What I Came to Tell You (30 page)

“I don’t see what the atomic bomb has to do with who killed my mother,” Grover said.

“When terrible things happen we want to blame somebody, even if that somebody is us. But what if nobody is to blame?”

“Somebody definitely dropped the atom bomb,” Grover said.

“Maybe so,” Matthew said. “But does that mean they’re to blame?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Grover started pushing the wheelbarrow. A big flock of crows flew over them, veered away to a corner of the cemetery, landing high in a hemlock, making a loud ruckus as if unsettled by something.

Grover and Matthew passed a few family plots, and stopped in front of a new headstone that Matthew nodded to.

CLARA NORTON FALLON
MARCH 10, 1935 – NOVEMBER 29, 2011

The letter writer’s wife. She’d died just a few weeks ago.

“What I came to tell you is this,” Matthew said. “Sometimes things just happen.”

“Maybe you just want to feel better,” Grover said.

“Is that a bad thing to want?” Matthew asked.

They walked out the cemetery gates, where a faded gray Honda Civic wagon sat parked. The car was crammed with boxes and clothes and piles of what must’ve been history books.

“I thought you said you’d stopped driving?” Grover asked.

“Until I figured out that nobody else was going to get me to where I needed to go.”

A thought occurred to Grover. “Was this the car that …?” He touched the hood.

Matthew sighed, held his hand out to Grover and said, “So long.”

Grover looked at Matthew’s hand but couldn’t bring himself to shake it.

“I don’t blame you,” Matthew said, then got in his car and started it, the muffler rattling. He was backing up when all of the sudden Grover ran after him, banging on the driver’s-side window. Matthew stopped the car and rolled down his window.

Grover looked at him. “So long.”

Matthew pushed his glasses up on his nose and nodded.

Grover watched the car rattle down the street. Even after Matthew had driven out of sight, his words hung in the cold air, taking real form, so that Grover could read them as clearly as if they’d been etched into a headstone.
Sometimes things just happen
.

I
t was the last day of school before Christmas holidays. Grover had delivered some reports to the main office for Mrs. Caswell, and on his way back, Miss Snyder waved him into her office and handed him an article she’d cut out of the
Citizen-Times
. “I figured you couldn’t have too many copies,” she said. “I thought they did a great job.”

As part of the big segment about Mr. Lunsford donating the land for the park, the TV people had done a tiny bit on Grover and his weavings. Then the
Citizen-Times
had sent out a reporter and a photographer and run a big two-page article with color pictures. In the past couple of days a lot of people had come by to see his weavings. At first he didn’t like being interrupted, but as more people came by, he became kind of used to it. The more people looked at his weavings, the more it felt like the weavings weren’t his anymore, like they belonged to everybody who came to see them. What he figured out was that the only weaving that
really mattered to him was the weaving he was working on at the moment.

“I have something else for you,” Miss Snyder said. She went to the wall behind her desk, took down his mother’s calendar and handed it to him. He flipped through the pages, looking at Van Gogh’s paintings and his mother’s neat pencil handwriting.

“How are you doing?” Miss Snyder asked.

“Okay,” he said.
The Starry Night
was the picture for December. He always loved that painting; all the circles of light against the dark made it feel alive. “It’ll be our first Christmas without her,” he was surprised to hear himself say.

Miss Snyder didn’t say anything for a little bit. “What will that be like?”

“Hard,” Grover said, “at least for Sudie.”

He felt her looking at him.

He sighed and said, “Hard for me too.”

They talked a while longer and toward the end of their conversation Miss Snyder handed him a little card with her name and cell phone number on it. “If Sudie or you need anything over the holidays or you just want to talk, give me a call.”

“Okay,” he said, knowing this was something Miss Snyder probably didn’t do for most kids. He put the card in his pocket and started to walk out, but then he turned around and, hardly knowing what he was doing, hugged her. Then feeling his face flush, he picked up the calendar and the article and walked quickly down the hall, not turning around when she called him to wish him a merry Christmas.

He walked back toward his classroom in a daze. What was that all about? Since when did he go around hugging counselors? He walked into his classroom and sat down at his desk in a daze.

“Be that way,” said a familiar voice. “Don’t say a word.”

Grover whirled around and for a minute thought he was seeing things, because there, right back in her old desk, was Emma Lee.

Grover and Sudie had planned to meet their father at the Wolfe house to celebrate the end of school, and they talked Clay and Emma Lee into coming with them. As they walked up Montford, Clay explained that the Roundtrees were moving back to Asheville. He said that Emma Lee and he and even their grandmother had been saying to their mother that they should move back, and Leila had seemed to be thinking about it. “But after that night when we all went to Bean Streets after the Christmas Waltz, and Mama and your daddy didn’t hardly talk, and Grover walked out and your daddy went after him …”

“What was that about anyway?” Emma Lee asked Grover. “All of the sudden you just got up and left.”

“Anyhow
,” Clay said, “after that night at Bean Streets, Mama seemed dead set on not moving back. But your daddy started calling.”

“He called every night at ten o’clock on the dot,” Emma Lee said.

Grover remembered hearing his father on the phone in the kitchen with the door closed. He’d thought he was making work phone calls, although he remembered thinking he was calling people pretty late. He also remembered thinking how his father laughed more than he usually did when he made work calls. But then he’d been laughing more in general, since Mr. Lunsford had stopped threatening to close the Wolfe house.

“At first Mama and your daddy hardly said a word,” Clay said. “But your daddy kept calling and each time Mama got off the phone, she seemed a little better. Then one morning last week she said we were moving back.”

As they passed Reader’s Corner, Byron rapped on the window and waved at them. She pointed to the article she’d taped to the window. There were several photos, including one of Grover and Sudie standing in front of the biggest weaving.

“Hey, we read that,” Emma Lee said. “You’re famous!” She elbowed Grover.

They’d walked a little farther up Montford, and as they passed Videolife, the clerk with the pointy beard came out. “Your weavings blew my mind,” he said to Sudie and Grover. He handed Sudie a little wrapped package. “Merry Christmas.”

Sudie being Sudie, she immediately unwrapped it. “
Fantastic Mr. Fox
!”

The sight of the DVD sent Grover’s heart racing. Maybe this was the very copy of the movie their mother had been on her way to pick up. The very copy Grover himself should’ve picked up the day before.

“We don’t have any money with us,” Grover said to the clerk.

“It’s a gift,” the clerk said.

“But …”

“Please,” Sudie said. “Can’t we keep it?”

“We over-ordered copies,” the clerk said. Then he leaned over and, lowering his voice, said to Grover, “I was working here the day your mother was hit. I was the one who answered the phone when your father called, asking if your mother had come in yet. Your mother and I used to have long talks about movies. She had excellent taste.”

“Can I keep the movie?” Sudie asked, studying the back of the DVD case.

Grover looked at the clerk and then back at Sudie, and as he did he heard Matthew’s
Sometimes things just happen
. Something lifted in him. “I guess it won’t hurt anything,” he said.

Sudie hadn’t waited for his answer to start tucking the DVD into her knapsack.

When they reached the Wolfe house, Little Bit told them their father had someone in his office and that they could wait in the break room, that she’d bought a brand-new box of powdered doughnuts. The Wolfe house wasn’t as busy as it had been the day Grover’s class had come. Attendance had gone down with school about to be out. Even so, there were two church groups and several families.

Mr. Lunsford walked in the front door as they headed to the break room.

“Come on,” Grover whispered, motioning for them to hurry
up. Just as Grover thought he’d made it into the safety of the break room, someone caught his arm.

“Saw the big spread in the paper,” said Mr. Lunsford, like he was impressed. He started talking to Little Bit. Grover couldn’t believe Mr. Lunsford was making small talk with her, asking her how her day had been, asking about her family. Grover’s father had told him that Mr. Lunsford was a changed man.

Mr. Lunsford had been all over the TV and the newspaper for donating the land for the children’s park. The headline in the paper had read G
ENEROUS
C
OMMISSIONER A
M
ODEL OF
C
HRISTMAS
S
PIRIT
. The Atlanta and Charlotte papers had run articles about county commissioners passing the Childlife Refuge Program. The Associated Press had even run an article and Mr. Lunsford had been getting calls from all over the country to come speak about the Childlife Refuge Program. Grover’s father said Mr. Lunsford had gotten so much attention for being the Generous Commissioner that he had become … well … generous.

Only after talking with Little Bit a while about her grandchildren did Mr. Lunsford ask if their father was in.

“He has someone with him,” Little Bit said. “He has an appointment after this one as well.”

“Tell him that Delbert stopped by to see if he needed anything,” Mr. Lunsford said, wished Little Bit a nice day and left.

Little Bit shook her head. “I can’t get over how much that man’s changed.”

His father stuck his head out of his office, whispering, “Is he gone?”

“He said to tell you that
Delbert
stopped by,” said Little Bit.

“Why were you hiding?” Sudie asked.

“He comes by two or three times a day, asking if he can do anything,” their father said. “I’m starting to think I prefer the old Lunsford.”

Leila came out from their father’s office, wearing her nurse’s uniform. She must’ve come over from St. Joseph’s and they’d met for lunch. She looked sort of embarrassed and happy at the same time. The six of them walked over to Bean Streets and ordered hot chocolates, and like the last time, it was crowded and the four kids sat at one table and Leila and their father sat across the room. Unlike the last time, Leila and their father talked and when they weren’t talking they were just looking each other in the eyes. Grover was pretty weirded out.

When a family got up from the checkerboard table, Clay and Sudie went over to play, leaving Grover and Emma Lee alone.

“They sure seem different,” Grover said.

“You can say that again,” Emma Lee said.

“They sure seem—”

“Very funny.” Emma Lee sipped her hot chocolate.

“I never thanked you for coming to the Christmas Waltz,” Grover said.

“No, you didn’t.”

“Thank you,” he said.

She looked up at him.

“I mean it,” he said.

“It was a really nice night,” she said. “The nicest night I think I’ve ever had.”

“The kids still talk about your grandmother’s dress,” Grover said.

Emma Lee’s face reddened a little.

Grover’s father burst into laughter at something Leila had said.

“It’s strange for me too, you know,” Emma Lee said, cutting her eyes toward their parents.

Grover didn’t know what to say. He felt selfish having not given much thought about how it might be strange for Emma Lee and Clay too.

“Still,” Emma Lee said, her face softening. “Your father’s a good man.”

“I guess so,” Grover said.

“No guessing about it,” she said. “I know a good man when I see one.” Emma Lee looked at Grover.

“Did God tell your mother it was okay to move back?” he asked.

“Mama hasn’t brought up God much lately.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Grover saw his father lean over and cover Leila’s hand with his own for a moment.

“Guess this means we’ll have to be just friends,” Grover said.

“Were we ever anything else?”

Grover felt his face burning. “Well … I guess I just …”

Emma Lee laughed, and he knew she was messing with him. But then her face went serious and she leaned toward him and lowering her voice said, “Grover. You and me aren’t
just
friends.”