Prairie Evers (17 page)

Ivy shook her head again, real slow. “You know, I don’t. I feel bad about that. Like a person ought to miss her mother, no matter what. I miss the idea of her sometimes. The idea of a mother who was—more like yours, I guess. But I don’t miss my actual mother much. I guess I can’t. I can’t—let myself.”

“Well, as far as I can see, she hasn’t made herself real missable.”

Ivy made a face.

We sat there side by side, swinging our legs. Every now and then I kicked Ivy’s toe real gentle and she kicked back. That was our code: we knew what we meant, even if there were no words for it.

“Sometimes I get tired of never being the one to give anybody anything,” Ivy said after a long time. “Look at what you all gave me for Christmas. I didn’t have anything for anybody but frosted sugar cookies. And your mom and dad bought everything to make them.”

“Those cookies were
good
. I’m rotten at cookies; they always come out wrong, all lumpy and burned and raw at the same time. I couldn’t have done what you did. And grown-ups are supposed to buy the ingredients, that’s what they do. They bought everything I used to make the bookmarks too. And who wouldn’t rather have a cookie than a bookmark?”

Ivy shrugged. I could see she wasn’t convinced. “Sometimes I just think I ought to go take my chances with my mom and George. You are all so nice to me, but I don’t like being a charity case.”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t see it that way, but I didn’t know how to get that across to Ivy. Finally I had a thought. I grabbed her hand and said, “The fact is, Ivy, that you gave me something I never had before. And it’s something I always wanted. I never told anyone, not even Grammy.”

Ivy looked at me with a skeptical lift to her eyebrows. “Oh, and what is that?”

“A friend who was like a sister to me.”

I had revealed such a deep, precious secret, I expected Ivy to light up like a firework and fling her arms around me. Instead she looked doubtful. “But we’re not sisters.”

“Sure we are! We are if we say we are.”

“That’s not the way it works.”

“Sure it is.”

“You can’t just
decide
to be sisters, that’s impossible.”

“Sure we can. Haven’t we done all kinds of impossible things? Like raise chickens, and increase our egg sales with better advertising, and distract a coyote? Didn’t you teach Pup to fetch? Everybody knows you can’t teach a cat anything. And weren’t we teaching ourselves to play the guitar and banjo before Grammy came home, and what about getting your mama to let you stay here? None of those were things anybody thought could be done. Didn’t we get our entire class learning Cherokee? If that’s not impossible, I don’t know what is. We can be sisters if we want to. Who’s going to stop us?”

Ivy looked a little bewildered. “I don’t know. You just—can’t.”

“Yes, you can.” I stood up and placed my hand over my heart. “Ivy Blake, I declare you are my sister.” Then I shimmied fast down the ladder to the ground. “Betcha can’t catch me,” I hollered, and ran toward the east pasture.

“Can too,” Ivy yelled back, and I heard her scramble down after me.

I ran as fast as I could, but it wasn’t half a minute before Ivy caught up and flung herself at me and knocked me down like a bowling pin.

“Ha!” she said. “Slowpoke.”

I didn’t let her see, but I was smiling. “Slowpoke” is not something a guest says to her hostess, so I knew that Ivy had come around to my way of thinking, or at least was starting to. She started back toward the house, yelling, “Betcha can’t catch me!”

I hollered, “Can too,” and lit out after her.

DOGS AND CATS

I talked to Grammy
about the situation with Ivy late that night when we were the only two still awake. “I didn’t expect it to ever be hard to have Ivy here,” I confessed, leaning up against her where we sat together on the couch, gazing at the tree and its little twinkle lights and shining tinsel. “I thought it would always just be fun.”

Grammy chuckled. “You’re just finding out what it’s like to have a sibling. It’s the best thing in the world, but from time to time it’s a real headache. Why, you should hear your great-uncle Tecumseh
and me. We fight like cats and dogs sometimes. It’s like we can’t say two right words to each other, and you’d think we were mortal enemies even though either one of us would saw off a hand for the other if we had to.”

“Really? I didn’t know that.”

“Scout’s honor.”

I snuggled closer in to her. “Me and Ivy don’t ever fight
that
bad.”

“Someday you might. Or you might not too. Time will tell. But something tells me you’ll always be close as born sisters.”

I smiled to myself because Grammy had read my heart, just like always.

THE OLD SHOE, NUMBER 2

New Year’s Eve
rolled around, and in a way it was just like the year before. We played Monopoly and ate popcorn and drank RC Colas in glass bottles that Grammy had hauled all the way north with her as a special treat. The hand on the kitchen clock hopped past twelve, we all said, “Happy New Year,” and the very next instant Mama and Daddy tromped off to bed, yawning. But now there were three of us at the table.

I won the Monopoly game hands down. I have to say Ivy did not apply herself to managing her
real estate at all, and Grammy got purely reckless in her investments. She let that old shoe of hers wander into the very
worst
of financial situations. Then Ivy said, “I’m going to make a list of New Year’s resolutions before I go to bed.”

I liked that idea, so I said I would too. Grammy said she had a firm rule to only write resolutions in the morning and would wash up the dishes instead. Ivy and I got out the loose-leaf notebooks Grammy had sent us back in the fall and settled down to think.

I licked the tip of my pencil—I do like a pencil to write with, it seems to work along with you better than a pen, and makes that friendly scratchy noise that a pen won’t make, nor a computer either—but still nothing happened. I tested myself to see if I remembered the last word we did for Cherokee Word of the Day. It was
pencil
, and the Cherokee word for that was— I squinched up my forehead.

“What’s wrong with your face?”

“Nothing. I’m trying to remember something. The word for pencil.”

“
Di-go-we-lo-di
,” Ivy said. She was already back to writing.

I sighed. Nobody keeps their resolutions more than about ten minutes anyway, I said to myself. And anything that you really intend to do you are probably already embarked on. I sat there a long time while Ivy flowed along, writing like there was nothing to it.

“What’re you doing?” she asked, looking up at me finally. “Why aren’t you writing anything down?”

“I’m
thinking.
”

“Oh. Well, don’t let me stop you.”

“I won’t.”

Ivy went back to her notebook. I frowned. Then after a minute I grabbed Daddy’s new beekeeping magazine and used the spine as a straight edge to make a heavy black line across the top of the page. Above it I put
MY FLOCK
, in big bold letters. Below it I numbered one to sixteen and printed in the names of each of my chickens, starting off with Fiddle. On the next page I used the magazine edge to make a chart where I could fill in how many eggs I gathered each day and how many I sold.

That’s what I was writing. But what I thought in my head as I made my charts was different. I drifted through the year gone by. I remembered Grammy’s leaving. It had broken my heart. But that broken heart did begin to mend, just like she told me it would, and now here she was, back again, which proved that some prayers did get answered. I thought of selling Mama’s quilt for so much at the farmers’ market back in September, and Anne Oliver saying Daddy’s birdhouses were overpriced. I remembered how it had seemed like the end of the world the next morning, when Mama and Daddy told me they were sending me to school. But then school ended up being where I met my very best friend, and now here I was, sitting in the
kitchen with her like it was no big deal and never could’ve happened any other way.

Across the table Ivy sighed happily. “I just love New Year’s resolutions.”

“Not me.” I frowned over my egg chart.

“I like the feeling of starting new. Getting a whole new chance.”

I was about to tell her that was silly. You could have a new chance any day you wanted, you didn’t have to wait for a certain date on the calendar. But then, almost by accident, I kept quiet. Maybe Grammy made a tiny sound. I looked at her, but she was at the sink with her back to us.

Whatever caused it, that pause gave me time to remember: Ivy had her way of looking at things and I had mine. They didn’t always have to be the same. And I couldn’t blame her for having a soft spot for new beginnings. Come to think of it, maybe I did too. “I guess you’re right,” I said. “I see what you mean.”

Grammy turned from the sink just enough to give me a very quick wink.

I tucked my head back down over my notebook so Ivy wouldn’t catch my grin and wonder what it was about. She was happy with her resolution making and I didn’t want to distract her. I picked up my pencil again but I didn’t go back to my egg chart. Instead, after a long pause, I turned to another new page. At the top I slowly wrote,
The Old Shoe
.

All at once I understood how Mama felt about her quilts.
I saw how she could bear to spend so much time cutting tiny little squares out of fabric and then ever so carefully stitching them together. It was like she said—she saw a pattern in her head, and she had to make it come out into the world somehow. What I saw in my head when Grammy winked at me was our story—the story of how Ivy and Grammy and I came to be in the kitchen together on New Year’s Eve, with the Monopoly board still set up and the empty RC Cola bottles standing near it and Mama and Daddy gone to bed already and the smell of popcorn lingering in the air. I thought that what I’d like to do was write it all down, so that I’d never forget how glad I felt right at that very moment.
Just exactly one year ago,
I wrote, my pencil scratching along in its friendly way,
right after midnight on New Year’s Eve…

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

So many people influence the creation of a book. For their contributions to
Prairie Evers,
my thanks to the following:

A student I met many years ago at JKL Bahweting Public School Academy in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. His courage and honesty in sharing his story did much to inspire the character of Ivy Blake.

Tanis Erdmann, for her editorial work with me, for encouraging me as a writer, and for seeing the strength in Prairie’s story when it was first drafted.

Lisa Snapp and Jean Battle, two of Prairie’s earliest fans.

Pamela Grath, for so many things—friendship, philosophy, and such devotion to books and bookselling.

All at the Joy Harris Literary Agency. Particular thanks to Sarah Twombly for offering to help me draw Prairie out on paper more gracefully.

Nancy Paulsen and all at Nancy Paulsen Books who had a hand in sending Prairie out into the world.

Rebecca Fuge and her daughter, Elladiss, who read the book midway through its revisions to see what a kid and a mom would think.

John Henderson, of Ithaca, New York, who agreed out of the blue to consult on everything related to chickens for a total stranger via e-mail. Everything that’s correct about chickens is thanks to John, and anything that’s wrong is my fault. Thank you for considering so much more than just the technical aspects of poultry keeping, including but
not limited to sending me E. B. White’s “In Praise of the Hen,” helping me make the Agway man a more complex character, pointing out how much home-cooked food might mean to Ivy, and sending various photos and videos of eggs, Agway flyers, chickens and even chicken droppings.

John Battle, for reading the manuscript during its final stages of revisions. I was heartened when a guy who’d never read a middle-grade novel before (possibly not even when he was in a middle grade) ended up loving the story.

Ellen Smith. Thank you for comparing Prairie’s experiences to your own of growing up as a girl with Cherokee grandparents, and for finding them in some ways eerily similar.