Lena (3 page)

I counted the bills from Larry. “Another forty here. You hungry?”

“A little. We could eat the sandwiches he bought us.”

“That's lunch food. Lunch food's for lunch.”

 

“A person can eat a ham and egg sandwich for breakfast,” Dion said. “Why can't they eat a ham and cheese sandwich?”

 

“It's got mayo and lettuce on it, that's why. Mayo and lettuce ain't for breakfast. Mess your day all up eating the wrong thing at the wrong time. Just 'cause we kind of in between homes now don't mean we start acting like we don't have home-training.”

I got up off my knapsack and looked around the station. “I bet you there's a town to this place with a little diner or something where we could get us some breakfast food.”

 

Dion tore her eyes away from her book and squinted up at me. She didn't look scared like a lot of little kids. Just small and—I don't know—like she trusted me.

 

“Let's head over that way and get us a ride.” I pointed out toward the fields. “Seems more cars heading left than right so we should hitch left.”

“They going west,” Dion said, putting her knapsack on her shoulders and stuffing that book in her back pocket. She's smarter than me about things like east and west. Numbers too. And she knows a lot of big words. If you're reading a book and you come across a word you don't know, she could probably tell you what it means, save you a trip to the dictionary. Lot of people'd be embarrassed if their kid sister was smarter than them but I figure me and Dion more of a team than other people. She fixes my words and numbers and I save her from our daddy. I keep it so she can read in peace and not be scared to go to sleep at night.

“What you reading anyway?”

“Just some poems.”

“They rhyme?”

Dion shook her head. “I don't like the rhyming kind anymore. Those are for babies.”

“You gonna read me one later?”

“If you want me to, I guess.” She slipped her little skinny arm around my waist and we started walking.

“It's gonna get cold again soon,” she said, looking up at the sky. “It's too warm for December.”

“I know.” But I didn't want to think about it. It was December but for some reason it was warm again, like spring some days. At night it got real cold but in the daytime, I swear the temperature would climb to sixty degrees. I swallowed, remembering Chauncey, how right before it snowed there had been this Indian summer and me and Marie had walked around with our coats hanging from our heads. Besides our rain jackets, me and Dion only had flannel shirts and heavy sweaters now. It had been so warm when we left Chauncey, we left our coats behind because we didn't want to look suspicious. Every day I held my breath, hoping this wouldn't be the day it got real cold out.

“They call it the greenhouse effect,” Dion was saying. “It's 'cause of chemicals or something.”

“What's 'cause of chemicals?”

 

“The
warm,
” Dion said, sounding annoyed. “I bet you every year it's going to get hotter and hotter and soon the earth's gonna just catch on fire. Boom! The end.”

I looked at her and smiled. “You read too much.”

 

“Wait and see. When you know December to be warm like this?”

 

We got to the road and I stuck out my thumb. “We're just lucky, Dion. Got weather on our side.”

“Got
chemicals
on our side. Cop car coming.”

I put my thumb down fast and me and Dion started walking again, my heart beating hard against my chest.

The cop car pulled up alongside of us and slowed down.

 

“Where you two headed so early in the morning?” The cop tried to smile but it was a small smile.

I looked him straight in the eye and tried to keep my voice steady. “School, sir.”

“Well, school's in the other direction, isn't it? You two taking the long way.”

“Figure we'd get some breakfast first. Our mama went into labor last night and our daddy still with her at the hospital. We don't know how to cook yet.” I held out my hand and showed him a ten-dollar bill. “Mama left this money in case of emergency. Breakfast is kind of an emergency.”

The cop frowned down into my hand like he was trying to figure out what a ten-dollar bill was. Then he gave me and Dion another hard look.

“You two headed over to Berta's?”

 

“Berta's . . . diner?”

 

“What other Berta's is there?”

 

“Yes sir,” Dion said real quick, then ducked her head again.

“Well then, get in the back. And use your change to take a car service back to school. No use you boys being late on account of a baby coming.”

 

 

Berta's was at the end of a dusty-looking strip of stores. There was a Piggly Wiggly, a Coleen's Beauty Parlor and a dance school that looked abandoned. I stared at the dingy pink ballet slippers painted across the front window. I used to want to be a dancer when I was real little. Mama'd always said the minute her ship came in she'd pay for me to take some lessons. I'm a good dancer when I set my mind to it. Once, me and Marie put bottle caps on our sneakers and danced out in front of the drugstore. Some people stopped and watched us and that made me feel real good. This old man handed us each a dollar. Me and Marie sure laughed hard about that one.

“Come on, Lena,” Dion said, pulling my hand. “Before that cop gets to sniffing around us again.”

I followed her inside the diner. It was quiet and warm. A couple of old men were sitting along the counter drinking coffee. We took a seat at one of the booths.

“Can I get pancakes?”

I nodded. “You better get some bacon or sausage or something. Fill yourself up so we can hold on to those sandwiches awhile. Don't know where we'll be come nighttime.”

Dion looked at me real quick but didn't say anything.

The waitress came up to our table. She was pretty, with curly hair and a nose ring. Didn't look much older than me.

 

“What can I get you early birds?” she said.

“A menu, please,” Dion said, sounding like she ate at restaurants all the time.

 

The waitress smiled, then disappeared and came back with two menus. We ordered the Breakfast Special—pancakes, sausage, two eggs, home fries and toast.

“You two kind of hungry this morning, huh?”

I nodded. “And orange juice too, please—for both of us.”

After she left, I pulled our toothbrushes out of my knapsack. Our tube of toothpaste was almost flat. “Here, Dion, you go wash up first.” I handed her her toothbrush underneath the table, all the while looking around to make sure nobody was watching. “Run your fingers through your hair and make sure you throw some water on your face.”

There was one of those tiny jukeboxes on the wall beside our table. After Dion left, I flipped through it, looking at all the songs. There was mostly country with one or two songs that if I wanted to waste the dollar, I'd actually consider playing. When I got to the end, I started flipping through it again. I was trying hard not to think about where we'd be come nighttime.

Dion used to be afraid about the night. A lot of trucks had these little beds in the back and if a truck driver was real nice, they'd tell us to climb back there for a couple of hours. Once, we hitched with this lady truck driver. She had the most comfortable bed I'd ever slept in.

I sat back in the booth and let my breath out real slow. With all the hitching and sleeping we'd done over the weeks, we could well be in California by now. But we were mainly traveling zigzag, trying to stay close to towns rather than getting way out there on the highway. We hitched in cars more than in trucks 'cause with cars you usually got a nice family type person. I frowned and flipped through the jukebox another time. I didn't know where we'd sleep tonight.

When Dion slipped back in the booth, I took the toothpaste from her and stuffed it in my pocket beside my own toothbrush. Dion took her book out and started reading again.

In the bathroom, I peed, then gave myself a good long hard look. My cheekbones seemed to be sticking out more than usual. My whole face looked different—older somehow. All the parts of my face together don't add up to much but separate, if I wasn't frowning, they looked fine. My shoulders made me look skinnier than I actually was, more like a boy than a girl, especially with my hair cut short. I took my flannel shirt off and tied it around my waist. Underneath, me and Dion were both wearing navy blue thermal shirts with T-shirts under them because Dion had read somewhere that layers are the best way to go if you're traveling. After I brushed my teeth and threw some warm water on my face, I checked in the mirror again. I was doing a fine job. But I needed to get us somewhere before the cold settled in.

 

When I got back to the table, the waitress was setting down tall glasses of orange juice. She gave me a long look, then pulled her lips to the side of her mouth.

“You two on the road?”

 

I swallowed, looking away from her. As long as we kept ourselves halfway clean, most people couldn't tell anything about us. But this waitress knew a whole lot of things. I could tell by the way she looked at me. Some people could look right through you and see everything you buried inside yourself.

“Yeah,” Dion said quickly. “We're on the road to see our mama at Owensboro Hospital. She just had herself a baby boy.”

The waitress gave us another long look and I could tell she didn't believe Dion.

 

“Yeah,” she said. “I was on the road to see my daddy. He'd had surgery. And my friend Hadley was going to see her sick grandma.” She smiled.

“It's the truth,” Dion whispered, her eyes narrowing.

“I know,” the waitress said. “It's always the truth, isn't it? How old are y'all anyway? Look to me about nine and eleven.”

 

“I won't see nine again,” Dion said. “Until it's a hundred and nine. And my brother probably old as you.”

The waitress smiled. I could tell she liked Dion. “A mouth like that'll get you anywhere you want to go. Thing about being on the road is, people who figure out your secret are the ones you can trust. Those people probably got a closet full of skeletons same as yours. The ones who can't figure it out are the ones you worry about.”

Dion didn't say anything.

“How long you been on your way?”

We didn't say anything. Dion took a long drink of orange juice and glared at the waitress.

“You keeping to back roads, staying away from truckers?”

 

I looked down at my hands. “Yeah.”

“Look,” the waitress whispered. “I wouldn't turn y'all in if somebody paid me. It's not like that. I was on the road a long time and I learned some things. You two might be fooling a lot of people trying to look like boys but I had the same costume so I know. You look young, so stay near young-looking places—schools and libraries and such. Don't stay any one place too long either. Keep moving.”

“We're going to see our mama,” Dion said. “She . . . had . . . herself . . . a . . . baby . . . boy! It's called plain English.”

The waitress smiled and shook her head. “Well then, you send your mama my best,” she said. “And I'll be back in a bit with your breakfasts, which are on me. You-all keep your money. Be needing it.”

After she left, Dion glared at me. “You better learn how to hold on to your lies, Lee,” she said through her teeth. “I don't care if you don't know where the hell we're going or what's gonna happen when we get there. I ain't about to spend time in anybody's orphan house or jail.”

“She's not gonna tell nobody, Dion. You heard her. She been on the road same like us. And look at her. She made it to the other side. Got herself a job and everything.”

I turned the saltshaker around and around in my hand, trying not to smile. It felt good to have someone know. Somebody who'd taken the same trip and ended up in a small diner in a little town—all right.

Three

Maybe twice in my life I've broken somebody's heart. The night we left Chauncey, I broke Marie's. I guess next to Dion, Marie's the person I love most in the world. Before Marie came along, I hadn't had me a best friend in a long time. Seemed with all our moving and all, it just didn't happen. When we lived over Che Che's I had me a friend. We was real tight for a while but then Daddy said he didn't care much for me hanging around black people. We moved soon after that. Then I just had me, Dion and Mama but nobody on the outside.

Back in Chauncey, there wasn't a whole lot of white people and the black people who lived there, well, most of them didn't care too much for white people. The white people living there were like my daddy—he don't like black people and he'll say it right out. I don't know what's worse—not liking somebody because of their race or saying it right out. Both things tear a person up inside. At Chauncey Middle School, black kids sat on one side of the cafeteria, the white kids sat on the other. Same in the classroom—you'd see the two or three white kids all huddled together. My daddy used to always say united we stand, divided we fall, and I truly think all the kids at Chauncey had daddies at home saying the same thing.

Marie had this group of black girls she hung with. They were voted Most Popular and Best Dressed and all. They just floated through the school—white kids and black kids stepping out of their way.