Savvy (16 page)

Bobbi was in the bathroom, taking forever to get herself ready, and Lill fussed and mussed over Samson, trying to run a comb through his mane of dark hair before he could escape into the recesses of the empty motel closet. Across from me, Fish let go a belch to be proud of and Will Junior matched it in length and volume as though trying to beat a world record.

I wrinkled up my nose at them as I cut my waffles. “I thought you wanted to grow up to be just like your daddy, Will Junior,” I scolded, trying not to let on that I was still feeling unsettled by his kiss in the pool. But the boy just smiled at me and winked.

“I do.”

Fish snorted and jabbed Will in the ribs with his elbow, dripping syrup on the floor with his fork. “Don’t tell me Pastor Meeks can belch like that,” he said through a mouthful of waffle.

“Pastor Meeks can’t,” Will replied with another shameless grin.

Lill chose that moment to try to turn on the television, wanting to check the weather. We all turned to her with a sudden shout of “DON’T!” that nearly made that poor woman sprout wings and fly. Fish stood up so fast he knocked his plate of waffles facedown onto the floor. He bumped Will, who elbowed the plastic cup of orange juice on the nightstand next to him and sent it spilling and dripping into the drawer with the Bible and the phone book and the pizza delivery coupons. Bobbi unlocked the bathroom door and stepped out in time for the rest of us to make a dash for towels and water.

Lester knocked just as things were returning to order. He was wearing the new tie Lill had bought him, along with a clean shirt and a fresh pair of overalls.

“Time to go,” he said with a broad smile just for Lill. Lill straightened the knot in Lester’s tie, returning his smile and letting one hand linger lightly on the man’s chest.

“You look real fine, Lester,” said Lill, beaming.

Since everyone else was ready to go, I dressed as quickly as I could in the bathroom. I brushed my teeth and combed my hair. I put on a little shiny red lip gloss that Bobbi had left on the counter, then thought better of it and dabbed it back off again with a tissue. Before leaving the bathroom, I cheerfully added a paper-wrapped soap to the pocket of my dress that still held Will’s birthday present pen. Then I joined the others and we all flop-flapped down the hall in our new Mega Mega Mart flip-flops, following Lill and Lester downstairs toward the Heartland Bible Supply bus like a gaggle of flat-footed goslings, keeping a lookout for any unwanted attention.

Ahead of me, Lill laced her large hand through Lester’s arm and I tried not to listen to Carlene and Rhonda as they carried on at length about his new crush; though, today their voices didn’t seem as loud and nasty as usual.

“I didn’t think my boy would ever find himself a decent woman,”
said Rhonda.
“I suppose he’ll mess it up.”

“ ‘Decent woman?’ What was I—chopped liver?”
sniped Carlene.
“It wasn’t my fault Lester couldn’t see a good thing when it was right in front of his face.”

“Lester always liked liver,”
Rhonda snapped back.
“You, Carlene, are just a scrawny old chicken gizzard.”

I thought about those two gals and their constant griping and bellyaching, and my head swam with questions. If I could tell what Lester was thinking or feeling by listening to those voices in my head, why did they always talk about him like he wasn’t even there? They were always cutting him down to the quick. It seemed like those two ladies had had such an effect on him that now it was only their voices he heard loud, loud, loud. Was it their nasty chit-chat that told Lester who he was? No wonder the man had a stutter and a twitch.

Maybe it’s like that for everyone, I thought. Maybe we all have other people’s voices running higgledy-piggledy through our heads all the time. I thought how often my poppa and momma were there inside my head with me, telling me right from wrong. Or how the voices of Ashley Bing and Emma Flint sometimes got stuck under my skin, taunting me and making me feel low, even when they weren’t around. I began to realize how hard it was to separate out all the voices to hear the single, strong one that came just from me.

Climbing back up into the big pink Heartland Bible Supply bus, the morning warm and bright, I tried to listen past Carlene and Rhonda; I tried to hear if there was any of Lester’s own voice left in Lester. The more I watched and listened, the more it became clear as clear that whenever Lill smiled Lester’s way, or whenever she spoke to him as we traveled down the highway, Carlene and Rhonda seemed to lose their sway. Lill shone on Lester like the sun. And on his arms, his sleeves rolled up, the women’s scowling, animated faces dissolved back into the thin black lines of lifeless tattoos.

Maybe Lill
was
an angel, I thought to myself; maybe she was Lester’s angel, sent down from heaven to clear the voices from his head.

I turned my eyes away from the adults, choosing a seat by one of the few windows not threaded with cracks or covered in cardboard and silvery duct tape. I watched out the window as we bumped and thumped toward Wymore and Lester’s next delivery, passing an endless landscape of grizzled cornfields. The earth was yawning and stretching here, turning green at the toes of the brown and broken stalks of last year’s harvest. It was spring and the whole world was coming back to life. The whole world was waking up. Now, I thought to myself, if only Poppa would too.

W
e arrived in Wymore just as the morning’s second service was ending at the big brick church off Tenth Street. Lester parked the bus in front of the building and waited as Lill straightened his tie one more time and brushed crumbs from his shirt. The man positively beamed at Lill’s spit and polish attention, and his shoulders gave neither a hitch nor a twitch.

“Now, don’t forget what we talked about,” she continued encouragingly. “See if you can deliver those Bibles right to the minister’s wife. A woman’s going to be much more likely to take kindly to something that’s pink.”

Lester nodded at Lill and stood up tall as she kissed him on the cheek.

“That’s for luck,” said Lill, and Lester turned every shade of red. “You’ll do fine.”

Lester’s mouth worked and worked like he was chewing on a big wad of Bobbi’s bubble gum; he looked like he wanted to say something to Lill but couldn’t make his lips move right. After a moment, he reached out and awkwardly shook Lill’s hand like he and she had just signed a contract. Then, with one large pink Bible tucked under his arm, Lester strode from the bus wearing a sheen of confidence that fit him like a new pair of shoes. He walked stiffly, but with more pride than I’d reckoned him able to muster.

Lill bit her cuticles as she watched Lester through the window. Since we’d left Lincoln, she’d been coaching him, giving Lester tips on how to talk to people and how to present himself like a businessman, rather than just some deliveryman easily pushed around and disrespected. Now it was her turn to fidget and fret.

While Fish and Will pitched wadded-up balls of paper torn from Lester’s stack of magazines at each other over the seats, Bobbi and I moved to sit by Lill. I didn’t need to draw anything on Lill with my shiny silver pen to know that she was love-struck. I couldn’t fathom it myself, but I guessed that happy endings came in all shapes and sizes.

Before long, Lester returned to the bus with a smile that threatened to split his face in two. Climbing up the three steep steps, he let out a whoop and a holler. Then, with a little heel-clicking skip, he leaned over and took Lill’s face in his hands, laying a long hard kiss on her mouth. Lill threw her arms around Lester’s neck and kissed him right back with a zest and a zing and a zeal that set the rest of us looking away—looking at just about anything,
anything
else.

Bobbi stuck out her tongue with a sour and shimmying shudder, squirming away from the happy couple and into the seat across the aisle, yet I couldn’t help notice that lightning-fast smile of hers come and go once, like a sentimental chink in her teenage armor.

Loosening his lip-lock with Lill, Lester straightened up and announced, “Not only is the minister here accepting the delivery, but the Wymore Women’s Guild would like to p-purchase three extra cases of Heartland B-Bibles.”

Lill clapped her hands like my sister Gypsy, joyfully enthusiastic.

“That takes care of all the B-Bibles I didn’t deliver yesterday,” Lester said with relief, patting the back of his driver’s seat as though now his bus was safe and he had been redeemed.

Lester recruited Fish and Will to help him carry boxes from the bus into the church. The boys tucked their heads down and held the boxes high to hide their faces as best they could, so that no one might recognize them from the ALERT! MISSING! ALERT! newscasts.

When they returned, Lester had cash and Fish and Will each had handfuls of powdered sugar donuts cut demi-semi into quarters. Will brushed white sugar off his black T-shirt as he handed me a piece of donut, then sucked more sugar from his fingers as he sat down next to me—next to me
close
. Despite the donuts, Fish looked dark as a storm cloud in his seat across the aisle and a shadow fell over the sun. Will glanced from Fish to Lester to me, looking worried.

“Lester says he has to make one more stop before we get to Salina, Mibs,” he began. “I guess he has to give some gal money from selling all those Bibles, and the stop is right along the way. But he promised he’ll get us down to the hospital soon—a few hours is all.” Will was trying to reassure me. He knew how badly Fish and Samson and I wanted to get down to our poppa and was none too sure what might happen if we got more frustrated and impatient.

I held my bite of donut carefully between two fingers, watching the powder drop onto my lap as the bus rumbled and roared back to life. It was taking so long to get to Poppa; a few more hours of such uncertainty and dread were sure to feel long enough to hold days, months, or years worth of normal everyday worries—everyday worries like what to do about a certain curly-haired boy.

Will finished his donut and made a face, looking annoyed and uncomfortable. He reached under his leg and pulled out a wadded-up ball of magazine paper that he’d sat down on. Something about the crumpled ball of glossy paper caught my eye. I popped the piece of donut into my mouth and took the paper wad from Will, coughing a little as I inhaled the powdered sugar. Untwisting the crumpled ball, I smoothed it out against my lap, ignoring the way Will’s knee kept bumping mine. The picture was the one from the magazine cover, the picture of the human heart looking like nothing more than a big mushy ball of watermelon threaded through with fine, pale roots. When I had first seen that picture, I had thought it made a person’s heart look like a fragile, fragile thing rather than the sturdy muscle that I’d learned it to be. Now, I realized it was both.

With that thought in mind, I turned toward Will, my heart thumping, thumping, thumping hard against my ribs. I needed Will Junior’s full attention. Scooting away from him a bit and setting the rumpled picture down between us, I reached out and took Will’s face in my hands the way Lester had done with Lill. Holding another person’s head in my hands like a basketball didn’t feel near as awkward as I’d expected, despite how embarrassing it had been to watch Lester take hold of Lill the same way. But, unlike what happened between the two of them, there was to be no kissing this time around.

Instead, I looked Will straight in the eye, ignoring the way Fish goggled at us from the next bench over. Will looked back at me, startled, and I kept my heart muscle strong, feeling something inside me shiver like a pale green flower shoot just waking up for spring. But whatever that thing was, it was still too new to feel ready to bloom; it wanted time to send down roots. Someday soon I was going to bloom like crazy, and then I’d have what I needed to keep me standing tall.

“I like you, Will,” I said. “I may even
like you
like you. But I’m just not ready to be kissing you yet, all right?” My heart was beating so hard with the hurly-burly fluster of truth-telling that it felt fit and full to bursting. I was confident that Will’s heart was a steady one and suspected that he wouldn’t fall to watermelon mush just because I wasn’t ready to be kissing him. But we were friends now and I didn’t want to bust that up.

I let go of Will’s face and he stopped bumping my knee with his. His smile turned slaunchways and his black eye gave him a stubborn, scrappy look that I couldn’t quite read all the way to the end.

“All right then, Mibs,” he said. “Just give me the pen back.”

“My birthday pen?” I asked, surprised and less muscled by measure. Will raised his eyebrows meaningfully and held out his hand. My stomach knotted and my lower lip began to tremble. I felt younger than young and all the rooting and all the growing up I’d just got done doing seemed to slip through my fingers as I reached down into the pocket of my special-occasion dress. I reached down past the paper-covered soap I’d so happily secreted there that morning and now, sadly found broken in two. I reached down to wrap my hand around my fine and fancy happy birthday pen with its silver finger grip and its shiny rounded cap.

I couldn’t look at Will as I held the pen out to him. I stared out the window instead, ignoring the satisfied look on Fish’s face where he sat across the aisle and trying to stop my lips from quivering, trying to tell myself I was being a silly shilly-shally for feeling so let down when I’d just been the one
doing
the letting down. I watched rolling hills slip past and slope away like prairie waves outside the windows of the bus. I felt Will take the pen from my hand and heard him uncap it with a quick metallic
zing
.

A moment later, a voice filled my head like a deep-toned bell and the sound of it rang and echoed in my ears.

I can wait.

I can wait.

I can wait.

I turned back toward Will, who sat with his right hand raised in my direction like he was taking an oath or asking to be called on—a blue-inked sunshine smiling out at me from his palm.