The Book of Lost Friends(57)
I’ve fallen behind on laundry, grading papers, planning lessons, and just about everything else. I’m also dangerously low on pooperoos.
On the upside, with the change in classroom snacks, I have shed my old nickname and the kids are testing a new one—Loompa, owing to the Oompa-Loompas in the ever-popular book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a copy of which has been added to our classroom shelves, courtesy of the judge’s penchant for Book of the Month subscriptions. We’ve devised, after much class debate, a system of allowing weeklong checkouts from our new lending library. One of my extremely quiet backwoods kids, Shad, has the book right now. He’s a freshman and a member of the notorious Fish family. He saw the movie after a family trip to visit his father, who’s doing three years in federal prison on some sort of drug charge.
I’d like to learn more about Shad’s situation—he consumes a lot of pooperoos, for one thing, and also covertly stuffs them in his pockets—but there aren’t enough hours in the day. I feel as though I’m constantly doing triage on who needs my attention the most.
Which is why it’s taken me days to venture into the LaJuna situation. I’ve just finished paying a call at the home address in her file. The man who answered the door of the ramshackle apartment informed me, quite curtly, that he’d kicked the so-and-so and her brats out, and I should get off his porch and not bother him again.
My next option is Aunt Sarge or Granny T. Sarge lives closest to town, so here I am. The one-story Creole cottage reminds me of my rental, but with renovations. The siding and trim have been painted in contrasting colors, creating a dollhouse effect in sunny yellow, white, and forest green. Seeing it strengthens my resolve to plead the case with Nathan for my rental house being spared. It could be as cute as this.
Tomorrow is farmers market day. I’m hoping to catch him.
First things first, though. Right now, I’m after LaJuna.
No one answers the door, but I hear voices coming from around back, so I make my way past an immaculate flower bed to a chain-link fence and leaning gate. Morning glory vines twine their way up the posts and back and forth through the wire, woven like living cloth.
Two women in tattered straw hats work along a row of tall plants in a vegetable garden that takes up most of the yard. One woman is heavyset and labors along, her movements slow and stiff. The other is Sarge, I think, though the floppy hat and flowered gloves seem out of character. I watch the scene a moment, and a memory teases my mind, then breaks through. I recall being a small child in a garden, having someone guide my stubby fingers over a strawberry as I pulled it from the plant. I remember touching each berry still clinging to the plant and asking, Pick this one? Pick this one?
I have no idea where that was. Someplace we lived, some neighbor warmhearted enough to play surrogate grandparent. People who were always home and spent a great deal of time out in their yards were my favorite targets whenever we’d land in a new town.
A yearning skates in unexpected, slams hard against my heart before I can turn it around and send it packing. Every once in a while, even though Christopher and I had talked about it at length and agreed that kids weren’t right for either one of us, there’s that urge, the painful What if….
“Hello!” I lean over the gate. “Sorry to bother you.”
Only one garden hat tips upward. The older woman continues along the row. She plucks, and drops, plucks, and drops, filling a basket with long green pods of some sort.
That is Aunt Sarge in the other hat. I recognize the way she swipes her forehead with her arm before readjusting her hat and crossing the yard to me. “Got another problem with the house?” Her tone is surprisingly solicitous, considering that our last meeting ended unpleasantly.
“No, the house is fine. Sadly, I think you’re right about its future rental status, though. If you hear of something coming open, a garage apartment or whatever, I don’t need much, since it’s just me.”
“Well, if it’s going to end up just you, it’s better to know when he’s only the fiancé, right?” She recalls our conversation during the roof recon, and I feel the tug of kinship again.
“Truth.”
“Look,” she offers, “I’m sorry I was hard on you the other day. It’s just that it’s not a far trip from believing you can change things in Augustine, to going nuts. That’s all I was trying to say. I’m not much of a diplomat, which is mostly what cut short my military career. Sometimes, if you’re not willing to blow smoke at people, you find yourself ditched on the side of the road.”
“Sounds a little like the faculty in a college English department,” I admit. “Minus the Humvees and camouflage, I mean.”
Aunt Sarge and I actually chuckle. Together.
“Is this your house?” I say, by way of keeping the conversation going. “It’s great. I’m a sucker for anything antique or vintage.”
She thumbs over her shoulder. “Aunt Dicey’s place. My grandmother’s baby sister. I came by last spring to visit after…” A labored sigh, and whatever she was about to divulge is quickly rerouted to “Didn’t plan on staying, but Aunt Dicey was in a mess. No propane in the tank, the plumbing cut off to most of the house. Ninety-year-old woman heating bathwater on the stove. Too many no-account kids and grandkids and great-grandkids, and nieces and nephews. Whatever Aunt Dicey has, if somebody asks for it, she’ll give it. So, I just moved in.”