“Oh no, I cain’t take it,” I say. Is she serious?
“It’s yours,” she says, shrugging and turning back to the computer.
“Thank you so much!” I tell her. “The is the best present I ever got ever.”
She laughs but it is.
I wish I had something to give Cricket in return but it looks like she’s got ever-thing anyone could need and then some.
But I bet she doesn’t have Gideon’s Bible.
“Here we go,” Cricket says, tapping buttons. “We can start here. Wow, so pretty!”
She slides her chair over to make room for me alongside her at the desk. And there, smiling at me from the computer screen, is a picture of my momma when she was young.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Carrie
I stand outside the Loveless office and watch them drive away until I cain’t catch sight of the taillights no more. After being in air-conditioning it feels good to get warm standing here in the sun. I rub the freezing out of my right shoulder, which was where the air in the car hit for the whole entire drive.
“Hey, Mr. Burdock. Hey, Birdie.” I come in the door and pet Birdie the cat laying on the front desk right on top of the book Mr. Burdock writes in when people come and go.
“Here she comes, Miss A-mer-i-ca,” he sings to me, why I don’t know. He always breaks out into some song when he sees me. Then he musses my hair even more than it’s already mussed.
I wish just once he’d fetch the key from the cubbyhole, hand it over, and let me be on my way right quick but that never happens. Mostly I don’t mind but today I need to be up there to make it look like I been up there all along. The last thing I need is Momma coming in for the key right now, catching me sneaking back in when I was supposed to be here all along.
“Can I have the key, please?” I ask nicely and all but he’s smiling in the way he does when he’s settling in for a long talk. Orla Mae called long talks gabfests.
“Why don’t you start by telling me how you came to be best friends with that rich Chaplin lady,” he says. “I’d be real curious to know ’bout that. You know who they are, right? The Chaplins?”
“Um, I know they’re real nice but I ain’t—I’m not—best friends with them and anyhow I only just met them and I really need to get up to the room, so—”
“You think your momma would like knowing her baby girl’s climbing into cars with strangers? Because me? Well, personally that ain’t something I’d cotton to. Not at all. And don’t even get me started on Missus Burdock. You got to take care not to just get in a car with anyone offering you a ride. The world’s a scary place sometimes. Now, it just so happens the Chaplins are good people, but you didn’t know that when you got in the car. You’ve got to be more careful than that, girlie.”
“Please don’t say anything to my momma! I mean, I only just met them and I don’t think I’ll probably ever see them again and if my momma finds out I’ll never see the light of day so please don’t tell her, please, Mr. Burdock.”
Sometimes it’s okay to stretch the truth if it’s helping you keep the peace or if you don’t mean any harm to anyone. That’s what Mr. Wilson told me. I know I’ll see Cricket and them again tomorrow, but for all Mr. Burdock knows they hated me and don’t want to lay sight on me ever again. He doesn’t know that already Cricket feels like a sister to me. I knew I could tell Emma any secret and she’d keep it and already I know I could do that with Cricket too. I knew Emma’d never hurt me ever and I know Cricket wouldn’t either. But for all Mr. Burdock knows, Cricket doesn’t want to have anything more to do with me.
“Um, could I please have the key to our room?” I ask again.
“You mind my words, girl. Oh, and you don’t need a key,” he says, tipping his head up toward the second floor, “your momma got home a bit ago.”
I holler “bye” and “thank you, sir” over my shoulder but the door closes on the words. I take the stairs fast as I can, two at a time up until the final four, when I get out of breath.
Please, dear Lord, if you can hear this coming from my brain, please let Momma be passed out already. Please, Lord.
I open the door real slow and careful in case the Lord’s heard my prayer and put her into sleep before I got here.
“Well well well,” Momma says, in her whiskey voice that melts words into one another. “Look who decided to grace us with her presence. Hurry up and shut that door ’fore all the bugs in the state of North Carolina start making nests in here.”
“You never said you had a kid,” says a man setting next to Momma on the side of the bed. “Lookee, lookee here. Aren’t you just full of surprises.”
The sound of Momma laughing along with him is so strange I barely know it’s her. Then there’s the fact that there’s another person in our room—he makes the room feel tiny.
The man stares at me so hard I pretend there’s something on the floor I need to find so I don’t have to look at him. I feel my cheeks burning, though, and for some reason it makes me feel naked. His face is bumpy and red but not like a suntan, more like picked pimples. He’s got a belly that, if he were a lady, people’d ask him when’s the baby due. His arms have so many tattoos it’s hard to know what his skin really looks like and the tattoos end in a perfect straight line at his wrists which makes it look like he has on a long-sleeve shirt. I glance up long enough to see his grin showing a missing side tooth.
“She’s a shy one, that girl of yours,” he says to Momma, passing her the bottle he just swigged from. Momma keeps her stare on me even when her head tips the bottle back. She swallows hard, like a man. Why they have to talk about me like I ain’t standing right in front of them, I do not know.
“Shy isn’t the half of it,” Momma says to him and he acts like that’s the funniest thing he ever heard.
Then Momma looks at me with her fake eyes and says, “Come say hello then go on and get yourself something from the vending machine, all right? Quit dawdling and come over here. Caroline, this is Mister …”
Momma’s face turns to his and then the two of them start laughing all over again. What is so daggum funny? I want to say.
Looking at me the man says, “McNight. Hollis McNight. You can call me Rock, though. Everyone calls me Rock.”
I look at Momma to see if this is another joke but she gives me that whiskey stare again that I know means I’m either in trouble big-time or becoming invisible and what she’s really looking at is behind me or above my head. She looks back at him and then I nearly cain’t believe it—she touches his arm. Momma hates touching anything and ever-thing. She runs her finger from his shoulder down almost all the way to his elbow. Slow.
“I bet I know how you got that nickname,” Momma says to him. She’s acting weird. If I only heard her and was blind to how they were sitting next to one another, I’d think from the way she’s talking to him that she was in his lap. How in the Sam Hill would she even know how he got his stupid nickname? I wonder. She’s being so fake and show-offy. I wish I could tell him he’s a fool if he thinks she’s being real right now.
“Cain’t say,” the man says to Momma, tipping his head toward me instead of saying out loud the rest of the sentence—with her in the room. I want to say I’m not a baby, Mister Rock or whatever your stupid name is. That’s how much you know. People say all kinds of things around me and I can take it just fine.
“I can show you though,” he says to Momma. He tilts his head back to get the last drops from the bottle then blows into it making a horn sound that makes me jump which they laugh at even though the joke’s on Mr. Creepy Rock because I happen to know Momma’s fake laugh when I hear it, not that I hear it all that often but still. She’s fake-laughing. He’s setting on the edge of my bed, probably smelling it all up and bugs from him are probably crawling into the covers and the sheets right this very minute. I look at him and in my head I’m yelling get off my bed stupid Mr. Creepy Rock but he’s so dumb he smiles and says, “I think I’m making myself a little frien
d.”
Momma looks at me then looks away and says, “Don’t count on it. Girl’s crazy as a three-legged cow.”
“You know how to play a trombone, kid? What’s your name—Caroline?” he asks me. I hate him saying my name.
“It’s all right, I don’t bite,” he says. “I just asked you: do you know how to play the trombone?”
He says it slow like I’m deaf.
“No, sir,” I say. I hate that my voice cracks when I say it.
“Look at you, little nervous Nellie,” he says. “I’ll show you how.”
While he chuckles and holds the empty whiskey bottle out to me, Momma walks over to her pocketbook and pulls out a dollar bill. She don’t say not to so I have to walk over to him. She’d kill me if I weren’t polite. We ain’t animals, she’d say.
“All you gotta do,” Mr. Creepy Rock says, “go on and take the bottle. It’s empty, don’t worry. Now hold it at your chin and push your upper lip out like this”—he makes a monkey face—“and blow some air down into it. That’s it! You got it! Now you can say you’re a trombone player! Ha ha look at you, wiping at your mouth like you’re gonna get cancer from the germs. Boy, you’re a good little girl, aintcha.”
I hand the sticky bottle to him and back away. I hate the way he smiles real wide at me. And the way he says good little girl doesn’t make it feel good at all.
“Here,” Momma says, shoving the dollar bill into my hand. Her back’s to him. Her eyes are back to being cold and there’s no sign of her laughing when she lowers her voice so only I can hear and says, “Now go on and leave us be.”
“Where?” I ask her.
“We should send her on a beer run,” Mr. Creepy Rock says.
“Well, now, wouldn’t that be handy,” Momma says back in the fake voice. I can tell she doesn’t want to do whatever he’s saying but she has to go along with it because she doesn’t want to be inhospitable. When Richard started hanging around back in Toast, Momma said we should do whatever he said because he was our guest and we needed to be hospitable. If you don’t make guests feel right at home you’re inhospitable, she said to me and Emma. We ain’t animals you know, she said.
“Hey, kid, I buy you fly,” Mr. Creepy Rock says, standing up to fish out his wallet from his back pocket. He’s got a silver chain snaking from his belt to his front pocket and whatever’s on the end of it jingles from inside his pants. He pulls a twenty out of his billfold and holds it out for me.
I look at Momma, who is staring at it like a stray dog looking at table scraps.
“What’re ya, deaf? You a little Helen Keller, are ya?” He laughs and looks over at Momma who’s fake-smiling so he keeps going, cracking jokes, trying to make her laugh a laugh he doesn’t know ain’t real.
“You need me to do sign language, Helen Keller? Look at her, just staring at it like she never saw an Andrew Jackson before. All right, now, this here’s what we call money. M-O-N-E-Y. Take this—good girl, that’s right put it in your pocket. Good. Now go on down to the corner place and fetch us a bottle of Jim Beam. Tell Lenny—he’s the guy behind the counter—tell Lenny it’s for Rock and he’ll sell it to ya. Go on. Scoot, Helen Keller.”
I look at Momma but I cain’t make out what all she’s thinking behind the plastic mask she has frozen across her face. She just nods at me and keeps on grinning for him to see.
“She’s a quiet one, that one,” Mr. Creepy Rock says to Momma as he settles back down on the bed. This time he puts his arm around Momma, acting like it’s his bed, in his room that he paid for with the money he made from selling ever-thing he ever owned.
“You like ’em seen and not heard, do ya?” he says to Momma, twisting a piece of her hair around his finger.
They’re back to laughing when I close the door behind me. It’s summer so the night hasn’t fully taken over for the day yet. It’s dark enough to where you couldn’t read words but still light enough to where you’d know what’s on a plate in front of you. My mouth is watering so much on my way to the candy machine, you’d think I was a dog or something. My fingers shake hard, I’m so excited for a candy bar, and I almost push the wrong button and end up with a Mounds, but phee-you, the right one falls to the slot after all. I eat my Baby Ruth real slow, pulling off teensy tiny pieces with my fingers, pretending I am a momma bird dropping worms into baby bird beaks. In my head I count to thirty and chew real slow to make it last longer. Leaning on the balcony rail in front of the candy machine, I watch the traffic light turn red, yellow, green—it stays green longest, red second longest, and yellow but a second or two.
It’s hard not to eat the whole candy bar altogether but halfway through I make myself quit so I can have some for tomorrow.
“What in the good Lord’s name do you think you’re doing, going about your own sweet business without a care in your empty head.” Momma’s popped her head out the door to our room, hiss-whispering down the balcony to me and pointing to the spot right in front of her. “Git over here.”
“Sorry, Momma,” I say on my way hurrying to her. Thank goodness I swallowed the bite before she saw me chewing real slow.
“You’re gonna be sorry when I get through with you. Now hurry down to the store and fetch up that bottle like the man told you to.”
“He’s scary, Momma,” I whisper, my mouth moving before my brain can tell it not to. “I got a bad feeling from him.”
Good thing there’s a rail along the balcony or I would’ve fallen onto the blacktop parking lot when she whacked me. Instead I only hit my head on it but it don’t hurt too much. Before I can pull myself back up to standing Momma appears over me.
“You get a bad feeling from him?” she hisses at me. The blood’s warm trickling down from where I hit my head but I hold still while Momma whisper-hollers at me. The balcony lights flicker on and ever-thing turns orange, and orange is a scary color in a mad mother’s face. “If you so much as make a squeak about him, I’ll pull your arm out of the socket and beat you dead with it. You hear me? That man in there could be my meal ticket outta here. You mess this up for me and I swear to Jesus I will hunt you down and send you to Hell where you’ll rot for the rest of your pathetic life. After all you put me through. Standing there. High on your horse. Telling me you got a bad feeling about him? You better hurry the hell up and get that liquor. And bring back the receipt and every penny of change, you hear me? Pull yourself together and get going,” Momma says before disappearing behind the slammed door.
I cain’t waste time rubbing my head but I have to pause a bit because when I stand up I see stars and I know if I’m not careful I might could faint. I got a propensity for fainting spells. Momma wrote that on the medical form parents had to fill out at my last school. Caroline is uncoordinated, bruises real easy, and has a propensity for fainting spells, she wrote. She used the dictionary.
I’m on my last leg with Momma I can just tell. I’ve got to watch myself and do ever-thing perfect from here on out. I’ll go the extra mile. I swear I’m gonna be so good Momma won’t know what hit her. Maybe I’ll pick up some ice along with the Jim Beam. She loves ice. Clinking it around in her glass, shaking it into different positions. Momma used to say without ice the world’d be hell. That’s the best idea I had in a long time, to get ice for Momma. That’s extra mile material for sure. Wait, the ice machine’s still broken—there’s an Out of Order sign on the front flap of it. Dangit.
The man behind the counter at the liquor store nods like he knew I’d be standing there in front of him, telling him Rock sent me to buy a bottle of Jim Beam. When I ask him where’s the ice he tilts his head toward the freezer at the back of the store and goes back to filling in the crossword puzzle. I fetch the ice while he sacks up the bottle then hands me the receipt and change without saying a word. Dang, this ice is heavier than I thought it’d be. Didn’t look this heavy whenever Richard’d come in with a bag or two on his shoulders. Figure if I lay the bottle down on top of the ice and carry it with both hands like I’m rocking a baby
I might could do it. Trouble is my arms get frostbit before I’m out the door practically. It is ice, after all. I push back out into the world, the bell jingling behind me, and I decide I’ll count the steps it takes to get back to the room—that’ll keep my mind from thinking about my freezing arms. Twenty steps to the sidewalk. At thirty steps I’ve got to stop.
I lose count somewhere short of the Loveless office. Mr. Burdock’s not in there but Birdie’s curled up under the potted plant in the window.
“Hey, Birdie kitty kitty kitty,” I say through the glass, tapping to get his attention while I rest my arms one last time. Birdie looks up at me, meows, then tucks his head back into his curled self. I wish I was a cat that could sleep all day and night. “You’re a good kitty cat, Birdie. Aren’t you. Yes you are. Good kitty.”
I pick the ice bag back up with the bottle laying neatly across the top and head to the stairs. Mr. Burdock put plastic grass carpet on all the steps. I make it one floor up and am three steps toward the second floor.
“You need a hand with that?” Mr. Burdock’s voice comes out of nowhere behind me.
I didn’t plan on dropping the ice—I swear I didn’t. But it’s dark and Mr. Burdock scared the living daylights out of me and before I know it Jim Beam is crashing onto the cement way down below.
He whistles through his teeth and I drop the ice and say “she’s gonna kill me” over and over on my way hurrying down to see if what I think happened really happened. Maybe it was a bad dream. Maybe my mind played tricks on me again like Sheriff said back in Hendersonville.
She’s gonna kill me.
The minute I see the broken glass bottle and the spray of wet coming out from it I know I’m in the kind of trouble I haven’t seen since Richard passed. I can hear Mr. Burdock on his way down to catch up with me. “Now, hold on a minute,” he’s saying, “let me see what’s what. Just hold on till I get down there.”
Between him and Momma I’m dead, plain and simple. I’ve got to run. I ain’t got a choice. No way am I going back up there with less money and no Jim Beam. And Mr. Burdock didn’t want a kid staying here in the first place—I bet he’s been waiting on something like this to kick me out. My heart’s pounding like a horse in the Kentucky Derby.