He wandered aimlessly, feeling nothing, feeling everything. The night was brighter now. The moon was high and round, like a new softball. Cricket sounds puttered like the motors of tiny toys. Faintly sweet and rotten smells came to him from the trash bags and cans lining the curbs. His mother — snippets of memory — fell through the night like summer snow, fell in moonlit whispers:
“Davey . . . Davey . . .”
In time he wanted only to sleep. He dragged himself onto a porch. There was a grassy mat in front of the door. It said welcome. He lay down on it, curled himself up . . .
A loud
slap,
and something hit him in the face. He opened his eyes to see a folded newspaper leaning against his nose. A car was accelerating up the street.
The morning paper . . .
The
morning
paper!
He heard his mother’s last words to him: “
We’ll see the sun rise tomorrow.”
He jumped to his feet, ran to the sidewalk. Across the street, beyond the rooftops of Perkiomen, the sky was pale gray with an unmistakable tinge of pink.
“No!” he shouted. “Not yet!”
He started running before he realized he didn’t know which way to go. His house was on Brewster. Where was Brewster? Where was he?
Headlights coming toward him. He stood in the street, waved. The car stopped, the window went down.
“Can you tell me where Brewster Street is?”
The man pointed. “Over there. You okay?”
But David was already running . . . running . . . racing the rising sun, racing down the middle of streets, flying over lawns and flower beds, jamming his eyes to the ground, beseeching the unstoppable sun: “not yet . . . not yet . . .” With every step the night was draining away. He dared look up to get his bearings. Nothing familiar. No Brewster Street. He ran on, flowers colorful smears beneath his flying feet . . . “not yet . . . not yet . . .” Another look up — still no Brewster — but
there
. . . a herd of appliances. Refrigerator John’s! He raced to the door, pounded. “Refrigerator! Refrigerator!”
The door opened. Refrigerator stood in boxer shorts and a T-shirt. David burst past him into the living room, dove into the sofa and buried his face in a pillow.
It took some doing, but John finally dragged two pieces of information out of the groggy boy on the sofa: One, he had been out all night, and two, he wanted to sleep. Well, maybe John didn’t know much about kids and grandmothers, but he knew about worry, and this kid was going home to do his sleeping in his own bed — now.
The boy went ballistic when John pulled him from the sofa. “No! No!”
He lugged the boy across the room. “Your grandmother’ll be worried sick.”
“She doesn’t know.”
“I don’t care. At six in the morning you belong in your own bed.”
The boy dug in his heels, clamped his hands over his eyes. “The sun!”
“What about it?”
“Is it up?”
“Sure. It’s light out.”
The boy clutched his arm. He was frantic. “Go see for sure! Please!”
Was the boy going daffy? John was inclined to just sling him over his shoulder and haul him out of there, but in the end he decided it was less trouble to just do it. He went outside, took a gander, came back in. “Yep. Sun’s up. Let’s go.”
The boy still balked. “All the way? Sunrise is over?”
What was this boy afraid of? “It’s over. Next one’s not till tomorrow.”
He felt the boy relax in his arms. From then on he was no trouble. He climbed into John’s truck and went right back to sleep. John knew the address. When they got there, not wanting to wake the boy again, John carried him to the front door and rang the bell.
He had to ring it four or five times before the door finally opened. In the doorway stood a woman hardly taller than himself, clutching a pale blue bathrobe at her throat. His first thought was that she looked much younger than the old crone that David’s descriptions had led him to expect. Her hand shot to her mouth and she gasped in wide-eyed shock: “David! Oh my God!”
He tried to smile reassuringly. “It’s okay, Mrs. Limpert. He’s only sleeping. He’s fine.”
Her eyes darted from his face to the boy’s to the street beyond. She was baffled.
“What —?”
Right there John decided to lie, to spare her what he could. “He just showed up at my house this morning. I guess the birds woke him up and he decided to visit me.” He looked at the boy’s face, so peacefully sleeping. He wagged his head. “Kids, huh?”
The smile she gave the sleeping boy was loaded with a history he could not read. But he could read the love in her brimming eyes.
“How about if I carry him to his bed?” he suggested.
Her head snapped up. She seemed to see him for the first time. “Yes — I’m sorry. Come in. Come in.”
She led him down a hallway to a room in the back of the house. As he deposited the boy in his bed, she laughed and said, “Here you are putting my grandson to bed and I don’t even know your name.”
“John Daywalt.” He held out his hand. She shook it like a man. “I do appliances. Fix. Sell. Trade. Over on Tulip.”
She squinted at him. “Refrigerator John?”
“That’s me. And you must be the grandma.”
“Margaret Limpert.”
They shook hands again.
“Let me get his shoes off,” she said, “and we’ll go put some coffee on. Can’t have morning without it.”
“You got that.”
And so they talked over coffee in the kitchen. They started off discussing his business and the town and so forth, but pretty soon they zeroed in on the only thing they really wanted to talk about: the boy. David.
“Did you know his mother died?” she said.
He said yes, he knew.
“He was very attached to her.”
“I know.”
“He still misses her every day.”
“I know.”
The conversation went on like that until it occurred to him that he better stop saying “I know.” He was feeling uncomfortable, guilty even, because he knew so much about her grandson. In some cases more than she did. He wondered if she was aware of how the boy talked about her. If she was aware, she wasn’t letting on. She had nothing but nice things to say about her grandson. John admired her for that. He liked her. She had a pleasant, somewhat plumpy face and a full friendly smile. Yes, there was gray in her hair and a crinkle about her eyes, so that a nine-year-old might call her “old,” but she was hardly ready for the glue factory. And she was obviously devoted to her grandson. John knew from the boy’s talks with Primrose how he treated his grandmother. He knew how it must hurt her. But she did not let it show until they had been talking nonstop for well over an hour. Then she paused and sipped her coffee and looked away. Her smile wilted, and when it came back it was no longer real. “Well, I shudder to think what he must say about his grandmother!” She said it with a laugh and a forced not-that-I-care airiness.
But he wasn’t buying it. His heart went out to her. He knew what she was hoping for. She wanted him to refute her fears. She wanted to believe that the boy was unkind only when he was with her, that when he was with other people he spoke of her with affection.
He gave her exactly what she craved. “Hey” — he pumped up two thumbs — “he loves his grandma.”
She winced, blinked, brought back the fake smile. She knew he was lying. She reached for his empty cup. “More?” From then on he did most of the talking. He was careful not to say anything that would give away the boy’s late-night escapes from his bedroom. He talked about Primrose, about the two of them practically living at his house. As soon as he said “practically living,” he regretted it.
It was midmorning when he got up to leave. At the door her smile was real once more, but not quite so big. “Well,” she said, “I’m glad he has you two.” He shook her hand and walked away and heard the door close softly behind him.
Several days later, David woke up to find a note on his bed. It said:
Meet me at my place. Now!
A minute later he was on his bike, wondering,
Is this another trick?
But still pedaling.
She was outside, sunning herself on a lawn chair by a birdbath inside a shin-high white picket fence that surrounded the white and blue van-home. Bare feet. Sunglasses. She did not move as she said, “I stopped over for you. I Baloneyed for you. Where were you?”
The last two weeks, the separation, vanished.
He said, “Shopping for school clothes.”
“With your grandmother?”
“Yeah.”
He didn’t like her in sunglasses, lying there so still. “Is this a trick?”
She got up laughing, wagging her head. “You still think everything’s a trick, huh? Well, you’re right. I’m gonna . . .
kidnap you
!” She lunged for him. He jumped back. She howled.
“I still don’t like you,” he told her.
“Good,” she said. “I still don’t like you either. And I’m still waiting for you to say something.”
“About what?”
She rolled her eyes. “About
what
?” She spun around, thrust her arm toward her new home. “Didn’t you happen to notice anything a little different?”
David looked. “Mm, yeah.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“What do you think?”
He shrugged. “It’s okay.”
She stared at him. She nodded thoughtfully. “ ‘Okay,’ he says.” She tapped the fence with her toe. “You hear that? You’re okay.” She knocked on the birdbath. “You too, you’re okay. That’s spelled O-K-A-Y. Did you ever get such a monumental compliment before? I sure didn’t. I don’t think I can
stand
it. I think I’m gonna
faint.
” She struck the back of her hand to her forehead, she swooned. “Oh! . . . Oh! . . .”
Ignoring her, David said, “You got egged.” He was looking at three egg splatters on what used to be the back window, now painted white.
Primrose ditched her swoon, led him to the window, and placed his hand on one of the splatters, then the other two. David’s eyes bulged. “They’re fake!”
“Somebody was selling them at the flea market, along with fake dog poop and vomit. I glued them on.”
“Why?”
“I figured, maybe if they see them there, they’ll say, Hey, look, she’s already egged, let’s hit somebody else.”
“Did it work?”
“Nope.” She snickered. “Sometimes they even come in the daytime now.” David could only stare. She shrugged. “I don’t care. I got what I want. They’re just jealous because of my new place. They wish they could have a place of their own too.”
She pulled him around to the door, pushed his head in. “What do you think? Just okay?”
David was amazed. Instead of the bright green paint that he himself had helped to lay on, the interior was covered with wallpaper. There were birthday cakes and kettle drums and prancing horses in feathered bonnets.
“Did I hear you say wow?”
“Wow,” said David, meaning it.
“I got sick of that green after two days. It was like,
eech!
Fridge took me to the wallpaper place. I picked it out myself.” She ducked in for a peek. “Bee-yoo-tiful.”
David said, “Is that why you told me to come over?”
Primrose came out with her socks and sneakers. She sat on the lawn chair. “Nope.”
David stood over her. “So why?”
Primrose brushed dust from the bottom of her foot and pulled on a sock. “We’re going somewhere.”
Telling him, not even asking.
And what does he do? He follows her like some dumb little puppy dog, till here they are walking along some dumb railroad track, probably get themselves killed, and he
still
doesn’t know where they’re going.
So for the tenth time he asked her where they were going. This time she answered: “To the city.”
“The big city? Philadelphia?”
“Yerp.”
David was excited. He had never been to Philadelphia. The only big city he had ever been to was St. Paul, Minnesota. Once. And he heard Philadelphia was bigger than St. Paul.
He was also a little scared. He had never heard of two kids going to a big city by themselves. She was wearing a backpack. He wondered how long they would be gone. He looked back. There was no sign of Perkiomen, only two steel rails going around a bend.
“Why are we going this way?” he said.
“ ’Cause I’m not old enough to drive.”
“You know what I mean. The tracks.”
“It’s the only way I know.” They were walking on the railroad ties, Primrose stepping on every other one. David had tried it, but the steps were too long for his legs. “I did this before,” she said.
“You did?”
“Yeah. Well, not all the way to the city.” She stepped up on the rail, her arms out like a tightrope walker. “There’s a place up ahead where you can see the skyscrapers.”
Skyscrapers. He remembered them from St. Paul.
“Is that why we’re going? To see the skyscrapers?”
She teetered off the rail. “Nopey dopey.”
“So why then?”
She climbed back on. “Tell ya later, gator.”
David was getting mad. He hated when she acted goofy like this. “I want to know now.”
“Guess you’ll just have to trust me,” she breezed.
“I
don’t
trust you,” he growled. “I don’t even
like
you.” To show her, he pushed her from the rail.
She stumbled along the ties, laughing her laugh. When she turned back to him she seemed about to say something, when suddenly her eyes shifted. She was looking past his shoulder. Her eyes were bulging, her mouth a silent scream, and that was all David needed to know to figure out what was coming behind him. And when she cried, “Jump!” and leaped from the tracks, that’s what he did too — he jumped.
He landed on his side, he kept rolling, getting as far away as possible, stones digging into his skin. When he came to a stop and dared to look, what he saw was not a thousand-ton train roaring by, but a ropey-haired girl on her hands and knees, heaving so violently that he would have thought she was throwing up if he didn’t know she was laughing.
After a while she tried getting upright, staggered tear-blind into the tracks, and fell back to her hands and knees. In time she tested her feet again and found that she could stand. She wiped bucketfuls of tears from her eyes.
“You shoulda seen —,” she started to say to David, but he wasn’t there. Or there. Or there. Not down the tracks. She turned and looked back the way they came, and there he was, in the distance (How long had she been laughing?), walking the ties between the rails, walking slump-shouldered down the middle of the tracks around the bend. . . .
Around the bend . . .
“David!” she screamed. She shucked her backpack and took off. In her mind’s eye she could see a huge diesel lumbering around the bend, and something told her the dumb clunk had no intention of jumping this time.
“Daviiiid!”
It took forever to catch up. When she did, she yanked him from the tracks and shook him like a rag doll. “You stupid jerk! What do you think you’re doing?”
He screamed back in her face, jaw jutting, hateful: “What do
you
care?”
They glared at each other. She thought he might cry. She thought she might cry. And then she heard the rumble. Felt it first, actually, in the soles of her feet, on her shoulders, then heard it, low and faint as her own heartbeat; then louder, sooner than she would have guessed.
She grabbed him and pulled him farther away, up against a wall of gray rock, David trying to wrench free. She held on tight as the blue face of the engine poked around the trees and the ground trembled and thunder drowned out everything but fear. Ten steps away the train went by, blotting out the world, fanning her face. The first brown leaves of August leaped from the cinder bed and settled at their feet.
The engine grumbled on toward Philadelphia, and soon the only sound was that of boxcars and coal hoppers: the
k-chk k-chk
of their barbelled, pennymashing wheels. When the last car went by, she spat after it in disgust. “Look at that. Not even a caboose.”
David squirmed free. They resumed walking, but he kept way ahead of her. She didn’t mind, so long as he stayed off the tracks. When he came to her backpack, he gave it a kick.
“You’re kicking your own food,” she called.
They walked like that for a while, the separation a full block if they had been on a street. They came to another bend in the tracks, a sharp one this time, sharp enough so that suddenly David was out of sight. Primrose clutched her backpack straps and ran — and practically plowed into him. He was standing stone still, staring ahead.