Genuine Sweet (16 page)

I was headed back inside when Miz Tromp said, “You are gonna give your grandma a call before we go, aren't you?”

“I'll have plenty of time to call from the road,” I replied. “Tom surely has a cell phone he can lend me. If I can help Penny, I want to get on with it.” Besides, I didn't want to give Gram the chance to forbid my going. After her secret-keeping about the Waltons, it was hard to know what she'd say.

Miz Tromp pursed her lips. “All right. Let's go.”

16

T
OM, MIZ TROMP, TRAVIS, AND I PILED INTO TOM'S
jeep. Edie took her own car; she'd be staying there with her mother till the end, one way or the other.

After we dropped off the biscuits at Jura's, it was nearly nine. The night air was thick with an unseasonable fog.

“Curious weather,” Miz Tromp said. “Do you mind if I—?” She pointed at the radio.

Tom said that would be fine.

“. . . thirty percent chance of snow with temperatures dipping below freezing,” the radio announcer said. “The Department of Transportation warns commuters to expect delays in the morning. Y'all be sure to drive careful.”

“I'm glad we left when we did,” Tom observed. “As it is, you three might need to stay overnight.”

Stirring things up with Penny Walton
and
spending the whole night out? Gram would be beside herself!

I reckoned there was no point in putting it off now. “Tom, could I borrow your phone?”

He passed it to me gladly enough, but it took some help from Travis to figure out how the dang thing worked. Finally, though, I managed to dial home.

Gram answered on the eleventh ring.

“You all right, Gram?” I asked.

“Fine, fine. I was just nodding off,” she replied. “What time is it?”

“It's late,” I replied. “Listen. I need to tell you something, so try not to worry, all right?”

That caught her attention. “What's wrong? Are you hurt?”

“No, I'm fine. Everything's fine. It's just, um, I may be spending the night out.”

“Out! Don't be silly! Out!” She laughed.

“I mean it, Gram. Something's come up.” And then I told it to her. All of it. Edie's tears, Penny's sickness, the bad weather. “We might have to wait for the roads to thaw in the morning.”

Gram was silent for a time.

You could have knocked me over with a feather when she finally said, “That's a good idea, Gen. You don't want to be traveling if the roads get icy.”

“So—you're not mad?” I asked.

“Mad that my girl wants to help a neighbor? Mad that she can't let the suffering of another human soul pass her by? This is what the legacy's for, Gen. To help. To heal.”

“B-but what about Loreen Walton, and Ma, and all that big to-do?” I protested. “What about small wishes and not offending folks?”

She sighed. “I was being silly.”

“Gram, you're never silly!”

“Not true! Remember the year I decorated my Easter hat with caladium leaves because the lilies didn't bloom? That was downright silly, if you ask me.”

That
had
been silly, but still—“Gram, what on earth has gotten into you? Just a few days ago, you were full of dire warnings and woeful tales!”

“Life is short, Gen. We got to do what good we can,” was all she said.

“What about Penny's sickness?” I wanted to know. “Can the stars cure it?”

“Truthfully, Gen, I think they can do most anything,” Gram replied. “But we have to let them. If Penny is willing, the stars'll answer. If she's not, well then, bless her heart and come on home.”

I thought that over. “Some people think when it's your time to go, you ought to face your destiny with your head held high.”

“So they do.”

“How's a person to know which is which? When it's destiny and when to let the stars help out?”

“I reckon . . . there's a certain quiet knowing,” she told me.

I looked over to see the glint of the streetlights reflected in Travis's eyes. I reached out and poked him in the knee. Not sure why. Maybe I wanted to check-see if he was really there.

“You're sure this is all right with you?” I asked Gram. “Will you be all right alone tonight?”

A little snappishly, she replied, “I'm a grown woman, ain't I?”

“Well . . . all right, then,” I said. “See you around lunchtime, prob'ly.”

“Come at your own gait, honey.”

She hung up.

I held out the phone so Travis could shut it off.

“Everything fine?” he asked.

“Ye-ah.” I gave an uneasy shrug. “Something just feels, I dunno, peculiar.”

He glanced at Tom and Miz Tromp in the front of the jeep. “I know what you mean.”

 

Somewhere about midway through the drive, I drifted off. When I woke, my head was on Travis's shoulder.

“Sorry,” I said, peering through my unruly hair. “I didn't drool on you or anything, did I?”

He laughed. “No.”

Up front, Miz Tromp rifled through her bag and came out with a water bottle for each of us. She handed one apiece to Travis and me, then murmured something to Tom. He smiled and took a bottle.

“Can I ask you something?” Travis asked me.

“Sure.”

“How come you wanted me to come along tonight?”

“I couldn't very well invite your ma and leave you sitting at home,” I teased.

“Naw. Really.”

The truth was, it had just seemed like the natural thing to do. I was getting used to having Travis around. If I was gonna do something hard, he should be there.

“I reckon it's because”—I chewed on my lip—“you help me feel strong.”

For a second, I thought he was going to try to hold my hand. He seemed to think better of it, though, and gently bumped me on the arm with his fist.

“Someday soon, I'm gonna ask you to wish-fetch me a new pair of pants,” he said.

“Oh? Why's that?” I asked.

“'Cause you sure do make a fella feel like he's too big for his britches.”

 

It was deep dark when Tom pulled his jeep into the Ardenville Cancer Center. The halls were quiet, and most of the patients were asleep. When I glimpsed Penny from the hallway, though, she sat wide awake, a mound of pillows and plush toys threatening to crowd her off her own bed. In the harsh hospital lights, her skin had a troubling, greenish cast. But it was still Penny, poised with a pen over one of those sudoku books, looking as angry as I'd ever seen her.

I was crossing her threshold when she swore, “Dang fool thing!” and threw the booklet across the room. It landed at my feet.

Penny saw me and snarled. “You!”

I picked up her game book and set it on a table. “Miz, uh—”

“W-who! Who told you?”

Edie stepped forward. “I brought her here, Mama.”

Penny turned three shades of red, huffed twice, and swallowed down what was clearly an uprush of pain. “You brought her? Then you get rid of her!” She turned her face away.

I can't explain how, but right then, I had the clearest knowing that, as angry as Penny was, she was far angrier at herself than she was at either me or Edie.

“Miz Walton, please—” I tried.

“Get out!” she roared, then grunted—with the strain of shouting, I imagined. “I don't want to hear a word you have to say! Nurse!” She reached for her call button and mashed it with both thumbs. “Nurse!”

Tom stepped forward. “Penny, please, hear us out.”

“Oh-ho!
You're
behind this! Mister Alternative Treatment! Mister Fluff-My-Aura Man! Tell you what.” She pointed a trembling finger. “You're fired. I want a new day nurse. Get your supervisor. We'll deal with this right now.” Penny mashed the button again. “Nurse! A
real
nurse, please!”

A real nurse did come in, and a supervisor, and two other folks who I reckoned were some kind of orderlies.

Penny waved an arm. “I want these five, including my daughter and this—this nurse-of-false-hopes, out of my room! I told you people I didn't want any homeopathic pseudo-medicine anything, and I meant it!”

And there it was. Just as fast as we came, a security guard was muscling us out of Penny's room.

I was so stunned, I nearly let it happen.

But all at once, I saw a glint of silver through the window. The sky was blanketed with glowing clouds, as if a full moon hung beyond them. One lone star, just one, shone out.

A wisp of music, the faintest breath of it, whispered behind my ear.
All shall be well.

“Waaaaait!” I bellowed.

Everybody—Penny, nurses, guard man, everyone—froze.

Now what?

I had one chance to get this right. I had to let Penny know that a wish might yet heal her.

“Please! Miz Walton!” I called. “My ma never tried to cure your sister. Loreen asked my ma to let her die!”

As soon as the words were out, I knew I'd yapped up heartily.

Penny turned small and smaller, folding in on herself. Sass's bold real estate lady was gone. The tiny woman who took her place was something like the husk of a person who'd wandered a desert for weeks but never found a watering hole. She didn't even seem angry anymore. Just . . . empty.

“That's enough from you,” muttered the guard. “Let's go.”

As he strode us down the hall and toward the lobby, Edie called back to her mama, but Penny didn't reply.

It was a fairly bleak scene, there in that lobby, with Edie sobbing her eyes out and Tom standing stiff as a statue while his supervisor fired him on the spot.

Here's what comes of it,
I recalled Gram saying.

I could only nod and agree.

“I'm sorry,” I said to no one in particular.

Then I walked out.

 

I didn't know where I was going, precisely, so I wandered for a time. Around the parking lot, into a pretty little garden that—if the cold kept coming—wouldn't make it through the night. On the far side of some roses, a staircase clung to the outside wall of the building. I squinted at it, following it up to a landing on the roof. Again, there shone a bit of silver, that same lonely star overhead.

I climbed the stairs like a sleepwalker, dazed. I wasn't sure why I bothered. High up or down low, this would still be my biggest gaum-up yet.

I just
had
to come,
I poked myself.
All for the sake of fixin' things that wasn't mine to fix. Edie's ma not speaking to her. Tom fired. Penny's spark snuffed out, maybe for good. Not to mention the starving folks whose biscuits didn't get made tonight!

I glanced up and around, as if the night sky might hold some answer as to how things had gotten so strained. Of course, it didn't. And as for the rooftop, there were only a few flower pots and a bench for sitting. Ardenville was prettier than I imagined a city could be, though. From up high, its lights twinkled like low-to-earth stars.

The wind gusted then, so I couldn't be sure, but I thought I heard another scuffle down below. Tom's voice, maybe, and Travis's.

After a time, Travis called clearly from the parking lot, “Genuine? You around?”

I walked to the tippy edge of the roof and shouted down, “I'm here! You can just let the police know where to find me when they get here.” For, surely, they were coming to arrest us all.

I was walking the roof's edge, imagining what it might be like to jump off and suddenly find I could fly, when a
chunk-thunk
sounded behind me. I turned to see a pair of doors opening. It was a freight elevator.

Edie stepped out, pushing Penny Walton along in a wheelchair.

They didn't say anything as they came my way, so I held my tongue and let the rush of cars on the highway fill the silence.

Edie wheeled Penny up to me, reached out and squeezed my hand, then left without a word.

“I don't like you, you know,” was how Penny started us off.

“I was figurin' that.” My feelings weren't hurt. Truth to tell, after yapping Pa's chances for that handyman job, Penny wasn't at the top of my list, neither.

She grunted, her face gone tight with pain. It was a while before she managed to go on, “Did you make that up, what you said about Loreen asking Cristabel to let her—?”

“I'm no liar, Miz Walton.” I said it harshly, I'll admit. But looking at that poor shuck of a lady before me, I couldn't stay mad. “And it was told to me by the most truthful man I know. I believe him.”

Penny let out a sigh.

“Darn it,” she said.

For a time, Penny and I just looked out over Ardenville. A few snowflakes started to fall.

She said, “I used to love the snow.”

“Used to?” I asked.

“These days, all I can think of is how gray it'll look after it's been sitting a while.”

“Most days it melts while it's still white,” I replied.

Penny nodded. “You're right. And yet I still keep thinking gray.”

I tried to think of something kind to say, but the only thing that came was, “I imagine they give you lots of medicine here. And tests and whatnot.”

Penny let out a strange sound, something between a sob and a laugh. “Tests!” she cried, and made the sound again, this time looking at the sky, shaking her head in disbelief.

“Tests and medicine!” Penny exclaimed. “You're right about that. I've had every test that ever was and then some! And you know what they say, Genuine Sweet? They say that I'm dying. That a cancer cell is more powerful than a person.” Penny made a fist so tight it shook. “More powerful than all the prayers and wishes in the world. More powerful than all the saints and G—” She fell apart, bawling.

I finally understood why Penny had caused that big ruckus back in Sass. She was sick in her body, and heartbroken on top of it.