The Kindest Lie(64)
“Your parents are so strict.”
“Yeah, and I’m gonna be in trouble. I should have been home hours ago.”
Before getting out of the car, Midnight stuffed the magazine page into his jacket pocket. The feeling was coming back to his toes, and he wiggled them to get the blood flowing. Their footprints were still visible, a road map to quickly get them back to the fence where they’d come in.
About ten feet into their walk, they heard something rattling.
“Let’s go,” Midnight said, and sprinted, wiping his fogged glasses with his mittens and adjusting his backpack straps on his shoulders. Corey bolted ahead of him and made it to the fence first. He pulled on the gate, but it must have gotten stuck in the snow.
The jangling sound got closer and Corey clawed the chain link, using his upper-body strength to pull himself up. Within seconds, Midnight was there, too, and found his foothold on the fence, but with one arm struggled to pull his body to the top. Before he had a chance to look back, he heard the growl.
Halfway up the fence, Midnight glanced down and saw the little yellow eyes of the German shepherd glowing in the dusky dark, searing into his backside. He clutched the fence wiring. Any slight stumble could end with him being supper for the junkyard dog. Bones had taught him enough about dogs not to stare and make him think he was challenging him. He looked up instead.
“Give me your hand,” Corey called to him from the top of the fence.
The dog barked, and Midnight froze, his body disobeying his mind, which told him to keep climbing.
“A little bit more and you got it.”
Looking up, he saw Corey’s outstretched hand. The dog lunged at the fence. Midnight lifted himself up another few inches and clasped Corey’s hand.
The dog’s growls and barks rumbled in his ears as he threw his backpack over the fence and with Corey’s help propelled himself to the other side. He landed with a thud onto the snow’s cushion, his breaths coming in short grunts.
“We made it.” Corey dropped to the ground, too, lying on his back.
The dog was still running and jumping on the other side, fangs bared, lunging at the fence. A trickle of blood oozed from Midnight’s wrist where he must have scratched it on the fence. He licked the blood and then grinned at the dog, sticking his tongue out at him because he could.
At home that night, Midnight found Granny at the kitchen table going over the books for the shop. Her fat fingers snaked the length of a piece of paper filled with lines and numbers. Auntie Glo and Nicky must have been out visiting one of her weird friends.
Without looking up from the paper, Granny said, “I made you chicken teriyaki with rice. No skin on the chicken. Doctor says we got to eat healthy.”
“Yeah, okay,” he said, not hungry, the adrenaline from the day at the junkyard still filling him. From the smell of the house, Granny had already had Kentucky Fried Chicken for dinner. No greasy bag in the trash. She must’ve hidden it in the big bin out back, but he knew. Still, he didn’t mention it.
She put away her books and calculator and began setting up the Monopoly board on the kitchen table. They started playing and he watched Granny’s eyes follow the tokens on the board.
“Never put all your eggs in one basket,” she advised. “Invest in a lot of different properties. One goes bad, you still got others.”
“Did you and Mom ever play?” he said, taking out a cash loan early in the game.
“Oh, yeah. I taught her this game and everything else about money.”
He wondered if Daddy would’ve known how to manage his money better if he’d played Monopoly. In the first round of the game, Midnight sold and mortgaged all his property and ended up in bankruptcy. Even though he knew it was just a game, his loss made him ashamed. When he thought she wasn’t looking, he snatched six hundred dollars from the bank.
“I saw that,” she said. “Cheaters never win, Patrick.”
Even with her bad eyesight, she noticed everything. He thought about Corey’s dad working at the real bank with all that money every day and for the first time realized the Cunninghams were likely very rich.
He said, “Granny, do you wish we lived at the Boardwalk? I do. We could own it and charge people a ton of rent. We’d stay on the top floor.”
She rubbed her eyes and wiped the crust that collected in the corners. “I’ve never had a lot of money and I’ve made it through. I never stole a dime from anybody.”
Midnight didn’t know whether or not to believe her. He didn’t smell any cough syrup on her breath, so maybe she was telling the truth. “If I was poor and really hungry, I think I’d steal food.”
“It’s never right to steal, I don’t care how bad off you think you are.”
“You mean like what Daddy said Mr. Eli and his grandfather did at the plant?”
Granny stacked the play money, put away the tokens, and folded the board fast. “Don’t let me hear you bring that up again. Butch should never have said that. He has a temper sometimes and doesn’t know what he’s saying. You misheard part of it, so don’t go repeating it. We don’t know what anybody did or why.”
Following him to the couch, she waited for him to get settled for the night and then sat on the edge by his feet. She opened a fresh pack of Newports and put a cigarette between her lips.