Before We Were Yours(37)

I’ve already thought about that. But who was the man? Why did he come in here? Does he want to be our friend? He’s the first one who’s been nice to us at Mrs. Murphy’s house.

“We’ll wait for Briny,” I say. “We’ve just gotta be good till then, that’s—”

The door handle rattles. Camellia and I fall into our beds both at the same time and pretend we’re sleeping. My heart pumps under the scratchy blanket. Who’s out there? Is it our new friend or someone else? Did they hear us talking?

I don’t have long to wonder. A brown-haired lady in a white dress comes in. I watch her through a thin place in the blanket. She’s stout as a lumberjack and round in the middle. She isn’t one of the women we saw yesterday.

At the door, she frowns, then looks toward our beds, then at the keys in her hand. “All of you, out of bet.” She talks like the family from Norway whose boat was tied up down the way from ours for a month last summer. Bed sounds like bet, but I know what she means. She doesn’t seem mad, really, just tired. “On your feet, and folt the blankets.”

We scramble up, all except Gabion. I have to rustle him from his cot, and he stumbles around and lands on his rear while I take care of the blankets.

“Someone else was in this room duringk the night, yes?” She holds up a key pinched between her fingers.

Should we tell her about the man with the peppermints? Maybe he wasn’t supposed to be in our room? Maybe we’ll get in trouble if they find out we didn’t tell.

“No’m. Not nobody. Just us,” Camellia answers before I can.

“And you are the troublemakingk one, I am tolt.” A hard look comes Camellia’s way, and my sister shrinks a little.

“No’m.”

“Nobody came in.” I have to lie too. What else can I do now that Camellia told a fib? “Unless it happened while we were sleepin’.”

The woman pulls the chain on the lightbulb overhead. It flickers, and we blink and squint. “This door shouldt have been lockedt. It was, yes?”

“We dunno,” Camellia pipes up. “We was in our beds the whole night.”

The woman looks at me, and I nod, then make myself busy with cleaning up the room. I want to get rid of the peppermints, but I’m too scared to, so I keep them stuck in my hand, which makes it hard to fold the blankets, but the lady doesn’t notice. Mostly, she’s just in a hurry to get us out of there.

When we leave the room, I see the big man standing there in the basement, leaning on a broom handle next to the fat black boiler stove with slats that look like the mouth on a Halloween pumpkin. The man watches us go by. Camellia smiles over at him, and he smiles back. His teeth are old and ugly, and his thin brown hair hangs down around his face in sweaty strings, but still, the smile is nice to see.

Maybe we do have a friend here after all.

“Mr. Riggs, if you have nothingk else that must be done, see to the branch that has fallen in the yardt duringk the night,” the woman says, “before the children are goingk out.”

“Yes’m, Mrs. Pulnik.” His lips curve up at the edges, and he moves the broom a little as Mrs. Pulnik starts up the stairs, but he doesn’t sweep anything.

Camellia looks back over her shoulder, and he winks at her. The wink makes me think of Briny, so maybe I do like Mr. Riggs a little bit.

Upstairs, Mrs. Pulnik takes us to the laundry room and gives us some things off a pile. She calls them playclothes, but they’re really not much more than rags. She tells us to get ourselves dressed and use the bathroom, and we do, and breakfast looks a lot like the supper they gave us last night after the bath—a little scoop of cornmeal mush. We’re late getting to the table. The other kids have already gone to play. After we’ve scraped our bowls clean, we’re told to get outside too and not to try leaving the backyard and the churchyard, or else.

“Andt you will not be goingk near to the fence.” Mrs. Pulnik grabs Camellia’s arm and Lark’s before we can make it through the door. She leans over us with her round cheeks red and sweat shiny. “A boy tunneledt underneat yesterday. Mrs. Murphy has given him the closet. To be given the closet is very, very bat. In the closet, it is dark. Do you understandt?”

“Yes’m,” I croak out, picking up Gabby and reaching for Lark to get her away. She’s standing still as a stump, not a thing moving but the big old tears dripping down her cheeks. “I’ll make sure they mind the rules till we can go see our mama and daddy.”

Mrs. Pulnik’s big lips push together and curl. “Goot,” she says. “This is a wise choice for you. All of you.”

“Yes’m.”

We get out the door quick as we can. The sun feels like heaven, and the sky stretches out big between the poplars and maples, and the bare dirt at the bottom of the steps is cool and soft. Safe. I close my eyes and listen to the leaves talking and the birds singing their morning songs. I pick out their voices, one by one, Carolina wren, redbird, house finch. The same birds that were there yesterday morning when I woke up on our little shantyboat.

The little girls grab on to my dress, and Gabby hitches himself back against my arms, trying to get down, and Camellia complains that we’re just standing there. I open my eyes, and she’s looking at the tall black iron fence that circles the yard. Honeysuckle and prickly holly and azaleas grow thick over most of it, higher than our heads. There’s only one gate that I can see, and it goes to the playground behind the run-down church house next door. That’s got more of the same fence around it too.