Maybe Lill was an angel, I thought to myself; maybe she was Lester’s angel, sent down from heaven to clear the voices from his head.
I turned my eyes away from the adults, choosing a seat by one of the few windows not threaded with cracks or covered in cardboard and silvery duct tape. I watched out of the window as we bumped and thumped towards Wymore and Lester’s next delivery, passing an endless landscape of grizzled cornfields. The earth was yawning and stretching here, turning green at the toes of the brown and broken stalks of last year’s harvest. It was spring and the whole world was coming back to life. The whole world was waking up. Now, I thought to myself, if only Poppa would too.
27
We arrived in Wymore just as the morning’s second service was ending at the big brick church off Tenth Street. Lester parked the bus in front of the building and waited as Lill straightened his tie one more time and brushed crumbs from his shirt. The man positively beamed at Lill’s spit and polish attention, and his shoulders gave neither a hitch nor a twitch.
‘Now, don’t forget what we talked about,’ she continued encouragingly. ‘See if you can deliver those Bibles right to the minister’s wife. A woman’s going to be much more likely to take kindly to something that’s pink.’
Lester nodded at Lill and stood up tall as she kissed him on the cheek.
‘That’s for luck,’ said Lill, and Lester turned every shade of red. ‘You’ll do fine.’
Lester’s mouth worked and worked like he was chewing on a big wad of Bobbi’s bubble gum; he looked like he wanted to say something to Lill but couldn’t make his lips move right. After a moment, he reached out and awkwardly shook Lill’s hand like he and she had just signed a contract. Then, with one large pink Bible tucked under his arm, Lester strode from the bus wearing a sheen of confidence that fitted him like a new pair of shoes. He walked stiffly, but with more pride than I’d reckoned him able to muster.
Lill bit her cuticles as she watched Lester through the window. Since we’d left Lincoln, she’d been coaching him, giving Lester tips on how to talk to people and how to present himself like a businessman, rather than just some deliveryman easily pushed around and disrespected. Now it was her turn to fidget and fret.
While Fish and Will pitched wadded-up balls of paper torn from Lester’s stack of magazines at each other over the seats, Bobbi and I moved to sit by Lill. I didn’t need to draw anything on Lill with my shiny silver pen to know that she was love-struck with Lester. I couldn’t fathom it myself, but I guessed that happy endings came in all shapes and sizes.
Before long, Lester returned to the bus with a smile that threatened to split his face in two. Climbing up the three steep steps, he let out a whoop and a holler. Then, with a little heel-clicking skip, he leaned over and took Lill’s face in his hands, laying a long hard kiss on her mouth. Lill threw her arms around Lester’s neck and kissed him right back with a zest and a zing and a zeal that set the rest of us looking away – looking at just about anything, anything else.
Bobbi stuck out her tongue with a sour and shimmying shudder, squirming away from the happy couple and into the seat across the aisle, yet I couldn’t help notice that lightning-fast smile of hers come and go once, like a sentimental chink in her teenage armour.
Loosening his lip-lock with Lill, Lester straightened up and announced, ‘Not only is the minister here accepting the delivery, but the Wymore Women’s Guild would like to p-purchase three extra cases of Heartland B-Bibles.’
Lill clapped her hands like my sister Gypsy, joyfully enthusiastic.
‘That takes care of all the B-Bibles I didn’t deliver yesterday,’ Lester said with relief, patting the back of his driver’s seat as though now his bus was safe and he had been redeemed.
Lester recruited Fish and Will to help him carry boxes from the bus into the church. The boys tucked their heads down and held the boxes high to hide their faces as best they could, so that no one might recognize them from the ALERT! MISSING! ALERT! newscasts.
When they returned, Lester had cash and Fish and Will each had handfuls of powdered sugar doughnuts cut demi-semi into quarters. Will brushed white sugar off his black T-shirt as he handed me a piece of doughnut, then sucked more sugar from his fingers as he sat down next to me – next to me close. Despite the doughnuts, Fish looked dark as a storm cloud in his seat across the aisle and a shadow fell over the sun. Will glanced from Fish to Lester to me, looking worried.
‘Lester says he has to make one more stop before we get to Salina, Mibs,’ he began. ‘I guess he has to give some gal money from selling all those Bibles, and the stop is right along the way. But he promised he’ll get us down to the hospital soon – a few hours is all.’ Will was trying to reassure me. He knew how badly Fish and Samson and I wanted to get down to our poppa and was not too sure what might happen if we got more frustrated and impatient.
I held my bite of doughnut carefully between two fingers, watching the powder drop on to my lap as the bus rumbled and roared back to life. It was taking so long to get to Poppa; a few more hours of such uncertainty and dread were sure to feel long enough to hold days, months or years worth of normal everyday worries – everyday worries like what to do about a certain, curly-haired boy.
Will finished his doughnut and made a face, looking annoyed and uncomfortable. He reached under his leg and pulled out a wadded-up ball of magazine paper that he’d sat down on. Something about the crumpled ball of glossy paper caught my eye. I popped the piece of doughnut into my mouth and took the paper wad from Will, coughing a little as I inhaled the powdered sugar. Untwisting the crumpled ball, I smoothed it out against my lap, ignoring the way Will’s knee kept bumping mine. The picture was the one from the magazine cover, the picture of the human heart looking like nothing more than a big mushy ball of watermelon threaded through with fine, pale roots. When I had first seen that picture, I had thought it made a person’s heart look like a fragile, fragile thing rather than the sturdy muscle that I’d learned it to be. Now, I realized it was both.
With that thought in mind, I turned towards Will, my heart thumping, thumping, thumping hard against my ribs. I needed Will Junior’s full attention. Scooting away from him a bit and setting the rumpled picture down between us, I reached out and took Will’s face in my hands the way Lester had done with Lill. Holding another person’s head in my hands like a basketball didn’t feel near as awkward as I’d expected, despite how embarrassing it had been to watch Lester take hold of Lill the same way. But, unlike what happened between the two of them, there was to be no kissing this time around.
Instead, I looked Will straight in the eye, ignoring the way Fish goggled at us from the next seat over. Will looked back at me, startled, and I kept my heart muscle strong, feeling something inside me shiver like a pale green flower shoot just waking up for spring. But whatever that thing was, it was still too new to feel ready to bloom; it wanted time to send down roots. Someday soon I was going to bloom like crazy and then I’d have what I needed to keep me standing tall.
‘I like you, Will,’ I said. ‘I may even like you like you. But I’m just not ready to be kissing you yet, all right?’ My heart was beating so hard with the hurly-burly fluster of truth-telling that it felt fit and full to bursting. I was confident that Will’s heart was a steady one and suspected that he wouldn’t fall to watermelon mush just because I wasn’t ready to be kissing him. But we were friends now and I didn’t want to bust that up.
I let go of Will’s face and he stopped bumping my knee with his. His smile turned slaunchways and his black eye gave him a stubborn, scrappy look that I couldn’t quite read all the way to the end.
‘All right then, Mibs,’ he said. ‘Just give me the pen back.’
‘My birthday pen?’ I asked, surprised and less muscled by measure. Will raised his eyebrows meaningfully and held out his hand. My stomach knotted and my lower lip began to tremble. I felt younger than young and all the rooting and all the growing up I’d just done seemed to slip though m
y fingers as I reached down into the pocket of my special-occasion dress. I reached down past the paper-covered soap I’d so happily secreted there that morning and now, sadly, found broken in two. I reached down to wrap my hand around my fine and fancy happy-birthday pen with its silver finger grip and its shiny rounded cap.
I couldn’t look at Will as I held the pen out to him. I stared out of the window instead, ignoring the satisfied look on Fish’s face where he sat across the aisle and trying to stop my lips from quivering, trying to tell myself I was being a silly shilly-shally for feeling so let down when I’d just been the one doing the letting down. I watched rolling hills slip past and slope away like prairie waves outside the windows of the bus. I felt Will take the pen from my hand and heard him uncap it with a quick metallic zing.
A moment later, a voice filled my head like a deep-toned bell and the sound of it rang and echoed in my ears.
‘I can wait.’
‘I can wait.’
‘I can wait.’
I turned back towards Will, who sat with his right hand raised in my direction like he was taking an oath or asking to be called on – a blue-inked sunshine smiling out at me from his palm.
‘Don’t worry, Mibs,’ he said aloud.
28
After Wymore we continued south, leaving Nebraska and finding ourselves on the far side of Kansas, still miles from Salina. Despite the Beaumont pleas to go straight to Salina Hope Hospital, Lester was fixed tight to his plans for one last detour. So we ate Pop-Tarts and crisps and candy bars from the Mega Mega Mart and watched the landscape roll by outside the bus, trying not to think about Poppa lying broken in the hospital, trying not to imagine The Worst.
We were just north of Manhattan when a siren wailed and lights flashed behind us. All of us kids tensed like watch springs, coiling down into our seats, keeping low as Lester pulled the bus to the side of the highway with the rest of the Sunday traffic. It was with more than a touch of relief that we watched a white-and-blue police car fly past us on its way to someplace else and realized it wasn’t ALERT! MISSING! ALERT! after us. But Lill and Lester hardly noticed a thing, so absorbed were they with each other.
Not long after, as Lester followed a long curve in the highway, Fish got to his feet and moved towards the front of the bus, stopping just shy of the yellow line painted on the floor. He was peering ahead of him up the highway and his knuckles were white where he clutched the back of Lester’s seat. I got up from my place next to Will, squeezing past him to move towards Fish. Something was up, sure as sure.
‘What’s going on, Fish?’ I asked him over the noise of the bus. The others were looking our way now, curious.
‘I smell water,’ said Fish. ‘And lots of it.’ I cast a quick glance next to us at Lill, who was looking our way enquiringly. Lester turned his head as well.
‘You’ve got a g-good nose,’ he said to Fish. ‘We’re not too far from Tuttle Creek Lake. That’s a fair-sized b-body of water, that is.’
I put my hand on Fish’s shoulder. ‘You’re doing fine now, Fish,’ I reminded him quietly. ‘There’s no need to worry… right? You’ve got things under control. You’ve got it scumbled.’
Fish gave one quick, hard nod with each thing I said, as though he was punctuating my sentences with his chin.
‘You’re good,’ I said to him. ‘You told me so yourself back by the pool at the motel, remember? It’s just a bunch of water.’
Another nod.
‘I’m good,’ he finally agreed, and his hand relaxed its grip on Lester’s seat. I knew that, despite Fish’s newfound confidence, the memories of his full-blown thirteenth-birthday hurricane would haunt him for a long, long time. It was the sort of thing no one could ever really forget.
‘We’re almost there,’ said Lester. ‘Carlene lives just up ahead. As soon as I p-pay her what I owe her we can head on over to Salina. It won’t be too long until you’re all b-back with your families.’
‘Carlene? Not Carlene! I yammered before I could stop myself. Startled, Lester swerved the bus into oncoming traffic, barely missing a honking pickup truck as he turned to look at me funny.
‘What d’you know about Carlene, young miss?’ asked Lester, surprised. ‘I don’t b-believe I’ve ever mentioned her name. It’s Carlene’s cousin Larry that owns the Heartland Bible Supply Company. She helped me get my job.’
‘It’s just… I… isn’t Carlene tattooed on your arm?’ I said quickly, trying to cover up my blunder. I jabbed Fish in the ribs with my elbow. My brother’s eyes went wide as he realized that I’d been hearing things about Lester that no one else had, and he tried to help.
‘That’s right, you’ve got tattoos on both arms, don’t you?’
‘Well, I did that a long time ago,’ Lester mumbled, trying to unroll and button his shirtsleeves over his tattoos as he drove. His right shoulder began to jerk up and down like he was trying to keep a persistent bird or bee from landing on his shoulder. Lill looked away from him, studying her shoes.
‘What’s Lester still doing with all these rotten kids,’ Rhonda’s voice came spilling back into my head like vinegar.
‘He’s got no brains, that’s the problem,’ Carlene’s voice stirred in. I was disappointed to hear those ladies. For a while, Lester’s mind had been too full of Lill to let those voices in; I hated to see him bid them back.
‘Lester the dunderhead.’
‘Lester the dimwit.’
‘Lester the dumbbell.’
‘Lester the –’
‘Stop it!’ I cried out, and everybody looked at me. I realized I had my hands over my ears, and except for the noise of the bus, everything else was quiet.
‘Why do you listen to them, Lester? Carlene abandoned your dog on the side of the road because it chewed up her best red shoes!’ I couldn’t stand it any more. Lester hit the brakes hard, steering the bus once again to the side of the road and coming to a sudden, lurching stop. He didn’t look at me and he didn’t move. Instead he just sat there, staring out of the front window, letting the bus engine idle.
‘She’s a bad one, that Carlene,’ I said, then pressed my lips together tight, knowing I’d already said too much.
‘Mibs, honey,’ said Lill softly. ‘Maybe you and Fish should just go sit back down.’
‘Naw, Lill,’ said Lester, his jaw quivering with anger or sorrow or both. ‘The girl’s right. I don’t know how or why she knows it, but she’s right.’ He sniffed once and wiped his nose on his sleeve. ‘I always knew that C-Carlene got rid of my dog and lied about it. I just… she just… well, she g-got me this here job, after all.’ He traced the steering wheel in front of him with one finger. ‘She g-got me this bus.’
‘Lester the cry-baby.’
‘Lester the softy.’
‘Lester the –’
‘Go sit back down, Mibs,’ Lill repeated gently. Fish took me by the arm and steered me into a seat. Bobbi popped a gum bubble and raised her eyebrows my way, saying nothing but looking sympathetic to my distress. Will sat on the edge of his seat, holding on to the bench in front of him as though ready to jump to my aid.
Lester let the bus idle at the side of the road for several minutes. I did everything I could to ignore Rhonda’s and Carlene’s raging abuse of Lester. I felt sick over his willingness to allow that kind of talk in his own head, and I vowed that I would never let Ashley Bing or Emma Flint or anybody else like them have that kind of power over me. I wouldn’t let the voices of bullies or meanies or people who barely-hardly knew me work their way into my brain and stick.
Eventually, Lester turned to Lill like a beaten-down man asking for mercy. ‘I just need to settle up with her, Lill. I just need to p-pay Carlene what I owe her from the B-Bibles and then I’m done, then I’m yours – if you’ll have me, that is.’
Lill’s smile was so big that her whole large self seemed small in comparison. ‘Of course, Lester,’ she replied, and Lester’s face transformed. He looked like a man who had finally found his own perso
nal guardian angel.
‘Then I am a happy man.’ The voice filled my head.
If I wasn’t mistaken, the voice was Lester’s very own.
29
Carlene turned out to be a big woman in a little woman’s body. She had big hair, big teeth, big long fingernails and big fuzzy slippers, but the rest of her was hollow and shrunken and bony. She looked like a witch dressed up for Halloween as a movie star. When Lester pulled the big pink Bible bus into the Tuttle Terrace Trailer Park, Carlene was sitting outside in a garden chair. She was reading the Sunday paper and wearing nothing much more than a shiny satin robe and bright pink lipstick that bled into the wrinkles radiating from her lips, making them look ragged-jagged. Her feet were out of her slippers and I could see that her long, thick toenails were painted to match her lipstick.
When she saw the bus coming up her street, Carlene folded her paper and crossed her arms, not bothering to get up. I could see her squinting through the glare on the cracked windows at the rest of us, obviously surprised to find Lester carrying passengers.
‘It’s p-probably best if you all stayed here,’ said Lester as he stood to descend from the bus. But, before he could, Samson appeared at my side, squirming and wiggling and whispering into my ear. I grimaced at Fish as he looked our way then called out to Lester as he opened the door of the bus.
‘My brother’s got to go to the bathroom, Mister Swan, sir,’ I said. Fish smacked the palm of his hand to his forehead. Bobbi snorted and Will chuckled. Lester looked bewildered and anxious as he watched Samson silently dance in place in the aisle of the bus.
‘You’ve got to take him, Lester,’ said Lill like they were already an old married couple. Lester looked even more afflicted.
‘I’ll take him,’ said Bobbi, surprising everyone and standing up to take Samson’s hand. ‘Someone’s got to put the kid out of his misery.’ Samson took Bobbi’s hand without hesitation and the two of them brushed past Lester to exit the bus. Not sure what was going to happen next, Fish and Will and I moved over to carefully slide open the windows facing Carlene’s trailer so that we could have a better view of the action outside. Bobbi led Samson down the steps and stopped in front of Carlene’s chair.