Rocky Road (17 page)

And as if all those bells and whistles weren’t enough, Ma bought a karaoke machine to get the teens excited. And then she spotted an old Wurlitzer jukebox for sale in the newspaper. “Music makes people merry, and merry people spend money,” she said, announcing we’d be buying that vintage beauty too.

The trip to get the jukebox took two hours since the owner lived in Erieville, a farm town that could easily fit right into the Texas Hill Country. Ma gave the potbellied owner four one-hundred-dollar bills for that dusty hunk of junk, which was parked in a muddy driveway next to a stinky compost pile.
We had to lug it ourselves to our car without help from the guy, who kept chewing on a toothpick and counting his money. And let me tell you, that jukebox weighed a ton.

The next morning we plugged it in and discovered it played old-fashioned records, not CDs, and it played them at warped slow speed. So Ma spent a day calling around for a jukebox repair technician. There was only one such guy in all of upstate New York. He looked older than the jukebox, and he smoked cigars the whole time he did the repair. But he got it working again—and Ma got a whopping bill for a hundred and fifty dollars. Plus we had to buy an air purifier to get the smoke stench out of the shop.

Watching Ma dole out all that money, I worried about what was left in the Ditch Fund. I even thought about knitting scarves and crocheting potholders to sell to seniors in the apartment lobby, just to bring in some cash—but what with homework, peer mediation, Operation Homebound, and watching Jordan, I didn’t have enough time to
do
crafts. And when I finally got Jordan down to sleep at night, I sewed patches for Winnie’s piano-bench cushion.

Operation Homebound took Chief and me longer than usual on Wednesday. The flu was going around Building One, so we had twice as many drugstore packages to deliver. And word was someone took a fall in the Assisted Living building, because EMT vehicles blocked the front and the aides wouldn’t let us in right away with our cart.

But even with delays, Chief and I got the mission accomplished.

“We’re a lean, mean, efficient team,” he told me when we finished. Then he gave me my “chow pay” for the week: a Freihofer’s marble pound cake.

“Pound cake with ice cream is a family favorite!” I called, waving goodbye as I skipped toward Building One to get my brother.

No one answered when I knocked on Winnie’s door, so I took the elevator up to our apartment.

Inside, Jordan was stretched out on the futon looking pale, with Winnie standing beside him.

“What’s wrong?” I asked and signed.

Winnie crossed her arms over her sweater and gestured toward Jordan. “Diagnosis: chicken pox.”

“Where?” I didn’t see any red spots on his face. But then he pushed his shirt up. His belly had four red button-like mounds, each with a skin blister in the middle.

“Give it twenty-four hours and your brother will be covered in polka dots,” Winnie said. “About then they’ll get itchy too. Our job is to keep him from scratching.”

“Does my ma know?”

She nodded. “I bumped into her in the elevator this morning after she picked Jordan up from the school nurse. Poor thing was beside herself, wondering how she would care for your brother and handle her business. And it didn’t help that Jordan was fussing up a storm.”

I looked down at Jordan with a sad face, then drew a circle with an S hand on my chest. “Sorry.”

But Winnie told me not to fret. “Us old nurses never retire, we just walk the floor for our friends. I’ll care for Jordan and help out with dinners here for a while so your ma can tend to her business and you can keep up your schoolwork.”

Hearing her words, I slyly reached over to the basket behind the sewing machine and covered up my quilting materials. No sense spoiling her surprise.

I glanced at Jordan. He was looking at photos of tropical fish from a photo album of Winnie’s. I couldn’t remember the last time he seemed so captured by anything besides cartoons.

I exaggerated sniffing and signed to Jordan, “What’s that good smell?”

He grinned and pointed to Winnie.

“I heard a rumor that the Dobson kids love macaroni and cheese, so I whipped up some Winnie Mac. Along with ham, mixed veggies, and fruit cocktail.”

“And I brought dessert!” I added, holding up the pound cake.

I sat beside Jordan on the futon. He was rubbing his palm against the spots on his belly.

I shook my head, snapped my fingers, and clawed at the air. “No scratching,” I signed.

After dinner, Winnie stacked the plates in the sink, but I stopped her when I heard her getting flustered about the lousy sinks around here that always back up.

“Go on. I’ll finish this. You must’ve skipped your nap today,” I said, grinning.

She wiped her forehead with a napkin. “Guess I am getting a little cranky. But I’m not leaving yet. I’ll park my old bones on this stool and let you do the dishes while you give me a lesson.”

“A lesson on
what
?”

“Sign language. If I’m going to be caring for Jordan, we need to understand each other. I took a trip to Paris ten years ago. For the month before I left, I memorized ten French words every day. That sure helped when I had to read menus and get directions. How about you teach me ten new signs a day? Ten basic signs.”

I showed Winnie
sleep, school, play, bathroom, mom, sister, happy, sad, thirsty
, and
hungry
. She got just about all of them right too—except
bathroom
. That one confused her, and I told her it gave Ma trouble too.

I shaped her hand into the letter T with her palm facing out, then shook it side to side a couple of times.

She tried again, and this time
bathroom
looked right.

Then we practiced the signs for
Tess, Ma, Delilah
, and
Jordan
. “Name signs are picked by the person they describe,” I explained. “You have to capture what makes you unique. What do you want yours to be, Winnie?”

She paused. “Hmm, that’s a tough one. I’m not sure.”

She asked me to show her
nurse, singer
, and
super senior
, but none satisfied her. Then I signed
piano player
and
gourmet cook
, but she passed on those too.

“It’s tough to capture my plus-sized personality in a word or two,” she said, laughing.

It was Jordan who finally gave Winnie an idea. As he ate his pound cake and ice cream, he pointed his fork to Winnie’s left hand and giggled.

“Snake!” he signed, waving a bent V hand from his mouth, still giggling as he touched the ring on her pinkie. It was silver, shaped like a snake with gold-studded eyes and a sparkly red tongue.

Winnie looked down at her ring and smiled. “Elston gave me this for my birthday when he was in the second grade. Hard to believe it was forty years ago,” she said, dreamy-eyed. “It might’ve come from a gumball machine for all I know, but it sure made me feel special. No other mom in the neighborhood had one.” Then she paused and turned to Jordan and spoke very slowly. “Show me
snake
again,” she said, and he read her lips.

When he did, she asked me to sign the letter
W
.

Then she finger-spelled
W
and signed
snake
, and that became
Winnie
.

S
weet surprises blew in the late March wind. I got a perfect score on my Cell-ebration lab and an A on my poetry project! The teacher even scribbled “Very moving!” near the cinquain I called “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants.” (And Pete was flattered when he discovered I wrote a poem about our outing.)

One afternoon I showed up at Winnie’s apartment after school to pick up Jordan and discovered a side of my brother that I’d never seen.

Winnie was belting out her Motown tunes at the piano, and Catherine was sitting in her wheelchair choreographing a dancer—
Jordan
! He was standing on the coffee table, wearing sunglasses and a black felt hat and shaking his body like a dog coming out of a pond. A CD player blasted music from underneath the coffee table.

“Don’t you just love the Four Tops?” Catherine said, smiling. Rudy the cat was stretched out on the rug, all whiskers and grins, as if he was a true Motown fan too.

“Next one goes out to Tess,” Winnie shouted and signed as a new song began.

“Ooooh, Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch. You know that I love you,” Winnie sang along with the Four Tops, and Jordan signed with his head bobbing.

Meanwhile, Catherine stuck her arm up to demonstrate the next move, and Jordan twirled around.

“Legs. Use legs!” Catherine signed, and I was impressed that she finger-spelled
legs
properly.

Jordan’s timing was good.
Really
good. He shook his leg like a tambourine with each
ooooh
. He clapped his hands to the beat. And every time Winnie sang the chorus, he tipped his hat and jiggled his shoulders. Even his tongue wagged to the rhythm.

I couldn’t believe it. How could Jordan be dancing? He couldn’t hear!

But he was dancing. And then it hit me fast, like the drumbeat. Jordan
felt
the music from his sneakers, through
the wooden table. That was why Winnie put the CD player underneath. Just like how I thump the floor hard to get his attention when he’s not facing me.

“Bravo!” I clapped. And I laughed. But I also felt guilty. All these years we could have cut loose together dancing, had I given Jordan the chance. I’d gotten on Ma for not signing enough, but I hadn’t even thought about finding another way to help him enjoy music.

Jordan had come through the chicken pox without one scar thanks to Winnie, so Ma asked her to stay on as his regular afternoon babysitter, five days a week. I worried that Ma didn’t have enough money to pay for babysitting, but when I asked, Winnie just said she was compensated more than adequately, thank you. And Winnie found out about a playgroup nearby for deaf kids. I got the feeling that she liked the company as much as Ma liked not having to run back and forth between the shop and the apartment so much.

Something was different about Jordan lately. Maybe it was the friends he was making at playgroup and all the new signs he was learning at school. Or maybe it was because life at the Mohawk Valley Village was improving. Chief had posted a
DEAF CHILD PLAY AREA
sign in the parking lot so Jordan could ride his bike, and he’d gotten a telecommunications device for the deaf installed in our apartment. The TDD looked like a tiny laptop computer, and it allowed Jordan to phone Ma at the shop whenever he wanted by typing messages across its screen and reading Ma’s messages. Thanks to a relay service,
the TDD helped him communicate with others too. Jordan even learned how to order takeout. One week we had pizza four times!

Whatever it was, FrankenJordan wasn’t rearing his ugly head as much. And that was fine by me.

Another surprise waited for me at A Cherry on Top one cloudy, drizzly afternoon. I’d just come from my last “observational” peer-mediation session. This one involved Ellie (my meet-and-greeter) and another player from the girls’ basketball team. They’d gotten into a shoving match on the basketball court. Kim and Gavin did the mediating, and it turned out the hidden agenda was a doozie. Way back in kindergarten Ellie had been a bed wetter, and the other girl had blabbed to the whole team about it in the locker room, embarrassing and infuriating Ellie. (Basic need: to be treated with respect.) Kim and Gavin looked like they’d been running sprints themselves by the time the mediation ended. Listening to that verbal dueling made my neck break out with blotches again. And I was scheduled to mediate at the next session.

When I walked into A Cherry on Top, Ma was leaning over the counter, pouring goopy chocolate on a marble slate with a big copper kettle beside her. “Howgozit with peer mediation?” she called.