What I Came to Tell You (27 page)

“Why’s he bringing them?!” Grover whispered.

Sudie was already racing out of the Bamboo Forest to meet them. She ran up and gave Miss Snyder a hug.

Grover ran back to the workshop, packed up his tools, then, grabbing up his toolbox, started to make a run for it, but when he turned around, Jessie and the three women were there, looking at the big half-finished weaving behind him.

“Oh my Lord,” Mrs. Caswell said, walking up to it and lightly touching it.

“Goodness,” Miss Snyder said, looking at Grover and then back at the weaving.

“Astonishing,” Mrs. Dillingham said.

“I brought these ladies over to get a look at your work,” Jessie said.

Grover nodded but didn’t really understand.

“Sudie,” Jessie said, “why don’t you show them Grover’s gallery?”

“Sure,” Sudie said. “This way.” She showed them the entrance to the hallway, and the three women disappeared down the passageway with Sudie. Grover could hear them oohing and ahhing as they went deeper into the gallery. At one point he heard Mrs. Dillingham exclaim, “Miraculous!”

“I’m sorry to surprise you like this,” Jessie said in a low voice to Grover. “I figured you wouldn’t let me bring them if I told you ahead of time.”

“Why?” Grover asked, feeling angry.

“People need to know what you’re doing back here,” Jessie said.

“But why’d you bring
them
?” Grover whispered. These were the last people on earth he’d ever want back here. His teacher. His counselor. His principal. And it wasn’t even a school day.

“For one thing, I do their yards, and I’ve been telling them about your weavings for a while, and with Lunsford about to do away with the place …”

A flock of crows passed overhead, making a loud racket and settling on the far edge of the bamboo.

“You know when he’s cutting it down?” Grover asked.

Jessie sighed. “I ran into a fellow yesterday walking around the edge of the Bamboo Forest. He told me Lunsford had hired him to clear this all out.”

“Did he say when?” Grover asked, his heart feeling suddenly hollow.

Jessie looked at the ground. “Day after tomorrow.”

“Monday?” Grover sat down on the big stump in the center of his workshop.

“I asked him if he’d mind giving me a call as soon as he was sure what time of day he’d be clearing it.” Jessie sat down next to Grover.

After a little while, the women emerged with Sudie from the hallway. They surrounded him.

“What you’ve done here is remarkable,” Mrs. Dillingham said.

“I’d heard about your weavings,” Miss Snyder said, “but I’d had no idea.”

“This is important work, Grover,” Mrs. Caswell said. “People need to see this.”

“Indeed,” said Mrs. Dillingham.

Grover only half heard the women as he sat on the stump, looking around at the Bamboo Forest. Monday it would be gone. As the women left, Jessie said he’d go with them, that he needed to get back to work. Sudie followed them out, then returned in a minute and found Grover still sitting on the stump.

“I’m not working anymore,” he said.

“You mean today?”

“Ever.”

“Why not?”

“They’re cutting it down on Monday.”

“Oh,” she said, sitting down on the stump beside him. They were quiet for a little while. Finally, Sudie said, “You need to finish this one.” She nodded at the giant half-done weaving.

“What does it matter, Sudie?” he snapped. “I’ve been working on these weavings for weeks, and I’ve been working in the Bamboo Forest nearly all my life, and it’s all going to be gone in a couple of days.”

“You have the rest of today and tomorrow,” she said. “Finish it.”

He pushed himself up off the stump. “I have to go someplace,” he said.

“Can I come?”

“No.”

“Come on, Biscuit,” she said, sounding hurt. “
Sesame Street’
s on.” She stomped out of the Bamboo Forest.

Grover waited to be sure Sudie was gone, then headed up the street and turned in at Riverside. He hadn’t visited his mother’s grave in a while. The tapestries he’d made for her had all but fallen apart. The leaves and limbs had mostly disintegrated. Mainly what was left were the sturdy bamboo grids, tapestry skeletons. Grover sat down on a little wall and faced her headstone. He’d been thinking a lot lately about a night just a few days before she’d died.

It had been a Friday night. Their father had had to stay late at the Wolfe house and Sudie was spending the night up the street at Grace’s. Grover and his mother had eaten supper and Grover
was headed out the door. “I’m going up the street,” he’d said. Sam had a new video game he wanted to show him.

“I was thinking we might play a game,” his mother said.

“Like what?”

“Anything but Candy Land.” Candy Land was the main game little kids wanted to play in her office.

“I told Sam I’d come up after supper,” he said.

“How about checkers?” she asked. “Or Monopoly?”

“That takes so long.”

“Scrabble?”

“I’m terrible at Scrabble.”

“What about chess? Let’s play chess. Come on, Grover, I play games all day but I never get to really try.” She started to get the chess set out of the game cabinet.

“I told Sam I’d come up,” Grover said. What he didn’t say was that Sam had been telling him about his new Minesweeper video game all week. The other thing was that lately Grover’d found his parents more and more boring. The idea of playing a game with his mother on a Friday night when he could be up the street with his friend made him feel trapped.

Grover had walked up the street to Sam’s that evening, glad to be out of the house and headed toward his friend’s. If only he’d known, he would’ve played every single game in that cabinet with her. He thought about his father. He thought about Sudie. Even Jessie. What if something happened to one of them? What wasn’t he doing with them now that he would regret later? Life, he was beginning to understand, was one long last chance.

Grover was walking out of the cemetery when he saw Matthew raking up around some very old headstones in the Jewish section. At the sight of him, Grover felt a bolt of anger streak through him. He charged over to him.

“I know about you,” Grover said.

Matthew stopped raking, pushed his glasses back on his nose and leaned on the rake as if he’d been expecting Grover.

“I know about you looking after Mama’s grave,” Grover said. “About you repairing my workshop. About you helping me get Emma Lee out of the burning house.” With each thing he listed Grover heard himself become angrier. “And I know why.”

Matthew looked at him calmly.

“My father told me you were the driver,” Grover said. “He said it wasn’t your fault.”

“He didn’t tell you everything,” Matthew said matter-of-factly.

“Everything?”

Using the rake, Matthew picked up a handful of leaves and twigs, putting them into the wheelbarrow he’d been filling. “I had been answering my cell phone.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I glanced down at my phone to see who was calling, and when I looked back, your mother was right there in front of the car.” He motioned as if looking through the windshield at her.

Grover felt ambushed by this news. All he’d ever heard from his father, his friends, even the article that had run in the paper,
was that the driver, who the paper had not named, wasn’t at fault.

“I can’t help thinking if I hadn’t taken my eyes off the road …”

“Did you tell the police?” Grover asked, his throat tightening.

“I told the police. I told your father. I told anybody who would listen. They all said the same thing—that I would’ve hit her anyway. They all said no one could’ve stopped in time.”

“You told my father?” Grover asked.

“He wouldn’t press charges.” Matthew sounded as if he’d wanted his father to press charges.

“You looked down at your cell phone?”

“I did.”

“And then your car hit my mother.”

“Yes.”

Disturbed by something, a flock of crows erupted from a nearby tree, cawing loudly as they settled into a hemlock halfway across the cemetery.

“I haven’t driven since the accident,” Matthew said, “and will never own another cell phone as long as I live.”

“Why tell me this?” Grover asked.

“I knew you wouldn’t be afraid.”

“Afraid?”

“The way I see it,” Matthew said, putting another handful of leaves in the wheelbarrow, “my only chance of moving on is to tell the person who is likely to hate me the most.” He glanced at Grover.

Grover just stood there, taking in the cemetery. The
headstones and monuments came into such sharp focus it almost hurt to look at them. And there it was, the something else that had been weaving itself into his feelings since the day of the accident, almost without him knowing.

“I’m to blame.” Grover heard himself say it but he no more understood his words than if a stranger had spoken them.

“For what?” Matthew asked.

Grover felt a wall give way inside himself. “If I had gone to get the movie at Videolife like she’d asked, she wouldn’t have gone on that walk,” he said. “She wouldn’t have been on Charlotte Street with the dog in the first place.” This un-thought had been lying unspoken, hidden inside himself like a copperhead curled up in a Christmas tree.

A police car pulled into the gates, its blue lights silently swirling, and for a nanosecond Grover thought they’d come for him. But then came a hearse and a few solemn cars, their headlights shining. A funeral procession. Usually the lines of cars were much longer. The line for his mother’s funeral had been too long to fit into the cemetery. People had had to park throughout the neighborhood.

“You don’t have to do this,” Matthew said as he watched the line of cars wind along the far side of the cemetery and disappear over a hill.

“Do what?” Grover asked.

“Try to make me feel better.”

“Why would I care how you feel?!” Grover snapped. “You killed our mother!”

Matthew’s eyes widened and it appeared to Grover that he almost smiled.

“I’ve about finished up here.” The way Matthew looked around Riverside, Grover thought he meant he’d finished up at the cemetery. “I graduated,” he said. “I’ll be heading out in a couple of days.”

“Good,” Grover said, feeling confused and angry and something else he didn’t have a name for. Having remembered one person’s feelings he did care about, Grover began to trot up the little road. He happened to glance back and saw that Matthew had set his rake down and taken out a little notebook. He was bent beside a couple of headstones, scribbling away as if the dead were dictating to him.

Sudie was sitting on the couch with Biscuit beside her, watching
Nova
, when Grover walked in and turned off the TV.

“Hey! I was watching that,” Sudie said, clearly still mad.

“I have to finish that big weaving and I need your help.”

“You were snotty,” she said, staring at the dark TV screen. “You’ve been snotty a lot lately.” Frowning, she pet Biscuit.

“I’m sorry,” he said, sitting down on the couch beside her. “It’s just that with the Bamboo Forest about to be—”

“Listen, just because you’re not happy doesn’t give you the right to make other people unhappy,” she said, looking up at him. “I don’t need help being sad.” Her eyes reddened.

“But I need help finishing the big weaving.”

She stared at the blank TV screen.

“Please,” he said, petting Biscuit. “I can’t finish it without you.”

She glanced at him, then, pushing herself up from the couch, said, “I’m not doing this for you.”

They worked in the Bamboo Forest till dark. Sudie got his flashlights and set them up, and they worked till their father, who’d had a big group of Rotarians he’d had to take through the Wolfe house, had come home late. He’d heard from Jessie that the Bamboo Forest was going to be cut down on Monday, so he’d brought home a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had taken it out to the Bamboo Forest so they could keep working.

“Amazing.” Their father walked around the huge weaving as he chewed on a drumstick. He gave Grover and Sudie permission to work as late as they wanted.