Don't You Cry(49)

“I brought you breakfast,” I say as I set the tray of food on the floor beside her makeshift bed. I half expect varmints to appear from every corner of the room at the prospect of food, but they don’t. The house is quiet and still.

She reaches for the fork and loads the eggs onto its tines, blowing before she sets the scrambled eggs inside her mouth. I hear her stomach growl. I can tell from the look on her face that she likes it; either that or she’s so absolutely famished she’d eat anything and claim it was good.

“I like it,” she says. But then another look settles on her pretty face, a look of wonder or gratitude, or maybe even trust, as she says these words to me. “People don’t usually do nice things for me.” I am silent, not quite sure what to say to that, and she adds, “You didn’t have to do this, you know.”

I tell her that I know. But inside my heart fills with warmth, though the dilapidated house remains cold.

“There’s more,” I say, excusing myself while she eats. I tell her to keep eating. “Don’t wait for me,” I say. “I’ll be right back.”

And then I go, out the same window in the back of the home. In the backyard, in the dense underbrush that was once a nice garden, no doubt, I take in the overgrown shrubbery that needs to be hacked. It sidles its way up the home, into every crevice it can find, under the aluminum siding so that the siding slips right off the house. The stumps of deadened trees remain in the lawn, succumbing one by one to fungus and bacteria.

But the thing that really gets my attention is the tire swing, an old rubber sphere, now deflated, that hangs from an old oak tree by a rope. I wander to that swing and give it a gentle push and then stand and watch as it dithers back and forth through the gray November air. I hear phony children squeal in delight. Wheee! They beg: Again, again! Once they were here, but now they’re gone.

And then I scamper off to Pops’s and my garage to get what it is that I need. The street is dead quiet; it’s too early for anyone else to be up.

I didn’t sleep much last night. In fact, I hardly slept at all. I was up half the night thinking of Pearl sleeping on the hard floor, freezing cold. And that’s when I remembered the kerosene heater in our garage and a five-gallon, half-empty container of kerosene, one that Pops used to keep handy for when power outages rattled our town, something that only ever happened in the wake of winter blizzards. We needed something to keep us warm when the heavy snow all but buried us alive, and this was it. Pops bought it years ago—ten, maybe fifteen—and many times, it’s come in handy. Years ago he wouldn’t let me touch the darn thing—too dangerous, he’d say. These days I won’t let him near it.

I wrangle the awkward, heavy heater back to the house and inside, and there she sits, Pearl, with the plate of food on her lap. She’s about finished it all, and I can see already that she looks full, maybe even satisfied. She eyes the heater in my hand and asks, “What’s that?” and I tell her what it is as I fill it up with the kerosene and turn up the wick, igniting the heater. Just like that, the flame grows orange and the room starts to warm, bringing a sunniness to Pearl’s face I hadn’t seen before. She smiles.

I adjust the wick to the right height and say to her, though I don’t think it needs to be said, “These things can be dangerous. We need to keep an eye on it, make sure it’s off before we go,” but then I shrug, not wanting to make her feel like a ninny, and say, “but I’m sure you knew that already.”

But it’s second nature, I guess, an effect of reminding Pops all the time to turn off the oven, to close the front door, to flush the john.

Instead of saying anything about the heater, she says to me, “I like your necklace,” and it’s automatic, the way my hands go to the beaded shark’s tooth necklace that Ingrid made for me all those years ago.

“Thanks,” I say, taking in the shade of her eyes, a light brown like amber.

“Is it from a girl?” she asks point-blank, and I’m all but certain my face burns as red as the flames in the heater.

I shake my head, setting myself down on the floor. “Just a friend,” I say, but I feel the inclination to tell her more, to tell her about Leigh Forney, and how, for me, there really aren’t any girls. For strength and protection, Ingrid had told me when she gave me the necklace years ago, after I started working for Priddy to support Pops. She did it because she felt bad for me, like half the town felt bad for me at the time. My mother had abandoned me, and my father was a drunk. Such is life.

I run my hands along the tip of the shark’s tooth and, staring into Pearl’s eyes, I think maybe it’s working, after all.

But I don’t tell her any of this. Instead, I leave it at that—just a friend—and allow the room to grow quiet and still.

There are things I want to ask her: her name and what she’s doing here—in our town, in this house—for starters. But I can’t. I open my mouth to speak, but all that transpires is air.

She asks questions of me instead.

“You live across the street,” she says, and it’s then that I know she’s been watching me, seeing Pops and me at the kitchen table, maybe, irradiated by the bright lights of our home. Maybe she knows more about me than I think.

I say, “I do.”

“With your family?” she asks, and I say, Yes, and then, No, setting finally instead on, “With my father.” He’s family, don’t get me wrong. There’s just more to it than that.