The Secrets of Tree Taylor (11 page)

Their mother hollered out, “Tree? Come in a minute.”

I wanted to tell her I didn’t have time, that I had an assignment. I glanced at the Kinney house, then had a thought. Maybe I could get more background information before talking to Mrs. Kinney.

A crooked screen hung on the house’s peeling doorframe. The screen was too big, and somebody had tried to staple it to the frame, creating a big screen bubble.

Peering through the tiny wire squares of the screen, I got familiar glimpses of the DeShon home—an overflowing laundry basket, an overturned tricycle, a pile of diapers, toys scattered as if rained there, and a tiny, loud television. Canned laughter filled the house. I felt like I should knock, even though Mrs. DeShon was the one asking me in. I knocked.

Footsteps, bare feet, squeaked on the wood floor. A baby cried. Somebody swore—the “d” word for the structure that keeps water back. I’d forgotten they had a new baby. Dad had gotten the call in the middle of the night. I asked Mom once why babies were always born at night. She said they weren’t, although she agreed it did seem like it. Then she added, “Besides, that way your dad can deliver the baby at home. People around here don’t like hospitals, and they hate hospital bills.”

If somebody couldn’t pay Dad, he didn’t make them. Instead, patients kept us supplied with jams, jellies, fruits, veggies, and whatever else they had. We didn’t have the money for a new roof, but we always had plenty of pies, deer meat, and pickles. And we didn’t have to worry about Midge getting sick because the vet would take care of her for free. Dad had delivered both of Doc Snyder’s kids.

Finally, Mrs. DeShon stumbled to the door, her baby hoisted on her hip. Glancing past my shoulder, she must have caught sight of her boys. “You stay out of that mud, hear? Don’t you go getting dirty! We got to go to town.”

The boys didn’t make a move to stop baking.

Their mother looked back to me with the same deep-set
eyes as her boys’. Strands of two-color hair, brown roots, blond otherwise, stuck to her head. “Is your dad home?”

So that was why she wanted me? “He’s at the office.”

“Dang.” She started to walk away.

“Wait! Mrs. DeShon? Could I talk to you for a minute? I’m … I’m writing an article about what happened at the Kinney house.” I waited for her to ask who’d want
me
to write an article.

But she didn’t. She cracked open the screen door and signaled for me to follow her inside. “That was a bad business. We heard the shot, of course. Woke the baby. Scared the boys.” She shoved clothes and toys off the couch and sat down. “We was the ones—Robby was—to call the sheriff.”

“That must have been pretty scary.”

She shook her head. “Nah. We’re used to it.” She might have read confusion on my face because she nodded, like she was agreeing with herself. “Them two wake us up all the time. We can hear them fighting over the TV.”

Now we were getting somewhere. “They fight over TV?”

Mrs. DeShon looked at me like I had cooties. “No. They’re so loud, we can’t hear
our
TV.”

“I get it. Do you know what they fight about?”

“Everything. Him, mostly.” She felt her baby’s diaper and made a face. “Come to think of it, she never does her share of shouting. Nope. It’s him. Yelling at her for wasting money planting flowers. Then screaming at her for not watering them. He threw a hissy fit once and ripped out all her roses.” She grabbed a diaper from the laundry basket, plopped her baby onto the floor, and knelt beside it … him, or her.

“I feel for that woman. I really do,” Mrs. DeShon continued.
“No kids of her own. Just that nasty man for a husband. I made Robby go over to their house once, it got so bad.”

“What happened?”

I watched as she unpinned the diaper and held the pins in her mouth. Even I knew you were supposed to clean up the baby when you took off the old diaper, but she didn’t bother. She just scooped off what she could with the old diaper. Then off with the old and on with the new.

I decided right then that I would never have kids. Especially not babies. And absolutely not boy babies. Gross.

She waited until the pins were out of her mouth. “Robby knocked on their door. Mrs. Kinney peeked out, and my Robby said she didn’t look so good. He asked her if she was all right. She said she was fine. But he called your daddy anyways, and Doc come down to check on her. I don’t know what happened after that.”

Mrs. DeShon picked up her baby and held him close. “If you ask me, Old Man Kinney shooting himself was about the nicest thing he ever done. I hope they keep him in the hospital a long, long time.”

I thanked Mrs. DeShon for talking to me and told the boys bye as I left. The interview, or whatever it was, had taken a lot out of me. But I’d learned four things, and the minute I was out of the house, I pulled out my little notebook and wrote:

I felt pretty good about my background interview. Now I was ready to talk to Mrs. Kinney herself.

I needed a strategy. I couldn’t just show up on Mrs. Kinney’s doorstep and ask her if her husband had shot himself or if she had shot him. I could ask, but I’d probably get the door slammed in my face.

I raced home and found Eileen at the kitchen table, catching air-conditioning while she studied. “Eileen, do we have any cookies?”

“Mom made macaroons yesterday.” She pointed to the top of the fridge.

I loaded a paper plate with cookies and marched straight to the Kinneys’ front door and knocked three times. While I waited, I glanced back at the step where Mrs. Kinney and my dad had sat, the rifle between them.

The door creaked, and I jumped like a rabbit.

Mrs. Kinney peered out, looking ten years younger than when she’d stumbled out carrying that rifle. She’d trimmed
her hair, and it looked less gray.
She
looked less gray. “May I help you?”

“Cookies?” I said, like an idiot.

“Excuse me?”

I held out the macaroons. “Mom wasn’t sure if you liked coconut.” I didn’t know why I said that. It would have been true if Mom had been thinking about Mrs. Kinney when she made the coconut cookies. “We love macaroons at our house. Even Midge, our dog, can’t get enough. I thought you might like them, with Mr. Kinney in the hospital and all. Well, some of them. Eileen may have eaten some already. Maybe not, though. She’s always on a diet.” I shut up and wondered if Randy had ever started an interview with macaroons.

“That’s mighty kindly of your mother. You be sure to thank her for me.” She started to shut the door.

“Mrs. Kinney, wait!”

The door stopped just shy of shutting. Bony, crooked fingers snaked around the doorframe like the door was a bass fiddle and Mrs. Kinney was about to play it.

“Do you think I could talk to you for a minute?” My voice eked out so thin, you could have used it for varnish.

“Well …” She seemed to be considering the question. “Why don’t you come in for a spell, Tree?” She held the door open until I moved inside. “Let’s have us one of your ma’s cookies. Won’t spoil your dinner none, will it?”

“Nah. I mean, thanks. I’d love a macaroon.”

Mrs. Kinney disappeared into the kitchen—I could see the sink from where I stood, barely inside the door. I looked around her front room and tried to take it all in. I was prepared
to use Dad’s memory hooks so that later I could write about what was in the room. Dad was always teaching himself new things—how to speak French or Swahili, how to find constellations. And new memory systems. You could give my dad a list of fifty items, and he could repeat every item back to you, in the same order. Even a year later, he could list all fifty. The system had something to do with mental hooks.

But as I scoped out the Kinneys’ front room, what struck me were the things that
weren’t
there. There were no pictures. No photos. Nothing at all on the walls. No television and no radio. No magazines or books that I could see.

What did they do all day and night? Sit and stare at each other?

I still hadn’t taken a seat. I eyed an old couch shoved against the wall, behind a coatrack. Sarah’s family used to have a couch like that—gray and made out of rough material that scratched when you sat on it and left funny patterns on your legs if you wore shorts. The arms of Mrs. Kinney’s couch looked frayed. Sarah’s mother covered the arms of their couch with little towels.

None of the furniture in the room matched. One coffee table leg had been glued together. There were no overhead lights, just short lamps on tables and a three-way pole lamp by the big chair.

The last place I looked was down. Because the last thing I wanted to see was Mr. Kinney’s blood. But there was no blood, just narrow wood slats where there might have been a rug before.

“Here you go.” Mrs. Kinney came back with two macaroons on two napkins. “Sit yourself anywheres you like.” She handed me a cookie, then took the worn wooden rocker.

I chose the straight-backed chair next to hers. Mine didn’t rock, and it sure could have used a pillow. I couldn’t help wondering if this was Mr. Kinney’s chair. Might have explained some of that grouchiness. “How’s Mr. Kinney doing?”

“Now, that there is a good question.” She bit into her coconut macaroon.

I followed her lead and bit into mine. “Will he be coming home soon?”

“I reckon not.”

We listened to each other chew for a while.

“Coconut.” Mrs. Kinney smiled at her last bite before popping it into her mouth. “Some folks call coconut trees the tree of life.”

“Really?” That wasn’t the way I heard it.

“You can cook with it, use it on your skin or hair. Some around here puts it into livestock feed. Them Vietnamese make ropes out of coconut fiber. Reckon that’s where they get that tree-of-life name—using coconut for so many things.”

I nodded. I’d have to remember to tell Dad about coconut ropes in Vietnam … if he ever spoke to me again.

Mrs. Kinney nodded toward the other side of her chair, at a half-made basket, round on the bottom and unfinished on top. “That there basket’s got coconut for a base.”

“Cool. Are you making that for the steam engine show? The ladies at church are making all kinds of things to sell for the missionaries overseas. Eileen and I are dressing up as
prairie girls. My friend Jack says he’ll go as Jesse James, but he might be kidding. Will you be going?”

“Well, I don’t rightly know. Haven’t given it much thought. Alfred doesn’t hold with community shindigs.” A faint smile crept across her lips. “Reckon now I just might give it some thought.”

Neither of us said anything for way too long. “How do you know so much about coconuts, Mrs. Kinney?”

“I read. When I was your age, I wanted to be a librarian.”

I glanced around but didn’t see a bookcase. A knickknack rack tucked into the far corner had shelves, but no books—just three glass figurines huddled like the Cozad kids on a cold night.

Suddenly, I wondered if that rifle was still in the house.

“I know what you’re thinking, Tree.” Before I got a chance to pray that she didn’t really know what I was thinking, she went on. “Nary a book in sight, eh? Alfred’s never cottoned to books. I check out everything from encyclopedias to mysteries from the library and hide every single one of them under my bed. Might ought to rethink that too, I reckon. Your daddy passes me them old copies of
National Geographic
time to time.”

Another long silence passed. Mrs. Kinney may have felt it too because she returned to coconuts. “Did you know that a body’s got a ten times better chance of dying from a coconut falling on his head than from getting killed by a shark?”

I took that as my cue to exit.

The second I stepped outside, the skies opened. Rain slapped the ground in slanted sheets. Across the road, the DeShon boys were throwing mud pies at each other.

Before I reached the sidewalk, I was soaked to the bone. I ran home in the pounding rain, dashed to the bathroom, tore off my wet clothes, and wrapped myself in a towel. Then I headed for my bedroom to change.

Mom stopped me in the hallway. She was still wearing her nurse’s uniform: white stockings, white shoes, white dress, and a white nurse’s cap. “Looks like you got caught in the rain.”

“Yep.”

“I have to start dinner. But I’m glad I ran into you. You need to try on the outfit Eileen and I got you in Chillicothe last week. It’s on your bed.”

“Okay. Thanks, Mom.” She acted so normal. No way Dad told her about our fight.

On my bed I found a hideous pink-and-white-striped shorts-and-top outfit that I’d never wear in public. I put it on
but didn’t bother glancing in the mirror. I didn’t need to. Jack would have cracked up if he’d seen me in pink.

Mom called to me and demanded I show her the outfit, so I trudged to the kitchen.

“Tree! You look darling!” She turned to Eileen, who was poring over a medical book. “Eileen, don’t you think Tree looks cute in that outfit?”

Eileen glanced at me. “Nice.” Then she went back to her studies.

I retreated to my room. But even in my own bedroom, I felt self-conscious about the Eileenesque cutsie-shorts outfit. I probably looked eight years old in the thing. I plopped on my bed and tried to brush the tangles out of my wet hair. I wanted to take some notes on my first, brief interview with Mrs. Kinney. I wasn’t sure what to think of her. Next time, I told myself, I’d have questions prepared.

Without warning, my bedroom door burst open. The sound sent chills through my heart. My mind flashed back to Saturday. The gunshot. The door slamming. Dad flying out.

Mom stood in the doorway. “Tree?”

I dropped the brush. It bounced off my bed and clunked to the floor. “What? What is it?”

I had no idea what was wrong. But I knew something bad had happened. Something very bad. In the span of two seconds, dozens of terrifying possibilities flashed through my head, a slideshow of horror. “Is it Dad?”