Skies Like These (14 page)

They all settled down on the cloud of comforters and pillows. The candlelight was still flickering against the windowpane, casting shadows across the ceiling and walls.

“I don't believe I've heard that one,” Aunt Elise said.

Roy began telling his tale of stolen gold and vengeful spirits. Jade climbed into her sleeping bag and listened. It was Roy Parker at his finest.

 

27

The next day, after the Parkers left and the dog kennels were put back in order, Aunt Elise led Jade to the muddy bank of a creek out behind her property. “Join me in the shade,” she said, sitting under a rumpled oak tree.

Jade crossed the backyard, brushed off a spot of earth, and sat down. The dogs all ran into the water, lapping it up and splashing playfully. The storm the night before had made the water a bit deep for Lobo and Genghis Khan, but it was perfect for the others and barely came up to Astro's middle. Once the dogs had taken a good drink, they each found their own piece of shade.

Astro decided his spot was right between Jade and her aunt. His muddy paws wiped across Jade's yellow shorts, his hot breath panted on her cheek, and his heavy fur was shedding, making her legs itch.

Jade loved it.

“Have you ever floated a boat down a creek?” Aunt Elise asked, pulling a bundle of twigs and twine from her cargo-pants pocket.

“Can't say that I have.”

“Excellent.” Aunt Elise twisted three sticks together with the string, making a perfect triangle, and handed the supplies over to Jade. “Your turn.”

Jade tried to copy her aunt, but the triangle turned out more like a crooked, three-armed cross.

“Doesn't matter a bit,” Aunt Elise said, helping Jade tie off the corners. “It'll float just the same.” She scooted down to the bank's edge and dropped her boat into the murky, lazy water. It was the leftover rain mixed with Wellington's copper dirt. Jade also inched down and plopped her boat in. The sticks bumped and ambled out of sight.

“Is that it?” Jade asked.

“Floating stick boats down the creek is a classic summer pastime around here. You haven't lived until you've tried it.”

They each began making another boat. Jade was determined to fashion a proper triangle.

“I hope you're enjoying your vacation so far,” Aunt Elise said, her hands busy at work.

Jade kept twisting the sticks. “You were right when you said it would be an adventure.”

“Speaking of which, have you finished
Robinson Crusoe
?”

“I read the last chapter this morning.”

“And do you still think he should have stayed home?”

“I guess not.”

Aunt Elise smiled. “Good. Sometimes people need to step away from what they know in order to find out who they really are.”

“Like when you left Philly and moved out here?”

“I suppose.” Aunt Elise put the final twist on her boat. “Brenda told me she was able to convince Roy to give the cowboy-poetry contest a shot. That was a nice thought you had.”

Jade studied her aunt, who was focused on preparing the next boat, peeling strips of bark from a twig. Jade turned back to her own work. She had to admit, there was something soothing about twisting those brown sticks together and watching them float down the creek.

“Now that you've got the hang of it, we'll send our troubles sailing. Each time you put one of these into the creek, you assign a worry to it and send it sailing away.”

Jade gave her aunt a disbelieving look.

“Humor me,” Aunt Elise said. “One trouble for each boat. You don't even have to say them out loud. Easy peasy.”

“You forgot the lemon-squeezy part,” Jade said, untying a crooked corner of her boat.

“What?”

“The saying is easy peasy lemon squeezy. You forgot the lemon-squeezy part.”

“Silly me, how could I forget?”

This time Jade's boat was a perfect triangle. She closed her eyes and wondered which trouble to choose. Recently, there seemed to be so many. She had thought it would get easier when she quit working for Farley, but now she was on the outside, worrying about what kind of mischief Roy might be getting himself into over there. Was he really going to steal those art pieces?

“Got one?” Aunt Elise asked.

Jade opened her eyes. “Got one.”

“Me, too.” Aunt Elise raised her own stick boat.

They went to the water's edge and gently placed the sticks into the current. Jade's boat bumped into a skinny tree root jutting out from the bank but managed to wriggle its way free.

“See?” Aunt Elise said. “That worry wants to be let go. It doesn't like the cramped place you're holding it.”

They watched their twigs meander down the muddy water, bobbing and turning and fading into small specks off in the distance.

“When you decide to let a worry go,” Aunt Elise said, still looking down the creek, “it doesn't disappear right away. It kind of fades slowly, like these boats.”

Jade thought about that.

“Want to go chase them?” Aunt Elise asked.

“No,” Jade said in almost a whisper.

Aunt Elise took a step sideways, closer to Jade. “Me neither.”

 

28

When Monday came rolling around and the sun was shining bright, Aunt Elise was practically skipping through the house. She kept getting more and more excited as the day wore on.

In the afternoon, she said to Jade for the seventeenth time since lunch, “It's really going to happen. There's not a cloud in the sky. Those Boy Scouts will be here in a few hours.”

“Do you know what you're going to teach them?”

“I've been studying their handbook online. I'm supposed to teach them how to care for the telescopes and then I made this work sheet where they can learn constellations and planets and even sketch out the movement of the moon.”

“These are paying students, right?” Jade asked.

“Every last one of them.” Aunt Elise looked out the window again, smiling at the cloudless sky.

“How many are coming?” Jade asked.

“Six boys plus two leaders.”

“That's a hundred and twenty dollars!”

“Not counting the fifteen-dollar refreshment fee for your brownies and lemonade.”

“Nice.” Jade had already baked and frosted the brownies. She only had to finish squeezing the lemons.

“I'm going to kennel the dogs and sweep the front walk. You make the lemonade.”

Aunt Elise bounded out the back door, leaving Jade alone in the kitchen with a pile of lemons on the countertop and Copernicus at her feet.

“She sure is excited,” Jade said to the cat.

Copernicus rubbed his side against her ankle, purring.

Jade took it as a compliment on her idea to have Aunt Elise teach the classes. “I'm glad you approve,” she said, slicing the lemons in half and squeezing their juice into a green plastic pitcher.

Copernicus sat at her heel and meowed, asking for a taste of whatever Jade was making. He had made a habit of noticing when she was in the kitchen and had become fairly diligent in his requests for a sampling.

“Trust me,” Jade said, slicing another lemon and digging the seeds out with the tip of her knife, “you won't like this.”

Copernicus meowed louder.

Jade put her knife down. “Fine, don't listen to me.” She took half a lemon and squeezed a few drops of juice onto the linoleum.

Copernicus stepped over, sniffed, and looked at Jade with a blended expression of disgust and sadness. Like he wasn't sure if he could ever trust her again.

Jade shook her head. “I tried to tell you,” she said, followed by, “Stubborn cat.”

Copernicus lifted his tail high and stomped out of the kitchen.

As much as a cat could stomp.

Jade finished making the lemonade, watching her aunt out the window above the sink.

Aunt Elise giggled as she swept the walks and kenneled the dogs and double-checked the ladder at the back of the house. Then they had a quick dinner and stood vigil at the end of the driveway, next to the dog statue, as the sun eased down behind the Tetons.

“Any minute now,” Aunt Elise said, craning her neck, searching for a pair of headlights coming up the street.

“They'll be here,” Jade assured her.

Aunt Elise smiled and nodded, but kept her eyes on the road.

When the van full of boys finally came up the street and stopped at the gate, Aunt Elise let out a burst of laughter, she was so giddy.

She swung open the gate and waved the van up the drive, running in a cloud of red dust behind the back bumper. Looking at it, Jade thought of Astro and Yaz and Lobo running along the side of Aunt Elise's Lincoln Continental that first time she and Aunt Elise were the ones pulling up the long driveway.

When the Scout troop was finally up on the roof, with their attention focused on her, Aunt Elise directed them to find one of the largest constellations in the sky, Draco. She explained how Draco was Latin for
dragon
or
serpent
and skillfully recounted a story about how this particular dragon was placed in the sky to guard the gods' apple orchard and about the time the great warrior Hercules came to fight him. The boys sat in a semicircle, completely captivated by the ancient tale.

Then she pointed out the planets and helped the Scouts fill in their work sheets by lantern light.

After the lesson was finished, the brownies and lemonade were gone, and the Scouts were on their way home, Jade hooked her arm into her aunt's and said, “Those star stories were amazing.”

“Do you think they had a good time?”

“Absolutely,” Jade said. “And I bet they'll spread the word and get other troops to come.”

“I would like that,” Aunt Elise said. “I would like that a whole bunch.”

 

29

The next afternoon, Jade walked through downtown Wellington. Banners zigzagged across almost every street. They fluttered and flipped in the wind, reminding everyone about the upcoming Juniper Festival. The park across from the YMCA was crawling with workers who were busy draping electrical wires and assembling booths. Festival trucks lined the streets, getting ready to set up their portable tilt-a-wheels and the Pirate Coaster.

Jade took it all in.

“The stage will go right there along the back.” Sandy from the YMCA came up behind Jade. “You got your cowboy poetry ready?”

“It's my friend entering, not me.”

“Last year the winning poem was about the lonely call of a coyote ringing out across the still black of night.”

“You remember it?”

“I wrote it.”

Worry settled into Jade's gut. She was so certain the Parkers' poem would win the grand prize, she hadn't even considered the competition. “Are you entering again this year?”

“Look,” Sandy began, “entering this competition is about more than winning some prize money. It's about celebrating who we are. It's about the earth and animals and what true wealth is. Some of us spend our whole lives thinking about those things.” She put a hand on Jade's shoulder. “I'm not saying your friend can't write a poem, but I wouldn't get your hopes too high.” Sandy walked away through the park, stepping over wires and around boxes.

Jade began walking back to Aunt Elise's. She was passing in front of Roy's house when Mrs. Parker came sprinting out the door.

“Jade! You're just the person we need.” Her eyes were puffy and tear tracks cut through her face powder. “Have you seen Roy?”

“Not today.”

Mr. Parker came up the walk to join them. “Has she seen him?”

Mrs. Parker looked down the street—first to the right and then to the left and then to the right again. “No.” The word came out thin and weak.

“Is everything okay?”

Mr. Parker had some papers in his hand and held them out to her. “It couldn't be worse.”

Jade took the papers and began thumbing through them. It was the Parker genealogy Roy had sent away for. “I was worried about this.”

“You knew?” Mrs. Parker asked. “Why would you let him do something so foolish? It was fine as long as he was pretending to be related to Butch Cassidy. It made him happy. But sending away for proof is asking for trouble.”

“He had already sent for it when he told me,” Jade said. “I was hoping there might be a chance…”

Mrs. Parker threw her arms in the air. “Do we look like cowboy stock?”

“Roy does.”

“Well, we're not. Our family is from Detroit.” Mrs. Parker sat down on the sidewalk and dropped her head into her hands. “We told him, but Roy couldn't accept it, so we let him believe what he wanted. I told myself I was supporting him. I thought it was what good moms do.”

Mr. Parker sat down next to his wife and put his arm around her. “That
is
what good moms do, Brenda. Don't question yourself for one minute.”

“Have you looked over at Farley's ranch?” Jade asked. “He's probably there.”

“No,” Mrs. Parker said, lifting the hem of her flowing blouse and dabbing her eyes. “He's not there. That's how I knew he was missing. He didn't show up for work.” Her words grew heavy as she said, “He even had a chance to shoe horses today and he didn't go.”

“For real?” Jade was surprised. The Roy Parker she knew would have missed Christmas to shoe horses. She fiddled with the genealogy papers. “When did these come?”

“It must have been yesterday when I forgot to bring in the mail. He was so moody last night, but I thought it was because he didn't want to work on the Juniper Festival poem. When I got up this morning, I assumed he had already gone to Farley's. Then I got a call around ten saying he never showed for work. We waited a couple of hours, but he didn't come home, and then William found these papers on his bedroom floor. I've called everywhere, looked everywhere.” She dropped her face into her hands again and said, “I'm so worried about him.”