There’s nothing to do but follow him outside. Dani even brings Ian with her. We stand in a line in front of the trailer. On the far side of the big front yard, Jace stands with three of his buddies, including smoosh-face Randy Pilcher. Jace holds a baseball bat in his right hand.
“You got a problem?” Bobby says. His fists are balled at his sides, ready to go.
“Yeah,” says Jace. “I got a problem with a military reject snaking my girl out from under me.”
Bobby’s like, “You can’t keep your girlfriend, that’s your fault. But if you got the idea you want to use that bat on somebody, here I am.”
“I don’t know,” Jace says. “That’s quite an army you got there with you. You even got a spaz and a two-year-old on your side. We’re quaking and shaking.”
“Yeah, well, we outnumber you,” I holler at him. Then, looking down our lineup, I’m like, “Isn’t that right?”
Tillman’s the first to take a step back. “Hey, this isn’t my fight,” he says.
I look Gillis in the eyes, but he’s like, “I don’t know, Ceejay.”
The captain scratches his beard, then breaks ranks and trots to his truck. I can’t say I’m shocked at that.
“Whoa,” calls Jace. “Looks like your army’s deserting you.”
“Come on, Brianna,” yells smoosh-face Randy. “You know you’re on my side, girl.”
Brianna stares at the ground.
“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “Me and Bobby’ll handle this ourselves,” but Bobby goes, “No, we won’t, Ceejay. This is my fight. You stay out of it.”
“You know me better than that,” I tell him.
Jace smacks the barrel of the bat against his palm. “Well now, let’s get it on.”
Brianna’s still staring at the ground. Tillman leans back against the wall of the trailer, his arms crossed. Gillis stares at me, a confused leprechaun. The captain fires up the engine of his pickup, and Dani stands on the porch with Ian clutched against her. The thought hits me that this is how you know who people really are.
“Why don’t you put down that bat,” Bobby says.
Jace snickers. “Because I don’t want to.”
“You’re gonna wish you did,” Bobby says, and as soon as the did drops out of his mouth, he takes off running across the yard. A few feet in front of Jace, he pulls up and slings back his right fist like he’s ready to throw a titanic punch. Jace takes a batter’s stance, but just as he swings, Bobby does what I’ve seen him do before. He ducks his head and flies shoulder first into Jace’s waist as the bat whooshes around clipping nothing but air.
As soon as they both hit the dirt—Bobby on top—Jace’s buddies run to help, and I make my own charge. I’m almost there when I realize Gillis is right at my shoulder. We pull smoosh-face Randy off the pile, but there’s still this guy Dean on Bobby’s back, and this fat tub of crap named Steve is trying to kick Bobby from the side.
Randy hops up, ready to dive back into the fray, but he has something else to deal with instead—the big, old lime-green crazymobile is heading straight at him, the captain inside screaming with pure Yimmy glee.
Randy tries to dodge behind Jace’s car, but it’s too late—the captain’s barreling down on him. At the last second, Randy has to jump as high as he can so he goes rolling off the hood instead of taking the grille up his butt.
From there, the whole thing is hilarious. Gillis and I gang up on Steve, and as soon as we toss him aside, the captain zooms in. Now he has Steve and Randy both on the run. All we have to do is rip Dean off Bobby’s back and keep him off, which isn’t too hard, because all of a sudden Brianna’s mixing it up with us. She must have gone inside to get a weapon, but all she found was a flyswatter, and she’s chasing Dean around, swatting him like crazy on the back of the head as me and Gillis get our punches and kicks in.
That Brianna. She’s my girl. One hundred percent.
This is better than playing paintball in the woods. We could keep at it for a week, but finally, we chase all three of Jace’s buddies up on top of his car, the crazymobile growling like a junkyard dog beneath them.
“Keep that crazy asshole’s truck away from us,” smoosh-face Randy hollers desperately.
The answer to that is three gunshots. It’s Dani. She’s holding a pistol in the air with one hand while clutching Ian against her chest with the other. She has this conceited expression on her face like she’s the queen of everything she sees. I’ll bet a million dollars she got the idea to fire off the gun from some TV show and has been waiting years for just the right moment to use it.
“Now everybody who came with Jace, get the hell out of here,” she shouts, her voice hard and triumphant. “And you might as well go with them, Tillman.”
He shrugs. “I was just staying neutral,” he says. “It’s not my fault everyone went wild.”
“Yeah, right,” she says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t set the whole thing up.”
“It’s true, isn’t it?” I say. “That’s why you were checking your watch. You told those guys Bobby was going to be here.”
Before he can answer, Randy cries out from behind me, “Good God, look what that bastard did!”
I turn around and see Bobby, the baseball bat in his hand, walking away from where Jace lies splayed out like so much trash dumped in the yard. In all the excitement, nobody bothered to keep tabs on what was going on in their pile.
Randy jumps down from the car roof to get a better look. “You practically killed him, you son of a bitch. I mean, look at his face, what’s left of it.”
Jace lies still on the ground. His face looks like it got caught under a lawnmower.
“He wanted to know what war’s like,” Bobby says without bothering to turn around. “Well, there you go.”
Randy stares at Dani as if he’s begging her to do something, but she just goes, “You better scrape him up and take him to the emergency room.” Then she kisses Ian on the forehead and walks into the trailer with Bobby.
As Jace’s buddies gather him up, Tillman comes over and stops right in front of me. “I hope you’re real proud of your brother now,” he says. He doesn’t wait for me to answer. He just turns and walks over to the enemy side.
I want to yell something at him, but what would I yell? I loved you, you traitor? I’ve spent my life daydreaming about you? I wanted you like I never wanted anything else?
No. There’s nothing to say.
27
Turns out Jace wasn’t killed. His buddies didn’t even take him to the emergency room, though they probably should have. He had so many different kinds of drugs in him he was afraid the hospital would call the cops, and they’d arrest him right there in his little backless hospital gown. It didn’t take much convincing. The other guys were pretty wasted themselves, and they didn’t want to get busted either. A couple days later Jace did go in to have his broken nose ratcheted back into place.
All this I hear about from Gillis. Tillman told him about it. Gillis still talks to Tillman, but you better believe I don’t. Who needs him? I found out who my true friends are. When it came right down to it, Gillis was clutch. He didn’t leave me hanging. And I can’t say enough about Brianna and her flyswatter. She’s my girl right down to the ground. Not only because she defied smoosh-face Randy, but because I know how scared that girl gets. And she took my back anyway.
Then there’s the captain. I never in a million years would have expected it, but he really came through in that lime-green truck. Who knows how the battle might have turned out if he hadn’t come chugging along. He and Bobby don’t think the fight was as funny as I do, though. Bobby says fighting isn’t a laughing matter, and the captain says something about how the Nogo Gatu come cloaked in violence. That’s all right. I have to give the captain a break for that nonsense after the battle at Dani’s trailer.
I’m still not convinced his aero-velocipede is a good idea, though. Actually, it worries the crap out of me, but Bobby’s got it in his mind he wa
nts to help fix the thing up and fly it. He won’t listen to anything I have to say about how dangerous it is, so the next best thing I can do is to make sure I’m there anytime he goes to the captain’s to work on it. Besides, I figure it won’t take too long for him to get sick of Dani’s drama, and I’ll be around when he does.
Of course, the parents aren’t exactly happy about me hanging out at the captain’s, but as far as I’m concerned that’s pretty hypocritical. After all, they’ve always stuck up for the captain, told me and Lacy and Drew we shouldn’t make fun of him. I’ve even caught Dad standing around on the street corner outside the drugstore gabbing with the captain like they’re old high school buddies. But somehow it’s supposed to be different for me to hang around Casa Crazy in the evenings. Dad doesn’t order me to stay away, though. He knows I’m with Bobby, and right now, I’m the only connection the family has to him.
They do come up with another way to keep me from going there, though, at least for a little while. Actually, I knew it had to happen sooner or later—the family trip to Davenport to visit Grandma Brinker. Mom has been going over there every weekend, and Lacy’s been there practically the whole summer, but this will be the first time the rest of us have visited since she got diagnosed. It’s going to be awkward, to say the least.
Like I say, we’ve always been at odds with Grandma Brinker, and not just because of things like the gnome incident either. She never wanted Mom to hook up with Dad in the first place. And then after Grandpa died, she married that mean old moneygrubber Davis Brinker, and he didn’t like any of us. He finally died last year, and I felt like the biggest hypocrite in the world sitting at his funeral.
Dad assigns me the job of telling Bobby about the trip, but I’m like, “Why should I tell him? He’s not going to want to go any more than I do.”
Dad scowls. “This is about family. Your brother needs to stop feeling sorry for himself and think about others for a change.”
“Feeling sorry for himself?” I can’t believe how wrong Dad can be about his own son. “If you think that’s what he’s doing, then you should go over and tell him that yourself. You know where he is.”
“He’s the one who stormed out,” Dad says, folding his arms across his chest. “He should be the one who comes over here first.”
I look at Mom for support, but she doesn’t say anything. She just stands there looking like she’s about to choke on her little half-smile.
Of course, when I tell Bobby about the trip, he flat out says he’s not going. Grandma never wanted him around when she was healthy, so why should she want him around now? It makes sense, but I know I can’t use that or any other excuse to get out of going to Davenport. Neither can my little brother Drew, though he mopes around the house like an innocent man on death row for three days straight. He thinks it’s really unfair that we have to go on Thursday, and Dad’s not coming until Saturday. Mom explains that Dad has to work, but Drew’s like, “Hey, I have a life too, you know.”
“That’s right,” Mom says. “And your life is going to be with us in Davenport this weekend.”
“No one ever listens to me!” he wails, and stomps upstairs to his Xbox.
Me, I understand Dad has to work, but I don’t like the idea of Ms. Simmons the church floozy bringing him dinner—and her cleavage—Thursday and Friday night while we’re gone. Ever since Uncle Jimmy tipped me off to her game, I’ve been watching her pretty close. She’s shameless, scuttling around our house in her low-cut blouses, laughing like a nitwit at Dad’s corny jokes, even reaching over and touching him on the arm or the knee while they sit at the kitchen table.
What’s she doing staying for dinner anyway? She should just drop off the food and get lost. That’s what a real Christian would do. But does Dad tell her that? No. He actually enjoys having her there—my own dad, a victim of mammary hypnosis. You can see how I don’t like the idea of him alone in the house with that woman for two nights in a row.
Needless to say, I’m not in the greatest mood in the world as we drive over to Davenport, and when we finally get there, I don’t feel any better. It’s not as big a town as Knowles. They don’t even have a movie theater. But Grandma lives in a pretty nice two-story house on a street with trees that are so big and bushy they look like they’ve been there since before the American Revolution. Mom gets all bubbly and smiley as we pull into the driveway and she spots my little sister Lacy mowing the lawn. Myself, I’m stunned. Lacy mowing a lawn? The girl whines if she has to take the trash out.
She’s happy as a puppy to see us, though, even me. Of course she’s happy to see the others—she probably thinks they’re here to rescue her from Grandma—but after the last time I talked to her on the phone, I figured she wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me. Not true, though. It’s like she doesn’t even remember that phone call. Unlike me—I still can’t forgive her for not showing up for Bobby’s homecoming.
She even wraps me up in a big, sweaty hug, which is also new—she never sweats. And her clothes are nothing like her usual girly fashion, not a stitch of pink anywhere on her, just a gray Mickey Mouse T-shirt, a pair of denim shorts, and old grass-stained sneakers with no laces. “Wow,” I say. “Who are you and where’s my little sister?”
She laughs. “Isn’t this a great makeover? And it didn’t cost a cent.”
Inside, Grandma’s lying back in the recliner in her housecoat, slippers, and a curly gold wig that doesn’t even come close to looking natural. I know her hair fell out from taking chemo and everything, but this thing looks like something she stole off a mannequin at a department store. On top of that, she’s lost weight. Not that she couldn’t stand to. She was always a little plump, but this doesn’t look natural either. It’s beginning to dawn on me that Mom’s been sugarcoating things even more than usual.
Everybody tells Grandma not to get up, but she does anyway, and it’s more hugs all around. I feel like I’m being engulfed in old-lady perfume, but Grandma seems to really mean it this time. At least she acts like it. Usually, she just doles out a quick squeeze and a peck on the cheek that makes you feel like something coming down an assembly line and she’s just doing her job.
While Lacy finishes mowing the lawn, the rest of us sit in the living room with Grandma. Mom and my big sister Colleen drum up some conversation for a while, but Grandma’s tired and seems more than happy to let them do most of the talking. It gets boring pretty quick. Drew focuses on his Game Boy, and even Colleen can’t pretend to be part of the conversation for very long.
Finally, Lacy finishes up with the lawn and asks me if I want to walk downtown with her after she gets cleaned up. There’s not likely to be much excitement in downtown Davenport, but I figure it has to be better than sitting around listening to my mom talk about what the ladies at the hair salon have been up to lately.
As Lacy and I walk along the tree-lined street, she gives me the rundown on Grandma’s condition. Yes, she’s lost hair and weight and can’t keep her food down, but she still has a lot of spirit. Lacy has a hard time convincing her to rest instead of doing housework. Grandma’s always trying to wrestle around with the vacuum or the dust mop. Lacy has started getting up at six in the morning just so she can beat Grandma to doing the chores. But she’s not complaining. She actually laughs about it. She admires Grandma’s spunk.
“I don’t know,” I say. “It looks like Grandma’s a lot worse off than what Mom’s been telling us.”
“Well, that chemo’s hard stuff,” Lacy says. “There’s no getting around that. It’s a battle. But I don’t care how little or skinny she looks right now, Grandma’s a real fighter.”
“I’m sure she is,” I say. “Maybe she thinks she can slap cancer across the face like she did Bobby.”
Lacy looks hurt. “Come on, Ceejay. That’s not fair. That was a long time ago, and Grandma’s changed.”
“We’ll see.”
As we get to Main Street, she tells me the real reason she wanted to come down here. Turns out sh
e’s involved in a program at the library where she reads books to little kids. She’s decided she loves little kids and wouldn’t mind working with them someday as a career. Apparently, she hasn’t really had a chance to hang out much with anyone her own age, which is odd because back in Knowles her friends were her life. We’re talking about Little Miss Social here. Not to mention boy-crazy.
No, I figure one of these little library rug rats must have a cute older brother Lacy’s dying to worm her way into meeting. So I ask her, very casually, if she’s come across any interesting boys since she’s been in town, but she’s like, “Oh, there’s a couple of nice boys at church, but I haven’t got time for that right now.”
No time for boys? She has to be kidding. This is the same Lacy who practically burned out her little pink phone from rattling on and on to her friends about which boy had the best hair, the prettiest eyes, or the cutest butt.
She’s not lying about the kids at the library, though. A whole pack of them are gathered in a space in front of the kiddie book section. They actually cheer when they see her. Even the librarian claps. Lacy smiles and waves like she’s a celebrity strutting down the red carpet. Walking behind her, I can’t keep from feeling out of place. If Lacy is the star, then I’m the party crasher. I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody asked to see my library card and then kicked me out for not having one.
The kids all fall silent as she reads them a book about crocodiles and then another one about a six-year-old astronaut. They’re sitting there gazing up at her, their faces beaming like little mirrors turned toward the sun. Afterward, they gather round her chair, leaning into her, touching her arm, her shoulder, her hair. She knows all their names and exactly how to make them giggle. Then she introduces me to them, and the shocker is they take to me right off. Apparently, Lacy has already told them about me, so they’re like, Wow, this is great—the legendary Ceejay McDermott all the way from Knowles.