That night Granny did the strangest thing she’d done so far. She tucked me into bed, like she thought I was four instead of twelve. She even patted down my hair a few times. You could say me and Granny were close, but we weren’t too huggy about it. Now I was really wondering what she was up to.

  “This used to be your mama’s room, you know,” Granny said, sitting on the edge of the bed and looking around like she hadn’t sat here in a long time.

  “I know, Granny. You’ve told me a thousand times.”

  Granny pointed to the wall across from the foot of the bed. “I helped her hang up that Beatles poster. Didn’t have the least bit of an idea who the Beatles were, only knew they’d spelled their name wrong. Sandy said maybe that’s how the English people spelled beetle. She was smart that way, thinking things through.”

  Granny leaned over and pulled the sheet up under my chin. “I’ve been thinking about what you said back a couple weeks ago, about you coming to live here. I ain’t a good person to live with, I don’t think, but maybe we could work something out. I hate to think of you stuck there with that no-good daddy of yours.”

  I closed my eyes. So that was Granny’s other surprise, the one I’d been expecting to pop out at me from behind the couch. I let it settle over me. Now that it might happen, I couldn’t hardly imagine what it would be like to move from one house to another.

  “Well, you think about it, son, and let me know.” Granny walked over to the door and switched off the overhead light. “You say yes, and I’ll get on the phone with my lawyer first thing. Not that I have a lawyer, but I’ll get me one, don’t you worry.”

  “What do you need a lawyer for?” I asked, my eyes opening wide in the dark.

  “If I’m going to get custody of you, we’ll have to go through the courts,” Granny said. “And I reckon we’ll have to fight your daddy pretty hard. He’s too stubborn to let me get my way without making everybody miserable before it’s all over.”

  “You want custody of me?”

  “That’s what you want, isn’t it? I’d thought once or twice about trying to get custody way back when your mama died. But Shane and Summer was just in their early teens then, and Patrick was already a mess, always getting in trouble at school. I was afraid a judge might make me take all four kids instead of just you.”

  Granny stepped into the hallway and pulled the door closed behind her. I sat up in bed, smelling the smell of what used to be my mom’s room. I was waiting to feel excited about Granny wanting custody of me, but every time my brain got back around to that lawyer, my stomach got hot at the center, and the burning feeling made its way up to my chest. Didn’t seem right to go to court against your own father, some judge running his finger down the pages of a law book, looking for all the things your daddy was doing wrong.

  I tried lying back down and thinking about camping, about how round the rocks are you find in a river, all those years of the water rushing over them and smoothing down their rough edges. I had a shelf full of river rocks at home, from the two camping trips I’d taken. Filled my backpack up with them both times, even though I knew it’d make hiking out of the woods a whole lot harder.

  That’s what it felt like, thinking about a lawyer going against my dad, like carrying a load of heavy rocks on my back. It wasn’t the right way to go. Maybe instead me and Daddy and Granny could all sit down together and work up a schedule. Some days I’d stay at one place, some days I’d stay at the other. Daddy wasn’t hardly ever home, so it ought to be all the same to him, and Granny could still go fishing in the middle of the week sometimes without worrying about having to fix me dinner.

  That was such a good idea that I grinned into the darkness. For the first time in my life, I felt kind of smart. I guessed Henry and Miss Blue were rubbing off on me.

  FIFTEEN

  All fall me and Harrison kept racing, and all fall I kept winning. You might not think it was a fair match, but Harrison was the fastest kid under the age of ten I’d ever seen. So even if I had the advantage of being older, I still felt like he was pretty good competition and might even beat me one day when his legs got a little longer.

  I started running on my own sometimes, mostly through the woods behind the shiny new neighborhoods that kept sprouting up around my part of town like fields of mushrooms after a big rain. I’d go after school, run from my house to Granny’s. I didn’t even know what the neighborhoods were called or the names of the streets, but I’d run every day, just about. The woods were cool, and there was nobody around to stop me or bug me and ask me questions I didn’t feel like answering. I picked out my favorite yards and trees and one or two houses I liked the looks of.

  Most of the houses were all the same shape and color. But there was one right smack in the center of a new neighborhood that stood where a farm used to be. It had a screened porch, and somebody’d painted the whole thing a purple color, and it was crazy but it was pretty, too. I always liked to see that house coming into view, just because it was this wild thing in the middle of everything being the same.

  The next Saturday, week after fall break, I ran all the way to Granny’s to do my chicken chores. After me and Granny had that custody talk, I sort of felt like I was running home when I went to her house, even though I hadn’t sat down with her and Daddy to figure things out yet. I was waiting for the right time, and I wasn’t sure when that was going to be, since it was hard to imagine a time when Daddy and Granny would be happy to sit down in the same room together.

  Still, I felt all light and good about my idea, and that made me faster somehow. When I reached the backyard, I found Harrison over there, checking up on the business end of my chickens, and that made me feel good too, since he was the only person I knew who liked running as much as I did. Walking up to the back porch, I could hear him and Granny discussing Miss Blue’s relationship with Calvin.

  “What worries me is that she’s spending more time with a dog than she does with chickens,” Harrison was saying. “That could have a negative impact on her laying habits. And we really need these hens to produce.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about her egg production if I was you,” Granny told him. “She lays one green egg a day, which is all you can ask for. You just got to find it.” She turned and called out to me, “When you gonna build some nesting boxes, son? I found an egg in my shoe this morning.”

  “Was your shoe inside or outside?” I asked, coming up to the porch.

  “Outside.”

  “Then you’re lucky all you found was an egg.”

  Harrison gave me the once-over. “Tobin, why’s your face so red?”

  “Been running.”

  “Oh,” he said, nodding. He turned to Granny. “He’s really fast. He beats me all the time, and I’m the fastest one in my school, including all the fourth grade and all the fifth grade.”

  “He’s always been fast,” Granny commented. “He takes after me that way.”

  Harrison wiggled his feet, like he was ready to hit the ground running himself. “Hey, Tobin, do you think you’ll try out for cross-country?”

  I gave him a suspicious look. “Did Henry tell you to ask me that?”

  Just that week in PE, Coach Kelly had announced we were doing a three-week unit on track and field. Soon as he said it, Henry leaned over and popped me on the arm.

  “Dude, you’ve got to dress out for this. At least once. It’s your chance to shine.”

  I shook my head no. I guess I wasn’t feeling all that shiny right then.

  “Oh, come on,” Henry protested. “Think of the honor. Think of the glory.” He leaned closer to me. “Think of the poetry.”

  “What are you talking about, son? I don’t even like poetry.”

  Henry sighed. He leaned back against the bleacher behind him. “Where’s your soul, man? Where’s your sense of drama? Here we’ve got a chance to set the world on end. All it takes is you putting on a pair of gym shorts and running around a track. Can you imagine the looks on everyone’s faces? All this time, they thought they knew everything about you, and here it turns out you’re this god of speed. They don’t know you at all, man.”

  I looked around at the kids sprawled on the bleachers listening to Coach Kelly run his mouth about proper footwear. Kids that had been looking down on me for years now on account of me being a McCauley. That sweet buzzing feeling started filling me up again as I saw myself on the track, passing each of their sorry butts one by one. I could just picture Coach Kelly with his mouth hanging open.

  But what was supposed to happen after that? Was it supposed to be like a movie, where Cody Peters made an awkward walk across the track to shake my hand and say he was sorry for all the hell he’d given me? Would party invitations start piling up outside my front door? Why’d I have to prove anything to them snot buckets, anyway? They ought to be doing cartwheels and somersaults on my front yard trying to prove something to me.

  “No way,” I told Henry, shaking my head. “I told you, it’s a waste of my time.”

  Henry slapped his hand on the bleacher. “Man! Why do you have to be so stubborn?” But he let it go. Wouldn’t have surprised me, though, if he’d put Harrison up to dropping some hints.

  “Henry didn’t tell me to ask you anything,” Harrison said. “I just thought if you went out for cross-country, you could put a good word in for me with the coach for when I get to middle school. Why would Henry want me to ask you about cross-country?”

  “Because we’re doing track in PE, and he wants me to run.”

  Granny eyed my feet. “Can’t see how you could get much running done in them shoes, they’re so floppy-looking.”

  “I run in ’em every day,” I told her. “They work just fine.”

  Granny dug down into her pocket and pulled out her car keys. “Catch!” she called, throwing them in Harrison’s direction. He grabbed the keys out of the air and held them out to Granny like a question.

  “Go start the truck for me, son,” Granny said, using the railing to pull herself up from the porch step. “We’re going shopping.”

  “He’s nine years old, Granny,” I told her. “He can’t start no truck.”

  “Then it’s high time he learned how,” Granny said. “I’m going to get my purse. Meet you boys out front.”

  “What are we going shopping for?” I called after her. She turned back toward me and grinned.

  “New pair of shoes for you, of course,” she said. “You got to have the right shoes for PE, especially if you’re going to run.”

  I shook my head. Granny never bought me anything except a bag of popcorn at the movies. She must be serious about wanting me, I thought, if she’s going to start laying out money for clothes. I was smiling when I got in the truck. I have to say, it felt good to be wanted, son. Felt real good.

  SIXTEEN

  I let Granny buy me some new shoes, smoke-gray ones with black stripes. Harrison took a look at the brand name and said they were good ones, like real runners wore. They felt good on my feet, that was for sure. First time I took a run through the woods with those shoes on, I felt like a streak of lightning, son, the way I zipped over all the leaves and broken branches in my path.

  But just because I had new shoes didn’t mean I was going to run in PE. I knew it wouldn’t change anything, no matter what Henry said. Besides, them shoes didn’t make my legs look any less scrawny. Why get everybody looking at me again? Things were better than they’d been in a long time. I had a friend and I hadn’t even been looking for one, I was doing okay in a couple of my classes, I even had an extra-credit project. As far as school was concerned, I wanted everything to stay just like it was.

  What I didn’t know was things at home were about to blow sky-high.

  It all started ordinary enough. I was over at Granny’s, holding up one of Miss Blue’s green eggs to the sun. It was like one of them Easter eggs we’d made when we were little, when I still believed in the Easter bunny.

  Granny came down from the house, shaking feathers out of her gardening hat. “Your chickens are taking over everything,” she said. “Just look at that one over there, sweet-talking my dog.” Granny pointed over to where Miss Blue and Calvin were walking along where the ferns grew at the edge of the woods. “Can’t keep them two apart, and Calvin likes to sleep indoors come winter. I’m gonna have chicken feathers in my bed.”

  She jammed the hat onto her head. “Anyway, what I come down to tell you is your feathers-for-brains brother Shane is on his way over. Bringing me a carburetor, he claims.”

  “Why would he do that for?”

  “Says he’s cleaning out that backyard over there. Your daddy’s orders.”

  Five minutes later, Shane pulled up in Granny’s driveway. “Hey, old woman!” he yelled when he saw Granny. “Why ain’t you out fishing, anyway, nice day like this?”

  “I’ve been tethered to this house by five chickens, seven dogs, and three loads of laundry stinking up the kitchen. That Talmadge Lumberton dropped off his work clothes, asking me to do him the favor. His machine’s on the fritz.”

  Shane saw me and winked. “Sounds like Granny’s got a new boyfriend. Maybe this one’ll stick.”

  When Shane was done hauling out the carburetor and dumping it on Granny’s carport, where it would probably sit for three years until Granny got around to doing something with it, he threw my bike into his truck and gave me a ride home.

  “How come Daddy’s got you cleaning up the yard?” I asked him, rolling down the window to let the wind blow in my face.

  Shane pulled out onto the main road. “Don’t know, but he’s mad as hell about something, I can tell you that much.”

  When we got home, I helped Shane haul stuff to the driveway. “My buddy Teddy from work ought to be here in about fifteen minutes to collect all this mess,” he said.

  “Why do you got so much of everything?” I asked after a couple of trips to and from the backyard. Even with all my running, I was starting to feel out of wind from carrying that junk. “You planning to build yourself a whole fleet of cars?”

  “Nope, just one perfect automobile.” Shane got the same lovey-dovey look on his face he got when he talked about Becca. “It was like I was trying to put a puzzle together. Every time I was near a junkyard or a used auto supplies place, I had to go in and see if I could find one of the pieces I was looking for. Well, I found a bunch of pieces, all right, but never ones that fit together in exactly the right way.”

  I dumped a jumble of parts by a tower of tires. “Maybe one day you’ll get rich and you can buy yourself the perfect car.”

  Shane shook his head. “Wouldn’t be the same as putting it together myself.”

  The backyard was starting to clear out. It surprised me to see how much space there was. It’d been clogged up so long with all Shane’s carburetors and radiators, engine blocks and coils and coils of black hoses snaking this way and that, that I’d forgotten there was room to move back there. You could have a whole flock of chickens if you wanted.

  A horn honked out front and Shane’s friend Teddy, who was about as tall and wide as a deluxe refrigerator, hopped out of his truck. We spent the next twenty minutes putting the first load onto the truck. It was going to take at least three loads to get everything gone.

  I was handing up a steering wheel to Teddy when my dad pulled up behind Teddy’s truck. It was only four o’clock in the afternoon, way too early for him to be back from Uncle Rob’s. It made my stomach all nervous to see him home at the wrong time. It brought back the memory of when my mom was sick and Daddy was either at the hospital or wandering around the house all afternoon like a ghost.

  “What you doing standing there with your mouth open?” Daddy called, getting out of the car. “Can’t you see I need some help?”

  SEVENTEEN

  Daddy pulled two Food Lion bags out of the trunk of his car. I grabbed them from him, and he followed me into the house carrying four more.

  “Man, it stinks in here, did you ever notice that?” Daddy dumped his bags on the floor by the kitchen and looked around. “Patrick, is that you? You wash your socks lately?”

  Patrick was sitting in front of the TV. “It ain’t me. Just nobody’s taken out the trash in days, is all.”

  “Well, nobody’s stopping you,” Daddy told him. “Why don’t you get your behind off that couch and get that stink out of here?”

  Patrick stared at the screen like he wasn’t going nowhere, but then he must have changed his mind about that being a good idea. He pushed himself off of the couch as slow as a person could while still actually moving.

  Daddy turned toward the kitchen and looked around for a minute. Then he rubbed my shoulder. “Well, son, I reckon it’s time we took care of this. Company’s coming, and the house has got to look nice.”

  I tried to think of who might be coming to see us, but nobody came to mind. We weren’t the kind of family that made people feel welcome. “Who is it?”

  “Social workers, first thing Tuesday morning,” Daddy said. “Turns out your granny don’t think much of my child-rearing methods, so she’s called up the Department of Social Services and told them to come check out our situation. Rumor has it that you’re a neglected child.” His voice made it sound like he thought it was funny, but his face told a different story.

  I took a few steps backwards and flopped down on the couch. My stomach went cold and my face went hot. What could be going on in Granny’s head? “I didn’t tell her to do that,” I said.

  Daddy gave me a strange look. “I didn’t say that you did.”

  I shook my head. Granny was supposed to wait to hear from me what I wanted her to do, but I hadn’t told her yet. Now she’d gone and pulled a stunt that was a hundred times worse than driving up on the middle-school sidewalk.

 

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