Beyond Summer (18 page)

“Don’t spill the cookies!” the mother scolds, but they are not listening. But for the wrapping, the cookies would have spilled already.

I wonder where they are going. Perhaps to the church. Sometimes women bring plates with cakes and cookies to the Summer Kitchen. Lunch is long over today, but perhaps they will leave them for tomorrow. If they do, I will go there again for lunch. I will have one of Root and Berry’s cookies.

They search the trees along the creek as they wait for their mother, and I know they are looking for me. I poke my head above the leaves, and they see me and wave. Then I vanish again. I watch them come across the street with their mother. I hide like Peter Rabbit in the cane field. Once across the street, the boys run ahead.

They are taking the cookies to the blue house.

It didn’t take long to figure out that the new neighbors were strange. When we rang the bell, an old lady wearing a pink shower hat, a swimsuit, and a filmy bathrobe came to the door and opened the burglar bars. She caught me scoping out her swimming gear, and said, “We were just about to enjoy the water.”

Considering that backyard pools in this neighborhood were about as likely as icicles in July, that didn’t make any sense. “Uhhhh . . . We . . . ummm . . . brought you some cookies,” I muttered. “We live across the street. Just moved in last week.”

She took the cookies and smiled. “Oh, lovely! Crumpets.”

We all stood there for about a half a sec, having one of those awkward silences, and then something inside the house crashed and broke, two little boys hollered potty words at each other, a baby cried, a kid screamed so high the fillings in my teeth rattled, and some lady screeched, “Leave things alone! Do you see what you’ve done?” Then I heard laughing and what sounded like a herd of wild buffalo running through the house. Something toppled—a stack of boxes maybe—and a million tiny pieces of plastic hit the floor and scattered. LEGOs, just guessing. We had some wild times in our house, but nothing like what was going on in this place. A door slammed, and the mom roared like she was going to kill the first kid she could catch.

Benji’s eyes got wide, and him and Ty slid behind me. Ty’s arm slipped around my knee, and I tried to decide whether to say something, or act like I couldn’t hear the commotion.

The lady in the bathrobe didn’t even flinch. She pushed the burglar bars partway closed, just as calm as can be, and said, “Please accept our gratitude for the lovely crumpets. I believe we’d best be heading for the water now.” Pushing the bars closed far enough that only her face was sticking out, she whispered, “The natives are restless.” The boys peeked around my legs, watching the door slowly swing shut as she disappeared into the house, her pink robe floating behind her. The knob latched just as a kid inside screamed so high and so loud it probably shattered windows for a half mile.

“Whoa,” I muttered, and Benji agreed.

“Whoa,” he whispered. I grabbed the boys’ hands and we hustled back over to our side of the street. For the rest of the afternoon, I painted the red wall, caulked trim, and watched the blue house. No one came in or out. While the boys were napping, I went outside and hung around the front lawn, digging up dandelions, and . . . well . . . snooping. By the time Cody came home, I was ready to trade theories about the new neighbors, but Cody showed up tired and in a bad mood and down about the academy. The physical side of the program was no problem for him, but the bookwork side was eating his lunch. Even after spending two nights at a study group with guys from his class, he’d botched a test on juvenile law. Somehow, that was my fault, because the boys were noisy and wouldn’t leave him alone in the evenings. On top of that, he’d checked the bank account on the way home, and we were down to a hundred and sixty bucks until his next paycheck. He blamed it on the money I’d spent on the house, but the truth was, it was just as much his fault for grabbing convenience store food every day instead of taking something from home.

“You can take a sandwich, Cody,” I told him. “It’s not like we can quit working on the house. We’ve got to have it ready before Dell comes, and things need to be safe for the boys, besides.”

Right about then, he sprang it on me that a buddy of his could get him a couple weeks’ work doing a second- shift job at a parking garage downtown. All Cody’d have to do would be sit in the booth and take money. It was quiet there, and he could study his academy stuff, and pick up a few extra bucks at the same time.

“Why don’t you come watch the kids, and I’ll go get a job in the evenings?” I shot back.

He rolled his eyes like I was an idiot. “Yeah, right. And how am I gonna study with Benji and Ty climbing all over me? If I don’t do something, I’m not gonna make it through the bookwork. This isn’t the Push County sheriff’s department, Shasta. The academy’s tough. The parking garage job’ll help us out all the way around. It’s perfect.”

“Perfect for you,” I grumbled, but I knew his mind was already made up. Unless I threw a fit, he was gonna take that job.

He moped around for the next two evenings, grouching at the kids and slamming his books down whenever anybody made any noise, and pretty soon we were all on one another’s nerves. On top of stewing about what it’d be like to be stuck home by myself every evening, I was watching the blue house and wondering if I oughta turn the neighbors in for child abuse. The more time that went by without the kids across the street showing up outside, the more my mind invented twisted possibilities, like something you’d read in one of those cheap paperback thrillers.

I pounced on Cody the minute he hit the front porch on the third day. “I think we should call somebody about those people in the blue house. Sometimes you can hear the kids screaming from all the way across the street,” I told him, and he rolled his eyes, letting me know he didn’t want to talk, or work on the house, or keep the boys busy tonight. He just wanted to sit in front of the TV with a blank look on his face, or stick his nose in a book.

I’d put up with the silent treatment for three days now, and I was sick of it, so I followed him into the living room, even though I knew it’d probably start another fight. “All right, geez, take the stupid job if you want to.” I was surprised to hear those words come out of my mouth, but right now I’d of sent him off to a job cleaning sewers, if someone offered it.

He looked as shocked as I was, and then for a half a sec, he looked like he felt guilty. “It’s just for a few weeks. What’d you say about the people in the blue house?” All of a sudden he wanted to talk. Amazing how nice he could be when he got what he wanted.

“This morning, one of the kids was screaming so loud, he might as well of been on our front porch.”

He crossed the room and parked himself on the sofa. “Our kids are loud. It doesn’t make us child beaters.”

“I’m just saying, maybe if you went over there . . . like, with your academy T-shirt on, just, like, to say hi. Maybe you could get a look at the kids and make sure they’re all right. Normal people don’t keep their kids locked in the house, Cody.”

Rubbing his eyes, he picked up the remote, probably hoping he could turn me off with it. “You watch too much TV.”

That crawled all over me like fire ants, and I was mad before I even knew what was happening. “You know what, Cody? I haven’t turned on the TV in days. I’ve been working on the house, which is more than I can say for you. Dell’s coming the first week of August, and once she makes it up to Oklahoma, Mama and everybody’s gonna know we went and bought a house, and then they’ll show up here to see what we’ve gotten ourselves into this time, and the place’ll still be looking like junk.”

“Junk!” Cody’s good mood went right out the window. He smacked the remote down on the coffee table, so that we could end up having to buy a new one along with everything else we needed. “I’m working my butt off to pay for this place. I thought once we moved out of the apartment, you were gonna stop griping all the time.”

“I thought
you
were gonna help me with the house, instead of going and getting some stupid night job!” My whole body hurt from climbing ladders, hauling boxes, regrouting tile, pushing furniture around so I could fix the scratches in the dining room floor, and trying to repair the window weights in windows that hadn’t been opened since, like, before air-conditioning was invented. And I’d been dodging phone calls from home forever, and lying in e-mails, because once we actually talked, they’d want to chat with the boys, and the boys would spill about the house, and the family back home would go ballistic, thinking we were on the downward debt spiral again. On top of that, I was pregnant and starting to feel sick in the mornings, and I kept thinking I’d tell Cody once things were settled in the house, but the house bills and the house projects kept piling up, including a leak under the bathroom faucet I hadn’t even told him about. My next big job was to get on the Internet and figure out how to do plumbing.

The pregnant part of me popped to the surface, and the next thing I knew, I was crying like the front row at a funeral, sobbing out words that ran together in a stream of blabber. “You just don’t listen to . . . I’m stuck here all day in this house, and . . . and . . . you don’t . . . you just want to sit there with your face, with your face plastered-in-a-book-and-your-stupid-job-is-all-you . . . you don’t even care if the house looks like junk, and Benji batted the Nerf ball over the fence today, and there’s poison ivy in the creek, and we can’t go, and nobody mows it, and that stupid oleander bush is . . . is dangerous, and . . .” The meltdown was so total, I couldn’t even put together a whole thought that made sense. I wanted to run out the door and get in the car, start driving, and never come back.

Cody swung his leg around and dragged himself off the couch, throwing his hands in the air like a suspect trying to keep from getting shot. “All right. All right, already, I’m off the couch. Geez, cut out the waterworks. I’ll put in a bunch of time on the house this weekend, I promise.”

Even though he was giving in, I felt like I was sinking inside. When Benji and Ty were on the way, I cried over stupid things like peanut butter, Cody’s socks on the bathroom floor, an extra ten dollars on the electric bill. You name it, I cried about it. If Cody’d been paying attention, he would of figured out by now that I was pregnant again. I wanted him to. I wanted it to just dawn on him, instead of me having to make a big announcement. My mother always said men only think about what suits them—like how to get a car running, or how to trade in an old lawn mower for a new .22 rifle, or how to leave behind a wife and kids for the skinny little girl at the bank.

Of course, considering my daddy, Mama didn’t have a real high opinion of men. She couldn’t ever accept that Cody and me might be different—that Cody was the type of guy who’d get up in the middle of the night to rescue a friend stuck on the side of the road, or put his last five dollars in the collection plate at church. He was doing everything he could to get through the police academy so he could give his family a better life.

All of a sudden, I felt guilty for chewing on him. I didn’t want to fight. I didn’t want to end up like my mama and daddy.

“Sorry,” I whispered. “I’m just tired.”

“Don’t work so hard,” he said, like it was that simple; then he took a drink of his Dr Pepper and set it back on the table.

“I
have
to work hard. It’s not like I can keep Mama away forever. I don’t want the family to see this house until it’s done. You know they don’t think we can make our own life here. They just want to see us tuck tail and run home, so we can live under their thumbs forever.”

Cody frowned like he’d just bitten into something with a bad taste. “Who cares what your mom thinks? She doesn’t have a choice in it. That’s why we moved down here, right? To get everyone off our backs and out of our business.”

“We can’t keep
your
mom and dad away forever, either,” I pointed out, and Cody swallowed hard.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “I’m gonna go work on the yard.”

Something in the bushes outside caught my eye just as Cody walked past me on his way to the kitchen. He turned like he saw it, too.

“What was that?” I asked.

Cody shrugged. “The wind, I guess.”

“I swear somebody’s out there sometimes.” Chill bumps ran over my shoulders and made me shudder.

Cody’s sour look came back. “Don’t start up about the green-pants lady again, all right? Nobody’s out there.”

I rubbed my hands up and down my arms and checked the window. “Wait, wait, Cody, wait!” The door was opening across the street. “Someone’s coming out of the blue house. Look, look, look!”

Stopping in the doorway, Cody rolled a glance back over his shoulder. “Wooo, call in the National Guard.”

“I haven’t seen anybody come out of there in
three days
. Not since the morning after they moved in. The girl went somewhere for a little while, and then she came back, and since then, nothing. Oh, look, it’s the girl. Oh, oh, and the lady.”

Cody pinched his T-shirt between his fingers and pulled the fabric over his mouth. “Dispatch, dispatch, this is Williams. Ten-sixty-six on a girl and a lady in the driveway on Red Bird. I need backup. Repeat, need backup. Have a girl and a lady. Repeat, girl and a lady.”

“You’re such a jerk,” I said, but I couldn’t help laughing. Cody could always make me laugh. “You think that’s her daughter? Because that lady doesn’t look old enough—”

“I don’t
know
.” Which translated to,
I couldn’t care less.

“Well, come look and see what you think.”

“I’m not going to come look.”

“No, really, Cody, she’s . . . Oh, my gosh, wait. I think they’ve got a flat tire on their car.” I was vaguely aware that I was hopping up and down in the doorway, and if the neighbors looked over here, they’d think I was a loony tune. “Come look.”