Bones & All (15 page)

Still wearing his cowboy hat, Lee was moving all the canned goods from the cabinets into a plastic dairy crate on the counter. He pointed to a McDonald's bag on the table. “Got you something for breakfast.”

I thanked him, and as I wolfed down my Egg McMuffin I watched a girl ride a bike up the street and turn into the driveway. She hopped off and nudged down the kickstand with the tip of her sandal. “Who's that?”

Lee glanced out the window and sighed. “My sister. I'll just go and talk to her.” He paused. “It'd be better if you stayed inside.”

“Why?”

“No offense, all right?”

“But…”

He went out, letting the screen door slam behind him, and his sister leapt into his arms. She was really pretty, tanned and green-eyed like him, but she would've been even prettier without so much makeup on. I crept to the door to see her better. So much for hiding from the neighbors.

“What are you doing here?” I heard him say. “You've already missed enough school for one day.”

Kayla grinned. “Your fault, for not coming on the weekend.”

“You're right. I should've planned it better. Now go back to school.”

“We're basically done for the year anyway.” Jagged shapes on her fingernails caught the light, electric blue. It had been a few weeks since she'd painted her nails. “I had such a good time this morning, Lee. It was so easy to pretend you'd never left.”

“I had a good time too.”

“Don't you miss me when you're gone?”

“You know you're the only person in the world I ever miss.”

Kayla gave him a doubtful look.

“Don't go there,” he said. “There's no point.”

“And what about Mom?”

“What about her?”

“She's really worried about you.”

Lee thrust his hands in his pockets and kicked at a stone in the driveway. “Who're you kidding?”

“All right.
I'm
worried.”

“I'm sorry, Kay. I wish I didn't have to.”

“You
don't
have to!”

“Yeah, I do. You know I do.”

“I don't know why, Lee. You never tell me anything. I might not see you again for months!”

“I promise it won't be that long this time.”

“Who am I going to celebrate with when I pass the test?”

He grinned. “
If
you pass the test.”

“If I don't pass, it'll be your fault for not giving me enough lessons.” Kayla glanced over his shoulder and saw me standing behind the screen door. “Who's that?”

Lee turned around and shot me a cold look. I knew I shouldn't eavesdrop, but I'd rather have him be annoyed with me than let him shrug off my questions later on. I smiled at Kayla and gave her a little wave. She smiled back, but only with her lips.
She doesn't like me
, I thought.
She doesn't like me because I'm with her brother and she's not.

“Is she your girlfriend? Can I meet her?”

“She's just a friend. Maybe you can meet her some other time.”

He hugged her again and held on. “We can't stay. I just needed to see you. To make sure you're all right.”

“I'd be a whole lot better if you'd come home.”

He backed away from her, holding up his hand for goodbye. “I'm sorry, Kay. I really am.”

She folded her arms and furrowed her brow. “I hate this, Lee. I
hate
that you do this.”

“I'll see you soon, all right? I'll come by the house and we'll celebrate your new license with a movie or something.”

“And I
really
hate that hat,” she called after him.

“I know,” he said. “I heard you the first three times.”

I stepped aside to let him back in. Kayla stood in the driveway, head bowed, working her knuckles against her eyes. I drew back from the door screen.

Lee was cramming a few last things into his rucksack. “You got your stuff together?”

*   *   *

He guessed it would take us three days to drive to Minnesota, taking a more northerly route than we had taken to get to Tingley: through the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia into Ohio, then Indiana, up past Chicago, and across Wisconsin. The longer we drove, the more I felt the hum of excitement creeping out of the pit of my stomach and wending its way down my limbs and around my heart. Every mile on the odometer brought me closer to my dad.

Toward the end of the day's driving I figured I'd waited long enough to broach the subject of Kayla. “So how'd she do?” I asked.

“Hmm?”

“The driving lesson. How'd it go?”

“Oh,” he said. “All right. I think she'll pass.”

“Did you teach her with the truck?”

“Yup. I figured if she could handle this thing she'd have no trouble with my mom's sedan.”

“Is she going to get her own car once she passes?”

Lee paused before answering, and I started to feel like I was asking too many questions again. “I don't think so,” he said finally. “She's got a job at an ice cream parlor, but I still can't see how she'll be able to afford it. I wish I could get her a car of her own.”

A thought formed in my head and presented itself before I could push it away.
You could get her a car of her own, and you wouldn't have to pay a dime for it.

“I just want her to be able to leave if she has to, you know? All you need is a car that runs, and you have that freedom. Hell, you don't even need a license.” He sighed. “I really hate that she's trapped in that house with my mom.”

I rolled the window all the way down and stuck my head out.
You
deserve
to be broke and alone, thinking things like that.
“Did you ever think about taking her with you?” I asked.

“No. She deserves better than this.” As he spoke he leaned forward in the driver's seat, clenching the wheel with both hands. “I want her to go to college. I want her to have a normal life. A
good
life.”

“I'm sure she will.”

He flicked me a skeptical look.

“Do you think, maybe … if we have time, and there's a good place for it … maybe you could teach me how to drive too?”

Lee rolled his eyes, but at least he was smiling. “Good grief,” he said. “Next you'll be asking me to be your date to the prom.”

Again I turned to the window, so he wouldn't see how red my face was. “Then you won't teach me?”

“Yeah, I'll teach you. When it gets dark, we'll find a big parking lot someplace, after all the stores have closed.”

“As long as it's not a Walmart,” I said, and he grinned.

*   *   *

My first driving lesson took place in a Home Depot parking lot somewhere in Ohio, and it was not a success. I had a hard time remembering to press the clutch when I needed to shift gears, and I cringed every time I heard the crunching sound of metal on unhappy metal.

Lee was a good teacher though. “It's fine,” he said. “Just go slow. Stay in first gear. For now just get used to being behind the wheel.”

After an hour we switched places and picked up a pizza with extra cheese and pepperoni. Dinner warmed my lap all the way out of shopping center territory. The plan was to keep camping all the way to Sandhorn, at any state park more or less along our route, which Lee would trace for me in his dog-eared road atlas.

The pizza was cold by the time we found a place to stop in the woods, but we devoured it anyway, dangling our legs off the back of the flatbed. I was using my rucksack for a backrest, and he asked, “Why is your pack so big?”

“It's everything I have. Of course it's going to take up a whole bag.”

He shrugged. “You can always travel lighter.”

“But you need things. A flashlight. Maps. A change of clothes. Something to sleep in, stuff to cook with.”

“You got any of that stuff in
your
pack?” He looked at me and waited a moment. “C'mon. Show me what you've got in there.”

I loosened the cinch and opened the bag. Lee leaned over to peer inside. Books, mostly, along with a few pieces of clothing. “Those aren't your books,” he said.

“Some of them are.”

“Which ones?”

I divided the books into two piles on the flatbed—mine and theirs. Mine:
The Annotated Alice
; The Lord of the Rings three-in-one my mother had given me for my birthday; The Chronicles of Narnia, also in one volume; and the Ringling Brothers circus book, which Lee picked up and flipped through.

Then he picked up the first book from the second pile:
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
“Tell me about him.”

I sighed. “It was Kevin's. He brought me up to his room after school to study together for a history test. His parents weren't home yet. Nobody ever knew I'd been there.” I paused. “It happened like that a lot. A boy would make an excuse to invite me over after school, and…”

“Yeah. I know.” Next he picked up
Around the World in Eighty Days.

“Marcus. He followed me home after the St. Patrick's Day parade in Barron Falls two years ago.”

Choose Your Own Adventure:
Escape from Utopia.
“Luke. Summer camp when I was eight. He was the first one. After Penny, I mean.”

“Penny was your babysitter?”

“Yeah.” I took the book from him and ran my fingers over the cover illustration of the boy and girl racing out of the jungle, the chasm yawning just behind their feet. “Luke was going to be a forest ranger.”

“You can't think about that kind of stuff.”

I put the book back on the pile. “Easy for you to say.” As soon as I said that, a peculiar feeling came over me, as if I didn't care anymore what Luke had wanted for his life.

No, no.
Lee
was the one who didn't care. He didn't have to.

He laid
The Master and Margarita
on top of the pile he was making. “I already know about this one. Andy, right?”

I nodded. We kept on like that until Lee had gone through every book in my bag. He found north with Dmitri's glow-in-the-dark compass, and then he opened the little brown case to find the tortoiseshell eyeglasses. “What was his name?”

“Jamie.”

“You couldn't leave his glasses,” Lee said softly. “Otherwise they'd have known right away that something had happened to him.” He laid the glasses case on top of the book pile. “Is that all of them?”

I shook my head. “I didn't keep anything from the first time.”

“Was your babysitter the only girl?”

I nodded.

“Why is that, do you think?”

“I don't know. None of the girls at school ever wanted to be friends with me.”

“Lucky for them.”

For a minute or two I picked at the scab on my knee. I couldn't let it sting me, what he'd just said. Once again, Lee was right.

He picked up the books and put them back in my pack. “I've never been much of a reader.”

“Didn't your mother read you any bedtime stories when you were little?” He shook his head. “She didn't read to you at all?”

“I told you, she wasn't that kind of mom.”

“Then you never made friends with novels.”

“I guess I just don't see the point of it. All the things they used to tell us in school, how we should read all these books and do all these things to better ourselves. Like learning bigger words makes you a better person.”

“It's not about that.”

“There's no point. I
can't
better myself.”

“But that's not why I read. When I read a book I can be somebody else. For two or three hundred pages I can have the problems of a normal person—even if that person is traveling through time or fighting with aliens.” I ran my hand over
The Master and Margarita.
“I need the books. They're all I've got.”

He looked at me then like he felt sorry for me.

*   *   *

I wanted to know more about his sister, and his mother, and what he did for money besides taking it from people who no longer needed any, and what had happened that he had to sneak around his own hometown. I mean, I had a pretty good idea, but I wanted the
story
.

I started with the questions he'd be more likely to answer. “What were you doing before we met? How do you get money to live on?”

“Farmwork, mostly. Sometimes I just stay for a day or two, other times I stick around for longer. Depends on the farm and what they need me for.”

“And what do you do during the winter?”

“Last year I went down to Florida,” he said. “I was driving an old Camaro, that's the car I had before, and I used to park right on the beach and sleep in a tent on the dunes.” He laughed. “Guess that makes me a snowbird.”

“Were you there by yourself?”

“I'm always by myself.” I shot him a look, and he added, “Apart from you.”

Better an afterthought than none at all. “Do you think you'll go straight back to Tingley after you leave me in Sandhorn?”

“I guess it depends on what you find there.”

That was encouraging. “But I mean, after I get my stuff figured out. After I find my dad. Then what?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I'll go back.”

“Does she know?”

“Who? My sister, or my mother?”

“Either. Both.”

“My mom doesn't know. My sister, well … she knows there's something wrong with me, but I hope she never knows the whole of it.” He glanced at me. “I'm lucky, I guess. It's easier for me to hide it.”

“What happened?”

“I'll tell you sometime. Not today.”

“Can I ask you a different question, then?”

“Depends on the question.”