The Last One (7 page)

Bridget took the paper from her mother and trotted to the fridge, where she added it to her other masterpieces. “That’s what it would look like if Poker came to live at our house.” She flashed me a brilliant grin, showing off her missing front tooth.

“Poker would be lonely if he came to live here.” Ali scooped potatoes onto her daughter’s plate. “He’d miss his friends Rummy, Gin and Solitaire over at Mr. Fred’s. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

“Noooo.” The little girl shook her head. “But they could visit.”

“Sorry, toots. No horses here.” I stabbed a slice of white meat and put it on my plate. “Pass the gravy, please.”

“But Uncle Sammy, we live on a farm. We don’t have any animals. It can’t be a real farm if we don’t have any animals.”

“That’s not true, Bridge.” Ali reached over to tug her daughter’s braid. “We have Loopy and Butler.”

“But Mom, they’re not real farm animals.” Her voice came dangerously close to the whine line, and I watched Ali’s eyebrow rise. “They’re only a dog and cat. And they have to live outside.”

“I’m pretty sure Old McDonald includes those, right? With a woof-woof here and meow-meow there, here a woof, there a meow, everywhere a woof-meow ...” My sister had many fine qualities, but singing in tune wasn’t one of them. Bridget and I clapped our hands over our ears.

“Make it stop!” I moaned, and Ali stuck out her tongue at me. Bridget giggled, and another crisis was averted.

“The drawing really is good, sweetie. You should take it in and show it to Mrs. Norcross.” Ali sipped her water.

“I drew one for her in school today. She asked me if I was gonna take art lessons.” Bridget poked at her green beans.

“Hmmm. Did she?” Ali frowned. “Eat your vegetables, Bridget, don’t play with them.”

My niece dropped her fork to the plate with a clatter. She clutched at her throat and pretended to gag. “Poison ... beans ... killing ... me ... ’

I rolled my eyes. She’d been on an anti-veggie kick for the last month. “Just eat them, Sarah Heartburn. No drama tonight.”

She scowled at the four beans and then used her fork to push them into the small mound of mashed potatoes she hadn’t eaten yet. Before I could yell at her for trying to hide them, she scooped up the whole deal and put it in her mouth, chewed a few times and swallowed. “Done!”

“Chickens are done, little girls are finished. Go scrape your plate and put it in the dishwasher, please.” Ali patted her back as she passed.

I watched her skip over, dump crumbs into the trashcan and then slide her plate onto the bottom rack.

“Do I have a little while before I have to get a bath? I want to draw some more.”

Ali nodded. “Fifteen minutes, then I’ll be up to run it for you.”

We finished eating in silence. Bridget had gone a long way to soothing my mad, but in the quiet, I started thinking about red hair and flashing eyes again.

“So guess what?”

I’d known my sister for twenty-six years, ever since the midwife had plopped her onto my four-year-old lap in our living room about twenty minutes after her birth. I knew that these three words were the opening to something she was nervous to tell me. She’d begun that way the day she’d told me she was marrying that loser, Craig Moss, and again when she was pregnant with Bridget. So the wave of dread that washed over me wasn’t an overreaction. I put down my fork and stared at her.

“Just tell me. What did you do?”

Ali rolled her eyes. “Talk about the drama. Why does it have to be something I did? Maybe I just have some gossip.’

“Nah, if that were it, you’d start with, ‘Do you know what I heard?’”

“Bite me.”

“Nice talk for a mom. C’mon, just tell me whatever it is.”

“I don’t know if I want to anymore. You came home in a lousy mood, and now you’re making fun of me.” She pushed her chair back and picked up her plate and the empty potato bowl.

“Yeah, well, I had an annoying afternoon.”

Ali glanced back at me, interest etched on her face. “What happened? I thought you just went in to pick up the spark plugs.”

“I did. Never mind, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Did you and Boomer have a lover’s spat?” She grinned, wiggling her eyebrows. My sister liked to tease me that the garage owner and I had a relationship that was closer than just friends, mostly because we could talk about cars for hours on end. Hey, girls had their hairdressers and guys had their mechanics. It all worked out.

“I told you, I don’t want to talk about it. Stop trying to stall me. What’s happening?” I finished my last bite of chicken and began to clear the rest of the table.

“Well ... it all started when Bridget brought home that painting last month. Remember? The one with all the flowers?”

“Yeah.” It had been the most colorful piece of paper I’d ever seen, heavy with paint, but somehow more defined than what I expected from a little girl in first grade.

“I ran into Mrs. Norcross, her teacher, the next day. We started talking about how Bridge has a talent for drawing. And painting. She was saying that it killed her that the kids don’t get art in school any more, at least not beyond what she does with them.”

“When did they stop having art class? What happened to ...” I wracked my brain. “What was her name? Mrs. Downey?”

“Sam, Mrs. Downey was ancient when you had her, and that’s been twenty years. They had an art teacher in the elementary school until two years ago, and then they had to cut the program. Not enough money.”

“Huh.” I rinsed off my plate and put it in the dishwasher. “That sucks.”

“Yeah, it does, especially when you consider none of the sports programs were touched.”

“Sports have value, too.” I thought about my football coach from high school. Coach Trank had been the first person to show up at the house the morning after my parents had been killed. He’d stayed by my side through all the terrible decisions I’d had to make over the next few days—caskets, burial plots and church services—and even now, though he was retired and lived in Arizona, he called me every few months just to check in.

“Well, sure, but nobody’s trying to get rid of them. But they stop funding an entire program and not one of us blinks. That’s not cool.”

“Isn’t there an art teacher in town who could teach Bridget?”

Ali poured powdered soap into the detergent compartment of the dishwasher and closed it up with a click, pushing the start button. “Not that I know of. And even if there were, private lessons aren’t in our budget. You know that.”

I winced. The family farm and food stand, plus rent for the land we’d leased out to neighboring farms, paid most of the bills and kept us fed, but extra money wasn’t something we ever had to worry about. I wished I could’ve afforded to give my sister and her daughter every advantage, but it wasn’t realistic. Not yet.

“But no worries. Because I think I found the solution today.” Ali walked over to the desk, slid up the roll top, pulled out a glossy red brochure and handed it to me.

“ArtCorps.” I flipped it over. “What is this, some kind of military school?”

“No, silly.” She pointed to a list of bulleted points. “It’s a really cool volunteer program. Art students are sent into under-served communities to teach the kids. Right now, it’s new, and they’re just offering a summer course, but if it ends up taking off, Burton could apply for a year-round teacher.”

“Okay.” I gave her back the brochure. “So do you have to apply? Or I guess the school does.”

“Any member of the community can request a student artist. We had a meeting of the home and school association today, and we voted unanimously to apply.” She brought her thumb up to her mouth and bit the side of it, and instantly I was on guard. Biting her thumb was Ali’s tell. I didn’t have the whole story yet.

“And ... ?” I prompted.

She sighed and then spoke in one long sentence without coming up for a breath. “And the one condition is that room and board has to be covered by the community, meaning that the student artist has to live with someone in town for the summer. And I volunteered us.”

I groaned. “Aw, Ali, why us? We don’t even live close to the school.”

She pulled out one of the chairs from the table and sat down. “For two reasons. One, if someone didn’t volunteer, we couldn’t send in the application, and no one else was stepping up. Two, and this is key, if the art teacher lives with someone else, Bridget will get to learn in class, with other kids, and that’s great. But if the teacher lives here, with us ...” She smiled, wide and wicked. “Then Bridge gets the class
and
she has access to that teacher on off-hours. It’s like getting free private lessons.”

“But a stranger living with us all summer?” I flipped a chair around and straddled it, leaning my hands on the back. “What if it’s someone ... weird?”

“Sam, seriously. Why would you assume that? And the program is world-wide, so we could actually get a student from France or Spain ... wouldn’t that be amazing?”

All I could picture was trying to talk to some Goth-looking chick who couldn’t understand me. “And just how are we suppose to communicate with an art student from France? Neither of us speaks anything but English. Georgia English.”

“All the student volunteers are English-speaking. And maybe you’d learn something, too. Imagine that.”

I pushed back the chair. “I don’t need to learn anything else. I’m fine like I am.”

Ali sighed. “Okay, but are you all right with us doing this? I promise, I’ll try to make it so you’re not bothered. She—or he, you know, it could be a guy—can stay down here in Grandma’s room.” And then she pulled out the big guns, her lips curving into that huge winning smile that had been twisting me around her finger all our lives. “Think of what a great opportunity it’ll be for Bridget.”

“Okay, okay.” I held out my hands, palms toward her. “Fine. I surrender. Pierre Le Pew can stay here all summer and enlighten the young minds of Burton.” I stood up and flicked her nose. “Just don’t expect me to wear a beret.”

I’M A MUTTERER.

Ever since I was a little kid, I muttered. According to my mom, when other toddlers were throwing temper tantrums, I was sitting in the corner, my arms folded over my chest, talking low to myself about the injustices of life. She swore it came from spending too much time with Sadie, the gray-haired dynamo who, along with her husband Mack, had worked in our family restaurant for generations. Sadie had a tendency to walk around wiping down tables, talking to herself. Since I’d hung out with her at the Rip Tide since I was a baby, it wasn’t surprising I’d picked up some of her bad habits.

I muttered all the way from Boomer’s garage in the middle of Burton, down the empty country roads and into the rush-hour traffic of Savannah. And I was still at it when I stalked into our apartment and slammed the door behind me.

“Hey.” Laura glanced over her shoulder from the stove, where she was stir-frying something that smelled delicious. “You get the car back okay?”

“Hmph.” I threw my handbag onto the sofa and flopped down next to it. “Yeah, I got it.”

“What’s the matter?” She leaned her elbows on the counter and frowned at me. “Was Boomer a creep? Did he over-charge you?”

“No, and no. The price was more than reasonable, and he seemed like a good guy.” I scowled and jiggled my leg up and down, all my pent-up frustration waiting to burst out. “I ran into your hero while I was there.”

“My hero? Who ... oh, Sam? That’s funny, that you ran into him. Isn’t he nice?”

“No, nice is not the word I’d use for him. He was a jerk.”

Laura’s eyes widened. “What do you mean? What did he do?”

“He called me immature and irresponsible. He said I wasn’t a good friend to you. What did you tell him about me? I felt like he was ready to string me up and brand me with a scarlet D.”

“D?” Her forehead wrinkled.

“Yeah, for drunkard. He said I was an idiot and that I put you in danger and ... I don’t know, there was more.” I sniffed. Now that my mad was subsiding, the hurt feelings were making themselves known.

“Megs, I promise, I never said anything. I mean, he knew you were wasted because you were passed out in the front seat. But I never said anything else. Just that maybe you’d had a little too much rum. I wasn’t upset about it.” She rounded the breakfast bar and sat down next to me on the sofa. “C’mon, you know I’d never complain about being your designated driver. You’ve done it for me enough.”