Close to Famous (17 page)

I wanted to take those words back any number of times, but I didn't. Sometimes it took three days to get through one recipe. Once I tried to teach Miss Charleena how to make butterscotch brownies, and she kept saying, “How do I know if I've overmixed the batter?”

“Well, you just know. . . .”

“How do I know if the muffin springs back when I touch it? How much does it spring back?”

“Well . . .”

She was worse at cooking than I was at reading.

Once I just slammed Sonny's cookbook shut and started crying.

“Foster,” she said. “Maybe I'm the wrong person to help you. I'm not a teacher!”

“I think you're doing really well.” A guy said it.

I turned around. It was Macon.

“I think it's cool you're doing this.” He looked up at me smiling. “I know what it's like to have to deal with something that's always a problem. The problem with my problem is that everyone can see it and it can't be fixed.”

“What's your problem?”

“I'm short!” He stood there, small and miserable.

“You're not that short,” I lied.

“Last year the teacher called me to read something in class. She said, ‘Stand up, Macon,' and I did. Then she shouted, ‘I said, stand up, young man!' And I was already standing! All the kids were laughing.”

I bit my lip so I wouldn't smile.

“People call me names like elf and pipsqueak. A documentary filmmaker called pipsqueak? And there's squirt, shrimp, small-fry, dinky, and”—he shuddered—“
mini Macon
. It kills me, Foster. I feel tall inside.”

I smiled. “People call me stupid, dumbo, and dunce.”

“You're none of those things. You're smart.”

“Thanks.” I wish I could tell him he wasn't little.

“You need to know something about me, Foster. I would never call you a name or make fun of you. So, look. I'm a good reader and I could help you. And if you want to help me, I still need an assistant. You don't have to take notes. You can help me think of questions to ask the people who work at the prison.”

“You mean, like, ‘Have you ever had problems with a prisoner?' ”

“Yes, exactly.” Macon was writing.

“Have you ever wondered how the prisoners feel about you?”

“That's excellent.”

“Do you ever feel sorry for them?”

“Yes!”

“But I think to really learn about the prison, you've got to go to the Helping Hands House, Macon.”

“I hadn't thought about that.” He wrote that down, too. I'd never had anybody take notes when
I
was talking. “I can't believe anyone would ever think you were stupid.”

The widest smile took over my face.

Those next weeks weren't easy, I'll tell you, because three people had made it their business to teach me how to read. I'd made it my business, too, but Miss Charleena, Mama, and Macon were on my case day and night.

Macon wrote my job out on paper:

ASSISTANT

“This is what you are,” he said. “Let's sound it out.”

“Ass . . .” I began. “Hey, wait a minute!”

“It's phonics, Foster!”

Mama arranged things from Fish Hardware on the table, then she wrote the name of each thing on a sticky note. HAMMER, NAIL, CURTAIN ROD, PAINTBRUSH, PLUNGER. She said it might help if I could see the thing and the word that went with it. After the lesson, the toilet overflowed. Mama grabbed the plunger and started pumping.

“Plunger,” I said. “P-l-u-n—”

“Foster, just grab some towels right now!”

After I cleaned up, I asked Mama to write out,
She grabbed the towels and cleaned up the mess.
It helped to see the thing I'd just done written out, and I used my amazing memory to memorize what the words looked like.

“Do you think memorizing is cheating in reading?” I asked Mama.

“You use whatever God's given you, Baby.”

I felt like yeast was in my brain and it was rising. Sometimes I'd stand in front of the bathroom mirror and look to see if my head had doubled.

Sometimes I had to tell people,
Enough! My brain can't take anymore.
But it was better to be surrounded by people who were trying too hard than by people who didn't care. Kitty wanted to help, too.

“You know what killed me in school?” she groaned. “Word problems in math.”

“Those are the worst!” I agreed.

She laughed. “Donny has six cats and Susie has nine. If Susie gives three cats to Donny . . .” She shook her head laughing.

I finished it for her. “And then five more cats show up on Donny's porch so he has to give two back to Susie, how many cats does Donny have?”

We looked at each other and shouted, “Too many!”

I put a big sign with the alphabet right under Lester's daddy's stupid, dead fish. I taped paper underneath it and wrote down the new words I was learning. This way, when I was cooking, I could have reading right in my face.

Every night before bed I said to the fish, “Guard these words and letters. I'm counting on you.”

YOU KNOW HOW it is when you're learning something hard? You have a breakthrough and then you take twelve steps backward and forget you learned anything.

One day I'd feel my brain open up; the next day it would be locked tight. Miss Charleena never seemed frustrated with me. I guess I was frustrated enough for both of us.

Sonny's show was in reruns, and all anyone said was he was in critical condition. I renewed his cookbook at the Bookmobile. Then, to honor him, I turned his banana cake with fudge frosting into amazing cupcakes.

“I can move two dozen cupcakes a day if you're up to it,” Wayne told me.

I was! I baked red velvet cupcakes with fluffy white frosting; I made apple cupcakes with caramel frosting. I sure liked having a little baking business. I was even getting stopped on the street.

That last one hurt. “I fell asleep waiting for them to bake,” I explained to the man who said my lemon cupcakes were dry.

He climbed into his pickup and told me, “If you're going to put yourself out there, be ready to take your fouls.”

“You can't make everybody happy,” Mama told me later.

Then Amy had an idea. “A new cupcake, Foster. A cupcake no one has ever eaten in Culpepper. I want you to make it, and we're going to give them out on the first Cool Tool Saturday. Daddy said we could try this. I want to go all out.”

I smiled. “How about chocolate malt?”

She sat down. “This is possible?”

In the cupcake world, anything is possible.

And on Saturday I brought thirty-six chocolate malt cupcakes to Fish Hardware, and Amy gave me thirty-six dollars—which was very cool. Mama arranged them on a plate; the coffee was waiting. A swarm of people came into the store.

Amy held up “the ultimate cool tool, a must-have for anyone interested in anything.” Angry Wayne, Kitty, Lester, the sheriff, and Betty were watching as she took it out of a leather case and began to unfold it. “This,” she said proudly, “is the Über Tool. It's got a hammer, screwdriver, bottle opener, flashlight, wrench, first aid kit, pliers, scissors, nail file, wire, and a personal cooling device.” A little fan whirred.

Angry Wayne ate two of my chocolate malt cupcakes and bought the first Über Tool. He turned to me. “Why haven't we sold these cupcakes at my restaurant?”

“Amy wanted something brand-new, sir.”

“I want these cupcakes at my place Monday morning,” he ordered.

Amy marched over. “These are hardware cupcakes.”

Angry Wayne stared her down. “These cupcakes belong to the world.”

“My dad would have liked the Über Tool, Foster. He was always fixing something.” Garland smiled. We were outside Fish Hardware. “He fixed my running.”

“How did he do that?”

“I was fast, but I didn't want to practice. And one day I ran a really bad race. I didn't even finish. I made my school lose. And he told me, ‘Look, sport, it's a gift to be fast, and it's your job to see how far you can go with it.' He told me, when you start a race, you've got to finish it. And you know the crazy part? He had one leg a little shorter than the other, so he couldn't run. . ..” Garland gulped and looked away.

“He sounds awesome.”

“I've never had a coach so good. I try to go back over everything he told me.”

I know exactly what he meant.

Amy came outside grinning. “The cupcakes are gone, Foster. And we sold
thirteen
Über Tools. I think we've hit the tipping point!”

There was energy popping in the air. It felt like Culpepper was waking up. Macon finished an apple cupcake with caramel frosting, his favorite, and said, “Okay, you guys. It's time.”

Garland and I nodded.

“It's time to do what we have to do.”

“
You
have to do it,” Garland reminded him.

Macon stood by the Culpepper prison gate and announced to the guard, “I am a documentary filmmaker. I'm making a movie about how this prison has affected Culpepper. I'd like to speak to the warden.”

Macon had been practicing this line all day, but he needed to grow another foot to be taken seriously. The guard looked at him. “Very funny.”

“It's not funny!” Macon insisted. “This is serious!”