The Junction of Sunshine and Lucky (7 page)

“Lexie,” I call during our morning recess the next day. I can tell, from the way her walk hesitates, that she's heard her name. I can tell, too, from the way that she links her arm with Victoria's and quickens her pace, that she's ignoring me.

The way that she's racing to get away from me rips me apart, like I'm being attacked by a vicious dog.

“Lexie,” I repeat, louder this time, rushing to catch up to her. Harold and Irma Jean are with me, working so hard to keep up, the toes of their sneakers take a couple of bites out of my heels.

We're running so fast that the Halloween decorations on Dickerson's classroom windows fly past like the pages in an old flip book.
“Lexie!”
I shout so loud that everyone at the swing set and the teeter-totters turn toward me.

Their stares finally get her to turn around. “What?” she hisses. She eyes Victoria and shrugs, as if to tell her that she certainly hasn't done anything to encourage me to keep following after her.

“I-” I stutter, trying to remember what I was going to say. “I . . .” But my words get stuck in the back of my throat as I stare into her face, which looks upset and maybe even a little irritated. This is a face you turn toward a pesky little brother, not a face for a best friend.

How is it that I'm nervous trying to get Lexie's attention? How is it that I annoy her so much—or is it that I embarrass her? Does the fact that we were friends embarrass her now? The way her eyes dart back and forth makes me think she doesn't want anyone to pay much attention to the fact that we're talking.

“I wanted to invite you over. Both of you,” I say, trying to make my voice sound as smooth as river rock, and not nervous at all.

“I don't think—” Lexie starts, but I don't let her get the whole answer out.

“To see our house,” I insist. “Gus and I are working on it, you know. And Irma Jean is putting up new curtains in her front window, and Harold and his dad are working on their front yard.”

Lexie is still shaking her head. It hits me that she's so wrapped up in Victoria that she wants to agree with her on everything. So if I can convince
Victoria
to come over, Lexie will change her mind, too.

“Bring your camera,” I tell Victoria. “As a junior member of the House Beautification Committee, you could take photos of our improvements, and bring them back for the other members to see. I bet they'd all really appreciate that.”

This sort of swells Victoria up, like she's a puffer fish ready to explode.

“Nice,” Weird Harold hisses in my ear. “Great strategy.”

“We should go,” Victoria tells Lexie. “When?” she asks, looking at me.

“A week from Friday,” I say.

When Lexie nods an
okay,
I see some sort of flicker in her eyes. She looks like she's about to tell me something—maybe even a secret, judging by the way she starts to lean in.

Instead, Victoria grabs Lexie's arm and starts to haul her away as she announces, with a voice as forceful as a swift kick, “We'll be there.”

“Dear Mom,” I write later that day, sitting cross-legged on the front walk of Dickerson. “I know you remember the house where Gus and I live. Gus still has the notches in the kitchen where he used his pocketknife to cut into the wall, to show how much you grew. The notches aren't real sharp anymore, especially the ones at the bottom, because I like to run my fingers over where you used to stand. I smoothed them out pretty good.

“Other things have changed, not on the inside, but the outside. I bet if you'd come back and see it, you'd be so happy, your cheeks would ache from smiling.

“I'm having an open house a week from Friday, and I wish you'd be there.” It's the first time I've ever asked Mom straight-out to come home.

I'm still staring down at my words, daydreaming about the pride that will wash over Mom's face as she pulls to a stop in front of our house, when Old Glory starts honking like crazy. I know it's her—I can recognize Old Glory's voice as easily as I recognize Gus's. I fold my letter up in thirds real quick and slip it into my jacket pocket.

As Irma Jean and Harold climb into the cab, I realize that Gus has filled the bed of Old Glory with cans of paint. There must be fifty of them back there, all in different shades: lavender and sage and pumpkin and lemon and scarlet and navy and dinosaur green, and that's only for starters. As many colors as there are in a crayon box, it looks like—maybe more.

“Where'd you get all that?” I ask.

“From the hazardous waste disposal,” Gus says. “Can you believe they were free?”

“Hazardous waste?” I say through a crinkle in my face. “Isn't that for dangerous stuff? Toxic stuff?”

“You can't throw away wet paint,” Gus says. “So when construction companies wind up with too much of a certain color, they drop it off at hazardous waste. The cans are ours for the taking!”

“What do you think you'll do with it?” Irma Jean asks.

“The shutters,” I say, getting so excited, my insides burn. “We can paint each shutter a different color—the same way the panes in the windows are all different colors! Oooh—and maybe the railing—and the porch swing—and the front door—the garage door—the mailbox!”

Gus laughs. “Now, now,” he says. “We'll have to see how much paint we really have in all those cans first.”

We drive home as quick as Old Glory can manage. We drop off Weird Harold, who's anxious to get started on his own projects.

Irma Jean needs some sort of supply from Gus before she can race up her own front steps. I can't quite imagine what Gus could have that would help her with curtains, but while I wait for him to come back, I climb into Old Glory's bed so I can get a better look at all our paint.

I'm picking up cans to read the names of the colors when I hear the rustle from the pocket of my jean jacket—the letter I just wrote to Mom.

“Hey, Gus,” I say, after Irma Jean goes home and he comes back out of the garage, carrying brushes and a tarp. I lean over the side of Old Glory's bed to hand him my letter.

He darkens right up when he realizes what I've given him.

In not sure why, though. I've been writing to Mom ever since I could hold a pencil. Since Mom sends presents for Christmas and my birthday every year, Gus must know her address. I figure even if
I've
never seen a return address on any of my presents, it had to have been on the boxes somewhere in order for them to get to me. So every time I write a new letter, I give it to Gus, and he says he'll take care of it. I've never gotten an answer from Mom, but I've never quit trying, either.

Every once in a while, I even send her a gift. Nothing fancy—mostly school pictures or something little, like a hankie with her initial or a pretty pocket mirror I bought with my allowance. Just something to let her know I've been thinking about her.

“I thought you weren't doing that anymore,” he says quietly.

“Writing to Mom?” I say. “Of course I am. What would she think when she keeps sending me presents, and I don't write to her at all?”

He shakes his head. “It's just been a while since you've given me one of your letters. That's all,” he says, sliding it out of my hand. “I'll be sure to send it for you.”

A couple of days later, I'm standing in the middle of the street eyeballing our work when Ms. Dillbeck pops out of nowhere to block the sun with her eggplant body.

“I had to come get a closer look,” Ms. Dillbeck says. “You and Gus sure have been working up a storm.”

I nod, staring at the shutters that are all a different color and the rainbow that swirls around the porch railing. “I'm not exactly the best artist in the world,” I tell her. “In art class, colored pencils and paintbrushes always feel about as natural to me as chopsticks. But I figured I could paint up the front of my house.
That
shouldn't really take any special talent. Still,” I say as I look up into Ms. Dillbeck's face, “something's missing.”

Behind Ms. Dillbeck's shoulder, the venetian blinds are parted in Mrs. Shoemacker's house. Mrs. Shoemacker's fingers hold the slats open, and her face is pressed into the space between them. When she realizes I'm looking right at her, she lets go of the blinds in a quick snap that makes me flinch.

“I really like your flower boxes,” Ms. Dillbeck says, drawing my attention away from Mrs. Shoemacker's house as she points to the metal iris and marigolds and long strands of grass that Gus and I made from all the objects in Burton's boxes.

I shake my head. “I'm having people over soon, and the house needs to be—
more
.” My stomach falls down between my knees as I stare. “I wanted to fix the place up,” I admit, “but I also wanted the house to say something. About me and Gus.”

“Like what?”

I sigh. “First, it was that I wanted to show we're not shabby. Now, though—‘not shabby' doesn't seem right. I mean, me and Gus—we're a lot more than that. Right?”

“So you don't just want to patch up a few rotten spots in boards,” Ms. Dillbeck says. “You want to talk with your renovations. Tell a story.”

I nod, eagerly, because somehow, Ms. Dillbeck seems to know exactly what's in my heart. “A story about who Gus and I are,” I say, spilling over with excitement. Talking about it makes it all clear:
I want the outside of the house to say something about who we are.

“Get your wagon,” Ms. Dillbeck announces. “I've got something for you.”

Okay, so I've lived in Serendipity Place my entire life. But it's not like I've spent a hundred hours inside every one of these houses. If somebody blindfolded me, shoved me into Ms. Dillbeck's living room, and yanked the blindfold off, I'd have no idea where I was standing. So I don't know what to expect as I grab the handle of my wagon and follow after her.

When I step inside her front hall, I'm surrounded by drawings, every single one of them framed.

“You must have a lot of kids,” I say, pointing at the pictures.

“My nephew sent those,” Ms. Dillbeck says.

“He must draw an awful lot,” I say. “What grade is he in?”

“He's grown now.”

“And he still draws like that?” I ask. Because the pictures on her wall don't look like anything an adult has done. They look more like something that came out of a kindergarten art class.

Ms. Dillbeck laughs softly. “He sent them. He didn't draw them.”

Now I'm really confused. I want to ask why her nephew would have taken all that time to send her those pictures he didn't even draw—and why she would frame them. Frames, I figure, are for really special things.

But before I can say anything, she leads me into her old sunroom. The autumn sun streams into the room in beams that crisscross through the screen. Sort of looks like the sunlight's been cross-stitched here.

The insides of an old cardboard box rattle and clink as Ms. Dillbeck slides it out from under a table. When it gets close enough for me to look inside, I see a bunch of old broken pottery—cups and vases, their smooth glazes sparkling in the cross-stitched sunlight.

“This your nephew's, too?” I ask.

She nods. “He tried his hand at pottery for a while, but it turned out that he was better at buying art than making it.”

She lifts a strange mug that's caved in on one side. She turns it over in her hand, eyeing the clumps of hardened clay that rise and fall around the lip like the mountains in the relief maps at school.

“Look at this silly old cup,” she tells me. “I always loved it because my nephew made it. But it's not like I can drink out of it.”

“You're giving me that for my house?” I ask, feeling bubbles of excitement rise inside me.

“I know you can figure out how to make this talk for you,” she says with a wink, just before she puts the mug back and helps me hoist the box of pottery into my wagon.

“The posts, Gus,” I say, pointing at the simple, square poles that stretch from the floor of our porch to hold up our roof. “We could use Ms. Dillbeck's pottery to fix up the old posts, like we used the glass on the front walk.”

Gus takes Ms. Dillbeck's pieces into the back shed, where he puts them into an old pillowcase and smacks them with a hammer—not hard enough to turn them into dust. Just enough to break the old cups and half-finished vases into chunks the size of a quarter. He mixes up some QUIKRETE—thicker than before—and I come along with the pieces of pottery, squishing them into the gloppy mixture as far up as I can reach. I haul a small step stool out of the garage and use it to reach the middle sections of the porch posts. For the highest sections, Gus plants his ladder and I pass him bits of pottery, telling him exactly where I want each piece to go.

Gus and I are in the middle of the front yard examining our work when I hear footsteps. I look up as Weird Harold joins us, wearing a cap that reads
WHAT NOW?

“What do you think?” I ask, pointing. The concrete and pottery give the posts a thick, rough, almost dangerous feel—like the skin on the back of an iguana.

“Ms. Dillbeck's pottery, right?” he says, his crooked teeth flashing through his grin.

Part of me wonders how he knows about Ms. Dillbeck's pottery, while the other part is used to Weird Harold being able to see and know everything, like the cameras inside the door at Walmart.

So I nod, feeling pride start to leak out of my pores. “Think Victoria will like it?”

Instead of answering, Harold says, “I have something I want to show you.”

He hurries across the yard, disappearing around the corner of my house.

The Bradshaw backyard almost looks like a farm, with all the rows of vegetables and the tiny signs marking what's growing where: turnips and pumpkins and beets and eggplant. The picnic tables have a few already picked zucchini spread out on them. I love the look all the rows of green shoots give the backyard—and the earthy smell of so many plants.

Harold points to his dad, who's tugging at a tarp that's draped over some large mound beside the back fence. The tarp makes an awful rattling noise, like a whole class of kids erupting into a coughing fit. As we walk closer, Harold's dad peels the tarp all the way back, to reveal a heap of metal that actually
looks
sick—all rusted and rotted. “For you,” his dad says. “Our Monte Carlo.”

“But what if you ever need it?” I blurt. No one's ever given me something so big before—a gift I could literally get crushed beneath. “You might not be able to ride your bike sometime—”

“I can't drive it anymore,” Mr. Bradshaw admits. “It's been parked out here so long, the tires have rotted. The fluids inside have turned to acid and started to eat through the hoses. It's rusted pretty bad. Turns out there's only so much a few tarps can do to protect a car.”

“We might have been able to sell it,” Harold admits quietly, “if we'd put it on blocks in a garage like we should have. But now, it's not worth anything.”

“When I first parked this car out here, I wasn't really sure how much I'd wind up using my bike,” Mr. Bradshaw explains. “I parked it and started using the bike to save money on gas. Figured that I could keep this old car just in case, but—it's been so long since I've driven it, it's fallen apart. I'd started to think the thing was completely useless. Until you started working on your house.”

“For the house,” I repeat, shocked.

Mr. Bradshaw shakes his head sadly as he stares at his car. “I wish I could make the thing move again,” he admits. “That's what a car is for, isn't it? Moving?”

That gives me an idea.

“Gus!” I shout, racing toward the front of my house. “Gus! Wait till you see this!”