Beyond Summer (23 page)

I let the idea roll around in my mind while Pastor Al made a loop, handing out cookies. Tam watched her kid brother take the cookie off the plate, and her lip curled again. Even when Pastor Al stopped by to say hello, she wasn’t too friendly.

“Seen any speeding cars lately?” he joked as he shook my hand.

“Nope. None.” I wanted to crawl under a rock. The last thing I needed was for Tam to find out I’d called the police on them. I introduced her real quick, to throw the conversation off track; then I pointed out her brothers in the crowd, and showed off Jewel, just to give Pastor Al something else to talk about. Pastor Al seemed like the type who liked babies.

About a half second after Pastor Al finished shaking Jewel’s hand and getting a smile from her, I was sorry I brought up the b-word. “So, how’s that baby comin’ along?” he asked, and stared straight at my stomach.

Tam looked confused at first, but she clued in quick enough. Her perfect mouth hung open a minute; then she gave a perfect smile, and she looked at my stomach, too.

I felt the hole I’d been digging get deeper by the minute. “Fine. Everything’s fine.” My mind fumbled for something else to talk about. Something other than me. “Story hour was neat. The kids really liked it.” I glanced at the porch, but the woman in the red dress was gone, and the woman in the chef’s hat was headed back across the street to her bookstore, her long black braids and beads catching the sunshine.

“Glad you enjoyed it.” Pastor Al gave me a wise look, like he knew I was changing the subject on purpose. His round cheeks lifted, squeezing his eyes into a fan of wrinkles. “Sesay had them all going with her tale of Story Mouse, didn’t she? Quite something to have all those tales stored up in the mind. No telling how far she’s traveled, gathering them. Kind of remarkable to think about, isn’t it? You never know what treasures live inside people until you sit down and listen. That’s what I love about the Summer Kitchen.” He gave the building a proud look.

Around us, the crowd was starting to leave. Moms and kids wandered down the sidewalk, the men beside the building lit cigarettes and headed off, and a homeless man trundled across the parking lot with his two-wheeled buggy and his dog. “You think any more about that literacy class?” Pastor Al asked, squinting against the sun. “Still need volunteers. If you’re interested in stories, you’ll hear some good ones there, and you’ll get a chance to share some. You can’t really imagine the friendships that come out of something like that.”

I tried to picture what Cody would say about the boys and me coming up here in the evenings, but then again, it wasn’t really like I needed his permission. “Well, I’m not sure . . . I mean, I thought about it, but my husband’s going to be gone with the truck in the evenings now. He’d have a heart attack about us walking back home after dark, I think.” Actually, if Cody’s mother ever found out, she’d have me declared mental, and she’d take custody of my kids. Luckily, right now, Cody’s mom wasn’t speaking to us, which was why she hadn’t called.

Pastor Al gave Tam’s vehicle an astute look. “You two could volunteer together. We still need help. If you volunteer here just once, you’ll be hooked, I promise.” He glanced back toward the building as the cookie lady headed our way.

“Pastor Al, are you giving people the hard sell again?” she asked, then offered us cookies.

Adjusting his ball cap, Pastor Al cleared his throat. “No, ma’am, Mrs. Kaye. Just trying to drum up some more help for the literacy class.”

“We’ll take whatever assistance we can get.” Mrs. Kaye pushed some stray curls off her forehead with the back of her wrist, then focused on us. “There’s a meeting for mentors tomorrow night at six o’clock. You’re welcome to come check it out.”

A blond-headed girl who’d been helping on the porch turned our way and added, “It’s real fun, and we’re gonna do craft projects for the kids in the child-care room and stuff. And we’re gonna have puppet shows, and . . .” The fact that Landon, Ty, Benji, and a little girl were playing tag in the flower bed caught her eye, and the blonde reached in to grab the little girl. “Opal, get outta there. You’ll mess up Teddy’s roses, and you’ll poke your eye out.”

Benji popped out from behind a bush, then ran by and tagged Opal on the elbow. She squealed and tried to tag him back. Ty trampled a plant on his way out of the flower bed, and right about then, I figured it was time to leave.

“We’ll sure think about it,” I told Pastor Al. We thanked him and Mrs. Kaye, and herded the boys to the car. I talked Tam into pulling over to Terence’s studio for a minute, and I introduced them and showed off Terence’s paintings, but he wasn’t much on conversation, and the kids were getting restless in the car. Terence opened the back door and gave everybody gum from a pack in his pocket. I slipped around the front of the building and peeked in the bookstore windows, but it hadn’t opened back up after lunch yet, so Tam and I headed for Walmart with all the boys smacking Doublemint in the backseat.

Benji started pouting on the way, because we didn’t get to go in the bookstore. He didn’t care that it was closed; he just wanted to pout. He kept it up all the way across the Walmart parking lot and all the while we were shopping, which was seriously embarrassing in front of our new friends. Of course, Tam’s brothers were not a pack of peaches either, and by the time we’d done our shopping, the Walmart people were probably glad to see us go. A pack of Skittles at the Walmart checkout finally fixed Benji’s problem, and by the time we loaded up in the car, I was tired, but it seemed like a pretty good day. It’d been a while since I’d been out shopping with a girlfriend, and it felt good. Tam was interesting to talk to, but nothing about her made much sense. I had a feeling there were a lot of things she wasn’t saying. A girl who graduated from Highland Park, which meant she must’ve lived there, wouldn’t all of a sudden be moving into our neighborhood, whether her parents were tied up in some messy divorce or not.

“It’s kind of temporary,” she said as we pulled out of Walmart and started down the street. “We’re just living in this old house until we can work out something else.” She flicked a glance my way, embarrassed, like she’d just clued in to the fact that she’d called my house
old
.

“Ohhh,” I said. “Well, I hope y’all decide to stay. We’re here for good. We just bought our place from Householders. They made everything real easy. No closing costs, and the monthly payment’s super low, which is good, because we just found out the insurance on this new truck is a lot more than we expected, and the insurance on the house is higher than we thought, too. Cody spread the bills apart, so it’d work out better with the times his paychecks deposit. He’s the math genius in the family. Actually, there’s not a math genius in the family, and there’s so much we want to do on the house, and it all costs money, which is why Cody’s taking on a little night work at a parking garage downtown. It’s quiet there, and he can study for his classes while he sits in the booth.”

A monkey wrench turned in my stomach, torquing everything. I’d just gone out to Walmart and spent another twenty bucks. It was all stuff we needed—some more spackling and caulk, lightbulbs, a $3.99 rug for the bathroom, some more grout for around the tub—but when Cody found out, he’d have a fit.
I just gave you twenty bucks
, he’d say.
What’d you do with it?
It was probably the pregnancy hormones, but with the fun at Walmart over, I wanted to crawl into a corner and cry for absolutely no reason. Any minute now, I was gonna crack open like a watermelon. As soon as Tam pulled into our driveway, I grabbed the door handle and put on a happy face the best I could. “So, thanks for the ride, and for going to story time with us. Maybe we can give it a try again tomorrow, huh?”

“I’ll check with Barbara.”

“The thing about the reading class sounds cool. We could go tomorrow night and see what it’s all about.”

“Yeah. Maybe. I’ll check. Everything’s kind of, like, up in the air right now.” Tam wiped the dust off the top of the steering wheel, and then seemed surprised to see that her fingers were dirty.

I felt myself sinking lower and lower. “So, I was thinking we ought to trade phone numbers, so we can get in touch easier.”

“Sure.” Tam pulled her phone out of her purse and checked it.

“Mine’s dead. There are, like, almost no plugs in that house that the Fearsome Foursome can’t get to. I’ll give you my number, and you can just ring me, so I’ll have yours on my call log.”

“Sounds good.” I plugged her number into my phone and called it before we said good-bye. Then I unloaded Benji and Ty, who were definitely ready for a nap.

Inside the house, I went down for the count almost before the kids did. I meant to crash just for a minute, but by the time I woke up, it was past suppertime. Like usual, the kids weren’t happy, because Daddy wasn’t home, so instead of getting anything done on the house, I refereed fights and helped build a blanket tent in the bedroom, and then argued with Benji about a bath and bedtime, and then whether or not he could wear the dirty pajamas out of the laundry hamper.

While I was putting dirty stuff back in the laundry, Ty got the idea to make himself a glass of chocolate milk without asking. A gallon of milk and about a half bottle of chocolate syrup ended up on the floor, and by the time I cleaned that up and tried to keep from saying something to my kids that I’d be sorry for later, I felt like I’d hit a brick wall. Even though I usually hated going to sleep while Cody was gone, I was on the couch and out like a light ten minutes after the kids got in bed.

A charley horse woke me sometime later on. Since I was up, I staggered off to the kitchen in the dark for a cup of water. Just when I reached for the refrigerator, something caught my eye out the back door . . . some kind of . . . light. Yawning, I tried to clear my vision, then moved closer to the glass.

A creepy feeling crawled over my skin. Something wasn’t right.

The glow was coming from . . .

The shed?

The door shifted in the wind, widening the dim wedge of light falling on the grass.

I moved closer to the back window. We hadn’t even been in the yard today.
Maybe we left it open yester—

A shadow passed through the light, blocked it for a sec, then disappeared. My heart launched against my chest.

Someone was out there. . . .

The cell phone ringing snapped me upright. Swinging my legs around, I collided with something that shouldn’t have been next to my bed. My mind groped for an explanation as I searched for the phone. A hazy memory floated by, out of focus like a minnow a few inches below the water, darting in and out of the light, clear for an instant, then gone. I went somewhere today. I drove Barbie’s car. I took the sibs. . . .

The ring came again as I tried to put the memory together. Through the blur, I saw the phone lighting the table. The coffee table. I must have fallen asleep in the media room. That was probably Emity on the phone. . . .

I grabbed the phone and muttered drowsily, “Hey, what’s up?”

“Somebody’s outside in my shed.” The voice was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. It wasn’t Emity.

“Wha . . . Who’s this?”

“It’s Shasta.”

Shasta . . . Shasta . . .
Shasta was the kind of name one of Barbie’s friends would have. Shasta, like soda pop. Something sweet and bubbly.

“Across the street?” the voice whispered with an undertone of urgency. “We went to Walmart . . . and the church. Story time?”

The day came rushing back like a speeding train crashing headlong into the station. I knew why I wasn’t in my father’s house, why Shasta’s name was familiar, why I’d hit my knee on the coffee table.

Our new reality snapped into focus—the white church, story time, Walmart, Barbie stumbling in when Fawn dropped her off. The sibs had barely noticed as she staggered through the living room on the way to her bed to pass out. Jewel was busy in her bouncy seat, and the boys were watching Aunt Lute. She’d picked up a palette and climbed onto a chair, then touched her brush to the wall, slowly drawing a long, brown line on the plaster.

I gasped, and she glanced over her shoulder, teetering as she smiled at me. “Look,” she said, and pointed to this morning’s paint spatters, now dry. Instead of cleaning the smudges off the walls, she’d turned them into butterflies. “They’ll need a vine.” Nodding at her own observation, she went back to work.

By bedtime, the living room had morphed into a forest. I’d lain awake looking at it and wondering what Uncle Boone would say. Finally I gave up and let sleep take over. . . .

Pulling the phone from my ear now, I looked at the time. A little after midnight. Why was Shasta calling? “There’s somebody where?”

“Outside in my shed. The light’s on, and I know this sounds crazy, but I think somebody’s in there. I saw a shadow.”

Pushing off the sofa, I stood up, crossed the room unsteadily, pulled up the queen-size sheet we’d tacked over the window, and peered out. Other than a single light in the kitchen, Shasta’s house was dark. Along the creek, trees were blowing, casting shadows in the green-tinged glow of a lone streetlight. Underneath, a small brown dog sniffed at a pile of leaves, then trotted to the curb, seeming tranquil enough. “I don’t see anyone. There’s a dog wandering around out there. Maybe that’s what you saw.”

“I don’t think a dog could turn on the lights in my shed,” Shasta breathed. “I saw something go by the window.”

A shiver ran down my back, raising gooseflesh underneath the old sweats I’d slept in. “Maybe you should call the police.”

“Are you kidding? If a unit shows up out here, and I’m wrong, Cody’ll have a fit, and, since he’s not here, they’ll figure out he took the night job. They’re really picky about stuff like that. And besides, to be a police officer’s wife, you’ve got to, like, be able to hold it together when he’s on patrol and stuff. I’m gonna go out the carport door and sneak around there and see if I hear anything. I just didn’t want to do it without somebody knowing what’s going on, in case . . . Well, the boys are asleep in here.”