Greetings from Nowhere (14 page)

Read Greetings from Nowhere Online

Authors: Barbara O'Connor

Dear Burla,
Loretta gave me a real ruby.
Virgil sent the money to fix the car, so I guess I will be at that school soon.
How is Barney? Tell him I said
woof woof
.
Your friend,
Kirby
Kirby folded the letter and sealed it inside the envelope. Then he flopped back on the bed and stared up at the water-stained ceiling. A fly buzzed around the lightbulb up there.
His mother was humming in the bathroom. He could
hear the
pssssst
of her hairspray. Could smell the sticky sweetness of it.
“So you be ready in case I call, okay?” she said, padding out of the bathroom in her bare feet.
She slapped his leg. “I'm talking to you,” she said.
“I hear you.” Kirby kept his eyes on the ceiling.
“Then answer me.” His mother sat on the bed and put her sandals on. “If the car's ready, we're outta here,” she said.
“Whatever.” Kirby kept his eyes on that buzzing fly.
“I'll call up yonder to that school before we leave,” his mother said.
“Whatever.”
He closed his eyes and stayed real still until his mother left the room, slamming the door behind her. Then he jumped off the bed and peered through the slats of the window blinds. He watched his mother march across the parking lot and disappear up the road.
When he went outside, the sun was just peeking over the top of the mountains. The air was cool and damp. He could hear the eighteen-wheelers roaring up the interstate on the other side of the ridge behind the motel.
“Good morning, son,” Clyde Dover called from the office door. “You still up for doing that weeding?” he said.
“Yessir.”
So Mr. Dover showed Kirby where the rusty old wheelbarrow
was and gave him a hoe with a broken handle, and Kirby set to work.
He chopped at the hard red dirt. He pulled weeds and tossed them into the wheelbarrow.
Chop.
Pull.
Toss.
All morning long.
And the whole time, that poodle dog pin burned, burned, burned in his pocket.
Aggie dropped raisins into her oatmeal and talked to Ugly
in pig Latin.
Ood-gay orning-may.
Ant-way ome-say una-tay?
Then she pushed aside the sponges and spray bottles and garbage bags under the kitchen sink, looking for the laundry detergent.
Ugly watched her with his one eye, the tip of his tail twitching on the worn orange carpet.
“Maybe I left it in the laundry room,” Aggie said.
She gathered a bundle of towels and headed outside. Shuffling up the sidewalk in her bedroom slippers, she took a deep breath. The air smelled sweet and clean.
And then something hit her.
Hard.
Not a real thing she could touch.
But a feeling.
A feeling caused by a thought.
This was the thought:
These mountains are a part of me, like my arm or my hand or my heart. And in just a few days, I will be leaving them forever.
Aggie sat in the chair outside of Room 3 and clutched the bundle of towels against her.
Out by the water spigot, Loretta and Willow were washing plastic lawn chairs and singing a song about finding a peanut.
Loretta was wearing her cowboy vest over her bathing suit. Her jangly charm bracelet danced up and down her arm as she washed. Willow wore her pink plastic sandals and held her chin up in the air while she sang.
Aggie smiled, forgetting all about the thought that had caused the feeling that had hit her hard.
Then she gathered up the towels and headed on over to the laundry room.
 
 
The morning seemed to fly by. Aggie hung curtains in Room 8 and changed lightbulbs in Room 3. She washed the
coffee mugs and put extra soap in every room. She held the stool while Loretta's mother fixed the window blinds in Room 7. She showed Clyde Dover where to turn off the main water valve so he and Loretta's father could work on the plumbing.
Out in the parking lot, Kirby tossed weeds into the wheelbarrow, while Loretta and Willow dragged the clean chairs back out to the pool.
Birds hopped around the filled-up bird feeder and the flag fluttered in the breeze at the top of the flagpole.
The little motel was beginning to hum.
Willow watched her father spread grape jelly on bread. He
had made a little kitchen on top of the dresser in their room. A toaster. A microwave oven. A tiny refrigerator. A milk crate filled with saltine crackers, bread, peanut butter, cans of soup.
“How many people are coming in the tour group?” Willow asked, pulling the crust off her cheese sandwich.
“About nine or ten, I think.” Her father tossed the jelly knife into the bathroom sink.
“It sure is nice of Aggie to help us,” Willow said. “You know, since the motel's not hers anymore.”
Her father nodded, humming as he studied the To Do list on his clipboard.
Willow got a little fluttery feeling.
Her father wasn't closed up tight anymore. She could tell he had opened a tiny crack.
More than anything, she wanted to say,
Daddy, please let Aggie stay here with us.
But she knew she had to be careful. That tiny crack could snap shut at any minute.
Like a mousetrap.
Snap!
So she said, “I'm going to look for Loretta.”
Willow ran to Room 6. When she got there, Loretta came out and handed her a paper cup full of blackberries.
They raced out to the swimming pool and sat on the steps, eating their blackberries and talking.
About school.
About their friends.
About their favorite cereal.
About whether Loretta should go to Niagara Falls or Disney World.
About what they wanted for their birthdays.
And about Dorothy.
Willow loved how easy Loretta was to talk to. Even easier than Maggie. But the best thing was that no matter what Willow said, Loretta always had a good idea about it.
Like, when Willow told her she wanted to go visit Dorothy down in Savannah, Loretta said she should take
one of those maps from the office with her and put a big red circle around the spot where the motel was.
“That way,” Loretta said, “she can come visit
you
and she won't get lost.”
And when Willow told Loretta that Dorothy's birthday was July 27, Loretta squealed, “Her birthday's in
July
?”
Willow nodded.
Loretta grabbed Willow's shoulders and gave her a little shake.
“That's
ruby
!” she said.
“What's ruby?”
“
July.
The birthstone for July is
ruby
,” Loretta said. “You can send her one of those rubies I got in Cherokee!”
Willow could hardly believe Loretta was going to give her one of those shiny little rubies she had found up in the ruby mine in Cherokee. She made up her mind right then and there that she was going to give Loretta one of her china horses. Maybe the gray mare with the flowing white mane. That one had a tiny baby horse that went with it. Willow might even give her the baby horse, too.
It was nearly noon when Aggie came out to the parking lot
and gave Kirby a sandwich. The morning mist had burned off and the air was still and hot.
Kirby's hands were blistered and his shoulders hurt. He had filled up that old wheelbarrow about a hundred times, making trip after trip around back to dump the weeds into the burn pile by the garden.
“I got sweet tea, too,” Aggie said, holding up a thermos.
Kirby followed her out to the picnic table. He wiped his dirty hands on his shirttail and sat next to her.
“Ain't that a beautiful sight?” Aggie said, gazing out at the gray-green treetops in the distance. “I just love these mountains.”
Kirby nodded.
He was on his second cheese sandwich when Aggie said, “What's that?”
She shuffled over to the edge of the grassy patch by the flagpole and reached for something up under the bushes.
She came back and sat next to Kirby.
“Where in the world did this come from?” she said.
Kirby looked down at what she was holding.
A postcard.
A postcard of the Smoky Mountains.
A postcard that used to say
Greetings from the Great Smoky Mountains.
But now it was a postcard that said
Greetings from Nowhere.
The word
Nowhere
was scrawled across the front in big angry letters.
Aggie's hands were shaking.
Kirby's heart was pounding.
“Thank you for the sandwiches,” he said.
He hurried back out to the parking lot to chop weeds in the hard, dry earth.
He glanced over at Aggie. She slipped the postcard into the pocket of her apron and cleared the paper cups off the picnic table.
He kept chopping.
Chop.
Chop.
Chop.
That poodle dog pin so heavy in his pocket.
And then Aggie was standing next to him. “It must've been my lucky day when that car of yours broke down,” she said.
Kirby stopped weeding and looked at her.
“I mean, besides being a dern good weeder and a champion yo-yo-er, you're a fine young man,” she said.
For a flicker of a minute, Kirby felt like he was in the wrong life. Like somehow he had gotten plucked out of Kirby Tanner's life and plopped right down into somebody else's.
Somebody who didn't have to steal and lie to make people notice him.
Somebody who was a fine young man.
And in the next flicker of a minute, Kirby wished he hadn't kept that pin that was so special to Loretta, who was always nice to him.
And he wished he hadn't written that angry word about the Smoky Mountains that Aggie loved so much.
He wished he really
was
a fine young man.

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