A Piece of Heaven (5 page)

“Hey, Ma.”

She turned. When I saw her, I felt like crying. Her face was very swollen. I went over and gave her a hug. She was wearing a green blouse that I liked, and she smelled like soap. I noticed her hair was nicely combed.

“I’ve been waiting for you, baby girl,” she said, almost in a whisper. “Where is your brother?”

“Otis couldn’t make it,” I apologized. “He had to work.”

I glanced around the room. Everything in it was white. It was nice and cool.

“You have air-conditioning!” I exclaimed.

Ma nodded. “Pretty luxurious, huh?” Her eyes were red. “Under different circumstances, it would be a nice vacation spot.”

“Does the food taste okay?” I asked, trying to sound cheerful.

“I haven’t been able to eat much.” She plucked a white tissue out of a box on the stand next to the chair.

“I got a job,” I said brightly.

“A job!” she said. “Is it a baby-sitting job?”

I smiled like the cat that had swallowed the canary. “I’m a yard helper.”

“And just what is a yard helper?” asked Ma in a nervous voice.

I perched on the edge of the bed across from her. “I’m helping a singing teacher fix up his backyard. His daughter, Brielle, is coming home and he wants everything to be perfect for her. He’s such a nice man,” I gushed. “And I think his students sing on Broadway and in the opera.”

Ma fiddled with her ring that had belonged to Grandma Dora. “Did Otis meet him? Did you tell Mrs. Brown?”

“Not yet,” I replied. I took the telephone number out of my pocket. “He said you could call him.” I held out the piece of paper.

She shook her head. “I don’t know, Haley.…”

“I have to take the job, Ma,” I pressed. “I told him already. I’m getting five dollars an hour.”

“That’s good money for a kid your age,” she admitted. “But the thought of you running all over town, while I’m in here.…” She made a helpless gesture with her hands. “Why can’t you just stay inside and read?”

“I’m not going to stay inside all day long,” I protested. “It’s summertime. This is my summer job, Ma.”

Ma slid down in her chair. She pressed her fingers into the middle of her forehead and closed her eyes hard. She stayed that way for at least five minutes, without moving a muscle. My heart started fluttering again. It was scary.

“Did you have a nervous breakdown, Ma?” I asked quietly.

Tears were rolling down her cheeks when she took her hands away. “I hope not,” she said, with her voice shaking. “The doctor is trying me on different medications.”

My stomach knotted up. “Can you try them out at home?” She shook her head. “I can’t. I can’t do that to you and Otis. Besides, I can’t handle it alone.” Ma wiped her cheeks, but the tears kept on flowing. I glanced away. I couldn’t stand watching.

“What are we supposed to do, Ma?” I whispered.

She stood up, struggling to compose herself. “Be good,” she said. She came close. She touched my hair next to my face. “Go home now. I’m not so sure that you should come back.”

“But I want to come back. Please, Ma. I’ll come tomorrow after my job,” I promised hurriedly. “My boss, Jackson, has a garden with no flowers. He wants a dirt yard, isn’t that funny?” I said with a nervous laugh.

“What he needs is flower bulbs,” she said, staring off into space. I patted her back. Why was she acting this way? It was as if my strong Ma had turned into paper.

“You’re not to come back here,” she said, turning to me abruptly. “Do you hear me? You have to let me get well.”

“But how can I talk to you?” I breathed.

“You can keep in touch by telephone,” she said. “You can call me every day. It’s the best thing, Haley.”

Then she kissed me good-bye.

I drifted out of the room and down the hallway. A knife of pain went through me. Why had this happened to my mother?

CHAPTER FOUR

Our apartment smelled like a dead rat. Otis and I looked for it everywhere, under the kitchen sink and in the closet. Finally, our noses led us to the stove.

“I think it’s in the oven,” I said squeamishly.

Otis picked up the broom and inched forward.

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of a dead rat,” I teased.

“Aren’t you?” he challenged. “Some of those rats are as big as dogs. I’ve seen them over in the vacant lot.”

“But this one is dead,” I pointed out. “If it’s dead, it can’t hurt us.”

He grabbed the handle of the oven door, and I leaped out of the way.

“Look who’s chicken now,” Otis muttered with a smirk.

A wave of stench hit us in the face.

“Something dead is in there, all right,” Otis pronounced, making a face.

I held my nose and peeked in. The dead “rat” turned out to be “dead” duck
à l’orange,
which had been rotting in the oven since the night of my birthday. Otis howled hysterically. I have to admit, I thought it was funny myself. There we were, shaking in our boots over what we thought was a ferocious rodent, when all the time it was only a helpless little duck smothered with rotten oranges. I got out a garbage bag and Otis tossed the whole thing in, even Ma’s baking pan. All the way to the garbage chute, we couldn’t stop laughing.

When I told the story to Ma on the phone that night, she didn’t think it was funny at all. In fact, it made her sadder than ever.

“Poor Haley!” she sobbed into the telephone. “Poor Otis!”

“Stop crying,” I pleaded. “We’re fine. It wasn’t a rat. It was a duck.”

“But that was your birthday duck!” she moaned. She cried some more.

It was almost as if Ma was looking for things to be upset about. Still, every evening I called her.

“Otis and I cooked some beans,” I told her on the telephone once. She always wanted to know what we ate.

“Did you soak them first?” she asked quietly.

“Nope. But we cooked them for seven hours.”

I heard her sigh.

“Don’t worry, Ma. They tasted good. The only problem was that they kept on expanding. First we put them into a little pot, but then we had to find a pot that was bigger. The same thing happened to the rice. I never knew how much rice and beans expand when you cook them.” I giggled. “Food was everywhere.”

“What do you mean?” she asked in alarm.

“Both of the pots boiled over, even the big ones. The rice and beans just wouldn’t stop cooking. It was like the story of the porridge.”

“Porridge?” she sounded confused. “You ate cereal with rice and beans?”

“No, Ma,” I pressed, “the story of the porridge in
Grimms’.
You used to read it to me,” I reminded her. “The porridge filled up the whole town, so everyone had to eat their way out?”

“This isn’t a fairy tale,” she said with a whimper. “I don’t want to hear this.”

“We ended up throwing most of it out, anyway,” I said quietly.

She cleared her throat. “Where was Mrs. Brown?”

“At home watching television.”

“Does she ever bring you anything for dinner?” Ma asked helplessly.

“She brought us some turnip greens and ham hocks. Don’t worry, Ma, we aren’t starving.”

Ma began to wail. “I hate those fatty ham hocks!”

She cried and cried, so I finally hung up.

If I mentioned Otis on the telephone, that was a sure cue for her to break up. But Ma always wanted to hear about him.

“Where’s your brother? What is he up to?” she asked one night.

“He leaves early every morning and travels around with his buddy Reggie.”

She drew in a breath. “Where does he go?”

“I don’t know. He and his partner set up their incense stand down in the subway. He always comes home after dark.”

“That boy…he’d better not be up to anything,” she muttered. “I’ve got to get home to check up on him.”

“You’re coming home?” I asked. “When?”

“I’m not sure,” she answered. “The doctor is trying to adjust the medication.” Her voice drifted off.

I pressed my ear to the phone. She was trying to hold it in this time, but I could still hear her crying softly.

She even cried when I told her about my blister! “I was lifting rocks in Jackson’s yard,” I reported. “I got a big blister on one of my pinkies.”

Ma burst into tears like a baby.

“Snap out of it, Ma,” I said, losing my patience. “It wasn’t
your
blister, it was
my
blister. All I needed was a little bandage.”

Otis never talked to Ma himself, but I reported it all to him faithfully.

“If she doesn’t stop all that crying, she might go blind,” my brother said, pacing the floor.

“People don’t go blind from crying,” I told him. “But she might feel better if you called her.”

“Not until she acts like herself again,” declared Otis. “Anyway, she’ll be nagging me.”

Even though I knew that people don’t go blind from crying, I wasn’t so sure they might not mentally drown. It was as if Ma had fallen into a well, a well of tears that she couldn’t climb out of. Her voice had such a faraway sound! When we talked on the phone, I felt as if I were calling down the well to her. If I had had long braids, like Rapunzel, I could have made a ladder for Ma to climb up on. But she wasn’t in a well, and I didn’t have braids, and if I had thrown my braids down to Ma, she would probably have pulled me in with her. I wondered if depression was catching. Sometimes after I talked with her, I felt blue, too. Not exactly as if I were in a well, more as if I were in a moat or a chilly bog.…

If talking to Ma made me feel bog-like, working for Jackson was like standing on hot, dry land. I never imagined how hard it would be to move a door. There were eight of them stacked up in the yard. It took me one whole morning to move them. Jackson had said that he would help during breaks between singing students, but I wanted to do it alone to surprise him. The hardest part was figuring out how. They were too heavy to lift, that’s for sure. So I had to push each one a little at a time off the top of the stack, and then when I had just enough door hanging over one side, I would tilt it so that it was standing straight up. Then I wiggled it toward the fence, where I would rest it at an angle. I moved eight doors that way and lined them up. But the doors had to be carried a lot farther than that. Jackson had a rubbish company coming at the end of the week. The company had agreed to pick up the doors and some other stuff, but the things had to be out front. I didn’t have to carry the doors down the stone stairs, but I still had to get them along the side of the house somehow. I found the answer in the shed: an old pair of steel roller skates, a board, a hammer, nails, and some wire. I punched some holes into the board with the hammer and nails and placed the roller skates beneath it. Then I threaded the wire through the holes and around the skates, fastening them on to make a rolling platform. I needed a rope to pull it with, but I settled for a piece of burlap bag, which I nailed onto the front. Then, one at a time, I tilted the doors onto the platform and pulled them around the house and out front.

Meanwhile, through the open windows, I could hear Jackson’s students singing. Not all of Jackson’s students had voices as good as Win’s, the boy with the deep voice that I’d heard a few days before. One boy singing the scales couldn’t seem to find the right note. A girl who sang well low cracked on the high parts. Two students sounded okay, but I couldn’t understand the words to their songs. I think that they were in Spanish or Italian. When I sneaked a few peeks through the glass doors, everybody looked cheerful, even the ones who’d messed up.

Around noon, Jackson came out for a break. I stood in the middle of the yard, smiling. “What have you done?” he asked, glancing around. “Something’s different.”

“The doors are gone,” I announced.

“How?” he asked in surprise.

I pointed to my platform.

“You made a moving dolly,” he exclaimed. “Amazing!”

“I told you I took wood shop.”

“Great job,” said Jackson. “Those doors weigh a ton. How about a break?”

I went inside and washed my hands in the kitchen while he made us some sandwiches.

“How’s that blister?” he asked.

“Almost gone,” I said, drying my finger gingerly.

He smiled and shook his head. “I had my doubts about whether you’d be able to handle this job. You’re pretty strong.”

“My arms and back are sore,” I admitted.

“Try soaking in a hot bath tonight,” he suggested.

He spread some peanut butter on four slices of bread. I opened the refrigerator and took out some milk. I’d only worked there for a little while, but I already felt at home.

“Your mom called me last night,” said Jackson, getting me a glass.

I lifted an eyebrow. I hoped that she hadn’t been crying. “Sorry it took her so long,” I apologized.

He peered at me. “I didn’t know that she was in the hospital.”

“She went in kind of suddenly,” I muttered. “I didn’t think it mattered, so I didn’t bring it up.”

“Of course it doesn’t matter, as far as your working for me is concerned,” he said, plopping the sandwiches onto a plate. “I just hope that your mother’s illness isn’t too serious.”

I straightened my shoulders. “She’ll be home soon. She’s just a little depressed.”

“Are you staying with a relative?” he asked.

“My brother, Otis. He’s an entrepreneur.”

He picked up the plate. “Your mother must be very proud. She’s got two industrious kids.”

“Guess so,” I muttered, taking a sip of my milk.

“This summer, Brielle is working on a movie set,” Jackson said. “She wants to be a filmmaker someday.”

My eyes popped. “Wow, she must be creative.”

“She always was,” he said. “You’re pretty creative yourself, I bet.”

We went out to the yard. Jackson managed to locate another decrepit lawn chair in the shed to match the one that was already out. We sat down to eat.

Jackson glanced around the yard. “You’ve really made some headway, Haley. I feel kind of guilty spending the days indoors teaching, while you’re slugging away at it out here.”

“I like seeing the fruits of my labor,” I said, munching my sandwich.

Jackson chuckled. “That dolly you built was clever. So, is woodworking one of your hobbies?”

I rolled my eyes. “I haven’t done very much outside of school. My main hobby is reading.”

“What kinds of things do you like to read?” he asked.

My neck got hot. I figured that Jackson liked to read himself, since he had a ton of books. “I like to read fairy tales,” I confessed. I waited for a weird look.

“I like them, too,” he said brightly.

“You’re kidding!” I exclaimed. “People are supposed to outgrow fairy tales. My mother keeps waiting for me to read older books. She even gave me this,” I said, pulling out my thesaurus.

“A thesaurus! How great!”

“Actually, I love it myself,” I said. “I have a thing for interesting words. My brother hates it. He thinks I’m too loquacious, especially when I’m insulting him.”

Jackson’s eyes twinkled. “What’s your brother’s name again?”

“Otis.”

“Like Otis Redding?”

I nodded. Ma told me that Dad had dreamed up Otis’s name.

“How old is your brother?” asked Jackson.

“Fifteen.”

He glanced at me sharply. “And you’re staying by yourselves while your mother is in the hospital?”

I shrugged. “We can manage. We’ve got a neighbor, Mrs. Brown, who checks in on us.”

“I guess Otis could handle pretty much anything that arises,” Jackson commented. “It’s amazing how capable some fifteen-year-olds are these days.”

I giggled. “I’m not sure that
capable
is exactly the adjective I’d use for my brother. He
can
be enterprising,” I added, not wanting to give Otis a bad name.

“I don’t want to butt in, but if I can ever do anything…”

I nodded. “Thanks. But we’ll be okay.”

Jackson gave me a thoughtful smile. “I’ll bet you anything that you’re the capable one in your family.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’ve let a few pots boil over on the stove since Ma’s been gone.”

He chuckled. “Why worry about being a good cook, when you can build a moving dolly? I bet you can even sing,” he said, popping down the last of his sandwich.

“I sing alto in the school chorus,” I volunteered, “but most of all, I like listening to music. I love to listen to your students while I work.”

“Some of my students are just beginners,” he said. “This morning you heard some pretty unpolished stuff. But it’s amazing what they’ll sound like in a year or so.”

“When you were playing the piano the first day I came, I got goose bumps on my arms,” I blurted out. “I could listen to that forever.”

“There you go, complimenting me again,” he said modestly. “Being able to listen is a gift, too. Not everyone can respond deeply to music.” He got up and stretched. “What an improvement, having those doors out of the way! Sorry I wasn’t able to help you.”

“I was fine by myself,” I said staunchly.

“I’m sure you were,” said Jackson. A smile flitted across his lips. “I’ve been dreaming of the little party I’m planning for Brielle out here. Looks like it might happen.”

“Is it her birthday?” I asked curiously.

“No, her birthday is in April.” He touched one of the leaves on the tree. “This is more of a homecoming celebration.”

I imagined a tall, pretty girl with slicked-back hair walking into the yard, carrying a movie camera. Brielle and Jackson would hug each other, and then she’d make a movie starring her father. The movie set would be a garden with green grass and flowers, a garden that I had created in the yard! Though Jackson and Brielle wouldn’t see me, I’d be there, too, hiding behind the tree, perhaps.

“When my mother comes home, I think I’ll give her a homecoming party, too,” I piped up.

“That’s a wonderful idea,” said Jackson. “I’ve always loved giving parties.”

The doorbell rang.

“Back to work!” he exclaimed, hurrying away. “One of my older students.”