Wish (5 page)

But all I did was cry. And then Bertha was kneeling in front of me with her warm hand on my ink-stained arm.

“You are a blessing in this house, Charlie,” she said.

A blessing?

She should've called me mean and hateful and dumb and sorry, but she called me a blessing.

Then Gus stood up and said the perfect Gus thing.

“Let's have some of that blackberry cobbler before supper.”

So that's what we did.

The three of us sat out on the porch as the stars were beginning to twinkle up in the Carolina sky and ate blackberry cobbler before supper. And while Bertha told us about how her friend Racine backed her car into the flagpole at the post office that afternoon and then just drove on off like nothing had even happened, an acorn dropped from the branches of the oak tree hanging over the porch and fell right at my feet.

I nearly spilled my cobbler when I jumped up and grabbed it. I had almost let that day slip by without making my wish, and now here came an acorn like it was dropped right down from heaven. I hesitated, but then I went on and did what I had to do. I turned in a circle three times, clutching that acorn tight and making my wish.

Then I went back to my room and set the acorn on the windowsill. I would leave it there for three days to make sure my wish would be even stronger. That's what my Girl Scout leader in Raleigh told me about acorn wishes, and that could not be a lie because Girl Scout leaders do not lie.

After supper, we had more blackberry cobbler. Gus went out to the garden to make sure the sprinkler was turned off, and Bertha said, “Stay right here, Charlie. I want to show you something.”

She went to her room and came back with a tattered shoebox. She took the lid off and said, “Look.”

I peered inside. Photographs.

Bertha rummaged through them and took one out. She smiled at it and handed it to me.

“Your mama and me,” she said, pointing to the handwriting on the back.
Bertha and Carla
, in big printed letters.

I took the faded photograph from her.

Two young girls sat on the hood of a car with their arms around each other.

“Which one's Mama?” I asked.

Bertha pointed to the smaller girl. I squinted down at her. She was missing her two front teeth and had a Band-Aid on her elbow.

I could not take my eyes off of that girl. I imagined her getting down from that car and skipping in circles. I imagined her singing with her big sister, Bertha, in the backseat of their daddy's car. I imagined her telling knock-knock jokes and roller-skating and eating ice cream on her porch at night.

When had this gap-toothed little girl turned into that sad woman in her dark bedroom in Raleigh?

“Did y'all love each other?” I asked Bertha.

“We sure did.” Then she showed me some more photographs. Mama opening a present beside a Christmas tree. The two of them playing with a puppy in the snow. Bertha pulling Mama in a wagon on a dirt road.

“Why don't y'all see each other anymore?” I said.

Bertha let out a big sigh and shook her head. “We grew up,” she said. “When you grow up, sometimes life gets complicated.”

That wasn't a very good answer, but I could tell it was the only one I was going to get, so I just said, “Oh.”

When Gus came back in from the garden, we went out on the porch. They held hands while Bertha told us about some old man selling moldy strawberries from the back of a truck out on Highway 14. Then she said, “You can call Jackie tomorrow if you want to, Charlie.”

“No, thanks,” I said.

It was so quiet I could hear Bertha breathing. I could feel her looking at me but I stared out at the treetops.

“Charlie,” she said. “Don't be mad at Jackie.”

“I'm not mad at Jackie,” I said, but that lie was like a dark cloud settling over us.

I
was
mad at Jackie. She acted like she didn't have one single trouble hanging on her line and she didn't care one bit about me.

Then we sat there in silence, breathing in the cool night air and listening to the crickets under the porch.

That night when I went to bed, I laid there in the dark and pictured a clothesline full of somebody else's troubles. I knew for sure there were a lot of them I'd rather pluck off of that line than mine. I imagined what the other troubles might be. There would probably be toothaches and failed math tests. Lost cats and ugly hair. Cheating boyfriends and broken-down cars. But none of those could hold a candle to my troubles, weighing down that clothesline like a sack full of bricks.

I tiptoed to the window and stared out into the night, thinking maybe I'd see a falling star to wish on. The moon was bright over the mountains and sent a shimmering glow across the yard, making shadows that snaked around the dogwood tree and crept along the garden fence.

I knew Wishbone was out there somewhere all by himself. I wondered what he was doing. Eating stale bread out of someone's garbage? Trotting along the highway in the moonlight? Sleeping under somebody's porch?

I hoped Gus wasn't right about Wishbone wanting to be a stray. But then I remembered how he had wagged his tail at me that day. He liked me. I was sure of it. And if he was mine and didn't have to be a stray anymore, I bet he would love me.

I clasped my hands together like I was praying and whispered into the darkness, “Please come back, Wishbone.”

 

Eight

On Saturday, Howard was going to help me look for Wishbone, but first I had to go shopping with Bertha.

“I haven't been to Asheville in ages,” she said, getting behind the wheel of Gus's old car. It started with a rumble, sending puffs of black smoke drifting out of the tailpipe and floating over the yard.

As we wound our way down the mountain and onto the highway, Bertha chattered nonstop. She told me about the time she and Gus went camping and a baby bear got into their cooler and stole their hot dogs.

“Can you believe that?” she said. “A bear eating hot dogs!”

She talked about how much she hated snakes, and how when a tiny brown garter snake got in the house once, she stayed with her friend Jonelle for nearly a week until Gus swore on the Bible that it was gone.

And she could hardly stop laughing long enough to tell me about the time some guy named Arthur Kruger got drunk and lost his false teeth at the church picnic.

“I didn't even want to think about where those teeth would turn up,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I didn't eat any more potato salad after that, that's for sure.”

Finally I figured I'd have to interrupt her, so I did.

“But what about you and Mama?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Tell me something about y'all.”

“Oh, well, um, let's see now…”

I waited, watching her face. Seeing her searching for just the right thing to tell me.

“When I was about ten,” she said, “so, let's see, Carla would've been about seven, we spent the whole summer making yarn bracelets to sell so we could buy fish for an aquarium our uncle gave us.”

Yarn bracelets?

I wondered how come Mama never showed me how to make yarn bracelets.

“Then,” Bertha went on, “this mean boy who lived across the street from us threw every one of those bracelets up into the hickory nut tree in our front yard. Way up in the branches so we couldn't get them down.” She shook her head. “Isn't that so mean?”

“What did y'all do?”

“Well, that's why I'm telling this story, 'cause it's just so like Carla,” she said. “She stomped over to that boy and bit him on the hand so hard he hollered like she'd cut his hand off with a butcher knife. Then he ran home crying while she hollered cuss words at him.”

Bertha chuckled. “That girl had some kinda temper,” she said.

A temper?

Maybe I didn't get my temper from Scrappy, after all. Maybe I got my temper from Mama.

I hesitated, but then I decided to just go for it. “How come y'all stopped seeing each other?” I asked, hoping maybe this time she'd give me a better answer than she had before.

Bertha stared out at the road ahead. “Well, you know, when we got to be teenagers we were so busy with this, that, and the other thing. And then she dropped out of high school and the next thing I knew she was hightailing it to Raleigh.”

“But how come y'all never see each other now?”

Bertha pressed her lips together and shot me a look out of the corner of her eye. “It's kind of complicated, Charlie,” she said.

There it was again. Another not-very-good answer.

So we drove on in silence until we got to Asheville. At the mall, I couldn't help but think about Jackie. She and I used to spend all day at the mall, wandering from store to store trying on crop tops and miniskirts that we were never allowed to have. Picking out earrings we would buy if our ears were pierced. Spritzing fancy perfume on each other from the samples at the cosmetics counter.

“Let's go to Sears and look for Sunday school dresses,” Bertha said.

So we shopped all morning, and by the time we headed back to Colby, I had two new dresses and a lavender cardigan sweater. Bertha thought one of the dresses might be too short for church but she bought it anyway.

When we got home, Howard was sitting in a lawn chair by the garden watching Gus doing some repairs to the fence.

“Hey, there!” Bertha called.

Howard walked his up-down walk over to the car as I was getting my shopping bags out of the backseat.

“Hey,” he said to Bertha. Then he turned to me and said, “I drew a map.”

“What for?”

“To help us look for Wishbone.” He took a piece of folded-up notebook paper out of his pocket to show me. “I figured we could mark the places we look and it will help us keep track.”

I shrugged. “Okay.”

Bertha reached for the shopping bags. “I'll take those inside,” she said.

Then me and Howard headed off toward the road, peering into tangled shrubs and squinting into the dark woods along the way. Howard thought we should check the path where we had seen him yesterday.

“I bet he hangs out there a lot,” he said.

“Maybe.” I pushed some tall weeds aside and jumped over the shallow ditch that ran along the edge of the road. “But Gus said he's liable to be anywhere,” I added.

We looked and looked, climbing over fallen trees and pushing through prickly vines. But after a while, we were hot and tired and hadn't seen a single sign of Wishbone. So Howard whipped out his map and a stubby pencil and marked the places we had looked, and we decided to call it a day.

The next day, I marched into Sunday school in my new dress and plopped right down next to Audrey. I said, “Hey,” but she acted like I was invisible. I guess she forgot I was part of her church family.

First, we had to play that Bible Detective game again, and Howard added to his collection of Bible bucks. I couldn't get over all the stuff he knew about the Bible.

What was Moses's brother's name?

How many times a day did ravens bring food to Elijah?

Audrey waved her hand almost as much as Howard did, jangling her bracelets and going, “I know! I know!”

After that, Mrs. Mackey told us we were going to decorate the bulletin board in the fellowship hall and it would be called
Our Garden of Blessings
.

“We'll be making a garden of flowers to show our many blessings,” she said. Then she explained that we would make construction paper flowers and write one of our many blessings on each one.

I confess I wasn't too clear exactly what that meant, but I followed everybody else and got colored paper and glue and scissors. I worked real slow, hoping I could see what somebody else was doing. Sure enough, Audrey finished her first flower, a big yellow daisy. Then she used a blue crayon to write on one of the petals: “My family.”

My stomach squeezed up and my face felt hot. I put my hands in my lap so nobody could see them shaking.

That yellow daisy laid there on the table in front of me reminding me that I did not belong here. Letting me know that even though I was here in church in my new dress, I did not have a blessing.

“May I be excused?” I said to Mrs. Mackey. But I didn't even wait for her to answer. I hurried out of that room and went outside to the parking lot.

But before I had time to start feeling sorry for myself, something good happened. I saw a red bird. A big, bright cardinal on the telephone line across the street. I closed my eyes, spit three times, and made my wish.

 

Nine

“Come to my house after school tomorrow,” Howard said on the bus the next morning. “I have a plan.”

“What kind of plan?” I asked.

“A plan for catching that dog.”

“Wishbone,” I said. “His name is Wishbone.”

Howard took a bite of the toast he had brought on the bus with him. “Whatever,” he said. “We still need a better plan than a map.”

“I don't see why we can't—” I sat up and grabbed Howard's knee. “Don't move,” I said.

His eyes got wide. “What's wrong?”

“Take off your glasses,” I said. “Real slow.”

“Why?”

“Just do it,” I snapped, a little louder than I'd meant to.

He took his glasses off and then squinted over at me.

“There's an eyelash right there,” I said, pointing to one of the thick lenses. “I need it.”

“Why?”

“To make a wish.”

“A wish?”

“If you blow on an eyelash, you get to make a wish.” I took the glasses from him and pressed my finger on the lens. Then I held it up so Howard could see the tiny, reddish eyelash. “See?” I said.

Then I closed my eyes, made my wish, and blew, sending that eyelash out into the air where it disappeared, probably settling on the floor with clumps of dirt and chewed gum and trampled spelling tests.