His hand shook a little as he tried to hand the pictures back.
“Keep them if you want,” the boy said with a wave of his hand. “Mom can hunt up some more copies of them for me when I get home.”
Wes stuck the pictures in his shirt pocket. They seemed to almost burn a hole through his shirt into his heart. Still, he couldn’t tell this boy he’d go home with him. He was home. There wasn’t any use beating around the bush about it. Best to get it out in the open. “Okay, you found me. So what do you want from me, Robert Jr.?”
The question seemed to throw the boy off. Like they’d gone from sweetness and light to the brass tacks of the matter too fast. For a minute it looked as if he might just run out of the room and clear back to Pelphrey, Ohio, but he pulled himself together and said, “I don’t know.” He stopped and looked puzzled. “I don’t even know what to call you. Mr. Green? Grandfather? Wesley?”
“Wesley or Wes will do,” Wes said. “I guess as how I haven’t earned the name grandfather.”
“What does Jocie call you?”
“Wes.”
“Then that’s what I’ll call you too. Since we both claim you as grandfather. I think that’s bothering her a little, thinking she might have to share you with me, but maybe she’ll decide it’s not so bad after she talks to you and sees that nothing’s changed.” He glanced over at the door and then back at Wes.
“Everything changes. Every day.”
“Me being here, me finding you, won’t change how you feel about Jocie, will it?” The boy leaned forward in his chair and looked almost like he might be holding his breath as he waited for Wes to answer him.
“No.”
“So love doesn’t change.” The boy looked relieved.
“David out there would tell you God’s love won’t, but people aren’t so divine with their love,” Wes said softly as he stared over at Betsy Lou. No need in not being honest with the boy. He was young, but not too young to look straight at the truth. “Love down here on earth can get stronger or maybe weaker. Sometimes it can disappear.”
“Did your love for us, for Dad, disappear?”
“No, but I wouldn’t blame him if his love for me did.” Wes looked back at Robert Jr. “Did he want you to come hunt me?”
“He was afraid it wouldn’t be you. That I’d just be disappointed. That we’d all be disappointed. But before I left, he gave me gas money for the trip. And he told me that if it was you, to tell you he was sorry.”
“Sorry for what?”
“I don’t know. I asked him, but he wouldn’t say. Said you’d know.”
And Wes did know. He felt the same sorrow inside his chest. Sorrow for the years they’d lost. Sorrow for the way they’d turned away from one another instead of toward each other when they’d both already lost too much. Sorrow for the truth that there was no changing the past. “I can’t go back,” Wes said.
“Not even for a visit?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Not yet,” Wes said.
The boy was persistent. “All right, but can’t we still talk? Get to know one another before I have to go back to school. Do you have a couch I can sleep on? It was sort of crowded out at Reverend Brooke’s house.”
“I know what you mean. I spent a few weeks there at Brooke Central Station after I got out of the hospital with my leg busted last summer.” Wes smiled. “And I don’t reckon I’m so coldhearted I’d send a boy back out on these snowy roads. You can stay a day or two, but I can’t just sit around and talk. I’ve got to help David and Jo get the paper out. We’re already a half day behind.”
“Sure. Maybe I can help too.”
“Do you know anything about presses?” Wes peered over at him.
“No, but I like fiddling with stuff, figuring out what makes them work. I’m studying physics and science at the university.”
“You don’t say. Well, Junior, we’d better open the door and let the others come on back so we can get to work,” Wes said.
He stood up and went to open the door. Jocie must have been watching the door for the first sign of motion. She was bursting through into the pressroom before he could get the door pulled back. She wrapped her arms tight around his waist. “I don’t care if you are his granddaddy. You were my granddaddy first.”
It wasn’t exactly true, but it was true enough.
F
riday—January 1, 1965.
Jocie wrote the date at the top of the page in her notebook journal. Then she stared at the blank lines under it and didn’t know where to start.
Words were exploding in her head so fast that she wasn’t sure she could pull them out one by one to put down on paper. So much had happened. Was happening.
She chewed on the end of her pen and looked around the living room. Not that much was actually happening right that moment. Aunt Love was napping in her chair. Tabitha was feeding Stephen Lee his bottle and making eyes at Robert who was talking to Wes and her father about some project he’d done for one of his classes last semester. Leigh was yawning behind her hand and pretending to listen.
Jocie wasn’t even pretending. Robert was okay, but sometimes he went on and on about how smart he was. Jocie’s dad had told her maybe Robert was trying to impress Wes and that they should cut him a little slack until they got to know him better.
Jocie was willing to do that. She’d gotten over being jealous of him. Had lost that even before Wes had told her that Jupiter love was stronger than ten grizzly bears, stickier than bubble gum in hair, and had the staying power of a Jupiterian fropple.
When she’d laughed and asked what in the world a Jupiterian fropple was, he’d grinned at her and said, “Nothing in this world, for sure. A fropple is sort of like the frogs you have down here but some bigger with longer jumping legs. Fropples can hop all the way around Jupiter after eating two teeny little bugs. Never get tired. Never wear down. Never quit. Just keep hopping. Around and around.”
“But why are they hopping around Jupiter?”
“Now that’s something nobody knows. Mr. Jupiter, he’s had the scientists up there working on it for years. They can’t figure it out. Of course they did figure out that they could make rocket fuel from those little bugs. That’s how come I’m here. Bug juice fuel.”
Jocie almost giggled out loud thinking about bug juice fuel now as she looked across the room at Wes. He must have felt her eyes on him because he turned his head toward her and winked.
Jocie swallowed her giggle and started writing.
A new year. My fourteenth New Year’s Day although I don’t remember the first few any more than Stephen Lee will remember this one. But if he ever wants to he can read this and know what was happening on his very first New Year’s Day.
We started the New Year out right this year. Invited everybody over. Aunt Love cooked black-eyed peas and cabbage. Yuck! But she says that if you eat those things on New Year’s Day then you’ll have good fortune all year. I ate hotdogs and applesauce. Everybody else ate the peas and cabbage. Tabitha even mashed up one of the black-eyed peas and fed it to Stephen Lee. He made this awful face and spit it out, so I guess both of us will just have to trust the Lord instead of lucky black-eyed peas for our good fortune this year.
Things have been sort of crazy around here ever since Christmas. Ever since Robert showed up anyway. Robert is Wes’s grandson. Remember, I wrote about that last time. How no matter what Wes was still my granddaddy, and he is. But I don’t mind him being Robert’s too now. Robert has a sister. Lydia Rose. So I guess Wes is her granddaddy too. Robert says she’s seventeen. Wes says he might go visit them next summer. Might. He says he needs some more time to think about it.
Dad told me a little about what happened and why Wes was here. It didn’t have much to do with bug juice fuel, but I’m glad Wes still wants to tell me his crazy Jupiter stories. If he ever wants to tell me his Pelphrey, Ohio, stories, I’ll listen to them too. Maybe we can cry together about them the way we laugh together about the Jupiter ones.
The craziest thing about all this is Zella. Right. Zella! You won’t believe the stories that went around town after Robert showed up in the blizzard at her door. Well, it wasn’t really a blizzard, but it was a lot of snow. So much that a lot of it is still hanging around. Not enough to keep us from going to school Monday though, unless some new snow starts falling. I’m hoping. That way I won’t have to see the teacher from Neptune.
I don’t know how I’m going to survive five more months in his class. He’s scary weird. Plain and simple. I spotted him hanging around Leigh’s place the other day. Just standing out in the snow leaning against a tree staring across the street at one of her windows. It gave me that funky spider crawly feeling. Like I needed to do something. But what? Go over and ask him what the heck he was doing or run back downtown and tell Dad or go on up to Leigh’s and tell her to call the police. I wish somebody would arrest him and send him back to Neptune or wherever he came from.
It’s no telling what he’ll do to me next semester now that he’s chasing after Leigh. I don’t know what his problem is. He can’t catch her no matter how many roses he sends. She’s already been caught. By Dad. She has a ring to prove it.
Anyway the creep gave me a look and melted away down the street. Did you like that one? Melted away. Like the snow. I love it when the right words pop up in my head.
But where was I? Oh yeah, creepy teacher spying on Leigh. So after he starts off down the street, I go on in and tell Leigh he was out there. She shivered like somebody had walked over her grave. She tried not to look worried, but she was. And she tried to make excuses for him. Like maybe he was just walking by. Or maybe he was thinking about writing a poem about the snow. She said I had enough trouble with Mr. Teacher Creep from Neptune without hunting more so I should just forget about him. Gladly.
But back to Zella. It’s hilarious. She hunts up where Wes is from. She hasn’t admitted how yet, but I think she had to have poked around in some of his stuff. Anyway she found out and wrote to them in Pelphrey, Ohio. But she says she never told them to come. Robert just did. Showed up on her doorstep last Sunday night. People saw him on her doorstep and in her living room and bingo! They decided he must be some long-lost relative showing up. Like a son. Zella went almost apoplectic when she heard that. (I just had that word—apoplectic—in my ten-new-words-per-day vocabulary book, and it actually fits. I think.)
Anyway then the stories got even crazier when the news got out about how much Robert looks like Wes. Suddenly everybody was sure they’d figured out why Wes had shown up here years ago. Folks were saying Wes and Zella had a history together. That Robert maybe was their son. Zella’s talking about going to visit her cousin in Florida until the stories quit circulating. I think it serves her right—always messing in other people’s business.
Still, I almost felt sorry for her last week. She about jumped out of her skin every time the phone rang because she was afraid it was going to be one of her friends ready and eager to fill her in on whatever new version of the story was going around Hollyhill. To let her know for her own good, of course. I even answered the phone one day for her. Told everybody Zella was too busy to talk if it was somebody that wasn’t calling for business reasons.
I mean apoplectic didn’t even come close to it when she heard that story about her and Wes. She was ready for Dad to run a three-inch headline saying Robert was not related to her in any way. Dad told her that would just make things worse. That the only way to deal with gossip was to tell her friends the truth or as much of the truth as she wanted told and then just ride it out. She said she supposed he should know since he’d had to ride out a few gossipy stories after my mother left town when I was a little kid.
Tabitha hasn’t heard from our mother, from DeeDee, even though she’s sent her pictures of Stephen Lee. It bothers Tabitha. She says it doesn’t but it does. At least it did before Robert came knocking on the door. Now she’s so gaga over him that she hasn’t got time to think about anything else. Except of course Stephen Lee and she never forgets him. She’s a good mother. Stephen Lee’s lucky in that.
Tabitha still worries about him having chocolate-colored skin, but I never even think about it anymore. He’s just cute and adorable Stephen Lee, and I’d fight bears for him if I had to. We all would. Dad tells her some of the same things he told Zella. That we’ll just have to ride out whatever people say. That the Lord sends guardian angels to watch over little babies like Stephen Lee. And over big people too. People like me. My poor guardian angel got a real workout last year. I’m hoping all that kind of stuff is over. Tornadoes. Fires. I mean, what else could happen?
I know what you’re thinking. Weddings. But that won’t be anywhere close to tragic. Just different. Very different. Having a stepmom, I mean. Still it’s six months before the wedding, so I’ve got time to get used to the idea. Leigh wants to be a June bride, and she wants me to help her pick out her dress. Says she knows I won’t lie to her, and that if a dress makes her look fat that I’ll tell her straight out. And I would, but she’s lost so much weight that I don’t think any dress could make her look fat. She’s not exactly skinny like me, but then who would want to be skinny like me? Nobody, that’s who. Not even me. I haven’t started stuffing toilet paper in my bra yet, but I’ve considered it. But knowing the way things go for me, I figure it would just fall out and then I’d look like a real nut trailing toilet paper everywhere.
Gee, I’m getting writer’s cramp and no wonder. So guess I’d better wind this up for now before my fingers give out. I just wanted to count my blessings for 1964. I mean I know I sort of did that when I wrote on Christmas Day, but nobody can count blessings too often. So here goes. Surviving the tornado and the fire. Wes walking and riding his motorcycle again. Tabitha coming home. Stephen Lee. Aunt Love smiling more. Zeb. Wes being baptized and not freezing his ears off. And of course, Dad. Always Dad. The Lord knew what I needed when he gave me to Dad.
I don’t know what 1965 will bring. A wedding and a stepmother for starters, I suppose. But who knows what else? I would have never guessed what 1964 was going to bring back last January 1. Aunt Love says it’s mostly better not to know what’s going to happen before it happens. That we just need to lean on the Lord for strength to get us through whatever comes. But Dad says it’s okay to pray about it, to ask the Lord to bless us and keep us from hard trials. So that’s what I’m trying to do. Praise the Lord for my blessings and ask him to help me do the things I should do and not do the things I shouldn’t do in 1965.