Sway (23 page)

“This is the one from Mom's bracelet,” I said. “I thought she kept it.”

“Nope. I've been holding this one close to me,” said Dad.

“The whole time?”

“The whole time.”

I pinched the charm tight, smushing a perfect thumbprint across its cheek. Then, in the suddenly bearable morning sun, that smudgy silhouette took on a whole new shine. I couldn't believe Dad had been carrying it with him in a secret place all along. Like it was the most important thing in the world to him.

D
ad sat in the driver's seat holding out the map at arm's length like he was fighting off a monster. He'd traced our planned route home across Mississippi and Alabama with beige drippings from a coffee stirrer. For the first hour of the trip I was in charge of drying things off in the back of The Roast, one paper towel square at a time.

“So how's it look back there?” he called.

With all the once-sparkly pieces and parts scattered about, the inside of the RV looked like the sad, littered end of a Fourth of July parade. Even the glitter cass across my curtain was clumped and unreadable.

“Everything's soggy,” I said. “The afghan squishes. My backpack's soaked. Your hat is kinda smushy. And the tambourine won't even jangle.”

I didn't mention my wall noodling, which, I was surprised to find, had not been affected in the least. That's the good thing about something being permanent, I suppose. It holds up in a storm.

“Sorry about all your stuff,” he said. “But don't worry about M. B. McClean's things. Those fall into the
don't need no more, no how
category anyway, I guess.”

And unfortunately, there was a lot of
no more, no how
on the agenda in the The Roast for the next day and a half. No more spying. No calls to make. Nothing to fish for. No soaps to choose from. No reason not to just feel the dampness of the bed under you and enjoy a collection of wet shoes doing their little musty stink dance around your head. In other words, The Roast had become a major snore salad.

“Just a hundred or so more miles,” Dad said, and after that, he, Gordon Lightfoot, and I were silent for the rest of the drive, which stretched out into a slow passing of yellow road dashes, mile-marker signs, and cows. I counted all the way up to a hundred and sixty-three cows by the time we finally saw a familiar exit, adding on twenty more that were probably hiding behind bigger cows.

Dad put on his blinker and veered onto the exit ramp.

“Why are we stopping in Nimble Creek?” I said.

“Gas light's on,” said Dad. “I just thought we'd fill up somewhere familiar.”

It didn't take but a minute for us to be approaching all the old familiar sights of Nimble Creek, Mississippi, this time from the other direction. The decaying minigolf course, the big twirly ice cream cone, the park where…

“What in the world?” said Dad, startling me. “Cass, do you see what I see over there? Is that a mirage on that fountain in the park, or is there something weird on top of it?”

I craned my neck to look, but couldn't make out anything beyond the flagpole.

“I don't see anything,” I said.

“All right,” said Dad, aiming The Roast farther into the park. “It might not be anything, but I want to go check it out.”

He found his way to exactly where we'd parked last time and stopped in the lot between the big gazebo and the old minigolf place. The entire park was empty, save for the occasional darting squirrel.

“Looks like the heat's kept everyone inside today,” he said.

Sure enough, despite air-conditioning, we must have been in the hottest vehicle in the hottest part of the hottest day in Mississippi ever. Dad and I climbed down from The Roast, and I immediately noticed what a different scene it was from the last time we were here. No banner, no wagon, no tambourine. No moms fanning, and no kids playing. Despite the differences, though, I did notice something strangely familiar at the center of the park. And it was certainly not a mirage.

“No way,” said Dad, as he and I approached the fountain gazebo, slow and cautious like a couple of cats. When we got close enough to get a good look, I couldn't even begin to believe my eyes. There, on top of the big fountain, rising up from its middle, was a statue of M. B. McClean, with his happy Cassistant standing right next to him.

Side by side, Dad and I circled the fountain and took in every bit of the monument. Someone had squished a mound of soaps together and carved every last detail—top hat and flip-flops and all. The little Cass even held a tiny tambourine in her hand. It must have taken all the leftover soap in town to do it. Underneath the figures, there was a poster written in green-and-yellow finger paint. It read:

In Honor of Mr. M. B. McClean, for all the fun


—From Michelangelo and the gang


I immediately flashed back to that boy with the Frisbee, the little Spider-Man fan who'd washed with the Michelangelo soap at the tail end of our crazy day in Nimble Creek. How inspired the boy must have been by M. B. McClean that he would be able to sculpt something so grand out of something so ordinary as old soap. “Wow,” Dad said. “I guess sometimes the zingle really does happen later, huh?”

For a few seconds, I saw my dad's smile bust through his sadness. I, too, couldn't help but be somewhat stunned by the exhibit before us. A monument.
Of my dad and me
. It was such a wonder of smoothness and color and detail, it made me feel prouder than anything concrete ever could. In fact, I would have been glad to stand there forever, marveling at the thing.

“Hey,” Dad said, with a nudge to my side. “You got a pen I can borrow?” He had to say it twice to distract me from my stare.

“Yeah,” I said. “I've got a Sharpie in The Roast.”

“Run get it, if you would.”

I almost didn't want to leave, for fear of coming back and discovering I'd imagined the whole scene, but I was too curious to know what Dad was going to do with the marker.

When I returned, Dad took the Sharpie and stepped up to the statue, giving it a good look up and down before uncapping the marker and adding a little something to the poster-board inscription. Right next to the
M
, he squeezed in the letters
ake
. After the
B
, he wrote
elieve
. Then he backed himself all the way to the spot next to me, keeping his gaze on the mini-monument the whole time. I just stood there with my mouth hanging open. What he'd just done had most certainly made me forget to breathe.

“But, Dad…” I said. “What in the world? You mean you were
Make Believe
all along?”

Dad nodded, slow and smug. “All along.”

“Make Believe McClean?”

“Make Believe McClean,” he said.

“And those people knew it?”

“Probably.”

Dad's peaceful smile lingered for a few seconds more, and then we made our way back to The Roast, thoughtful and silent. Both of us were totally awestruck by what we'd seen, and I was totally dumbstruck by what I'd read.
Make Believe McClean
, I said again and again in my head until it turned almost musical.

“Now, let's get out of here before we have to see ourselves melt,” Dad said, as he opened the door of The Roast and gave me a boost. But as bright and joyous as that part of our day had been, as soon as the monument and the park were out of sight, I could feel a gloomy grayness settle back down all around the RV once again. The farther we got from Nimble Creek, the more I wished we'd had the Belfusses' Polaroid camera, so we could have kept a miniversion of the park scene with us the rest of the way home. That statue would have surely made a picture worth displaying on Dad's visor shade.

I ambled back to my room, wondering if Dad was missing Sway half as much as I was. In fact, while Dad navigated us out of Mississippi, I couldn't much think of anything at all except for soap slivers. Worthless as they might have seemed last night, I found myself longing for them in an unmistakably noodle-worthy way.

It doubled the mustiness in my little room when I pulled the curtain shut. Mr. and Mrs. Pizza's freshening powers had been drowned right out of them, but I figured the smell of some Sharpies could overcome all of that. I pulled the black one from my pocket and gathered the rest of his friends. Then I tore the wet corners of the Eiffel Tower poster right off the thumbtacks to expose the whole canvas of blank tree before me. I thought about how Dad would probably want to paint the wall white again if he ever sold the RV, but that thought totally brought some of the grayness down around me too. So instead of doing more thinking, I began to noodle like crazy right there on the wall, hoping that maybe even under future layers of white paint, there would remain a permanent memory of the things that happened on this trip.

At first I drew just a small oval sitting on a branch here and there. And then one per branch, and then two. And then even more, using every color I had. Before I knew it, I'd drawn at least a hundred soap slivers resting on the branches of that great big tree. And then I felt the need to decorate them. Not with swirlies. Not with paisleys. Not with hearts or sparks. But with letters. Among them were
AJ
for Aunt Jo,
UC
for Uncle Clay,
S
for Syd,
C
for Connie, another
C
for Celeste,
A
for Ambrette,
POW
for Ambrette's husband, and even a
TBN
for Toodi Bleu Nordenhauer.

I labeled a sliver for just about every person I could think of, getting so caught up in my noodling that I hardly noticed when an all-too-familiar buzzing came from below. Opening up the beauty box fast as I could, I found the phone vibrating its way across an otherwise empty compartment. The little screen showed me the same 239 number again, sending a squirt of fear from my head to my toes. Or maybe it was a squirt of courage, because this time I capped my marker and answered. If she was worthy of a sliver, then she was certainly worth talking to.

“Hello?”

“Cass?”

Oh good, it's Mom. Oh no, it's Mom. Oh wow, it's Mom.

“Mom?”

“How are you, baby?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“I tried to call you back the other day, but no one answered,” she said.

“I know. I was just kind of busy.”

“So where in the world are you?” she asked. “What have you been up to?”

There was such a pile of telling to do. I decided to start with the most immediate bits. “Mississippi, and noodling.”

“Noodling an in-between?”

“I don't know,” I said. “
Is
it an in-between?”

Mom left my question just hanging there in space.

“Hey, I just got your postcard,” she said. “That fancy little soap smelled real nice. I've already used it up.”

Little did Mom know what an honor she'd had to wash with Make Believe McClean's next-to-last living soap sliver.

“So what did that little
M T
on there stand for?” she said.

“Nothing. It's a secret.”

And that's when I swept all my scattering courage into a pile right in the middle of me. I took a deep breath. “Mom, I know all about what happened to you last year. I know about the man you couldn't save. And I know you had to stop being a rescuer.”

“Oh, Cass…”

I could feel my throat tightening. “The thing is, I just don't know why you had to stop being my mom.”

Then Mom wasted half a refill minute trying to put together a sentence. I could tell she was headed in the direction of an apology, but not in the direction of Alabama.

“Please don't say that, baby. You must know, I never, ever meant for things to get this way,” she said. “It's just that, sometimes when you mess up one thing and then another—well, you wake up one day and messing up just comes easy to you.”

Mom's voice got quieter and quieter, like our time might just poof away into noiselessness.

“But you used to know how to clean up messes,” I said. “Right, Mom?”

“
Used to
is right, Cass.”

That's when my own supply of words ran so low, I had to use some of Dad's.

“You shouldn't let what you didn't do ruin what you
did
,” I said.

“Baby, I'm afraid I've ruined a lot of things,” she said. “But no matter what happens, Cass, you need to remember something, okay? You need to know that you're already more of a hero than I'll ever be.”

Then Mom must have run out of words too. In her silence, I wondered how in the world somebody could make you so happy and so sad at the same time. And then I thought about what it really meant to be a hero. How maybe it's not just about pulling people from rooftops or flipped-over cars. Or even about having certificates. Maybe even sometimes it's about being the one who snags a ten-year-old's favorite pajamas because you're there to tuck her in every night with your calloused hands.

“Cass.” Mom finally spoke. “I guess I better—”

“But wait,” I said. “Mom?”

“What, baby?”

“When you used it…the soap, I mean…did you feel a zingle?”

“A what?”

“Never mind.”

“So what's this magic you called me about the other day?” she asked.

I picked up one last piece of courage and dusted it off.

“You know, Dad just might have some mercy left over,” I said.