The Junction of Sunshine and Lucky (9 page)

Halloween comes and goes. My fat pillowcase of candy turns into a wad of empty wrappers. The construction paper black cats in Ms. Byron's classroom windows are replaced by construction paper turkeys.

In all, a whole week has to crawl by before I finally get the letter. Gus is off on one of his pickups, so I'm the only one home when the mail truck sputters by. I tug on the mailbox door and find an envelope—from the House Beautification Committee.
It's here,
I think.
Finally. The House Beautification Committee's going to award Gus and me for all our work. Those pictures from Victoria did the trick.

My heart is kicking my ribs and my fingers are trembling as I tear into the envelope.

When I unfold the letter, I gasp and shout, “No! No, no,
no
!” Because this letter is the exact opposite of what I'd expected:

 

 

ATTENTION
AUGUST JONES

An Individual Residing at 779 Sunshine Street
Willow Grove, Missouri

The property at the above address is currently in violation of the following ordinances mandated by the city of Willow Grove and enforced by the House Beautification Committee:

1. The house located on the above property is not being adequately maintained.

2. Recent updates are deemed substandard.

As the owner of this property, Mr. August Jones shall have forty-five (45) days to address these issues.

If the condition of the property does not improve in that time, the House Beautification Committee will enforce fines for the prior forty-five (45) days and each day the house remains in violation thereafter.

 

The amount of the fine will be determined by committee vote and will be based on the severity of the offense(s).

Thank you,

The House Beautification Committee

(Making our city beautiful, one house at a time.)

I grab my bike and head straight for the wishing spot—but it feels empty, because Lexie's not here, and Mom never came for the open house, and now I've got a letter from the House Beautification Committee in my pocket and eyes that are fogging up with tears.

They hated it. The words pour into my stomach and harden, like concrete: they hated my house.
Some shine
, I tell myself, the voice in my head sounding ugly, like a chord played with a wrong note.

I leave Mom's billboard and head straight for Montgomery. I keep my fingers crossed the entire time that Chuck will be there.

When I skid to a stop, I find the playground marked off by yellow caution tape. I can't quite bear to look, and I've stared to turn my bike around when I hear my name. With Montgomery being so empty, the sound is eerie, and it makes me shiver.

“Auggie!” the voice calls again.

I pull my eyes from the frayed laces of my tennis shoes and feel my entire body spread into a smile. I wipe my eyes with the back of my wrist, because I don't want to look upset in front of the man hurrying across the playground. “Mr. Gutz!” I shout.

His name makes him sound like a terrifying monster—some creature that rises from a swamp, covered in moss, his eyeballs and guts hanging by threads. But Mr. Gutz is no monster. He's a real-live man, with his eyeballs and insides right where they should be—a man with sparkling silver hair and kind eyes and a laugh that's always waiting to skip out from behind his lips. When I was still a student at Montgomery, he was my vice principal.

“Actually,” Mr. Gutz says. “It's not Mr. Gutz anymore. My wife never liked it, so last summer, we changed our name to her maiden name. It was my anniversary present to her. It's Mr. Chong now.”

My face falls. Chong is as nice a name as any, but it pinches me that Gutz is gone. It just seems like everything is losable—even a funny last name.

“What happened out here, anyway?” I ask.

“The House Beautification Committee roped it off,” he says sadly. “I'm back to teaching again—over at Eastwood Elementary—and I came by after school to check in on the old place. I would have liked the playground equipment to be left alone, so that it could be used by all the neighborhood children. I hoped the families living in the area could use it as a park. But the equipment was already old, and it got knocked around in the storm. Since Hopewell is holding services here, the committee thought it would be best to keep everyone off the playground. Just as a precaution.” He talks a little distantly, like the words coming out of his own mouth are still a shock to him.

“The House Beautification Committee,” I grumble, shaking my head. The letter in my hand feels as heavy as a concrete block.

“Mr. Gutz—Chong—I—was hoping—Chuck—” I try, but my eyes are starting to get watery all over again.

“In the all-purpose room,” he says. “Getting ready for the big rummage sale.” He cocks his head to the side. “You okay, Auggie?”

I nod, but I don't feel okay at all. I race inside, where the entire all-purpose room is filled with tables, and the tables are piled high with stuff. A giant sign on the back wall announces
RUMMAGE SALE—PROCEEDS GO TO THE REBUILDING OF THE HOPEWELL COMMUNITY CHURCH.

The squeak of my sneakers on the tile floor makes him turn.

“Hey, Auggie,” he says, but his face looks funny—a little out-of-shape, like a washcloth right after all the water's been wrung out of it.

I feel the same way.

“You've been collecting this stuff a long time,” I say. Because it's going to take me a minute to work up the nerve to admit the real reason I've come to talk to him.

“Longer than I'd initially hoped,” he agrees.

“You got a lot of stuff,” I tell him hopefully.

He only barely nods.

“It is,” I insist. “A lot.”

“Sure. But it's a rummage sale. A quarter here. A dime there. Maybe a dollar every now and then.” He shakes his head. “You're right, Auggie. We got a lot of stuff.”

The smile he tries to put on wobbles as he eyes me. “What's the matter?”

“The House Beautification Committee has decided they don't like my renovations.”

I show him my letter. As he reads, he takes in a giant breath of air, the way people do when they're shocked.

“Would you come take a look?” I ask, because if anyone can find something nice to say about our work, it would be Chuck.

He stares at the mounds of stuff and smiles weakly as he offers, “I'll come look if you'll give me twenty minutes of sticker help.”

“I've been meaning to come by, anyway,” Chuck says, after I wound up helping him price the entire last table of clothes. “I've been meaning to, ah—”

“See what I did with your glass?” I finish.

“Yes—a little reinvention, I see,” he says as we stop in front of my house.

“Maybe more like a demotion,” I say.

“A demotion?” Chuck asks.

“Like when your boss gives you a job worse than the one you've already got because you've messed the first one up pretty bad.”

“You didn't mess this up, Aug,” Chuck says. “You did a really nice job.”

“Yeah, but it used to be in a church, and now it's on somebody's old house.”

“Church is a house. God's house,” Chuck argues.

I shrug my way into an agreement. If anybody'd know for sure, it'd be Chuck.

“Do you really think we did a good job, Chuck? You don't think it's ugly? You don't think what we did is—wrong?”

He sighs. “I don't remember ‘Thou shalt not paint thy house orange and green' being the Eleventh Commandment.”

I laugh. “You know, you aren't as uptight as most ministers,” I tell him. A glance at his shoes proves that much. “I guess we've done more than paint our shutters a funny color.” I nod once at the spinning wind chimes we made from the Monte Carlo. “All of a sudden,” I admit, “that letter from the House Beautification Committee makes me feel like working on the house was something really bad. Like I cheated on a test in school. Only, it still feels right, too.”

As I scrunch up my face, trying to make sense of it all, Chuck's mouth stretches into a wide, proud smile. “That makes me remember your mom,” he says, “and the time we set out to change the world.”

“Maybe some adventures begin nobly,” Chuck starts, eyeing the flowers on our roof. “Great knights and heroes climbing on their horses, ready to charge into battle. My adventure—the one I took with your mother when I was just a few years older than you are now—started out with hitchhiking.”

My eyes go as big as oranges. I know I'm going to have to keep this story a secret from Gus. This is gearing up to be the kind of tale he'd hate for me to hear.

“I guess,” Chuck goes on, “you reach a certain age, and you realize the world isn't much different than a house. You love your house—it's your comfort—but there are things you wish you could fix. The squeaky garage door, maybe, or the uneven kitchen floor. I know you understand what I'm talking about. The things in your house that drive you nuts.

“You get to a certain age, and you feel like you could fix things about the world, too. You think prejudice or unfairness could be done away with, same as a rotten floor.”

“And Mom always had an itch to get out of Willow Grove,” I jump in. Everyone says so.

“She said the place always looked drab to her,” Chuck agrees. “Even when we were kids playing chicken on our bicycles. She always said she thought the place was kind of dingy, like a sink of old gray dishwater. She used to say it just like that.” He chuckles.

“By high school,” he goes on, “she was trying to brighten up all the dull hallways, filled with gray metal locker doors, with what she wore. She had this way of putting something together—even if the clothes weren't exactly fancy, on her they looked like a magazine spread. Gus used to always say she looked like she'd just stepped out of a bandbox. Everybody else just used to stare.

“Which was a big part of the reason why she dressed that way, no doubt about it. She liked the attention. Liked to push the limits—of anything, really. Always liked to test how far she could take something. She was always in the principal's office.”

“Really?” I ask. “The principal?” No matter how wild everyone always swears she was, it's hard to imagine my own mother on one of those hard seats that are always propped up outside of a principal's door.

“You wouldn't believe how she knocked heads with the principal,” Chuck laughs. “Really challenged him, said he was picking on her. Even though she knew she was breaking the dress codes. As cockeyed as it sounds now, one day, she'd had enough, and decided it was finally time for the two of us to head off to change the world.

“According to your mom, we were always going to do it, anyway—change the world, I mean. According to her, we'd make our mark, and when we came back to Willow Grove, everyone here would see the error of their ways. They'd see that they should have let her wear her skirts any old way she wanted to.”

“So you set off,” I say, ready to hurry this story along.

“We set off,” Chuck agrees. “Thumbs in the cool autumn air.

“Thing is, though, your mom—she was never really much of a planner. And you can't willy-nilly go about changing the world. The world's way too big for a couple of kids with no plan.

“We snagged a few rides,” Chuck explains. “Got as far as Kansas City. Wound up turning back around when we ran out of hamburger money.”

“Hamburger money?” I squeal, while Chuck starts laughing. He laughs so hard, his face starts turning as many shades as our front windows.

“You sure have had a crazy life for a minister,” I say.

He laughs again. “Maybe so,” he mumbles as Old Glory rambles into our gravel drive. He waves at Gus, who climbs out of the cab and starts rummaging around in the packed-tight bed of Old Glory.

Gus waves back.

“She did leave, though,” I remind Chuck. “She did finally get out. For good. Everybody says Mom's in California, now. Shining brighter than the stars on the big screen or the ones in the sky.”

Chuck's laughter dies. His face grows so dark, you'd think he hadn't laughed in about eighty years.

I stare at him, wondering, for the tiniest of seconds, if his stories aren't mostly made up, like the stories Weird Harold's dad keeps promising to tell me. But there's something so sweet about the way Chuck tells his tales. He never tries to paint himself up to be perfect, never makes himself out to be some flawless superhero. So his stories always feel like the truth.

Instead of walking straight into the house, like Gus normally would coming back from one of his pickups, he heads over to greet me and Chuck. I slide the letter from the House Beautification Committee into his hand and turn away, because I don't think I can stand what that letter is going to do to his face.

“Substandard,” Gus repeats sadly.

Weird Harold appears, shaking his head and
tsk
ing us. “You're not the only ones,” he says. “Ms. Dillbeck, Shoemacker, even the Pikes. They all got one.”

“Everyone?” I ask, staring at the mailboxes lined down the street.

“Paranoid,” Weird Harold mutters. “That first day, over at Montgomery. Everyone thought I was paranoid. We tried sugar with that open house of ours—and it didn't work. I should have stuck to my petition, before the committee had a chance to get out of hand. My dad and I are going to the city council meeting on Thursday. If the rest of you want out of this, I think you'd better show up, too.”

I look up at Gus, feeling off balance. “Are we going, Gus?”

“Yeah,” he says as our chimes start to clink in the breeze. “Yeah, we are, Little Sister.”