Every Day After (14 page)

“Yes, sir.”

“Unless you take one of those blasted Goo Goo Clusters you’re constantly drooling over. I’m likely to start getting questions about why the glass is always wet.”

I bolted around the counter and threw my arms around him. He pushed me back, attempting to be serious. “Do we have a deal?” He put out his hand.

“Yes, sir,” I said, shaking it. “We have a deal.”

“Good. I’ll expect to see you at twelve o’clock tomorrow, and don’t be late. If there’s one thing the missus and I agree on, it’s that we don’t tolerate tardiness.”

I nodded and walked out of Hinkle’s happy I’d asked for a job. I never thought getting one would make me feel so good. After all, I was leaving with a regular income and a gooey Goo Goo Cluster melting slowly away in my mouth.

I’d just finished my last bite when I saw Ben coming off Oak Street onto Main. I called out to him. He waved but didn’t come over. I could see why. On a leash right beside him, behaving pretty as you please, was Ziggy, and right behind them, rounding the corner, was Mr. Reed. I looked twice to be sure I wasn’t seeing things. I closed my eyes and counted out the date. May 24. The time? What time was it? Just before lunch. I opened my eyes. It wasn’t the first or the fifteenth. It wasn’t between one o’clock and three o’clock. Yet here was Mr. Reed. In town. I watched Ben, Ziggy, and Mr. Reed walk down the street toward Henderson’s Hardware. Together. For Mr. Reed to go and break his longtime habits like that, he must’ve really liked Ben. A lot.

That night I spent an extra-long time with Mama, reading aloud the entire “Rhyming Proverbs” section in her book. The amount of time I’d spent with her over the past two weeks had shrunk to the size of a cotton boll, and making her sit inside every time I left made me feel extra bad.

During the nightly hundred brush strokes I gave Mama’s hair, I thought about my new job. It wouldn’t be
enough to last us. That much I knew. But it was a step—no matter how small—toward saving the house.

I reached the hundredth stroke and kept going, waiting on one of Mama’s wise sayings to pop out of her head, into the brush, up my arm, and into my brain. Then I’d know what to do. Maybe if she couldn’t tell me with her mouth, she could tell me with her mind.

Two hundred strokes.

Nothing.

I put the brush on Mama’s nightstand, braided her hair, and helped her into bed. Maybe she was too tired to think.

In my room, even before I put on my nightgown, I pulled my journal from the drawer.

May 24, 1932

Asking Mr. Hinkle for a job today made me think of Daddy losing his last year. It was just before the Fourth of July. No time is a good time to lose a job, I know, but the man who laid Daddy off right before a national holiday should’ve been horsewhipped
.

Daddy came home three hours early that Friday, and when Mama asked if he was feeling sick, he just said, “It was me today.”

Mama gasped and covered her mouth. Even I had understood what Daddy meant. For months, the steel mill where he worked had been cutting back on wages and workers. Daddy said all the men working there had gotten real quiet at their work since the depression came on. Daddy said each day all the men just crossed their fingers and prayed that it wouldn’t be them next. They figured if they stayed quiet enough, the bosses wouldn’t remember they were there. And they couldn’t get rid of somebody they didn’t remember. Well, either Daddy got too loud or somebody remembered him
.

During supper that night, my stomach was balled up in a knot and it wouldn’t let my food go down. Mama kept saying things like “We’ll make it work” and “We’ll get by.” Daddy didn’t say anything. He went to bed early
.

The next night, I begged and begged for Mama and Daddy to come and watch the fireworks with me. Neither of them did
.

I met Ben at our usual place, right in front of Powell’s. His ma wasn’t there either
.

Bittersweet looked beautiful with all the storefronts dressed in ribbons of red, white, and blue for the occasion. A huge banner stretched out over Main Street. It read, same as every other year:
Welcome to Bittersweet’s Annual Fourth of July Celebration—The Sweetest Celebration Around.
But Ben and I both knew that this particular party was more bitter than sweet
.

Before long, the eight members of the high school band were tuning up their instruments in preparation for “The Star Spangled Banner,” to be played during the short fireworks show. At the mayor’s signal, the first firework burst into the air. The band blasted forth their tune. And, for the first time in our lives, Ben and I sat watching the fireworks explode into the night sky without our parents beside us
.

All the locals had gathered for the event and were lining Main Street up one side and down the other, packed together like sardines. With each explosion, the crowd clapped and cheered. But not Ben and me. When somebody you love is sad, that sadness rubs off on you somehow. It made all the celebrating seem cruel. Without Mama and Daddy, loneliness filled me, even with all those people around. Even with Ben right there beside me
.

Over the next few weeks, nearly every time I saw Daddy he had a newspaper in his hands, searching for a job. There were none. Daddy changed. Some of the fight went out of him. Mama changed too. It was the first time I could remember that she didn’t have a proverb ready and waiting to make sense of everything. Maybe the problems were too big for words
.

Maybe they still are
.

I thought about Ben asking for a job at Mr. Reed’s and me asking for a job at Hinkle’s. I thought about Mama and me going around collecting sewing and laundry from anybody who would give it after Daddy lost his job. I didn’t understand. If me and Ben and Mama could find a job here, no matter how small, why couldn’t Daddy? Why couldn’t he have stayed?

 
Fourteen
 

The Sting of a Reproach Is the Truth of It

After work on Saturday, I got my very first pay from Mr. Hinkle. One dollar and sixty cents. It wasn’t gonna pay the mortgage overnight, but I was happier than a lark to be earning something. Sewing, fishing, and vegetables were all well and good, but one thing was for certain—they didn’t add up to enough to pay the mortgage.

When I got home, I took a canning jar from the pantry and started a savings jar all my own. The sound of the change clinking against the glass was better than music. I put the jar under my bed and went out to ask Mama what she wanted for supper.

I asked her every day, thinking she’d answer me at least once. She hadn’t yet, and as I stood there watching her staring and rocking, rocking and staring, I stopped myself. She hadn’t said a word in weeks, and I couldn’t bear to ask another question only to hear silence in reply.

I let Mama be and went to rummage through the kitchen. I had two choices: dumplings or pancakes. I was
near dumplinged out, so I decided on pancakes. Strange, yes, but easy.

I’d just cracked the eggs when there was a
tap-tap-tap
on the front door. My heart near jumped right out of my throat. I’d have known that knock anywhere. The sound of it widened the crack of hope in my mountain of hurt.

“Come in!” I called. “I’m in the kitchen.”

Ben tromped in, raking his fingers through his hair. It had lightened considerably from working outdoors over the past month, going from straw to cotton. His eyebrows had all but disappeared. He was also filthy. Any of Mr. Reed’s dirt that hadn’t set up house on Ben’s overalls was either smudged across his face or packed beneath his nails.

As dirty as he was, I wanted to fling my arms around him and tell him how much I’d missed him. But I couldn’t. The memory of him coming out of Hinkle’s that day with
her
was burned into my mind. And why was he finally showing up now, after he’d been avoiding me like the plague for the past two weeks? I wanted the truth, once and for all.

Ben spoke before I had the chance to demand it. “What’cha doin’?” he asked. He peered over at the pancake batter.

“Making supper for Mama.”

“How is she?” He shuffled over to the window and looked out. “Dr. Heimler ever come check on her?”

“He did, several times, but I pretended I wasn’t home. He hasn’t been by this week. Maybe he forgot about us.”

Ben shook his head. “Man alive, you’re stubborn. You should’ve let him look at her.”

“
I’m
stubborn! What about you? You’re the one who refuses to believe Erin Sawyer is bad news. I saw you with her, Ben, so don’t go trying to get around it. Have you been talking to her?”

“Well, so what if I have? I didn’t think you’d take the time to notice.” The corner of his mouth retreated inside his cheek. He heaved a breath. “I’ve been talkin’ to Erin for a while, even before your daddy left.”

“What are you saying, Ben? That you’re picking her over me?” I poured a small pancake into the skillet. It sat there like a blob. Skillet needed to be hotter.

“I ain’t pickin’ anybody over anybody, but who else does she have to talk to? Who else do I have? The way you act sometimes makes it hard not to think about pickin’ her. I think I’ve just about reached Wits’ End Corner with
you
, Lizzie.”

“With me? Listen, Ben, if Erin Sawyer doesn’t have any friends, it’s her own fault, and you know it. She came here mean as a rattlesnake and she just got meaner. You don’t believe she’s really your friend, do you? ’Cause she’s only talking to you to get at me. You trying to get at me too?”

“I ain’t never lied to you, Lizzie, not once. And I’m gonna tell you the truth now. I talk to Erin because she
listens to me. After Daddy died, you got to where all you cared about was me being here for you. That don’t seem fair.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My cheeks started to burn. “Sometimes I think you’ve got feathers for brains. Believe what you want, but the only reason she’s listening to you is to find out things she’s got no business knowing. How could you tell her about me and Mama, Ben?” Once I’d admitted out loud that Ben was the reason Erin knew all that she did, it pushed up the hurt inside me. It flooded through me fast and hard, drowning out all my anger. Nobody would think it, but hurt is stronger than anger.

“I didn’t set out to tell her. It just happened. She’d talk, and I’d talk. Mostly about me. But then about you. But I didn’t tell her nothin’ else about you after she got so mad about the essay contest. I told her she was taking things too far, and she told me she was gonna drop it. She knew I was worried about you, but she said you didn’t seem none too worried about me. And you didn’t. I knew you saw me with her that day. She saw you staring at us from behind that car.”

The pancake began to sizzle in the skillet. I flipped it and poured in another. I thought back to that day and Erin glancing over in my direction. So she
had
seen. “Well, she didn’t drop it, Ben. She got worse.”

Ben cleared his throat. “I tried to tell you all this that day we saw Dr. Heimler, but you were too busy rambling
on about the Hinkles. And after we saw the doctor, you were worried about your mama. But it don’t matter. We won’t be fussin’ about Erin anymore after today anyway.”

“So, you finally decided to see the light and stop being friends with her?”

“No. Me and Ma’s leaving.”

“Well, where are you going? You still gonna ignore me when you get back?”

“We ain’t comin’ back. Bank’s takin’ the house. Got to be out in three days. We’re headin’ down to Montgomery to stay with my aunt.”

Ben inched closer. The same blunt, breathless pain I’d felt when Daddy left gripped my insides. Ben was leaving. He was leaving me. I couldn’t let him. I needed him. I always had.

“You can’t move away!” I shouted. My voice erupted louder than I’d intended.