Crooked (3 page)

Then, when she was back outside, something bad happened. It wouldn't have been bad if she'd had a tissue in her pocket, but she didn't. And she needed, all of a sudden, to blow her nose just as Amos MacKenzie stepped out of Value Village, the thrift store across the street.

Amos MacKenzie was in the ninth grade, like Clara, but he seemed older because he was smart and almost never said anything. He had light brown skin, blond hair, and dark brown eyes. It had occurred to Clara, watching him in History, that if he were a horse, he would be a palomino. It had also occurred to her that this was a weird way to think of boys. She had a picture of Amos hidden in her desk at home—last year's Christmas card from the Cosgrove Dairy, in which the whole MacKenzie family was standing beside the milk truck on a fall day.

Now, as Clara removed Ham's leash from the parking meter, Amos and his father were putting a used snow shovel into a rusty white Ford van. So they had money troubles, too. At least Clara's father didn't take her to Value Village.

Clara felt in her pockets for a tissue and came up with a ticket stub from going to the movies with Gerri. When she glanced at the rusty Ford van, Mr. MacKenzie seemed to be looking her way, but Amos was already seated and staring straight ahead. Then Mr. MacKenzie did a slow U-turn that brought them close to the curb. Clara sniffled, pulled on Ham's leash, and waved, which for some reason made Mr. MacKenzie pull over, lean past Amos, and roll down the window. “Hi,” he said, and grinned. “I suspect you must be Miss Wilson.”

Clara nodded uncertainly and even blushed a little. She hadn't ever been called Miss Wilson before.

“I know because that canine looks familiar,” Mr. MacKenzie said, nodding at Ham, who was happily straining at his leash. “Sometimes he says hello when I bring the milk.”

“Yeah,” Clara said, “he likes to check everybody out.” She sniffled and brought her hand to the bridge of her nose at the same moment that Ham put his front feet on the van and began to pant in Amos's face. “Oh, no!” Clara said. She pulled Ham down and rubbed the side of the car for scratches.

Mr. MacKenzie laughed and in a half-comic voice said, “The value of this van, like all things important to me, goes way beyond surface beauty.” He nodded at Amos, who was blushing. “My son isn't old enough to see things this way yet. Amos hopes this old boat goes to the junkyard before he gets his license.”

“Oh,” Clara said, and looked at Amos, who kept his eyes down. This didn't subdue Ham in any way. He wagged his tail and then lunged for the van again, which caused Clara to drop the Princess-of-Monaco stationery. Several sheets slid out of the box into the dirty slush of the street.

“How are your parents?” Mr. MacKenzie asked while she was steadying herself.

“Oh, they're fine,” she said.

“I noticed people were up bright and early this morning,” he said.

Clara wondered if Mr. MacKenzie had seen her standing at the window in her nightgown, and her face got hot. But Amos wasn't looking at her. He was now leaning out and petting Ham. “Like your dog,” he said, glancing up at Clara. “What's her name?”

“Ham. She's a he.”

“Oh,” Amos said.

A car was approaching, and Clara sniffled as quietly and discreetly as she could. If there was anything in the world worse than a runny nose, she thought, it was a crooked runny nose.

“Well, Miss Wilson,” Mr. MacKenzie said in his easy, familiar way, “we better get moving or the neighbors will talk,” and then, with a saluting wave of the hand, which was accompanied by a stiff nod from Amos, he drove away.

2

TUMS

Amos MacKenzie slumped down in the car seat and tried to slow down his mind, which was bouncing around like a pinball. Ever since eighth grade, when she got pretty all of a sudden, Amos had sneakily paid attention to Clara Wilson. And just now, while they'd been talking, she had acted nervous. Did that mean she cared what he might think? And could that mean she might like him? A fine layer of sweat rose on the back of Amos's neck. Could she think he might like her? And why did that make him feel so weirdly happy? Most of the things that made Amos happy worked from the outside in—receiving an A on a test, say, or getting tickets to a World Series game, or eating his favorite German chocolate cake. But what he was feeling now was the opposite. It seemed to come from within him. It worked from the inside out.

Suddenly, without even meaning to, Amos found himself thinking of Clara Wilson's hair. In his mind, it was brown, but in the sunlight, it had looked almost red. It was so clean and soft-looking that he imagined himself gathering it into a ponytail with his hand, something his mother always did with his sister's hair when they were watching TV.

“Whatcha thinking, slugger?” his father said.

“Nothing.”

Amos pretended he didn't notice his father smiling and glancing over at him. It was something his father did. Whenever Amos's feelings went fluttering off in every direction, his father not only knew it but found it strangely entertaining. It was just one of about one million things annoying about his father.

Amos stared out the window and tried to be perfectly still so his father would decide he was mistaken this time. A few blocks passed. Then, on the sidewalk up ahead, Amos spotted a long-legged girl walking alone in tights, fuzzy sweater, long open coat—and with a shock realized it was Anne Barrineau, the Elusive One. At school, she smiled at almost everyone but talked to almost no one. She was smart, pretty, and remote. Rumors flew.
She doesn't date because she already has a boyfriend who goes to Jemison High.
Or:
Her parents are deaf-mutes, that's why she never talks.
As the van passed her by, Amos sneaked a glance back. Anne Barrineau, as always, was looking straight ahead, smiling.

Amos sat back in his seat and watched the stores pass: Pringle's Drugstore, where Bruce Crookshank had dared him to buy a pack of condoms; Doug May Sporting Goods, where he'd used his yard money for a Rawlins John Olerud–model firstbaseman's glove; Carat's Clothes for Men, where just two months ago, Amos's mother had taken him for a suit to be baptized in, which was the strangest of the numerous strange ideas his mother had been coming up with lately.

Lately.

What was lately?
Lately,
he decided, was ever since his father had been going to that doctor. But whatever the doctor had been doing or saying to his father was some kind of big-deal secret. If Amos was home with his mother when his father came back from the doctor, his father would give a thumbs-up sign and say, “Tip-top. A-okay.” And sometimes his mother and father would stop talking when Amos came into the room or make up new, cheery things to talk about, which got on Amos's nerves. He wasn't eight years old, he wasn't their delicate retardate child, so why couldn't they just keep on talking?

When his father turned the rusted-out Econoline onto Adams Avenue and there was no longer much to look at, Amos still slouched down, staring out.

“Pretty girl, don't you think?” his father said in that over-gentle voice he used when he was trying to get Amos to say things he didn't feel like saying.

“Who?” Amos said.

“Miss Wilson,” his father said.

Amos didn't say anything.

“The girl who was flirting with you.”

“Nobody was flirting with me,” Amos said in a sulky voice. “Maybe she was flirting with you,” he said.

“Well, now,” his father said amiably. “That kind of shines a whole new light on things, doesn't it? This pretty thirteen-year-old flirting with a forty-two-year-old bald man.”

“She's fourteen,” Amos said. His skin was prickly with sudden heat.

“And how did you come by that information?” his father said, still smiling.

“Because she's in the ninth grade,” he said, and stared out the window. He realized with regret that he'd opened the door to even more questioning from his father, but none came. Finally Amos turned to look at him, and what he saw was startling. There was a strange, contorted look on his father's face until he saw Amos looking, and then his father made a tightly constrained smile.

“Tums time,” he said, and reached across Amos to the glove compartment, where, to Amos's surprise, there was a big twenty-four-count box of Tums tubes. His father unwound the wrapping from four tablets and began to chew them. For five or six blocks his expression didn't change, and then the strange distorted face relaxed and became his father's face again. When finally his father talked, his voice was relaxed, too. “Guess I ate one too many flapjacks for breakfast,” he said.

Amos nodded, but it wasn't like his father had eaten a mountain of pancakes or anything. In fact, he hardly remembered his father eating anything at all.

A pickup truck splashed by to their right, spattering Amos's window with dirty water. “Moron,” Amos said under his breath to the other driver. He waited. Sometimes his father, when provoked, would use one of his favorite dopey words.
Jackanapes,
or something like that. But today it was like his father didn't even notice. He just drove along in his own little world. Finally, about three blocks from home, he broke the silence.

“Amos,” he said, “I want you to tell me something. If you could wish for one thing in the world, what would it be?”

Amos didn't know what to answer. He had the funny feeling he should give the answer that would have been true a few years ago, an answer that would be as comforting to his father as Tums. The truth was, Amos's wishes were different now. Now he wished he could walk over to the lunch table where Clara always sat with her friend Gerri and make some excuse to sit down. He wished he had his own car. He wished he didn't wish his father wasn't a lowly milkman whose big outings were twice-a-week Moose Lodge meetings and Thursday night bowling, but he did.

“To play first base for the Blue Jays,” Amos said, and then, refining a little, “and to hit for higher average than Olerud and more homers than Carter.”

And Amos was right. His father smiled and relaxed again in his seat.

3

EGYPTIANS

Clara's house had an attic. By parting the clothes in the upstairs hall closet and climbing the rungs of a permanent vertical ladder, you came to the trapdoor, which when pushed open allowed entry into the long empty room. “The schizophrenic attic,” Clara's mother called it, because one side was so unlike the other. All of the junk had been pushed into a disorderly heap in one half of the room. The other half was severely neat. It was here that her mother had set up a desk and tried to complete her master's degree in something called Egyptology. All Clara knew about it was the strange flat eyes of Egyptian art, which faced toward you even though the faces were in profile.

But that was before the money troubles. The company that employed Clara's father sold top-of-the-line office furniture, but not much of it was selling right now. It had something to do with businesses failing and used furniture flooding the market—that's what Clara got out of it, anyhow. So that was the end of Egyptology. Her mother had failed to find a teaching job and had finally taken a job at Kaufmann's Department Store, folding towels and ringing up sheets.

Clara thought Kaufmann's was a nice place to work, and she thought her mother looked elegant leading customers through the rows of pillows and bright towels, but when her mother came home for dinner, she would complain to Clara's father long-distance wherever he was and then talk to her sister— Clara's aunt—in Dalton.

Clara could always tell who her mother was talking to just by her tone of voice. With her father, her mother's voice was flat and tired-sounding. “Fine,” she would say when asked about her day, and then they might talk about the latest storm front. “Well, that's life in Jemison,” Clara's mother would say in her weary voice, “where the weather changes all the time, but the people never do.” But with Clara's aunt, her mother's voice grew bright and alive with hopes and schemes. She talked about new possibilities for making money: catering, sewing, furniture refinishing, anything. Lately, the big new idea was teaching abroad. “There are jobs right now, as we speak, for someone with my credentials in Kyoto and Provence,” Clara heard her mother say one night to her aunt. Clara was good at geography. She knew Kyoto was in Japan and Provence was in France. Clara was amazed and a little afraid. Why would her mother look for a job
there
when her family lived here?

Clara opened the gray box of Princess-of-Monaco stationery on her mother's desk and considered her plan. If she was going to put advertising flyers in the newspapers, she needed to get people's attention. She pulled out one of her mother's books and after some practice made a drawing of an Egyptian girl pulling a huge square stone across the page. Under that, she wrote:
Girl for rent!
Let me do your errands on snowy days. I'm fourteen and I can get your
groceries, your mail, or your hardware supplies, or walk your dog. Dependable and inexpensive! Call Clara at 543-4245.
At the last minute, she found a copy of her mother's résumé on the desk, so she added,
References upon request.

Clara liked the way her advertisement looked, and carefully made fifteen more, enough to give to all the elderly people on her route. Then she thought of Amos MacKenzie and had another idea. The MacKenzies were on her route, too. It had always been her favorite part, in fact—approaching the MacKenzie house and throwing something toward Amos's front door. So maybe she would give them an advertisement, too, and add a note to Amos.

She opened a book that translated the tiny pictures that stood for letters in the Egyptian alphabet. She found the Egyptian symbols for Amos's name, and she drew them precisely at the very top of one of her advertisements: a forearm, then an owl, a quail chick, and a folded cloth.
Amos
, it spelled, but what it looked like was a pair of birds about to be caught and served for dinner. After looking at the symbols for a while, she decided to write the letters of his name underneath, and before it,
Hi!
She folded the paper, slid it into its immaculate envelope, and wrote his name on the outside. She slipped the flyers under the rubber bands when she folded her papers in the late afternoon, and she put the letter with Amos's name on it in the paper she would save for last.

It wasn't quite dark when she went outside with Ham sniffing and pulling on one hand and the canvas vest full of papers thudding against her chest. The canvas apron tended to push her bra sideways and up. She'd never expected a bra to pinch. She had assumed it would be like a shirt or underwear—something you never noticed you were wearing. And she hated to wear white shirts now because the bra was so distinct underneath, reminding everyone, she felt, how little she needed it.

Carrying the paper for Amos MacKenzie made her walk faster. The whole evening seemed prettier and more mysterious, as though the lights in the windows were the lamps of happy people who were about to do exciting things. It was only much later that night, when she was lying on the couch near her mother and half listening to the TV and the low sounds of her father's voice coming through the phone, that Clara began to wonder if she'd done the right thing. And, lightning quick, she knew she hadn't. She'd done something stupid. Childish and stupid. She imagined people—especially Amos—dropping the expensive white paper into trash cans all through the neighborhood. He'd probably been totally repulsed by her runny nose. Her crooked runny nose.

“So you're coming home tomorrow for sure?” her mother said into the air above the telephone. She was doing a crossword puzzle, so she was using the speakerphone, which Clara knew her father disliked. He said he felt like he was doing a radio show.

From what seemed a great distance, her father said, “The flight's supposed to arrive at three-fifteen.”

“I'll still be at work then,” her mother said in her flat, distracted voice.

“That's fine,” her father said, and because his voice was so thin as it came through the phone, Clara couldn't decide whether he really thought it was fine or not. “What time do you get off work?” he asked.

“Six or so,” her mother said, filling in a long vertical word in her puzzle.

“Perfect. Maybe Clara and I will cook something,” her father said. “We could have some Thai food ready when you get home.”

Thai food was her mother's favorite, something Clara always dreaded because she preferred plain rice with butter. But it seemed a very bad sign when her mother, putting down her pencil to pick up the receiver and cut off the speakerphone, said, “No, that's okay. You and Clara go ahead. I'll probably just have something before I leave the store.” Instead of the usual exchange about missing him, she said a quick and wooden “Good night.” And then, before going back to her crossword, her mother set the phone down so carefully she might have been putting a china cup on display at the store.