What I Came to Tell You (5 page)

Jessie went to the back of the house to get a screwdriver from his toolbox, leaving the woman and Grover’s father standing there.

“Your daughter’s a reader?” their father asked.

“Emma Lee was born reading,” she said.

So that was the name of the girl who sat on the steps all the time.
Emma Lee
.

“Reading is a rare ability in kids these days,” their father said. Grover had never been all that great a reader. When he was nine years old, he fell off his bike, hit his head and got a concussion. Grover remembered sitting in the doctor’s waiting room, trying to read
Highlights
magazine. He could read the individual words but they didn’t add up. Lately Grover had struggled with reading like he was walking around with a concussion; the words didn’t add up. In fact almost everything that he did and everything he felt these days didn’t add up.

“Jessie tells me you manage the Thomas Wolfe house,” the woman said.

“He’s the
director
,” Sudie said.

“I read
Look Homeward, Angel
when I was in college,” the woman said. “But tried picking it up again a couple of years ago and couldn’t get through it.”

“I get that a lot,” their father said. Sometimes he sounded like he’d written the book himself.

“Then I don’t feel so dense,” she said.

“It’s Wolfe who’s dense,” their father said. “At least his sentences can be.” He smiled.

“Emma Lee’s read about everything the man ever wrote.”

“If y’all come by sometime I’d be happy to give you a personal tour,” their father said. Grover noticed their father’s Southern
accent got stronger talking to this woman, like it did whenever he talked to a repairman or a gas station attendant or anybody who had a thick accent.

“I went through the Wolfe house years ago,” Leila said. “Before it burned.”

“You need to go through again,” Sudie said.

“You wouldn’t believe the place now,” their father said.

“ ‘A phoenix risen from the ashes,’ ” Sudie said, quoting what their father had said in the
Asheville Citizen-Times
about the renovation.

“Emma Lee would love a tour,” Leila said. “So would I.”

“Great,” their father said, sounding livelier than Grover could remember him sounding in a long time. It gave him an uneasy feeling.

“You work at St. Joseph’s?” their father said, nodding at the woman’s scrubs.

“I’m an obstetrics nurse,” she said.

“She helps deliver babies,” Sudie whispered to Grover.

“I know what it means,” Grover whispered back impatiently.

“Both our kids were born at St. Joseph’s,” their father said.

Jessie came back in with a screwdriver, and the rest of the chocolate pie wrapped in tinfoil.

“I can’t take your pie,” the woman said. The long flat way she said “pie” was like a sentence all by itself.

“There’s plenty more where that came from,” Jessie said. “Good luck with the shelf. You need any help?”

“I’m pretty handy,” the woman said.

“Is the house working out okay, Leila?” Jessie asked. “I know that electric baseboard isn’t the best heat.”

“The house is fine, Jessie. We’re plenty warm. After a lifetime of splitting and toting wood for Nanna’s woodstove, I’m happy to come home from work and just turn a knob.”

One of Jessie’s cats had come up and was rubbing against her leg. “Merlin’s been visiting us pretty regularly.” She bent down and petted him. “He likes to sit in the front window and watch the birds.” She looked up at Jessie. “I feed him a little something every now and then.”

“If he ever gets to be a pest,” Jessie said, “toss him out.”

“Emma Lee and Clay like him visiting too,” she said. “My mother has always had dogs. She’s never liked cats. She doesn’t trust them.”

After the woman left, their father and Sudie settled back on the couch, and Grover and Jessie went back to their game in front of the fire.

“Nice woman,” their father said, getting up and putting another log on the fire. Grover could feel how his father’s mood had improved.

“They’ve been through a lot,” Jessie said, not taking his eyes off the board. “Lost her husband in Iraq.”

Their father shook his head. “It’s everywhere.”

Grover knew Sudie was remembering what Clay had said.
My daddy was a surveyor
. He looked at his own father, who stared at the fire. Death, Grover had figured out, wasn’t really
the funeral or the headstone or everybody saying how sorry they were. Death was a long, painful correction in thinking.

That night Grover couldn’t sleep. He’d been lying in bed with his door open, listening to George Harrison’s
All Things Must Pass
on his iPod. It had been his mother’s favorite album. Grover listened to it almost every night. He liked the gentle, dreamy music. Sometimes, just before he fell asleep, he’d find himself standing on the edge of some dark pool, looking down with the music echoing all around him. Sometimes, if he was lucky, he’d catch a glimpse of his mother’s face, like a faint moon, rising out of the deep, dark water.

The music usually helped him fall asleep. But on this night even George Harrison couldn’t help. The house was quiet when he slipped out and walked over to the Bamboo Forest. He took a flashlight but the moon was so bright he didn’t need it. He walked to his workshop and sat on an old tree stump in the middle of the clearing, listening to the night breeze rattle the bamboo leaves. A screech owl tittered nearby and in the distance a train whistle blew. Grover patted the old stump. It was hard to believe that anyone would or even could sell this place. How long did he have? How long before bulldozers mowed down the Bamboo Forest? He’d seen it happen in plenty of other places around town. One day there’d be grass and trees and maybe even a creek. The next day there’d be nothing but ragged roots and ground so torn up and red that it looked like it was bleeding.

Grover thought about his father saying he was too old to be doing
those little art projects
. Maybe he was. He had to admit that
when he thought about it, it was pretty silly for a twelve-year-old boy to sit around, trying to weave grass and leaves and sticks together. He saw something—a small ghost drifting toward him. His heart began to pound. But before the apparition reached Grover, Biscuit came trotting up ahead of it. The ghost turned out to be Sudie in her robe.

“I heard you get up,” she said, sitting beside him on the stump.

Biscuit gave a little yip and disappeared into the bamboo. He’d probably smelled a rabbit.

“Daddy didn’t mean all that tonight,” Sudie said.

“He meant it, all right,” Grover said. “And maybe I am wasting my time.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Sudie said.

“Is
stupid
your favorite word these days?”

“I can’t help it if a lot of things are stupid lately,” she said.

They sat on the stump a minute, listening to the screech owl. Biscuit gave another little bark as they heard him scamper around in the bamboo.

“Besides,” Sudie said, “you couldn’t stop making things if you tried.”

Grover expected this was true. He made things in spite of himself. Oftentimes he’d be sitting around and find himself in the middle of weaving grasses or arranging rocks or stacking sticks. Things came together under his hands.

“Can we go back to the house?” Sudie said, standing up. She hugged herself, shivering. “I’m getting cold.”

“You go on back,” he said. “I’m not ready to.”

“Then I’m not going back either.” Sudie sat back on the stump, crossing her arms against the chilly night air. She pulled the little cylinder necklace out from under her pajama top and held it. The two of them sat there, listening to the bamboo rattle in the breeze. The screech owl had gone silent.

“Can we go back, please?” Sudie said.

“Okay, okay,” he said, getting up.

“Come on, Biscuit,” Sudie called, and after a minute, the little dog emerged from the bamboo and ran ahead of them. She took Grover’s hand.

Before, Grover would’ve pulled away. Before, he wouldn’t have been caught dead holding his little sister’s hand.

G
rover was supposed to be reviewing for the big spelling test tomorrow. But he’d thought of a new idea for a weaving and started sketching in the margins of his spelling composition book. Loud caws and the flash of a crow’s wing made him look outside the classroom window. Matthew, Jessie’s assistant, passed by the front of the school. When Grover looked back, the rental house girl, Clay’s sister, stood just inside the classroom doorway. She had on an old-timey button-up coat that made her look older and taller. Mrs. Caswell and the girl talked quietly, then the girl went back to the cloakroom to hang up her coat.

“Class, we have a new student today,” Mrs. Caswell said when the girl returned. “Please welcome Emma Lee Roundtree. Where are you from, Emma Lee?”

“Mit-chell Coun-ty,” the girl said, her accent as thick as her brother’s. She wore faded jeans, a blue flannel shirt and running shoes. “We lived with my grandmother up on Roan Moun-tain.”

Whispering, sprinkled with a few giggles, went up from the class.

Mitchell County was where Grover’s family drove every year to find a Christmas tree. Their father always complained it was a long trip and a waste of gas. But every year their mother won out and they made the trip. This year, without their mother around, their father would surely just buy a tree at a lot in Asheville.

“Welcome to Isaac Claxton Elementary, Emma Lee,” Mrs. Caswell said.

“Thank you, ma’am,” she said.

More whispers and giggles, but Mrs. Caswell shot the class a look.

“I understand your father serves in Iraq,” Mrs. Caswell said.

“Until he was killed,” Emma Lee said.

Mrs. Caswell’s face went pale. “I’m sorry. I misunderstood what I read in your file. I’m so sorry.”

“It was four years ago,” Emma Lee said matter-of-factly. “His helicopter was shot down.”

Mrs. Caswell rubbed her brow. “Why don’t you sit in the desk behind Grover Johnston?” She walked Emma Lee to the empty desk behind Grover’s.

Emma Lee glanced at Grover as she sat down behind him, but he wasn’t sure she recognized him.

At lunch Grover’s class lined up to go to the cafeteria. Mrs. Caswell’s room was on the third floor, so they had to walk down three flights of stairs. Fifth and sixth grades were on the third floor; fourth and third grades on the second floor; and second
grade, first grade and kindergarten were on the first floor. The older you got, the higher up you went in the building. The stairs had dips worn in them from eighty-nine years of children’s feet. Built in 1922, Isaac Claxton was the oldest school building still in use in Western North Carolina, a fact Grover and every other student had had drilled into them from the moment they’d walked through its fort-sized doors. Other Isaac Claxton facts: It had been constructed out of bricks covered with a layer of polished concrete and the building’s style of architecture was federal, which as far as Grover could figure meant square-ish and with columns. To Grover it had always looked like a cross between a bank and a prison.

When they reached the first floor, they walked down the long kindergarten/first grade hall, which, as they neared the cafeteria, smelled of corn dogs and cooked cabbage. The bulletin boards outside the classrooms were decorated with fall leaves ironed between wax paper. Grover paused, noticing some red oak leaves that would go good in the new weaving. Thankfully, the stakes hadn’t reappeared in the Bamboo Forest.

Grover’s class quieted down as they passed the principal’s office. They could see her at her desk, working. Unsmiling and gray-haired, Mrs. Dillingham resembled George Washington so much that an
anonymous
artist had drawn a picture and taped it to the front door of the school. That the drawing was too good to have been done by anybody but Grover was not something Grover had thought about when he’d taped it up. It was two years ago, and his class had been studying the American Revolution.
Like most of his art, the picture had just come to him: Mrs. Dillingham stood at the front of a boat with her arms crossed over her large chest while teachers rowed her across a river. It was titled
Mrs. Dillingham Crossing the Delaware
. Mrs. Dillingham never said anything about it. Instead she had it framed and hung it on her office wall.

A few doors down, past the assistant principal’s office, they passed a door with
Counselor
stenciled on it, and a pale rectangle where his mother’s name used to be. His mother’s office door had always been open unless she was meeting with a kid or parents. Everyone at Isaac Claxton had loved his mother. Whenever his classmates had found out the school counselor was Grover’s mother, they’d say he was the luckiest kid in the world. And he’d tell them, the grass is always greener. The mother’s always nicer. He’d tell them they didn’t have to put up with having their mother around all the time at school. But now, with her gone, his mother seemed even more with him. Everything he saw, everything he did, everywhere he went, somehow or other ended up reminding him of her. His school, his neighborhood, his house, his whole life was booby-trapped with memories of her.

As he was passing, her office door opened. His heart skipped a beat. Instead of his mother, a short, young, blonde woman came out carrying a brown paper lunch bag. She pulled the door closed behind her.

“Grover,” said Miss Snyder, the new counselor, who walked along beside him in the line. “How are you?”

“Okay,” he said.

“Come by and visit with me sometime,” she said.

Grover felt Miss Snyder look at him but he didn’t look back.

“See you later,” she said, then walked on ahead.

When Miss Snyder had first arrived, she’d met with Grover and Sudie together. She’d told them how sorry she was and to let her know if they ever needed anything or just wanted to talk. Sudie had gone to see her many times. Grover never had. He wasn’t a big talker in the first place. Plus, he knew from having a mother who was a counselor and who was always trying to dissect her son’s feelings about every little thing that Miss Snyder would sooner or later try to get him to talk about his feelings. To Grover, talking about feelings was about as much fun as throwing up.