Wish (2 page)

Another, younger-looking redheaded boy got off with him. I watched them make their way across the weed-filled yard to their house. Bikes and skateboards and footballs and sneakers were scattered from the front door to the road. A garden hose snaked from a dripping faucet to a hole in the yard. A small, dirty-faced boy was dropping rocks into the hole, sending up splashes of muddy water.

Howard waved as the bus pulled away, but I turned my eyes back to that dried-up gum.

When we finally got to Gus and Bertha's long gravel driveway, I got off and watched the bus drive away, making the rain-soaked Queen Anne's lace bob at the edge of the road. I was starting up the driveway when I noticed something shiny in the dirt at the edge of the road.

A penny!

I darted over and picked it up. Then I hurled it as far as I could and made my wish quick before that penny hit the road and bounced into the woods.

There! I'd gotten in my wish for the day.

Maybe this time it would finally come true.

 

Two

I trudged up the long driveway, jumping over puddles of muddy rainwater and wondering what Jackie was doing right that very minute. Probably smoking cigarettes with some boy in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly across from the high school. Everybody thinks my sister is an angel straight down from heaven, but I know better.

When Gus and Bertha's house finally came into view, I stopped. I'd been there four days already but I still couldn't get over how that house hung off the side of the mountain like it did. The front of the house sat smack on the ground with flowering shrubs nestled right up against it. But the back was on stilts stuck into the steep mountainside. On top of the stilts was a tiny porch with two rocking chairs and window boxes full of flowers perched on the railing.

On my first night in Colby, Gus had dragged a kitchen chair out there for me after supper. Bertha had asked me about a million questions, like what was my favorite subject in school and did I have a lucky number? Did I want to go swimming at the Y sometime and did I like boiled peanuts? But I just mumbled and shrugged till she finally stopped. I was too mad to talk. What was I doing there on that porch with these people I didn't even know? I felt like I'd been tossed out on the side of the road like a sack of unwanted kittens. So the three of us sat in silence, watching the sun sink behind the mountain and the lightning bugs twinkle off and on among the pine trees.

I'd spent the next three days trying to convince Gus and Bertha that it was dumb for me to go to school since it was almost summer. But the next thing I knew, I was sitting on that bus full of hillbilly kids on my way to school.

“Hey, there,” Bertha called from the front door as I made my way across the yard. A fat orange cat darted out from behind the garden shed and trotted along beside me. Gus and Bertha had a whole passel of cats, sleeping under the porch, sunning on the windowsills, swatting bees out in the garden.

I went inside and dropped my backpack on Gus's tattered easy chair. The smell of warm cinnamon drifted through the kitchen door.

“I made coffee cake,” Bertha said. “I wonder why they call it coffee cake. Not a drop of coffee in it.” She held the door open for the cat to come in. “Oh, I know. I bet 'cause you're supposed to drink coffee when you eat it. You think? Well, anyways, who cares, right?”

It had been clear to me from day one that Bertha was a talker. Not like her sister, my mama, who went for days without saying a word. I had been surprised when I saw how much they looked alike, though. Same mousy brown hair. Same long, thin fingers. Even the same crinkly lines along the sides of their mouths.

I sat at the kitchen table and watched Bertha cut a thick slice of coffee cake and put it on a paper towel in front of me. Then she pulled her chair close to mine and said, “Tell me every little thing about your first day. Your teacher. The other kids. What your classroom looks like. What you had for lunch. What you did at recess. Every little thing.”

“Some girl ate a squirrel sandwich,” I said.

Bertha's eyebrows shot up. “A squirrel sandwich? Are you sure?”

I licked my finger and pressed it on the paper towel to get coffee cake crumbs. I nodded but I didn't look at her when I said, “I'm sure.”

A small gray cat sat on the kitchen counter grooming himself. I wondered if that was the one Howard had given them. Bertha picked him up and kissed the top of his head. “Charlie don't want cat hair in her coffee cake, Walter.” Then she gently put him down on the linoleum floor. His tail twitched as he watched a line of tiny ants marching from under the sink to a dark spot of something sticky by the stove.

“And there's an up-down boy in my class,” I said.

Bertha cocked her head. “What in the name of sweet Bessie McGee is an up-down boy?” She snapped a brown leaf off of a plant on the windowsill and tucked it into her pocket.

“This boy named Howard who walks up and down, like this.” I walked like Howard around the kitchen table.

“Howard Odom,” Bertha said. “Bless his heart. Good as gold, that boy is. Don't bat an eye when kids poke fun at him, calling him names like Pogo.” She shook her head. “I swear, kids can be so mean sometimes.”

“Pogo?”

“Yeah, you know, like a pogo stick.”

“He oughta punch their lights out,” I said. “That's what I'd do.”

Bertha widened her eyes at me, then shook her head. “Not that boy. He wouldn't hurt a fly.
All
them Odoms are like that. Good-hearted. Kinda wild sometimes, those brothers of his. But good-hearted.” She brushed crumbs off the table and tossed them into the sink. “Shoot, just last week, three of those boys were over here helping Gus replace them boards on the porch that got eat up with termites and they wouldn't take one penny. We sent them home with a burlap bag full of turnips and they were happy as clams.”

Turnips? Any kids who were happy about a bag of turnips must be weird, if you asked me.

Bertha sat at the table beside me again. “So what else?” she said. “Tell me something else about school.”

I shrugged. I wasn't going to tell her about that “Getting to Know You” paper dropped onto Mrs. Willibey's desk like a hot potato or about Howard being my Backpack Buddy, so I just said, “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nope.”

Bertha slapped her hand on the kitchen table. “I almost forgot,” she said. “I got you something.” She motioned for me to follow her down the hall to the tiny spare room where I'd been sleeping.

“Ta-da!” She flung her arm out and grinned.

I followed her gaze to the narrow bed in the corner. Propped up against the wall were two pillows in pink pillowcases with Cinderella on them.

“I realized this morning that this room don't look one bit like a little girl's room,” Bertha said. “So I went down to Big Lots and got those pillowcases. I was gonna get the matching bedspread but it was a double and not a twin. I might go back and get this fluffy pink rug they have if I can get Gus to help me move that bureau. And I know I need to get my canning jars out of here, and that old TV don't even work anymore but…”

She rambled on and on but I didn't even listen.
Cinderella pillowcases?
She must think I'm five instead of almost eleven. She sure didn't know much about kids.

That afternoon Jackie called from Raleigh. She told me how Carol Lee's cousin came to visit and gave her a cashmere sweater she didn't want anymore. And Carol Lee's daddy was teaching her how to drive since Scrappy never would. She said she was thinking about putting blue streaks in her hair and that some boy named Arlo was taking her to a NASCAR race down in Charlotte. She was so busy telling me about her happy life that she didn't even ask me what it was like living in Colby with hillbilly kids who eat squirrel. After we hung up, I went back to my room and laid on the Cinderella pillows and felt sorry for myself. How could Jackie be so happy? It seemed like she didn't care one little bit about me anymore.

I bet Scrappy didn't care about me anymore, either. I bet he was so busy playing basketball behind the tall fence at the county jail that he didn't even think about me up here on this mountain in a house full of cats with these people I don't even know. And I knew for sure my mama wasn't thinking about me as she shuffled around the house in her bathrobe all red eyed and stoop shouldered.

I was definitely going to have to go out on that porch tonight and wait for the first star to come out so I could make my wish again. Maybe two in one day would do the trick.

 

Three

That night, out on the back porch with Gus and Bertha, I saw the first star, twinkling over the treetops. I closed my eyes and wished like crazy.

“Making a wish?” Gus asked.

I felt myself blush. “No.”

Bertha nudged Gus. “Tell her about the time you wished your uncle Dean would disappear and then he did,” she said.

Gus flapped his hand at her. “Aw, now, Bertie. She don't want to hear that boring ole story.” He rocked his chair, making the porch floor creak and groan.

While Bertha talked a blue streak and hardly ever sat still, Gus was quiet and easygoing, with a calm, slow way about him. He wore a baseball cap all day and half the night, his scraggly brown hair poking out from under it every which way. The bill of his cap was dark brown with dirt and greasy fingerprints.

“That there is Pegasus,” he said, pointing to a cluster of stars hovering way up over the top of the mountains in the distance.

“Gus should've been a scientist,” Bertha said. “He can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about stars and air and plants and water and weather and all that stuff.”

Gus let out a little
pfft
.

“He thinks I married him for his looks.” Bertha winked at me. “But I married him for his brains,” she said.

Gus laughed.

And then the most amazing thing happened. They both reached out at the exact same time and held hands. It was like somebody had said, “Okay, on the count of three, hold hands.” I'd never in my whole life seen Scrappy and Mama hold hands. Shoot, most of the time, they didn't even look at each other.

I watched Gus and Bertha sitting there gazing at the night sky, the corners of their mouths turned up into contented smiles. Every now and then, Bertha looked dreamily over at Gus like he was a movie star and not some scraggly haired man who worked in a mattress factory over in Cooperville.

We stayed out there till it started to sprinkle again, a soft, cold rain that sent the cats at our feet darting inside.

I went to bed that night with my head swirling. I thought about Scrappy snoring away in the county jail and Mama staring up at the ceiling of her dark bedroom. I thought about Jackie, whispering gossip and painting her toenails with Carol Lee. I thought about Howard Odom with his up-down walk and his good-hearted family. And I thought about Gus and Bertha holding hands under the glow of Pegasus. And then I thought about my own pitiful self, laying there wondering if my wish would ever come true.

*   *   *

The next day, I wore Jackie's old white majorette boots to school. I knew I'd made a mistake the minute I got on the bus. As I made my way down the aisle, some of those girls pointed at my boots, giggling and whispering. I felt my face burn and I glared at them. Howard motioned for me to sit next to him, but I flopped down in the seat behind him.

I spent the morning drawing on my arm with a blue marker and pretending to read. At recess, Howard tried and tried to get me to let him show me around the school.

“I'm your Backpack Buddy, remember?” he said.

I shook my head. “Forget it,” I said. “I'm not really interested. Besides, I'm not going to be here much longer.”

“Why not?”

I rolled my eyes. “I
told
you. I'm going back to Raleigh.”

“But what if your mama don't get her feet on the ground?” he said.

Well, what the heck kind of question was that? I stomped away from him and plopped down under the cafeteria windows and glared at the kids playing soccer on the playground. Once or twice I glanced over at Howard. He was drawing circles in the dirt with his foot and looking all mopey.

When the bell rang, everybody scrambled to line up. A bunch of wild boys pushed and shoved their way in front of Howard and he didn't even say anything. As I headed toward the line, a girl from my class named Audrey Mitchell waltzed right up to me and said, “Nice boots.” She smirked while her friends giggled behind her.

I felt Scrappy's temper working its way from the tip of my toes to the top of my head. Hot as fire. Then I said, “Thanks. They're good for kicking,” and I kicked her skinny shin. Hard.

The next few minutes were a blur of crying and hollering and tattling and then I found myself sitting in front of Mr. Mason, the principal. While he lectured about my inappropriate behavior, I studied the inky little stars and hearts I had drawn on my arm that morning.

Mr. Mason asked me if I knew that what I did was wrong and would I like it if somebody did that to me and a bunch of other questions I didn't even care about.

I said “Yessir” and “No, sir” but I kept my eyes on my inky arm and clunked the heels of those majorette boots against the legs of my chair.

I shrugged when he said he was going to have to call Bertha and tell her what I'd done. Then I went back to my class and said I was sorry to Audrey Mitchell even though I wasn't really, and that was how my second day of school in Colby went.

That afternoon on the bus, Howard ignored my laser thoughts again and made a beeline right for me. He dropped into the seat next to me.

“You should save me a seat, 'cause I think Backpack Buddies are supposed to sit together,” he said.

“That's against the rules,” I said.

“I'm pretty sure you can save a seat for a Backpack Buddy.”