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Authors: Caroline Adderson

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BOOK: Middle of Nowhere
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ARTIE'S AFRAID OF
lots of things. The old lady across the street. Dogs. Men with beards. But his most annoying fear is of falling in the toilet.

Last year, when he was four and a half, he woke up in the middle of the night and went to the bathroom half asleep. He didn't notice the seat was up. Screams! Mom and I went running and there he was, arms and legs waving in the air.

“Help! I'm going down! I'm going down!” Ever since, there's no convincing him that he's way too big to be flushed away. And even now he needs somebody to hold his hand if he has to sit down.

Those were the times I really, really wished Mom was back. Saturday morning, Sunday morning, standing there holding his hand and gagging and wishing he would hurry up.

Still, we survived the whole weekend on the old lady's five dollars and the change from the twenty she gave me. Hotdogs for breakfast, hotdogs for lunch, hotdogs for supper. On Sunday morning I went back to the Pit Stop Mart and spent the rest on cereal for a little variety in our diet.

I took a shower and when I came out, Artie was rolling around on the floor with the phone tucked under his chin, chattering away, the way he did when Mom called from her class to say goodnight.

I snatched it from him.

“Mom?”

“On a scale of one to ten, ten being the most likely — ” the woman on the other end of the line was saying, “ — how likely would you be to choose a sugar-free soft drink over a regular soft drink, regardless of the brand?”

ON A SCALE
of one to ten, ten being the most likely, I would have ranked Mom being there when we got home from school on Monday as a ten. Maybe a nine, but no lower than that. She'd been gone a week.

We always wake her when we get home from school. Her shift at Pay-N-Save started at eleven at night, so she had to leave the apartment by ten to catch the bus, unless she had a class. If she had a class, she left after supper and went to work from school. She got home in the morning in time to eat breakfast with us and make our lunches and see us off. After school, Artie would come and lie on top of her and bury his nose in her neck. When that didn't work, he'd steal her earplugs and lift the satiny edge of her eye mask and growl.

Anyway, she wasn't there so I poured out some dry cereal for Artie and put him in front of the TV. Then I sat in the window and watched the house across the street. I hadn't seen the old lady all weekend, but the drapes had opened and closed and the lights went on at night and the TV colored her living-room blue. She would run out of food sooner or later, just like us. Or maybe she had somebody she could call — grown-up kids or grandkids.

Then I thought of something else. It was right in front of my eyes, but for some reason I didn't see it until that moment.

The next morning on the way to school, I took Artie across the street to look at the old lady's garden. Before her ambulance ride, she used to be out there all the time, watering her plants and not saying hi to us. I didn't know anything about plants, but they looked thirsty to me. I was going to offer to do the watering for her because I hoped she might pay me.

Artie pulled on my hand.

“Come on, Curtis. She's in the window.”

That was what I wanted. I pretended not to see her or notice when she stepped away from the window.

“Let's go!”

I needed to give her enough time to hobble to the door. It took forever. She moved so slowly with that thing. Finally she bashed her way out onto the step, holding the screen with one hand, clutching the walker with the other, scowling at us from under the knitted cap. Artie nearly fainted on the spot.

“Do you need any help?” I called.

“Do
you
?” she called back.

I thought she meant that she'd been watching our place at the same time I'd been watching hers. That she'd noticed a twelve-year-old going out with his five-and-a-half-year-old brother. That an adult never came out with them. Not once for a whole week.

I grabbed Artie and we took off.

It wasn't a good day after that. At school I found it hard to concentrate. Mr. Bryant asked me if everything was okay and I told him yes. But at that exact moment my stomach let rip the loudest gurgle you ever heard. It sounded like a flushing toilet. Mr. Bryant dropped his eyes to where the sound came from, as though I had a wild animal stuffed under my shirt. Or maybe he was looking at my shirt, which was one of the ones Artie had washed in the bathtub. It didn't look too clean, even though he'd stomped all over it.

Great, I thought. Now
two
people are suspicious.

Maybe Mrs. Gill was, too, because instead of a lunch, I'd packed Artie the penny candy I'd bought on Friday.

But I wasn't out of ideas yet. I had a few and one was bottles, so after school Artie and I went down to the creepy underground parking garage and checked the recycling.

It turned out I wasn't the only one to think of this. Margarine tubs and dirty ravioli cans spilled out of the bin, but they weren't anything we could cash in at the store. The beer cans and liquor bottles had already been scooped up.

So after the last Mr. Noodle split between us, I got the credit card from mom's wallet under the cardboard box in her bedroom. While Artie drew a picture, I practiced copying
Debbie Schlanka
over and over off the back of the card. She had a pretty easy-to-forge signature. It didn't look that different from how I wrote Curtis Schlanka. I realized this was because she never got that far in school. She only made it to grade nine before she quit.

My son Curtis Schlanka has permission to use this card. Best wishes.

I held it up. The “best wishes” looked dumb. It wasn't a birthday card! I wrote it again without any closing.

Using a credit card with a forged permission note was pretty much the same as stealing. If we were caught, the Pit Stop Mart clerk would call the police. Then Social Services would get involved. Most foster families only take in one kid at a time. They have their own kids like Mrs. and Mr. Pennypacker had Brandon. I could look after myself, but what about Artie?

The clerk with the gold front tooth was working at the Pit Stop again. He lifted his face out of a magazine as we came in and watched me take a basket. My heart started thumping.

Artie made straight for the candy.

“No,” I said, dragging him to the cooler at the back where the milk was. I wanted to fill the basket with food, but thought it would look suspicious if we bought too many groceries at the Pit Stop Mart, even though it was where I'd been buying everything because the supermarket was a bus ride away. I put in milk, apples, carrots, bread, sandwich meat, cheese spread, cans of fruit, packages of soup.

Artie didn't want carrots. He wanted a Slushie.

“No Slushie,” I said.

“I want candy. I want candy for lunch like you gave me today.”

“Shh. You were supposed to trade it for some real food. Remember? Did you?”

He crinkled his nose.

“Well, you can't have more candy. You'll get sick. You'll get rickets.”

“What's rickets?”

“It's a disease. Your legs bow out and get so weak you can't walk. You get it from eating too much candy.”

I shushed him again as we got close to the counter. Somebody else had come in and was buying cigarettes and lottery tickets. On his way out, he tossed the cigarette wrapper on the floor. The clerk glared after him, then kept on glaring as I heaved our basket onto the counter. He started scanning our stuff as though
we
had thrown the wrapper down. I took the credit card from my pocket. The note was folded around it and my fingers stuck to the paper as I handed it to him.

He looked at it with one eyebrow lifted. Then he looked at me the same way and my face got hot. I thought we were goners except just then, Artie reached up with the cigarette wrapper and put it on the counter where it unballed in slow motion.

“He littered,” Artie said.

And the clerk smiled. He showed his gold tooth to us, then snatched up the wrapper and tossed it in the garbage.

“Anything else? Scratch and win?” he asked, all friendly now.

“Okay,” I said.

He swiped the credit card and handed me a pen to sign the receipt.

“Should I sign my name or my mom's name?” I asked.

“Your name.” He passed the groceries over the counter in two bulging bags. “Good luck.”

I think he meant the lottery ticket. We scratched it outside the store, and even though we didn't win anything, I still felt lucky.

BEFORE BED WE
treated ourselves to bread and canned peaches, the bread dipped in the syrup and all soppy with it. It should have been easy to get to sleep because my stomach was finally full. Mom hadn't come back yet or even called but I was still ten out of ten positive she would be back. Because that was what she promised a long time ago when I was living with the Pennypackers. That she would never leave me again.

Also, our problems were solved. Our one problem, really. All I had to do was wave the credit card and the door of the Pit Stop Mart would swing open. Food was as good as free now.

I was too excited to sleep. While Artie snored beside me, I lay thinking of everything else we could buy. Things like clothes or a new toy for Artie. Or a skateboard, not for Artie. I wondered why Mom was always saying we couldn't afford things when we had this magic card.

But the next morning, the excited feeling was gone. I woke up remembering back when I was in kindergarten, waiting for Mom to pick me up. That day Mrs. Gill gave me an alphabet puzzle to do. Mom still hadn't come by the time I finished it, so Mrs. Gill asked if I wanted to help her.

Did I? I loved helping but hardly ever got the chance. Everybody wanted to be her helper. Now I was the only one there and I hoped so hard that Mom wouldn't show up before I finished helping.

My job was to go around the room with a bag of cotton balls. I felt very important taking out a fistful of the soft balls and leaving them on each table.

“We're going to make Santas for Christmas,” Mrs. Gill told me.

Mom didn't show up and I was glad except that there was nothing else to do after that. Mrs. Gill was writing something in her lesson book so I went over and climbed in her lap. She put the pencil down. It was raining and water was dribbling down the windowpanes. We sat together, watching the drips make patterns on the glass.

After a few minutes she said, “Curtis, I think we'd better call her.”

We phoned from the office. Mom didn't answer. I had the key around my neck in case of emergency and I showed it to Mrs. Gill. She said she would drive me home and wait with me until my mom came back. We lived in a different apartment then and it was a much longer walk to school so I was happy to drive in a car, especially in the rain.

On the way Mrs. Gill asked me questions. Had my mother ever forgotten me like this before? No. Was there somebody else who was supposed to pick me up? I said Gerry sometimes did. Who was Gerry? He was my mom's friend. Was he my father? No.

At the apartment, I unlocked the door and we went inside. Mrs. Gill put on her sad face. That was a game we played at circle time. She would put on a huge fake smile and ask, “What face is this?” “Your happy face!” we would call. Sad face. Mad face. Thinking face. “I don't see any thinking faces,” she would say when we weren't paying attention.

The sad face was about the bottles on the table.

While we waited, Mrs. Gill sat with me on the couch and took a book out of her purse.

“I always carry a book with me, Curtis. Just in case.” It was about a frog who rode a motorcycle. After she finished reading it to me, she checked her watch and asked if I was hungry. In her purse was a granola bar.

“Also just in case,” she said, putting on her happy face. Then she left me looking at the pictures of the motorcycling frog while she stepped into the hall to make some calls.

I tucked the granola bar down the back of the couch. Just in case there wasn't any supper that night.

BOOK: Middle of Nowhere
12.29Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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