The Smell of Other People's Hou - Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock Page 0,54
making them jump off the sidewalk. It’s a busy town, full of construction workers and big, muddy trucks. And it’s noisy.
“Is that girl keeping her baby?” Jack asks suddenly, watching a woman fiddle with the strings of her child’s sun hat while the infant squirms and screams.
“Her name is Ruth Lawrence,” I say, just so I can hear it out loud, exactly the way she said it. “And I don’t know, I didn’t ask her.”
I should have asked.
—
We keep watching the woman on the sidewalk as the infant pulls its hat off for the third time. The woman looks exasperated; both of them are red-faced and irritable.
Just watching this mother try to put on a hat looks like a nightmare. Being pregnant is one thing; a real, live, kicking human being is something else. I think of Ruth saying, “I’m just dealing with a lot,” and wonder if she thinks I was an ass not to ask her more about it.
Jack has pulled out the brown paper towel that Phil gave him and is tracing the thick black letters with his finger. He’d been doing it all across Canada. At one point I told him he was going to wear it out before we even got to Fairbanks.
“But it feels like the wing of a bird, or maybe a butterfly—it’s addicting.” He held it out to me to trace, but all I felt was a scratchy paper towel.
“You don’t feel that?”
I gave him the look.
“I can’t help it, Hank,” he said, and he sounded so old for a fourteen-year-old boy.
I did not envy Jack.
—
“You could lie,” he says, still tracing Selma’s name.
“What do you mean?”
“Just lie and say you’re eighteen so we don’t have to live with a foster family.”
“I can’t, Jack. We can’t risk them separating us and I don’t want to get caught lying. I promised Phil we’d keep it honest after how much he helped us.”
I stare at the sky. Canada geese are flying in a V shape overhead. It’s August, but fall is right around the corner. Isabelle said it can come and go in just a day. I imagine the geese flying over the route we just drove, looking for warmer waters. Life would be so much easier with wings.
Right then Isabelle comes flying out of the newspaper building as if she’s also a Canada goose, in a huge hurry to get somewhere. “My friend is at a ballet audition that’s just starting. We need to meet her there.”
“Isabelle, what about us?” I ask.
“What? You have an expiration date all of a sudden? You’ll keep until after the ballet,” she says.
Jack raises an eyebrow at me and shakes his head, but I know what he’s thinking because I’m thinking it, too. We’re both really going to miss her.
It’s been weeks since Selma’s last letter telling me that Dumpling’s in a coma. Worrying about Dumpling takes up all the extra space in my head, even the space I was using to wonder if Hank was really real. I want to call home and see how she is, but Sister Bernadette says international calls are strictly forbidden. I tried to write, but what would I say? And if Dumpling is in a coma, she wouldn’t be able to read it anyway.
Dumpling, the only person who even bothered to say good-bye to me. Of course, Gran couldn’t have come outside to wait for the bus the night I left Fairbanks, because what would the neighbors have thought? She had to teach me a lesson, and in some ways you had to admire how hard Gran sticks to her guns. It doesn’t hurt any less, but it does help to understand where she’s coming from.
I hadn’t expected anyone to sit with me, but Dumpling had showed up on the merry-go-round, just like she’d done on the steps of the church as we watched the river.
Dumpling had this way of being there without saying anything that was so soothing. But that night I could hear the minutes ticking by in my brain, closer and closer to the time I’d have to get on that bus.
“I’ve seen my gran give your dad letters,” I told her. I would normally have been embarrassed talking about my family like this, but I was desperate and I could hear the bus just a few streets away. The grinding gears and loud air brakes made my spine prickle; it was like hearing the future before you’re ready to be in it.