord give me strength.”

Mo collapsed back in her chair. Unpleasant revelations were coming at her one right after another, like a nest of yellow jackets run over by a lawn mower.

“Gertrude's hair turned pure white overnight. She took to that house and barely came out for a year.” Da rested the fan in her lap. “That was the year you were born, Mercedes Jasmine. I remember—this is how selfish your Da is. I remember being relieved not to have to see her. I was so happy while she was sunk in grief.”

The side door of the Wren house banged, and out zoomed Dottie, clutching a beer bottle in either hand.

“That child's wild as my Monette!” Da clapped a hand over her mouth, but her smile crept out around the edges as Dottie dashed across Mrs. Steinbott's grass (strictly forbidden) and buried her face in a fat yellow rose (penalty of death). “I'll never forget it. The very day after Monette's rose-petal bath, Mr. Walcott planted Gertrude three new bushes. A Martha Washington, a Dinah Shore, and a Purple Contessa.” Da nodded. “If I'm not mistaken, we're looking at them right now.”

Dottie zigzagged across the street to pick up a cookie at Mrs. Petrone's, then shot out between the parked cars to cross the street again and disappear up the driveway of the A.O.L. House.

“She knows that house is Absolutely Off Limits!”
Mo jumped up. “I gotta go.”

“Yes, you may be excused, Mo Wren. But first, answer me this simple question.” Attach Da's eyeballs to a drill and Mo would have a hole in her forehead, pronto. “When do you plan to teach that child to look both ways before she crosses?”

“I…I…” Mo swallowed. “I tried.”

“Tried's not good enough!” Da thundered. “You know how those drunk drivers come roaring down this street. Dead end or no. It's not safe!”

“You don't need to tell me that, Da!” The words exploded out of Mo. “I already know!”

You didn't talk to Da that way. Not if you had the sense a goose did. But Mercedes's grandmother didn't scold. Instead she let silence pool there on the porch. She gazed at her toe coffins propped up on the stool. At last she spoke.

“You do your best and then some, Mo. Lord knows what would have become of that handsome, foolish father of yours without your help!” Her hands fumbled with the fan. With a sorry little shock, Mo realized it was true: Da still wasn't strong, and maybe never would be again.

“But I worry about that sister of yours!” Her voice was too small. “Every last one of us does. If anything
ever happened to her, well, I can't even think.” She touched her throat.

“Nothing's going to happen to her.” Mo cupped Da's shoulder. “I give you my pledge. I swear it on a mountain of Bibles. Don't even
think
it, Da!” She swallowed. “Don't think too much, okay?”

“Excuse me.” Mercedes's face was pale. “But I refuse to sit here one more second.” She jumped up. “Talk about manners—when's she going to learn some?”

Mo and Da looked across the street. Starchbutt stared back.

“She looks at me like she wishes I'd disappear! Like I'm some nightmare she can't wake up from.”

“Some people,” Da began, then corrected herself. “All of us have our own way of looking at life. Some like things tidy and predictable—isn't that right, Mo Wren?”

“What?”

Da didn't bother to reprimand her for this breach of manners. “On the other hand, some of us have had too much experience of life's mess to hold with that kind of view. Mercedes, Mo, pay attention now. Every person you pass on the street, or wait behind in a line, or see sitting alone on her porch—every one is summoning up the courage for some battle, whether
you can see it or not. She jests at scars that never felt a wound!”

Even if Mo's head had been clear, she was pretty sure she wouldn't have known what that meant. She edged toward the step.

“I'm far from the best role model,” Da said. “But try to be kind. You never know what you have in common with another person.”

Mercedes gaped. “The only thing she and I have in common is we both suck in oxygen. Unless she runs on poison gas, which wouldn't surprise me.”

Da sat back, looking worn-out. Over her head, Mercedes rolled her eyes at Mo.

“Um, I better go,” Mo said.