Beyond Summer (31 page)

“I think I’ll take these boys down the street with me.” I snuggled kisses under Benji’s chin, then Ty’s, and they pulled their necks in like turtles, their giggles traveling across the yard and bouncing off Elsie’s house. I glanced over to see if Elsie was watching out her window, but the blinds were down and the place looked dark. Her car was in the driveway, like maybe she’d been somewhere already this morning. With my luck, she was probably tired out and taking a nap, and we were bothering her. Maybe later, if I could tell she was in the living room, I’d knock on her door and ask her what she knew about Householders. Elsie really wasn’t so bad, once you got to know her. She still wasn’t friendly. Mostly it seemed like she didn’t want us bothering her, but she wasn’t the worst neighbor you could have.

I wrestled with the boys, even though their rowdiness was starting to get out of control. It felt so good to hear them laughing and squealing, to hug their bodies close to mine. A warmth gushed over me like bathwater, filling me, driving away the bad feelings. This was my family. Mine. No one could take it away.

There was power in that, a completeness. No matter what, we were together—Cody, the boys, and me. This was all I’d ever wanted. Everything.

The boys wore down before we poked anyone’s eye out, and I lay there with them piled on top of me. A squirrel ran across the branch overhead. “Look, look, look!”

They rolled onto their backs as I pointed.

“Is a sk-rul!”

“A squir-rel,” Benji corrected, in his I-know-it-all, older-brother voice.

“Where him go?”

“Back to his house, with nuts.” Benji’s answer was matter-of-fact. Suddenly he was the nature expert. “Like in the book.”

“Ohhhh. Where the sk-rul book, Mommy?” Ty climbed to his feet to look for the squirrel. “Where him go?”

“I didn’t know we had a squirrel book.” I stood up, dusting myself off, while Benji brushed the grass from his clothes. There was no telling what books we had around now. After a few visits to the Book Basket with Tam’s brothers and the kids trading back and forth, we were loaded with reading material.

“It came from the green-pant—” Benji stopped in the middle of the sentence and popped his hand over his mouth, his eyes flying wide.

My good feelings scattered like rats in a grain bin. I’d thought we were past the pretend-people thing. It hadn’t come up since I’d told them to quit talking about it. “Benjamin Williams, remember what we said? We’re not going to tell that story anymore, and you’re not supposed to be telling it to Ty, either. No more green-pants lady. We’re not saying that name. That scares Mommy. Some people are just pretend.”

Benjamin’s sturdy shoulders lifted and then dropped, like it didn’t matter to him either way. “Okay.”

I checked Tam’s house again, but there was still no sign of life over there. “Tell you what, guys. Why don’t we walk down to the corner and see if the bookstore’s open, or if Uncle Terence is in his studio?” I’d taught the boys to call Cody’s cousin Uncle Terence, which I had a feeling Terence thought was weird, but they had to call him something. He was Uncle Terence whether he liked it or not.

“Yay!” Ty jumped, splitting his feet in the air like a mini cheerleader.

“I wanna go get my book in the house.” Benji was up the steps and across the porch before I could stop him. He yanked impatiently at the burglar bars. “Ma-a-ohm! Lemme in! I wanna get my book.”

“What book, Benji? I already locked up. Don’t worry about it.” Even we could afford books at the Book Basket. Everything there was used and smelled musty, but you could count on the prices being low. “We just won’t take a trade-in this time.”

“I wanna take the squirrel book back,” Benji whined, throwing his weight against the doorknob. I sensed a fit coming on, and I didn’t think I could handle it this morning.

“Benjamin Lucas Williams, you’ve got five seconds to get off that porch and march your little self over here. We didn’t get any squirrel book from the Book Basket, and you know it. If we have one in there, it belongs to the Lambert boys.” I
always
checked the books Benji and Ty picked out at the store, just to make sure there wasn’t anything bad in them, and I knew for a fact we hadn’t picked out any squirrel stories. The closest thing we owned was a nature book about reptiles. Squirrels are not reptiles.

Benji wasn’t giving in. “I wanna get it. It’s mine! She gave it to me.”

Heat boiled slowly upward, under my shirt, into my chin, over my ears, like I was a hot pot about to blow. Sometimes Benjamin could be so much like his daddy. I was up the steps and across the porch before I even knew what was happening. Yanking Benjamin’s hand off the door, I spun him around and pointed my finger in his face, and the tension I’d been tucking down all day flowed out with the power of water trapped behind a logjam. It pushed through me, swirling and foaming, a hot, murky mix of feelings I couldn’t control. “Benjamin Lucas, what did I just tell you? Huh? Huh? What did I say? You
stop
this lying. I mean it. You stop it! I’m sick of it! I’m just trying to do something nice for you guys. I’m just trying to do something good, and you’re being . . . you’re being a . . . a little . . .” Snapping my lips closed, I threw my hand over them, a dozen harsh words trapped in my throat. They were meant to hurt, to dig at him so that he would know he was digging at me. Why did he keep doing this? Why was he so determined to keep some imaginary friend, some mystical lady lurking around our house, haunting our family? Was this imaginary friend his way of telling me his own mom and dad weren’t good enough?

Doubts washed over me, sweeping up every thought, pouring tears into my throat, wetting my eyes.
Stop it. Stop this. It’s not him you’re mad at. It’s not his fault. He’s just being a kid.

Benjamin’s eyes filled up, two huge brown circles, so dark the centers were invisible. He blinked, and liquid matted his lashes.

Turning away, I pushed hard against my lips to stop the trembling, then blew out a breath. “Let’s just go. Just come on.” I started across the porch, Benji dragging from the circle of my fingers like a puppy on a leash. He didn’t fight, but he didn’t come easy, either. I ignored his glances back at the house. I had to, or else I was going to say or do something I’d regret later. I snagged Ty on the way past, and headed down the block with the boys jogging to keep up.

By the time we got to the corner, I’d slowed down and caught my breath. Benji was over his fit, and so was I, except for the leftover guilt for being a lousy mom. Every once in a while, even though I didn’t want to, I understood why my mama was so grouchy and bossy all those years we were growing up, and why she was so down on me for getting married young and wanting kids right away.

It was so much harder having a family, making a life, than I’d ever thought it would be. It wasn’t just playing with your kids, or changing their diapers, or making sure they had naps and food to eat. There were all the other things they needed—love, advice, understanding, patience. They needed you to set an example, to be good to them even on the days you didn’t feel like it, even on the days you wanted to give up and have somebody take care of you for a change. Here in Dallas, with no grandmas, and aunts and uncles and cousins to watch the boys for a few hours, a day, a weekend, there wasn’t any ignoring the fact that they deserved a mom who had her act together more than I did.

“There the bookstore!” Ty pointed ahead.

“Yup, there it is.” I swung the boys’ hands up and down, and Ty jumped a crack in the sidewalk on an upswing. “Looks like it’s open. I see MJ’s car out front and the lights are on.”

“Yay!” Benji cheered, and all of a sudden I was the best mom in the world. “Can I get two books?”

“Well, I’ll tell you what.” I let go of Benji’s hand and fished in my purse. “Mommy’s going to stop in and talk to Uncle Terence for a few minutes, and if you guys are real good, then I’ll give you each a dollar, and you can get as many books as that dollar’ll buy.”

“Awe-tum!” Ty’s opinion was positive, as always. “I gonna get five.” Lately, since he’d learned his brother was five years old, everything with Ty was
five
.

“You can’t get five for a dollar,” Benji pointed out.

“Maybe.” Everything with Ty was
maybe
, too. Never yes, never no. Just maybe. “Maybe five.”

Benji made a hard sound in his throat as we rounded the corner into the parking lot. “You can’t—”

“Benji, let him figure that out. It’s his money.”

Terence was busy cutting frames when we stepped into his shop. I stood in the doorway holding the boys’ hands until the noise of the saw died down. Terence cut the power and pushed up his goggles, snapping them over the tie-dyed bandanna on his head. “I didn’t see you guys there.” One thing about Terence—you could never tell whether he was glad to have company or not. Painting seemed to suit him because he couldn’t think of what to say to real people. Luckily, I could usually talk enough for both of us, which made Terence like me a little, I thought.

“We sneaked in.”

“Don’t guess that was too hard.”

“Yeah, you’re lucky I wasn’t a burglar or something.”

That got a little smile out of him. “Nothing here worth stealing, unless you’re into oil paints and wood stain. I don’t think anybody’d take this table saw if I gave it to them.”

“I bet Cody’d take it. Maybe he’d get some projects done around the house.”

Snagging a towel from the workbench, Terence wiped the sweat and sawdust from his neck. He yawned, setting the towel aside, then hiking his jeans up on his waist, where there was a gap at the bottom of his T-shirt. I waited for him to make conversation, but he didn’t, which was normal.

“You look wiped out,” I said, although the truth was, Terence always looked tired. He looked like someone who was worn out by life and couldn’t quite figure out why he was still here. In his paintings, the faces had a loneliness that made me wonder what he was thinking when he painted them. Back before Ty was born, I used to do some painting, so I knew you couldn’t help putting a lot of yourself into what you created.

“Yeah, a little,” he admitted. “I need to get a frame on this thing, and then I’m headed to another art show for a couple days.” A chin jerk pointed out a painting on an easel turned away from us. A chair sat in front of the easel, near the door to the bookstore, like someone’d been posing for him.

I walked a few steps into the room, holding the boys’ hands so they wouldn’t touch anything. “What is it?” Once upon a time, I thought maybe I’d be an artist, so I loved seeing how Terence made his people seem real. I liked the fact that he talked to me like I knew something, and he was interested in my opinion.

“Take a look. You can let the kids come in here. They’re not gonna hurt anything.”

I turned loose of the boys’ hands, and they wandered to the back corner to look at Terence’s tools, while I walked around the worktable so that I could see what was on the easel. My mouth dropped open and a chill ran over my shoulders. “You painted the voodoo lady?”

“The what?” Terence laughed and coughed at the same time.

“The voodoo lady. She, like, stands by the wall and stares at me when we’re doing the reading class. It’s creepy.”

“Maybe she’s learning to read.” Terence’s smile was forgiving, almost tender. “She asked me to write out some words for her on a piece of paper.”

“She did?”

He nodded. “She doesn’t mean to bother anybody. She’s just . . . a little afraid of people.”

I rubbed my hands over the goose bumps on my arms. “If she wants to learn to read, she could sign up for class instead of lurking over everybody’s shoulders.”

He picked up a piece of wood, held it straight out, and squinted down it, like he was checking for straightness. “You don’t know what it’s like, living on the street, until you’ve been there. You get so far away from normal, you don’t even know what normal is. Sesay has an interesting story, though. I was trying to capture that in the painting. I like to paint the street people sometimes—learn more about where they come from and how they ended up where they are.” He pointed toward his work again. On the canvas he’d surrounded the woman with darkness. The red scarf tied over her dreadlocks floated into empty space. A faint reflection shone in her eyes. I moved closer to see what it was.

Water, maybe, and rocks and a shore? Behind me, Terence was telling me the woman didn’t even know where she was from. An island somewhere. Someplace where soldiers came and took people away and burned down their houses—some kind of a military coup, he guessed. “I don’t know where she’s been all these years since. She wouldn’t say,” he finished. “I asked MJ about her. MJ didn’t know much, either. Sesay just showed up here a few months ago. Probably came from another place where she was living on the street. Some of them move around a lot.”

“Some of them?”

“The street people. Sounds like she works a little here and there, lives in shelters, does what she can. For them, it’s about survival. Most of them are harmless. They’re just afraid, you know? It’s not easy when nobody wants you around
.
”

I tried to imagine how it would be, wandering the streets, not knowing where you were going to sleep, or where your next meal would come from. “Do you think she’s got a family someplace? Someone she could go to? She’s kind of, well . . . old. She won’t be able to live like this forever.”

“I doubt she thinks about the future much. People on the street don’t keep a calendar.”

I looked at the portrait again, stared into the eyes, wondered what they’d seen. “It’s kind of sad, though, to think . . . I mean, for somebody to end up that way.” On the other side of the room, the boys were brushing sawdust off a workbench, watching it poof in the window light, and making a mess in the process. “Hey, you guys, quit that.”