Spare Change (21 page)

“Sorry,” the boy said, “I
forgot to leave the lock open.”

“Oh,” Olivia answered,
already forgetting the guilt connected to him being Charlie’s grandson, “I
thought you’d gone.”

“Gone where?” he asked as he
tromped through to the kitchen, leaving a trail of dirty footprints behind. “I
don’t exactly have no place else to go.”

“Oh, right.” She poured a
glass of milk and handed it to him. “Don’t worry,” she said, offering solace to
herself as much as to the boy, “we’ll work it out. There’s
got
to be
someone who’d be real anxious to have you come stay with them—a blood relative
on your mama’s side maybe.”

Trying to remember her
thoughts of being a bit more charitable to what was surely the last of
Charlie’s kin, Olivia turned to fixing breakfast.  “What would you like to eat
she asked, forcing herself to give off the sound of cheerfulness. “Eggs and
bacon? Cereal? French toast, maybe?”

“You got any potato chips?”

“Well yes, but not for
breakfast.”

“Why not?” Ethan Allen
asked. 

“Because it’s not proper
breakfast food. Why, there’s not an ounce of nutrition –”

“Mama says potato chips is a
fine breakfast.”

“I’m not your mama!” Olivia
snapped. But before a half-second had passed she regretted making such a
comment to the motherless boy. “Well now,” she sighed in a voice sweet as sugar
cane, “…will you just listen to me; acting grumpy when I ought to be thinking
about our breakfast. Let’s see now, I could fix us a scrambled egg omelet with
some potato chips alongside of it, how’s that sound?”

“Okay,” he shrugged, “but
far as I’m concerned you can skip the omelet.”

By the time Olivia cooked up
an omelet and set it in front of the boy, she was wishing she’d never married
Charlie Doyle. Of course, she could wish from now till doomsday and it wouldn’t
change a thing, she simply had to focus on what it was she could do with this
boy and his mangy-haired dog. Olivia knew for a fact, Charlie had no brothers
or sisters, and the woman who fathered his son had died some thirty years ago,
which left only the maternal side of Ethan’s family. She poured herself a cup
of coffee and sat down across from him. “So,” she said, “are you acquainted
with any of your mama’s relatives?”

The boy shook his head. “I
don’t know that she had any.”

“Surely there were some.
Sisters maybe, or brothers?”

Ethan, now busy slicing the
omelet into pieces for Dog, simply shrugged unknowingly then lowered his plate
to the floor.

“Well, maybe if you tell me
your mama’s maiden name and where she came from, I could locate somebody…”

“Mama?” he laughed, “Nobody
knew where mama came from.  According to her way of telling it, she crawled out
from under a rose bush.”

“That’s no way to talk about
your mama!”  

“It ain’t me what said it! Shit,
Mama’s the one—”

“Stop that cussing!” Olivia
commanded. “An eight year old using such language, why, you ought to be ashamed
of yourself!” 

“I ain’t eight.”

“Well, excuse me! What are
you then,” she asked flippantly, “nine?”

“No,” he answered, rolling
his eyes like people do when they’ve heard something that’s beyond believing,
“I’m eleven!”

“Eleven!” Olivia slumped
back in her chair, “Eleven? You’re eleven years old?”

“Yeah…and, you can just save
the wisecracks about being small for my age.”

Before Olivia could start
piecing together the loss of the boy’s parents and the unlucky circumstance of
him being eleven, Clara burst through the door. “Guess what?” she called out on
her way through to the kitchen, “Somebody in this building has smuggled in a…”
The statement was cut short when Dog came flying through the air and landed
against her bosom.  Clara, being low to the ground and built with a substantial
center of gravity, wavered a bit but stayed upright and as soon as she’d
regained her balance, she screamed, “dog!”

Olivia could already picture
all of her belongings set out onto the curb.

“How could you?” Clara
shouted, “You know the rules!”

“It’s not what you think;”
Olivia mumbled apologetically, “The dog isn’t mine.”

“Not yours? When it’s standing
right here in your kitchen?”

“The dog belongs to Ethan
Allen Doyle, Charlie’s grandson.”

“Oh.”  Clara looked over at
the boy then lowered herself into a chair.  “Still,” she sighed, “you know the
rules.  If The Committee gets wind of this…”

Olivia, feeling the need to
talk and knowing that she had some explaining to do, suggested Ethan sneak the
dog down the back stairwell and walk over to the building across the street.
“You might even want to take a stroll down to the market, pick up some peanut butter
and a can or two of dog food,” she said pressing a dollar bill into his palm. 

Once Ethan was beyond
earshot, Olivia told the entire story; how she’d found the boy on her doorstep,
how he supposedly had no other family to turn to and how the dog had come along
as part of the package.  “What was I to do?” she sobbed, “Toss the poor child
out into the street?”

“But The Rules Committee has
specifically stated—”

“It’s not as if he’ll be
here forever,” Olivia pleaded, “just till I can work things out. It might be a
day or two, a week at the most.”

“Well,” Clara hedged, “I
suppose if The Committee didn’t know…”

“I’d make sure the dog stays
quiet.”

“A few days, you say?”

“Maybe less.”

“I guess I could speak to
some of the neighbors…”

Olivia

I
can’t help wondering if the turmoil of this life ever
ends. Just when I start believing I have an existence to call my own, Ethan
Allen shows up at the door, claiming to be Charlie’s grandson.

I can honestly say, if it
weren’t for those blue eyes which are exactly the same color and shape as
Charlie’s, I would have turned the boy away, figuring him to be an imposter. I
probably should have done it anyway—I mean, what’s a woman like me going to do
with a child?

Worst of all, he’s
eleven! Why, I could barely handle my own year of being eleven.

 I can’t even venture a
guess as to how this thing will turn out. More than likely, I’ll end up
evicted. I’ll be set out on the street with a handful of belongings and nowhere
to go. No apartment, no friends. 

I feel sorry for the
child, but having him and that awful dog live with me is simply too much to
ask. I’m willing to lend a hand and help the lad find his true family, but I
don’t think I can do much more than that. There has to be somewhere the boy can
go—some family, someone who’s accustomed to having children around and knows
how to deal with them. Heaven knows that’s way beyond the realm of my
capabilities. I don’t like making such a decision; but I can’t think of any
other alternative.

I’m not really the boy’s
grandma and I’ve got no obligation, but I still feel for the child—everybody
ought to have somebody that loves them.

The Best Kept Secret

W
ho knows what might have happened, had Clara not
agreed that tossing Charlie’s poor grandson out into the street would be quite
unchristian. But after she’d spent two whole days going from door-to-door
explaining the situation and telling folks they were beholden to help Olivia
Doyle in her time of need, the Rules Committee had no chance. Even if they had
brought in members of the Spanish Inquisition to ask about the rumored barking,
residents would have simply shrugged their shoulders and claimed not to have
noticed the clumps of dog hair on the seventh floor carpet. 

Clara reported this back to
Olivia on Tuesday afternoon as she and Ethan Allen were sitting down to a
dinner of macaroni and cheese, which the boy claimed was his favorite. “Does
that mean I can stay here?” he asked when he heard the news.

“For a while,” Olivia
answered, “till we can sort things out. I’m sure somewhere there are relatives
who are worried sick over your whereabouts.”

Ethan rolled his eyes then
swallowed down a bite of macaroni.

Olivia was starting to
picture herself hobbling through life with both the boy and the dog chained to
her right leg. How could such a thing be happening; especially now that she’d
pulled together the remnants of her life and started over. Hoping maybe the boy
had rushed to judgment in thinking there were no relatives, she tried again.
“So, Ethan,” she asked, “did your mama ever mention where she and your daddy
met?” 

“Nope.”

“What about Christmas cards,
or birthday cards? She maybe get cards or letters from the folks back home?”

“You gotta be kidding!”

“I most certainly am not. Folks
generally stay in touch, one way or another.”

“Not Mama!”

“Well, what about friends or
neighbors?”

“We didn’t have no
neighbors. The Picken’s farm was closest, but Mama claimed she wouldn’t wipe
her ass on that mealy-mouthed Missus Picken.” 

“I told you to stop using
such language!”

“You said, if I was eight—but
I’m eleven!”

“That’s still too young to
be cussing.”

“I ain’t cussing,” he replied
sullenly, “I’m just repeatin’ what Mama said.”

“Well, repeat it without
cuss words,” Olivia snapped; then she scooped up his dish and carried it over
to the kitchen sink. She would have been angrier with him for bantering about
foul language as he did, but obviously the boy had a bunch of hurts tearing at
his insides. Anybody could see it in his eyes, in the way he’d look down at his
shoes and mumble answers that had the sound of words pushed through a mouthful
of marbles. It was a terrible thing to lose somebody you loved—nobody, Olivia
thought, knows
that
more than I do. She slipped back to thinking about
the days that followed Charlie’s passing—minutes weighted like hours, hours
longer than a day and an aching loneliness that rubbed her nerves raw. Caught
up in the moment of remembering, she turned to the boy and said, “I’m real
sorry about your mama and daddy, Ethan.”

“Yeah, well.” He shrugged,
then reached into his pocket and pulled out a Spaulding rubber ball which had
accidentally
followed him home from the market. “I can’t do nothing about that,” he said,
and started thunking the ball off the side of the cabinet. Bounce-thunk-bounce.
Bounce-thunk-bounce.  Bounce-thunk-bounce.  It was a sound that could jangle a
person’s nerves real quick.

“I wasn’t expecting you
could do anything about it,” Olivia answered, sounding unbelievably tolerant.
“I was just offering up some sympathy.”

Bounce-thunk-bounce.

She’d come across people
like this before, clerks or telephone operators, singled out for some rinky-dink
infraction of the rules—angry, but yet unwilling to defend themselves. You had
to draw people like that out, ask question after question till you got them
started talking, then you might learn the truth of things. “Who was it that
died first,” Olivia asked, “your mama or daddy?”

Bounce-thunk-bounce.

“Ethan?”

“They was both killed,”
bounce-thunk-bounce, “…the same time.”

“Killed?”

He nodded, but focused his
concentration on smacking the ball.

“In a car accident? How?”

“Murdered,” the boy
answered, then whacked the Spaulding with such force that it rebounded off the cabinet
and went sailing through the kitchen window. Olivia, although she was certain
everyone in the Wyattsville Arms building had heard the breaking of glass, went
to the boy and in the most comforting way imaginable whispered, “It’s okay,
honey,” she wrapped her arms around him, and pulled his head to her bosom. 
“When you’re ready, Ethan,” she said, “then we’ll talk about what’s happened.”

He pulled back and screamed,
“I can’t never talk about it! I didn’t see nothing!”

“Okay,” Olivia replied as if
she’d accepted his answer and wanted nothing more, but she knew the explosion
of words were hiding something terrible and sooner or later, the boy would let
go of it. When he stomped off to the living room, she remained in the kitchen
and finished doing the dishes. 

Later on, she followed him
into the living room and found the dog sitting on her new silk chair. Ethan
Allen was stretched out across the floor, his dirty sneakers tracking
footprints up the side of the wall. “You got any playing cards?” he asked.

“I believe so.” Olivia
stepped over his legs and began looking through the desk drawer. After she’d
rummaged through a number of boxes and packets she came upon a worn deck of
cards—cards that Charlie, who had a fondness for gambling, had no doubt spent many
an evening with. “Here you are,” she said and handed them to the boy. 

 Ethan shuffled the deck a
number of times, then turned to her with a sly glimmer in his eyes. “You know
how to play poker?” he asked.