17
I knew my day was going to be bad when Kirby Price called me a dirt bag in gym and everybody laughed. (Even Luanne. I saw her.) And then it got worse. When Mama got off work that night, the car wouldn’t start. She turned the key and there was just one little click and then nothing.
“Well, that’s just great,” she said, pounding her fist on the steering wheel.
Me and Toby looked at each other, but we both knew better than to say anything.
She turned the key again. Click.
She flopped back against the seat and said a cuss word.
Toby giggled and I poked him to be quiet.
“My life just goes from bad to worse,” Mama said.
Then she sat there staring out the window at the Chinese restaurant across the street. A family came out. A real family. A mom, a dad, two kids. They broke open their fortune cookies and read their fortunes out loud while they walked to their car. They all smiled and laughed and acted like they had the best life in the world. When they drove by us, they were still laughing. They didn’t even look at us sitting in our car that wouldn’t start. I wished I was one of those kids, eating my fortune cookie and laughing with my family.
Mama turned the key again. Click.
I stared out the window, praying that old car would start. And then I couldn’t hardly believe my eyes. There was Mookie, pedaling his bike up the road toward us.
I ducked down real quick and motioned for Toby to get down, too. Naturally, he had to go, “What?” and sit there looking stupid. I grabbed his T-shirt and yanked him down.
Then I peeked out the window. Mookie had gone on past us and disappeared around the corner.
Mama turned the key again. Click.
I finally got up the courage to say, “What’re we gonna do now?”
I held my breath, hoping she wasn’t going to yell at me, ’cause I didn’t need that after that dirt bag stuff at school.
Mama shook her head and let out a big whoosh of a sigh that blew her hair up off her forehead.
She turned the key again. Click.
“I guess we’re sleeping here tonight,” she said.
I looked around us at all the places where there were people who would see us. The Chinese restaurant. The Quiki Mart. The Chevron gas station.
“What if somebody sees us?” I said.
“Y’all go on over there to the gas station and wash up,” Mama said. “I’m going in the Quiki Mart and get us something to eat.”
I watched her run across the street, her jeans dragging on the ground.
“What if somebody sees us?” I hollered out the window. But Mama didn’t even turn around.
The next morning Mama walked over to the coffee shop to get her friend Patsy to drive me and Toby to school. I like to died when I saw Patsy pull up beside our car, roll down her window, and say, “Come on, y’all.”
She had a big poofy hairdo that stuck way up on top of her head and ugly sparkly earrings and a cigarette hanging out of her big red lips. Her car was rustier than ours, with bumper stickers all over the back. MY OTHER CAR’S A BROOM. HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS. Stuff like that.
I climbed in the backseat and slouched down as low as I could. Please don’t let anybody see me, I prayed. Especially Kirby Price.
Just before we got to school, Patsy said, “Look at that!”
Me and Toby looked where she was pointing.
There was Mookie, pedaling along the side of the road on that rusty ole bike of his, the little American flag waving in the breeze.
“I’ve seen that man all over town,” Patsy said. “He sure looks happy, don’t he?”
I slouched back down in the seat and turned my face away from the window. I sure wished Mookie would get on out of Darby instead of hanging around like he was.
“Imagine being that happy when all you got in the whole world is a beat-up old bicycle,” Patsy said.
When we passed him, she waved out the window and hollered, “Hey.”
Mookie tipped his hat.
After school, me and Toby had to walk back to the car. It took forever and Toby kept griping and hollering, “Wait up, Georgina.”
Then he kept asking, “When are we gonna take Willy back to Carmella’s?”
I pretended like I didn’t hear him. Finally he grabbed my backpack and yanked.
“I said, when are we gonna take Willy back to Carmella’s?”
I whirled around to face him. “I don’t know, Toby, okay?”
I started off up the sidewalk again. Toby trotted along beside me.
“She’s looking for him, Georgina,” he said.
“I know.”
“I bet Willy wants to go home.”
“I know.”
“Maybe Carmella has some money now. Maybe Gertie gave her some.”
I stopped. “Look, Toby,” I said. “I’ve got to figure this thing out. We went to all this trouble to steal that dog, so we might as well get some money out of it, right?”
Toby shrugged. “I guess.”
“What do you mean, you guess?” I said. “That’s the whole reason we got ourselves into this mess in the first place.”
“What mess?”
I started walking again, but Toby grabbed my arm.
“What mess, Georgina?” he said. “Are we in trouble?”
“No, we’re not in trouble.”
“Then what mess?”
“Look, Toby,” I said. “Carmella may not even get any money. If we take Willy back now, we probably won’t get anything. But if we wait much longer, well, I don’t know …”
“What’ll happen if we wait much longer?” Toby said. “Georgina, is Carmella gonna call the police?”
“No.”
“But what if she does?”
“So?”
“So, we might get arrested. We’re kidnappers,” Toby said.
“We are not.”
“Well, dognappers, then.” Toby’s face was puckering up like he was gonna cry. “What if we have to go to jail?” he said.
“Shut up, Toby. There’s no such thing as dognappers.” I hated it when Toby started thinking up stuff I should’ve thought of. Maybe we were dognappers. Maybe we could go to jail.
I pictured Willy’s face on a milk carton. His head cocked and his ears perked up. “Have you seen me?” it would say underneath. And Carmella would be sitting there at the kitchen table with her Cheerios, looking at Willy and crying her eyes out.
“And what about Willy?” Toby interrupted my thoughts. “Think about him,” he said. “I bet he’s sadder than anything.”
“Shut up, Toby,” I said. I sure didn’t need Toby heaping more bad feelings on top of me like that.
Neither one of us said another word as we made our way along Jackson Road toward the car. Toby kept on finding things on the ground and saying, “Hey, look what I found.” A quarter. A cigarette lighter. A pencil.
Then, right before we got to the car, we came to one of those LOST DOG signs with Willy’s cute little face smiling out at us. I shut my eyes until we were all the way past it, but I could still feel him looking at me.
When we finally saw the car, Toby darted ahead.
“Hey, look at that,” he said, pointing to the ground.
I looked down at a shiny quarter nestled in the sandy roadside next to our car. And then I noticed something else. Tracks in the sand.
Tire tracks.
Bicycle tire tracks.
But Toby didn’t seem to notice. He just grabbed that quarter like it was made out of gold.
I shuffled my feet in the sand, making those tire tracks disappear, then I unlocked the door and climbed in the backseat.
Me and Toby stayed in the car all afternoon, eating graham crackers with jelly and playing Crazy Eights. Toby kept asking me when we were gonna take Willy back to Carmella, but I didn’t even answer him. I knew that was making him mad as all get-out, but too bad. I didn’t want to talk about Willy and Carmella. I didn’t even want to think about Willy and Carmella. I had this bad, bad feeling that I’d gotten myself into a mess. And it seemed like everything I did stirred that mess up more—stirred it up so much it was starting to stink.
18
By the time Mama got back to the car that night, Toby was asleep and I was finishing up my math homework.
“Hey,” Mama said, tossing her purse on the seat and handing me a blueberry muffin.
“Me and Toby stayed here all afternoon like you told us to,” I said, peeling the paper from the muffin and taking a bite. It was dry and crumbly, but it tasted good.
“I know that’s hard on y’all, Georgina,” Mama said. “I promise things will be better soon.”
Yeah, right, I said in my head. I’ve heard that before.
But out loud I said, “Have you got enough money saved up yet?”
Mama sighed. “Well, I was doing real good until this dern car decided to up and die on us,” she said. “I swear, when it rains, it pours.”
“What’re we gonna do now?” I said.
She dug through her purse and pulled her car keys out. “I’m trying to find somebody who can fix the car cheap,” she said. “Patsy’s nephew might take a look at it tomorrow.”
She put the key in the ignition and turned it. But this time, instead of that click sound we’d been hearing, the engine whirred and whirred and then started with a roar.
Mama jerked her head around and grinned at me.
“It started!” she squealed.
Toby sat up and rubbed his eyes. “What happened?” he said.
I pumped my fist in the air and let out a whoop.
Mama clasped her hands together like she was praying and hollered up at the ceiling, “Hallelujah, praise the Lord!”
“The car started?” Toby said.
Me and Mama nodded at him and then we all slapped each other a high five.
Mama put the car in gear and pulled into the street. “Let’s go find us a place to spend the night before our luck runs out and this thing dies again.”
We drove through the streets of Darby, Mama humming, Toby snoozing, and me wrestling with all my crazy thoughts.
First there was Willy, tied up on that rotten old porch instead of curled up next to Carmella. Then there was Carmella, missing her little dog more than anything. And then there was Mookie. How come he kept popping into my swirling thoughts? I wasn’t sure. But something about those bicycle tire tracks and this broken-down car starting up like it did had got me to thinking about Mookie. Mostly he just seemed like a crazy old man. But sometimes I wondered if maybe he wasn’t as crazy as he seemed.
We spent that night on a dark, quiet street not far from Whitmore Road, which made me think so much about Carmella that I didn’t sleep too good. I kept picturing her in my mind, tossing and turning in her bed. She’d probably get up a few times and make sure that little doggie door was open just in case Willy came back during the night. Maybe she’d shine her flashlight up and down the street, whistling and calling his name. She might even think she heard him barking from way off in the woods again and drive her car in that direction, hollering his name out the window. Then she’d come back home all alone and sit on the couch with one of his chewed-up toys in her lap.
When my mind started wandering over to that old house, where little Willy was curled up on that dirty, falling-apart porch, I sat up in the backseat and looked out the window at the moths fluttering around a nearby streetlight. The air smelled sweet, like honeysuckle. I could hear the sound of a creek nearby—that even, ripply sound of water. Every now and then, a bullfrog croaked.
Those noises reminded me of the time me and Luanne camped out in her backyard. We had shined our flashlights up on the ceiling of the tent and told each other our secrets. Which boys we liked. How many kids we wanted when we got married. Stuff like that.
Then Luanne had said we had to tell each other the worst thing we had ever done. She told me how one time her mom had knitted her a sweater and she had hated it so much she threw it in the garbage. Then she told her mom she had left it on the school bus.
When it was my turn, I had told Luanne about the time I wrote a nasty word on my desk at school. When my teacher saw it and hollered at me, I told her Emily Markham had done it. Emily had cried so hard she got an asthma attack and had to go home.
That was it. That was the worst thing I’d ever done.
But not anymore. If Luanne and I camped out and shared our secrets now, I’d have to tell her I had stolen a dog. What would she think about that, I wondered.
I fell asleep that night to the soothing sound of the creek, flowing over rocks and winding through the dark woods somewhere outside the car window.
The next day after school, I went straight on over to Carmella’s. Toby had to study for his spelling test at the coffee shop. Mama thought I was trying out for the softball team like Luanne and Liza and everybody. I knew I shouldn’t be lying to Mama, but I had to. I needed to find out if Carmella had gotten any money yet.
When I got up on the porch, I could hear Carmella inside yelling.
“Yeah, well, thanks a lot, Gertie.” Then there was the bang of the phone slamming down. Hard.
“Carmella?” I called through the screen door.
I heard her shuffling up the hall.
“It’s me. Georgina.” I squinted through the screen into the dark room. Carmella was standing there with her arms dangling limply at her sides and her hair hanging over her face.
“Carmella?”
She lifted her head real slow and looked at me. Her face was all red and splotchy.
I pushed the screen door open and stuck my head in.
“Can I come in?” I said.
She nodded.
I stepped inside. The house smelled like rotten food or something.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
Carmella made her way over to her easy chair and dropped into it with a grunt. Her hair was damp with sweat, sticking to her splotchy cheeks.
“I came home from work early just so I could call Gertie,” she said. “I should’ve known better. She just flat out won’t lend me any money.”
“Oh.”
“I guess she don’t remember that time I kept her kids while she was in the hospital,” she said. “Or that time I drove clear out to Gatesville in the middle of the night when her car broke down.”
She took a magazine off the pile on the coffee table and fanned herself.
“I guess being sisters don’t mean nothing,” she said.
“So what’re you gonna do?”
She threw her hands up and let them fall on her knees with a slap. “Nothing I can do. If somebody brings Willy home, I’ll just have to—hey, wait a minute.” She snapped her fingers and grinned at me.
“What?” I said.
“I know who’ll lend me money,” she said.
“Who?”
“My uncle Haywood.”
She pushed herself up out of the chair and went over to the desk. She took a beat-up address book out of the drawer and flipped through the pages.
“There!” She jabbed a finger at the page. “Uncle Haywood. I’m gonna call him.”
And so she did. Called her uncle Haywood and told him the whole pitiful story. I’d lived every minute of it, but it like to broke my heart hearing about it like that. When she finished, she said, “Yessir,” and “No, sir,” and “I will.”
By the time she had hung up, she was grinning at me and clapping her hands.
“Is he gonna lend you the money?” I said.
“He sure is.” Carmella pushed the damp hair away from her face. “Now all I have to do is hope and pray somebody brings my Willy home,” she said.
Suddenly her smile drooped and her eyebrows squeezed together. “Do you think he’s okay?”
“Who?”
“Willy,” she said. “Do you think Willy’s okay?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Really?”
I nodded.
Carmella looked out the window. “I hope you’re right,” she said.
“I bet he’s trying to find his way home right now,” I said.
Carmella kept staring out the window. “I wonder where he is,” she said.
I felt my face burning. I was glad Carmella wasn’t looking at me.
“I bet he’s, um, oh, probably …”
“I hope he’s not scared,” Carmella said.
I shook my head. “Naw, he’s not scared. I mean, I bet he isn’t.”
“You know, like I said before, if I had a million dollars, I’d give every penny of it away just to get Willy back.” She nodded at me. “I really would,” she added.
I looked down at the dusty wooden floor.
“Did you get a chance to check those woods over there?” Carmella said, jerking her head toward the window.
“Um, yeah, a little,” I said. “I mean, me and Toby looked in there some but …”
“Did you call his name?” Carmella said. “And whistle?”
“Um, sure we did,” I said. “We called and called and …”
“Georgina.” Carmella put her hand on my shoulder. “I’ll give you that five hundred dollars and anything else you want if you find him.”
I nodded, but I couldn’t make myself say anything. I knew if there was ever a time for me to say, “Carmella, I know where Willy is,” this was it.
But I didn’t.
And I knew my silence was like stirring.
And the more I was stirring, the worse it was stinking.