All for One (18 page)

Her feet carried her to it, and her hands held the slowly opening fold of lined white pages over the top of the container, a white plastic bag drooling over its top edge. Held the pages there for a second, then another, then another, until the seconds became a half a minute, and a half a minute became a minute, and all she could do was breath, and look at the compressed pages, the silly story her Bryce had written, and tell her hands to spread, to pull apart and let what they held fall into the trash. Into the trash. To be gone. Gone.

But her hands did not part. Instead they drew the pages away from the waste basket, and one of them slipped the small packet into the front pocket of her jeans.

Before the girls woke from their afternoon nap she’d hide the pages in a dresser drawer beneath her red satin teddy.

Fifteen

There was no sense in taking homework home if you could get it done at school. That had been Jeff Bernstein’s personal credo regarding the bane of all schoolchildren since his third grade year. If there was time at the end of the day, if everything else was done, then crack open that book— science, in this case —and free up some time for the rest of the day and night.

And so he had the planets listed, and had the satellites (some people called them moons, but the knowledgeable writers of
Our Universe
said most emphatically that the proper term was satellites) matched properly to their hosts all the way up to Jupiter. He would surely have no homework
this
weekend, he was convinced, when a finger gently tapped him on the shoulder.

He looked up and saw Miss Austin standing behind him. She was eyeing
Our Universe
suspiciously.

“I have all my other work done,” Jeff said, smiling, pleased.

“Do you?” Mary asked, in that way that suggested the proper answer, the only answer, should be ‘no’.

Jeff hesitated for a moment as he thought. “I did the math problems with the decimals, and page forty-four in the workbook.”

Mary nodded. “But you are forgetting something...”

I am?
Jeff thought, bewildered, a state that lasted only until Miss Austin glanced over her shoulder at the suggestion box. “Oh.”

“It is Friday, Mr. Secretary,” Mary said, and tossed her head toward the box, giving her student a quiet
‘Get to it’.

Jeff closed
Our Universe
on the work he’d now have to do over the weekend and weaved through the desks toward the suggestion box. Miss Austin smiled at him and sat at her desk. He took the suggestion box to the group work table at the back of the room and removed its lid as he sat down, something between a frown and a scowl fixed to his expression.

This was not one of the better parts of being class secretary. Being a ‘secretary’ might be considered bad in itself if one were a sixth grade boy, but it was just the station in the hierarchy of power that Jeff liked. Being in the know without being in charge. In on it all without too much responsibility. His two cents’ worth was worth just about that, and that was okay with him. Hell, it was damn dandy. Except at times like these.

Times like these. Fridays. Missing the previous one had almost led him to neglect
this
weekly duty of the class secretary. Going through the suggestion box, noting the thoughts, criticisms, or ‘brilliant’ suggestions of his classmates, dropped anonymously into the converted shoebox.

Anonymous, they ought to be glad, Jeff thought as he dumped the folded slips of paper on the table. Six, no seven this week. Not too many. Not too many stupid ones, he actually thought. For sixth graders his classmates— well, most of them —could be pretty big numbnuts. Anonymous numbnuts, at least.

He checked the time on the wall clock and, with just ten minutes left in the day, pulled a paper and pencil from the table’s material tray and told himself to get
this
done before the bell.

The first slip of paper he unfolded and stared at for a moment before shaking his head. He caught himself, and looked up to make sure Miss Austin hadn’t seen him.
‘Jeff, a world with only one person’s ideas would be just a one-person world,’
she had told him once, about a month into fifth grade when he called Chris Bickle’s suggestion that the class should have a motto a ‘stupid waste of breath’. She said something else right after that, something that made him understand why, just maybe, he had always had such a hard time making and keeping many friends. Good friends.
‘And a one-person world is not a place others choose to frequent.’

Miss Austin hadn’t seen him, he noticed. She was busy with PJ, handing her a stack of papers, probably the week’s spelling tests to be corrected over the weekend. There was no extra credit in it, but then PJ sometimes just liked being helpful. That was a change, and it sure was a far cry from third grade when she had knocked his two front teeth out for telling her that there was a hole in the seat of her overalls. Just
telling
, not even making fun of. Things sure had changed, Jeff thought.

Most things, he corrected himself, and looked back at the slip of paper, making a stab at disinterest but settling for a mostly covert roll of his eyes. No name was written on the slip, but Jeff knew its creator. Who else but Chris Bickle would write,
I think the motto for next year should be UP UP AND AWAY?

Jeff folded the slip in half and put it aside without even noting its contents. Chris Bickle had a new suggestion every week. And this was probably the thing he had gotten up for during the class meeting on Monday. Okay, Jeff thought, maybe it wasn’t a waste of breath (or ink, in this case), but, jeez, sometimes a lamehead was a lamehead, and you just
had
to call it that. Or just
think
it. Privately, of course.

Next ‘brilliant’ suggestion. Jeff unfolded the paper.
A carom turnament between all the schools
. Okay. Other than ‘tournament’ being misspelled, this wasn’t a bad suggestion, and was obviously meant for the council to take to the conference at Camp One Wing. Yeah, Jeff thought as he wrote ‘Inter School Carom Tourney’ at the top of his list. Not bad at all. He was a pretty good carom shot himself—when there wasn’t a hunk of plaster slowing him down...

Slowing him down...

Jeff put the tip of the pencil to the list and swirled a fat, dark period hard into the paper at the end of what he’d written. As the spot of paper disintegrated under the force, the pencil tip broke with quiet
snap
.

The sound made Jeff stop, and he lifted the pencil and gawked at its now blunted tip. After a few seconds he began to smile at it.
Yeah, slow me down, did you? Well, in a month this thing’ll be off me, I’ll be making wicked bank shots against some yutz from Greenwood, and, hey, you’ll still be DEAD good old Guy. Huh? How about that? Hah ha ha ha to YOU!

Jeff traded the broken pencil for a sharper one from the material tray and picked the next suggestion. Still smiling, he unfolded it and read it to himself.

His eyes blinked fast three times.

What?

And blinked again, so rapid this time that they appeared in some short, finite spasm.

What?!

His eyes locked open now, and fixed upon the slip of paper, upon the five words written upon it.

Just five words.

His eyes came up from the paper and played slow across the room, over the backs of his classmates one by one, a purposely muted anger tinting his gaze. Anger and inquisition.
Which one of you wrote this? Which one?!

The clock ticked down to its last minute and Jeff looked back to the creased rectangle of paper. His stare was hot and steady, the question gone from it now, something else taking its place. Something that wasn’t fear. Was not fear. Not yet.

Not yet, but his heart began to race in its absence.

Five words someone had written. Five words.

Jeff read them again, his mouth moving without sound as the bell began to ring.

Five words:
I saw who did it.

Sixteen

The cars were there. The whole friggin collection of them, Michael saw as he neared Mrs. Beeman’s house, his face twisting into that mask of petulant disgust only a child could manage with such perfection.

“Oh, man,” he said aloud, passing Mrs. Green’s old silver Dodge Aries. Mrs. Henkel’s even older Mazda Cosmo was parked at the curb ahead of that, and Mrs. Meyer’s black Cadillac DeVille ahead of that, and the cars of six other old women sat either on the street or in the driveway of Mrs. Beeman’s house. The driveway that ‘needed attention’. Great, Michael thought. The whole friggin cucumber sandwich club was here.

He continued on and turned quietly up the driveway, skirting the line of cars parked in it, keeping the tank-like hulks of old steel between him and the house. Polite cackles drifted from the pretty old house, piercing the closed windows and making Michael cringe as he made his way toward the wood shed, praying all the way that Mrs. Beeman would never even know he was there. That she and her friends— Michael had heard his Uncle Grant call them the ‘Jewish Widow’s Club’ —would just play the card games they played every week or so, eat those awful (
yech!
) sandwiches, drink their smelly tea, and let him find enough leaves to rake into a pile so he could earn his five bucks in peace and be on his way.

Please God, please God, please God...

As he came around the front of Mrs. Resnick’s big Lincoln, Michael glanced into the flurries flitting from the gray sky and continued to ask his maker to give him a break. It was Friday, after all, for Chris—

“Michael. Oh, Michael.”

He froze in his tracks, his head dipping briefly and his eyes closing for just a second before he looked toward the voice and smiled the best smile he could, considering the fate that probably lay ahead.
Yech!
“Hello, Mrs. Beeman.”

Mrs. Helen Beeman, seventy eight and possibly the smallest full-grown woman Michael had ever met anywhere, pulled a blue shawl tight around her narrow shoulders and came gingerly down the steps from her back porch, one hand releasing the railing and reaching toward her occasional laborer. “Michael, come here.”

There was no use resisting. If word got back to his mom that he was somehow rude to an old lady, especially Mrs. Beeman, she’d have him in church in front of Father McDowell insisting that he be given a million Hail Marys as penance. And then she’d think up her own punishment. No, his fate for this afternoon was sealed.

Michael met the old woman halfway to the porch and let her steady herself with a good grip on his biceps. “My dad said your driveway—”

“Yes,” Mrs. Beeman agreed prematurely, nodding and looking at the drifts of browning leaves crawling up the gray slat fence that separated her driveway from the Handy property. “It needs desperate attention.” Then her eyes turned skyward, blinking at the increasing wash of flakes tumbling from the clouds. “But this is terrible. It’s too early for snow.”

“It’s no problem,” Michael assured her. “I can get it done before—”

Mrs. Beeman shook her head gravely. “No, this one is coming in fast, my boy. I can’t let you work in this. Your mother would wonder what kind of person I was.”

The first thing to flash in Michael’s head was, in big, blazing letters lit by Fourth of July sparklers,
I’m off the hook!
Then, quite casually, Mrs. Beeman looked from the sky to him and smiled, her eyes steady and brightening. Brightening with thought. With intention.

The sparklers fizzled and the taste-memory of cucumber sandwiches made his tongue pull back toward his throat.
Oh, crap.

“You’ll come in for a minute,” Mrs. Beeman said. It wasn’t an order, but it wasn’t merely a suggestion either. Her hand tightened gently around his jacketed arm. “Some of my friends are over.”

A million Hail Marys or this? A million Hail Marys or this? The scales were having trouble with this one. “Oh, I’ve met your friends before, Mrs. Beeman. Remember?”

“Yes,” she concurred, his statement of fact bouncing clean off her willful way. “Come now, Michael.” Mrs. Beeman began to move back toward the porch, smiling a glow and tugging his arm. “Come.”

His small, sturdy body, just a wisp smaller than hers, fell into a halting step with the old lady, part support, part reluctant anchor. By the bottom of the back steps they were walking side by side, and once through the back door and into the glassed-in mud porch Mrs. Beeman showed him where to put his school backpack (on a virtual table made of stacked
Sunset
magazines) and where to hang his jacket (over the back of a wingback chair that she sat in in the spring to watch the birds eat the wild berries in her back yard), and then with a hand on his back she began to guide him through the kitchen.

Five bucks. This is not worth five bucks. No way, no how. Not five bucks, not ten, not even a rookie Cal Ripken, mint condition, is worth this.

In the kitchen, on one glinting marble shelf of a baker’s rack, a tray of those things rested, waiting to be...eaten.
Yech!
Man, cucumbers with some sort of gross creamy spread between two miniature pieces of bread. Unbelievable! That was not what cucumbers were for. Cucumbers were meant to be made into pickles, Michael knew. Like his mom did, or tried to do, a couple summers ago. Or maybe, just maybe, sliced and put into a salad. And even there you could pick your way around them and leave one or two pieces of lettuce on the plate, with the cucumbers stashed beneath, and just pat your stomach and say you didn’t want to fill up before the main course. But these things? How were you supposed to eat your way around the middle of a sandwich?

The sight of those sandwiches slowed Michael’s step, and Mrs. Beeman encouraged him with a good pull. “Into the parlor, dear boy.”

Michael made himself look away from the sandwiches, forward again, through the doorway to the dining room. As he did he saw a puffy, cheerful face pull back from where it had peeked around the doorjamb, and he recognized it, and the soft curls of blue hair, as belonging to Mrs. Gersh. The clop of her shoes’ thick heels followed her out of the dining room and into the front parlor, and from that not-distant-enough space Michael heard discrete chatter rise. Odd chatter, he found himself thinking, the realization hitting him that it was a lot like the kind of whispering chit-chat he and his friends might make when talking about someone close by. The verbal equivalent of passing a note in class.