Looking for Cassandra Jane (The Second Chances Novels) (2 page)

And since she was sort of exotic looking, I liked to imagine she’d been a princess from the Far East, kidnapped at birth and sold to my grandparents because she was so beautiful. She was sure lots prettier than old Aunt Myrtle. I suppose that’s why my daddy liked my mama better. My grandma told me I resembled her, but I still can’t see it. When I was little I’d climb up onto the bathroom sink and look into the murky mirror in front of our medicine cabinet, but all I saw was a pale, pinched face with two dark holes for eyes and a mop of black hair sticking out all over. My grandma said the black hair and dark eyes came from my mama’s daddy. He was full-blooded Cherokee, which makes me one-quarter. The first time I saw an old photo of my mama’s daddy, I was sadly disheartened. He didn’t have long braids or beads or feathers or anything that looked the least bit like a real, true Indian. Instead he had on an old-fashioned soldier’s uniform. My grandma said that was because he’d been in the army and fought in World War I a long, long time ago. I thought it would’ve been much more exciting if he had fought against Colonel Custer at the Little Big Horn, and I even told Joey Divers that he had. And Joey actually believed me—until he told his mama, that is, and of course she set him straight.

Joey then pointed out that I was a liar, and I didn’t argue with him on that account, but in my defense I did tell him that I had what my grandma called a very fertile imagination. Now I wasn’t exactly sure what
that
meant just then, and neither was Joey (although he did look it up later) but it seemed to smooth things over just fine. And Joey forgave me, which wasn’t surprising, because I was, in fact, the only friend he had.

Joey Divers was what my grandma called “a poor lame duck.” He had suffered from polio when he was just a baby and consequently had a useless left leg and was forced to wear a stainless steel brace connected to an ugly black shoe. And therefore he couldn’t run and play with the other boys, and sometimes they even teased him about it. But not when I was around. That’s because I was never afraid of them. In fact, I don’t think I was afraid of hardly anything—except for my daddy, that is, but only when he was drunk. Anyway I would stand right up to those stupid boys, fists doubled, eyes squinted up real mean, and I would tell them that I was one-quarter Cherokee Indian and that my grandpa had whupped Colonel Custer at Little Big Horn, and that I could beat up every single one of them!—one at a time, of course. Fortunately they never took me on. I suspect they thought they might get in trouble for fighting with a girl, especially when the fight was due to the fact that they’d been picking on a little lame boy. And I guess I was mostly relieved that they didn’t want to fight with me. Although I did get a reputation for being pretty tough and, I suppose, pretty weird as well.

That reputation helped me to get through a lot of hard times. After all, it wasn’t easy having a drunk for a father in a small town like Brookdale where everyone knows everything about everybody. And besides that, sometimes being tough is all a girl’s got anyway.

Two

I
can honestly say I was a child of the sixties. Before starting first grade in 1960, I was like that little ant who wanted to move the rubber tree plant, and I had
high hopes
—high in the sky, apple-pie hopes! But it didn’t take long before I realized that life for me wasn’t going to be easy. And it seemed to start out with those ugly, brown, lace-up shoes that Aunt Myrtle insisted I needed for school.

Actually they were quite expensive (which in my opinion was an unfortunate waste of good money!). I can still remember how the young pock-faced salesman claimed they would “help” my feet (like he was a medical expert), but for the life of me, I couldn’t see any reason my feet needed help—why, I’d been walking on them just fine for at least five years! On the way home, I pouted in the front seat of Aunt Myrtle’s car, saying that those orthopedic shoes looked just like Joey Divers’s polio boots. Well, she told me I could just count my blessings and thank the good Lord that at least I didn’t have a stainless steel brace to wear with them. Leave it to Aunt Myrtle to find the sunny side of things. Anyway Joey liked my shoes just fine. In fact, I suspect it was those blasted shoes that really solidified our friendship back in the very beginning. And that was only because of Sally Roberts.

On the very first day of school Sally Roberts walked right up to me. And for a brief, hopeful, and slightly delirious moment, I thought she was going to invite me to be her friend. But then she looked straight down at my shoes and laughed. “You look just like Minnie Mouse.” She turned to her friend Lucy Marsh. “Just look at those skinny legs sticking out of those clodhopper shoes.” And they both laughed long and hard.

I turned and walked back to my desk, holding my chin in the air and trying to act like I didn’t give a whit about Sally Roberts or her friends, but all the while wishing that the knothole in the wood floor beneath my desk would just open wide and swallow me up whole so that I could simply disappear altogether.

By recess time I’d decided the sooner I could wear out those horrible shoes, the better off I’d be. So I climbed onto the merry-go-round, and when it got to going real fast, I let my feet hang down over the side, dragging my shoes
thumpity-thump, thumpity-thump
over the top of the rough blacktop. I hoped that by the end of the week I’d need a new pair of shoes—maybe something in patent leather with little silver buckles, or maybe even white saddle shoes. (As it turned out those orthopedic shoes were tougher than steel, and they lasted until I finally outgrew them the following spring.)

Joey Divers stood nearby watching my little shoe-scraping exhibition with wide-eyed interest until he finally came over and spoke to me. “Do you know that you might be wrecking your shoes?” he asked. Sheepishly I told him what Sally Roberts had said about me that morning.

“I think your shoes are very nice,” he said seriously as he leaned into his crutches. “I think they make you look intelligent.” I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad, or if I even wanted to know. So I just stared at him and said nothing. Then he told me that
intelligent
was just another word for “really smart.”

Well, at the ripe old age of six, being pretty still seemed preferable to being smart. And when I looked over to see Sally Roberts playing hopscotch surrounded by a group of admiring girls, her blonde curls bobbing-up and down as she hopped along in a fluffy pink dress, I felt seriously jealous. Of course I knew that her daddy was an important person at the First National Bank and that was probably why Sally’s shoes were shiny and black with straps so dainty you’d have thought all that hopping and jumping would just bust them right off. Those were the kind of shoes you wore to Sunday school or birthday parties (that’s if you were lucky!). It just didn’t seem fair that she was so rich she could wear them to school for everyday if she wanted to; and even her anklets were clean and white, trimmed with delicate lace along the edges. It was enough to almost make me cry, and crying was something I tried not to do much of, even back then.

I later asked my Aunt Myrtle if I could get some lace-trimmed anklets, and she just laughed. Then she told me I better learn to appreciate plain and sensible clothes because it wouldn’t be too long before I would need to take care of the laundry all by myself. Which of course turned out to be exactly true. The following summer, my Aunt Myrtle went off to work as a teller at the very same bank as Sally’s daddy. Naturally she could no longer help me or my daddy with our mundane household chores since she had to get herself really dolled up to go stand in that little caged box and hand money out to important people.

To tell the truth this was something of a mixed blessing. It did get Aunt Myrtle out of my hair, but at the same time it suddenly seemed that my daddy expected me to do all the cooking and cleaning and everything. And
that
seemed like a whole lot to ask of a seven-year-old girl, although my daddy told me more than once that he did as much when he was a boy (he’d been taken in by a farm family who’d only wanted a slave child). So I tried real hard not to complain, at least not when my daddy had been drinking—I knew better.

It wasn’t long until I got this notion that if I did everything just right, just perfect even, then maybe, just maybe, my daddy wouldn’t drink so much, and maybe he and I could finally be like those happy families that I saw on my grandma’s TV set
(Father Knows Best
and
My Three Sons
and
Leave It to Beaver)
. Of course it never worked out that way, but that didn’t stop me from trying and hoping. I even wore one of my mama’s old ruffly aprons tied around my waist (it reached to the floor).

Getting everything done just right became a sort of superstitious game for me. I thought if I got all the dirty dishes washed up and the floor all swept and supper started by five o’clock, then my daddy would come home by six and be sober. Once in a while, it worked. Most of the time it didn’t. After a while I just gave up altogether and learned to do the minimum of work, and then just lie low. That’s when my daddy started calling me lazy and mean and wicked. He could get himself all fired up mad about things
not
being done just right around the house, but I soon came to realize that he’d get just as mad when things were done perfectly too—if he was drunk, that is. I finally figured if I was going to catch his wrath no matter what, why bother trying to be perfect all the time? And the less I did around the house, the more reason he’d have to get mad anyway. And that always gave me a real good excuse to just clear out of there.

It was during those years that I started my secret club in a shed in the backyard out behind our house. Our house was just a rental (we weren’t the sort of folk who could actually own a home) and I suppose I didn’t have any real legal right to use that old shed, but since nobody said I couldn’t I figured it must be okay. I can still recollect that sweet musty smell of old damp wood mixed with the lawnmower smell of old cut grass and gasoline. And that shed had lots of neat stuff inside it too. I knew they weren’t my daddy’s things, and I guess they belonged to our landlady, but since she was about a hundred years old and confined to her wheelchair I didn’t expect that she minded much that we borrowed them. Besides, it was just me and Joey in the club most of the time anyway, and usually we were real careful with everything. That is until we burnt the whole place down. But that was purely an accident, involving candles and a science experiment that went awry.

When we first started meeting in the shed, we cleaned it up as best we could, sweeping out decades’ worth of dust and thick spider webs. I told Joey that black widows lived in there, and it scared him so badly he wouldn’t come back inside until I swore on an old Bible that we’d found on a shelf that I had lied to him about the spiders. Then we set up an old wooden card table and two rickety chairs in the center of that dark, dank space. And for some reason we even put the Bible on the table. It’s not that we were religious or anything, but it just seemed like a good thing to do. And it looked nice sitting right there next to our dues jar, which was most often empty.

Of course we didn’t know exactly what the purpose of our club was to start with, but we both knew we needed a place to get away from our troubles. It wasn’t that Joey had a truly bad family or anything. In fact, his daddy went to work almost every single day, long hours too, and sometimes even on Sundays, although Mrs. Divers said it was a sin to work on the Lord’s Day. Anyway, Mr. Divers built small houses and additions and fences and such for people in Brookdale, and he hardly ever got drunk—just once in a while like on New Year’s Eve, and Joey said he never got mean-drunk, just goofy-drunk is all. Mr. Divers was a big, barrel-chested kind of man, with muscles that bulged right through his T-shirts. He’d been a Marine in the war and he walked with a swagger, and I’m sure no one in town ever crossed him. And I’m just as sure that he loved Joey in his own way, but I don’t think he ever knew how to show it real well, leastways not back then, when it really counted. I think Mr. Divers felt worried that Joey was such a fragile boy that he might actually break if he was handled too roughly, and so he reserved all his wrestling and roughhousing for Joey’s younger brother, Randy (a healthy child who was born after Dr. Salk invented his famous polio vaccine).

Unfortunately what Joey missed out on in attention from his daddy was more than compensated by Joey’s mama. Mrs. Divers babied and coddled him to the point where Joey said it sometimes actually felt like he couldn’t breathe (which even caused Mrs. Divers to suspect he might have asthma, although he did not). She didn’t want him to go to school, or to play with other children, or even to go outside much. Consequently, Joey started school later than most kids, but at least he’d spent a lot of time reading books and making models of cars and airplanes in his room.

So if our club had given itself a name, it might have been called the Misfits Club. We never called it that, at least not out loud, although I’m sure we both thought it from time to time. I suppose in some ways it was similar to what people these days might call “group therapy,” and in all likelihood it might’ve saved me and Joey from some additional psychoses in our later lives. Not that we sat around and whined about our problems all the time, but if we needed an ear we always found it in each other.

Most of our time was spent pretending and daydreaming. Maybe that’s what misfits do to escape the sad realities of their pitiful little lives. Our favorite dream was that we would one day invent something extraordinarily brilliant and consequently become rich and famous. And then people would point to us and say, “I remember when I used to know them back when they were just nobodies.” And because of my deprived economic state, we also spent a fair amount of time and energy on moneymaking ventures that would increase our club treasury (which we stowed away in an old canning jar that we kept hidden under a loose floorboard in the shed).