Also Known As Harper (2 page)

I went in and got a glass of yellow lemonade for Hem. He was one to appreciate a cold drink while he was doing his waiting. It was warm for April, and I was thinking I wouldn't be needing my sweatshirt for much longer.

I handed him the glass and sat down next to him on the bottom step. “Any sign?”

He shook his head and took a slurp off the top of the glass. “It wasn't very comfortable out there on the driveway path. Here you got something to lean yourself on.” He tipped his head back against the porch rail and drew an “H” in the water dribbles on the side of his glass. It always seemed extra quiet when Hem was doing his waiting. It was as if everything around him was holding its breath.

Truth was, I knew why Hemingway waited there every night. He was the only one Daddy had been halfway decent to. Even when the whiskey turned his words into slow jumbles, Daddy usually made nice when it came to Hem.

Mama had figured it out straightaway. I remembered sitting on the steps with her, watching Daddy push Hem on his tricycle.
Hem's a boy, plain and simple, Harper Lee. When your daddy looks at Hem, it makes him think of happy times. He reminds Daddy of when he was a boy. But when he looks at us, he just sees the right now, and it reminds him of how his life hasn't turned out anything like he planned.

“I heard a car 'bout five minutes ago.” Hemingway looked off toward the end of the driveway. “Sounded just like Daddy's pickup when it turned the corner.” He made like he was turning a steering wheel.

I nodded. Sometimes I got to thinking about Ms. Harper Lee, the author, and how I wished Atticus Finch in her book,
To Kill a Mockingbird,
was my real daddy. I pretended I was Scout Finch, the daughter in the story, and that Hem and me were sitting out there waiting for Atticus to come back from a day of lawyering at the Maycomb County courthouse. He'd ask me about my poems and he'd sit down and read a couple out loud, pausing and thinking about all the really good parts.

But the sight of the Earlys across the way brought me back to my own porch, and I remembered I was
Harper Lee Morgan, daughter of no one who mattered much.

“It ain't polite to stare,” Hemingway whispered across the yard. He wasn't like me. He never let himself be out-and-out rude to anyone, even Winnie Rae Early's enormous mother.

Mrs. Early made her way down her steps sideways, her elbow out and tilted at an angle to keep her balance. It looked to be plenty hard to try to move those heavy sausage links sideways and continue the stare going across the yard. On top of it all, she was trying to keep her revival-tent dress from riding up in the back and still hold tight to her pack of cigarettes.

“Going off to smoke her cancer sticks, I guess.” I nodded my head toward the end of her driveway.

Winnie Rae said her mother thought that people who smoked and drank inside their own homes were uncivilized and had no proper upbringing. So Mrs. Early went off every night to do her smoking in a lawn chair beside their pickup at the end of their driveway.

“Who's that?” Hem jabbed his little finger in the direction of a woman in the other lawn chair. The webbing sagged down in the middle as if it was reaching for the ground under the woman's seat.

“That's her sister,” I said. “Winnie Rae's aunt. You've seen her before. She's the one that drives the green van. She comes around every once in a while and smokes up a few cigarettes with Mrs. Early.”

“The one with the little kid.” Hem stared down Winnie Rae's cousin, who looked to be about four.

I leaned in close to Hem. “She's looking extra large today.” I nodded toward Mrs. Early.

He sat back and tried to make his stomach pooch out in front of him. “She's got a baby in there.”

“Huh-uh.” I tilted my head to the side to get a different view. “She's just fat.”

Hem shook his head. “She's got a baby in there. I heard her tell Mama yesterday.”

“Sure hard to tell when a person's that big.” I blew a piece of hair out of my eyes. “All we need around here is another Early.”

When Mrs. Early finally heaved her big old body down into that lawn chair, I saw her kick at the ground and say a few words into the dirt that I'm not inclined to repeat. Winnie Rae's cousin looked a little off-kilter at first, when Mrs. Early let loose with her swears, but not too out of sorts. He went right back to running his little cars along the dented-up part on the back of the van, as if he was used to those words.

I nudged Hem with the back of my hand. “I see she found my message.” I'd gathered up the stubs from all her nasty cigarettes and spelled out
Smoke Kills
on the ground by her chair.

“I'm going to miss them when we go to our new house,” I said, shaking my head. “Mean neighbors are much more interesting than the regular old kind.”

I'd have taken my time and thought of something more clever to spell out on the ground if I'd known that was going to be the last night in my house.

 

 

 

 

 

SARAH LYNN NEWHART
leaned back against the chain-link fence next to the school. She had her arms bent out to her sides like chicken wings, and she had a good backward bounce going on the fence.

“It's about time!” She gave one last bounce and pushed herself up to a stand. Then she moved in to her usual five inches away from my face. That Sarah Lynn was a close talker. It ran in her family.

“You oversleep or something?” I could feel the little bursts of her breath on my chin. “Bell's going to ring in about five minutes.”

I took a half a step back. “Hemingway wouldn't get out from under my feet. He wouldn't let me leave until I made a sling for his arm.”

“He break his arm?” She reached behind her and pulled a blue rolled-up paper out of a diamond link in the fence.

I shook my head. “You know Hem. The things he wants most in this world are a big white cast and a pair of crutches.”

She held the blue paper out to me. “Hot off the press. I grabbed you one from Mrs. Rodriguez's desk before Winnie Rae Early snapped them all up for herself.”

I unrolled the paper, and my stomach got the prickly churns.

“It's just like last year.” I sat down on the bottom of the playground slide and smoothed the paper open over my legs.

She shrugged. “Just like last year?”

I nodded. “The paper. It's exactly the same. Word for word.”

I had memorized every letter of that paper last year, I had been so excited about it. And just then the words from the blue paper came into my mind before my eyes had even gotten to them. I was going to get another chance to read my poems, and I could feel that same tingly feeling in the front of my head that I
always got when my words arranged themselves into a poem or a story.

But it was hard to push away the memory of Daddy sitting at the kitchen table with the whiskey poisoning the air around him.
You're lazy with a pen, Harper Lee. Being sloppy with your words is the worst kind of lazy. If you expect me to sign my name to this sort of garbage, you got another think coming.
And then he'd put the tip of his pen on top of the “P” on the Whaley County Poetry Contest permission slip, like he might be getting ready to sign his name, anyway. But the tip of his pen had pressed down harder, and hadn't let up until it had made a big crooked “X” over the front of my permission slip and edged over onto one of my poems.

I tried to remind myself that Daddy and his green-ink pen weren't anywhere near me anymore.

“What's wrong, Harper Lee?” Sarah Lynn, who was crouched down by the slide, moved in so her nose was practically touching mine.

I shrugged. “Nothing. Just thinking about the poems I've been working on.” But I couldn't push that voice out of my head. It made me feel like Daddy was back with us again. He had always tried to make my poems shrivel up and seem like they
weren't anything special. Nothing that you'd read out loud at a poetry contest.

I scooted back and put the blue paper in my backpack, trying to remember his words couldn't reach me. “Maybe you could come over and we could work on our poems this afternoon.”

“Huh-uh.” She shook her head. “You know we can just be school friends.”

A school friend was like a secret you could never share with anyone. I wanted a real best friend.

“My daddy hasn't even lived at our house for a good solid year now,” I reminded her.

She shook her head again, slow and hard with each word. “Mama says no way am I to go to your house ever again. I'm not even allowed on your street.” She raised her eyebrows. “For heaven's sake, Harper Lee. I'm not even supposed to be talking to you at school.”

If I had done something wrong, it would be so easy. I could say I was sorry and we could be best friends again. But it didn't seem to work that way when you were trying to apologize for someone else. For something someone else had done.

I stood up. “Your mama could drive you and pick you up herself.”

“Not a chance.” She pressed her lips together hard.

I nodded and breathed out a long breath of air. Sarah Lynn's mama had never gotten over the time Daddy gave Sarah Lynn a ride home from our house. Mama was at work, and Daddy had been refilling his coffee cup all afternoon. By the time he went to drive Sarah Lynn home, he'd emptied a good three-quarters of his whiskey bottle.

When he'd tried to back out of Sarah Lynn's driveway, he'd plowed over the better portion of Mrs. Newhart's cutting garden and sent their garbage cans skidding into the neighbor's driveway across the street. Afterward, Daddy had had trouble making his eyes focus right and didn't seem to care one way or the other about all the yelling Mrs. Newhart was doing. She'd called Mama at work and really let her have it. Mrs. Newhart said you could smell the whiskey in the air a good ten-foot circle around him.

I made my face like I didn't care. “Maybe Mrs. Rodriguez will give us some time in class today.” I swung my backpack over my shoulder and went to get in line on the four-square court.

I planted my feet along a thick painted edge of a square and tried to push Daddy out of my brain.
Once his whiskey smell had gotten in somewhere, it took some doing to air it out.

Sarah Lynn nudged her way behind me and bumped up against the books on my back. Her long sleeves swished against the canvas of my bag as she bent over to tie her shoe.

I looked down at her. “Could you take a couple of steps back, please?” I pointed behind me. “You're going to squash my lunch.”

I liked Sarah Lynn and I wanted to be more than just school friends, but sometimes she just plain annoyed me. I wanted to be the kind of friends that had sleepovers and rode their bikes in each other's driveways. There wasn't anything so special about the flowers in her mama's cutting garden, anyway. And I'd taken a million whiskey drives with Daddy. I was an expert at it. I'd taught Sarah Lynn how to get a good knuckle grip on the seat so you wouldn't slide around too much in back.

Winnie Rae stepped out of line a few people ahead of me and turned around so she could get a good nosy stare going. “My mama said you shouldn't have ripped that sign down.” Her yellow T-shirt rode up in the front, and I could see a white stripe of skin trying to fold itself over the waist of her jeans. “She
doesn't have time to be putting those things back up. She's too busy running the motel.”

I rolled my eyes and nudged Sarah Lynn in the leg, softly, with my heel. “Winnie Rae wants us to think that her mama's a front-desk hostess, taking people's reservations and such.”

Sarah Lynn raised one eyebrow and looked in Winnie Rae's direction.

I made my voice a little louder, so it carried up the line. “But anyone at all knows the truth, Sarah Lynn.”

Sarah Lynn gave a good evil eye to Winnie Rae for me.

“She might be a landlord.” I added a good evil eye of my own. “But she's just a housekeeper. Same as my mama.” The bell was going to ring any second, so I had to move fast. I had a lot more words trying to spill out of my mouth at Winnie Rae.

“And another thing you should know, Sarah Lynn.” I stepped out of line myself, so Winnie Rae would be sure to hear me. “My mama does laundry and floors and such in people's houses, but I know Mrs. Early to be more of a toilet-and-bathtub cleaner.”

Right when I was getting up some nice momentum, the bell rang and I had to get back in line. Which
was probably a good thing, because Winnie Rae was looking like she was getting ready to come at me.

I leaned back and whispered to Sarah Lynn, “How Mrs. Early gets down low to scrub those motel toilet bowls and wipe out the tubs is beyond me.”

Sarah Lynn giggled and nudged me up the steps to the main hallway.

I breathed deep and waited for the school smell to creep in. I didn't feel this way anywhere else. From the first time I walked through the kindergarten doors, I'd sniffed out the pencil sharpener and the stacks of new paper and I'd felt every part of my body relax.

I sat down at my desk and took out my morning journal. My pencil hardly needed any direction. I'd had something in my head since yesterday, and my pencil was practically moving on its own.

I was thinking I might like to add a short story to my poetry collection. It could maybe give me an edge over the competition. Something a little different. A little longer.

Mrs. Rodriguez walked by and put her hand on my shoulder. “Nice job on your essay, Harper.” When she smiled she had a big space between her top front teeth. Sometimes you could hear a quiet whistle coming through. “You've got a special gift for words.”

She set the essay down in the corner of my desk and ran her hand over my cover sketch of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. “You remind me of Eleanor, you know. You're strong and creative, just like she was.”