Ivy in the Shadows (2 page)

I had a sinking feeling that this moment wasn't going to go forgotten. In the short time we'd been coming here it was easy to see that once the Hickory Women's Presbyterian Guild took on a mission, things were never the same. Just ask anyone who ever had a stare-down with one of them over trying to take a cookie before the pastor invited the parishioners to refreshments.

After church, the same people we met at the Kroger grocery store who never did more than nod in our direction came hugging on Mama. They told her how courageous she was. I slipped out the door before they could get their arms around me, too.

I ran around the back of the church, where I knew JJ would be. They always took the Little Lambs class outside on nice days, and seeing them now, holding hands and singing kiddie Bible songs, made me wish I was that age again.

“Come on, JJ,” I said. “Time to go.”

“Okay, bye, Maryann, bye, Adam.” And the list went on. I'll have to admit, JJ was a sweet kid. He always had to say goodbye to everyone.

“Bye, Caleb,” he said.

“Caleb? What was Caleb doing in Little Lambs?” I asked. Caleb was about my age, too big to be in the Little Lambs class. He had moved to my school last year but we didn't have the same classes so I didn't know much about him.

“He's a helper. And he's my friend,” JJ said. “He's been around the world!”

“Around the world?” JJ was only five. I figured he'd gotten part of it wrong. But I glanced back at Caleb. He was a squirrelly-looking kid. He wore glasses and had the kind of brown hair that is the most boring color on the planet. The way he looked and the fact that he made stuff up about being a world traveler made me decide he must be a loser so I kept my mouth shut. I felt almost pious for choosing not to make fun of the less fortunate.

When JJ and I got too hot outside and tired of waiting on Mama, we went back into the cool church. The crowd around Mama had thinned to just Pastor Harold and a man and woman who had given a mind-numbing talk on their summer mission trip to Minnesota, which sounded like an excuse to get in a vacation, if you ask me.

“Oh, Ivy, JJ, come here!” Mama said. “See? These are my children,” she told the couple as she took a tissue from her purse and wiped the sweat from JJ's face.

“Kids, this is Mr. and Mrs. Bennett.” She looked nearly ready to explode with happiness.

“Ivy is the same age as Caleb. You might have seen her at school last year. I'm sure they'll be the best of friends.”

Best of friends?
“Mama!”

“Ivy, take your brother and wait outside,” Mama said, still in that chirpy voice but looking at me out of the corner of her eye like I'd better not ruin whatever she was up to.

I sighed a great big one, figuring you can't get into trouble for breathing, can you? But I did it loud enough so she'd know I didn't want to be best of friends with anyone but my best friend, Ellen. Then I grabbed JJ's hand and left the building.

When Mama came out, we piled into our car. “Roll the windows down,” she said. “I read you can save gas by not running the air conditioner.”

“Mama, it's 150 degrees outside!”

“Must you argue with me every step of the way, Ivy? Be glad we have a car.” She used her elbows to steer as she put the back of her brown hair up with a bobby pin. “If it comes between the house and the car, we'll be hoofing it.”

She'd made that threat before. I had heard her tell Aunt Maureen, “They say to do without food but don't move out of your house. Once you do, you'll be homeless.”

“Listen, kids, I have some great news. Two bits of news, actually. Turns out our landlord's wife, Mrs. Morgan, goes to our church. How's that for luck?” She glanced at JJ in the rearview mirror. Then she looked both ways before turning her bright face on me for a second.

“What's lucky about that?” I asked. Last I knew, Mr. Morgan had called and demanded the rent.

She turned back to the road. “She's going to ask her husband to cut our rent in half for the next six months. Half!”

“Can you pay half?” I asked.

“Well, not yet. But I'm working on that.” Her face lost its spark as she concentrated on the road.

“Which brings me to my next piece of good news,” she said. “Mr. Bennett moved to town last year to fill in as the high school science teacher but a vice-principal position is opening up at a school in Bloomington, near their daughter and her family. Mr. and Mrs. Bennett plan to stay with their daughter while they look for a house there but that's nearly three hours from here. Since her house is really small and Caleb just got settled at school here last year, they thought it would be best all around if they could wait and move Caleb once they buy a new home, hopefully in a month or so. And here we've got that big old half-empty house…”

Mama's voice caught. I knew why. I remembered when we moved into the house. “It's perfect, Cass,” Jack Henry had said. “Harmony Street. It's on the same side of the road as Harmony Street Blues. I'll never get lost coming home from work.”

“I don't know…” Mama had said.

“We can get a dog,” Jack Henry had said.

Mama had laughed. She sounded more like a kid than a woman. “You know how much I love animals.”

“Of course I do, Cass.”

“But it's so
big
!” Mama had said.

He'd swung her around. “Sure, it might seem that way now with only Ivy, but you just wait. We'll have a dozen kids and then you'll be telling me you think it's too small!”

But Jack Henry suddenly developed an allergy to animals, or so he'd said. And JJ was the only baby he had ended up wanting.

“So.” Mama's voice broke into my thoughts. “They'd like to pay me to let him stay with us for a few weeks.”

“Caleb?” I asked. She nodded.

“Caleb Bennett, a kid we don't even know, is going to
live
with us? Mama, what were you thinking?”

“I was thinking about keeping a roof over our heads and food in our stomachs, Ivy. These are hard times for us, changing times. We're in flux, you know.”

I had heard Mama use that word with Aunt Maureen. It meant just what she was saying—nothing would be the same again.

“Even when Jack Henry was here, we thought about converting some of the rooms to take in boarders. I'll admit, I'm not comfortable with that idea now that it's just … us. With no man in the house.” She cleared her throat and a sad look stole over her face. “But Caleb's a child. I think it'll be just fine.”

JJ strained against the harness of his booster seat to pat her back.

“I think it's great!” JJ said. “Caleb's my friend. Can he sleep in my room?”

“It is not great, JJ. You're just a little kid. You don't understand,” I said.

“I do, too, Ivy, and you're just being mean. It'll be nice having a big brother instead of just a dumb sister!”

I knew I'd gone too far because JJ never had a bad word to say about anyone, especially me. But I didn't care. It wasn't Caleb, exactly. I didn't even know him. It's just that our lives felt like a box that had been picked up and turned upside down. You don't have to be an expert on gravity to know that when things are flipped over, something's bound to break.

2

“Push, kids!” Mama said.

JJ tried but he wasn't much help in bringing the old mattress up from the basement. Mama pulled from above, which meant all its weight was on me. We'd made it to the top of the basement steps and now we had to get it upstairs to the spare bedroom that, until now, we hadn't used. Mama was getting it ready for Caleb.

“I said push!”

I turned around so my back was against the mattress and used my body to give it a heave. Finally we were making headway. When we got to the top of the stairs, all three of us fell flat on the mattress, out of breath.

“Please, Mama. Please move Caleb's bed into my room,” JJ said for the hundredth time.

“Honey, there's no room in there for another bed. Besides, I'm sure Caleb will want some privacy.”

“Not to mention we barely know him,” I mumbled, but Mama heard.

“I'm not saying it's a perfect situation, Ivy,” she said. “And I didn't know you'd got yourself a job bringing in enough money to keep us. Why, if I'd known that, I wouldn't have begged for help in front of half the town at church.”

She was using her most sarcastic tone. That tone gets me sent to my room when I use it.

“You know I don't have a job, Mama. That's not funny.”

“Neither is starving. Now stop finding fault and help me get this mattress into the spare room.”

We had always closed off this room. “One less room to heat and clean,” Mama would say.

We'd dragged the bed frame from the basement earlier. It was Jack Henry's before he married Mama. Now we fit the heavy mattress and box springs onto it. Mama pulled out a sheet from the hall closet. She snapped it into the air before settling it onto the bed. I helped tuck the corners in nicely like she'd taught me.

School had gotten out at noon today for teacher prep. Ellen had invited me over to her house and then shopping, but Mama put me right to work as soon as I got home. I knew I had some making up to do before she'd let me go anywhere.

When we got the bed made and the room dusted, I said, “It looks right nice.”

Mama smiled. It was the sign I'd been waiting for.

“May I run over to Ellen's house? I'll be back by supper.”

“Sure,” she said, one finger to her chin as she surveyed the room. “Just don't be late for supper. The Bennetts are coming.”

I wanted to yell, “If you'd just listen to me, you'd know I said I'd be back by then!” but I bit my lip. All Mama and I did lately was bicker and I didn't want her to keep me from Ellen's.

I hurried out the door, then headed to our car. Last week I'd checked the crack between the seats for money and had found eighty-seven cents, so I tried again today, reaching as far as my hand could go. I felt metal and some grit but didn't come up with any more cash.

Ellen always wanted to walk downtown and shop at the convenience store or CVS. I'd never been one to care about shopping, and Ellen knew I didn't have money these days. Still, I got tired of looking but not spending.

I cut through the backyard and down the alley and went two blocks south to her sunny yellow house. Her mama worked, but there were pretty flowers in the yard, and inside, why the smell of Pine-Sol nearly knocked a person down! My mama didn't have a job but somehow things never looked quite as spick-and-span as they did here. Not even when Jack Henry was around and Mama thought she was happy.

I knocked on the door and caught my reflection in the window. My hair was a mess, so I bent over at the waist causing it all to fall forward, then threw my head back. It was a trick Ellen taught me in the school bathroom because I never carried a comb.

“It's still messy but in a more styled way” was how she put it. Me, I don't care so much. Hair is hair. It gets messed up. But looking good was important to Ellen lately so I made an effort when she was around.

She yanked the door open, put one finger to her lips in the shushing position, then pointed to the cell phone at her ear. I sat at the stool near the kitchen counter and nibbled on the fresh grapes her mama kept in a wooden bowl there. I listened to her “Uh-huhs” and “No ways!” until she finally finished. She clicked off her phone and dropped it into her purse.

“That was Alexa Ray. I couldn't just hang up on her. She's grounded, so I have to take her calls when she can sneak them in.”

“What's she grounded for?”

“I can't tell you.” Alexa was in our class but neither Ellen nor I were especially close to her.

“Why can't you?”

“I'd be breaking confidentiality,” Ellen said.

I tried to make her laugh. “Better than breaking your arm.”

Ellen rolled her eyes and pulled her purse strap onto her shoulder. “Ready?”

And this was the one thing that was starting to bother me a lot where Ellen was concerned. Until lately, Ellen and I would have cracked up over someone else saying “I'd be breaking confidentiality.” She'd have made a joke of it. Better than the one I'd tried to make about breaking an arm. But even a lame attempt like mine would have made her laugh. Now she seemed above all that. I knew it wouldn't last but it got to me how she acted like she was a teenager instead of the girl who'd swallowed her sister's goldfish on a dare just three short months ago.

“Yeah, I'm ready.” I popped one last grape into my mouth and scooted off the stool.

When we got to the door, Ellen dug her lip gloss out of her purse and ran one shiny finger over her lips. She handed the tube to me. I hate the feel of anything on my lips. I won't even use ChapStick in the winter. But I put a tiny bit on my finger and kind of dabbed it on my bottom lip, then wiped the slick stuff onto my jeans. I wished things like glossy lips weren't important to Ellen and she'd turn back into the old Ellen, my best friend since first grade.

She smiled, swung her purse back onto her shoulder, and out the door we went. She talked about school, about how much fun this year was going to be. She said that, even though we'd only been in school three weeks, we were already off to a great start.

“How do you figure that?” I asked. “Last year we were the oldest kids in school. This year we're at the bottom.” We were seventh graders in an Indiana town too small to have a middle school. “We're not even that. Freshmen are at the bottom. We're sub-students. For the next two years we'll be targets for every bully in the building.”

Ellen laughed. “You're not looking at this from the right point of view.”

I raised my eyebrows. “I thought I just said our view was from belowground. Not much to see from there.”