Come a Stranger (29 page)

Rachelle, who also had a boyfriend, also a senior, wasn't there, although she should have been; Rachelle was big with the seventh month of pregnancy and had dropped out of school and what she was going to do Mina didn't know, because that boy wasn't about to get married. Rachelle was living with Sabrina's parents for the time being, because her parents hit the ceiling and hadn't come down yet. What she'd do, she didn't know. Sabrina's parents said there were worse things, much worse
trouble to get into, and they wanted Rachelle to be sure she did what she thought was right. Rachelle's parents said they were grateful, mostly, Mina thought, because her father had stepped in. He was minister to both families.

Somewhere in the audience also were Jeff's father and their monk friend, Brother Thomas. Dicey and Mina sat together separate from them. At graduation, the kids liked to stick together. They wanted their parents and relatives there, but they wanted them to go home right away, afterward.

The seniors sat on bleachers up on the stage, behind the podium. Mina had finally found Jeff, in the middle, between Phil and Andy. They tried to get the seniors to line up in alphabetical order, but the kids always chose to sit with their friends, regardless of the alphabet. Mina remembered that from Belle's graduation, and Zandor's. This was the fourth graduation she had been to, and she could tell Dicey with confidence, “It's long and boring.”

Dicey bit her lip. She'd only come because Jeff wanted her to. She'd only gotten dressed up because Mina and Mrs. Tillerman had told her she had to and found a pattern that they thought would suit her and picked out a fabric Dicey admitted wasn't too bad. “Why that boy puts up with your antics,” Mrs. Tillerman had grumbled at Dicey.

Mina, who had been in on the long relationship, thought she understood why. What she didn't understand was how Dicey managed to maintain the distance from Jeff that she did. Mina had changed from being a friend and sometimes advice-giver to Jeff into having a real crush on him for a while: There was something about his long, narrow body and his long, dark eyelashes that pleased her eyes, and something about his quiet courage to love Dicey that touched her heart. She'd known, while
she had the crush, before it changed back into friendship, that Jeff never looked at anybody but Dicey. That was all right because she'd also known that having a crush on Jeff meant she was growing free from Tamer Shipp. Not entirely; not as a person; not as probably one of the best men she would ever meet. But when Mina had found her eyes lingering on the bony shoulders under Jeff's oxford shirt and found herself thinking that he looked like some Greek statue of what a young man should look like, part of the rush of feelings she felt was a sense of freedom, of being ready to grow upward even farther from the strong tangled roots of her life.

The principal started things off. Mina glanced over at Dicey, who was thinking about something else. What, Mina couldn't guess; some scheme, some plan maybe, although with Dicey it was just as likely that she daydreamed about Algebra. The dress Mrs. Tillerman had made was plain white, with a high collar and no sleeves, with a blousy top over a gathered skirt. Mina and Maybeth had forced Dicey to put on a touch of Mina's lipstick, which she was in the process of chewing off as she thought. Sometimes Dicey just made Mina smile, the way she was.

After the principal came the valedictorian. This year, it was a weedy-looking boy with sandy hair so long he tucked it behind his ears, who talked about commitment. Belle's year it had been a girl whose voice had barely whispered out, as she talked about what women were not able to do in the world. Mina figured she'd probably be valedictorian her year, and she was considering what she'd talk about: God, maybe, which would get some people squirming in their seats; maybe a quick history of race relations, which would sit people up, especially if she refused to take it too seriously, which might be fun to try and write. She figured she had plenty of time to think about it. She knew if she
got Dicey to vet the possibilities, Dicey would smell out anything second rate.

The graduation speaker was somebody from one of the local community colleges who talked about what education could do for a person. Mina listened, in case he had anything interesting to say, but he didn't. After the speeches, one after the other, all alike in their black robes and mortarboard hats, the seniors moved across the stage, took their diplomas and shook hands and returned to the bleachers. When everybody was in place again, the ceremony was over. People flowed onto the stage and down from the stage; they flowed out into the aisles and back among the seats. People flowed all over the place.

“Let's go wait by the car. He won't be long,” Dicey said to Mina. It took Mina a little while to get there, because there were some people to say hello to, but with Dicey tugging her along impatiently it didn't take very long. They stood by the Greenes' station wagon, which Jeff had for the evening. Brother Thomas would take Jeff's father home.

The lamps overhead that lighted the parking lot attracted most of the bugs, and it was pretty quiet outside. “Did you give it to him yet?” Mina asked Dicey. Dicey had made Jeff a strap for his guitar, out of the mainsail of her boat. She'd saved the big pieces of canvas when the sail blew out. She had put the strap together at work. Dicey had a job with a small-time sail-maker in town, so she knew how to handle canvas. Once she had the strap made to her satisfaction, she'd found fittings for each end of it, the boat fittings of polished brass, small enough to attach to the guitar.

“No, I haven't yet. What if he doesn't like it?”

“Dicey Tillerman, you could give him an old shoelace and he'd treasure it because it's yours,” Mina told her.

“Yeah.” Dicey grinned. “He's something, isn't he?”

“You look good too. Are you sure you won't go to the party?”

“Sure. He doesn't want to either. He just always asks, you know how he is. But I'm going to miss him when he's at school.”

“Don't tell me that, tell him,” Mina advised.

“He knows,” Dicey said.

“Besides, he's only going up to Baltimore. He doesn't want to get too far from you.”

“I know,” Dicey said.

They waited without saying anything for a minute. A few people started to come out into the warm night. “Nobody knows,” Mina started to sing, because the song had come into her head, “the trouble I've seen.” Dicey joined in, both of them singing softly. “Glory, halleluiah,” they sang. That was odd, Mina thought, because it was a trouble song, but with the glory halleluiah at the end, it was almost as if you should praise God for the trouble you'd seen. The song was a mournful, mourning song, but it was also a praising, thanking song. Mina had never understood that before; and now she wondered what else there was in that song, and in everything, that she didn't yet understand. She would have talked to Dicey about it, but Dicey was watching Jeff approach, working his way through the parked cars, with another boy behind him. “Who's that?” Dicey asked Mina, but Mina didn't know.

This other boy had slung his jacket over his shoulders because of the heat. He was bigger than Jeff, not so much taller as broader through the shoulders, built thicker, built muscular. His trousers rode low on his hips. Mina, for some reason, always liked the way that looked on a boy, especially when he wore a vest, as this boy did. The “Gambler Look,” she named it to herself, liking it. Jeff introduced him, Dexter Halloway. “His family might be moving down here,” Jeff said.

“Down from where?” Mina asked.

“Baltimore.”

“Crisfield's not down from Baltimore,” Mina declared. “I've been there, I've got family there, Crisfield's not down.”

The boy laughed. He had a good, rich laugh.

“We ought to get going,” Dicey told Jeff. “Maybeth made you a cake. Sammy decorated it.”

“I'm glad you came,” he told her. “I like your dress.”

“They intended you to,” Dicey said.

Dexter asked, “Mina, where do you live?”

“In town, just a few blocks from here. Why?”

“I could walk you home. I'm supposed to chat up the locals, Jeff, and it's safe to walk around here at night, isn't it?”

“Except for the mosquitoes,” Mina said. “But the mosquitoes are pretty vicious.”

“My dad's having a drink in the hotel bar with your father and Brother Thomas, and there's no way I'll get lost. So I'll see you around.”

“Is that okay with you, Mina?” Jeff asked.

Mina didn't want to be a third party tagging along. “Sure,” she said.

“But you have to look out for Mina,” Jeff warned Dexter. “She's t-rou-ble.”

After the station wagon had driven off, Mina waited for Dexter to start walking. “Do I want to move to Crisfield?” he asked her. He had about six inches on her, maybe five. He didn't move.

“How would I know?” Mina asked, waiting. “It depends on what you're looking for.”

“Sanctuary, I think. At least, that's what my parents are looking for, although they don't say so. A change of scene, for sure.”

“Oh,” Mina said, curious, but not wanting to pry.

Then they had nothing to say and were just standing there.

“Shall we go then?” Mina asked.

He agreed, but didn't move.

After another couple of minutes, he asked her, “I don't know where you live.”

Mina threw back her head and laughed, causing people passing nearby to look curiously at her. “I'm sorry. I was working so hard to be feminine, you know, letting you take the lead. It's this way.” She was still chuckling when they left the parking lot and moved toward town.

“You don't look fifteen,” Dexter said to her.

“I never looked fifteen,” Mina answered. “I looked ten for a while, then I started looking twenty-eight. How old are you?”

“Seventeen. I'll be a senior next year.”

“You're going to move before your senior year?”

They made their way along one of the main streets, then turned off to where there were no streetlights, just lights from the windows of the houses. She couldn't see his face, if she had looked.

“One of my sisters—she's gotten in with a bunch of kids—My mother thinks the best thing is to relocate. She got picked up for shoplifting, that's what precipitated the crisis,” his voice told her. “But we none of us suspected that . . . that she was up to anything. It's hard on a family when that kind of thing happens. Especially—it's my mother's second marriage, and she had these three kids and Dad took us all on. I'm the oldest.”

Their steps matched, and Mina was wearing heels, so he must be abbreviating his, she thought, listening to their footsteps down the quiet street. They passed houses on one side and cars on the other as they walked down the sidewalk. She heard TVs and sometimes voices. She thought about what
he'd told her. It bothered him, about his sister.

“If you're the oldest, that probably means you're the responsible one, and the big achiever in your family. That's the way the oldest child usually is. I'm second youngest in mine,” she said.

“So you're irresponsible? An underachiever? Immature?” he asked, his voice telling her he didn't believe that.

“Not everybody goes according to the usual rules,” she agreed.

They walked on in the humid darkness, past a couple of big old houses, built at the turn of the century for huge families and their servants, but now crumbling into disrepair. One of them had a round tower running up its side, showing dark against the sky, the tower shadowy black and the places where there were windows shiny black. “Wait,” Dexter said. “Wait a minute.”

They went back to stand on the sidewalk in front of the dark house. A couple of magnolia trees grew in the front yard, and the porch was a dark strip behind its railings.

“Is this empty?” Dexter's voice asked. He was almost whispering.

“It looks it. I wouldn't know. Why?” She wondered if he was the kind of person who wanted to break into an empty house. She wondered how well Jeff knew him.

“Because it's the kind of project my mother could really get her teeth into. She could spend years on it. If we bought it.” Mina couldn't see his face, but his voice sounded excited. “See”—he moved to the steps and looked up at the house—“she never worked at a job, she never had to and she doesn't want to. She's got some money of her own, which is lucky because my father—my real father—isn't the kind of guy you can rely on. He's—”

“The perfect youngest child?” Mina suggested, giving him a way out.

“Yeah. Dad's not like that. Mom did fine the second time. But—do you think it would be okay if I just went up onto the porch? You have to touch something, to get a feel for if it's all right. Or I do anyway.”

“Go ahead,” Mina said, embarrassed at what she'd been thinking about him.

He went up and stood there, a dark figure. He lifted his shadowed face as if he could see up and into the house; he stood there, quiet, as if he was listening. Then he jumped down, over all four steps, and came back to join her, still looking back to the empty house. “It'll do, if it's only on the market, if we can only afford it. My dad's a professor and I don't know how the prices are down here—up here,” he corrected himself. “It feels right. What's the neighborhood like? We could be in it by midsummer, and Mom would have five years work ahead of her so she'd be off Clarissa's back. Because she gets on people's backs, worrying, and that's the thing that'll drive Clarissa right away, into drugs or who knows what else, and they both know it, but knowing it doesn't help much. Does it? What's the neighborhood like? You didn't answer. Is it a bad neighborhood?”

Mina didn't know what to answer because—because she didn't know what he'd think was a bad neighborhood. The neighborhood was starting to be mixed; a couple of white families had moved in, taking advantage of lower prices in this part of town. He came from Baltimore, a city, and his father was a professor, so probably he wasn't frightened of whites the way someone from a more insulated environment would be. But she didn't know if city neighborhoods had the same economic mix most Crisfield streets did: Some of the families on this street were respectable middle class; some of the families had troubles, some of the troubles were bad ones, and some of the bad ones
were troubles of their own making. Mina wondered how to frame this question; to ask Dexter the precise kind and degree of his various prejudices. Just the thought started her giggling.