What I Came to Tell You (11 page)

“When your mother was alive, did you think of her all the time?”

“No.”

“That didn’t mean she wasn’t there, did it?”

“But now remembering her is all that’s left,” Grover said.

“Is it?” his father asked, but it didn’t sound like he expected Grover to answer. More like he was asking himself the question.

“What about you?” Grover asked. “Are you forgetting her?”

His father wrapped his hands around his knee and leaned back. By this time of night, he always looked like he needed another shave. He had bags under his eyes and there was a softness in his face that made him look older. “If you’re asking do I
feel better some days, I do. Other days I miss her so bad I can hardly bring myself to get out of bed in the morning.”

Grover remembered seeing his father cry on the porch that night after he’d torn up his workshop. It was one thing to have a father who was cranky and stormed around the house, a father he could be good and mad at. It was another thing to have a father whose voice shook, who even cried. It embarrassed Grover, and he didn’t know what to say or do. His father sat on Grover’s bed for a while. Grover couldn’t remember the last time his father had sat with him.

Grover zipped up his coat and ducked into its collar, trying to cut the wind. It was early November and the weather was freezing, the coldest morning Asheville had had so far this year. The wind burned his cheeks. Sudie, who read the weather in the paper every morning, said it would be twenty-one degrees this morning. “The wind makes it feel like below zero,” Sudie said, pulling her scarf up around her face.

They stared with envy whenever a car passed. “Lucky dogs,” Sudie muttered as she waved to friends who waved from the toastiness of their Volvo station wagon.

Their father had started them back walking to school. Grover, Sudie and their parents used to walk the several blocks to Isaac Claxton, and then their father would cross over into downtown and walk a few more blocks to the Wolfe house. After the
accident, their father had driven them. He hadn’t seemed to have the energy to get everyone ready, including himself, soon enough to walk. But Grover guessed the main reason their father drove was because of how their mother had died. If Sudie or Grover just walked down Edgemont, their father always looked them in the eye and said, “Watch out for cars.”

As they passed the Bamboo Forest, Grover checked for new stakes. He did this every morning. His father had helped him pull up all the stakes, which wasn’t easy. More and more, working in the Bamboo Forest made Grover feel part of something bigger. More and more he felt like, as weird as it sounded, he was working with the place itself. The bamboo sections practically laid themselves into grids, tree branches wove themselves between the bamboo sections and leaves arranged themselves into patterns. Nature was the artist and he its assistant.

Several blocks from school, the Roundtrees’ van passed them. The brake lights came on, and they pulled over to the curb. Clay rolled down his window. “Y’all want a ride?!”

It was the first time Grover’d noticed the American flag decal and the
Support Our Troops
sticker on their bumper.

“Hop in,” Leila said.

“You have room?” their father asked, which made Grover and Sudie look at each other. Hadn’t he just finished telling them walking was good for them?

Clay climbed out of the car and opened the sliding back door, revealing Emma Lee, who looked up from a book. Clay climbed into the very back seat and Sudie climbed in next to him. Their
father took Clay’s seat up front next to Leila. Grover climbed in, shut the van door and slid in next to Emma Lee, who glanced up at him, then went back to reading her book.

“Look what I made.” Clay held up a Cheerios box with rubber bands strung across an open hole in the side. “Emma Lee helped me with it last night.” He strummed it.

“Let me try,” Sudie said.

He held it out to her.

Emma Lee seemed deep into her book. At first Grover and Emma Lee hadn’t talked much after that morning when she’d taken him down to the Bamboo Forest to find his father, the morning after his father had torn up his workshop. Grover had felt uncomfortable around her. She’d observed his family at its worst.

One day on the playground Emma Lee had sat down beside him when he was working his Rubik’s cube and, out of the blue, said, “The war changed our daddy. He’d always been real sweet. Never spanked us, never hardly raised his voice. The last time he came home on leave we didn’t know him. He hollered at us and threw things and sprained Mama’s wrist and gave her a black eye. She’d just finished the paperwork to file for divorce the day we heard.” Since then Grover hadn’t felt as weird around her.

“You better come see it before time runs out.” Grover’s father was talking to Leila.

“Asheville wouldn’t be Asheville without the Thomas Wolfe house,” Leila said. “It’s a major landmark.”

“That’s what I keep telling commissioners,” his father said.

“And what do they say?”

“They say if it’s such a major landmark, why are attendance numbers so low?”

“Maybe we could come over some afternoon,” Leila said, looking in the rearview mirror at Emma Lee and Clay.

“Sure,” Emma Lee said.

“Emma Lee and Clay could walk over with Grover and Sudie after school one day,” their father said.

“It’s Jessie’s assistant.” Sudie was looking out the window at Matthew walking along Montford with his backpack, sipping from a Bean Streets cup.

“I’m glad Jessie hired him,” their father said.

“You know him?” Leila asked.

“He’s a history student from the college,” their father said flatly. “I gave him a little help with a research project a couple of years ago. Last spring he had sort of a breakdown and dropped out. But he’s back now and re-enrolled.” He looked out the window at Matthew.

“You don’t sound too crazy about him,” Leila said.

“Oh, he’s okay,” their father said. “Jessie’s right to give him work.”

They rode along in silence for a minute, then Leila started in telling a story about a girl who’d delivered her baby at the hospital yesterday. The girl had never told the father she was pregnant with their baby. “The poor boy never figured it out till last night in the middle of eating pizza at Frank’s she looked up at him and told him her water had broken. The next thing he knew they were at the hospital and she was giving birth to a nine-pound boy.”

“Was she heavy in the first place?” Clay asked, strumming his Cheerios box.

“Skinny as a rail,” Leila said.

“How could he not know?” their father said.

“He said he figured she’d been stopping by the Krispy Kreme a little too often.”

His father laughed a big laugh that seemed to come from deep down in him. It caught Grover off guard. He remembered a night a couple of years ago when his father was driving them back from El Chapala, their favorite Mexican restaurant across town. Grover had been sitting in the back with his sister, and up front his father and mother were talking about something. Suddenly, their father burst out laughing, then their mother started laughing. They both laughed so hard, their father finally had to pull over. It was at times like those that Grover was reminded how much of a couple his parents really were, making him feel excluded and safe at the same time.

A
fter being dropped off in front of the school, Sudie and Grover started up the Claxton steps with Emma Lee and Clay. Miss Snyder happened to walk in at the same time, and Grover held open the big door for her. She smiled at him, and, remembering she wanted to see him, he looked away.

The whole rest of the day Miss Snyder was everywhere. When he was in the library, she was at the desk talking to the librarian. In the cafeteria, she was in the line ahead of him. Later in the day, when he was delivering something to the office, she was walking up the hall toward him. That afternoon when Sudie and Grover stopped by Bean Streets for hot chocolate and a game of checkers, Grover looked up and saw her standing over them.

Sudie jumped up and hugged her. She was always hugging Miss Snyder and her teachers whenever she saw them out in public.

“I don’t think I’ve ever beaten Sudie at checkers,” Miss Snyder said.

“You haven’t,” Sudie said, sitting back down across from her brother.

Miss Snyder watched them long enough for Sudie to do a double jump and take two of Grover’s men.

“She’s following me,” Grover said to Sudie after Miss Snyder had left.

“All the way to Bean Streets?” Sudie asked.

“She wants me to come see her.”

“I like going to see her,” Sudie said. “All we do is play checkers or hearts or booby trap.”

Grover stopped himself from saying that the only reason Miss Snyder played games with her or any of the other Claxton kids was because it was her job. It was her job to get at kids’ feelings. Their mother had played games with kids too. She’d once explained to him that playing with little kids was a better way to understand them than asking direct questions. Grover didn’t say anything more about Miss Snyder to Sudie. It was good for his sister to have someone to talk to.
She
needed it.

The next day, Mrs. Caswell was at the board, diagramming a sentence. She’d said that back in the Dark Ages when she was in sixth grade everyone had to learn how to diagram a sentence. She didn’t expect the class to learn how, but she thought they should at least see what a diagrammed sentence looked like. Grover didn’t care about the
subject
and the
predicate
and all the other names of the parts, but he loved the look of it, the design it made, like a tree turned on its side. He was imagining a whole forest of diagrammed sentences, when there was a knock at the
door and Miss Snyder came in. Grover’s heart raced as the two women went out into the hall.

With their teacher out in the hall, the kids in the class turned to each other and started talking in low voices, whispering and giggling.

Emma Lee leaned forward. “Teachers are never talking about what you think they’re talking about.”

They heard Mrs. Caswell and Miss Snyder laugh out in the hall.

“See?” Emma Lee said, whispering behind him.

After a minute Mrs. Caswell came back, clapping her hands to quiet everyone. “Back to work.” She picked up the chalk and finished the sentence she’d been diagramming.

Grover didn’t trust it. Mrs. Caswell wouldn’t say in front of the whole class that Miss Snyder wanted to see him. She’d tell him at the end of class after everyone was gone. When the bell sounded and the class lined up to go to lunch, Mrs. Caswell didn’t even glance Grover’s way. He lingered, pretending to look for something in his desk, but she just looked at him over her glasses.

“Found it,” he said, picking up a pencil, and ran to catch up with the line.

As Grover’s class passed Miss Snyder’s office, the door was closed and no light came from the bottom of the door, which was how Grover used to tell if his mother was in. His mother used to intercept him on his way to lunch. Sometimes she pulled him out of line, took him into her office and shut the door. She’d tell him to be nice to a particular boy or girl. She’d never say why. He’d
know it was because the kid’s parents were divorcing or someone in their family was sick, had maybe even died. As he passed Miss Snyder’s closed office door, Grover realized he’d become one of those kids his mother had told him to be nice to.

After lunch, Grover went out on the playground. Miss Snyder stood with Mrs. Caswell and Miss Shook, talking.

“You’re shooting worse than usual.” Sam fished the basketball out of the juniper bush. Grover watched Sam swish another shot.

Shouts went up on the other side of the playground as Emma Lee, who’d launched the kickball all the way to the chain-link fence, streaked around the bases.

Most days Emma Lee played kickball with Mira and some other girls. Although Ashley and her friends hadn’t called Emma Lee a hillbilly or anything else after that day in class, they never invited her to play with them.

“Earth to Grover,” Sam said, holding the basketball out to Grover.

“Oh, sorry.” Grover took the ball.

“I’m glad to see you’ve finally taken an interest in the opposite sex.”

“I don’t think of her like that,” Grover said, shooting and missing.

“You think of her like she’s a boy?” Sam asked.

“Well, no.”

“So you must think of her as a girl,” Sam said.

“I think of her as a person,” Grover said.

“Not a girl?” Sam asked, retrieving the ball.

“Nope.”

“Just a person?”

“Yep.”

Sam stood there a minute, holding the ball against his hip and looking across the playground where Emma Lee trotted into the outfield. “Well,” he said, “she sure is a pretty person.”

“Miss Snyder called my father,” Grover said, glancing in the counselor’s direction. “She wants me to come see her.”

“About what?” Sam said.

“And you call yourself the son of a psychiatrist?”