The Last House on the Street(13)

“Well, maybe she could talk Garner into telling his daddy to stop raising my rent,” Buddy said. Randy Cleveland owned nearly half the buildings in town, including the one that housed Buddy’s car shop.

“I doubt she has that sort of clout,” I said.

“Well anyhow,” he said, “don’t you ever let what happened to Brenda happen to you.” There was a warning in his voice like he’d break my neck if I came home pregnant.

I rolled my eyes. “I’ll be a virgin on my wedding night,” I assured him. “Assuming I ever have a wedding night,” I said. “And you should have waited, too.”

“Way too late for that.” He laughed. He was ridiculously handsome, my brother. Built like a football player, he had sandy hair, our father’s dark eyes, and a lopsided smile that girls found irresistible.

The weather was warm and the kudzu vines were just beginning to green up, rising like towers on either side of the road, trapping us or sheltering us, however you wanted to look at it. I could already make out the shape of a Tyrannosaurus rex on the north side of the street and an enormous panther on the south.

“So,” Buddy said, “are you and Reed going to be next?” His voice was casual, but I could tell that the words were planned. He worried about me. Even though Buddy had only been three when I was born, he’d been my protector since that day.

“Right now I want to focus on school,” I said. “I don’t have time for men.”

We’d reached the end of Hockley Street, and the dirt road narrowed to one skinny rutted lane that cut through the thick forest. Even now, at two in the afternoon, it was dark in the woods. We fell silent as we brushed away leafy branches and stepped over familiar roots until we reached the massive oak above a round clearing, the ground thick with pine needles and decayed leaves from a hundred autumns. I walked across the clearing and around the oak, where I started climbing the wide boards Daddy’d hammered into the trunk when we were small. He was the one who’d spotted the huge triangle of the oak’s branches fifteen feet from the ground. He was the one who built the sturdy little house way up there, adding a deck where we could sit and share secrets or quietly watch the forest in the clearing down below. The plentiful deer. The occasional fox. The birds that flitted from branch to branch around our heads.

I reached the little house, walked through it, and scurried on my hands and knees out to the deck, where I dangled my legs over the edge, high above the clearing. Buddy came to sit next to me.

I’d pictured us climbing up here today. It seemed like the right place to tell him my summer plan. I was afraid, though, of how he’d react. I knew he thought the idea of “Yankee kids” coming to Derby County was wrongheaded. Even though he’d hired a young Negro guy, Ronnie, to work in his car shop and seemed to like him a lot, my brother was still undeniably a bigot. When I told him about the protests at UNC last year, he said to stay out of it. “I don’t see what the coloreds have to complain all that much about,” he’d said. “They have roofs over their heads. They have their own stores, their own schools, their own churches. It ain’t like they’re slaves. Why would they even want to come into a white restaurant where they know they’re not welcome?”

Now I looked at my loafer-clad feet high above the clearing and took in a breath. “I’m not going to work in the pharmacy this summer,” I said.

He laughed. “Good luck gettin’ out of it,” he said. I’d worked in the pharmacy every summer since I was fourteen.

“You know that SCOPE program?”

“Those Yankee kids comin’ down here to tell us how we should be runnin’ things?”

“That’s not what it’s about, Buddy,” I said. “The Voting Rights Act is coming and some of the people in poor areas will need help registering. I want to work with SCOPE to help them.”

He leaned away from me to look at my face. His blond eyebrows were nearly knitted together in the middle. “Are you messin’ with me?” he asked.

“No, I’m absolutely serious. I’ve already spoken with the minister in charge and—”

“Uh-uh, little sister,” Buddy said. “Not gonna let you do that. Think about them three boys that got themselves killed a couple of years ago.”

“It was last year,” I corrected him, “but that was in Mississippi. North Carolina isn’t like the Deep South, and you know it. I’ll be perfectly safe.”

“This is stupid, Ellie.”

“I know Daddy’s going to be disappointed about the pharmacy.”

“That’s going to be the least of his objections,” he said. “And Reed ain’t gonna be thrilled about it either.”

“He’ll survive without me for one summer.”

We were quiet for a moment. Then Buddy said, out of the blue, “I treat Ronnie at the car shop the same way I treat the other guys. No better or worse. That’s how it should be.”

“I should hope so,” I said.

“I ain’t no racist,” Buddy said.

“That’s a double negative. What you just said actually means you are a racist.”

He stared at me. “What’s your problem?” he asked, but then he immediately softened. Put his arm around my shoulders again. “What did you do with my sweet sister, huh?” he asked.