Summer of Joy (26 page)

But he had looked relieved that she might think a miracle was possible. “They do,” he said. “Every day. As a doctor I’m constantly seeing things I can’t explain. That no one could explain.”

“I’ll bet you do,” she said. “But I shouldn’t count on it, right? So how long?”

He’d never really given her a time. Just told her that if there was anything she wanted to do, that she should consider doing it soon. Just in case the miracle didn’t come through, Adrienne supposed. Then he’d said she would need someone to help her in the latter stages. And did she have anyone she could depend on?

Adrienne looked through the mail. Advertisements for things she couldn’t buy. Bills she couldn’t pay. A get-well card with a verse she didn’t even bother to read from that silly little waitress they’d hired on down at the restaurant a few weeks ago. A letter from her mother in Florida. Then there was what she’d been looking for. Tabitha’s handwriting on an envelope.

Adrienne still hadn’t written Tabitha back, but the girl had always been persistent to a fault. She’d sent at least one picture every month even as the notes along with the pictures had gotten shorter and shorter. Tabitha had only scribbled a few lines with this one.

Adrienne stared at the photograph. Tabitha must have gotten down on the floor to snap the picture of the baby crawling toward her. His eyes looked determined as if he already knew that whatever he wanted in life he was going to have to get on his own. His eyes that were so like hers even if they were brown instead of green.

If there’s anything you want to do.
The doctor’s words echoed in Adrienne’s head as she stared at the baby who seemed to be trying to crawl out of the picture right into her arms. She lifted her left arm until the pain stopped her and wondered if she’d be able to hold him if he did magically appear in front of her.

31

T
hursday, April 8, 1965. I can’t believe spring break is almost
over. I’m ready for school to be over. Two more months. I surely
can survive that. I survived January and February and March.
That was three months.

Jocie was sitting in Leigh’s car in the parking lot waiting for Leigh to get off at lunch. Leigh had taken the afternoon off so Jocie could go with her to Lexington to shop for a wedding dress. Leigh was nearly in panic mode. The wedding was less than two months away and she didn’t have her dress.

They’d dabbled at shopping a couple of Saturdays in February, but Leigh hadn’t found anything she liked. She hadn’t been worried. She had plenty of time. Weeks and weeks before June. March had passed with no time for shopping. Leigh said everybody and his brother in Hollyhill put off getting his or her new license plates until the last minute and then showed up at the courthouse and groused about standing in line. Leigh couldn’t take off work until after that madness was over. Besides, she said she figured she might lose another pound or two.

Jocie’s dad kept telling Leigh not to worry about losing any more weight, that she looked perfect the way she was, and she did look pretty. Glowing all the time. Like she was walking around on air. Zella said that was the way brides-to-be were supposed to look. But Zella did think it was high time Leigh had her dress. That a person shouldn’t procrastinate about something that important.

Leigh hadn’t exactly been procrastinating. She just couldn’t find the right dress. The perfect dress. When Jocie asked her what the perfect dress looked like, Leigh couldn’t tell her. Just said she’d know when she saw it.

Jocie checked her watch and rolled the car window down. It was warm with the sunshine coming through the windows. Leigh had told her she might be late getting off at lunch, but Jocie didn’t mind waiting. She liked having time to write in her journal.

I’m going with Leigh shopping again. I told her maybe she should take Tabitha and let me stay home with Stephen Lee, but then Tabitha started working at the Family Diner Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Aunt Love has Stephen Lee for about an hour before I get home from school and she still takes care of him even after I’m there. But it makes Tabitha feel better with both of us around. She worries about Aunt Love leaving the door open or forgetting something on the stove and catching the house on fire or letting Stephen Lee climb up the stairs. Of course when it comes to Stephen Lee, Tabitha worries about everything. She goes a little nuts every time he pulls on his ear with an earache or falls down and bumps his head.

I think she’s going overboard. Half the time when Stephen Lee bumps his head he doesn’t even cry. He’s a tough little rascal. You can look him in the eye and tell that. He’s more likely to cry because he’s mad than because he’s hurt. But you should see the list of what me and Aunt Love have to watch out for that she leaves us every day. Aunt Love just laughs about it. And I don’t think Tabitha has to worry for a minute about Aunt Love forgetting to take care of Stephen Lee. He’s in there in her brain along with all those Bible verses she’s always throwing out at me.

I’ve got so I don’t mind her Bible verses that much. “Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised.” Psalm 48:1. She says that one nearly every morning now when I go in the kitchen for breakfast. I’m back out sleeping on the porch again. I love it out there where I can see the stars through the windows and Zeb can sleep on the floor beside me. Anyway how could anybody be upset by a verse like that? Great is the Lord. I mean a person ought to be ready to shout that one out whenever. Off the rooftops or wherever. Dad just preached about that—getting up on the roof to tell the good news of the Lord. That’s in the Bible somewhere.

Aunt Love doesn’t shout out her verses much anymore. Most of the time she’s singing the Psalms to Stephen Lee these days instead of using them to try to control my unruly behavior. Maybe I’m just growing up and getting less unruly. Wes says it happens to the best of us. Just look at him and how he’s been earthed and goes to church every Sunday now. That he’s just getting rulier and rulier. When I asked him what rulier meant he said he guessed it was the opposite of unrulier and meant a body noticed there was a rule here and there that might make sense.

He and Robert have been writing some. Not as much as Robert and Tabitha. Those two keep the mailman busy. Tabitha has a whole stack of Robert’s letters hidden away in her dresser drawer. Says if she catches me trying to read them she’ll tear all the pages out of my journal notebooks and mail them to Zella. I don’t know why she thinks I care if Zella reads what’s in my notebooks. There’s nothing secret here. Not secret like those letters. I think they’re in love.

Everybody’s in love, I guess. Believe it or not, Paulette and Ronnie are still going strong. And Charissa is still swooning over Noah every time she sees him or thinks about him. Noah hasn’t asked her out yet, which I tell Charissa is just as well since there’s no way her daddy is going to let her go on a date. Not till she’s sixteen and we’ve got two years to wait for that. Of course I couldn’t care less about going on a date with anybody. I guess I still have a problem with arrested development.

Charissa tells me if I’d spend half as much time thinking about boys as I do worrying about what Mr. Teacher Creep is going to do next, I’d be better off. And more normal. She starts rolling her eyes if I so much as say the first word about Mr. Creep. That’s one reason I have to write it all down in here. I mean she knows he’s a creep and that he does pick on me, but she says so what? That happens to a lot of kids in school when they get on the wrong side of this teacher or that. That black kids like her have that problem all the time just because they don’t have white skin and they just have to learn to get along with it.

Thank goodness I can still talk to Wes about it. I don’t talk about it to Dad because of the weirdness with Mr. Creep still chasing after Leigh as if he didn’t know she was engaged. He sent her more roses that ended up at the nursing home again on Valentine’s Day and wrote her a poem. I saw it. It stunk. Didn’t make the first bit of sense. Then just last Friday before spring break he even tried to get me to carry a note to her. Can you believe that? You should have seen the look on his face when I told him they still sold stamps at the Post Office. I’ll have to pay for that one when we go back next Monday.

The man is weird. Definitely weird. Me and Wes are pretty much in agreement on that. Still, I have to go to English class. Mr. Madison told me I did. Yeah, I actually asked. I mean, you’ve got to know how bad things are if I went to the principal’s office. Students don’t voluntarily go to the principal’s office.

But when I got my last theme back and Mr. Teacher Creep had marked a big red F on it, I’d had enough. I went right up and asked him about it, and he sort of laughed and said I should have picked a better subject. That nobody could write a proper paper about dogs. I reminded him he’d said we could write about anything we wanted, and he said that didn’t mean he had to approve of whatever we decided to write about. But Joe Masterson wrote about horses and he got a B. I saw his paper. Had red marks all over it where he’d misspelled this or that word. Probably misspelled horse. Then Mr. Creep had written “Good Effort” on top of it. My paper didn’t have a red mark on it. Not one. Except, of course, the big F. That was because there weren’t any mistakes. Not one. And what I’d written was interesting too. I might get Dad to run it in the Banner if we have some space to fill. Dogs have universal appeal. Except I suppose with Mr. Creep. Maybe they don’t have dogs on Neptune.

Anyway I didn’t give myself time to think. I marched right down to Mr. Madison’s office and sat down in a chair and refused to move until Miss Gilbert let me in to see him. I was so mad. I mean I plan to go to college someday and how’s it going to look if I get an F in freshman English? Bad, that’s how. And I’ll need scholarships. A person has to get A’s to get scholarships.

Anyway once Miss Gilbert saw I meant business and let me go talk to Mr. Madison, I showed him the paper and told him how I’d tried to talk to Mr. Creep about the grade he’d given me, but that he’d just laughed at me. Well, I didn’t say Mr. Creep, but I wanted to. I told Mr. Madison how I was trying to be a perfect student in that class. On time, quiet, homework turned in, every answer on the tests right. I told him how Mr. Creep kept making me stand in front of the class and do humiliating things like hop on one foot while repeating whatever stupid poem he told me to and how once he’d hit me on the back of the head with a book.

But I didn’t tell him everything. I didn’t tell him how Mr. Creep keeps lurking around Leigh’s apartment and calling her. I didn’t tell him how Mr. Creep makes fun of the stories in the Banner. I didn’t tell him how I have to go to my locker and stick my head inside it nearly every day after English class so nobody will see me crying. I didn’t tell him how I prayed every day to be invisible when I went in there. I’ve even been desperate enough to pray for Mr. Creep a few times. And no, I don’t pray that he’d fall in a hole and break both his legs. I just wish that sometimes.

Well, you know how it is with teachers. They form a solid wall in front of you no matter what they actually think. So Mr. Madison said I couldn’t switch out of that class because Mr. Creep is the only freshman English teacher. He kept my paper and suggested I send my dad in to talk to him about my problems. My problems? What about somebody talking to Mr. Creep? He’s the one with problems.

So now I have to talk to Dad about talking to Mr. Madison. And I’ll have to tell him some of what’s been going on and he’ll get that look on his face like he’d rather not include Mr. Creep in his prayers either. I’ve been putting it off, but I’ll have to do it before Monday. Maybe Sunday night after church. Dad will be too tired to go rushing out of the house to throttle Mr. Creep then. Or maybe I can get by with talking to Wes and letting him go talk to Mr. Madison. That ought to be interesting. Wes could share his Jupiterian theory that no one from Neptune should ever be a teacher. Or for that matter, even allowed on earth. I like the way Jupiterians think.

“What are you writing about that’s got you smiling?” Leigh asked as she opened the car door and slid under the wheel.

“Oh, nothing much,” Jocie said and shut her notebook. “Just silly stuff.”

“That’s the best kind of stuff to write in a journal.” Leigh stuck the key in the ignition and turned it. “You ready to go find that dress?”

“Sure.”

“We’re going to do it today. We have to do it today. How’s that for pressure?”

“You don’t have to have a fancy dress to get married. Sometimes people tie the knot in whatever they happen to have on. Don’t even dress up a bit.”

“I know. I see them at the courthouse when they get Uncle Howie to marry them since he’s the judge and all. He comes and grabs me to be one of the witnesses if they don’t bring someone with them. But I’ve been waiting a long time for this, and I want everything to be perfect. I mean, I already have the perfect groom. It’s not too much to want the perfect dress too, is it?”

“I don’t know. But I’ll say a wedding-dress prayer for you if you want me to. Dad says it’s okay to pray about everything.” Jocie looked down at her journal and thought maybe she should be praying more about what to do about Mr. Creep instead of just griping all the time.