Harry Sue (11 page)

And finally,
finally
they went away.

Beau just let Homer do his time. He didn't try to make him do any special exercises. Just living through the day had got to be the biggest challenge Homer was up to facing.

That's why I wanted this J-Cat far away from
him. If I could, I would shoot her out of a cannon, send her back where she came from, melt her in a puddle of big ugly sundress.

“Harry Sue,” Homer said quietly, drawing me back into the room with him. He was smiling. He looked up and to the right, asking me with his eyes to move a curl that had fallen over one of them, making him blink. I pinched it with two fingers and moved it back, then I let my whole hand smooth that shiny hair—just to make sure it stayed in place.

“Harry Sue, get out your notepad. I know how we're going to find your mom.”

My hand left Homer's head to cover my mouth.

“For real?” I managed to whisper.

The whole time I was trying to find my mom, I believed with all my heart that my mom was trying to find me. I don't know why. How does Dorothy know that Aunt Em and Uncle Henry want her back again? How does she know they didn't find some other orphan to haul out to their new house on the prairie to handle the chores while she was gone?

I had evidence in my notepad. I put down every little thing, just hoping that all together it could make the case that Granny was doing her best to keep my Mary Bell from me.

Didn't Granny blame everything on Mary Bell? She blamed her for stealing Garnett. She blamed
her for having the baby that made him drop out of community college. That's right, the same baby that got him locked up. She even blamed Mary Bell's genes for being so strong that, upon seeing me, most folks couldn't figure out what Garnett had to do with it. I looked that much like my mother. But most of all, she blamed Mary Bell for what happened to Garnett on the inside.

I believe that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Granny Clotkin was nut up. What happened to Garnett was my fault, Fish. His dying the way he did happened because of
me
, not my Mary Bell.

Walking back from Homer's house that day, I was full, not just of J-Cat, but of Homer's news, too. Another idea had caught in his head, one that would make me as happy as it would make him to walk again. And just because he knew nothing short of a miracle could make his dream come true didn't stop Homer Price from helping me realize mine.

And that, Fish, is the true meaning of a road dog.

It was a sentence Beau had tossed off in passing that had snagged Homer's imagination, just like when I'd read that bit about trees absorbing energy. Something about the telephone answering system for the Wisconsin State Lottery.

What difference did it make to the price of tea in China, I wondered, that Wisconsin had an 800 number for buying lotto tickets? This was Michigan, not Wisconsin, and you could buy Quick Picks or the Daily Double at every gas station and drugstore in town.

But Homer was way ahead of me, seeing as the whole time I was rescuing Spooner from the pond and messing with the new teacher's art supplies
and almost sending Violet Chump to her eternal reward, he was putting things together in his mind.

“First I had to make sure what Beau told me was right before I said anything. Then I had to call myself. Well, I had the maternal unit call. Wisconsin is very progressive, Harry Sue. Even lumps like me, with a valid credit card, can participate in legalized gambling.”

“Yeah, but why?” I wanted to know. “Your mom could just snag you a Daily Double at the gas station.”

Homer smiled. He loved the dramatic pause.

“Well, not every lump has people to do his bidding. If your granny were laid up here, you think there'd be someone to wait on her? Maybe it's for people outside the state to call in their choices.
I don't know
, Harry Sue. Let's return to what matters here. What matters isn't that there is a telephone ordering system. There is. What matters is that every telephone operator in the Wisconsin State Lottery is a conette.”

Homer stopped one more time before he put it together for me. “There's a wealth of information to be gleaned here.”

“You're playing me, Homes.”

“No, this is for real, Harry Sue.”

“They let those conettes have credit card numbers?”

“There are safeguards in place. Besides, you
think they could have porch furniture from Land's End delivered to their cell block? What's a conette going to buy?”

“How about presents for her kids?”

“Well, the point is, they thought of all that,” Homer said grumpily because, once again, we weren't going in the direction he wanted to. “They can't make any calls out.”

I was about to argue they could memorize the numbers and pass them on to relatives. Let's face it. It's in my blood to know these things. But I didn't want to make Homer cross, so I let him go on with his story.

Well, almost. As he sat there, chewing his lip and waiting for me to jump on board, I thought of something else that troubled me.

“Why would you think she's in Wisconsin? She wasn't distributing across state lines, so it's not a federal crime. She's somewhere in Michigan, Homer, I just know it.”

“You don't think conettes have friends? You don't think their hacks know hacks in Michigan? I bet they even go to the same conferences.”

“But what are you driving at?”

Homer rolled his eyes. “My mom left it behind the Kleenex box. It's a good thing she tucked it away or that J-Cat might have stomped on it.”

I fit my hand behind the Kleenex box and pulled out the Dinkins family cell phone.

“You want me to …”

“It's got to be you, Harry Sue. Number's taped to the back.”

I turned the phone over. There it was, in Mrs. Dinkins's crabbed handwriting on a torn scrap of blue-lined notepaper. The 800 number for the Wisconsin State Lottery.

Of course it had to be me. I mean, Homer couldn't even pick up the phone to dial.

But what exactly was I doing?

I looked at Homer's excited face and realized that if I didn't get excited with him, I was gonna burn the spot. And I realized this was as much about Homer as it was about me. He was trying to have my back the only way left to him, by bringing me my Mary Bell. When I looked at it that way, I thought what was so wrong with asking for a little information?

I pressed the numbers in and waited. First thing I heard was music. Happy orchestra music. Soaring trombones. Big drums. It was music for winners, I realized. Music to get you in the mood.

“Welcome to the Wisconsin State Lottery,” a nice voice said. “Please pay attention, as the following menu selections have changed. For English, press one.
Para español, dos.
”

Homer's eyebrows were raised. He wanted the play-by-play.

“I chose English.”

The nice voice came back on. “To order the Daily Dole, press one. To order the Instant Millionaire, press two. To check the winning numbers for a previous date, press three….” I listened to the whole menu, but it wasn't until after “To repeat the selection process, press eight” that I heard the one I wanted.

“To speak to a customer service representative, press nine.”

A tight band pressed around my chest. There was a clicking noise and I heard the soothing lady come back on. She said, “Connecting to an operator. Your call may be monitored to ensure quality service.”

“They're connecting me,” I told Homer.

“Jeez, it takes long enough.” He'd been straining in his bed for so long he had to relax back onto his pillows.

I started to ask him just what I was supposed to say, expecting more music or the nice lady or just waiting. But I heard another voice, a real voice I had to strain to understand because she spoke with a heavy accent.

“Welcome to the Wisconsin State Lottery,” she said. “My name is Consuela. How may I help you?”

“Uh …” I looked at Homer helplessly. Was I really supposed to spill my guts?

“Yes?” the voice with the name Consuela said.

“Consuela, are you … do you … ?”

“Are you having some trouble with the system?” Consuela prompted.

It took me a second to figure out what she said because it sounded like “see-stem.”

“It's just …” I glanced helplessly at Homer, who was mouthing the word “mom.”

“I'm looking for my mom,” I said in a rush. “She's a conette.”

There was a long pause.
“Dios mio,”
Consuela said. Then the clicking noise. Then the nice lady. “If you feel you have reached this number in error …”

I pressed the “end” button on the phone.

“What? What?” Homer asked, all excited. He was using his shoulder to get a little leverage, bouncing his head back and forth. It was how he underlined his words. How he said,
I really want this!

“She hung up on me,” I said.

Homer made me repeat the conversation word for word, including all the selection options.

“Dios mio,”
he said slowly. “That means ‘my God.’”

He smiled and gave me his “aha” look. “Con-suela's going to help us,” he said.

“What makes you think that?”

“She said, ‘My God.’ It's hardly like saying, ‘Get lost, kid.’”

“But she hung up on me.”

“So?”

“I see that as a sign of rejection.”

Homer sighed. “Harry Sue, you've got to have patience.”

He nestled back into his pillows, smiling. “We'll call her again tomorrow.”

I didn't get home in time to see the kids off. Sink and Dip had just finished painting their nails and were eating the leftover snacks, pushing stick pretzels to the edge of the counter with their palms and pinching them so as not to disturb the drying polish.

Hunger squeezed my stomach as I opened the fridge, looking for something decent to eat. I was inspecting a piece of American cheese for fuzz when Granny burst through the door, looking like she wanted to bust some heads.

“I tell ya, that nigra's movin' in!” she shouted at no one in particular.

Sink looked at Dip and rolled her eyes.

“Now, Gran,” she said. “Maybe he's the gardener.”

To Dip, she said, “Gran seen him through her binoculars this morning cutting the grass down the block.”

“That house that's been vacant?” Dip asked. “But Granny, you said you didn't care who lived there long as somebody started taking care of the place.”

“I draw the line at nigras!” Granny whirled around to face Sink, her eyes wild.

“He was carrying a chair. Into the house!” she screamed, like that was a federal crime. “What kind of lousy gardener carries chairs?”

Dip was rubbing at her eye and forgot the nail polish, smearing it on her cheek.

“Gran!” she complained.

But old Granny was far away, being consumed by her discovery. She slammed the carpetbag she called a purse onto the counter and fished out her cell phone.

“Put on Eunice Baker,” she shouted into the phone. “Eunice, you old windbag. I told you that nigra was moving in this morning. Now what's gonna happen to these house prices?”

Granny paused and we heard the whine that was Eunice's voice, trying to calm her down. “What difference does it make if he's African? Where I come from, black is black!”

She listened a minute longer before throwing the phone back into her purse in disgust.

Granny was old-school, born in Detroit to a family who settled there long before black people moved up north in search of work in what we learned in school was the Great Migration. Sometimes she even called it Old Detroit, and we all knew what she meant. She meant white Detroit. If we'd been on speaking terms, I might have mentioned that the Indians were here even before Detroit came along.

Granny's hate was so bad it was illegal, Fish. If black people showed up at our door looking for day care, Granny told them she was just full that morning. Got her reported once when the very same lady called that afternoon and Granny said she had three openings.

Funny how her hate sometimes worked in my favor. Because of Granny's preferences, I knew a whole mess of crumb snatchers were safe from her wicked ways. Me, I didn't have a preference, but Beau says in the joint, you hang with your own kind. Black with black, white with white, Asian with Asian, Latino with Latino.

I spent considerable time figuring that out. Seems to me, we all bleed red. But then again, I don't make the rules. I'll just have to live by them.

“His name is Mr. Olatanju,” I told Sink and Dip, surprising myself by pronouncing it perfectly.

Now that I had everyone's attention, I took my time giving up the information. I'd moved along to a piece of bread and started pinching off the green spots.

“He's my new art teacher,” I added.

Granny looked pretty cheesed off to have her information confirmed. Far as I remember, she only had three looks: “mad as hell,” “scheming,” and “lovable-but-worn-out day-care provider.” She started using her purse to do a bicep curl. Whenever she was really worked up, Granny started pumping stuff. I've seen her do a grab and lift with a seventy-pound crumb snatcher who accidentally pulled a few flowers while weeding the front garden. She had worked up quite a sweat by the time the doorbell rang.

Granny disappeared into the hall. First we heard the door swing open, then the sound of something breaking into pieces on the cement front stoop.

Then Granny's voice: “Don't try to give me any of that poison African crap,” she screamed. “You! You go back where you came from. We don't mix with nigras and you're blacker than most. Now go on off my porch. Don't want no nigras round here.”

I had crept into the hall to get another look at my teacher as he towered over Granny. His head was down, looking at his hands.