Beyond Summer (36 page)

I want to be proud. I want to be proud of something I’ve done.
“We’re fine, Mama. Really. I promise we’ll come down for a visit once Cody’s not working so much. He’s been doing some temp jobs.”

“Because you need money.”

“Mama, I told you, we’re fine.”

She huffed again—the same sound she used to make when some teacher sent a test home with a note saying,
Shasta is capable of more, but she just doesn’t apply herself.
“Why do you have to be so stubborn?”

“Because I’m like my mama.”

I could picture her rolling her eyes and shaking her head as she said good-bye and hung up the phone.

Tam came back with Elsie just about the time I was moving to the sand pile to make what would probably be some highly weird introductions. Tam walked slowly beside Elsie, her elbow held out like she was trying to help Elsie walk, but Elsie wasn’t having any of it.

They stopped at the porch, and Elsie plunked herself into a lawn chair, looking like she was here to get a cavity drilled or pay her taxes instead of share a hot dog and a little company. By the sand pile, Sesay retreated into the shadow of the bushes, watching the boys sail little wooden boats on a pretend lake. Meanwhile, Tam’s stepmother was keeping her distance with the baby, and the crazy aunt was talking, but it was hard to tell who she was talking to. She looked like an actor in a play, sending a monologue into thin air.

“I’m fine,” Elsie grumbled. “You didn’t need to come bring me over here, and . . .” She squinted across the yard then and figured out who was in the shadows beside the shed. “What’n the name of blazes is
that
doin’ here?”

I took a breath. So far, my neighborhood picnic was a bomb. “I asked her to come eat a hot dog with us.”

“You joinin’ the mission service?” Elsie wasn’t in one of her better moods, although her moods were usually bad, or at least that’s what showed on the outside. I had a feeling that, on the inside, Elsie was lonely and scared. It couldn’t be easy at her age, living all by yourself.

“I thought you might want to tell her thank you,” I said, still feeling pretty snippy after talking with Mama.

Tam’s head swiveled, and her eyes went wide. She’d never seen my bratty side. Normally, it took Mama, my brother, Jace, or one of my know-it-all cousins to bring that out.

Elsie pulled back, sitting ramrod straight in her chair, her chin disappearing into the folds of skin hanging underneath. “What’n the world for? For hangin’ around lookin’ over my shoulder all the time in that class? Just standin’ there like some kind of vagrant, gettin’ in the way of normal folk?”

Something in me snapped, then. I was sick of people being hard on each other, being hateful and critical when there wasn’t any need for it. I was sick of mortgage companies sending bills you didn’t sign up for, and Mama acting like I’d always be a screwup, and working but never seeming to have enough money, and the world just taking one look and sticking you in a box and trying to keep you there. Maybe people, even people like Sesay, were more than what showed on the surface.

I turned to Elsie and blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “Well, you know what? Maybe you might want to thank Sesay for saving your life, because she did.”

The picnic in Shasta’s backyard was like one of those somewhat unwanted presents you end up with at the holiday gift exchange: It seems like a disappointment at first, but over time, it grows on you. Our gathering started off on shaky ground, none of us knowing what to talk about or where to be. Elsie sat on the porch giving everyone unpleasant looks, Sesay hid in the shadows by the garden shed, Shasta fussed over the food like Martha Stewart, and Barbie hovered by the sandbox, holding Jewel and nervously fingering a heart-shaped necklace my father had given her. She looked as if she regretted having come.

Fortunately no gathering could remain quiet with five young boys present. After they’d finished in the sand pile, Shasta’s kids wanted to pull out a croquet set they’d found in the shed. Shasta told them no at first, and I leaned close to her and whispered, “Why not? It’ll give us something to do.” We shared the slightly desperate silent exchange of people whose party was flopping, and then she set down the hot-dog platter and turned off the grill.

“Good idea,” she said. “Let’s have a little fun before we eat.” Mark, Landon, and Aunt Lute passed out the mallets, while Shasta, Tyler, and Benjamin pushed wire hoops into the ground. Tyler handed a mallet to Sesay, and she held it close to her face, smoothing a finger over the cracks in the old wood. When Mark took a mallet to Elsie, she frowned and pushed it away.

“I’m just gonna watch,” she grumbled. “I ain’t up for game playin’.”

Standing by the porch step with her arms crossed, Barbie seemed to echo those sentiments. She checked her watch, probably counting the minutes until we could go home. When Mark tried to hand her a mallet, she smiled indulgently, but didn’t reach for it. “I don’t need one, honey. You go ahead and play.”

Mark’s smile faded and his shoulders drooped, the mallet hanging loose at his side. He was used to being told that Mommy didn’t have time.

I was tempted to walk across the yard and smack Barbie. Couldn’t she see that all the kids really wanted was her attention? Would it kill her to play croquet?

Aunt Lute handed Landon a mallet and sent him back to Elsie’s chair. “Oh, but everyone must play,” she insisted. “The Queen of Hearts has decreed it. The game isn’t the least bit strenuous. You won’t muss your hair.” With a pointed look at Barbie, she motioned for Mark to return to the porch with the unwanted mallet. “Unless, of course, your hedgehog should run away, and then it’s off with your head! Hedgehogs are such mischievous little things. Alice’s hedgehog wouldn’t cooperate at all. And the mallet kissed her. Good heavens, what a sight that was!”

Barbie and Elsie grudgingly took possession of their croquet equipment. Aunt Lute explained the rules in terms of flamingos and hedgehogs, and the game of queen’s croquet began. After a few shots, Elsie was granted a reprieve from play, when she stumbled over an uneven spot in the yard. “I ain’t a invalid,” she argued, then laid a hand on Daniel’s shoulder. “Go get my chair, there, little fella, and bring it out here where I can sit in it while I wait for my turn.” She reached for Jewel, whom Barbie had been carrying in one arm. “Here, let me hold that baby while you take your shot. You’re gonna need both hands to outplay me. I got that hedgehog goin’ right where I want it.”

The game continued from there, Aunt Lute directing the queen’s men, Jewel watching from Elsie’s lap, Sesay tucking her hair into the collar of her dress to keep it out of the way, and Barbie purposely missing shots, so as not to get ahead of the boys. Landon and Tyler, too young to navigate the game very well, eventually resorted to rolling their hedgehogs like bowling balls. Aunt Lute decreed a foul, pronounced a sentence of “Off with their heads!” and she and Barbie chased the boys around the yard.

While Shasta cooked the hot dogs after the croquet game, Sesay helped the boys find rocks from the flower bed and a small ball from the sandbox toys. “I will show you a game my mother teaches me when I am very young,” she said, moving to the porch with Aunt Lute following curiously behind. “The game is called
oo-slay
. When I am young, the children play this game everywhere they go.”

As Sesay explained the game, Elsie peered over the boys’ shoulders. “Well, that’s like jacks, except usin’ a ball and pebbles,” Elsie observed, scooting forward in her chair. “I used to win all the time at jacks. Let me see that ball.”

Barbie squatted down to watch, and Landon snuggled in beside her, his fingers toying with her hair. Giving him a tender look, she took his hand and kissed it. “You want to give it a try, Landon?” she asked. “Tell you what, I’ll bounce the ball and you grab the rocks. Get ready now. . . .”

From her post behind the hot-dog grill, Shasta caught my gaze, winked, and gave me the thumbs-up. Even she knew that this game of mother-son jacks was long overdue.

After supper, we sat together on Shasta’s back porch while the boys chased fireflies. Shasta flipped on the porch lights, and Sesay pulled out an art pad Terence had given her. On the pad, she’d drawn familiar objects—a paintbrush, a leaf, a flower, a lizard, a toad, a hummingbird, and dozens of others. She’d planned to have Terence help her write the words, the
line pictures
, she called them, but we sat at Shasta’s picnic table and filled in the blanks instead. When the yard grew too dark, the boys wandered to the porch and sounded out the letters as we wrote. Even Elsie participated, leaning forward and tapping a finger to the pad. “That ain’t a flower; it’s an iris,” she said, pointing to Sesay’s drawing. “You oughta write
iris
, not flower.”

“Let’s make both kind,” Mark suggested, and Barbie tousled his hair.

“Good idea,” she agreed. “They’re both nice words to know.” By the end of the evening, we’d achieved a strange but comfortable group harmony, in which we ignored the difficult issues—Elsie’s fall in the garage, Barbie’s recent behavior, the fact that Sesay was homeless—and we focused on reading instead.

Our time together was quiet, pleasant, relaxing.

“That was nice,” Barbie said, as we walked home. Shifting Jewel’s droopy body from one shoulder to the other, she turned to watch Sesay disappear down the street. Sesay hadn’t said good-bye. She’d simply tucked her pad into her backpack and walked away as we were picking up the dishes. “Where do you think she’s going?”

“I think she stays at the mission some.” The truth was that I’d tried not to consider it in too much detail. Sesay’s life was hard to imagine.

A shiver ran across Barbie’s shoulders. “That must be awful.”

“Shasta said she’s working for the guy who has the studio behind Book Basket, and she might be staying there some. To tell you the truth, she seems more worried about learning words than she does about where she’s living.”

Barbie sighed, cuddling Jewel under her chin as the boys ran ahead to catch up with Aunt Lute. “I can’t imagine what that would be like—to be so old and not know how to read.”

“Me, either,” I admitted. Watching Sesay struggle over words tonight, I’d tried to imagine being surrounded by words whose meanings were a mystery. Suddenly I realized that the reading class was more than a way for me to pass time. It gave purpose to my stay here on Red Bird Lane. It was something important for which I didn’t need money, or nice clothes, or a big house, or a golf scholarship. All I needed was time. Time, I had.

Barbie climbed our porch steps with a resolute sigh, as if she had to steel herself to go inside. “I guess I shouldn’t be complaining.” It was hard to tell whether she was talking to herself or to me. “At least we have a place.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, but the words were halfhearted. Even though I knew I should be grateful, it was hard to properly appreciate our overstuffed mess of a house. Right now, the boys were climbing the burglar bars on the front windows, making monkey sounds, and Aunt Lute was pretending to be a zookeeper. Getting them bathed and in bed would be insane tonight, as usual.

Barbie slipped around them and stuck the key in the dead bolt. “I still hate this house, though.”

“Me, too,” I admitted, and both of us laughed. For once Barbie and I were on the same page, and there wasn’t any point trying to hide it. This house was too small for lies, anyway.

Pausing with her hand on the door, Barbie squinted toward the street. “Tomorrow’s Sunday,” she said out of the blue. “Maybe we should get up and go to church. Not our old one—the little white one where you do the reading class.”

I backed up a step, surprised. Shasta had been after me to go to service with her this Sunday, but I’d been putting her off. Attending seemed pointless when it felt like our family was totally off God’s radar right now. “Maybe,” I muttered.

Barbie shrugged as she pushed open the door. “I guess we can see how we feel tomorrow.”

“I guess,” I agreed, secure in the knowledge that after such a busy night, Barbie and the kids would sleep way too late to make it to the service at ten a.m. Whenever I saw Shasta tomorrow, I’d apologize and say we overslept. I just wasn’t ready to sit in church and sing all the same old songs, and pray the same old prayers. If God hadn’t answered by now, He wasn’t going to. I was better off not focusing my hopes on divine intervention.

My plan would have worked nicely if Shasta hadn’t shown up at eight a.m. with a tray of homemade cinnamon rolls. “We were up early,” she chirped, as I answered our door with a serious case of bed head. “We baked.” She gave me a big, sheepish smile that was as transparent as a Caribbean sea. She was just making sure we were up. With Cody going to work again today, she didn’t want to attend church alone. “See you in a bit.” She headed back across the street with an annoying little finger wave. I could already hear Barbie and the kids beginning to stir in the bedrooms. Sunday was off and running, whether I wanted it to be or not.

As it turned out, though, Sunday wasn’t all that bad. The congregation members at the old white church were welcoming enough. Elsie greeted us with a curt wave as we came in. Pastor Al acted as if we were visiting celebrities. The choir sang off-key. A homeless man wandered through the door ten minutes into the service and sat in the back among the empty pews. I caught myself looking around for Sesay, but there was no sign of her.

The service was traditional and quiet—no giant projection screens or Christian rock bands like our old church. No call for anyone to come down front and offer up dramatic testimony. Just a simple sermon, a few songs, and a short time of meditation while ushers collected the offering. Barbie dropped a fifty in the basket, and I watched in shock. Not only did the fifty stand out amid the ones and fives, but we couldn’t afford it.