Beyond Summer (11 page)

“But he said things were fine,” Barbie protested. “This morning, he said . . . he said he knew the bank account was dry, but it was all a mistake.”

Uncle Boone shook his head. “He was jus’ hoping he could still find a way out. He’s Superman, you know? He jus’ couldn’t buy that it was really gonna come down and everybody’d find out what’s been goin’ on.”

Barbie’s lips trembled. The edges, normally perfect, were smeared where she’d been pinching her mouth with her fingers. “You’re wrong!” She sobbed. “Paul wouldn’t . . . he wouldn’t do those things. You’re wrong!” The rising panic in her eyes said that even she was beginning to understand the nightmare was real.

“I wish I was,” Uncle Boone answered quietly. “I wish I was.”

Barbie stood up abruptly. “Get out!” she hissed. “Just get out!” Spinning around, she flung a hand toward the door and disappeared down the hall, her stilettos tapping a rapid tattoo on the tile.

Uncle Boone’s eyes fell closed. “Man,” he whispered, slowly shaking his head. He looked toward the playroom, where the thumping had started again. Barbie was yelling at the sibs and sobbing at the same time, half ordering them to behave and half pleading with them to be quiet before she went crazy.

“What now?” I whispered. “What do we need to do?”
I could get my stuff together, load it in my car, and call Emity—tell her I need a place to stay. Her mom would let me. Maybe we could just . . . head for Europe early.

Where would I get the money? There was nothing in my wallet but a Visa card that apparently wasn’t good anymore and a debit card for the overdrawn household account.

“Pack up everything you can.” Uncle Boone’s voice broke into my thoughts. “The important stuff, the stuff the kids need. The stuff you don’t wanna lose. I’ll bring one of my construction trucks over here in the mornin’. You think you can find some boxes?”

“I guess so,” I muttered, thinking,
This can’t be happening. It can’t. I have a golf lesson in the morning. . . .

My head reeled, tears stinging the backs of my eyes. I wasn’t going to cry. I wasn’t. Barbie was the weepy, helpless one. I wasn’t like her. No matter what, I wasn’t like her.

“Where are we going . . . when the truck comes?”

Uncle Boone stood up. “I’ll figure out somethin’. You just work on gettin’ things together—the stuff you need, all the important papers, medicine, diapers . . . all that stuff.” He nodded toward the ongoing commotion of Barbie yelling and the sibs destroying the toy room. “And talk some sense into her.”

If I wait for the young mother to put out her boxes each day, I cannot walk to the mission before the line is too long. You can stand in it, but the rooms will be gone before you reach the door.

I am not bothered by this. I have been watching the family in the yellow house for four days now—checking their boxes. The weather is warm and dry, so nothing is ruined. If I help with cleaning at the Summer Kitchen, the woman there—her name is SandraKaye, but the children call her Mrs. Kaye—will give me a sandwich in a bag, and then Teddy, who tends the church garden, will smile shyly and offer a flower to me. I will trade a bird, or a horse, or a dolphin, if I have one in my pocket. He will laugh and hold it up to twirl in the sun. He is not a normal boy, Teddy. He is the size of a man, but he has the mind of a boy. I can never be invisible to him. He calls my name and waves each time he sees me. He leaves the lock open on the storage barn behind the church. I can sleep in there now, and I am safe for the night.

I bring Teddy good things I have found in the boxes from the new yellow house—a flowerpot that looks like a frog, the handle from a broom, and a little statue of an angel with a broken wing. He placed the angel in the garden and used the broom handle to support a tomato plant behind the church. I am still waiting to see what he will do with the frog.

Each day, MJ at the Book Basket talks about the reading class. “It’ll be starting week after next, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in the evenings,” she says. “Six o’clock. There’s a signup sheet in the Summer Kitchen during lunch.”

“I have watched the family in the yellow house,” I tell her. “In the evenings, the father comes home. The Indian chief stopped to visit them. They were eating supper.”

“They’re relatives—cousins of some kind. I asked him about it.” MJ gives me a crooked look. “You shouldn’t be hanging around looking in people’s windows, Sesay,” she says.

“They cannot see me,” I tell her. “I found some branches they had cut from their bushes. I carved a turtle and a fish. Today, I have a fat little toad. I carved him of pecan wood.” I bring out the little toad that’s made of a knot of wood from their clippings, and I lay it on the counter.

“Looks like it needs a string yet,” MJ notices.

“God will bring one,” I say. “He leaves bits of string everywhere. For the birds.”

MJ smiles and takes a roll of heavy black thread from under the counter. “You can trade me for a story. Come over to the Summer Kitchen for lunch, and you can share a story with the kids after they eat.”

“I may go,” I tell her, cutting the string with my knife and threading it through the toad, then tying it. Next, I cut a second one, because there’s a little lying-down horse in my pocket, as well. “I think we will soon have another yellow house. Across the street from the last one. I have been watching it.”

“I hope not.”

“I think so. I saw the big man with the ponytail—the black man with the hair like mine. Have you seen him? His workers are busy repairing the house.” When the big man and his workers fix a house, they always paint it yellow. Then new people move in. If they do not last long in the house, which usually is so, the big man comes with more workers and a large truck, and they take away what was left in the house, and then repair it for another family to come in.

“Boone,” MJ grumbles. “He’s nothing but a henchman for Householders. I hope you’re wrong about the house. That would make six on Red Bird, now. A few more and they’ll be trying to force everyone out so they can tear the houses down and build condominiums.”

Six
, I think, and count the houses in my mind. “I think they will paint the house soon. Yellow.” I imagine the wet paint and wonder how my horse or the fat toad would look in yellow. The horse, perhaps, I decide, but not the toad. The toad should be brown. Perhaps the Indian chief will use brown paint today. Lately, he lays a painting palette by the door, and if I go two steps into the room, I can swipe my finger across and have any color that is there. He does not see me when I come and go, even if he is inside working. “I will share a story after lunch today. For the children,” I tell MJ, and then, “I am going to see the house now.” If they paint the house yellow, someone new will move in, and there will be more boxes. The family in the last yellow house has fewer boxes now.

I trade for a new book, and MJ gives me my doughnut, and then I slip around the corner to eat it. The Indian chief is painting again. After a bit, he sets one palette by the door and picks up another one. He does not see me, so I slip in to rub a bit of brown on my toad. There is white, too. The Indian chief has painted a rider—a warrior on a horse. The horse is spotted white and brown like a dog. I put white on one finger and brown on another, thinking I will color my horse the same. This horse is for the Indian chief. When paint is on the floor, you can take it. It will dry up anyway. But on a palette, it would be stealing if you did not pay for it. They will cut off your hand for stealing.

“I left a brush there for you,” he says, as I move two steps past the door. He says this without turning around. “It’ll probably work better than your fingers. You can clean it in the cup when you’re done.”

I look around to see who he is speaking to, but there is no one other than me. On the chair by the palette, a brush and a small cup of liquid rest on a square of newspaper. I wipe my fingers on the newspaper, then squat beside the chair, and set down the little horse, and paint it.

I can do much better with the brush. I remember that my grandfather had brushes. He kept them in a small leather pouch. He’d made them from horsehair, and twigs, and a tiny bit of metal from a cracker tin, which he pinched into place to hold the bristles. He carved beads, and painted them, and traded them to a man who came with a donkey and a wagon. My grandfather’s beads were beautiful, but they were never the valuable color.
Too many red beads
, the man would say.
Everyone has red beads today, but I suppose I’ll take them anyway.
Then he would do the favor of taking the beads. The next time he came, there would be too many blue beads, or green, or carved ones painted to look like birds or fish. You could never know ahead of time which beads were too many.

I finish the spotted horse and paint brown on the toad. Just a bit of green around his eyes, and black for the eyeballs, and a few spots on his back. He looks very fine with so many colors. A big, fat toad. I hold him in the palm of my hand and turn him ’round, and I know where I have seen him before. He was sitting on the window ledge of the little house that isn’t really a house at all. It has been made from the back of a large truck, but there is a window in it. I remember it now, as if I were there again, though many years have passed since I saw that house. It was a lifetime ago.

In my memory, I am tired from the boat, and burned from the sun, and the room is crowded with people sitting on the floor. The door opens, and the light pours in, and from the corner of my eye, I see a man come, but I am watching the little toad. Grandfather once told me that a good, fat toad is a blessing.

The man walks through the room, and he looks around, and people watch him without moving their heads.
Those two, and that one
, he says. Then I feel him standing close to me.
And this one
, he says, and someone touches my arm. The hand pulls me up, and I land on my feet.
No parents with her? Does she speak any English?
he asks, and another man, the man who has brought us here from the boat in the dark of night, answers him. There are no parents with me. Auntie is somewhere in the ocean. I look out the window, and the toad hops away, taking his blessing with him. . . .

The memory feels painful, then. I lower the painted toad away from my face and cut off the memory like a fruit with a worm in it, going rotten on the tree. It will spoil the crop, if you let it.

I stand and wash the brush in the cup. The Indian chief has moved to the corner. His back strains as he stretches canvas over a frame.

“You can keep the brush,” he says.

I do not answer, but I leave the little brown-and-white horse, and I tuck the brush into my pack as I walk down Red Bird Lane to see about the house that will soon be yellow.

Something is happening down the street. I stop in the trees by the edge of the creek to watch. The house remains faded blue, like a winter sky, but the building trailers are gone. There is a big truck in the driveway.

The house isn’t being painted today.

Someone is moving into it.

It didn’t take Tyler long to notice there was a moving van across the street. His things-with-wheels radar went off the minute the truck rumbled up Red Bird. He wrapped his hands around the burglar bars on the front door, like a little jailbird trying to break out. “See da tuck! See da tuck! Got a ooh-hawl!”

I pulled my paint roller away from the wall long enough to look out the front window. A construction crew had been working over there for days, but now it looked like someone was moving in. “It’s not a U-Haul, Ty.” To Tyler, everything was an ooh-hawl, ever since we rented one to move our stuff from Oklahoma. Carrying boxes up and down the U-Haul ramp and riding in the truck was a bigger thrill than Chuck E. Cheese’s, and after that he was a U-Haul man for life. “That’s some other kind of moving van.”

“Unna go see!” Ty cheered, clapping his hands, then reaching through the bars.

“No, baby.” Sitting back on my heels, I swiped my forehead with the back of my arm. It was seriously hot in the house with the windows and the front door open. The sooner I could finish painting this wall and get the place aired out, the better. I still had major caulking work to do on the trim, and the rest of the living room to paint, but at least this was a start.

“I unna go-ohhh,” Ty complained, stretching out the words as he plunked down on his butt in the doorway.

“Mommy’s got work to do.” I was almost as whiny as Ty. I was hot and tired, my hair needed to be washed, and after a week of nonstop unpacking, painting, cleaning, window scraping, and trying to camouflage old termite damage no one’d told us about, I was sick of the house and everything in it. The boys were just plain sick of being stuck inside. In a whole week, they’d barely gotten to play in the yard, and we’d never made it next door to the park. Even though Cody was sure Ty’s “green-pants lady” was made up, like an imaginary friend, it creeped me out to let the boys be in the yard by themselves. I couldn’t get over the feeling that someone might be watching them. Little wooden animals kept turning up in strange places, for one thing. Each time, they were in out-of-the-way spots—hanging on the backyard fence, underneath the oleander bush, strung in the roses by the porch, tangled in the iris bed by the mailbox, on the window ledge outside the boys’ room, swinging from a tree branch by the creek between our yard and the park.

It always seemed like it was possible that those things had been there all along, and we’d just never noticed them—like last year’s Easter eggs that turn up all of a sudden. Finding them was the thrill of the day for Benji and Ty, but their talk about the green-pants lady and their going on about seeing her in the trees by the creek made me feel like someone was stalking our house—watching my kids, and leaving behind little totems. Worse yet, the boys could describe the green-pants lady in pretty good detail. She looked like a cross between a Hobbit and Whoopi Goldberg, as near as I could figure. Benjamin drew her with big feet and long, gray coils of hair.