Homecoming (28 page)

“It’s too bad you can’t sail over,” Tom said to Dicey.

“It sure beats the bus,” Jerry agreed.

They didn’t sound like they were offering, so Dicey played it low. “Yeah. But it’s
a short trip. We’ll survive.”

“Yeah, it’s too bad,” Tom said to her. “We’d offer to sail you over, see, but Jerry
would have to ask permission, and . . . ”

Dicey nodded, as if she understood. Well, she did. She understood what he was up to.

Jerry studied his feet.

Dicey stood up. “We gotta get back now. Thanks for the Cokes.”

“Wait a minute,” Jerry said. “Would you really like to sail over?” he asked. He was
looking at Tom, not at them, as he spoke.

“Gee, yes,” James said.

“We could get back by dark, you know,” Jerry said to Tom. Tom just smiled. “I’ll tell
my mom I’m having dinner at your house. Do you think we could? Get over and back?”

Tom looked doubtful.

“I’d like to try it, wouldn’t you?” Jerry insisted.

“Oh, I’d like it, you know that. I’m always game for something out of the ordinary.
But
I
don’t have to be home by dark.
I
don’t have the mother who has to know where I am every minute of the day.”

“Cut it out, okay? Lay off that stuff. I mean what can they do to me after all? Lock
me in the attic? Beat me with wet noodles? Send me away to school?”

Tom shrugged.

“Gee, I don’t want to get you in trouble,” James said.

“Trouble,” Jerry said, as if there was no trouble he couldn’t handle. “Let me worry
about that. I’m game for a day’s hard sailing. Think you can do it?” he challenged
Tom.

“Anything you can do I can do,” Tom answered.

“We’ll see,” Jerry said. “You kids get back here early
tomorrow—eight o’clock. Can you be here that early?”

“I think so,” Dicey said. “I think there’s a seven o’clock bus we could say we were
taking. It sure would be fun to sail over.”

“It’s not easy,” Jerry warned her. “You have to keep out of the way.”

“We can do that,” Dicey said.

“And the little kids—can they swim?”

“I can swim good,” Sammy said.

“Okay, then. Okay?”

“Okay,” Dicey agreed. They left the boat quickly. She picked up her bag from the dock
and hustled everyone ahead of her down the dock. When they were well out of sight,
she slowed down and turned to James.

“Gee, James,” she said—and burst out laughing.

James joined in.

“I want hamburgers for supper tonight,” he said.

“You deserve them,” Dicey answered.

“I thought you’d never catch on,” he said. “I thought that Jerry’d never catch on.
You know, Dicey? We made them do what we wanted them to do.”

“Tom really did it,” Dicey said.

“Yeah. Why did he? Does he want to get his friend in trouble?”

“I dunno,” Dicey said. “Is that what friends do?”

“Don’t you know?”

“No. I never had a friend like that, a best friend from first grade. We never had
many friends, did we?”

“I guess not.” James thought about that. “None of us did. Maybe Tillermans don’t.”

They ate dinner at Burger King: hamburgers, french fries, milkshakes. It tasted good
to them, after weeks of Cousin Eunice’s frozen dinners and pot pies. They wandered
around
again until evening had settled in, milling with crowds of people who seemed to have
nothing else to do but saunter down the streets and look in store windows, or peer
at the little houses.

When they had drifted back to their own empty house, the little children fell asleep
almost at once. Dicey and James sat for a long time down by the river. Occasional
boats motored up and down. Voices floated across the water. The air was humid and
hot. Altogether Dicey felt satisfied.

“What do you know about our grandmother?” James asked her.

“I think she’s poor,” Dicey said. “And maybe strange.”

“Strange? Like Momma? Crazy?”

“Strange like all the Tillermans,” Dicey said. “She lives all alone on a farm.”

“Why do Tillermans always live alone?”

“
We
don’t. We live together.”

“Together, but all alone together,” James said.

“Maybe every family feels that way,” Dicey said. “Maybe that’s what families are.”

“I don’t know,” James said. “I don’t think so.”

Before she went to sleep that night, Dicey counted her money, peering at the bills
in the dim light. She had forty-seven dollars left, and some change.

It had cost them a lot to get to Annapolis. Dicey decided that forty would be the
amount to keep in her pocket. Once they got across the bay, they’d have to stop spending.
They’d have to fish for food, and get clams; or something. And she’d have to earn
money if she could. Seven dollars could go a long way, if it had to, if you made it.
She’d make it go as far as she could, all the way to Crisfield. If she could.

W
hen Dicey awoke, she was cool and damp, and even a little chilly. The morning air
lay moist over her. She turned her eyes from the gray sky to her family.

Sammy wasn’t there.

She sat up, peering toward the bush they used for a bathroom. She waited, long enough,
she judged, but he did not appear. She jumped to her feet and looked around.

His little figure sat huddled on the bulkheading at the end of the lawn. In the mists
rising from the water, he could have been a woeful little bush planted between the
willow and the pine.

Dicey went to the bathroom, then walked down to join him. He knew who she was without
turning his head. “What got you up?” she asked.

“I had to pee,” he said. His fingers picked long splinters from the wood. “I was thinking,”
he said.

“You worried?”

He shook his head. “I’m not scared of sailing.”

“I never said you were,” Dicey answered. “You’re not scared of anything, are you?”

Sammy looked at her then, his eyes questioning. “I had a dream that you were all on
a bus and the door closed and I couldn’t get on. I ran and ran after it, but it kept
getting away.”

Dicey nodded her head and watched the mists rising almost in straight lines, like
rain going backward. In the east, the sky lightened.

“Dicey? Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Tell the truth?”

“I always do.”

“No, you don’t,” Sammy said.

Dicey understood him. “I’ll tell the truth, Sammy, I promise.”

Sammy asked his question: “Why were you going to go alone, before James caught you?”

The hulls of the boats were shadowy silhouettes on the water. Mist caught in the branches
of the trees across the river. The mists would burn off, Dicey thought. There wasn’t
much wind.

“I don’t know what we’re going to find when we get there,” Dicey said. “So I figured
if I went down alone and saw what it’s like, then I could come back and get you all.
If it was okay. If it wasn’t okay, I could just forget about it. Also, I had enough
money to get there and back on a bus and stay on my own in a hotel. See, Sammy, I
don’t know what this grandmother will be like. I was trying to make things easiest
for you all. Do you understand?”

“I guess so. I think so—like I fight when people say things, so they won’t say them
anymore. Are you sorry that we’re with you?”

“A little, yes. It’s harder with four of us. And more expensive. And”—since Dicey
had determined to tell the whole truth, she did—“I kind of liked the idea of traveling
alone—you know? With no one to look after. But I was wrong, Sammy, or at least I think
now I was. I made a mistake not telling you.”

“Why?”

“Because we do things together. The trouble was, we didn’t do
things together at Cousin Eunice’s and that got me thinking the wrong way.”

“How can something get you thinking the wrong way, if you know how to think the right
way?” Sammy asked. But he was sitting up straighter and kicking his heels.

“They just do. I don’t know how.”

“I always thought . . . well, you didn’t make mistakes.”

“Everybody makes mistakes!”

“Not you—you didn’t.”

“Oh, Sammy. I made dozens of mistakes.”

“Name one.”

“Staying too long at Rockland. Not planning how to cross the Connecticut River. Not
having any money in New Haven. Not telling Cousin Eunice what I thought, about you
and Maybeth.”

“Don’t tell me,” Sammy begged. “Don’t tell me any more.”

“But you asked me to!” Dicey protested.

The sun was rising, turning the sky and air a rosy gold color. Gulls wheeled through
the air. A boat motored quietly down the river, the people on it dark figures.

“You did,” Dicey insisted. “You did ask me.” She reached over and tickled Sammy under
his arm. He squirmed. She reached her other arm over and wrestled him down to the
grass, tickling, crying, “You did, you did, you did. Say so.”

Sammy screamed with laughter and wriggled under her hands. “All right, I did!”

Dicey stood up. She brushed her hands briskly together. “Let’s get going,” she said.
They raced back up the lawn.

They were early down to the boat, early and hungry. James grumbled that he wanted
breakfast but Dicey ignored him. She didn’t want to spend any money until they got
across the bay. She wanted everything to stay just as it was until they were actually
on the other side.

The Tillermans sat on the end of the dock waiting. All around them, the boatyards
came awake. Water traffic made many little waves. A slight breeze blew now, and little
boats sailed down to the mouth of the river and the bay.

Time passed slowly. Dicey sensed that it was after eight o’clock. Cars streamed over
the bridge, going toward town. People going to work, she thought. Her hunger mounted.
She had been sure, at first, that she could wait to eat until they were across.

“Tonight,” Dicey announced, “we’ve got to wash our underwear. And put on clean. Maybe
shirts too. Okay?”

“Do you think they forgot?” James asked. His head moved restlessly. “Or changed their
minds?”

“Maybe,” Dicey said. “Or they could have been lying to us.”

At this, James smiled: “That would serve us right, wouldn’t it?”

They had to eat. If Dicey was hungry, James must be starving. She went back to a gas
station and bought crackers with peanut butter from a machine. Then she put in two
more quarters and got chocolate bars.

When she returned, the two boys were there, busy working with sails on the deck. They
were dressed just as they had been the day before. Dicey wondered if they slept in
their swimming suits. She looked at James and raised her eyebrows. She handed out
packets of crackers and offered some of hers to Jerry and Tom. “No thanks,” they both
said. “We just ate. You kids stay in the cockpit, okay?”

It was like sitting in a booth without a table, with the four Tillermans, two to a
side, knees hitting knees, stiff and watchful. The boys spent a long time putting
on the jib. Jerry came back and stood by the base of the mast. He pulled down on a
rope. The jib rose slowly and hung flapping at its stay. Jerry told Tom to fend off
from the bow while he backed out of the dock.

When Jerry returned to the cockpit, he looked at the Tillermans. “Ready to go?”

“You bet,” Dicey answered.

“Drop your bag on one of the bunks below,” Jerry told her. “Then I think you and your
brother James had better go sit on the cabin. I need room for play on the tiller,
and Tom’ll be back here, handling the sails. You ever sail before?”

Dicey thought of lying and then thought better of it. “No,” she said.

Jerry considered this. His face was thin and his hair was bleached to a metallic tone
that matched the gold in his eyes. His mouth looked soft and sulky, but his body was
lean. “Okay,” he said, “listen carefully. We’re going to have to tack out a ways,
then we can reach over to St. Mikes. Tacking means we zigzag, going as close to the
wind as possible.” His hand sketched a zigzag motion in the air. “At the end of each
tack, I’ll call, ‘ready about.’ The boat will rotate, about sixty degrees, and the
mainsail and boom will swing from one side to the other. The heel will reverse too.”

“What?” James said. “I don’t understand.”

Jerry held his hand out stiffly, slanted one way, then reversed the slant. “That’s
what the keel does when we tack and come about,” he said. “On a reach we’ll ride pretty
flat. All you have to do is hang on when we come about. There’s no danger. I want
you to sit where you’re put, and sit quiet. But if I tell you to move, or give any
order, you’ve got to obey right away. Got that?”

“We can do that,” Dicey said. “All of us.”

She leaned down and tossed her bag onto a bunk below. Then she and James went up forward
to sit on the roof of the cabin. They could lean back against the mast, or slip down
to the deck and lean against the cabin wall.

Jerry started the motor. Tom uncleated a heavy line with a
floater tied on its end and dropped it into the water. James looked at Dicey: “I hope
they know what they’re doing,” he said.

The sun was toasting warm. The water danced beneath the keel. The motor hummed. The
boat slipped out into the river and turned east. The jib flapped.

Waterfront buildings glided slowly by, boatyards, condominiums with great glass windows
looking out over the water, an occasional small house in the middle of a green lawn.
Theirs was one of many boats headed out to the bay.

The motor stopped. Dicey turned her head. She smiled to Sammy and Maybeth, sitting
straight up and still, one on each side of the cockpit. Tom stood up, holding the
tiller. Jerry jumped up behind them to raise the mainsail. When he had it cleated,
he jumped down into the cockpit and hauled in on a line.

The mainsail stiffened, then puffed out. The boat responded, surging forward underneath
them.

Tom returned the tiller to Jerry and pulled in the jib. It was not the kind of jib
Dicey knew. At Provincetown she had seen little, narrow triangular sails. This jib
was long. It curved back around, halfway down the length of the cockpit. Dicey turned
her head back and yelled, “What kind of a jib is that?”