It took me a while to come up with a way to find out about J. Norm, but finally I did. I looked up the number for the guy who lived in J. Norm’s garage apartment, Terrence Clay, and I called him from Russ’s cell phone while Russ was outside working on his Harley, which was about all Russ did since the wreck. Russ was hoping for a big insurance check and maybe some disability money, too.
When I called Terrence Clay, he told me where J. Norm was and how he was doing. The word “coma” hit me like a brick to the head.
“But for how long?” I asked, peeking between the blinds to make sure Russ was still outside. “He’s gonna wake up, right?” By then, it’d been almost three weeks—a long time to still be unconscious. It was my fault. Terrence had said the coma was due to lack of oxygen to the brain during the heart attack. If I’d been smarter that day in Houston—if I’d paid more attention, taken J. Norm to a doctor when he wasn’t feeling good that morning, everything would be different.
“They don’t know how long it might be before he wakes up, or what shape he’ll be in when he does,” Terrence told me. “His daughter has him in the nursing home here, at least for now.” He sighed, like he didn’t see anything good coming, and then we got off the phone.
After that, I called Terrence whenever I could get a chance at Russ’s phone. It wasn’t as good as being able to go visit J. Norm, but it was something.
The third time I called, Terrence told me that J. Norm had woken up. I was so happy, I almost squealed out loud. Terrence was out of town right then, so he didn’t know many details. He just knew that J. Norm was awake and talking a little. “He’s got you to thank for that, Epiphany. If you and that truck driver hadn’t gotten him out of the car and started CPR, he wouldn’t be here.”
I felt pure joy for the first time since J. Norm and me were on the road.
“When you see him, can you tell him I asked about him? Tell him I’m okay. He doesn’t need to worry about me.”
Russ was on his way in, then, and I had to hang up. I put the phone back on the end table with Russ’s wallet. I hoped he wouldn’t notice I’d used it, but if he did, I could probably make him understand. Russ listened, at least. He was even starting to like me all right. Most days, I helped him out with his projects, or fetched beers and sodas out of the fridge when his buddies came to hang out. Russ was kind of weirdly parental about it, though. If anybody looked at me the wrong way or said something rude, he gave them a dirty look and said, “Hey. She’s a kid, okay?”
I decided that, somehow, he’d started to think about me like the little sister who ran off and never came back. Maybe even a guy like Russ wanted to make up for the things he’d done wrong in the past. I guess he wished he’d looked after that little sister while she was around.
Once I knew that J. Norm was awake, I started working on Russ. I tried to make him see, little by little, that I wasn’t going to end up like his sister who ran away. If I could convince him of that, maybe I could convince him to take me to visit J. Norm.
Russ didn’t have a clue that I had something in mind, of course. He was just happy I’d listened to him about the runaway thing, and after school finally let out for the summer, he was glad to have somebody out on the front porch every day, watching for cars to go by. “Now that I got this disability claim goin’ on,” he said, “I can’t be havin’ some investigator from the insurance company drive up and see me putting an engine on the hoist, or running the grinder on some motorcycle part.” He grinned at me, like he was pretty proud of himself for thinking it through. “You keep an eye on the road while you’re sitting out there, okay? Holler at me if you see any cars that look like they don’t belong in the neighborhood.”
“All right, Russ.” I gave him a smile and a wink to butter him up. “I got your back.” Just like that, Russ and me were the best of friends.
Things were going so well between Russ and me by the second week of summer vacation that I got the courage to ask him to take me to see J. Norm at the nursing home. Russ had downed a few beers that morning, and he was just hanging out on a stool in the carport, tinkering with a carburetor, so I figured it was a good time to bring up my big question. When I asked, he gave me the same look he used on his buddies if they tried to check me out. That look said,
You just crossed the line, and you better get back on your own side.
“You’re gonna have to talk to your mama about that.” He picked up a spark plug and blew on it, like the conversation was over.
“You know what she’ll say,” I pushed. I hadn’t been able to get ahold of Russ’s cell phone for a week. He’d started keeping it in his pocket. I wondered if he’d figured out I was using it. “You and I could just go, Russ—while she’s at work. We can run over there, and she won’t know anything about it.”
For a minute, I thought he was considering it, but really he was just looking for the little piece of sandpaper that’d blown off the cable spool he used for a workbench. I picked it up and handed it to him. “I’m not gettin’ involved in that. I’m not gettin’ in the middle between you and your mama. That man’s daughter . . . what’s her name . . . Deborah? She’s called twice in the last couple weeks, and your mama wouldn’t even talk to her on the phone. That tell you anything?”
I stomped a foot, frustrated after six and a half weeks of being trapped here in jail. “Come on, Russ. Mama doesn’t even have to know. It’d just be between you and me.”
He looked me square in the eye then, his mustache crinkling on one side, like he had a bad taste in his mouth. “I’m not your daddy.” I took a step back, felt like he’d hit me.
I’m not your daddy.
Russ looked away again, sanding the contacts on the plug. “I can be your friend, Ep, and I can take you by Wal-Mart for the grocery shopping, and keep watch over you now that it’s summer break, and make sure that DeRon kid knows what happens to little boys who jerk a girl around, but I’m not gonna get into it with your mom. Her and me are good together, you know?”
I gave up then and went back to the porch to watch for cars and read
To Kill a Mockingbird
. It’d been an English assignment to begin with, but I’d missed taking the test on it while I was stuck at home after all the hoopla about the runaway thing. The teacher made me keep the book after the end of school, because I had to write the paper before she’d release my semester grade. I was bored enough that I’d read the story more than once. It made me think about Cecile and the women in the baby pictures with me. They lived in times like that, in places like that. If anybody’d caught Cecile taking off with those five little redheaded kids, she’d have been dead, and nobody would’ve done a thing about it. Everybody who helped her hide those kids would’ve been dead, too.
Did Cecile and the sheriff argue about whether to go through with it? Did they worry about what might happen to their own families? How did they know who they could trust? How did they find people like J. Norm’s mother, who would take in a little child and keep the secret? Did the maids really arrange it all, like Mr. Lowenstein said?
I still needed to know the rest the story—as much of it as there was left to find, anyway. J. Norm did, too. Some way or other, I had to get back to see him again.
I tried to leave off wondering and think about
To Kill a Mockingbird
. Even though I’d read the book three times, I couldn’t come up with the right thing to say about it in a paper. Maybe I didn’t care if that English teacher flunked me for not making up the assignment. What was the point, anyway? So many people had written about that book, anything I said would be a repeat of stuff somebody else already came up with.
Some days, I just wanted to walk out of this whole, stupid life—skip writing about
To Kill a Mockingbird
and get a job and my own place. J. Norm would be all over me for even thinking about it if he found out, though. He’d probably get right up out of that hospital bed, and . . .
“Russ, there’s a car coming,” I hollered over my shoulder. A high-dollar ride was melting out of the heat waves a couple blocks down. It was silver, something expensive, like a Beamer or an Acura. A new one. Nothing like people from our neighborhood would drive. “Russ, there’s a car!” But Russ couldn’t hear me. He’d started the grinder, and he was busy running the wire brush on a rusty gun barrel. I set my notebook down and started toward the carport. If Russ didn’t get the big insurance settlement he was counting on, it would be my fault, since I was the lookout. Russ and Mama had plans for that money. Russ wanted to find a bigger, better trailer for his business, and they were gonna buy a house and fix it up. There was a new program through the Blue Sky Hill homeowners’ association, where low-income homeowners could get matching money for a down payment. The only problem was, you had to have some money to match, which Mama and Russ didn’t.
While the silver car was waiting at the stop sign, I jogged around the corner and got Russ away from the grinder. The wire brush was still spinning to a stop when he took off his goggles and moved to his lawn chair behind the holly bushes. He picked up a hot-rod magazine, trying to look like he’d been there all day.
The car pulled up to our curb, and I thought,
Well, maybe I really did guess right. It could be a lawyer in that nice car. Someone from the insurance company, coming to offer Russ a bunch of money for not suing in court.
If that happened, I wanted to watch. Russ taking on some slick lawyer would be better than getting ringside seats at WWF wrestling. A battle of the rip-off artists. Atticus Finch may have been a lawyer with principles in
To Kill a Mockingbird
, but so far the people from the insurance company were as oily as the pavement on a usedcar lot. I halfway hoped Russ won, even though he was scamming. When you’re picking between two wrongs, it’s tough to know where to fall, but lately, Russ was the closest thing I had to a friend.
I couldn’t see past the holly bushes, but I heard car doors open and shut, and then the trunk. Russ leaned forward and rubbed his back, practicing while he tried to see through the hedge and figure out who was here. I picked up the screwdrivers from around the grinder so it wouldn’t look like somebody’d been working.
“Go see who it is,” he whispered, trying to catch a glimpse through the bushes.
“No.” If it really was somebody official, and they asked me any questions, I didn’t want to get caught up in Russ’s lies. I was in enough trouble already, and I wasn’t going to jail for insurance fraud.
I stood there fingering the screwdrivers, waiting for someone to come up the sidewalk, but it took forever. Keys jingled, and something metal rattled and clattered. I heard a soft, high squeal, like wheels turning. Maybe it was an insurance company doctor with a case of medical stuff, here to check Russ out.
“Go see,” Russ whispered again.
“All right, all right.” I couldn’t stand it anyway. The curiosity was killing me.
I poked my head around the end of the holly bushes, the screwdrivers still in my hand. Whoever it was had made it almost halfway up the front walk. I caught sight of his T-shirt and pants before he disappeared behind the corner of the house. He wasn’t dressed like a lawyer or anything, but he was a big guy. He had a lady with him, too. I could hear high heels—not, like, I-serve-drinks-at-a-club high heels, but the kind of sensible pumps that ladies wear to someplace official.
A feather of fear tickled my shoulders. Maybe this wasn’t about Russ at all. Maybe it was about me. I’d thought the whole thing with me running away was settled once we had the big powwow with the police and social workers and the counselor from school. What if it wasn’t?
I waited until the woman clonked up the front steps, and then I moved carefully down the driveway, leaning over so that I could get a look at them before they got a look at me. I could see the man’s leg now—a tennis shoe, khaki pants, kind of wrinkled. Definitely not a uniform. His shirttail was hanging out. The shirt was blue, the kind that tells you his name is probably sewed on the front somewhere. He had a T-shirt underneath, stretched tight over some love handles, a little skin showing.
You’re probably scaring yourself to death for no reason. He’s probably here to check the gas lines or something.
Some lady on the news had her house blow up after a gas leak last week. It’d crossed my mind that if our house blew up, I was in trouble. There were burglar bars on all my bedroom windows, and as far as I knew none of us had the key.
The man’s hand was resting on a rubber grip . . . a handle, like you push something with. . . .
I took two more steps, and all of a sudden, I knew who the guy in the denim shirt was. Teddy, the sweet, slow-minded guy who lived next door to J. Norm and grew all the flowers. What was he doing here?
Another step, and I figured out what he was pushing. A wheelchair. The screwdrivers slipped from my hand and clattered against the cement, and a second later, I was running through the scrappy grass Russ never mowed. It was just six or eight steps, but it felt like I couldn’t get there fast enough. By the time I made it across the yard, tears were spilling from my eyes, and I was calling his name: “J. Norm! J. Norm, you’re here!” I tripped on the edge of the cement and half knelt, half fell over J. Norm’s chair, tackling him with a great, big hug I couldn’t have stopped anyway. “You’re here! You’re here!” I kept saying. All I could think was that everything would be all right now.
J. Norm patted me between the shoulder blades and whispered exactly the same thing that was going through my mind. “It’s all right. It’s all right now. . . .”