A few days later, Mrs. Willibey called Bertha about my bad attitude. That day in school, she had asked me if I had two-thirds of a piece of pie and I wanted to give half to my sister, then how much of the whole pie would that be? I told her I wouldn’t give my sister any of my pie. Everybody had laughed except Mrs. Willibey. She had turned red and pressed her lips together and made her eyes into little slits when she looked at me.
When she called Bertha that afternoon, I was stretched out in Gus’s easy chair watching TV. The fat orange cat named Flora was curled in my lap.
I heard Bertha say “She did?” and “Oh, dear.” Then she lowered her voice and I could only make out bits and pieces drifting through the kitchen door.
“… a rough time…”
“… missing her family…”
“… been hard on her…”
Then she hung up and I kept my eyes on the TV when she came in and sat on the couch.
“That was Mrs. Willibey,” she said.
A fast-talking guy on TV was pouring chocolate syrup on the floor and mopping it up with a Miracle Mop.
“She told me you’ve been a little rude in school,” Bertha said.
Now the man on TV was showing the set of knives that came free with the Miracle Mop.
Then Bertha started going on about how she knows how upset I must be about my family being all broken like it is. Well, she didn’t use the word broken, but she might as well have. She said she knew how it must be scary to see Mama like she was. How I must be worried sick about Scrappy. How I must miss Jackie so much.
I kept my eyes on the mopping man and in my head I said, Pineapple. Pineapple. Pineapple. But Howard’s stupid idea didn’t work because the next thing I knew I was hollering at Bertha. Mean words about minding her own business and who cared about my broken-up, sorry excuse for a family. Not me, that was for sure. The words kept spewing and got louder and faster. How I hated Colby and all those hillbilly kids and this nasty old house hanging off the side of the mountain and those canning jars in my room and especially those Cinderella pillowcases.
Then I stalked outside, letting the screen door slam behind me and trying not to think about Bertha sitting there on the couch looking like she’d been stabbed in the heart.
A couple of cats leaped out of my way as I stormed across the yard and up the driveway toward the road. I kicked at dirt and yanked on leaves and hurled gravel into the woods. When I got to the road, I didn’t even care that the asphalt was burning hot under my bare feet. The mad was swirling inside me, making my ears ring and my stomach churn. But then, the next thing I knew, I was sitting in the dirt on the side of the road crying so hard I couldn’t hardly breathe.
What was wrong with me? Why had I said those mean things to Bertha? Why was I acting so hateful at school? And then, while I was sitting there wallowing in my pity, somebody said, “What’s the matter, Charlie?”
I looked up to see Howard standing by his bicycle in front of me.
I put my head on my knees and mumbled, “Nothing.”
“Must be something,” he said.
“Go away.”
“Naw.” He laid his bicycle in the weeds by the road and sat next to me. “You have to tell me what’s the matter.”
This boy beat all. He sure had a lot of gumption for a little ole redheaded up-down boy.
“I don’t have to tell you anything,” I said.
“Then you have to tell somebody.” He pushed at his glasses.
“Why?”
“My mama says you should never keep your troubles to yourself. She says if you share ’em with somebody, they get smaller.”
“Go away,” I said.
“Did you kick somebody again?”
I shook my head.
“Poke ’em with a pencil?”
“No!” I hollered.
“Mama made this needlepoint sign that says, ‘If all our troubles were hung on a line, you’d choose yours and I’d choose mine.’”
I lifted my head and stared at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked him.
“It means everybody’s got troubles and some of ’em are worse than yours.” He yanked at a blade of grass and tossed it into the road. “Or something like that,” he added.
Ha! That was a good one. I couldn’t think of anybody with worse troubles than me. Then I looked at Howard with his eyebrows knitted together and a look of pure worry on his face and before I knew it, I was spilling those troubles out to him. I told him how I wished Scrappy wasn’t in jail. How he and I used to play poker and watch Wheel of Fortune and eat macaroni and cheese for breakfast. I told him how scared I was when I saw my mama crying into her pillow in her dark bedroom, not even caring one little bit whether I had clean clothes or even went to school. I told him how Mama and Scrappy would holler at each other the livelong day while me and Jackie sat on her bed with the radio turned up loud so we didn’t have to hear them. I told him about all those times I watched from the bedroom window when Scrappy drove off with his tires screeching and gravel flying while Mama yelled “Good riddance to bad rubbish” from the front porch. I told him how much I missed Jackie, who knew all the words to nearly every song on the radio and would french braid my hair and share her nail polish with me. And then I told him those mean things I’d said to Bertha.
When I was done, the silence settled over us, still and soft, like a veil. The sun had gotten lower in the sky, sitting on top of the mountains in the distance, and the air had grown cooler.
For a minute, I thought maybe Howard was embarrassed by all that stuff I’d told him and didn’t know what to say. I was starting to wish I had never shared my troubles with him like that. But then he looked right at me and said, “Want my advice?”
“Um, sure, I guess,” I said.
“You can’t do nothing about Scrappy and them back in Raleigh,” he said. “The only thing you can fix is what you done to Bertha.”
I guess he was right. I couldn’t fix my mess of a family, but I could try to make things right with Bertha. I stood up and brushed the dirt off the back of my shorts. And then I couldn’t hardly believe my eyes. Right there at the edge of the woods was that brown-and-black, floppy-eared dog!
I put my finger to my lips and went, “Shhhh.”
The dog was watching me with his head cocked to the side.
“Don’t move,” I whispered to Howard.
I took one slow step toward the dog and guess what? He wagged his tail! Two tiny little wags. That dog liked me.
“Hey, fella,” I said, taking another step.
Then, wouldn’t you know it, a car came roaring up the road and whizzed past us and that dog darted off into the woods.
I stamped my foot. “Dang it!”
I’d almost forgotten Howard was there when he said, “I’ve seen that dog before.”
“He’s mine,” I said.
“Really?”
“Well, he’s gonna be.”
“I bet he’s full of ticks,” he said. “And he might have the mange. Stray dogs have the mange.”
“So what?” I said. “His name is Wishbone.” The minute I said that, it felt right. Wishbone. That was the perfect name for my dog.
“I’m going to catch him,” I said. “Then I’ll bathe him and get the ticks off him and teach him tricks and let him sleep in the bed with me.”
“I’ll help you catch him,” Howard said, picking his bike up out of the weeds.
“You will?”
“Sure.”
Suddenly Howard seemed different. He didn’t seem so much like a nosy up-down boy, nagging me half to death about being my Backpack Buddy. He seemed more like somebody being nice to me. Somebody I had shared my troubles with.
I watched him get on his bike and pedal off toward his house. Then I called “Bye, Wishbone” into the woods before I hurried up the road to make things right with Bertha.
By the time I got home, it was getting dark. Gus’s old rattletrap of a car was in the driveway and the smell of spaghetti sauce drifted through the screen door.
My feet felt like cinder blocks as I made my way across the yard toward the house. More than anything, I wanted to just go on back to my room and pretend like this day had never happened.
But I didn’t.
I put one cinder-block foot in front of the other until I was on the back porch, where Gus and Bertha sat gazing out at the mountain view.
“Hey,” I said, and my voice sounded like a sniveling baby. I kept my eyes on the leaf-covered floorboards of the porch.
“Hey, there,” Gus said.
I couldn’t look at Bertha, but her silence smacked me hard. I sat down and studied the fading hearts and stars I’d drawn on my arm. From somewhere way down in the woods, a bullfrog croaked, sending his deep-throated call echoing out into the cool evening air.
I counted to three in my head and then I said it. “I’m sorry, Bertha.”
Then I did what I’d told myself I most definitely would not do.
I cried.
And, I swear, I could not stop no matter how much I wanted to.
The worst part was that I couldn’t get myself to tell Bertha those things I’d practiced in my head. Like how I didn’t mean to holler at her. How I don’t hate this house perched on the mountainside with Pegasus up there shining over the porch. How those canning jars don’t bother me one little bit. And most of all, how I love Cinderella, because who doesn’t?
But all I did was cry. And then Bertha was kneeling in front of me with her warm hand on my ink-stained arm.
“You are a blessing in this house, Charlie,” she said.
A blessing?
She should’ve called me mean and hateful and dumb and sorry, but she called me a blessing.
Then Gus stood up and said the perfect Gus thing.
“Let’s have some of that blackberry cobbler before supper.”
So that’s what we did.
The three of us sat out on the porch as the stars were beginning to twinkle up in the Carolina sky and ate blackberry cobbler before supper. And while Bertha told us about how her friend Racine backed her car into the flagpole at the post office that afternoon and then just drove on off like nothing had even happened, an acorn dropped from the branches of the oak tree hanging over the porch and fell right at my feet.
I nearly spilled my cobbler when I jumped up and grabbed it. I had almost let that day slip by without making my wish, and now here came an acorn like it was dropped right down from heaven. I hesitated, but then I went on and did what I had to do. I turned in a circle three times, clutching that acorn tight and making my wish.
Then I went back to my room and set the acorn on the windowsill. I would leave it there for three days to make sure my wish would be even stronger. That’s what my Girl Scout leader in Raleigh told me about acorn wishes, and that could not be a lie because Girl Scout leaders do not lie.
After supper, we had more blackberry cobbler. Gus went out to the garden to make sure the sprinkler was turned off, and Bertha said, “Stay right here, Charlie. I want to show you something.”
She went to her room and came back with a tattered shoebox. She took the lid off and said, “Look.”
I peered inside. Photographs.
Bertha rummaged through them and took one out. She smiled at it and handed it to me.
“Your mama and me,” she said, pointing to the handwriting on the back. Bertha and Carla, in big printed letters.
I took the faded photograph from her.
Two young girls sat on the hood of a car with their arms around each other.
“Which one’s Mama?” I asked.
Bertha pointed to the smaller girl. I squinted down at her. She was missing her two front teeth and had a Band-Aid on her elbow.
I could not take my eyes off of that girl. I imagined her getting down from that car and skipping in circles. I imagined her singing with her big sister, Bertha, in the backseat of their daddy’s car. I imagined her telling knock-knock jokes and roller-skating and eating ice cream on her porch at night.
When had this gap-toothed little girl turned into that sad woman in her dark bedroom in Raleigh?
“Did y’all love each other?” I asked Bertha.
“We sure did.” Then she showed me some more photographs. Mama opening a present beside a Christmas tree. The two of them playing with a puppy in the snow. Bertha pulling Mama in a wagon on a dirt road.
“Why don’t y’all see each other anymore?” I said.
Bertha let out a big sigh and shook her head. “We grew up,” she said. “When you grow up, sometimes life gets complicated.”
That wasn’t a very good answer, but I could tell it was the only one I was going to get, so I just said, “Oh.”
When Gus came back in from the garden, we went out on the porch. They held hands while Bertha told us about some old man selling moldy strawberries from the back of a truck out on Highway 14. Then she said, “You can call Jackie tomorrow if you want to, Charlie.”
“No, thanks,” I said.
It was so quiet I could hear Bertha breathing. I could feel her looking at me but I stared out at the treetops.
“Charlie,” she said. “Don’t be mad at Jackie.”
“I’m not mad at Jackie,” I said, but that lie was like a dark cloud settling over us.
I was mad at Jackie. She acted like she didn’t have one single trouble hanging on her line and she didn’t care one bit about me.
Then we sat there in silence, breathing in the cool night air and listening to the crickets under the porch.
That night when I went to bed, I laid there in the dark and pictured a clothesline full of somebody else’s troubles. I knew for sure there were a lot of them I’d rather pluck off of that line than mine. I imagined what the other troubles might be. There would probably be toothaches and failed math tests. Lost cats and ugly hair. Cheating boyfriends and broken-down cars. But none of those could hold a candle to my troubles, weighing down that clothesline like a sack full of bricks.
I tiptoed to the window and stared out into the night, thinking maybe I’d see a falling star to wish on. The moon was bright over the mountains and sent a shimmering glow across the yard, making shadows that snaked around the dogwood tree and crept along the garden fence.
I knew Wishbone was out there somewhere all by himself. I wondered what he was doing. Eating stale bread out of someone’s garbage? Trotting along the highway in the moonlight? Sleeping under somebody’s porch?
I hoped Gus wasn’t right about Wishbone wanting to be a stray. But then I remembered how he had wagged his tail at me that day. He liked me. I was sure of it. And if he was mine and didn’t have to be a stray anymore, I bet he would love me.
I clasped my hands together like I was praying and whispered into the darkness, “Please come back, Wishbone.”
On Saturday, Howard was going to help me look for Wishbone, but first I had to go shopping with Bertha.
“I haven’t been to Asheville in ages,” she said, getting behind the wheel of Gus’s old car. It started with a rumble, sending puffs of black smoke drifting out of the tailpipe and floating over the yard.
As we wound our way down the mountain and onto the highway, Bertha chattered nonstop. She told me about the time she and Gus went camping and a baby bear got into their cooler and stole their hot dogs.
“Can you believe that?” she said. “A bear eating hot dogs!”
She talked about how much she hated snakes, and how when a tiny brown garter snake got in the house once, she stayed with her friend Jonelle for nearly a week until Gus swore on the Bible that it was gone.
And she could hardly stop laughing long enough to tell me about the time some guy named Arthur Kruger got drunk and lost his false teeth at the church picnic.
“I didn’t even want to think about where those teeth would turn up,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I didn’t eat any more potato salad after that, that’s for sure.”
Finally I figured I’d have to interrupt her, so I did.
“But what about you and Mama?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Tell me something about y’all.”
“Oh, well, um, let’s see now…”
I waited, watching her face. Seeing her searching for just the right thing to tell me.
“When I was about ten,” she said, “so, let’s see, Carla would’ve been about seven, we spent the whole summer making yarn bracelets to sell so we could buy fish for an aquarium our uncle gave us.”
Yarn bracelets?
I wondered how come Mama never showed me how to make yarn bracelets.
“Then,” Bertha went on, “this mean boy who lived across the street from us threw every one of those bracelets up into the hickory nut tree in our front yard. Way up in the branches so we couldn’t get them down.” She shook her head. “Isn’t that so mean?”
“What did y’all do?”
“Well, that’s why I’m telling this story, ’cause it’s just so like Carla,” she said. “She stomped over to that boy and bit him on the hand so hard he hollered like she’d cut his hand off with a butcher knife. Then he ran home crying while she hollered cuss words at him.”
Bertha chuckled. “That girl had some kinda temper,” she said.
A temper?
Maybe I didn’t get my temper from Scrappy, after all. Maybe I got my temper from Mama.
I hesitated, but then I decided to just go for it. “How come y’all stopped seeing each other?” I asked, hoping maybe this time she’d give me a better answer than she had before.
Bertha stared out at the road ahead. “Well, you know, when we got to be teenagers we were so busy with this, that, and the other thing. And then she dropped out of high school and the next thing I knew she was hightailing it to Raleigh.”
“But how come y’all never see each other now?”
Bertha pressed her lips together and shot me a look out of the corner of her eye. “It’s kind of complicated, Charlie,” she said.
There it was again. Another not-very-good answer.
So we drove on in silence until we got to Asheville. At the mall, I couldn’t help but think about Jackie. She and I used to spend all day at the mall, wandering from store to store trying on crop tops and miniskirts that we were never allowed to have. Picking out earrings we would buy if our ears were pierced. Spritzing fancy perfume on each other from the samples at the cosmetics counter.
“Let’s go to Sears and look for Sunday school dresses,” Bertha said.
So we shopped all morning, and by the time we headed back to Colby, I had two new dresses and a lavender cardigan sweater. Bertha thought one of the dresses might be too short for church but she bought it anyway.
When we got home, Howard was sitting in a lawn chair by the garden watching Gus doing some repairs to the fence.
“Hey, there!” Bertha called.
Howard walked his up-down walk over to the car as I was getting my shopping bags out of the backseat.
“Hey,” he said to Bertha. Then he turned to me and said, “I drew a map.”
“What for?”
“To help us look for Wishbone.” He took a piece of folded-up notebook paper out of his pocket to show me. “I figured we could mark the places we look and it will help us keep track.”
I shrugged. “Okay.”
Bertha reached for the shopping bags. “I’ll take those inside,” she said.
Then me and Howard headed off toward the road, peering into tangled shrubs and squinting into the dark woods along the way. Howard thought we should check the path where we had seen him yesterday.
“I bet he hangs out there a lot,” he said.
“Maybe.” I pushed some tall weeds aside and jumped over the shallow ditch that ran along the edge of the road. “But Gus said he’s liable to be anywhere,” I added.
We looked and looked, climbing over fallen trees and pushing through prickly vines. But after a while, we were hot and tired and hadn’t seen a single sign of Wishbone. So Howard whipped out his map and a stubby pencil and marked the places we had looked, and we decided to call it a day.
The next day, I marched into Sunday school in my new dress and plopped right down next to Audrey. I said, “Hey,” but she acted like I was invisible. I guess she forgot I was part of her church family.
First, we had to play that Bible Detective game again, and Howard added to his collection of Bible bucks. I couldn’t get over all the stuff he knew about the Bible.
What was Moses’s brother’s name?
How many times a day did ravens bring food to Elijah?
Audrey waved her hand almost as much as Howard did, jangling her bracelets and going, “I know! I know!”
After that, Mrs. Mackey told us we were going to decorate the bulletin board in the fellowship hall and it would be called Our Garden of Blessings.
“We’ll be making a garden of flowers to show our many blessings,” she said. Then she explained that we would make construction paper flowers and write one of our many blessings on each one.
I confess I wasn’t too clear exactly what that meant, but I followed everybody else and got colored paper and glue and scissors. I worked real slow, hoping I could see what somebody else was doing. Sure enough, Audrey finished her first flower, a big yellow daisy. Then she used a blue crayon to write on one of the petals: “My family.”
My stomach squeezed up and my face felt hot. I put my hands in my lap so nobody could see them shaking.
That yellow daisy laid there on the table in front of me reminding me that I did not belong here. Letting me know that even though I was here in church in my new dress, I did not have a blessing.
“May I be excused?” I said to Mrs. Mackey. But I didn’t even wait for her to answer. I hurried out of that room and went outside to the parking lot.
But before I had time to start feeling sorry for myself, something good happened. I saw a red bird. A big, bright cardinal on the telephone line across the street. I closed my eyes, spit three times, and made my wish.