“Your brothers are cute,” LaRhonda said, and Donald made a retching noise. He didn’t like LaRhonda much more than she liked him, but he wasn’t as mean about it.
“Both of them?” I said.
“Well, Tommy. Eddie’s pretty good-looking, but he always looks at me like I’m in trouble.”
“You’re in trouble a lot of the time,” Donald said.
“You don’t even really live around here, so how would you know, Duckface?”
My mother said LaRhonda was jealous of Donald, because she thought of herself as my best friend but could tell I liked Donald, too, and maybe more. My mother said LaRhonda was the kind of girl who wouldn’t understand having a boy as a friend. But I thought it was more that LaRhonda didn’t know what to make of Donald. Donald’s personality was like vanilla ice cream, and LaRhonda was like that weird Neapolitan kind, with the layers of strawberry and vanilla and chocolate, that turned a tan color when it melted in your bowl and you made ice cream soup. Sometimes Donald lived around us and sometimes he didn’t. He’d be at school with us for a year or two, living with his grandparents at the far end of the valley, and then he’d go back to living with his mother and disappear for a while and I’d almost forget his face. But I’d always feel like something was missing. Sometimes I thought of him and LaRhonda as sort of like the angel and devil that sat on someone’s shoulder in the cartoons. She was always talking and always picking at me, and he was mostly quiet but nice when he did say something. I was working away at the corn table, coloring in the raised flowers on my mother’s paper napkins with crayons. LaRhonda said, “That’s dumb.” Donald said, “That’s pretty.” That was those two in a nutshell, as my aunt Ruth liked to say.
“I wish I had a brother,” LaRhonda added as Tommy pulled away with the squeal of tires that was his trademark. It wasn’t true. If Donald had said he wanted a brother I would have believed it, but I’d never known anyone as cut out to be an only child as LaRhonda. “Or a sister,” she added. I said nothing. I figured I was never going to get a sister, but I’d never wanted one after seeing my mother and her sister Ruth together or, more often, apart. There didn’t seem to be any upside.
Another car pulled over. A man in a seersucker suit got out. We all three knew he was not from around here, since we’d never seen him before and because he got out of the car. People who came for corn asked for it through the window, and people who needed things fixed took the gravel drive back to my dad’s shed.
“Hello, ladies,” said the man. He was bald and his head glistened with beads of sweat. We were so quiet you could hear the big insects and small birds. The year before there’d been a man in town who drove around asking girls for directions with a map on his lap. When they got close to the car he lifted the map. “Hello, Mr. Pickle,” I heard Tommy saying when he talked about it to two of his friends, all three of them laughing, but my mother just told me if a man asked for directions to send him to the nearest filling station and not to get too near the car. I said I was going to have to get close enough for him to hear me. “Everything’s an argument with you,” my mother said, ironing my father’s church shirt. Which wasn’t really fair, or true. I was just a person who stated the facts.
“I don’t know if my mom’s home,” I said. LaRhonda stepped on the toe of my Keds. “Mimi,” she said, on the lookout for perverts.
“I’m sure your mother is a lovely lady, but I’m here to see Mr. Miller,” he said. “Maybe you can give him this.” He took a card from his wallet. It said his name was Winston Bally, and he worked for some state office with a long name.
“Not this again,” my father said when he looked at it, but he came out and led the man back to his shed.
“He came to see my grandfather, too,” Donald said. “About the water.”
“What about the water?” said LaRhonda, who didn’t live in Miller’s Valley, or not really. The town was