Beyond Summer (43 page)

“Dell is a good name,” I say, trying to imagine the line picture, to decode it.
D
, like
doll
. “It has a good sound.”

His happiness fades for an instant. He looks away. “It’s about the only thing I ever gave her. I didn’t do much right when I was young.” I feel the pain in him, and I think I should stretch across the table and lay my hand over his, but then I know I should not. If you touch people, they pull away and rub their hands on their clothing.

I only sit and wait until he looks my way. He seems to wonder what I am thinking. “You are young yet,” I say. “And she is young. The path behind is only the path ahead, if you walk backward. Do not let yesterday use up too much of today.”

His eyes pinch as he considers this. “Good point.” The sadness fades from him, and his face brightens again. “I’ve got something for you.” From his pocket, he takes an envelope and slaps it onto the table. “Sold your birds. All three of them. Didn’t even make it to the folk art gallery with them. All three sold right out of the booth at Art Fest. You’re a hit, Sesay.” He slides the envelope across the table toward me. “Here you go. This is yours.”

“I have never seen it before.” There are dollars in the envelope. A small stack of them. It is not mine.

“For your hummingbirds.” He pushes the envelope closer. “I sold them.”

“But I gave them to you. For my room. For my bed.”

He laughs, his smile lovely in his cedar-wood face. “The room is free. No one’s using it, and you’ve paid for it by staining the frames and sweeping, anyway. This place hasn’t ever been so clean. I’ll teach you how to use the saw, and you can help cut frames if you want to do more. But I’m not keeping the money from the birds.” He slides the envelope farther, so that it teeters on the edge of the table and will fall if I do not catch it. “Come on. Take it. Buy something you want.”

I watch the envelope quiver in the breeze of the fan. If it topples to the ground, the money will spill out, but if I take it, with it will come the worry of where to hide it, and who might try to take it from me when I set down my pack or fall asleep on the benches along the street. “The Lord says, ‘I shall not want.’”

Terence clicks his tongue on his teeth. “You’ve been hanging out at the mission with Michael too much.”

“To want is to choose to be unhappy with what is.” My grandfather told this to me long ago, and now, when I say it to Terence, I remember a story my grandfather told, a story about want.

Terence taps a finger to his ear. “You’ve got a point there, but it’s your money. I’m not keeping it.”

“It can remain here.” I cannot think of reasons for the money, and it seems useless to try. I have a bed, and the sink to wash in, and work making frames and creating my carvings. I am learning to know the line pictures in the book, and this costs nothing. In the bookstore, the books cost nothing, and if I go to the right places each day, there is food enough.

Terence stretches across the table and takes the envelope, then moves a few steps to his workbench. “Tell you what. We’ll keep it under the tray with the drill bits for now. Nobody’ll think to look for it there. Want to count it or anything?”

I shake my head.

“You don’t even want to know how much it is?”

I shake my head again. The amount would mean nothing to me.

He closes the drawer, and I can see that I have disappointed him. The money was a gift, and I have refused it. “I will tell you a story my grandfather says to me when I am a little girl.”

Terence puts a leg over a stool and rests his hands on the table. “Why do I have the feeling there’s a lesson coming here?” He nods toward a rusted chair that is used around the shop, sometimes as a seat, sometimes as a ladder, sometimes as a table for his paints. The chair is splattered with colors, like a rainbow that has dried in place.

I sit in the chair and slide my pack under the table. “All good stories contain a lesson.”

“Your grandfather probably said that, too.” He laughs, the way a friend laughs when he knows you. Terence has learned that many of my stories are from my grandfather. I have learned much about him, as well. It is strange to have this young man know me. Strange and wonderful. Wonderfully strange.

“Perhaps this is a Grandfather lesson. You can decide when you hear it.” I close my eyes, and I smell the damp, heavy soil of my grandfather’s home. Sand squeezes between my toes, and overhead, the sun pushes through the high, thick roof of leaves. I tell the story as my grandfather told it. In my mind, I hear his voice:

“Many, many years ago, there lives a king. This king, he is very rich and has many wives and children, but he is not happy. He think to himself: I have everything, but that does not make me happy. What must I do to be happy?

“One day, Mr. King, he shout angrily to his servants: ‘Why can I not be happy? What must I do to be happy?’

“One of the servants, he say to the king, ‘Oh, my king! Look at the sky! How beautiful the moon and the stars are! Look at them, and you will see how good life is. That will make you happy.’

“ ‘ Oh, no, no, no!’ answers the king. ‘When I look at the moon and the stars, I am angry, because I know they are beyond my reach and I cannot have them.’

“Then another servant, he say, ‘Oh, my king! What about music? Music makes a man happy. We shall play to you from dawn until darkness, and music will make you happy.’

“The king’s face, it grow fierce wit’ anger. ‘Oh, no, no, no, no!’ he cry. ‘What a silly idea. Music is most fine, but to listen to music from morning until evening, day after day? Never! No, never!’

“So the servants, they go away, and the king sit angry in his rich room until one of the servants come and bow to him, and say, ‘Oh, my king. I t’ink I know something that will bring you much great happiness. It is very easily done.’

“‘What is it?’ ask the king.

“Says the servant, ‘You must find a happy man, and then you must take off his shirt and put it on. His happiness, it will go into your body and then you gonna be as happy as he!’

“The king, he like this idea greatly, so he send his soldier men all over the country to look for a happy man. They go on and on, but it is not easy to find a happy man in the king’s country. They are afraid to return to the castle without a happy man.

“One day then, the soldier men come to the smallest village in the farthest part of the Mr. King’s country. There, they find a man who say, ‘I am the happiest man in the world!’ He is poor, but he always smile and laugh and sing. Everyone know this about him.

“The soldier men, they don’t waste any time bringing the happy man to the king, and the king is so much excited. ‘At last I gonna be a happy man!’ he say, and he take off his golden shirt and throw it aside. ‘Bring him in!’

“The doorkeepers open the door to the king’s room, and the king, he stand in front of his throne. ‘Come here, my friend!’ he call down the long aisle. ‘Please take off your shirt and give it to me!’

“The little smiling man, he come slowly in the door, but when he step into the light, do you know what the king see? The king, he look at the man and see . . . what does he see? He see that he cannot take the happy man’s shirt, because the happy man, the happiest man in the world, he has no shirt!”

I throw my hands open at the last words, and Terence tips his stool back on two legs and laughs.

He slaps the tabletop and says, “Now, that is a great story.”

“Yes, a good story,” I tell him. “A good story to know.”

Terence nods, as if he agrees with this. “True enough. Your grandfather must’ve been a wise man.” He looks around the room, considering the many things within it; then he shakes his head and looks toward the envelope. “All right, I get your point, but, Sesay, there must be something you’d like to do with that money besides keep it under the drill bits. There must be something you’d like to have. Something you wish for.”

I touch my mouth and laugh at myself. I do want something, after all. I am not so unlike the king. “I wish for a smile. A beautiful white smile, like the happy man.”

Terence allows the stool to settle onto all four legs. He rests his elbows on the table and studies me as if I am a book filled with line pictures. “Sesay,” he says softly. “You keep carving those birds, and I promise you, I’ll find someone who can give you that smile.”

I watch him, and I know he is true about this.

I feel as though I have just put on the happy man’s shirt.

When I got home from reading class, Dell called to say she was coming into town early to hang out before her conference, and maybe spend a little time with Terence. She was flying in on a red-eye, which normally would of been good news, especially with Cody out of town and the house feeling lonely, but all my house projects were taking longer than I thought they would, especially now that I was burning up time digging into the Householders problem. I’d called their office three times today and sat on hold for over an hour total, and all I got was the runaround. Meanwhile, the house was a mess, the painting wasn’t finished, and the pictures that were supposed to be hanging in the hall were still on the floor. I hadn’t even finished decorating the red wall because I couldn’t decide if I liked it or not. Dell picked the worst time in the world to come early.

I didn’t argue with her when she said she’d get a hotel near the airport tonight and be here tomorrow after she visited with Terence. At least that’d give me a little time to do damage control on the house and try to get it looking respectable.

As soon as I hung up, I gave the boys their baths, put them to bed with a movie, and went to work like a madwoman, scooping laundry off the floors and finishing some of the spackling and painting. There wasn’t any hope for the cracked plaster in the boys’ bedroom. That was a bigger project than I could get done in one night. It didn’t help that I’d been feeling lousy since yesterday. My stomach was in curlicues over the Householders mess, and now with Cody gone and Tam tied up with her family, I didn’t have anybody to vent to. All I could do was stew and worry, and walk around the house feeling queasy and too nervous to eat. Just like with the other two pregnancies, the upset stomach kept hitting me at the worst possible time. As soon as Cody came home from D.C., I’d have to tell him about the baby. It’d be obvious once he saw me nursing glasses of Sprite and nibbling on dry toast. He knew what that meant.

By one in the morning, I felt too lousy to keep working. I was light-headed from not eating, but too sick to eat, so I gave up and climbed into bed with my body achy and my stomach gurgling. Then I lay there flopping around like a fish onshore, until finally I got out of bed again and settled in the living room with a glass of Sprite and the laptop. If I couldn’t do anything else, maybe I could figure out a way to keep us afloat until we solved this Householders mess. I started out by looking through page after page of short-term loan ads, trying to figure out if we could get a loan against the truck, and ended up looking at articles and printing pages about real estate fraud and development companies like Householders. Somewhere in the swamp of Internet information on loan companies and home foreclosures, I fell asleep.

I woke up kinked sideways in the chair with the laptop balancing on one knee, and the clock on the VCR telling me it was five in the morning. An Internet page came on the screen as I set the laptop on the table. I couldn’t remember why the page was there, at first, but then everything came back to me. Around my feet, the floor was littered with printouts of notes and articles about Householders and home foreclosures. Sometime while I was sleeping, they’d slid off the chair arm and scattered.

While the computer shut down, I gathered up the papers, leaning on the coffee table to grab the sheets that’d slid under the sofa. A sharp twinge pinched in my lower back, and I rocked forward onto my knees, then sucked in a breath and waited for the muscle cramp to pass before I stretched a hand under the couch. It was dusty and disgusting under there, a minefield of Matchbox cars and something slimy that felt like it might of been food in a former life. Yuck. Before Dell got here, I needed to . . .

A paper came into view, trailing from my finger—a sideways headline and pictures mixed with a column of words that’d printed almost too small to read.
From Householders Hero to Homeless
. The headline was hard to ignore, even at five in the morning, with a stomachache and sore muscles. Lifting the paper into the light, I slid to the floor with my back pressing into the chair and my knees crunched against the coffee table. I blinked hard, tried to get my eyes to focus on the picture of a man giving a speech at a banquet. His face was familiar, like I’d met him somewhere. Not likely, though. The caption read,
Ascher Arts Center
—not the kind of place where I’d be hanging out, for sure. I blinked again, trying to read the rest of the photo description.
Pictured here at a 2009 luncheon benefiting the Ascher Arts Center, former quarterback Paul Lambert has not been seen since Wednesday, when he fled town amid a storm of controversy and a federal investigation regarding Rosburten Company, which touted high returns via real estate investments, including numerous housing developments and most recently a planned athletic theme park featuring miniature replicas of major-league baseball diamonds, a pro-level training facility, a wax museum showcasing sports greats, and dozens of elaborate athletic-themed rides. In the face of several deals gone sour and a declining real estate market, Rosburten allegedly employed fraudulent tactics, including channeling money in the form of a Ponzi scheme, using capital from new investors to supply returns to existing investors, as well as to fund generous bonus packages and lavish vacations for its executives, including Lambert. Questionable monetary compensations were allegedly also delivered to one or more city councilmen in return for favorable zoning clearances and tax abatements to benefit Rosburten’s ongoing development projects. Federal investigators are seeking Lambert, known in his professional sports days as the Postman. . . .