As Simple as It Seems (4 page)

It didn't take long to find the blue station wagon. It was parked in the driveway of the Allen house. To my surprise the woman in the big hat was unloading suitcases and boxes from the back. Curious, I got off my bike, stashed it in the weeds, and quietly crept closer to get a better look at her.
Flatlander,
I said to myself as soon as I saw her tight black clothes and the shiny gold bracelets decorating her arms halfway up to her elbows. Her hair was blond, a brassy shade of yellow I was sure had come from a bottle, and she was thin as a pencil. She wore very high heels with leather straps that crisscrossed around her ankles like ribbons on a Christmas package. I would have been willing to bet there wasn't a person in all of Sullivan County who owned a pair of shoes like that.

As the woman pulled the last of the suitcases out of
the car, she must have tugged too hard on the handle, because it broke off, sending the heavy bag crashing down onto the toe of one of her fancy shoes. She grabbed her foot and started hopping up and down, cursing a blue streak. When the worst of the pain had passed, she stopped hopping, lifted her head, and yelled at the top of her lungs.

“Pooch!”

One of the second-floor windows of the Allen house flew open and a boy stuck his head out. I recognized the face as the one I'd seen earlier, pressed up against the car window.

“Coming!” he called down, then ducked his head back inside and disappeared.

A faded
FOR RENT
sign was nailed to a large tree in the yard, but nobody had lived in the Allen house for years. The real estate office that handled it hired my father's company to keep the lawn mowed, but other than that, the house was in poor condition. It was badly in need of a fresh coat of paint, and I noticed that several of the shutters had fallen off.

“Mountain retreat, my butt,” the woman grumbled as she pushed the suitcase with the broken handle over to the edge of the lawn and left it there along with the rest of the stuff she'd already unloaded. When she closed the rear
hatch of the car, she slammed it so hard that Jack, who was standing near the bottom of the driveway, barked.

“What the—”

Startled, the woman turned and seemed to look right at me, but I must have been well hidden by the weeds, because slowly she shifted her gaze to the left until she spotted Jack. Without taking her eyes off him, she yelled again.

“Pooch!”

“I'm right here, Mom.”

The redheaded boy had come out onto the porch and was standing on the top step with his hands on his hips. Despite the summer heat he was wearing long pants—the baggy kind with lots of pockets—and a long-sleeved shirt.

“Where's Dixie?” the woman asked anxiously.

“Upstairs,” answered the boy.

She turned and looked at him with narrowed eyes.

“Are you sure?”

He nodded, and the woman went back to staring down the driveway at Jack.

“Bring me a stick,” she called over her shoulder.

The boy obeyed, running down the steps and quickly picking up a couple of small twigs, which he brought to her.

“What am I supposed to do with these?” she asked, dropping the twigs on the ground, “Bring me something bigger.”

“What's it for?” he asked.

She pointed down the driveway at Jack.

“I don't like the looks of that dog,” she said.

The boy put his hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun. “He looks friendly to me. He's wagging his tail, see?”

Jack started up the driveway dipping his head, coming to say hello, but as soon as he got within full view, the woman gasped.

“I told you there was something wrong with that dog,” she said. “Look at him—he's missing a leg. Some wild animal probably chewed it off. What if he's got rabies?”

The boy shook his head.

“If he had rabies, he'd be foaming at the mouth, Mom. Besides he's wearing a collar. He must belong to somebody around here.”

“Who in their right mind would want a dog like that for a pet? He ought to be put to sleep. Git!” the woman yelled at Jack.

Jack stopped in his tracks and tilted his head, confused by her unfriendly tone.

“I said
git
,” she shouted again.

When Jack still didn't move, she picked up a stone and threw it at him, clipping him in the side. He yelped and jumped back. When she bent down to pick up another stone, Jack finally got the message, tucked tail, and slunk back down the driveway.

“The last thing I need is to get bitten by some rabid hillbilly dog,” the woman grumbled, dropping the stone.

“I told you, Mom. Rabies makes you foam at the mouth,” the boy said. “And then you go crazy and die.”

“Thank you, Doctor Doom,” his mother said. She touched her cheek with her fingertips and grimaced. “I need a pain pill and an icepack. Help me get this stuff inside. I think I'm starting to swell again.”

When the boy didn't move, his mother got annoyed.

“What's the holdup, Pooch?”

“I was just wondering,” he said. “Do you think it's true, what that lady at the post office said about the house?”

The woman waved his question away like she was shooing a fly.

“Of course not. She was just trying to get a rise out of you, Pooch. Fun is hard to come by in a podunk town like this. Can you imagine having to live here year-
round? I'd rather die. They don't even have high-speed internet up here—they use dial-up.
Dial-up.
Now come on, help me get this stuff inside before I puff up.”

I'd never heard the word
podunk
before, but it didn't take a genius to know that it was an insult. Typical. Flatlanders always thought they were better than everybody else.

I stayed hidden in the weeds watching until the boy and his mother had lugged the last of their stuff up the stairs and into the house. When they were finished, the boy came back out and sat on the porch by himself for a while.
Pooch.
Could that really be his name, I wondered? And why had they come to Clydesdale if they thought it was such an awful place? One thing I didn't have to wonder about, though, was what it was they'd heard down at the post office. Francine, the postmistress, loved to gossip. When she learned where the newcomers were staying, she would have been eager to pass along what everyone in town had been saying for years…
the Allen house was haunted.

Tracy Allen was the youngest of the three Allen girls. The summer she turned nine, she and her family went on a picnic down at Bonners Lake. Tracy was a good swimmer—she'd earned her deep-water badge at the community pool in Washerville just like her sisters—but that day down at Bonners Lake, she drowned.

Nobody knows exactly what happened. Maybe she got a cramp, or maybe she dove too deep and hit her head on rock. All anybody could say for sure was that one minute she was there, and the next minute she was gone forever. I was only a baby when Tracy Allen died, so I never knew her, but I'd heard the story a million times. When something tragic like that happens in a small town, it never quite goes away.

The Allens moved away soon after the accident, and it wasn't long before the rumors started up about
the house being haunted. People claimed to have seen Tracy's ghost sitting in the window, and some even said they'd heard her crying and calling out for help in the middle of the night.

It was because of Tracy Allen that I refused to take swimming lessons when I was little.

“Swimming is fun, Verbie,” my mother told me, “and besides, it's not safe for a person not to know how to swim. You're six years old now. Plenty old enough to learn how to swim.”

But Tracy Allen had learned how to swim, and look what had happened to her.

In spite of my protests, my mother insisted that I take lessons at the community pool. I spent the first three classes clinging to her legs sobbing. Eventually, after much coaxing by both the swim instructor and my mother, I was persuaded to get into the shallow end of the pool, where after a good deal more coaxing I finally managed to master the dog paddle well enough to take me, kicking and spluttering, from one side of the pool to the other. By that time the other kids in the class, Annie among them, had moved into the deep end to learn how to tread water in preparation for the deep-water test, but I dug in my heels. Although I was no longer afraid of getting into the
pool, and could not only dog paddle but also float on my back, the thought of being in water over my head threw me into such a panic that I think everyone just decided to be satisfied with what I had already achieved and leave it at that.

 

As I pedaled home in my nightgown that summer afternoon after spying on the new neighbors moving into the Allen house, I wondered what kind of people threw stones at innocent dogs who were only trying to be friendly. Flatlanders, that's who. If they hated Clydesdale so much, why didn't they turn around and go back where they'd come from?

Jack beat me home and was back in his favorite spot under the clothesline when I arrived. Inside, my dad was napping on the couch, with the newspaper over his face. There was a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich waiting for me on the counter, and next to it a note from my mother saying that she'd gone into town for an emergency band practice.

My mother played in the Clydesdale Band. It wasn't much of a claim to fame, since anybody who knew how to play an instrument even halfway decently was allowed to be in the band. She sat in the middle, in between the clarinets and the flutes and right behind the trombones.
It was easy to spot her, not only because of her size but also because she was the only one in the band who played the spoons. When she played at home she used our regular everyday silverware, but on concert nights she always used a pair of silver soup spoons, holding them together back to back, making them click in time to the music by tapping them against a little padded block of wood that my father had wired onto an old snare drum stand.

Clydesdale was very proud of its band, but nobody had much time to practice, so the music always sounded a little rough around the edges. That didn't stop people from coming to the concerts, though. Not just summer people either—town people came too. Everybody brought blankets or lawn chairs to sit on and cans of
Off!
to keep the mosquitoes and no-see-ums from biting. If it was raining, people would park in front of the post office and along both sides of the road. Then they'd sit in their cars with the windows cracked open, honking at the end of each number instead of applauding.

The summer concerts were on Wednesday nights, and sometimes the band would get together earlier in the day to run the numbers a couple of times, but this was a Sunday, so I had a feeling the reason my mother
had called it an
emergency
practice was because the band was scrambling to get ready for the Fourth of July.

The Clydesdale Band always played at the Fourth of July celebration. There would be barbecued chicken, a strawberry shortcake raffle with proceeds going to the ladies' auxiliary, and after the concert a small fireworks display. Annie and I had always watched the fireworks together, lying on our backs on an old blue bedspread. We would each hold our breath in anticipation as the rockets shot up, then whoop and shriek as they exploded into patterns we gave names to, like waterfall, curly fry, and dandelion puff. I had never missed a Fourth of July celebration in my life, but I'd already made up my mind that I wasn't going that year. I knew the old blue bedspread would feel as big as the ocean without Annie lying beside me.

I poured myself a glass of cold milk and ate my sandwich standing up at the counter. Nearby, two spoons lay near a jar of silver polish and the rag my mother had used to shine them that morning in preparation for the upcoming concert. I picked up one of the shiny spoons and was making a face at my upside-down reflection when Honey came over and began rubbing against my legs, meowing. I reached down
and scratched her between the ears, but we both knew it wasn't me she'd come looking for.

Most of the animals my mother brought home from the shelter were too sick or too old or too sad to get better. She cared for them anyway, and gave them names, and did her best to make them comfortable until their time was up. Over the years a parade of abandoned pets had come through our house, but from a very early age I got good at being able to tell which ones it wasn't safe to love. I thought Honey was one of those, but she ended up surprising me.

I was four years old when my mother brought her home. One of the grocery clerks at Peck's had discovered the tiny kitten curled up behind the soda can machine in the recycling shed.

“Where is the mama cat?” I asked.

“Nobody knows,” my mother told me.

“What if she comes back looking for her baby?”

“I don't think that's going to happen, Sugarpea.”

“Why not?”

“Sometimes the mama rejects a baby if it isn't perfect.”

“What's not perfect?” I asked, peering at the little ball of golden fluff in my mother's hands.

She gently pulled up one of the kitten's eyelids, revealing a milky white eye. “She's blind,” she told me. “See?”

I shuddered and hid my face in my hands.

Dr. Finn explained to my mother that because the kitten was so young—in addition to being blind—the chances of her surviving without her mother were slim to none.

“The most humane thing would probably be to put her down, Ellen,” he said. But he knew my mother wouldn't let him do that.

Instead she brought the kitten home and made a little bed for her with a heating pad in it, and she got up every two hours all night long for weeks to feed her warm milk with an eyedropper.

“I'll be your mama now,” I remember hearing my mother croon to the tiny kitten once as she held her up against her cheek.

After a while Honey, which is what my mother decided to call her because of her color and her sweet temperament, was strong enough to stand up and lap milk from a saucer if we put it down right in front of her and dipped a finger in to help lead her mouth to it. She would never be able to hunt mice or chase yarn
balls the way other cats could, but no matter where my mother went in the house, somehow Honey could always manage to find her.

 

I poured what was left of my glass of milk into Honey's dish and set it down in the corner.

“Here you go, kittycat,” I said.

I watched Honey make her way across the room. Stepping carefully, her eyelids closed tight, she looked as if she were sleepwalking. I pushed my glasses up with a knuckle and pulled them partway back down.

My father was still asleep on the couch, snoring loudly. I looked up at the clock, which was shaped like a teapot and hung on a nail above the stove. It was only twelve thirty. How was I going to fill the long afternoon ahead? I found myself thinking about that boy, Pooch. If only someone else had moved into the Allen house instead—a nice girl my age, for instance.

I got an apple out of the fridge and went back outside. Band practice never lasted very long. My mother would be home soon. If I didn't want to risk another exhibition of my true nature, I was going to have to find something to do other than hang around the house all afternoon. I had left my bike out in the
driveway, so I wheeled it back into the garage. That's when I noticed the fishing poles leaning up against the wall in a corner. And suddenly I knew exactly how I was going to spend the rest of my afternoon.