Follow Me (22 page)

“I’ll be seeing you,” she said abruptly.

“Hey,” Sally called as the girl moved awkwardly down the aisle, holding her suitcase in front of her. “You didn’t finish your
story. What did your horse say? What was the word?”

“Tomorrow.”

At first Sally thought the girl was promising to tell her later, tomorrow. But then, as she watched other passengers line
up, she realized
tomorrow
was the word the horse had spoken, in a dream. She pondered that as the driver opened the doors.

The girl was the first to exit. Out on the sidewalk, she turned to look at the bus, raising her free hand to wave, and bumped
into an oncoming woman who’d been walking hunched over. The fringe of a green shawl hung down below the woman’s waist, reminding
Sally of a similar shawl that her sister Tru used to wear to church. She’d twisted her brown hair in a bun, the way Tru wore
hers. She limped away from the freckled girl, and as she did, she raised her head just enough for Sally to see the features
and recognize her sister.

Trudy Werner! It was her own Tru, come to wherever they were all the way from home. And wouldn’t you know, as Sally pulled
up in a Northway bus, Tru just happened to be walking by. Oh, the good grace behind coincidence! Dear Tru. There was so much
Sally wanted to ask her, so much she hadn’t gotten a chance to say the last time they’d seen each other. Without Loden or
the rest of the family to censor her, Tru would tell Sally what had happened to her son. Even if someone else was raising
him, Sally bet that her sister was keeping an eye on the boy, making sure that he got proper care and affection. She must
have been dying to tell her all about him that day Sally had appeared at the farm. Maybe Tru had left home in search of her
and that’s why she was out on the street. Maybe she was looking for her sister right at that moment.

Sally grabbed her purse and rushed into the aisle. The same doors that had almost closed her out and kept her from entering
the bus almost kept her from leaving.

“Please! I’m getting off here,” she said to the driver.

“Here,” he echoed flatly.

“Yes.”

He opened the doors. She leaped from the bottom step and ran past the freckled girl to her very own Tru, put a hand on her
shoulder, whirled her around with a great exclamation of joy — and saw that the face belonged, in fact, to a stranger, a middle-aged
woman who up close didn’t look like Tru at all.

“Excuse me,” Sally said, backing away. “I’m sorry. I thought you were my… someone… a friend. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” the woman offered cheerily. “I hope you find her… your friend.”

While Sally watched the woman continue down the sidewalk, the freckled girl from the bus approached. She murmured something
Sally couldn’t decipher. Sally murmured back, “What?”

The girl said softly, “This isn’t Rondo.”

“No?”

They stood in silence for a long moment. The girl set her suitcase on the sidewalk and scratched an itch behind her ear. She
yawned, stretching out her arms. She rolled her shoulders to loosen the stiff muscles. And then she held up her hand, beckoning
Sally to take in the scene around her — the line of storefronts, two newsstands on opposite corners of the intersection, cars
coming and going, the bus disappearing down the street, belching exhaust, another bus approaching from the opposite direction.

“Welcome to Tuskee,” she said, and Sally heard in her voice something not unlike the squeak of a rusty old iron gate swinging
open.

The small city of Tuskee was more than big enough for Sally Mole. It had three drawbridges and a seven-story office building,
along with a library, a small hospital, more bakeries than she could count, and several tailors, haberdasheries, laundries,
and apothecaries. On North River Avenue there was even a shop specializing in watch repair. Sally was impressed. A city that
had enough broken wristwatches in it to support a repair shop was of a different order from the other towns she’d passed through
since leaving Tauntonville.

When the freckled girl introduced herself as Penny, Sally heard,
Benny. Benny? Who? What?
Ha, that was a funny gaffe!
Penny, not Benny,
had come to Tuskee to look for a job. She was from Bellona, a village notable for being the place where Henry Ford was once
issued a speeding ticket. She was just a month shy of eighteen. She told Sally that she was in a hurry to get going with life.
After selling her Appaloos’ to her little sister for a dollar, she was ready for any adventure. She cared less about the money
she would earn than the stories she would hear. She wanted to hear as much as she could before she got married.

She’d planned to stay with her uncle and his family, who lived just a few blocks from the bus station. When she found out
that Sally was alone in Tuskee, without a place to stay, she declared that her aunt and uncle would have an extra bed for
her. At first Sally resisted. She was ready to use what was left of the money from Mrs. Mellow on a hotel room while she decided
what to do with herself. But Penny just looped her arm around Sally’s elbow and pulled her along, promising her she’d have
a hot bath and a good meal before the day was over.

The Campbells’ house was an overfilled red saltbox at the end of a lane. With seven children, three dogs, and innumerable
cats, the family was too big for the house, or, as Mrs. Campbell would complain, the house was too small for the family. But
it was ample enough for anyone who needed a place to stay. Mrs. Campbell met them at the front door and gave Sally a hug just
as crushing as the one she gave her own niece, welcoming her as if she were another relative and had been missing for years.
Yes, here Sally was, saved from whatever terrible fate she would have suffered if she’d stayed on that Northway bus. She’d
been on her way to Rondo, Penny explained. Rondo? Mrs. Campbell had never heard of Rondo. No one had heard of Rondo. No matter.
Sally was in Tuskee now, where anyone in need would never be denied a helping hand.

“I hope you’re planning on staying for a long while,” Penny said as they followed Mrs. Campbell into the house.

Why not? She had nowhere better to go. And about that bath — she wouldn’t mind one, if indeed there was hot water to spare.

Almost before she knew what was happening to her, Sally found herself being treated like another member of a family in a household
so crowded and wild that no one could keep track of how many people truly lived there. There wasn’t a quiet corner to be found.
Children shouted and banged on the upright piano, dogs barked, cats ran skittering across the kitchen table, and the telephone
rang. The telephone was always ringing at the Campbell house. Mr. Campbell was Tuskee’s favorite plumber, and he had more
work than he could handle. Basements were flooded and sinks were clogged all over the city; every problem was more dire than
any other problem. But as soon as the people got to chatting with Mr. Campbell on the phone, they’d forget their urgency,
and by the end of the call they’d be saying that they hoped Mr. Campbell would come by whenever he had the time to spare.

It seemed to Sally that Mr. Campbell was home an awful lot for a plumber who had customers waiting. He wandered quietly from
room to room, stopping to survey each scene, his face lit up with happy puzzlement. The children would race past him and sometimes
bump against him, bouncing off and then rushing on their way. Sally wondered if he was as confused as she was about the family.
She found it hard to be sure who was a Campbell and who was a guest. The fact that they all were clothed and fed amazed her.
Somehow Mrs. Campbell managed to put food on the table every evening, big platters of pork or chicken and boiled vegetables
for the family and any guests around to grab in passing. The first evening she was there, Sally followed Penny’s cue, helping
herself to the food, eating with her fingers while she was standing, nibbling on a chicken leg while across from her a small
boy hunched over a corncob, the dogs jumped and barked, two girls fought over the last drop of milk in the bottle, and the
telephone rang and fell silent and rang again.

And always in the middle of the pandemonium was Mrs. Campbell, who remained as impossibly serene as her husband, though evidently
less baffled by the liveliness of her big family. While Mr. Campbell was a wispy man, drifting aimlessly through the crowded
rooms, Mrs. Campbell was a large and solid woman. Just by hovering in one place for more than a few seconds, she provided
a steady center around which all activity swirled.

There were more children than beds available in the house, but that didn’t stop the Campbells from having guests. The pair
of black-haired twin boys slept in the backyard in a tent. And since the Campbell girls were in the habit of adding to their
numbers with friends, they couldn’t fit in the small bedroom and instead had a slumber party in the living room. There were
too many girls for Sally to keep track of their names. That first night there were ten of them, including Sally and Penny,
and they sprawled across blankets piled on the floor, lay head to head in a star-shaped pattern. For a while they traded gossip,
then jokes that got bawdier as the hour grew late, and then they started to sing. It turned out that Penny could play any
tune by ear on the piano, and she played the Campbells’ upright in accompaniment while the girls kept singing late into the
night.

Though she didn’t sing along, Sally enjoyed listening. She thought it odd and wonderful that the parents didn’t march downstairs
and tell them to be quiet. It seemed a house where expectations weren’t bolstered with any rules. As she drifted off to sleep,
she remembered the story Penny had told her about the horse named Nestor and the word he’d said in a dream:
tomorrow
. It was a good word, she decided, a hopeful and useful word. Now it was Sally’s turn to look forward to
tomorrow,
something she hadn’t allowed herself to do for months.

After just one day of searching, Penny found a job as a salesgirl at a shoe store — not the most lucrative kind of work, she
acknowledged, but it was a good way to begin meeting people. Watching her get dressed early the next morning and set off for
the store, Sally was surprised to feel a shade of envy. And while she wasn’t quite prepared to make a decision about her future,
she did head out to the corner newsstand, where she bought the local paper so she could check the classifieds.

She kept herself busy that day by getting her bearings, tracing the grid of streets downtown, noting the different stores
and municipal buildings, and then heading farther out along the river, past the industrial section into the suburban neighborhoods,
where tidy brick houses were shaded by flowering magnolias and fat, lazy dogs lounged on the front walks. As she passed an
elementary school, a bell rang, summoning the children on the playground; a girl high on a swing leaped off, landed in a nimble
crouch, and ran to join the line forming at the door. Sally was amused to feel herself resist a sudden urge to take the girl’s
place on the swing. A few blocks farther on, she stopped in a bakery and bought a molasses cookie, which was still deliciously
warm from the oven. She ate it as she walked along.

Everything she experienced that day reinforced her conviction that this river city was ideal. While she hadn’t traveled that
far in terms of miles from the Woolworth’s in Fenton, where she’d left Benny Patterson at the counter, she’d come far enough.

She bought the
Tuskee Chronicle
three days in a row but found no suitable listings. By the end of the week, she made it known to the Campbells that she was
willing to take most anything that came along. And when what came along was a full-time clerking job at Potter’s Hardware
on Mead Street, located around the corner from the bus station and just a couple of blocks from Penny’s shoe store, Sally
didn’t hesitate. At seventy-five cents an hour, it was a start.

The owner of the hardware store, Mr. Potter, was a good friend of the Campbells. He hired Sally to take the place of his former
helper, Arnie Bly, who had worked for him twenty-three years before being felled by a tumor in his gut. Arnie Bly had died
back in the winter, but only now was Mr. Potter getting around to replacing him. He made Sally swear that she was too healthy
ever to fall ill before he agreed to hire her. He didn’t ask about her experience and didn’t seem to mind that she knew next
to nothing about hardware supplies. He was happy to teach her.

Mr. Potter had a face that changed as the daylight changed, from a ruddy morning glow to a placid shine to a dusky fatigue
by five o’clock. He spoke slowly and precisely, almost as if he thought Sally wasn’t completely fluent in English. He kept
on talking even after he’d told her everything he thought she needed to know about the store. She hadn’t been working there
long before he began trusting her with the details of his life. She learned that his wife was busy helping their daughter
take care of her young children; his son was a schoolteacher; he had two brothers in Tuskee; and he proudly claimed among
his ancestors a Seneca queen, a Portuguese fisherman, and a Scottish thief who’d been exiled for his crimes back in the 1700s.

Mr. Potter was unfazed by Sally’s inexperience. Like everyone else she’d met since she’d stepped from the bus, he didn’t worry
about falling behind. There were more than enough hours in the day for the people who lived here. Even when they were in a
hurry, they had a carefree way of showing it. Though they made sure that in the end, nothing was neglected, they carried on
their affairs as if there were no world beyond the borders of Tuskee and therefore no pressing need to produce more than the
residents themselves could generate. They didn’t worry that they’d disappoint strangers with higher standards than their own,
and they didn’t worry that strangers would disappoint them. They just pitied all those who passed through on the bus without
stopping.

Surrounded by such contentment, Sally didn’t take long to begin settling into her new life. Her routines found their shapes,
their simple contours. She had finally landed in a place where she truly was welcome. Though she couldn’t yet know for sure,
so far it seemed that there was nothing these people wouldn’t forgive. No one blamed her for the rash actions of her youth;
no one whispered about her behind her back. And with every day that passed, she felt less afraid of her own potential for
making a wreck of things. It wasn’t that she was unaware of the long-term consequences of her earlier indulgences. She understood
that some consequences couldn’t be left behind by boarding a bus. But this time around, her future wouldn’t be something she
just stumbled upon by mistake.