And there it is. The Box. Sitting by itself in the middle of the red-and-white tablecloth. It’s more a rectangle than a square; dark gunmetal gray with a lid that fits perfectly to the bottom. No one says a word to us. They stand to the side of it, waiting for one of us to reach out to lift the lid.
With a few more baby steps we’re up to the edge of the table and I know it’ll fall to me to open it. If I hadn’t throwed up at Dot’s, I would have now, so I s’pose that was good luck I got it over with early. I let go of Emma’s hand and wipe the sweat onto my blue jeans. I breathe in and breathe out and move my arm out in front of me so my hand is a dollar away from the edge of the box.
I jump when one of the men says, “Go on, now,” and that makes my heart race even faster.
Then, I do it. I reach…for the edge…of the lid…and I carefully lift it…just a tiny bit, not even more than a dime, when a ‘lectric shock runs through me so fast and hard I scream, drop the lid and run, not waiting for Emma, pushing past the man at the door, escaping from the laughter that echoes out from that smoky room across the general store, and I bolt right to Miss Mary’s waist where I cleave on like moss to a tree. Emma’s there in a heartbeat, trying to hold on to Miss Mary, too, and I feel her nudging us toward the screen door, her voice over our heads saying, “Thank you, sir,” in a way that-can it be 78
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true ?—sounds like she’s smiling. “I guess the Box live up to the hype after all,” she’s saying from the front porch to the register man, who’s opening her car door for her. I can tell because even though I still haven’t let go of her waist I can see dusty work boots alongside Miss Mary’s shoes that look two sizes too small for her fat feet, plus she isn’t talking louder so he can hear her from inside the store. Is she trying not to laugh?
“Y’all be sure to drive safe, now,” he says, shutting the door after we slide into the back, gripping on to each other like we were still at Miss Mary’s waist.
After all that, I still couldn’t tell you what was inside that dreaded box. I just know it’s the scariest thing I have ever seen in this whole entire world.
FIVE
t’s moving day and I don’t mind saying that Momma’s right—I am as bothered as a bee in a jar. Emma’s packed up most of our things since I refuse to take part in one bit of this move. She doesn’t mind. She’s a neat girl for someone as little as she is. She keeps all of her picture books and stickers in a nice low stack by the bed so all she has to do today is lower the stack into the box Momma put together for us to share. I’m the messy one. My things are like cows scattered across the meadow, they’re stubborn and hard to round up. And just when Emma thinks she’s gotten them all, another one turns up on the stairs. Or at the top of the mattresses where our pillows go.
The stamp book will be the last thing to go into the box because I’m studying it right now, trying to memorize the order the countries are in to keep my mind off of this move.
Lately Momma’s been calling it a fool’s errand, this move. I don’t 80
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understand what she means. Fool’s errand. The way she says it to Richard it sounds like she’s coming over to my side, but when I ask her what it means she just shoos me away. She barely has time for me and Emma these days. She’s got her mind all tangled up with the bits and pieces of moving a family of four. She said that when we move we aren’t going into a new school and I don’t know what to make of this news. I think I’m happy about it because then there won’t be any more of Sonny’s tortures or Mary Sellers’s snorting at me, but I don’t know where Momma expects us to get our learning. I was making real progress reading. And Emma, she’s starting to add and subtract, but without school I bet she’ll forget how and I’ll have to do all her counting for her. Momma says to quit talking about it, but I’m an eight-year-old–eight-year-olds are supposed to go to school; it’s our job, for goodness’ sake. Plus I was just starting to try on the idea that in a new school I could be popular for once in my life. Nobody’d know I was picked on at my old school. I’ve been practicing telling the new kids how I was voted the most popular girl in my third-grade class, and once they knew that, I know they’d want to be my friend. Emma doesn’t seem to care she’s not going back into school. That’s because, like I told you, she actually was cool and cool people don’t give a d-word what other people think of them. That’s what makes them cool.
“Carrie, Emma,” Momma calls from downstairs. “Get on down here, we got some errands to do.”
“Okay,” I call out for both of us. Emma, she’s been real quiet lately and I think it has to do with Richard and how he’s been closing the door with her on the other side of it with him. It’s like they’re sharing a secret and I don’t get it. He looks pleased as punch he’s got this secret, but Emma looks like she doesn’t want to be holding it for him.
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She’s one loyal girl, though, because she’s not even telling me the secret and I’m the closest person in the universe to her. But she’s always been good with secrets. She never tells anyone anything. That’s yet another reason why she’s got a whole army of friends.
“What’s taking you so long?” Momma’s starting to sound annoyed. “Okay, okay,” Emma says, and we go down the attic stairs and then
down the real stairs to the kitchen, which is Momma’s headquarters. “We got to go get some more boxes so put on your flip-flops,” she says.
I can barely remember Momma the way she used to be, before Richard broke her into pieces. One time when I went into the Cash-n-Carry to pick up a carton of cigarettes for her, Mr. Appleton himself told me to say hello to her for him. That alone isn’t anything new here in my town but it was the way he said it, all smiley like he and her had an inside joke and just my telling her hello from him would be giving her the punch line, that made me think more than once about it.
In the car I get right into the back seat even though Momma says I’m old enough to sit up front with her. But I don’t want Emma to feel left out so I stay in the back with her.
“It’s Tuesday and I think Harold’s just got through unpacking their delivery,” Momma says. Harold’s is the stationery store in town and Mondays they always get boxes of fresh papers, so we head there first since their boxes are clean and don’t smell bad.
“lackpot,” Momma says, pulling up alongside the pile of flattened cardboard next to the Dumpster in the back. I’m glad about this, too. “Go on,” she says.
We get out and lower the back of the station wagon and start loading in the pieces that are always heavier than they look when you first 82
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pull up. I count thirteen small ones and get sad, since Momma says thirteen was Daddy’s favorite number. His lucky number. Our daddy never walked under ladders and was known to throw salt over his shoulder if the shaker spilled so you’d think he’d shy away from thirteen, it being unlucky and all, but Momma says he was full of con-tra-somethingthatmeans-opposites so I guess it makes some kind of sense.
“Let’s go,” she says as we crawl back into the car, and we’re offto the market. The all-time worst place for box-getting I can think of. Why would anyone want to put their favorite things into soggy boxes that smell like squash ? I asked Momma this once and she called me little miss fancy and then gave us the box with eggplant written on the side just for spite. So I’m staying just as quiet as Emma, and I know from the way my sister looks at me that we’re both hoping Momma gives us a Harold’s box for the rest of our stuff.
At the market Momma parks and heads inside. “I’ll be right back.” Me and Emma get out, too, and scan the mess alongside the Dumpter here. Not a good box day. First of all, a lot of the boxes have tops and bottoms ripped off and the flaps on some of the others don’t touch each other so if you put something in them it’d fall right through.
“I hate market boxes,” Emma says. I’m a little surprised since it’s
the first thing she’s said to me all day.
“Me, too,” I say.
“I wish we could just run away,” she says, and I nearly tip over since I’m squatting by the grape boxes when she says this.
“Why cain’t we?” I say, all excited now that Emma’s back on my team. Finally, a secret with my sister! Just like the good old days.
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“They’d find us,” she sighs. “He’d find us and then it’d just be worse than it already is.”
“What if we went somewhere they couldn’t find us?” I ask her quickly so we can get the ball rolling before Momma comes back out of the market. “We could go anywhere!” I say. “They wouldn’t even know where to begin looking.”
But Emma’s shaking her head. Her hair is matted all the time now. Momma says she must have rats’ nests in there but Emma won’t let her comb them out and she won’t let her cut it so I guess it’s going to stay matted for a while.
“Yes, they would,” she says. “They’d find us for sure. Grownups would tell on us and then they’d come get us.”
Just then, before I can try to talk some sense into her, Momma comes out of the back door to the market, the one the delivery guys use, and she’s looking right past us.
“Get in,” she says, even though we haven’t loaded a single rotting box into the back yet. Her voice is hard and low, almost like a man’s. She starts the car and revs it up really loud and Emma and I look at each other and scramble in before she turns on us.
Momma hasn’t turned on the car radio and that’s a bad sign. Momma never drives without the radio on. Even if we’re out in the middle of nowhere and all that comes in is staticky foreigners talking, she’ll listen to it.
“I don’t know how he thinks we’re supposed to eat,” she mumbles in an angry voice. “I had one nerve left and that man killed it dead.”
We pull up to the house and when the car stops, the cloud of dust the tires make keeps billowing forward, like it thinks the car will catch up. By the time we get out and go to the trunk to unload, Momma’s 84
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already slamming into the house calling, “Richard, Richard? Where are you, you son of a bitch!”
Emma and I take all the boxes out of the back and she makes a neat stack of them just outside the kitchen door but we don’t go inside. No way do we go inside.
Emma turns and walks out to the meadow and I follow.
“Hey, wait up,” I call out to Emma. When she sets her mind to it she can out-walk me any day of the week. I guess she has her mind set today.
I’m out of breath when I catch up to her. We’re on the edge of the meadow where the cattails scratch our legs and the ticks look for ways to jump on board. So we keep moving till we get to the lower grass in the middle.
“We should just do it,” I say. “Let’s just do it. Before the move. There’s a million and one places we can go to hide and they’ll have to move without us. Richard’s new job starts next Monday and by then they’ll have to give up on finding us.”
Emma looks at me for a second and then goes back to picking at the grass with her dirty fingers. I can tell she’s listening.
“Seriously, it’s a good idea and you know it,” I say. “We could leave on Friday, they won’t notice we’re gone until Saturday, they’ll look for us on Sunday and then they’ll have to go. Richard won’t care a whir and Momma will just plan on coming back to look for us later in the week and by then we’ll be long gone.”
Emma is looking at the tree that stands on the far edge of the meadow from where we’re sitting. We climb that tree a lot, we know every branch, every knot. We know just where to put our feet. We can even do it in flip-flops.
“No way,” she says.
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“Why not?” I say. “Because,” she says. “Because why?” I say.
“You sure don’t think like you’re two years older than me,” she
says. That just plain makes me mad.
“What’s that supposed to mean ?”
“It means we can’t do it. If there’s one thing parents don’t like it’s when kids run away. He’d kill us.” She looks over at me. “He’d kill
US.”
And she looks serious as a heart attack, as Momma always says. But I don’t get it. She’s the one that started talking about running away. I’m going to talk her into it if it kills me, and the first thing I’m going to do when we’re living on our own is get her hair combed. It’s so pretty when it’s all silky and soft, like petals on a yellow pansy. She used to like it when I combed it so I know she’ll like it again someday.
Right as I’m eyeing her she gets up and walks back toward the house.
“Stay out here,” I say, but when she keeps on going I get up and follow her. Again.
We listen at the kitchen door and when we don’t hear anything we open it slowly so it doesn’t creak. We open it just wide enough for us to squeeze through and then we carefully slide out of our flip-flops and walk barefoot across the kitchen floor like it’s made of broken glass. I’m holding my arms out to keep really steady but Emma can just walk that way without the arms. Upstairs we hear Momma and Richard yelling at each other. A thump. The sound of Momma hitting the floor. Each step feels like it takes forever to get past the landing outside their door but finally we make it up to the Nest.
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“What’re you doing?” I ask her.
“What does it look like I’m doing,” she says back, like we didn’t just have that talk in the meadow.
She’s taking some of her stuff out of the box she packed just last night. The neat little piles are on the quilt on our bed and I think I’m getting my wish.
So I go over to my clothes and I pick just the things that I like wearing, not the things Momma gets me in town from the White Elephant, which everyone calls the hospital store ‘cause the money they make goes to the hospital like it’s some charity and not a mean old place where they stab you with needles. Those clothes are smelly before we even get them home, and when I tell her I don’t like buying things from the smelly hospital store she calls me little miss fancy again and then makes me wear them for spite. So I leave those in the box and I fold the ones my grandma sent me from the store in Asheville and put them next to Emma’s on the bed.