A Smidgen of Sky (9 page)

I nodded to show Mama I understood, but I knew Ginger didn't think Tina was perfect. Especially not after finding that letter in her daddy's box. “So is he not gonna let the two of them talk?”

“I convinced him he ought to.”

“Is that what you were fighting about?”

“We weren't fighting, Piper Lee. I was just trying to help him see that if he doesn't allow Ginger to talk to her mama, she'll surely resent him for it.”

Mama smiled as if everything were just fine, but once we got home, she paced from one part of the house to another. She puttered around in the bathroom for a bit, then gazed out the kitchen window for a while, then finally sat down to fix a hole in one of the aprons she wore at work.

I spread some newspaper on the kitchen table and brought out my model ARV Super2. If I could get the wheels assembled, I'd finally be to the painting stage. But some of the parts were so tiny, they were almost impossible to work with. I used Mama's tweezers to lift a tire and dropped on a single drip of glue, but when I tried to fix it in place, it slipped free and landed on the newspaper. I grabbed it up quick before it could stick and tried again—and again. I wished I'd stuck with the level 3 models instead of convincing Mama I was ready for a level 4.

“I'm thinking now that maybe we shouldn't have left,” Mama announced out of the blue.

“Why's that?”

“I just feel funny about walking out, leaving Ginger like I did. I think she needed me to stay.”

“She's got Ben there.”

“I know. There's just times when a girl needs a mama around.”

Hot pressure flowed down from the top of my head. “You talk like you're her real one.”

Her sharp look shamed me. “No, Piper Lee, I'm not her mother from birth. But in this past year alone I've been more of a mama to her than Tina ever has. Most any woman can carry a baby inside her, but it's the one who loves you and tries to raise you up right that makes a real parent. You remember that.”

I tried to swallow, but my throat felt all closed up, as if it were full of model glue.

 

T
HE NEXT MORNING
after breakfast Miss Claudia called me over and asked if I'd like to earn a few dollars. She led me into her bedroom and pointed to a huge plastic flowerpot full to the brim with pennies.

“Wow, Miss Claudia, how long have you been saving these?”

“A long while now. I've no idea how many there are, but if you roll them for me, I'll give you twenty percent of the total.”

I stared at the pot and mulled things over for a minute. Rolling that many pennies would take forever and a day, but then I remembered the sonic boom simulator ride at the air show. I had three dollars saved up—surely there were enough pennies to earn me the other four dollars I needed. “Yes, ma'am,” I said. “I'll do it.”

Miss Claudia clapped her hands like a little kid getting a present and said, “Well, bless your heart.” She lifted the edge of the quilt hanging over her bed. “There's a whole sack of penny rolls under the bed here. Do you mind savin' my old knees and getting them for me?”

I groped around in the dark until I found the paper bag. It was so coated with dust that it made me sneeze. I dumped a bunch of penny rolls out onto the carpet and pushed the bag back under the bed.

“Jus' holler if you need me,” Miss Claudia said. “I got some kitchen towels I'm making for your mama, to go along with the potholders. They're just the cutest things—red and green like a watermelon.”

Her saying “watermelon” made me think about Ginger dropping her wedge on account of the hornets. I wished I could go just one single day without thinking about her, or Ben, or the wedding. I stacked pennies into little towers of ten and fretted over Operation Finding Tina. I didn't know what the next step should be, or if there even
was
a next step.

I'd piled thirty-four penny rolls into a pyramid when Mama stopped by to tell me she was headed to work. She paused out in the living room to talk with Miss Claudia, and after a bit I noticed she'd dropped her voice down low. I crawled over to the doorway.

“ . . . after four years, just out of the blue,” Mama said.

“Well, I'll be hog-wallered,” Miss Claudia said. “What could she be thinking?”

“Maybe it's some sort of control issue. She wouldn't tell Ben how she knew about the wedding. Just said she knew more about things than he thought.”

I went limp as a dishrag with relief. Ben had talked with Tina and she hadn't tattled on me. Maybe she wouldn't. Maybe she liked making Ben puzzle over the mystery.

“I surely wouldn't worry too much over it,” Miss Claudia said. “I just don't see how that girl would have a leg to stand on after walking out the way she did.”

“You wouldn't think,” Mama said. “But I'm afraid she walked out because of Ginger, not Ben. I think she loved him.”

“Well, surely she doesn't think she can waltz back in and pick up right where she left off?”

“No, Ben set her pretty straight on that. But she could still cause trouble for us if she wants.”

“You know what that girl's problem is, don't you?” Miss Claudia said. “Jealousy. Pure and simple.”

“I think so, too. I'm just praying Ginger doesn't get hurt over it.”

“Now, that little girl is one hundred percent Ben's, and her mama knows it.”

“Maybe,” Mama said. “But you know how things work nowadays. She could demand visitation, maybe even sue for custody.”

Goose bumps popped up all over my arms. What if Tina tried to take Ginger away from Ben? Never in a million years would I have thought up such a thing.

Miss Claudia heaved a big grumble of a sigh. “Well, it's like the Good Book says, Heather: ‘Each day is sufficient for its own badness.' So don't fret too much about what could happen when it likely won't happen at all.”

“Course you're right,” Mama said, and I could tell she was smiling. “And now I better skedaddle 'fore I make myself late. You know, I do so appreciate all your help with Piper Lee while I'm at work.”

“My help? Why, she's the one in there helpin' me right now.”

“Bye again, Piper Lee,” Mama called.

I skittered back to the middle of the room. “Bye, Mama.”

I was all in a flap after that. I kept losing track of my counting and had to start over. I finally stretched out on my back across Miss Claudia's carpet and closed my eyes for a minute to get my head to stop spinning. I'd been so scared to call Tina, not knowing how she might react. Never once had I thought she might get all jealous and riled up.

A shiver passed through me when I recalled the Real Investigations website. Deep down, I didn't really expect much to come of it, but what if I was wrong—again? Right then I started wishing I'd given things a bit more thought before posting Daddy's story for all the world to see.

The soft shuffle of footsteps made me spring up before Miss Claudia could come in and catch me flopped over. She brought me a bologna sandwich and a dish of peach cobbler and praised all my hard work with the pennies. I finished counting a couple hours later with a grand total of eighty-nine penny rolls. I set aside the twenty Miss Claudia told me to keep for myself and stacked the rest back in the flowerpot. I hoped they each had fifty cents, but I wouldn't have staked my life on it.

 

That evening Mama brought home some leftover chicken and pasta from the Black-eyed Pea. After eating, we headed back over to Ben and Ginger's. I wanted to go about as badly as I wanted a tooth pulled, but I knew there wasn't much point in saying that out loud.

When we pulled into the yard, Ben came through the front door with two bottles of beer and set them on the porch railing. I figured that was a pretty clear sign he and Mama were gonna sit on the porch swing and talk, so I traipsed around to find Ginger in the back. She was bouncing on the trampoline, waving purple and white pompoms over her head and wearing one of those short belly shirts that Ben didn't approve of. She looked as cheerful as a cow in clover.

“Hey, Piper Lee, guess what?”

I kicked off my flip-flops and climbed onto the trampoline. “You got to talk to your mama.”

“I did, for a whole half hour.” She dropped beside me with so much force, I had to brace my arms to keep from being flipped over. “She's taking classes to be a travel agent, and once she's done, she'll be able to fly places for free.”

“I'll be able to fly places for free someday, too,” I said. “In my very own plane. So what else you talk about?”

“She just moved into a new apartment not too long ago—a real nice one with a swimming pool and a tennis court.”

“How come she left the South? Did you ask her that?”

Ginger shrugged. “Wasn't from here to begin with. Daddy says she grew up in Washington State—must be why she talks funny.”

“So did you ask how come she never calls or anything?”

Her smile faded a little. “We didn't talk about that. She said she thinks about me a lot, though, and she's gonna call more often now. In fact, she says she's gonna call again tomorrow night.”

“What'd your daddy say about that?”

“He don't like it much. He's probably over there tellin' your mama all about it now.”

I glanced over toward the house. “Wanna go listen?”

She shook her head. “Probably get licked if we get caught. Daddy's been all bent out of shape since Mama left the message on the machine.” She lowered her voice a notch. “It's almost like he's mad at me.”

“Nah. He just don't like your mama callin' out of the blue like she did.”

“She has a right to call, to talk to me anytime she wants.”

“Mama thinks she's just jealous.”

The look on Ginger's face made me want to grab those words and stuff them back into my mouth.

“Say what, Piper?”

“Nothing much. She just thought that, well, your mama calling real sudden-like must have to do with your daddy getting married again.”

“That just gave her an excuse to call. She really called 'cause she was thinking 'bout me. You even heard her say it on the machine the other night.”

“I know,” I said. “It's just that if she misses you so much, why'd she wait till now to come back in the picture?”

“I don't know,” Ginger said. “I told you we didn't talk about that. Besides, haven't you ever done something you wish you hadn't? You don't want to talk about it, and you don't want other people to talk about it either, right? So why would I go and make her feel all bad about something she already feels bad about?”

“Okay, okay. Don't go getting all riled up about it.”

Her bottom lip trembled. “I'm not. But you don't know what it's like, Piper Lee.”

“What what's like?”

“To go your whole life thinking your mama don't care about you, and then to find out that maybe she does after all, but then to still have people telling you that she don't.”

I didn't feel much bigger than a June bug right then. “Sorry,” I whispered. “I didn't mean it like that.”

Ginger barely talked to me the rest of the evening. She said, “Pass me a spoon, please,” when we went inside to make root-beer floats, and she said, “Bye,” when Mama and I walked out the door. Those six words—that was it. I couldn't really blame her—I didn't feel much like talking to me either.

 

M
Y NEXT CHANCE
to sneak away to the library came Thursday after Mama left for work. I waited till Miss Claudia was busy slicing peaches for her next batch of cobbler and then asked if I could go look for a book on model airplanes.

“As long as you promise to hurry on back,” she said.

I headed for the library, trying not to get my hopes up so as to save myself the disappointment. But I still couldn't help feeling all tingly when I asked to use a computer. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people could have seen my post. Surely somebody knew something.