The next day after Bible school, Wishbone and I were sitting out front while Gus worked in the garden. Tiny wrens and sparrows hopped around the yard and fluttered up to the bird feeder on the fencepost. After a while, Bertha came out with a couple of cats trailing along behind her. She smelled like lavender and I couldn’t help but notice how much she looked like Mama, with her hair curling around her face and her eyes crinkled up at the edges.
I figured she was going to tell me a story about some lady in her knitting group or something, but she said, “I found that note.”
My stomach squeezed up and I felt kind of scared for a minute.
“Um…”
“That note in your lunch box?” she said.
Well, what in the world could I say now? I felt like a big, dumb baby for writing that note. I wanted Bertha to go away. I did not want to talk about that note.
But Bertha did not go away. She sat petting the cat purring in her lap and gazing out at Gus weeding in the garden. And then she said, “You know, Charlie, me and Gus always wanted children.” She rubbed Wishbone’s belly with her bare foot. “We have had many blessings in our life together, but having children has not been one of them. So, um…”
I watched her foot rubbing Wishbone and waited.
“Well,” she said. “I guess I’m just not too good at doing things that mothers do.”
My heart sank and I scrambled to think of something to say, but I couldn’t.
“When I saw that note I wanted to kick myself,” she went on. “How come I didn’t think how much a little girl would love a note like that in her lunch box? I wished like anything I had thought to do that but I didn’t. Just like I didn’t think how silly that rainbow lunch box was.”
And then there was her hand on my knee. It was dark and tan from hours in the sun. Fingernails rough and dirty from pulling weeds in the garden.
“So, I hope you’ll be patient with me while I learn,” she said.
I hung my head and nodded. I should’ve said something nice to her. I should’ve said, “Oh, don’t even worry about it. That rainbow lunch box was no big deal.” I should’ve said, “I don’t even care about that dumb note.”
But the truth was, all I could do was sit there feeling her warm hand and breathing her lavender smell.
“Let’s go help Gus,” she said.
So the three of us pulled weeds and picked beans and pinched dead flowers off the marigolds. Wishbone sat outside the gate and whined to get in, but he wasn’t allowed because of his digging.
When we were done, we climbed into Gus’s car and picked up Howard before heading down the mountain to get ice cream. Wishbone stuck his head out the window, his ears flapping like crazy in the wind, while me and Howard sang Bible school songs.
Every once in a while, we passed a clearing with a view of the mountains stretched out as far as you could see. A smoky blue haze floated over the treetops. It reminded me of my first day in Colby, when Gus had told me why these are called the Blue Ridge Mountains. Sometimes it felt like just yesterday that I’d sat on the school bus with all those kids I didn’t know, riding through this town and thinking every laundromat and trailer park and shabby little house along the way was the sorriest thing I’d ever seen. But now here I was, singing Bible school songs with my friend Howard and my arms wrapped around my very own dog, and when I looked out at the now-familiar sights of Colby, I realized they didn’t seem to look quite so sorry anymore.
Bertha chattered away in the front seat the whole way to town while Gus nodded silently. We got ice cream at the Dairy Freeze and sat at a picnic table trying to eat it quick before the summer heat made it run down our cones and drip onto our laps. Bertha scooped a little bit into a paper cup for Wishbone, and Howard let him have the last bite of his cone.
On the way home, me and Howard taught Gus and Bertha some of our Bible school songs, and then the best thing happened. I saw a yellow railroad car. That was on my list of things to wish on thanks to Fulton Banner, a crazy old man who lived next door to us in Raleigh.
“Yellow railroad cars aren’t too plentiful,” he told me. “When you see one, make a wish.”
For a minute, I thought I might not even bother making my wish. Maybe I was just wasting my time. But then, something inside me told me not to give up and to keep on trying. I mean, you never know, right?
So I looked back at that yellow railroad car as we passed it and made my wish.
And so the summer drifted by up there in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I was glad when Bible school was over and all I had to do was play cards on Howard’s porch or take Wishbone down to the creek. Some days we rode our bikes to nowhere in particular, and once in a while we sold vegetables and bread-and-butter pickles out of a wagon at the end of our driveway. Mrs. Odom taught me how to crochet and helped me make a scarf for Bertha. Gus took me fishing and I even won a few Bible bucks in Sunday school.
Jackie called every now and then. She had a new boyfriend named Jake who drove a motorcycle. Carol Lee’s parents didn’t like him.
“But who cares?” she said. “Not me.”
She didn’t get the bank teller job she wanted, but she met some guy who needed a file clerk at his insurance agency, and then she could finally quit that Waffle House job.
I got a few more letters from Scrappy. He didn’t say much except “It sure has been hot here lately” or “I’m getting fat eating jailhouse food. Ha ha.”
I still made my wish every day because I decided I was not ready to give up yet. I wished on a butterfly that landed on me, on a camel-shaped cloud, on a cricket in the house, and a lightning bug glowing on my ring finger. I found another four-leaf clover and a penny in a parking lot, and one time we drove across the state line into Tennessee, which is good for wishing if you clap three times first.
And then one day a lady from social services showed up at Gus and Bertha’s. She snooped around the house, her eyes flitting here and there, examining every little thing. She made a face at the cat hair on the couch and raised her eyebrows at those canning jars in my room. Bertha followed along behind her chattering a mile a minute about what a big help I am around the house and how much I’d loved Vacation Bible School. (Of course, she left out the parts about T. J. Rainey and that dumb lunch-box note.)
“And check out her dog!” she said, nodding toward Wishbone snoring by the back door. “You wouldn’t believe how she takes care of that dog. Feeds him. Walks him. Lets him sleep right on her pillow every night.”
That lady made another face and then asked if there was somewhere we could talk.
“Why don’t we go out on the back porch?” Bertha said.
So we sat out on the porch with the afternoon sun high above the mountains while that lady sat in Gus’s chair and told us that the situation back in Raleigh had improved.
I watched Bertha’s face turn white and felt my stomach do a flip.
Improved?
That lady went on to tell us how Mama was doing better and trying harder and deserved a chance. She explained about how it was always best for children to live with their real parent.
“Whenever possible,” she added quickly.
Then she blabbered on and on, but all I heard were words like Charlie’s well-being and supervision and stable environment.
Bertha kept pushing at her hair with a shaky hand and nodding, and then that lady said she would send someone to pick me up in a few weeks and that was that.
Believe me when I tell you, my head was spinning. Why was I feeling so scared? I sat there on that porch with confusion swirling around me like a swarm of angry bees. Shouldn’t I be feeling happy? Hadn’t I wanted to go back to Raleigh? Didn’t I hate these hillbilly kids here in Colby? Didn’t I want to get the heck out of a place where my only friend was an up-down boy and I slept on Cinderella pillowcases in a shabby old house hanging off the side of a mountain?
And then I had a thought that made me jump up and run to the front door, where Bertha was watching that lady’s car disappear up the driveway.
“What about Wishbone?” I hollered. “Tell that lady I’m not leaving Wishbone!”
Bertha swiped at her cheeks and pulled me to her and said the perfect Bertha thing.
“I will make things right for you, Charlie,” she said. “I promise.”
The next day Mama called. Bertha talked to her first, soft and low with her face toward the kitchen wall.
“I know, Carla, but…”
“… think of Charlie…”
“… not fair…”
Finally she gave the phone to me.
“Hello?” I said, and felt like a baby. Why couldn’t I be strong and sassy-mouthed like Jackie?
Then Mama told me how she can’t wait for me to come home and she’s been so lonely and nobody understands what she’s been going through.
“And Jackie thinks she’s so gall-derned grown-up that she’s not coming back home and that’s fine by me,” she said.
After that she started on Scrappy. What a no-good nothing he is and how he left her high and dry.
“Doesn’t anybody ever think about me?” she said.
I knew I wasn’t really supposed to answer that, so I didn’t.
“Scrappy got a tattoo of a blackbird in a cage on the back of his hand,” I said.
And guess what happened next?
She hung up!
Click.
Just like that.
“What happened?” Bertha asked.
I shrugged. “I guess she didn’t wanna hear about that tattoo.”
Bertha stood there slack-jawed, looking from me to the phone and then back at me.
“Maybe y’all just got disconnected,” she said. “I bet she’ll call back.”
So we stood there staring at the phone while the refrigerator hummed and a cat purred beside us.
But the phone didn’t ring.
Bertha shook her head. “Nothing ever changes with her,” she said. “Carla, Carla, Carla. It’s always about Carla.”
Then she grabbed me by the shoulders and said, “I’m sorry, Charlie. I shouldn’t’ve said that.”
“It’s okay.”
“No,” she said. “No, it isn’t. She’s your mama.”
I wanted to ask Bertha if I really was going back to Raleigh, but I was scared to. Hadn’t she said she would make things right? But what did that even mean anyway?
I decided to walk down to the Odoms’, hoping my swirling insides would settle down. I clipped Wishbone’s leash to his collar and we set off down the road. I let him stop every now and then to sniff a tangle of weeds or inspect a tin can on the side of the road. My swirling stomach didn’t settle down until the Odoms’ house came into view. Then, just the sight of it set things right again. That weed-filled yard was littered with balls and tools and shoes. Burl’s legs stuck out from under his truck in the driveway. Music from a radio drifted out of Mr. Odom’s shop in the garage. Cotton was lining up bricks along the edge of the road, and Lenny was swinging a baseball bat at rocks that hit the road sign with a clang. And then there was Howard, working on a crossword puzzle on the steps. By the time I got to the front porch, Mrs. Odom was already out the door giving Wishbone a piece of cheese.
I sat on the steps for a while, not talking, watching Howard working on his puzzle. The thing about Howard was, you could be with him and talk or you could be with him and not talk. He liked you either way.
We went inside to play Monopoly, which I personally think is boring but Howard likes it. Wishbone got mud on the floor but Mrs. Odom didn’t even care. She brought us orange Jell-O in coffee mugs and let Cotton jump on the couch.
I kept trying to make myself tell Howard about that squinty-eyed social services lady and how the situation at home had improved. I wanted to put a smile on my face and take a deep breath and say, “Guess what! I’m going back to Raleigh!”
But I just sat there eating orange Jell-O while Howard put another hotel on Boardwalk.
* * *
Jackie called that night and told me she couldn’t wait to see me again. She told me her new boyfriend, Jake, would take me for a ride on his motorcycle and she could put blue streaks in my hair if I wanted.
“And I’m finally getting my very own apartment, Charlie, so you can have the bedroom all to yourself and—”
“I don’t want to go back to Raleigh,” I said.
Silence.
“I said, I don’t want to go back to Raleigh,” I hollered.
“How come?”
“’Cause I want to stay here in Colby.”
“But I thought you wanted to come back.”
Jackie let out a big, heavy sigh and then she started with I told you this and I told you that. And what could I do but agree with her? She had told me all that. How I had Gus and Bertha treating me like a princess and those good-hearted Odoms thanking the good Lord for me at the supper table. How Howard was the nicest friend I could ever want. How I had these beautiful mountains and that little porch under the stars. I just hadn’t seen all those things until now. I’d been so busy making my wish that I hadn’t seen things the way they really were.
“But Bertha’s going to make things right,” I told Jackie.
“What does that mean?” she said.
“I’m not sure.”
Then she said she’d call again later, and I went to bed with my stomach so tangled up in knots I couldn’t sleep. I laid my cheek against Wishbone’s warm side and listened to his slow, steady breathing. I couldn’t even think about that clothesline of troubles. Shoot, I had so many troubles that line was liable to fall right over.
The next day, Mama called again. I could hear her voice clear across the kitchen while she talked to Bertha.
Loud and fast.
Bertha kept saying “Slow down, Carla,” and “What’re you talking about?”
Then she said, “Wait, what?”
“Chattanooga?”
“With who?”
“For how long?”
Bertha kept shaking her head and her face got redder by the minute. Then she hollered, “What about Charlie? You know, your daughter?”
Bertha almost never got mad about anything more than a cat bringing a mouse inside, so it was a bit of a shock to hear her yelling like that. But then it got worse. She lit into Mama, telling her how she needed to get a hold of herself and act like a mother. How she needed to think about somebody besides herself sometime.
“So you’re just gonna waltz on up to Chattanooga and come back and be a mother when you’re good and ready, is that it, Carla?”
And then Bertha was staring at the phone in her hand, and the silence on the other end felt heavy and sad there in that little kitchen.
“Am I going back to Raleigh?” popped out of my mouth when I wasn’t even expecting it to.
“No, you aren’t,” Bertha said.
Then she told me she had some calls to make, and I should go down to Howard’s.
I told Howard everything, starting with that squinty-eyed social services lady telling us how the situation in Raleigh had improved and ending with Bertha saying, “No, you aren’t.”
And when I was done, he said, “Ain’t Bertha the best?”
And wasn’t that so like Howard, finding the only good part when things are bad? I wondered what he thought about a mama who just waltzes up to Chattanooga instead of making orange Jell-O in coffee mugs. For a minute, I even wondered if he still wanted to be my friend, knowing my family was all broken up like it was.
But that thought flew right out of my mind when he said, “Let’s build a fort.”
So we spent the afternoon in the Odoms’ dusty, ramshackle garage searching for stuff to make a fort with. Scraps of wood. A warped table with no legs. A rusty stop sign riddled with bullet holes.
Cotton kept following us around saying, “What about this?” and holding up something dumb like a broken hamster cage or an empty paint can. Wishbone like to went crazy sniffing around for mice and chipmunks or whatever else might’ve been in that garage chewing on bags of bird seed or nesting in a busted radiator.
Lenny and Burl helped us drag everything to the woods at the edge of the yard, and then Howard wanted to sit on the porch and draw a plan for the fort. Me? I’d just dive right in, but not Howard. He was a planner.
We worked on our fort for a while but it was too hot, so we went inside and laid on the living room floor in front of the fan.
I stared up at the water-stained ceiling and said, “I hope I don’t have to go back to Raleigh.” My voice came out all quivery, and I had to swallow hard to keep the tears from coming.
I hoped Howard wouldn’t say, “I thought you wanted to go back to Raleigh.”
He didn’t.
He said, “You’re not.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know.”
He said that so firm and sure that I felt better right away.
After a while, Mrs. Odom came in and told me Bertha had called and that I should go home. So I tied Wishbone’s leash to Lenny’s bike and headed off up the road with my stomach starting that familiar swirl again.
What if Bertha hadn’t been able to make things right for me, after all?
When I got back, Gus was home from work, sitting in a lawn chair dunking turnip greens in a bucket of water.
“Hey, there, Butterbean,” he called out when he saw me.
Wishbone slurped up some of that sandy turnip green water and me and Gus laughed. Bertha’s cat named Lula Mae sauntered over and rubbed her head against Wishbone’s leg. He gave me a mournful look, but he let her do it.
Later, while Bertha put turnip greens and cornbread and tuna casserole on the table, she told me we would talk about everything after supper.
I didn’t know what “talk about everything” meant, so I just said okay. But inside, I felt scared. I pushed tuna casserole around on my plate and didn’t say much while Bertha told us about some friend of hers whose son ran off and joined the army.
“Honest to goodness,” she said. “The way she keeps crying and carrying on, you’d think he jumped off a cliff.”
After supper, I helped her clear the table and then we went out on the porch to eat peaches with vanilla ice cream. I watched the lightning bugs twinkle down below and waited for us to talk about everything.
Finally Bertha started.
“So, Charlie,” she said. “I talked to social services today and told them I didn’t think your situation at home has improved, after all. I told them I thought maybe they’d made a mistake.”
“You did?”
“I did.” Then she told me how they agreed to check on things. She repeated some of those social services kind of words like reevaluate and stable environment.
“They promised they would get back to me in a few days,” Bertha said.
* * *
Well, let me tell you, those few days felt like a few years to me. Worry followed me every minute, making my insides flop around and my heart beat like crazy.
Howard kept saying, “Trust me. You’re not going back to Raleigh.”
But when I asked him how he knew that, he said, “I can’t tell you. Just trust me.”
I wanted to trust him more than anything, but that ball of worry in my stomach just wouldn’t go away. And then, of course, laying in bed with Wishbone snoring beside me, I couldn’t stop thinking about how wrong I’d been about everything here in Colby. How I hadn’t seen all the good things Jackie saw right away. And then I found myself wanting to be more like Jackie again. And Howard, too. Both of them always seeing the good in things.
I put my head on Wishbone’s warm side and made a promise to myself right there in that little room of mine. No matter how things turned out, I was going to try to see the good in things, like Jackie and Howard. I knew I’d probably always have to say “Pineapple” once in a while on account of Scrappy’s temper that I have. But, who knows, if I tried hard enough, maybe someday somebody might even call me “good-hearted.”
Those few days dragged on and every little thing I looked at nearly turned me into a crying baby, thinking I might be leaving. Bertha stirring grits by the stove with a cat at her feet. Gus out in the garden in his greasy baseball cap, picking nasty green worms off the tomato plants. Even the shed and the porch and the lawn chairs and the canning jars lined up on that shelf in my room made me sad.
I tried to stay busy at Howard’s, but then being at the Odoms’ like to broke my heart. That ratty old couch on the porch. The yard full of bicycles and balls and dirty sneakers. And, of course, Howard, studying his fort plans like he was building a castle, then heading out to the edge of the yard with that up-down walk of his.
Finally after a few days, the kitchen phone rang while me and Bertha were out on the porch eating egg salad sandwiches for lunch. She answered it and talked for a while, and when she came back out, the look on her face told me something good was about to happen.
“How would you like to stay here with me and Gus, Charlie?” she said.
My heart nearly leaped right out of my chest. “Stay?” I said.
Bertha nodded. “Stay.”
“For how long?”
Then Bertha said almost the exact same words that Jackie had said on her last night in my room. About how Scrappy was going to keep on being Scrappy and Mama was going to keep on being Mama. And then she told me as long as she had a breath in her body, she was going to make things right for me.
I wanted to jump up and down and pump my fist and let out a cheer that would echo across the valley below us. I wanted to spread my arms like wings and fly right off that porch and out over the treetops and up into the clouds. I wanted to dance with Wishbone and then race down to Howard’s to tell him this news.
But what I did first was hug Bertha.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I would like to stay with you and Gus.” I hugged her one more time and added, “I would like that a lot.”
Bertha looked at me all teary-eyed and said, “Guess what I’m doing first thing tomorrow?”
“What?”
“I’m getting every single one of those dang canning jars out of your room.”
We laughed and I asked if I could go tell Howard the news.
So me and Wishbone raced down to the Odoms’ and up the porch steps. I banged on the screen door hollering, “Guess what, y’all!”
I didn’t even wait for anybody to come to the door. I burst right into their living room, which I know was not a very nice thing to do, but I couldn’t stop myself.
Howard jumped up from the couch and Mrs. Odom came running in from the kitchen and I said, “I’m staying here! I’m not going back to Raleigh!”
Mrs. Odom hugged me and told me that was the best news ever, but Howard just said, “Told ya.”
Then he gave Wishbone half a vanilla wafer and said, “I knew you were staying here.”
“But how’d you know?” I asked.
“’Cause that was the other part of my wish,” he said. “That day at the creek. I wished that you would be my friend and stay here in Colby.”
“You did?”
He nodded. “Yep. And since the part about being my friend came true, I knew the other part would, too. But I couldn’t tell you ’cause of that rule. You know, that you can’t tell your wish to anybody or it won’t come true?”
Well, didn’t that just beat all, Howard making a wish like that?
On my way home, I thought about how I’d made my wish so many times and it hadn’t come true. And there was Howard, getting his wish on the very first try.
Still, my heart felt light as a feather as I turned up the gravel driveway toward Gus and Bertha’s.
That night after supper, we sat out on the porch and ate blackberry cobbler and listened to Bertha’s stories.
“And then,” she said, “one time we ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere with three cats in the car. Remember that, Gus?”
He nodded and said, “Yep.”
Then Bertha let out a big contented sigh and said, “I never in my wildest dreams would’ve thought we’d have a family like this, would you, Gus?”
A family like this?
Is that what she’d said?
She had said that!
A family.
A real family.
A family that cared about me and called me Butterbean and was going to take the canning jars out of my room first thing tomorrow.
A family that wasn’t broken.
A family that I’d been wishing for all those times.
I couldn’t hardly wait till Sunday, when I could find my flower in the Garden of Blessings and write “My family” on it.
Suddenly Bertha called out, “Star! First star! Everybody make a wish!”
I looked up at that star twinkling over the mountains, but instead of wishing, I just closed my eyes and breathed in the piney air.
My wish had finally come true.