The Seventh Most Important Thing (3 page)

G
oing home was the best part of Arthur's sentence. He decided he'd worry about the other parts later. Anything was better than a ride back to juvie in the grim gray school bus with bars on the windows and a driver with a gun.

For once, he didn't mind having to kick his sister's pile of stuffed animals out of the way when he walked into their bedroom. At least he had a bedroom he could walk into.

The frosting-pink bedspread on Barbara's side of the room didn't bug him nearly as much as it usually did either. He didn't even care that his sister had left a large crayon picture on his bed showing Barbara, frowning, with the words
Don't Do Any More Bad Things, Arthur
underneath it.

He was just glad to be home.

“We need to have a talk,” his mom said, sticking her head into the bedroom before he'd had time to unpack or get changed.

“Now?” Arthur sighed. Couldn't he have five minutes to himself?

“I don't want to let it wait.”

His mom was like that. Whenever she had something on her mind, she had to talk about it right then. Arthur was the exact opposite. He could hold things inside forever.

They sat on the saggy bed in his mom's room, which still felt empty with all of his dad's things gone. Although the door was half closed, Arthur could tell his little sister was sitting right outside. He could hear her fidgety feet on the stairway.

“We're going to have some new rules now that you're home,” his mom said. She pulled a folded piece of notepaper from the pocket of her funeral dress. “I've written them down.”

“Rules?” Arthur was surprised, because his mom had never been very strict.

Arthur's mom glanced down at her paper. “First rule. You are going to talk to me more when you are upset. I mean that, Artie.” She looked at Arthur, her mascara still smudged from the day in court. “You have to talk to me more about how you're feeling and not just hold it inside. I don't want to go through this again.” He could see her eyes starting to tear up.

“Fine. Okay. I will,” he said, trying to get his mom to move on to another topic. He didn't want to keep going over why he'd thrown the brick.

“Second, no more getting into trouble with the police. That's how your dad started when he was younger. Getting into fights at school or street racing or whatever else he did back then.”

He glared at his mom. “I'm not like that.”

It kind of made Arthur mad that she would say this to him, but deep down, he couldn't help wondering if she was right. His middle name, Thomas, was from his dad, but that didn't mean they were the same people. Or did it? Until he threw the brick, Arthur had never been in trouble with the cops before.

“Well, I just want to make sure,” his mom said in a not-very-convincing voice. She looked down at her paper again. “Third, you will come straight home every day after school to watch Barbara.”

“Okay.” Arthur wasn't really sure why this was a new rule. He'd always watched Barbara.

His mom folded up the paper and stuck it back in her dress pocket. “Last, and this is hard for me to say…” His mom's voice shook a little. “We have a lot of bills right now. Until I find a new job, things are pretty tight, okay?” Arthur knew his mom was working a couple of waitressing jobs to make ends meet. He also knew that some of their money problems were due to him, since the court had said they had to pay the Junk Man's hospital bills.

“That's it.” She reached out and gave him a hug. She smelled like soap and hair spray. “I love you and I'm glad you're home.”

“I'm glad to be home too,” Arthur said awkwardly, feeling embarrassed.

It felt like he'd been away for months.

“
W
ere you scared?” Barbara asked, sucking on a grape lollipop as she watched Arthur unpack his paper bag of clothes later.

The small paper bag was all he'd been allowed to bring when the cops had arrested him for throwing the brick after somebody had seen him running back home. You could take one toothbrush, one comb, and one set of street clothes to wear when you left juvie. That was it. In juvie, everybody wore the same olive-green jumpsuits. If you were lucky, the previous owner hadn't died in them.

Arthur shrugged. “No, I wasn't scared. Not really.”

“Did everybody in the jail have guns?”

“I wasn't in jail.”

“Mom said you were.”

“Well, I wasn't.”

Carefully, Arthur put his clothes in the two top drawers of the dresser he shared with his sister. It was odd how grateful he was for everything all of a sudden: The beat-up old dresser with Barbara's Winnie the Pooh stickers on it. The clothes he hadn't seen in three weeks. His sister. The disgusting smell of her grape lollipop.

“Was it a school for bad kids?”

“Kind of.”

“Did you make any friends there?” Barbara stopped partway through licking her lollipop, as if this scary possibility had just occurred to her.

Arthur had to stifle a sarcastic laugh. “No.”

There were no friends in juvie, he thought. Just varying degrees of people you didn't want to have as enemies.

Arthur's bunkmate had been a huge kid called Slash. On Arthur's first day there, Slash had held a rusty razor to his neck and told him that if he farted, belched, barfed, or breathed too loudly in bed—Arthur was on the top bunk—he was dead.

Fortunately, Slash had turned out to be the loudest snorer in the room, so Arthur still had a head attached to his shoulders, even if he hadn't gotten much sleep.

“You know, I can help you make better friends if you want,” Barbara said. “I have lots of them at school.” She began going through a long list of names on her fingers.

“Okay. Thanks.” Arthur forced himself to smile at his sister. Despite everything that had happened, somehow she was the only one in the family who seemed to have stayed fairly okay. Normal. And right now, he didn't mind sharing a room with a normal kid, even if she was a curly-haired seven-year-old who played with Barbies. At least her name wasn't Slash.

That night, after Arthur crawled into his bed, he was surprised when his little sister whispered from the darkness on her side of the room, “You awake, Arthur?” She'd gone to bed hours before him.

“It's late. Aren't you supposed to be asleep?” he replied, trying to sound big-brotherly. It was past eleven.

“Yes, but I can't.”

“Well, try.” Arthur turned to face the wall and tugged the covers over his shoulders, as if the conversation was finished.

“Are you going to die, Arthur?”

Arthur's head snapped back toward his sister's side of the room.
“What?”

“Some of my friends said Daddy died because he was bad and drank too much and went too fast and crashed his motorcycle, and now you've been bad and you had to go to jail, so are you going to die too?”

“Don't be stupid, Barbara,” Arthur blurted out. “I wasn't in jail. I'm not going to die. Just be quiet and go to sleep, will you?”

Arthur knew he should have been more understanding. His sister was only a little kid trying to get some answers.

There was a long silence. Now Arthur couldn't sleep. His bed felt too soft. The room seemed too weirdly quiet after juvie. Barbara had started him thinking about death and his dad.

Then Barbara spoke up again—almost a whisper.

“Do you think Daddy's in heaven?”

Arthur gave an aggravated sigh. “Of course he is. Where else do you think he'd be? God, you're driving me nuts with your questions tonight, Barbara. I'm tired and I want to go to sleep, so just shut up and stop talking, okay?” He smacked his pillow and turned toward the wall again. Thankfully, Barbara seemed to get the message this time.

But the truth was, Arthur wasn't sure. About heaven or anything else. He had a lot of doubts. The doubts often kept him awake. Sometimes they gave him nightmares. He could see the cops at their door, with little drops of rain glistening like glass on their shoulders, saying the word
instantly
again and again. His father had died
instantly.

He remembered overhearing one of his aunts talking at the funeral home, saying how it was too bad her brother—Arthur's dad—hadn't been more of a religious person in life because heaven was such a beautiful place for believers to spend eternity.

She never did say where she thought everybody else went.

After about fifteen minutes of lying there in the darkness, thinking about heaven and his dad and the word
instantly
and how he probably shouldn't have been so mean to Barbara the first night he was home, he threw off the covers and got out of bed.

He had just reached the door when Barbara whispered, “Where are you going?”

“To get a book downstairs.”

“Why?”

“To look up something. Go to sleep,” he said firmly, shutting the door behind him.

His mother's bedroom door was already closed. He padded softly down the steps to the small bookshelf in the living room—the one that was stuffed with mail and bills. Somewhere on the shelves was a dictionary, he remembered. His mother's high school name, Linda Wesley, was on the inside. That was how old it was.

He turned to the word he was looking for:

redemption (ri-demp
'
-shun)
n
. 1. The act of being rescued or set free. 2. The act of being saved from consequences. 3. The payment of an obligation. 4. Salvation from sin.

If he was supposed to understand what
redemption
meant after reading the definitions, he didn't. How could the judge think working for the Junk Man would rescue him and set him free? What did “the payment of an obligation” mean? And what consequences, other than juvie, was he being saved from?

None of it made any sense. Irritated, he pushed the dictionary onto the shelf and went back to bed.

The next morning, when he walked outside to get the newspaper for his mother, he found something else he didn't understand.

At first he thought there was a deflated balloon on the porch steps. Then he realized, no—it was a hat. A black leather motorcycle cap missing the orange Harley-Davidson wings on its brim.

Arthur's heart pounded as he picked it up. It was his father's old hat, he was almost certain. Underneath the cap was a note scrawled on a scrap of cardboard:

Arthur looked up and down his street, which was empty. He had no idea what to think.

A
rthur wondered if he should tell someone about the note, especially the weird part about the wings and St. James. Had the Junk Man left it for him? And if so, why had he signed it St. James?

He considered bringing the note to his probation officer when he went for his first appointment a few days later, but after meeting her, he was glad he hadn't. In juvie, he'd heard that some officers were nice and some were complete jerks. His officer turned out to be a short, box-shaped woman named Wanda Billie who didn't seem to have much patience for anything.

Her office was in the basement of the courthouse. Arthur's mother dropped him off while she went to look for free parking, and it took him forever to find the right hallway and the right numbered door. The whole place appeared to have been designed as a human maze.

“You're late,” Officer Billie said when he walked into her office fifteen minutes past his two o'clock appointment time.

Arthur glanced at the clock above the officer's head and tried to explain. “I couldn't find—”

“Stop.”
The officer held up her square-fingered hand. “Are you late or are you not late, Mr. Owens?”

“The elevator wasn't—”

“Stop.”

Already the hand thing was getting old. Arthur wondered if the lady had been a traffic cop in a previous life.

“Did I ask you what made you late?” The officer chomped on her gum.

“No, ma'am.” Arthur shook his head.

“Have a seat.” Officer Billie gestured to the cracked black plastic chair in front of her desk. Everything in the room appeared to be broken. The wall next to him had a spiderweb of cracks in it, as if someone had tried (and failed) to put their fist through it. He sat down gingerly on the broken chair. He kept his hands in his lap.

“So.” Officer Billie leaned back in her chair. “You're the kid with the anger problems who threw a rock at a black man's head.”

“Brick,” Arthur tried to explain. “And it wasn't because—”

“Stop.”
The officer put up her hand again. “I don't care about the details. All I care about is you, buddy. Right here. Right now.” She leaned forward and rapped her knuckles on the desk. “How are you going to change your life?”

Arthur didn't answer, and he didn't think Officer Billie was expecting an answer, because she pushed on without waiting for his reply.

“You understand you've been given a second chance, right? I'm in charge of overseeing your second chance.” She pointed to her barrel-shaped self. “And you better not mess up. None of my kids ever messes up. Got that?”

Arthur nodded.

Putting on a pair of reading glasses, she picked up the single sheet of paper that was sitting in the middle of her desk. Arthur had never seen anybody with such an empty desk. He hoped he wasn't her only project.

“Now, it says here you'll be working four hours a week for Mr. Hampton until you complete the one hundred and twenty hours required by the court.” The officer stopped reading and glared at Arthur over the top of her glasses. “That doesn't mean a hundred and eighteen hours or a hundred and nineteen and a half hours or a hundred and nineteen and three-quarters hours, got it? I don't care whether you get lost, sick, tired, or your dog dies. You are required to finish a hundred and twenty hours, no excuses.”

Arthur managed to resist saying that he didn't have a dog. “What sort of work will I be doing?” he asked politely.

“Whatever you are told to do, buddy.”

He knew he shouldn't keep going with this futile line of conversation, but he did. “I'm not sure the judge knows that sometimes…” He hesitated. “The Junk Man—well, Mr. Hampton—goes through people's garbage looking for stuff, so I just wanted to make sure that I'm not—”

“Stop.”
Officer Billie held up her hand. “Who is the one with the problem here?”

Arthur had to try very hard not to sigh out loud. “Me?”

“That's right. Did Mr. Hampton throw the brick?”

“No.”

“Did Mr. Hampton get himself arrested and sent to the detention home?”

“No.”

The officer jabbed her finger toward Arthur. “Then I don't think he's the one we should be worrying about here, do you?”

“No, probably not,” Arthur mumbled. He stared at the scratched wooden top of the desk, wondering how many times he had to meet with Officer Billie. He hoped it wasn't very often.

As if she'd read his mind, the woman said, “Once a month. You come here once a month—next time, be on time—and we'll talk about how your assignment is progressing. Mr. Hampton will record your hours and report to me also. Then I report to the judge. The buck stops with me. That's it. Pretty simple. Got it?”

“Yes,” Arthur replied, desperately hoping the meeting was over.

Officer Billie held a crisply folded piece of paper toward him. “Here's the address where you are to meet Mr. Hampton on Saturday for your first day of work. Be on time. Work hard. Four hours, no excuses, remember?”

Arthur took the paper and nodded. “Yes, ma'am.” He stood up and started to ease toward the door.

“Stop,”
the officer called out behind him. Arthur didn't even need to look to know she had her hand up. He turned around reluctantly.

“Don't forget,” she said, pointing a warning finger at him. “Don't mess up.”