What I Came to Tell You (12 page)

“Oh, about
that
,” Sam said. “Well, you have seemed kind of down.”

“Kind of down?!” Grover said. “My mother gets run over by a car and I’m ‘kind of down’?” His voice shook.

A couple of kids in the outfield of the kickball game looked toward them.

“Calm down,” Sam said, looking around.

“Daddy said I didn’t have to go see her,” Grover said.

“Then don’t,” Sam said.

“What if I
should
go see her?” Grover shot the ball and missed.

“ ‘Should go’?” Sam said, catching the rebound.

“What if that would be the best thing to do?”

“Then go see her.”

“I don’t want to go see her,” Grover said.

“Then don’t!” Sam shot the ball from a good twenty feet out. It swished.

“Would you go see her?” Grover asked.

“For you?” Sam asked. “I don’t see how that would work.”

“No,” Grover said. “Let’s say you needed to talk to someone about something like, say … a dead mother. Would you go see her?”

“Sure,” he said, not hesitating as he looked toward where Miss Snyder leaned up against the building, talking with the teachers.

“You would?”

“You bet,” Sam said, “Miss Snyder is hot.”

Grover looked at his friend.

“What?” Sam said. “She has nice legs.”

“You’re hopeless,” Grover said.

Sam tossed the ball to Grover, who walked out to the spot from where Sam had just swished the ball. He totally missed the basket but Daniel Pevoe, who was waiting to play Sam, caught it.

“HORSE,” Grover said under his breath as he walked off the court.

That afternoon Mrs. Caswell sent Grover down to the office to get a box of chalk. He liked these errands. He got to see another side to Claxton as he walked past all the classrooms with kids at their desks hard at work. It was kind of like being backstage in a play. On the way back from the office, he noticed that a bright line of light shined along the bottom of Miss Snyder’s office door. She was in.

He was still standing there trying to decide whether to knock when the door opened.

“I thought I heard someone.” Miss Snyder motioned him into her office.

“I wasn’t stopping by. I’m on my way back from the office.”

“Why don’t you come on in?” Miss Snyder asked.

“Mrs. Caswell will wonder where I am,” he said, his voice shaking a little.

“I’ll call her and tell her you’ve stopped by.” She picked up her office phone and dialed. Grover heard Mrs. Caswell pick up on the other end.

“Jill,” Miss Snyder said into the phone, “this is Brenda. Grover Johnston has stopped by my office. Do you mind if we visit for a little while?” Miss Snyder nodded, then said, “Thanks.” And hung up. “Mrs. Caswell says we can visit as long as we like.”

There was something in the way Miss Snyder had sounded on the phone with Mrs. Caswell that told Grover the two women had talked about him. He’d fallen into their trap.

“Would you like some hot chocolate?” Miss Snyder asked, taking out a couple of mugs and two packs of instant hot chocolate.

Grover loved hot chocolate, but knew what she was up to. He shook his head.

“You sure? I’m going to make some for myself.”

He paused. “Okay,” he said, telling himself even if she did bring him hot chocolate, she wasn’t getting anything out of him.

“I’ve got to run down to the cafeteria to get some hot water,”
she said. “I’ll be right back.” Miss Snyder left him sitting alone in her office. This was the first time he’d been in his mother’s office since she’d died. He looked around. Miss Snyder had asked their father if he would mind her keeping some of the same pictures and toys their mother had had till the end of the year. She’d told him she didn’t want to just swoop in and immediately put up all new pictures. Like their mother hadn’t existed.

There was a framed print of a scene from
Goodnight Moon
. A big poster of Max dancing with the monsters from
Where the Wild Things Are
. A calendar of Van Gogh paintings Grover had given her last Christmas. His mother loved art and every year Grover gave her a calendar of some famous painter’s paintings. Last year it had been Picasso. The year before, Renoir. The year before that, Chagall. Grover flipped through the calendar, reading the little notes his mother had made. The last date she’d written something was April 5. She’d written in her neat print:
Lunch with Grover
. The next day she was hit.

Grover walked over to the shelves of toys his mother had used with kids. There were things mixed in he’d never seen before. One was a Rubik’s cube like he’d never seen. Not a cube exactly, more pillow-shaped. He picked it up. Ten rows by ten rows. It would take a genius to solve this. He began moving the rows around but when Miss Snyder returned he quickly set it back on the shelf.

“You found my V-CUBE,” she said, handing him a warm mug of hot chocolate.

“Thanks,” he said, taking a sip. “Is that what it’s called?”

“I ordered it from a company in Greece,” she said, pulling her chair around from behind her desk to sit across from him. “But as soon as I saw it I knew I was in over my head.”

“It looks hard,” Grover said, his eye going back to the V-CUBE on the shelf.

“I bet you could work it.” She took the V-CUBE off her shelf and handed it to him.

They drank their hot chocolate in silence. In between sips of his hot chocolate, Grover would pick up the V-CUBE, trying to work it. Grover wondered if Miss Snyder had gone and gotten hot chocolate to give him some time alone in the office. He remembered what Sam had said and glanced down at her crossed legs. But then he looked away. He tried to clear his head, telling himself he wasn’t going to fall into this trap. He set his hot chocolate on her desk. “I know why you’re doing all this.”

“Doing all what?”

“The hot chocolate and the cube and all.”

“Why?”

“To get at my feelings.”

“Is that what I’m doing?”

“My mother told me that’s how counselors do it. You get kids playing and comfortable and everything, so you can observe them and get at their feelings.”

“And that’s a bad thing?” she asked.

Grover shrugged. “Maybe not for some kids.”

“Like your sister maybe?”

“Yeah, it’s good for Sudie,” he said. “She’s big on feelings.”

“But you?”

“I hate ’em.” He crossed his arms and stared at the floor.

“Really? All feelings?”

“If it’s a feeling,” he said, “I pretty much hate it.”

“So you hate being happy?”

“Well, no.”

“Isn’t happiness a feeling?”

“Okay,” he said, looking at her, “I don’t hate
one
feeling.”

“Excited? You hate being excited. For instance, when you’re excited about working on your tapestries?”

“How do you know about my tapestries?”

“You’re getting to be a pretty famous artist around town.” She sipped her hot chocolate. “What about smart? Do you hate feeling smart when you work an especially difficult math problem?”

She
had
been talking to Mrs. Caswell.

“So, we’ve come up with at least three feelings you don’t hate. I imagine there are a couple more.”

Grover looked back toward the calendar hanging on the wall. “Mama always wanted to know how I was feeling.”

“So what did you say to her whenever she asked you how you were feeling?”

“Nothing.” He paused. “Or I’d say I didn’t want to talk about it or I’d go to my room or outside to make something in the Bamboo Forest.” He looked again at the calendar. “Can I have that at the end of the year?”

“You can have it now if you like.”

“Keep it till the end of the year. I’d just like to have it then.”

“Of course,” she said. “Will you come see me again?”

“I didn’t come see you in the first place. I was passing by your office and you opened the door.”

Grover sat back in his seat, working the V-CUBE. He didn’t say anything, and neither did Miss Snyder. Outside the closed door, he heard some kids’ voices—a class on its way down the hall, out to recess. The couple of times he glanced up from the V-CUBE, Miss Snyder was watching him.

“You miss your mother?” she finally asked.

Grover shrugged. “Who wouldn’t?”

“Hansel and Gretel,” she said.

He looked up. “She was a stepmother.”

“You know, I think you’re right about that,” she said.

He worked the V-CUBE a little more. “One thing I never got about that story,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“What kind of father takes his kids out in the woods and leaves them?”

He worked the V-CUBE for a couple more minutes. When he got up to leave, she asked, “Will you come back to see me?”

“I said I didn’t come to see you in the first place,” he said.

“Well, the next time you’re running an errand for Mrs. Caswell, I hope you’ll stop by.” She lifted up the V-CUBE. “We’ll be waiting.”

Grover was pretty far down the hall before he admitted to himself that Sam was right. She did have pretty legs.

T
he afternoon the realtor stabbed a For Sale sign on the edge of the Bamboo Forest, Grover’d been hard at work on his biggest tapestry yet. Eight feet high and five feet wide, it was so big he rested the bottom on the ground and lashed it to several growing bamboo stalks to hold it upright. At school he sketched and drew in the margins of his schoolwork. He headed to the Bamboo Forest the moment he got home from school. He worked after supper, weaving by flashlight till his father called him in.

This afternoon Clay had come over and hung around while Grover worked. Clay made it his job to keep the workshop neat, picking up leaves or sticks or branches that Grover had stripped away from the bigger limbs. Clay helped cut up the bamboo sections for the big grid, and Grover taught him how to lash them together. Under Grover’s careful supervision, he even wove in some limbs himself. Mostly, Clay did what he was
doing at the moment, sitting cross-legged on the big stump and talking.

“I’ve got a mind to contact Guinness World Records,” Clay said. “This one might be some kind of record.”

Grover wove in a pine branch he’d come across on the way home from school.

“By the time you finish this, it’ll take half the neighborhood to tote it to the plot.”

Biscuit came from nowhere, and Clay leaned down to pet him. In a moment Sudie appeared on the edge of the workshop. “Come quick,” she said.

Grover dropped the limb he was working on, and he and Clay followed Sudie to the edge of the Bamboo Forest. Sudie motioned them to stop, grabbed up Biscuit and held him, then pointed to a shiny Mercedes pulled up next to the field. They watched as a woman in an expensive-looking coat and glossy high heels lifted a metal sign out of her trunk, walked to the edge of the field, then—like this was something she did all the time—plunged it into the ground.

Grover flinched.

Biscuit started barking, but Sudie clamped her hand over his snout.

The woman wiped her hands and looked around. Grover, Sudie and Clay ducked. The woman closed her trunk, climbed into her car and drove away. They waited till they were sure she was gone, then walked up to the sign. Grover’d known what it said the minute he’d seen the woman. Here it was—a tombstone for the Bamboo Forest:

Lunsford Realty
Lot for Sale
2+ acres
Contact Maureen Abdalla
Call 555-1389, ext 312

Grover’s chest began to ache and his mouth suddenly felt full of ashes.

“Aren’t you going to pull it up?” Sudie asked.

He stuffed his hands into his coat pockets.

“You’re going to leave it there?” she asked.

“It won’t make any difference,” Grover said.

Sudie gave Grover a disgusted look, then began to tug on the sign. She pulled and pulled, but it wouldn’t come up. She kicked it and it made a tinny rattle. Her arms flopped by her sides, and she started in the direction of home with Biscuit behind her.

“Where are you going?” Clay called.

She kept walking but hadn’t gone far when a shiny BMW slowed and then backed up. The window rolled down. The driver, a big bald man in a coat and tie, seemed to be writing down the number on the sign. Sudie ran back and planted herself in front of the sign.

The man rolled his window down farther. “Hey, kid, you’re blocking the sign.”

“It’s not for sale,” Sudie said.

“That’s not what the sign says,” the man said.

“Get out of the way, Sudie,” Grover said.

At the sight of the sign, something in Grover had shut down.
Gone
. First his mother, now the Bamboo Forest. And he himself felt gone. Gone from every place he’d ever known. Deep-down-in-his-soul-nobody-home gone.

“Listen, honey,” the man in the car said, “will you move so I can see the phone number? Then you can stand there the rest of the day for all I care.”

Sudie crossed her arms. The man got out, slammed the car door behind him and walked toward Sudie. Biscuit barked.

“All I need is the phone number,” the man said, walking around to the other side of the sign, but Sudie kept moving around with him. Biscuit barked and growled.