It was her.
“David from Minnesota,” she said. “Come on.”
He got up and went toward her, squinting against the glare.
“Shoe.”
He went back, picked up his sneaker and sock. To the ring-toed lady at the candle he said, “What did you see?”
Madame Dufee was about to speak, but the girl beat her to it. “A long and happy life. Now come on.”
The girl clopped out the door. She wore skates. He followed. Both sat on the single shallow step, he to re-sneaker his foot, she to remove her skates.
“I saw the bike,” she said. “I figured it was you.” She stood in bare feet, no rings. “Want to see my room?”
“Okay.”
She led him —
Was she serious?
— to the junker. She ran a finger over the petrified egg splats on the back. “I usually scrape them off first thing in the morning. Didn’t get around to it today.”
“Who did it?” said David.
“Hah!” She laughed. “Who didn’t? They get their older brothers and sisters to drive them over.”
“Why?”
She stared at him. “Why what?”
“Why do they do it?”
She looked up the street. “Who cares?” She looked at him. “I sure don’t.” She thrust a skate at the sky and yelled, “I don’t care!” She reared back, hair ropes flying, and spit: “Ptoo!”
David laughed. He had never seen a girl spit before.
She opened the driver-side door. “Welcome to my room.”
The first thing David noticed was that the steering wheel and seats were gone. He ducked in. She was right: it
was
a room, or as close to a room as the inside of a van could get. Curtains. Dresser. Rugs. Bed — well, a bedroll. Even a black-and-white polka-dot beanbag chair.
“Watch your head,” she said. “What do you think?”
“Neat.”
“I’m going to get some posters. Put them on the ceiling. I’m definitely going to paint the outside. Put a little white fence around it. Flower boxes. Like this.” She opened a
House Beautiful
to a picture of a window with a flower box.
“Who’s that?” David pointed to the picture on the dresser.
“That’s my father. His name’s Bob.”
“Is he dead?”
“Why do you say that?”
David shrugged.
“Well, he’s not. I just don’t know exactly where he is, that’s all.”
David said, “I have a father.”
“Give that kid a prize.”
“He works in the state of Connecticut. That’s two hundred miles away. He’s the boss of a big mall. He only comes home on weekends. He’s overwhelmed.”
“That so?”
“Yeah.” David sat on the beanbag chair. “I’m thirsty.”
“Good for you.”
“Don’t you have anything to drink in this car?”
“It’s a room, not a car.”
“Well, do you?”
“You see a refrigerator?”
“No.”
“So what do you want? A beer?”
“No. Mango Madness.”
Her eyes shot open. “Really?”
“It’s my favorite.”
She wagged her head. “Amazing.”
“What’s amazing?”
“Me and a little kid runt like the same drink.”
“I’m not little,” he said. He leaned back into the beanbag chair. “Is that your mother in there?”
She glared at him. She snipped, “What makes you think she’s my mother?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did I ever
say
she was my mother?”
“No.”
“Did I ever call her Mom? Mommy?”
“No.”
She glared another second, then laughed. “Yeah, she’s my mother.” She gave him a friendly smile. “She’s goofy, huh?”
David giggled. “Yeah.”
The smile vanished. “You calling my mother goofy?”
David froze. “No.”
She laughed. “Why not? She
is
goofy.”
David was going goofy with confusion. He took no more chances. He kept a blank expression on his face and said nothing.
“My mother is psychic,” she said. “Scratch that. My mother
thinks
she’s psychic.”
He risked a question. “What’s that?”
“It means she can, like, tell the future.”
“She’s a fortune-teller?”
“Yeah. She thinks.”
“The sign says ‘Reader.’ ” When he first saw it, he thought the person inside must be a reader for Summer Story Time, like his grandmother.
“That means she reads your palm. Tells you what your future will be.”
“She read my foot. It tickled.”
She snickered. “Yeah, sometimes she does that too. She says she’s exploring new territory.”
This was all new territory to David, this strange girl and her strange mother. “Are you psychic too?” he asked her.
She snorted. “Nah. Thank God. It’s all bullcrap. I’d never want to be my mother.” She was twisting her hair. “She lives in the clouds. In the future. I think all those palms got to her. Not me. I’m living now. Today.” She laughed. “Plus!” She swatted at a fly with
House Beautiful
.
“Plus what?”
She pointed toward the garage-size house. “There’s only one bedroom and one bed in there and I have to sleep with her and she
snores.
”
She laughed. David took a chance to join in.
“So that’s why I moved out,” she said.
David had heard his grandmother snore once or twice, but never his mother. “Are you an only child?” he asked her.
“Yeah. You?”
“Yeah.”
“Only way to fly.”
“What’s that mean?”
She sat cross-legged on the floor. “I don’t know. A saying.”
They were silent for a while, David floating in the polka dots of the giant black-and-white beanbag, feeling something good from long ago. At last he said to her, “Why aren’t you dead?”
She looked at him; she laughed. “Don’t look so heartbroken. If it’ll make you feel better, I’ll kill myself.”
“You tricked me.”
She rolled a skate into his foot. “Not really. I knew about the egg hunt. I went in the back way to get a couple of eggs for breakfast. I’m too old now to be in it. Not that I would ever go running down the hill with the rest of those idiots. And then” — she rolled the other skate — “I heard everybody coming and I saw the leaves . . .” She grinned.
“What?” he said.
“That bug. Boy, you don’t know how hard it was to keep still with that thing crawling on my face.”
“I flicked it off.”
“I know.”
David sat up. “You
did
trick me! You saw my memento!”
“Don’t have a hernia. How could I see it? My eyes were shut. I was dead, remember?”
“You could’ve peeked.”
“I didn’t.” She grinned again. Her grin seemed to say,
I know stuff you don’t.
“So, are you going to show it to me now?”
“No.”
“Do you have it on you?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” He
always
had it on him.
She grinned. “Is it from your mother?”
“No!” he shot back. “And nunna your business anyway.”
She grinned some more. He was liking her less and less.
“So,” she said, “want to know my name?”
David stared at the ceiling. He shrugged. “I don’t care.”
“Primrose.”
He snickered. “Right.”
“Really, that’s it. Primrose. Ever hear such an ugly name?”
He did not answer. He would not get suckered into another trick.
She got her skates. “Come on.” Outside, she put on the skates and stood, now taller than ever. She took a bill from her pocket, a twenty. She waved it before his nose, grinning. “Want a Mango Madness?”
“Where did you get that?”
“Can I see the memento?”
“No.”
“You want to know where I got all this money, don’t you?”
“No.”
She cloppered across the dirt to the street. “I knew you did. But to find out, you have to come with me tonight.
Late
tonight.” She looked back at him. “Are you allowed, little boy?”
“I can do anything I want,” he said.
When my father isn’t home,
he thought. “I’m not little.”
“Good,” she said. She pushed off. “Let’s go get some Mango Madness.”
He pushed off. Over the gravelly surface of Tulip Street, his bike tires were quieter than her skate wheels. Along the way, he sometimes thought to call her Primrose, but he did not for fear that it was a trick. He hoped it wasn’t a trick. Because he thought it was the second-most-beautiful name he had ever heard.
Luckily, David’s grandmother’s house was an old-fashioned rancher, with all the rooms on one floor. To sneak off, all he had to do was lift up the screen and climb out. Which is what he did that night at precisely 9:30 p.m.
A voice came out of the dark. “Over here.”
She was waiting in the alley. She turned on a flashlight, aimed at something — a wagon. A
big
wagon. The biggest wagon he had ever seen. Wood-slatted sides up past his waist. “Wow!” he said. “Where’d you get it?”
“Refrigerator John made it.”
“Who’s that?”
“You’ll find out.”
“Can I pull it?”
“Be my guest.”
David pulled the wagon down the alley.
“It’s really dark,” he said.
“That’s night for ya.”
“Maybe you ought to shine the flashlight.”
“Only when I need to.”
“You sure it’s not stealing?”
“I’m sure I’m not going to explain the whole thing again.”
She had explained the whole thing that afternoon. They were going “shopping.” That was her word. His word was trashpicking. Tomorrow was trash pickup day. Which meant, she had explained, everybody would have their trash out on the curbs tonight. So it was perfectly okay for them to come along and take whatever they wanted. And what they wanted was stuff she could sell at the Saturday flea market. So she could make enough money to buy paint for her room (the van). Counting what she had left over after buying their lunch (Mango Madnesses, chili dogs, sour cream and onion chips, beef sticks, Klondike bars), she figured she needed about forty-five dollars.
They came to the street, and a streetlight. David felt better.
She went straight for the curb at the end of a driveway. There were two trash cans and a tiny leaning rocking chair. The chair was leaning because it lacked one rocker. She picked it up. “Isn’t this cute? For a two-year-old. I can sell it for five dollars if —” She set it down and took the lid from a trash can. She aimed the flashlight into it. “Ah-hah!” She pulled out the other rocker. She laid chair and rocker in the wagon. “Refrigerator John will fix it.” She waved. “Onward, Nellie.”
David was feeling less better. The streetlights, it turned out, were far apart, oases in a desert of darkness. He discovered his voice could substitute for light.
“What if somebody thinks we
are
robbers?” he said.
“I guess they’ll shoot us,” she said.
“Why is your hair that way?”
“What way’s that?”
“Like ropes.”
“They’re called braids, for your information.”
“Look like ropes to me.”
“The better to strangle runts with.”
She picked up a paperback book.
The Case of the China Doll.
Into the wagon.
“Does it hurt your mother to walk with those rings on her toes?” he said.
“Never asked her.”
“How come you had the egg in your mouth that day?”
“I don’t know. No reason. I just do goofy things sometimes.”
A car roared by, radio booming, voice yelling, “Scavengers!”
“What’s that?” he said.
“Us,” she said.
A golf club went into the wagon.
“Why were you sleeping in the library with all those little kids?” he said.
“I was sleepy.”
“Why, really?”
“I felt like it.”
“Come on.”
“You’re too little to understand.”
“I’m not little. Stop calling me little.”
“Little.”
He couldn’t help it — he giggled.
She kicked a TV set. “Never take electrical stuff to sell. It never works and people bring it back and get mad at you.”
“My mother wore a ring on her finger,” he said, “but not her toes. And she wasn’t goofy.”
“That so?”
“Yeah. Her name was Carolyn Sue Limpert.”
“I know. She got hit on the head.”
“She slipped and fell on the wet spot because a guy was mopping and didn’t put the sign up.”
“Right.”
“We were going to get up early the next morning and see the sun rise. On April thirtieth.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I don’t let grown-ups touch me, except my dad. And I don’t break rules.”
She shone the flashlight in his face. “Why not?”
He pushed the light aside. “Can’t tell.”
She grinned. “You will. Someday.”
She poked around with the flashlight beam till it found a lamp shade. Into the wagon. “Fifty cents, if I’m lucky.”
“I don’t like you,” he said.
She chuckled. “Grumpy little runt. You probably don’t like anybody.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Yeah? Who?”
“My dad.”
“Congratulations. Who else?”
Silence.
She snickered. “So many, you don’t know who to name first, huh?”
“I used to like lots of people in Minnesota.”
“What about your grandmother?”
“She thinks she’s my mother. Nobody’s my mother.”
The wagon wheels hummed softly over the street. “Same here,” she said.
Primrose began kicking trash cans and shining the flashlight into front windows. “Stinky stuff tonight. What’s the matter with you people? How am I supposed to make a living on this junk?”
Up ahead a light went on. Across the street a door opened. “Hey!” someone called. “Outta there! Git!”
“Git yourself,” Primrose growled.
“They’re gonna call the cops,” said David.
“Let ’em,” said Primrose.
David whined, “I’m tired of pulling.”
“Oh great.” Primrose yanked the handle from him. “Big help you are. It’s what I get for bringing a baby along.”
“I’m not a baby.”
Two blocks later he became so sleepy he couldn’t think of anything to do but climb into the wagon. He knew Primrose would pitch a fit but he didn’t care. He curled himself around the junk and closed his eyes.
Sure enough, the wagon came to a halt and Primrose screeched: “Out! Out!”
He pretended not to hear.
“Sen-sational,” she snarled. “See if you ever come out with me again.” He felt her hot, bitter breath in his ear. “Infant turd.”
The rest of the night was a drowsy clatter. He was aware of her piling stuff all around and on top of him, but it might as well have been blankets for all he cared. Then there was a man’s voice, and laughter, and the junk was leaving the wagon, and sometime later he too was leaving the wagon (lifted out of it and draped over his windowsill), and then there was the plump softness of his pillow beneath his head.