Me and Howard rode our bikes up and down that mountain road all morning long. We tromped through woods, pushing our way around thick shrubs and stepping over pricker bushes. We went back to the creek behind Howard’s house three times, calling and whistling. We peered under porches and opened sheds and circled barns. By lunchtime, the blazing summer sun overhead left pockets of melted asphalt in the road and trickles of sweat down our backs.
We didn’t talk much, and that was fine by me. I’d gone over and over in my head how I would say I’m sorry to Howard for what I’d said about his wish. But whenever I thought the time was right, my mouth went dry and my throat squeezed up and the words I’d planned to say stayed bottled up inside.
We went back to Gus and Bertha’s a few times to check the trap, but the table scraps were still in the pie tin. We had lunch on Howard’s front porch, sitting on the couch eating Vienna sausages and cold pork and beans off of paper plates on our laps. Dwight and Cotton were out in the yard throwing rocks at the mailbox. They hit the metal with a loud thwang and left little dents on the sides.
Mrs. Odom came out and told them to stop, and then she sat on the couch and told me not to worry. She was sure Wishbone would come back.
“You got to think positive,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” I mumbled.
Did she know I’d said that mean thing to Howard? If she knew, I bet she wouldn’t want me on her team anymore.
That afternoon Burl drove us into town to search parking lots and Dumpsters. Dwight and Lenny made some Lost Dog signs and we nailed them to telephone poles and fence posts.
It was almost suppertime when me and Howard rode our bikes back to Gus and Bertha’s and checked the trap one more time. Then we sat in lawn chairs out by the garden and watched dragonflies flit over the tops of the marigolds.
In my head, I said, “Howard, I’m sorry I said that about your wish. You know, about your up-down walk?”
Then I’d say, “Shoot, nobody even cares about your up-down walk.”
But then, he’d know that was a big, fat lie, ’cause he saw those kids leaving him out of their kickball games and cutting in line in front of him like he was invisible.
So I sat there in silence with my thoughts spinning in my head. Maybe he didn’t care about what I said. I mean, he was still being nice to me. He was helping me look for Wishbone.
“You sure do look forlorn,” Howard said.
I didn’t know one other kid in the whole world who would use the word forlorn. But that was the perfect word to describe me.
Forlorn.
Just before supper, Jackie called and told me she went to see Scrappy in jail and he got a tattoo.
“Don’t you even want to know what it is?” she asked when I didn’t say anything.
“Um, sure.”
“A bird,” she said. “A blackbird in a cage. Right on the back of his hand. Can you believe that?”
“I guess.”
Then she rambled on about how graduating from high school wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be and how much she hated her job at the Waffle House.
“People leave the tables all nasty with syrup,” she said. “And they plop their crying babies in a highchair and expect me to bring them their blueberry waffles in, like, a minute.”
She told me that her boyfriend, Arlo, wrecked his car and turned out to be a loser.
“And Carol Lee saw him at the mall with Darla Jacobs,” she said, “so I told him adios, sucker, and then—”
“Aren’t you gonna ask me about Wishbone?” I said.
“What?”
I’d been telling her all about Wishbone when she called. How smart he is and how he learned to sit and stay and how he slept beside my bed.
“Wishbone,” I said. “My dog. Aren’t you even gonna ask me about him?”
“Oh, um, sure,” she said. “How is Wishbone?”
“Gone!” I hollered. “He’s gone.” And then I spewed out the whole sorry story about how he’d run off and how I’d looked everywhere but I figured he’d rather be a stray than live with me. I tried to stop but I couldn’t. I moved on to how he didn’t want me the same as nobody else wanted me and how I hoped she was enjoying her perfect life while I was stuck here in Colby with a bunch of squirrel-eating hillbillies. And then I hung up and sat on the floor with my back against the wall. I could see Bertha in the kitchen stirring something on the stove and pretending like she hadn’t heard me.
When the phone rang again, I just looked at it there in my hand.
Bertha stopped stirring.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring.
“Hello?” I said in a trembly voice.
“Charlie…” Jackie’s voice floated through the telephone line, soft and sure. From Raleigh to Colby. I pictured that voice traveling from Carol Lee’s fancy brick house, along highways and over treetops, and then up the winding roads and down the gravel driveway into this little house perched on the side of the mountain and finally getting to me, sitting on the floor and needing to hear it.
“I’m sorry about Wishbone,” Jackie said. “I really am. I hope he comes back.”
I watched a fly dart from the window screen to the lamp to the ceiling.
“Charlie?” Jackie said.
“What?”
“I know this whole situation has been hard on you.”
Situation?
Is that what this was? A situation?
“I think Mama’s getting better,” Jackie said. “I talked to her yesterday and she sounded better.”
What did that mean? That she got out of bed? That she got her feet on the ground? That she cared one little bit about me? That I’d go back to Raleigh and our broken family would suddenly disappear and in its place would be a real family, holding hands and saying the blessing?
“Maybe I can come visit you soon,” Jackie went on. “I’m gonna get my driver’s license in a couple of weeks. Did I tell you that? And Carol Lee got a car for graduation. Can you believe that? If I get some time off from my godforsaken job I could come to Colby. We could go to Asheville and hang out. They have vegan restaurants there. Did you know that? I’m thinking about becoming vegan and I bet if I…”
She jabbered on about all the things we could do, but she left out the part about how she would go back to her perfect life and I would still be here without my dog and wishing I hadn’t been mean to Howard.
That night when Gus got home, the three of us drove around looking for Wishbone. We went down to the school and over to the diner. We drove through trailer parks and up alleys. While we drove, Bertha told us a story she’d read in the newspaper about a dog that fell out of the back of a van in North Carolina and managed to find his way back home to Indiana.
“Almost four hundred miles!” she said. “The family had been on vacation over in Maggie Valley. I can’t hardly believe that.”
Gus was quiet, shifting a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other while he scanned the roadside and the parking lots and the woods as he drove. Every now and then he said, “Don’t worry, Butterbean, we’ll find him.” But I was thinking that maybe now was the time to change my wish. Maybe next time I got a chance, I should wish my dog would come back.
Finally it got too dark to see much anymore, so we headed home. We turned into the driveway and that old car bounced and squeaked over the holes, the crunch of tires on gravel echoing in the still evening air. The headlights sent beams of light dancing through the mountain laurel and chokeberries beside the driveway.
Finally the house came into view and I thought my heart was going to leap right out of me at what I saw.
There was Wishbone, wagging his tail as he trotted toward us, dragging his leash on the ground behind him.
Wishbone had liverwurst and scrambled eggs for dinner every night for a week. He learned to roll over and turn in circles and flip a dog biscuit off his nose and catch it. And he didn’t sleep on the floor beside my bed anymore. He slept right in the bed with me. I didn’t mind his liverwurst breath one bit. I loved his soft, warm fur and the feel of his heartbeat against my cheek when I hugged him.
Every night after supper, when me and Gus and Bertha sat out on the porch, Wishbone snored contentedly while I rubbed my bare feet over his warm back. Sometimes he’d jump up and let out a bark at a noise down in the woods. A raccoon or a possum or maybe even just the rustle of leaves in the wind.
“That is one happy dog, Butterbean,” Gus would say.
Then Bertha would urge Gus to tell us another story about his dog, Skeeter.
“How about that time he fell in the river when y’all were fishing and your brother jumped in after him and flipped the boat over?” she said.
Gus chuckled, but before he could say a word, Bertha said, “Oh, I know! Tell Charlie how your sister used to dress Skeeter up in her Girl Scout uniform.”
I took Wishbone to the Odoms’ almost every day. I still hadn’t told Howard I was sorry for what I said about his up-down walk, so there was always a big ole elephant in the room for me. But Howard, he never let on that anything had happened between us. Still, I felt mad at myself for not speaking up. I kept thinking about what Bertha had said about judging folks for how they fix their mistakes, and I knew I wasn’t doing a very good job of fixing mine.
Every time me and Wishbone showed up at the Odoms’ front door, one of them would say hey and wave us in and I’d get caught up in the flurry of that family like a tornado spinning me off of my feet.
Me and Howard played Parcheesi at the kitchen table with a fan whirring in the doorway, while Wishbone scurried around searching for dropped crackers or spilled juice. Cotton would stick his face right up against the fan and let out a Tarzan yell, his voice coming out all quivery and making us laugh.
Burl and Lenny would come in and make tomato sandwiches, leaving greasy black fingerprints on everything they touched. It seemed like they were always working on some kind of engine. Car. Motorcycle. Lawnmower. Every once in a while, a swear word would drift through the screen door from out in the yard and Mrs. Odom would march out there and tell them to hush up talking like that.
Dwight went to baseball camp at the YMCA and came home covered in red dirt and sweat. Most days, he and Cotton ended up in some kind of wrestling match, throwing sofa cushions at each other until Cotton ended up whining to Mrs. Odom.
Some days it was so hot, me and Howard would lay on the porch with ice cubes on our foreheads and tell knock-knock jokes. One day, Mr. Odom put a tarp in the bed of his pickup truck and filled it with water. We sat in there with our shorts and T-shirts on and ate frozen Kool-Aid in paper cups.
“I wish we could go to a real swimming pool,” Howard said.
“When I go back to Raleigh,” I said, “I’m gonna take swimming lessons like I did last summer.”
“When are you going back to Raleigh?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. I’m just saying … when I do…”
“Maybe if you stay in Colby, Daddy will drive us over to the lake one day,” Howard said. “We can take Wishbone. I bet he’d like to swim.”
“Maybe.”
“Let’s go down to the creek,” Howard said.
I sighed. He’d been trying to get me to go back down to the creek behind his house for days, but I was nervous.
“What if Wishbone runs off again?” I said.
“Hold on to the leash real good,” Howard said. “But really, Charlie, he don’t wanna run off. He just made a mistake last time.” He tossed a saltine cracker on the floor for Wishbone. “He came back, didn’t he?”
So I finally said yes, and the three of us trudged down the path to the creek, with ferns tickling our legs and Wishbone sniffing at every little thing along the way. But when we got there, a bad, heavy feeling settled over me. Instead of seeing the tiny silver minnows darting around the mossy rocks, I saw the look on Howard’s face when I had said, “You wished you didn’t have that up-down walk.” And even though he acted like he didn’t care anymore, for me those words still hovered in the air between us like a storm cloud.
I tossed a pebble into the creek and watched the water ripple and the minnows scatter. “I’m sorry for what I said, Howard.”
When he looked a little puzzled, I added, “About you wishing you didn’t have that up-down walk.”
“Oh.” He tossed a pebble into the creek, too, and Wishbone leaped in after it, sending up a spray of cold water.
“I know that was a mean thing to say and I’m sorry,” I said.
I waited for Howard to say, “That’s okay,” but he didn’t.
I waited for him to say, “Don’t worry about it,” but he didn’t.
I waited for him to say, “Aw, heck, Charlie, I forgot all about that,” but he didn’t.
In fact, he didn’t say anything for the longest time, and then he shrugged and said, “I’m used to kids saying mean things about the way I walk.”
Ouch!
Stab me in the heart, Howard!
Toss me into the Mean Pile with all the other hateful kids in Colby.
Squish me into the mud like the worm that I am.
My eyes darted from tree to rock to creek to fern while I scrambled to figure out what to say next. And then I spied it. A blackbird feather nestled in the leaves and pine needles beside the creek.
“Look!” I said, grabbing the feather and holding it up for Howard to see.
He squinted at it, pushing his glasses further up on his freckled nose.
“Something to wish on,” I said. “You stick it in the ground and make a wish.” I held it out to him. “Here. You take it. Make a wish.”
He shook his head. “Naw.”
“Why not?”
He took his glasses off and wiped drops of creek water off of them with the edge of his shirt. Then he put them back on and said, “’Cause I know my wish ain’t never coming true.”
Well, now, that surprised me, coming from Howard, who was always Mr. Positive.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“I just do.”
“But look at me,” I said. “I’ve made the same wish every day since fourth grade and it hasn’t come true yet.” I stroked the top of Wishbone’s wet head. “But if I make that wish enough times, I know it will someday.”
“Then I hope it does,” Howard said.
I held the feather out to him again. “You sure?”
He nodded.
So I stuck the feather into the soft dirt beside the creek, closed my eyes, and made my wish.
On the way home that day, the feeling that had been weighing me down so much since I’d said that mean thing to Howard felt a little bit lighter. I wasn’t sure if I had fixed my mistake, but at least I had tried.
When Bertha told me Jackie was coming to visit, my thoughts bounced every which way. I was excited as all get-out to see her. I’d missed her like crazy and hoped she’d been missing me, too. But I had some of ole Scrappy’s anger simmering inside me. It seemed like she was so busy being happy that she didn’t have time to think about me.
The day we were going to pick her up at the bus station in Asheville, I spent the morning practicing tricks with Wishbone. I wanted Jackie to see how smart he was and how much he loved me. Then I tried to make my room look like a real bedroom and not like a place to store canning jars.
First, I pulled my bedspread way up so it covered my Cinderella pillowcases. Then I tacked a towel over the shelves to hide those jars. I put Wishbone’s toys in a shoebox and wrote his name on the side with a marker while he sat there watching me with his head cocked. Every now and then he took out a tennis ball or a dirty rubber bone but I put it back.
“We want everything to look nice for Jackie,” I told him.
Next, I pushed Gus’s old jackets and sweaters to the back of the closet and hung up some of my T-shirts so it looked like I had a whole closet of my own. Then I put a towel over Bertha’s sewing machine and hung my backpack on the hook on the closet door.
When I was done, I stood in the doorway and glanced around. It looked better, but I knew it wasn’t anything like the room Jackie shared with Carol Lee. I bet they had matching floral bedspreads with heart-shaped throw pillows and pictures of rock stars taped on their headboards. I’m sure they had a dresser with a tray of nail polish and a jewelry box full of bracelets. They probably had pink-and-gold diaries with little keys and bags of potato chips under their beds to share at night while they talked about how happy they were. And I was sure they didn’t have a single canning jar in their room. Not one.
On the ride to Asheville, Bertha pointed out some of the things she hadn’t showed me before when we went to the mall.
“That place there has the best boiled peanuts in North Carolina.”
“The Blue Ridge Parkway is up yonder.”
“That road there goes to Blowing Rock, where the Tweetsie Railroad is.”
I said “Oh” and “Yeah” and “Uh-huh,” but really I was thinking about Jackie. Maybe I shouldn’t have fixed up my room so much. Maybe if I’d left it the way it was, she’d feel sorry for me and take me back to Raleigh with her.
“Aw, Charlie,” she’d say. “You can’t stay here in this little ole room sleeping on a baby Cinderella pillow.” She’d toss her hair over her shoulder and add, “This house is liable to fall right off the mountain if you sneeze too hard. You’d better come on back home with me.”
While Bertha told me about the Mile High Swinging Bridge on Grandfather Mountain, I thought about me and Wishbone at Carol Lee’s house. But then I started to worry. What if Carol Lee’s parents didn’t like dogs? What if they didn’t like me?
Before I had time to stack up too many worries, we pulled into the bus station.
When we got out of the car, Bertha gave my shoulder a jiggle and said, “Are you excited?”
“Sort of,” I said, but the truth was my insides were swirling like crazy.
We sat in a row of sticky vinyl seats and waited for Jackie’s bus to get there. Bertha chatted with some woman who had a bunch of wild kids running around the bus station. Once, they tipped over the newspaper stand and she didn’t even say anything. Gus fell asleep after about a minute, his head nodding until his chin dropped down onto his chest and his cheeks puffing out with every breath. I sure hoped he didn’t call me Butterbean in front of Jackie.
Finally the man behind the ticket counter called out, “Bus number 94 arriving from Raleigh!”
And before I knew it, Jackie was swooping toward me, tall and tan and smiling. I could practically see the happiness floating above her like a halo.
The first thing she did was turn her head sideways, point to the bright blue streaks in her dark hair, and say, “Like it?”
“Um, it’s okay,” I said.
“Scrappy had a hissy fit.” She grinned. “But you know what I say?” She tossed her head so her blue-streaked hair swished back over her shoulder. “I say, Who cares? ’Cause this is the new me.”
The new me?
What did that mean?
Was that like a new life?
Maybe Jackie had gone and found herself a new life like Mama had tried to do all those years ago. A life that didn’t include me.
On the ride back to Colby, Jackie and Bertha jabbered away like they’d been best friends forever. By the time we got home, they had every minute of every day planned out.
Bertha was gonna teach Jackie how to fry chicken and sew a zipper in a skirt.
They were gonna visit the thrift shop over in Fairview to look for a football jersey Jackie needed for a play she was in at Carol Lee’s church.
They were gonna pick squash in the garden for Jackie to take back to Raleigh, and Bertha was gonna share her super-secret recipe for squash casserole with cream of mushroom soup.
On and on.
Jabber, jabber.
Hello? I thought. What about me? Anybody wanna do something with me?
Bertha must’ve read my mind or noticed my slumping shoulders, ’cause when we got out of the car, she said, “And I bet Charlie’s dying to show you around Colby. She knows every nook and cranny now.” She winked at me. “Right, Charlie?”
“I guess.”
“And just wait until you see Wishbone!” Bertha said.
As soon as we got inside, Wishbone came leaping toward us, ears flapping and tail wagging. I knelt down and let him lick my face.
“Eww,” Jackie said. “Don’t let a dog tongue get in your mouth.”
“He’s just kissing me.” I pressed my cheek against his nose. “He loves me.”
Jackie made a face.
“And watch this,” I said. I showed her how Wishbone could sit and shake and roll over.
“Wow, Charlie,” Jackie said. “I never knew you were such a good dog trainer.”
“Well, he’s pretty easy to train ’cause he’s so smart. And by the time we get back to Raleigh, I bet he’ll know a whole lot more stuff.”
Jackie lifted her eyebrows and squeezed her lips together, but she didn’t say anything. She strolled around the tiny living room, studying photos of old people on the table beside the couch, peeking into Bertha’s yarn basket, peering into the kitchen.
“I love your house,” she said to Bertha.
“Gus’s grandaddy built it with his own two hands,” Bertha said. “Ain’t that right, Gus?”
Gus blushed a little and nodded.
“Check out the back porch,” Bertha said, motioning toward the kitchen.
The next thing I knew, Jackie was out there raving about the view and the mountains and all. I sat on the floor in the living room with Wishbone snuggled in my lap, listening to this new Jackie and wondering what had happened to the old Jackie. The one who went to my dance recital while Mama and Scrappy stayed home and yelled at each other. The one who spent her allowance to buy me one of those friendship bracelets the other girls at school had. The one who made cupcakes for me to take to school on my birthday while Mama watched soap operas in her bathrobe.
That Jackie was gone and in her place was this new Jackie with blue streaks in her hair, out on the porch telling Bertha how much she loved the Blue Ridge Mountains. And then this new Jackie went and said something the old Jackie never would have said:
“Charlie is so lucky to be here with y’all.”
Lucky? She thinks I’m lucky I got yanked out of the only place I’d ever known my whole life and sent off to live with people I’d never laid eyes on before? Lucky my family was all broken up and scattered every which way?
Then Bertha said, “No, me and Gus are the lucky ones, right, Gus?”
“Right,” Gus said.
When they came back in from the porch, Bertha said, “Charlie, why don’t you take Jackie back to your room so she can put her things away.”
I led Jackie to that tiny room and waited for her to say what I’d been imagining she’d say, like how awful it was. Even though I’d fixed it up, she’d say it was way too small. She’d peek behind that tacked-up towel and see those canning jars and then she’d say I’d better go back to Raleigh with her.
But no. This new Jackie said, “I love this room, Charlie. Can you believe you’ve got a room all to yourself and don’t have to share anymore like we did back home?”
Well, didn’t that beat all? “I liked sharing a room back home,” I said, making my voice sound pitiful.
I was going to show her Gus’s clothes jammed in my closet, but she flopped onto the bed and said, “Well, yeah, but it’s nice to have a room that’s just yours. Nobody leaving their dirty socks on the floor or taking up all the space on the dresser.” She kicked her sandals off and leaned against the wall. “Don’t get me wrong. I like Carol Lee and all. But sometimes I wish I could be by myself. Not have her snooping through my stuff or using my makeup without even asking.”
She tossed her hair over her shoulder and said, “I just love Gus and Bertha, don’t you?”
Now I have to say, that question caught me off guard, and I surprised myself when I didn’t hesitate one little bit and said, “I do.”
Did I love Gus and Bertha? I hadn’t ever really thought about it before, but maybe I did. But then, everybody loves Gus and Bertha ’cause that’s the kind of people they are.
“And you got yourself a dog, Charlie!” she said, rubbing her bare foot along Wishbone’s back. “It seems like everything’s turned out so good for you. Your very own room and your very own dog. Living with two nice people who don’t cuss and holler at each other every minute of the day.”
Then she jumped up off the bed and said, “Show me the garden.”
* * *
That night, Bertha made grilled cheese sandwiches and potato salad for supper, and then we sat out on the porch under the orange sky streaked with gray-blue clouds. The smell of rain mingled with the sweet scent of honeysuckle, and crickets chirped in the huckleberry bushes along the edge of the woods.
Bertha and Jackie talked about boys, and if I didn’t know better, it would’ve been hard to tell which one of them was a teenager and which one was a grown-up woman. Bertha told Jackie about the first time she ever met Gus when he fixed a flat tire on her daddy’s car out on Highway 14.
“I’d never laid eyes on such a handsome boy in my life,” she said. “My friend Jayme flirted her head off with him, but I knew I was the one he had eyes for. Right, Gus?” She poked Gus, and he nodded while he chewed on a toothpick.
Later, me and Jackie went back to my room and played Crazy Eights while she told me about some boy she’d been dating named Scooter. He was the paintball champion of Wake County and had a cousin in the Marines he wanted to fix up with Carol Lee.
Jackie had brought nail polish with her, so we painted our fingernails and told the same jokes we’d told about a million times before.
“What do you call a cow that eats your grass?” Jackie said.
“A lawn moo-er,” I said. “What do frogs order in restaurants?”
“French flies.”
We laughed like those were the funniest jokes in the world. For the first time since she’d showed me her blue-streaked hair at the bus station, she seemed like the old Jackie, and I realized how much I’d been missing her.
After we turned out the lights, she fell asleep in no time flat. Her soft snoring drifted through the air, reminding me of all those nights we’d shared in our room back home. I thought about how we laid there in the dark and listened to Mama and Scrappy fussing and fighting. When I was little, sometimes I’d crawl in bed with Jackie and she would sing right in my ear so I couldn’t hear the mean words they hurled at each other.
Now here we were sleeping in the same room together again, Jackie in my bed and me in a sleeping bag on the floor with Wishbone. Except this time, the only sounds I heard were Jackie’s soft snoring and the bullfrogs down in the woods. And then I thought about Jackie raving about this house and that porch and my very own room. In my head, I could still hear her saying how she just loved Gus and Bertha and telling me how everything’s turned out so good for me. But then I thought, what’s so good about being tossed out of my own house and riding the bus with those giggling kids and feeling for all the world like a stray dog with no place to call home? I hugged Wishbone closer and kissed his nose, while my thoughts bounced around so much they finally wore me out and I fell asleep.