Beyond Summer (26 page)

“You don’t give yourself enough credit.” Tam wagged her chin, like she was handing me a lecture. “You’re going to be better at it than I am.”

I shook my head. I doubted I’d ever be better than Tam at anything. “Everybody doesn’t look at me and think I’m somebody, like they do with you. When we go out with the kids, people see you, and they think you’re, like, the babysitter or the older sister. They see me, and they think I’m some kind of teenage-welfare-mom-immigrant. You don’t know what it’s like.”

Tam looked at me for what seemed like forever, and then she stared out the window toward the church. “You know what, Shasta? You’re right—I don’t know what it’s like to be you, but I do know what it’s like to worry all the time about what everybody else thinks. When my dad . . . went broke, when we lost our house, all of a sudden all those people I was so worried about wouldn’t even speak to me anymore. Even friends we went to church with didn’t want anything to do with us. For a while, I thought that was God’s fault—that He was using those people to punish us. But what I’m starting to realize is that I’ve been punishing myself. It’s not God’s fault that I care so much about what everyone thinks. It’s mine. I’ve been letting them define me. I’ve been giving them all the control, but when you get right down to it, what should matter is whether or not you can live with who you are.”

What should matter is whether or not you can live with who you are.
Maybe that was the problem all along. Maybe all the things I’d thought I needed to be and do to fix my life—be pretty, be smart, be a cheerleader, a beauty queen, a Choctaw princess, find a boyfriend, get married, start a family of my own—were just patches on a suit of clothes that would never quit getting new holes. Something was always poking through from the inside. Until I quit beating myself up for my daddy leaving, until I quit letting that define me, I’d never be the person I wanted to be. Maybe he didn’t leave because there was anything wrong with me. Maybe he left because there was something wrong with him.

“Let’s go,” Tam said again, and I realized I’d been sitting there with my hand on the door handle. Tam didn’t wait for an answer. She opened her door, and I knew I’d better get ready, because in about two-point-five seconds, kids were going to come piling out in all directions.

I climbed out and swung the back door open. “I’ve got the baby,” I said, and Ty gave me a pouty lip as his feet hit the pavement. He and Benji were tired of me making a fuss over the baby all the time. I hoped they’d feel different once “the baby” was their baby sister.

Ty was waving at somebody by the time I made it to the curb with Jewel. “Hieee!” he called. Across the street, the lady with the dreadlocks stood underneath the bottle tree in front of the bookstore. She had on a gray skirt and a raincoat, in spite of the fact that it was hot and dry. She was watching us, still as a statue, her face tipped to one side.

“She’s baaa-ack.” I gave a chin jerk toward the bookstore. “That lady just creeps me out.”

Tam glanced that way while trying to hold four kids with two hands. “Come on, she’s harmless.” She started around the side of the building toward the nursery rooms in the back, and I followed.

“I don’t like the way she watches the kids.” I could feel her eyes following us as we passed the memorial garden, where the handicapped guy, Teddy, kept the roses blooming like something on a Miracle-Gro label. “I’m telling you, it’s creepy. I hope she’s gone when we finish class tonight. It’s weird enough in the daytime, but after dark she’d be, like, Zombie Woman.”

“You’ve got a wild imagination.” Tam opened the door to the children’s building, and Mark and Daniel ran through, knocking the handle against the wall so hard that the entire building vibrated. The boys took off down the hall, ruffling Sunday-school papers tacked to bulletin boards. Tam ran after them, hollering, “Wait a minute, you two. Mark! Stop it! Dan . . . Mark! Out of the kitchen, now!” By the time we handed the baby over in the nursery, Tam’s little brothers had tried to break into a pack of Little Debbies, and three teenage helpers were out in the hall working to chase them down.

“Oh, no, you don’t!” The girl we’d met before, Cass, caught Daniel and grabbed the Little Debbie box away. “These are for after our project and story time. If you guys wanna have snacks, you can just haul yourselves into the room and sit down at a table like you’re supposed to.”

Benji and Ty scooted into the room, and Tam’s little brothers followed with major pouty lips. Tam caught a breath and looked at the ceiling. “Guess they’ve got it under control.” She headed for the door like she couldn’t get outta there fast enough.

My stomach knotted up again on the way to the fellowship hall, where the lights were on, and people were already gathering. I came in behind Tam, got my name badge, and stood there feeling like a fake. During the introductions, it didn’t take me long to figure out that only a few of the mentors—four older ladies who’d gone through the training with Tam and me—were from the neighborhood. The rest were college kids bused over from SMU to get credit in some class. They were all in teaching school, which meant they already had way more training than us. When we huddled up to get last-minute directions, I felt like the odd man out. Tam fit right in, and the college guys couldn’t stop flirting with her long enough to listen to what the class leader was saying.

While we were getting our marching orders in the front corner of the room, the students were coming in the back. They looked just as uncomfortable as I was. To make things worse, when I turned around, there was my grouchy next-door neighbor—the one who gave us dirty looks out the window—sitting at one of the tables. She turned her nose up, like she didn’t see me heading to the back of the room to sit with the tutors. She probably didn’t want me in her reading class any more than she wanted me living next door to her.

My palms started sweating during the greetings and intros. Pastor Al welcomed everyone to the church; Mrs. Kaye invited the students and the mentors to stop by the Summer Kitchen for lunch anytime, and then she said hi to some of the people she already knew. “And I see a few Summer Kitchen regulars here, too,” she said. “Welcome.” She waved at Tam and me as
regulars
, and the college kids checked us out, and I wanted to sink down through my seat and run like creek water.

Finally, Mrs. Kaye turned the class over to the literacy lady, and the lesson started. I couldn’t focus on it. I couldn’t think of anything but all the college kids sitting there, knowing I was a
regular
at the free-lunch café.

A few of the people at the tables were café regulars, too. It’d never crossed my mind that, while I was listening to story time with Benji and Ty, I might be sitting next to somebody, a grown person, who couldn’t go home and read that same book to their own kids. Even after watching all the Literacy Here training videos, it didn’t seem real. I wouldn’t’ve thought there would be so many people like that, so close by. I guess when you’ve always known how to do something—like pick up a book and read it—it seems automatic that everybody else can, too. This was America, after all. How did anybody go through grade school and not come out knowing how to read?

I might not of made it to college, and every teacher in Hugo High School might of thought I turned out to be just another small-town loser, but at least I could read. Maybe I could handle this tutoring thing, after all. The lesson on the whiteboard up front was really simple—phonetic decoding, word patterns, and sight words you see every day on signs and restaurant menus. I was already teaching Benji that stuff.

I could do this. I really could.

I scanned the room, looking over each of the students, trying to picture what this person or that person would think if they got me for a tutor. My next-door neighbor’d probably laugh in my face. What was she doing here, anyway? She had to be at least seventy. How did a person get to be seventy, buy a house, drive a car, and do all the normal things without reading?

In the seat next to her, a Mexican guy, maybe about forty, was nodding and smiling. His clothes were dirty from work, his jeans green with a plaster of grass trimmings and clingy Bermuda seeds. The man next to him was young, maybe even a teenager, but they knew each other. Every so often, the younger guy pointed to the board and explained something to the older guy, and they both nodded. A dark-haired woman next to them slapped the younger man on the arm once, and put a finger to her lips. They were a family, I guessed. A whole family, at reading class together. The woman raised her hand and asked a question in Spanish. The teacher rattled off an answer as quick as you please, like she spoke Spanish every day.

The knot shimmied in my stomach. I couldn’t speak two cents’ worth of Spanish. If they tried to hook me up with somebody who didn’t know much English, I’d look like a doofus.

The teacher finished answering, and most of the college kids, including Tam, laughed like they understood what she was saying. I felt like an idiot. An idiot who should of paid more attention in high school Spanish.

A couple African-American ladies on the left side of the room gave the Spanish talk a sneer and leaned back in their chairs, crossing their arms and sending tired looks toward the clock, like they weren’t sure they belonged here, either. At least one of them had four kids. I’d watched her cross the parking lot after we left the children’s building. The kids were quiet and shy, and they looked like their clothes hadn’t been washed in a week. If my Nana Jo’d been there, she would of eagle-eyed the lady and whispered behind her hand,
It’s one thing for folks to be poor, but soap and water don’t cost much.

The first thing you learn, growing up Choctaw, is that family’s important. Nana Jo and Mama always looked down their noses at the hillbilly types who spent their money on beer, cigarettes, and weed, and went around town with their kids dirty and half-dressed. The women in my family believed in getting an education and being able to take care of yourself and your kids. If Mama’d been sitting in my seat right now, she would of turned her nose up at the people in these chairs, especially the moms. Maybe, when Mama came, if I could tell her I’d been tutoring people to read, she’d be impressed. . . .

The lecture part of the class ended, and Pastor Al, Mrs. Kaye, and the instructor, Lynne Barnes, started calling out students’ names and pairing them up with instructors. After three pairs, they called Elsie Lowell, and my grouchy next-door neighbor raised her hand. Then, of course, Mrs. Kaye pointed to me and motioned. I dragged myself out of my chair, feeling two inches high. They couldn’t give me somebody young and friendly, oh, no. I had to get the lady who shot dirty looks out the window whenever my kids made noise in the yard. “You two live next door to each other,” Mrs. Kaye said, and smiled at my neighbor as I slid into the seat. “Elsie, did you know that?”

Elsie answered her with a constipated grunt.

Mrs. Kaye turned to me like she didn’t even notice, and went right on. “Elsie used to come over and help with the Summer Kitchen when we were over on Red Bird. Did you know we started our little café in the house you’re living in now? I didn’t realize that until I looked at the address on your volunteer sheet. My uncle Poppy built your house. He lived there all his life. Sometime when you’ve got a minute, I’ll tell you more about the house, if you like.”

“That’d be great,” I said. “When we bought it, they said they didn’t have any background on its history.”

Mrs. Kaye’s eyebrows shot up and her chin pulled back into her neck. “Bought it? I thought those Householders homes were rentals.” The strange look in her eye lifted me in my chair, made me lean closer to her, thinking she was about to say something really important. Then she didn’t say anything.

Elsie grunted and turned her face toward the door, like she wanted to get up and head out.

“Well, it’s a special kind of loan deal, but it’s ours,” I said. “Cody—my husband—knows more about that stuff than I do. I was busy trying to corral the boys when the guy was explaining everything.” The picture of Benji and Ty running like wild men through the cubicles of the Householders office flashed through my mind. The loan guys couldn’t get us out of there fast enough, which was probably why now Cody didn’t really understand the paperwork, either. “Householders made it all real easy, though.”

Elsie threaded her arms over her chest and muttered something that sounded like, “Hmph, those yellow houses.”

Mrs. Kaye leaned across the table to pat Elsie’s hand. “I’m glad you decided to come, Elsie. You know, we could use your help here during lunches anytime. Just because the Summer Kitchen isn’t right next door anymore doesn’t mean we wouldn’t love to have you.”

Elsie jerked her chin slightly. “Been busy lately.”

I glanced sideways at her. As far as I could tell, Elsie sat in her house all day with the television going.

Mrs. Kaye smiled and slid a folder across the desk. “Oh, well, of course, but I want you to know you’re always welcome. When you’ve lost a spouse, it’s important to get out and spend time around people—you know, try something new, like this class.”

“Heard you needed people.” Elsie straightened in her seat. “Guess I can come fill a chair.”

“We’re glad you did.”

I watched Mrs. Kaye walk away and thought,
Seriously, she has to be the nicest person in the world.
Maybe I wasn’t cut out for tutoring, because the way Elsie acted irked me. I’d pictured getting paired up with somebody who was grateful I was there. Who actually
wanted
help. Instead, I got Elsie.

We sat there for a minute, watching while the rest of the folders were handed out, and tutor-student pairs took out the books and started working in them.

“Guess we oughta do somethin’.” Elsie snorted so hard that nose hairs puffed out and then sucked back in. There were pasty rings of makeup around her eyes, two shades darker than her skin, like she’d bought it years before, when she actually got out of the house for more than just the daily trip to the mailbox.