At Last (The Idle Point, Maine Stories)(10)
Halloween came and went and Thanksgiving too. One snowy afternoon in early December, Noah and Gracie were walking home with Mrs. Chase when they saw Laquita standing at the corner near the hardware store. Her bare hands were clenched into fists and she looked like she'd been crying.
"Isn't that the Adams girl?" Mrs. Chase said. Her voice sounded like a hug to Gracie and instantly she felt jealous. Nobody had ever sounded that way about her.
She met Noah's eyes behind his mother's back and made him a silly face. He laughed, and Mrs. Chase gave him a sharp look then said, "Stay here, children. I'll see what's wrong."
The wind off the water was high. It smelled to Gracie like salt and snow. Next to hot chocolate and puppy breath, that was her favorite smell in the whole world. She loved the way Idle Point smelled, all salty and sharp. She couldn't imagine living anywhere else in the whole entire world. Sometimes she heard Gramma Del and Daddy talking about how all the youngsters were up and leaving Idle Point for the cities where all you could smell were cars and people and she wanted to say, "I won't be like that. I'll never leave here." She loved the sound the wind made on winter nights when she burrowed deeper under her blankets, the way the sea spray kissed her cheeks and nose as she walked to school, the way the waves exploded against the jagged rocks that outlined the shore. Idle Point wasn't soft and pretty like the storybook towns in picture books. To Gracie it was better: it was perfect.
She and Noah stood close together as they watched Mrs. Chase speak with the dark-haired little girl who kept brushing at her eyes with the back of her sleeve. They both knew that Laquita never cried, not even the time Buddy Powell pushed her off the swing and she cut her knee open. Laquita was only six years old, just like Noah, but she already had four brothers and sisters trailing behind her like the tail on a kite.
Mrs. Chase walked back toward them, holding the girl by the hand. "We're going to walk Laquita home," she said in her sweet voice. "Gracie, you take Laquita's hand. Noah, you come around this side and take my hand."
Big ugly spears of jealousy stabbed Gracie in the chest. She was supposed to be holding Mrs. Chase's hand, not Laquita's. She didn't care if the little girl looked sad enough to cry. It just wasn't fair. Wasn't it enough that Laquita got to play Mary in the school Christmas play next week while Gracie was just a stupid shepherd? She didn't have the right to just show up there on the corner and push Gracie aside that way. And why did Mrs. Chase have to use her mommy voice anyway when everybody knew Laquita had a mommy of her own? It just wasn't fair.
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It was the worst day of Laquita Adams's life, worse even than when she'd wet herself when her cousin Ellie tickled her and wouldn't stop no matter how loud Laquita yelled. She didn't want Mrs. Chase to walk her home. She didn't care that it was freezing cold outside or that her hands had turned into twin popsicles. Sooner or later Daddy or Mommy would remember to come and get her. She didn't need for Noah and Gracie to see that all the stories about her family were right, that her parents didn't know how to take care of children, that they couldn't be trusted. Her parents loved her even if they did sometimes seem to lose her in the crowd of kids. She just wished nobody else had to know about it.
Laquita knew the way these things worked. As soon as Noah and Gracie saw the love beads and smelled the incense and met her parents with their long, long hair and soft voices and strange ways, they'd go running right back to school with stories about the hippies over by the river and how they had too many babies and too little money and maybe somebody should do something about it, help them out maybe, remind them that the world already had too many children.
Laquita didn't know much about the world, but she was sure her parents had too many children. There were babies everywhere you looked and smelly diapers and blankets and banana squished into the rugs. And with each new baby it seemed she got more forgotten. Why couldn't they be happy with just one or two babies like everybody else? Why did they think they needed so many? She couldn't imagine Noah's mommy with a houseful of babies all crying at once. She couldn't imagine Noah's mommy even visiting a house filled with babies, but that was just what was about to happen.
"You children stay here," Mrs. Chase said when they approached the rickety front porch and suddenly Laquita saw her house the way it must look to her. The missing step. The collapsed pumpkins left over from Halloween oozing seeds and smelling like barf. The baby shoe on its side near the door. Worst of all was the noise! Crying babies and the television and Daddy's voice sounding louder than she'd ever heard it.