Jumping the Scratch, Page 3

  “How come you’re afraid to walk on the driveway?” she said.

  I felt my palms go slick. I hadn’t expected that question. I reached into the mailbox and pulled out the mail, making a big point of sorting through it, as if I were looking for something important. Keeping my eyes down, I tried to walk past her, but she stepped right in front of me and stood there with her arms crossed, blocking my way.

  “Don’t pretend you didn’t hear me,” Audrey said. “I asked you a question. How come you’re afraid to walk on the driveway?”

  “Who says I am?” I said.

  “I do,” she said, pushing up her big glasses with a thumb. “I mean, I guess you don’t have to walk on the driveway if you don’t want to. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re afraid, right?”

  I shrugged.

  “You could be looking for garter snakes or maybe you don’t want to get gravel in your shoes, right?”

  I shrugged again. If Audrey Krouch wanted to stand there all day answering her own questions, it was okay with me.

  “I guess those are some pretty good reasons why you might not walk on the driveway,” she said, “and I guarantee you I could come up with a bunch more just as good as those if I had to, but I don’t have to because I happen to know the reason you don’t want to walk on the driveway is that you’re scared to.”

  I tasted butterscotch and swallowed. Audrey was watching me carefully. She pushed her glasses up again.

  “I think you should know I have ESP,” she told me solemnly.

  The last thing I needed was Audrey Krouch sniffing around in my business. I pushed past her and started back down the road along the ditch. But just as I was about to cut into the weeds, she called after me, “Wait. It’s not the driveway, is it? It’s the office. That’s what you’re scared of. The office.”

  My heart gave one hard thud in my chest. Then I whirled around and shouted at her, “You shut up, Audrey Krouch. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Do you hear me? You don’t know squirt.”

  But apparently she did.

  6

  “WHAT DAY IS IT?” SAPPHY ASKED WHEN SHE SAW me walk in with the mail.

  “Still Monday,” Marge said, rolling her eyes and turning a page in her magazine.

  “Coupons!” Sapphy said happily.

  I was still pretty shaken up from my conversation with Audrey. It was one thing to notice that I didn’t like to use the driveway—that would be pretty obvious to anybody who bothered to pay attention—but how could she possibly know about the office? Nobody knew about that. I dropped the mail on the counter, pulled the coupons out of the pile, and brought them over to where Sapphy was sitting at the table, eating orange sherbert out of her china gravy boat. That’s what they called it in Michigan: sherbert, not sherbet, and with or without the extra r, Sapphy ate a lot of it.

  When we first moved into the trailer, my mother was surprised to find that Sapphy was keeping the good bone china in her cupboard for everyday use. We’d never used ours. It was still in the box it had been sent to us in after Grandma Jeanne died. When Sapphy came home from the hospital, it didn’t occur to my mother to move the china; it wasn’t until after Sapphy had dropped one of the bowls and broken it that my mother decided it might be a good idea to pack up the china and put it away until Sapphy was feeling a little more coordinated. The problem was, Sapphy kept opening the cupboard expecting to find her mother’s china there, and each time she didn’t, she’d get upset and think that it had been stolen. Finally my mother gave up and put the china back in the cupboard. After that, Sapphy managed to break all her dishes one by one until the only thing left was the gravy boat. From then on, whenever Sapphy went looking for one of her dishes to have sherbert in, we’d give her the gravy boat and explain that it was the only thing clean at the moment. She’d laugh and say, “Well, I guess there’s no law that says a person can’t eat sherbert out of a gravy boat if she wants to.”

  I left Sapphy in the kitchen eating her sherbert and looking over the new coupons, and I got back to my homework. Pretty soon Marge came out with her jacket on and her purse slung over her shoulder. “That wash will be ready to go in the dryer in another fifteen minutes, and then you’ve got to remember to take it out half an hour after that. Don’t leave it sitting in the dryer or it’ll wrinkle. You hear?”

  I heard her, but I wouldn’t be going to the laundry shed in fifteen minutes. I knew Old Gray swept the shed out last thing every afternoon before he knocked off for the day, and I wasn’t about to risk running into him.

  After Marge left, I went over my math, checking all my answers twice before moving on to the spelling words for the week. A little while later I heard my mother get up and start to take a shower. She didn’t sing in the shower the way my father used to. He’d bellow at the top of his lungs. The morning of the day he left, I remember hearing him in the shower singing a country-western song about playing poker with a deck of fifty-one cards.

  I heard the water go off, and a few minutes later my mother came out with her head wrapped up in a towel like a turban, a menthol Kool dangling from her lower lip. She squinted to keep the smoke out of her eyes.

  “Marge gone?” she asked.

  “Who’s Marge?” said Sapphy.

  My mother took the cigarette out of her mouth, bent down, and kissed Sapphy’s forehead.

  “Marge is your nurse, Sapph,” she explained patiently. “She comes and takes care of you because you had an accident at the factory.”

  “Is that what happened to my hair?” asked Sapphy, reaching up and touching the uneven tufts of stiff hair that stuck up like patches of crabgrass all over her head. “I swear it wasn’t like this when I went to work this morning. I look like I stuck my pinkie in a socket.”

  Sapphy was always the funniest of the “gem sisters.” After the accident she still said funny things, but it wasn’t the same. She wasn’t the same. Her eyes didn’t sparkle; they were flat and dull, like the eyes of the bluegills my father and I brought home from the pond on the stringer. And when I talked, even though she still listened, she didn’t tilt her head to the side like a crow anymore. She couldn’t really hear me, at least not the way she used to.

  My mom opened the fridge, pulled out the bottom drawer with her foot, and took out a head of pale-green iceberg lettuce. Resting her burning cigarette on the edge of the sink, she tore the lettuce up and threw it in a bowl, poured bottled dressing over it, then boiled a pot of water to make macaroni and cheese. My mother used to cook real dinners back in Battle Creek. The house would start smelling good around four o’clock in the afternoon, and when suppertime rolled around at six, there’d be pot roast or pork chops or a platter of spaghetti and meatballs sitting on the table, sending up a cloud of steam. My mom always served up my dad’s plate first, and sometimes he’d be ready for seconds before she’d even had a chance to serve herself. He loved her cooking, and so did I. I wondered sometimes about that cashier from the MicroMart he ran off with and whether she knew how to make meatballs or pot roast with browned potatoes and real gravy. I wondered too if while they ate their dinners together, he’d told her about me.

  The kitchen at Wondrous Acres was so small, you couldn’t get to the sink if the refrigerator door was open. There was a small square Formica table tucked into the corner next to the doorway. That’s where the three of us sat later that night, eating macaroni swimming in melted Velveeta cheese.

  “How was your day today?” my mother asked me. She had taken the towel off her head and brushed out the tangles, but her hair was still wet and smelled fruity, like ripe peaches.

  I was pushing my fork through the macaroni, attempting to maneuver a single noodle onto each one of the tines without using my fingers. I could have told her about the kids laughing at me at the bus stop and Larry Baywood threatening to squeeze my cheeks. I could have told her about Miss Miller giving me the fisheye because some guy named Arthur was coming to visit our class in the morning and she wanted us to dress up for him. O
r I could have told her that Audrey Krouch claimed she had ESP. But I was afraid to tell her anything. Afraid that once I started talking, I wouldn’t be able to stop until I’d told her everything, including what had happened to me on Christmas Eve in Old Gray’s office. I didn’t want to tell her about that. I didn’t want to have to see the look on her face when she found out how dumb I had been. So I shrugged and lifted the forkful of noodles to my mouth and said nothing.

  My mother sighed, crumpled her napkin in a ball, and dropped it onto her empty plate.

  Suddenly I remembered the laundry.

  “Be right back!” I said, jumping up from the table.

  “Hold on a second, cowboy. Where do you think you’re going without clearing your place?” my mother said, grabbing my arm.

  “Sorry. Marge told me to put the laundry in the dryer,” I said. My mother let go of me, and I picked up my dishes and carried them over to the sink.

  “Take your aunt with you. She could use the fresh air, and I have to get ready for work,” my mother said.

  The laundry shed was an unpainted plywood barn wedged in between units 9 and 10. Inside were a couple of washers and dryers, a soap dispenser, a pop machine, and a long table for folding clothes. On the wall over the table was a big bulletin board covered with notices about church dinners, garage sales, penny socials, and used outboard motors for sale.

  Sapphy, still in her pajamas and robe, stood looking at the bulletin board while I pulled the wet clothes out of the washer, threw them into the dryer, slammed the door, and set the dial to high. As I fished some change out of my pocket, I heard her murmur, “Somebody sure pulled out all the stops for this one.”

  I dropped the coins into the slot and walked over to see what she was talking about. It was a flyer printed in black ink on light-blue paper, and all around the edges someone had carefully glued on dozens of silver foil stars. I knew it was those sparkly stars that had caught Sapphy’s eye.

  “What are they selling?” I asked, leaning closer to read the words.

  LET MADAME YERDUA

  SOLVE YOUR PROBLEMS

  100% AUTHENTIC

  PROFESSIONAL HYPNOSIS

  NO PROBLEM TOO BIG

  OR TOO SMALL

  100% FREE

  “My father did that once,” said Sapphy.

  “Did what?” I asked.

  “Got hypnotized.”

  “He did?” I was surprised. I’d heard a lot of stories about the past, most of them more than once, but I’d never heard anything about Grandpa Will getting hypnotized.

  “It was at a county fair. Your mother and Aunt Emmy had the chicken pox, so Mom stayed home to take care of them while my dad and I went to the fair. I wanted to go on the big Ferris wheel, but he didn’t like heights, so instead we paid a buck apiece to go into a musty old tent where there was a man in a turban who claimed he could hypnotize people and make them bark like dogs.”

  “Grandpa Will let him do that to him?” I asked.

  “He volunteered,” she said.

  My grandpa Will was a very serious man. He wore long-sleeved shirts buttoned all the way up to the top, even in the summer. He never smiled, and he always shook my hand instead of hugging me hello, even when I was really little.

  “Did Grandpa Will bark?” I asked incredulously.

  Sapphy grinned and nodded.

  “Really?”

  “He howled like a hound dog in front of everybody. I’ll never forget it.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “The man in the turban snapped his fingers, my father woke up, and he didn’t remember a thing that had happened,” Sapphy said.

  “He didn’t remember?”

  “Not a blessed thing.”

  “Why not?” I asked, and now I was hanging on her every word like dew on a blade of grass.

  “I don’t know. I guess he must have said something to make Dad forget.”

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  Sapphy shrugged.

  “I don’t remember, or maybe I was too far away to hear it, but whatever it was, it sure worked. I’m telling you he howled, and afterward he swore up and down that he couldn’t remember a thing about it.”

  Underneath, along the bottom of the blue flyer, the paper had been carefully cut into a fringe of even half-inch strips. On each strip was a phone number neatly printed sideways. My hands were shaking as I reached up and tore off one of the strips.

  “Come on, Sapphy,” I said. “It’s time to go home.”

  7

  MY MOTHER, DRESSED IN HER WORK CLOTHES, HER hair dry and pulled back in a ponytail, was squatting in front of the open fridge, rummaging around on the bottom shelf when we walked in.

  “What happened to all my diet cola?” she asked. “You’re not drinking it, are you, Jamie? I’ve told you a million times, chemicals will stunt your growth.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not me, it’s Marge,” I told her. “But if you ask me, it doesn’t look like it’s stunting her growth any.”

  “Don’t be a wiseacre,” she said. “We’re lucky to have Marge. I don’t see anybody else stepping up to help out, do you? Certainly not your good-for-nothing—”

  She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t have to. We both knew she was talking about my dad. I looked at her face, at the way her mouth was pulled tight and thin, and I wondered if she remembered how she and my dad used to sit out on the porch together after dinner, talking and laughing and sometimes even kissing when they didn’t think I was watching. Normal as cornflakes.

  I slid my hand into my pocket and felt around for the little slip of paper. What had her name been? Madame Yerdu? Or was it Yerda? Oh, who cared what her name was? The only thing that mattered was if she knew the magic words. I knew nothing could ever undo what had happened, but maybe just maybe I would finally be able to forget. I felt antsy as I watched my mother digging around in the fridge. Hurry up and go, I thought. Hurry up and go.

  Finally she managed to find a lone can of diet cola hiding way in the back, pulled it out, and stuck it in her purse. She’d drink it on one of her breaks, to help keep her awake until her shift was over.

  “Sapph, do you want any more macaroni before I soak the pot?” my mother said.

  “Did we eat already?” Sapphy asked.

  Mom sighed.

  “Yes, Sapph. We just ate,” she said.

  “Funny, I don’t remember that,” Sapphy said. “I’m not hungry, though. Except maybe for some sherbert.”

  My mom scraped the last of the macaroni into a Tupperware bowl and stuck it in the fridge. Then she squirted dish detergent into the pot and set it to soak in the sink.

  “Give your aunt some sherbert while I get her sleeping pill,” she told me.

  Sapphy was standing in front of the open cupboard, looking forlornly at the old blue-and-white dishes we’d brought with us from Battle Creek.

  “What in the world are these doing in here?” she asked. “These aren’t my dishes. Where’s my good china?”

  My mom came back with Sapphy’s pill.

  “Here you go,” she said, handing it to her along with a glass of water. “Take this, and you’ll be set till the morning, when Marge comes.”

  “Who’s Marge?” Sapphy asked.

  My mother looked at me and shook her head.

  “Sometimes I’m tempted to take one of these pills myself,” she said.

  She pulled a crumpled pack of Kools out of her pocket, lit one, blew smoke out the side of her mouth, and kissed me on the cheek. Smoke and peaches mixed, like burned cobbler.

  “Don’t forget to do magic triggers tonight,” she told me as she put on her coat. “Oh, and I keep forgetting to tell you, I found something new I think might be worth trying.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “A formal.”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “A dress. It’s long and blue—you can’t miss it. It’s hanging in the back of the closet in her room in a dry cleaner�
�s bag. She loved that dress, and you never know, maybe it will trigger something.”

  One of the doctors Sapphy saw after her accident told us that sometimes a person with amnesia can get her memory back all of a sudden if the right thing triggers it. The magic trigger could be anything—a photograph or a song or the smell of a cherry pie baking in the oven. Sapphy’s memories were like keys jangling on a big ring, and it was up to us to keep trying them until we found the one that would finally pop the lock.

  We decided to look for magic triggers room by room, starting with the kitchen. One of the first things we tried was the spice rack that hung on the wall next to the stove. We opened up all the little bottles and cans, letting Sapphy sniff the powders and dried-up leaves inside each one. My mother had kept her spices jammed in a little cupboard over the stove in Battle Creek, but Sapphy’s were lined up in the rack, alphabetized with the labels facing out. Allspice, Basil, Bay Leaf, Cardamom, Cinnamon, Coriander, Curry. When we got to Nutmeg, I pried open the lid and was instantly reminded of the eggnog my father used to make on New Year’s Eve, when my parents would have a few of the neighbors over to ring in the new year. He always ladled out a cup for me before he poured in the booze. Virgin Nog, he called it.

  After the spices, we moved on to the refrigerator, opening all the bottles and jars of condiments in the door. Sapphy tasted steak sauce and mustard, maraschino cherries, and sweet pickle relish, but none turned out to be a magic trigger.

  When we’d exhausted all the trigger possibilities in the kitchen, we turned our attention to the old-fashioned record player out in the living room.

  “Maybe Sapphy’s trigger is a song,” my mother said. “She’s always loved music.”

  I knew the names of the Motown groups I listened to in the morning on the radio, but Sapphy’s record collection was full of people I’d never heard of. Like the spice rack, they were kept in alphabetical order, so we started at the beginning and made our way through them, one album at a time. We listened to Rosemary Clooney, Tommy Dorsey, Peggy Lee, Glenn Miller, and, when we hit the S’s, Frank Sinatra. Sapphy had more Sinatra than anything else, and each time we put him on, she would say the same thing: “Nobody sings like Old Blue Eyes. Boy, does this take me back.”