Orchard of Hope (12 page)

“That’s what every man wants. A need to fill.” Wes pushed his eggs around a little more with his fork.

“You need some salt for those?” Jocie asked. “Ketchup maybe?”

“No, they’re fine.” Wes put down his fork. “I just haven’t got much appetite. All this laying around, I guess.”

“You have to eat, Wes,” Jocie said.

“Don’t you worry none about me, Jo. You just leave the plate there. I’ll eat it in a little while. I just need to swallow down some more coffee first to wake up my stomach.” Wes picked up his coffee cup and took a sip.

Jocie tried to think of the right thing to say to make him want to eat, to make him feel better, but she couldn’t think of anything. Wes had always been the one who made her feel better when something was wrong. She wanted to do the same thing for him, but she didn’t know how. Everybody—her father, Aunt Love, the doctors—said Wes just needed time to get better, and that she needed to give him that time. But Jocie worried everybody was wrong. She worried Wes needed something more than time, something she needed to make sure he got, if she only knew what that something was.

Jocie pulled her bare feet up on the cot, wrapped her arms around her legs, and leaned her chin on her knees. “Can I get you anything before I go with Dad this morning? Or maybe go up to your place and get you some more books or something?”

“I haven’t read the ones you brought me already.” Wes nodded toward the pile of books on the table beside his chair. “Funny thing about reading. When you’re busy working all the time, you think it’d be good to just sit down and read all day, but then when you can just sit and read all day, your eyes get tired or the books all get boring after a while.”

“Even Nero Wolfe?”

“Well, maybe not old Nero, but I finished the latest one about him back in July. It’ll be awhile before he makes another appearance on the pages of a book.”

“Maybe you’ll get something in your book club mail.” Jocie dropped her feet to the floor and sat up straight. “Or even better, you can start writing that
Hollyhill Book of the
Strange
we’re always talking about.”

“Now that’s an idea. I’ll think on it today,” Wes said, but he didn’t sound as if he really would. He took another sip of his coffee. “Your daddy says that boy he got to help at the paper is supposed to start today.”

“Yeah. I don’t know how much help he’ll be. He doesn’t know anything about setting up ads or anything.” Jocie broke off a piece of one of the biscuits on Wes’s plate before she scooted back on the cot and got comfortable again.

“You can teach him. And it don’t take a lot of know-how to do most of the stuff I was doing.”

“That’s not true.” Jocie frowned over at Wes. “Me and Dad have been having a prayer meeting at the press every morning to keep it working until you can get back. Dad says we’ll be up a creek without a paddle if it breaks down on us.”

“He could fix it.”

“Yeah, right.” Jocie took a bite of biscuit and chewed a minute before she said, “What’s more likely is that we’d have to load you up and make you come tell us which piece to change or screw to tighten or whatever. So you’d better hurry and get well before the press starts missing you too much. It’s already making funny noises.”

“You are oiling it regular, aren’t you?” Wes said, showing the first real interest in anything Jocie had said.

“I guess,” Jocie said with a shrug as she finished off the biscuit.

“You guess? You’d better know. It’ll break for sure if you don’t keep it greased up.”

“I’ll remind Dad today when we get there, but I don’t think it needs oil. I think it just needs you.” Jocie poked his arm with her finger. “And I know we need you. Noah won’t be able to do half what you did.”

“He’ll learn.” Wes set his cup down. “What’s old Zell think about the boy coming to work?”

“She’s not too excited about it. I’ll have to bring Noah by sometime to let you meet him and you’ll understand.”

“You already told me he was black.”

“It’s more than that. I don’t know how to explain it, but you know, I told you how he was when I bowled him over on my bike. Sort of ready for a fight or something. It’s like he has his radar on full to catch even the hint of a slight, and of course, his radar was going full blast with Zella. You know how she is.”

“Yep. There’s only one Zell in the world.”

“And he baited her a little.”

“Oh, like you do sometimes when you’re not wearing your halo?” Wes raised his eyebrows at her.

“As if you don’t,” Jocie shot back.

“Well, most of the time she asks for it,” Wes said, a real smile creeping across his face.

“Maybe so, but we don’t usually make her ask twice. But at the same time, she is sort of like family at the paper. I mean, Dad needs her to keep things running, and I kept feeling like I needed to jump in between her and Noah so neither of them would get too upset.”

Wes rubbed the whiskers on his chin. “So you’re worried you’re going to get caught in the middle?”

“Maybe not the middle, but somewhere in a spot I don’t know what to say or do.”

“That is a dilemma. You don’t want old Zell to go completely bonkers. Sort of bonkers is bad enough. And at the same time you want to get along with this new boy, and you’re worried you won’t say the right things because he’s black.”

Jocie looked down at her hands. Wes could always figure out what she was thinking even when sometimes she didn’t know herself. “I don’t want to do the wrong thing. Like when we were out at his house yesterday. I didn’t see Noah. He was out in the field helping his father.”

“So what happened?” Wes picked up his coffee and took another drink.

“Nothing really.” Jocie looked up at Wes. “His mother was nice as can be. Way friendlier than she’d been at church. Even with all of us showing up on her porch. Leigh, Aunt Love, me, Dad, Mr. Harvey, and Miss Sally.”

“Quite a crowd.”

“But she was okay with it,” Jocie said.

“Then what’s the problem?”

“I don’t know. Maybe there isn’t one, but I went out in the yard to talk to Noah’s little sister, Cassidy. She was out there with the twins I told you about. Eli and Elise. They are so cute. Anyway, Cassidy, she’s maybe ten. She acted afraid of me.” Jocie shifted uneasily on the cot as if a spring had suddenly come up through the mattress to poke her.

“Maybe she’s just shy.”

“I guess, but you know, I thought for a minute she was going to run and hide behind a tree or something. It made me feel funny to think somebody might be afraid of me.” Jocie pointed to her chest.

“Why don’t you ask Noah about it?”

“Oh, I don’t think I can do that,” Jocie said. “He’s already told me I’m too nosy.”

“Newspaper people are supposed to be nosy.”

“That’s what I told him, but I can’t just start asking him questions about Cassidy.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I guess because I don’t know him well enough.”

“You will soon enough if he’s working with you and your dad. And don’t worry about him being black. After a week you won’t even notice what color he is.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.” Wes looked at her over his coffee cup.

“Have you known a lot of black people?”

“We had all colors up in that spaceship I fell out of.”

“Right,” Jocie said, but she didn’t follow up on the Jupiter bit. Instead she spit out another worry. “You know I’m going to start high school next week.”

“So I’ve heard,” Wes said with a nod. “I thought you were looking forward to it.”

“I am. Mostly.” Jocie hooked her hair back behind her ears and sat up a little straighter. “I guess I’m a little nervous about finding my classes and that kind of stuff.”

“They’ll point you in the right directions the first few days, and after that you’ll be able to do the pointing.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Jocie said. “But things are going to be a lot different. What with the schools desegregating and everything.”

Wes looked at her. “That’s not bothering you, is it?”

“No, it just got me to thinking. I don’t think I know a single black kid my age by name. Don’t you think that’s kind of strange?”

“For sure,” Wes said. “Maybe that should go into that
Book of the Strange
you’ve been after me to write.”

“I guess.” Jocie pushed a smile out on her face even though she didn’t feel much like smiling.

Wes leaned over to touch her on the shoulder. “It’s not going to be a problem for you, Jo. You’ll find out their names, and then you can be friends or not. And Noah will just be Noah. You can’t take care of the whole world.”

“How about just Hollyhill?”

“Not even all of Hollyhill.”

“How about you?”

“That you can do,” Wes said as he held out his cup toward her. “You can start by moving this table off my legs and getting me more coffee.”

13

Jocie glanced at the clock on the pressroom wall. Almost lunchtime. She went in the front office to remind Zella that Noah was supposed to show up for work around noon.

“Dad wanted to be sure you hadn’t forgotten.”

“How could I forget that? We can only hope he remembers his manners this time.” Zella yanked the paper out of her typewriter and glanced up at the clock over her desk. “But if your father wants him to have a welcoming committee, he’ll have to do it himself. I’m leaving early to meet Leigh at the Grill for lunch.”

“It’s only eleven thirty.”

“The special today is fried chicken. You know how crazy that place gets when Willanna fries chicken. There’s no way you can get a decent table if you wait till twelve.” Zella dropped the black plastic cover over her typewriter. “I’d ask your father to come along, since heaven only knows, he’s too backward to ask Leigh to lunch himself, but it wouldn’t be proper you being here alone with that colored boy.”

“What’s proper got to do with it? Noah’s just going to be working for Dad.”

“Proper has everything to do with it,” Zella said as she patted her hair to be sure all her perfectly round curls were still in order. Then she pulled a mirror out of her desk drawer and applied a fresh coat of lipstick. She popped her lips together before she went on. “It was bad enough with Wesley back there. That man has to be running from the law or something. Who knows what he might have done before he showed up here in Hollyhill? But something for sure, or he wouldn’t be so secretive about his past.”

“He’s not secretive. He tells me stories about where he came from all the time,” Jocie said just to egg her on a little. She’d heard all Zella’s theories about Wes dozens of times. He was on the run from the law. He had an ex-wife or even wives after him. He owed the IRS money. Lots of money. Or if not the IRS, he owed the kind of people it was dangerous to owe money to.

“Don’t start with those silly Jupiter stories. Wesley Green is no more from Jupiter than a pig, and you know it, Jocelyn. It’s high time you started paying attention to what is true and what is only stories. After all, you’re almost fourteen.”

“But stories are fun,” Jocie said.

“There’s more to life than having fun.”

“Don’t you ever try to have fun?” Jocie asked. The question made two spots of color appear on Zella’s cheeks, but Jocie hadn’t asked it to be mean. She really wanted to know. A few days ago she had tried to write something about Zella in her journal and realized she didn’t really know all that much about her. She knew Zella had never married but sighed over romance novels. She wore bright red lipstick. She could type sixty words a minute without making even one mistake. She could fold a whole pile of newspapers without getting the first spot of ink on her clothes. She was as much a part of the newspaper office as the press in the back. Still, what she did when she wasn’t at the newspaper office was a total mystery to Jocie.

“Well, of course. I have fun all the time.” Zella peered in her mirror and grabbed a tissue to wipe a bit of lipstick off her tooth.

“How?”

“Well, there’s my bridge club. And I’m always doing things with my Sunday school class. You’re the one who doesn’t know a thing about anything.” She dropped the mirror back into the drawer and slammed the drawer shut. “You’re way too young to understand how a person can be satisfied with life the way it is. You’re just all filled up with fantasies and dreams.”

“Didn’t you like to dream about things when you were my age?”

“I didn’t have time for that kind of nonsense. I had to help my parents on the farm.”

“I can’t imagine you feeding chickens or pigs,” Jocie said.

“Well, I did, but I never planned to make a career of it. So after my father died, Mother and I moved to town and I got a job here at the paper. That was while Mr. Henry still owned the paper. He was such a nice man.”

“Dad’s nice too.”

“Well, of course he is. I never implied he wasn’t. Your father’s problem is that he’s too nice for his own good sometimes.”

“How can you be too nice?” Jocie asked.

“The same way you can ask too many questions.” Zella snatched up her purse and stalked out the door and up the street.

As Jocie watched her go, she wanted to call out a couple more questions. How could she be a dreamer and ask too many questions at the same time? Didn’t dreamers come up with their own answers without having to ask anybody anything? Not that she would have expected an answer to either of those questions from Zella.

Her father was always telling her she couldn’t expect to get an answer to every question. Or every prayer. But with prayers, a person just had to trust God to send the best answers at the right times. And the Lord did. She’d been praying Tabitha would come home for years, and now she had. Maybe the same was true with questions. She just needed to give the answers some time to come clear.

She couldn’t know whether Noah would show up for work and be willing to let her teach him how to do things. She couldn’t know how long it would be before Wes would be back helping them. She couldn’t know what was going to happen next week when she started high school. Would she get lost and not be able to find the right classrooms? Would the older kids laugh at her just because she was a freshman? Would she start worrying, the way Paulette did, about whether boys thought she was cute?