I was the person not invited at June’s house. That feeling hangs on you like a smell. I had put showers between myself and Creaky’s barn, but this is not something that washes off. You get used to it, not in the good way, to the extent of the entire world oftentimes feeling like a place where you weren’t invited. If you’ve been here, you know. If not, must be nice.
June didn’t mind me though, or was good at being sweet whether she felt like it or not. Which they probably do teach you in nurse school. She read my mind, same as she had with going to the ocean place. Again she took us places I liked. The skateboard park, even though Maggot and Emmy weren’t into it because all we did was watch. But Jesus God. For kids with zero sidewalks in our lives, watching skateboarders on TV is just cartoons or sci-fi, you don’t buy in. But seeing them in real life? Shit. I about died of happiness. Like boys could fly.
So that was June, seeing my little moments. Putting extra food on my
plate at every meal. Not in the Lady Leaders way of “watch me being nice,” just on the quiet. I tried to use manners and not act like a person that’s been wanting seconds ever since around August.
What I dreaded was Christmas morning. The Peggots had brought
presents they piled under Aunt June’s tree, but weirdly nobody discussed them, no shaking or checking tags to see who got the biggest. Because of me, the kid not supposed to be there. Awkward. I planned on making myself scarce Christmas morning. I’d fake a stomachache or take a really long shower until the presents all got opened. Mainly I just wished Christmas didn’t exist.
The worst was at night, with me and Maggot lying practically under the
tree with the presents. Which wasn’t a tree, honestly, just fake, small, set up on a table. You’d expect better from somebody so classy. But where are you going to go cut a cedar in Knoxville? At home, any farmer will let you
come get one out of his fencerow. At Creaky’s we cut cedars out of the
pastures to pile up and burn, because they’re too many and a nuisance. Why Aunt June hated it in Knoxville, being so far away from everything: from
free Christmas trees, just for example.
That’s where I was, thinking about shit like our last cedar bonfire at Creaky’s that got out of hand somewhat with Swap-Out and the gasoline. Maggot asleep. And all the sudden here’s Emmy touching my back. I almost shit myself, rolling over to see her lying two inches away. I’d not expected her to come back. She wasn’t just all about the murder baby this time, so that was a relief. We were quiet like before, and Maggot stayed asleep. Or else a good friend about it. He never said anything the next day, or any other day, because it happened every night after that. She didn’t
surprise me again, either. I was always on the lookout.
We talked about everything under the sun, lying on those pillows. What we liked, what we hated. I told her my bathtub thing, due to my dad dying at a place called Devil’s Bathtub. Actually I said it was only whenever I was small, being scared of them. She didn’t laugh though. She was scared about moving, leaving Knoxville. I couldn’t believe it. I told her there’s trees, mountains, rivers, birds singing in your ears, we’ve got the whole rest of the world over there, other than people, which are only one thing. Going wherever we wanted to without adults, even at night. The woods. I got caught up in telling her all this and almost forgot my messed-up life,
because in some ways she was worse off than me. She’d never even seen a lightning bug. That is just tragic. I told her the different ones. One kind goes totally dark, then they all blink together, thousands, one big sparkly pop all up and down the creek. It can thrill a person senseless.
In time we got into the darker side of things. My dead baby brother, for one. How Emmy ended up with Aunt June, for another. Complicated as hell. Turns out she had a mother out there at large all along, girlfriend of her dad, Humvee, that was killed. I’d heard people say a hunting accident.
Emmy said yes, he was supposed to go get Pampers one day but instead ended up turkey hunting with some friends. Three men, three twelve- gauges, and a handle of fireball whiskey being one handle too many for the
close quarters of a turkey blind, as anybody knows, except them evidently. Oh my Lord. She said it was Humvee’s shotgun but different stories, either he accidentally fired it or somebody sat on it. He was too messed up for the hospital in Pennington, they had to get him to Knoxville and too much blood loss on the way.
Poor Mrs. Peggot. Given the fireball whiskey aspects, no wonder her having her policies on what she called demon liquor. For Emmy’s part, she said she herself felt somewhat to blame, as far as the stresses and strains of a baby on such a young dad. His girlfriend was home with her at the time, so not involved, just probably waiting a long time for those diapers. But being a teen mom and then total wreck from the incident, she turned into
the all-around bad-news type of mother, so. The Peggots had to step in and take Emmy. Then the next year after Humvee was killed, their daughter Mariah went to prison on her own matters, and Maggot turned up needing to be looked after also. The family you could say hit a bad patch.
This was news to me, that Mrs. Peggot had taken in not just Maggot but Emmy before him. Two tiny tots to raise. That’s the Peggots for you, doors wide open. I’d known them to take other cousins for whole summers before, including Hammerhead Kelly and his stepsisters after the parents split up, which was how Mr. Peg got him started on deer hunting. Emmy asked if Hammerhead still came around or had moved away with his dad in the split-up. I said he was still with the stepmom Ruby, June’s sister, and Mr. Peg’s favorite. I didn’t bring up hunting, given Emmy’s bad-luck dad, plus not knowing where she stood with the whole city-person outlook on shooting Bambi, but I knew Hammer and Mr. Peg still hunted together.
Many a time in the fall I’d see Hammer dressing a buck in their driveway. It would kill you how big and gentle he looked, drawing his long knife up the middle of the carcass, easing the gut and lungs to slither out in a pile. Like he’s being sweet to that deer, even though dead.
I told Emmy he went by just Hammer now, and came over to help with things Mr. Peg had got too old for, like gutters. He was basically a Peggot grandson, even though technically not all that related. I told her I was basically one too, raised by them as far as the more solid parts. I admitted that for the longest time I’d thought Mrs. Peggot was my real mammaw.
Emmy put her eyes square on mine. It scared me almost, getting looked at like that. “You’re wishing she really was, aren’t you?” she said. “Then they’d have to adopt you.” She kissed her finger and touched my cheek.
“They probably wouldn’t, though.”
I wanted her to say I was wrong, but she rolled on her back, looking at
the ceiling. I watched her thinking it over. I’d never had that close a look at another person’s face before. She had brown-sugar freckles and a little silver line through one eyebrow where she said a cat scratched her. The tiniest furrow plowed through her eyebrow hairs, never to grow back.
She rolled back to face me. “I don’t know. They didn’t legally adopt either one of us. For Matty they’re just guardians. His mom is still his mom.”
“Not that she’s doing much about it in Goochland,” I said. “No offense to anybody.”
But Emmy was off someplace else, thinking of her own messed-up past. I was pretty shocked of it. Given the Peggots being so decent. “Having both of us was too much,” she said. “Think about it, he’s a newborn and I’m a toddler. Poor Mammaw. She really needed Aunt June to take over with me. I never gave it much thought till lately, but I mean, who does that? Take over raising your dead brother’s two-year-old, while you’re still in nursing
school.”
June Peggot, was the answer. The Peggots had brought in the trailer next door so she could have her own place with Emmy and still be all one family while June finished up school. That was the same trailer that soon would be Mom’s, then Mom’s and mine, after June got her hospital job and moved with Emmy to Knoxville. Emmy’s bad-news real mom still would turn up at the Peggots’ every so often, threatening to go to court and get Emmy back. She was in no position now as an IV drug user, homeless etc., but that didn’t stop her from showing up in the middle of the night, banging on the door, raising Cain to see her kid. The Peggots kept quiet about Emmy being in Tennessee so she wouldn’t go after June and try to steal Emmy back.
That’s why the big secret. But Skank Mom had finally agreed to sign Emmy over for good. Amen and hallelujah on Aunt June finally winning the mom war.
I asked how that felt, given away by her real mother. Emmy said she had all the mom a person could want. She didn’t care if she ever laid eyes on the other one again.
The upshot of all this talking was me getting pretty much in love with Emmy. She was beautiful and like a grown person. In the daytime we didn’t let on. Hanging out with her and Maggot, I tried to be normal, but
sometimes said things to impress her. Like how the other foster boys thought my cartoons were good. And the football hero Fast Forward that was my friend. She just said something polite, but Maggot chimed in on
how awesome this guy was. I’d forgotten Maggot knew him from that time they came to the farm. This got Emmy interested to the extent of saying she’d like to meet this famous Fast Forward.
So we played it cool, and I wondered if the other was real or just some after-hours game she was playing. But then she would let me sit on the couch with her while she was reading, and under the blanket her feet would touch my feet. She’d look up from her book and smile at me and, oh man. Utterly wrecked. Back in the summer she’d announced the one time about us getting married, which was kid shit. Like somebody giving you Monopoly money and saying “Here, go buy a house.” But now all I had to do was think of Emmy, her face or her toothpaste smell, and it would give me these waking-up feelings as regards the guy downstairs. Not kid shit. At night we’d be talking and I’d get obsessed on kissing her, even though not
having the nerve. It was her finally that did it. She asked if I wanted to go to second base, which of course I did, except for not knowing exactly where that base was located. I’d heard different things. I said okay, and she took my hand into the neck of her gown and put it on her chest. Nipple and everything, warm and soft. Christ. Now I had a whole new body function to be terrified of doing on accident, from being that mixed up and happy at the same time. But I held it together. I just told her I loved her and that kind of thing. I told her whenever she moved back to Lee County, we could take
walks together with Aunt June’s dog Rufus.
After that I had a new brain-Lysol to calm myself down: walking in the woods with Emmy. I’d picture us holding hands, maybe with our own dog. Being grown-ups. It would be so much safer than being a kid.
For Christmas breakfast they invited Mrs. Gummidge, which was the cat lady downstairs where Emmy slept over on Aunt June’s night shifts. Emmy still wasn’t old enough to be on her own in the stranger-danger building overnight, even though graduated from daytime babysitting and Popsicle-
stick-type shenanigans. I figured this cat lady wouldn’t get presents either, so we could sit together watching the others, and I wouldn’t have to stay in the shower.
Emmy warned me about Mrs. Gummidge being a sad human being and not to laugh at her, or Aunt June would kill us. I said I was in no position, being star player on the sad-sack team. But listen, this lady was in her own league. We were all, Merry Christmas Mrs. Gummidge! And she’s like,
“Well, it might be, I don’t know. I been feeling so poorly.” Aunt June asked how are Cain and Abel, which were her cats, and she said, “Well, they’ve both been at death’s door for a good while. But it’s for the best. If I pass away first, I don’t know who would take them.”
Mrs. Gummidge was a sister of somebody the Peggots knew in Lee County, which was how they knew she was safe and not a stranger. She’d helped keep Emmy ever since they first moved here, so they were used to her, but man alive. She had a downer comment for every occasion. Wasn’t the Christmas tree pretty? Well, she said, a lot of times they started fires.
Yes, the weather had been warm, but that meant winter would last longer. She had on these thick brown stockings rolled up under her knees that she had to wear night and day for her varicose veins that hurt her something awful. She had some name for them like compressure hose. I didn’t ask, trust me. It just came up. All through breakfast which was pancakes and
bacon, Mrs. Gummidge discussed how she was forlorn in the world and too poorly to be fit company for anybody since Mr. Gummidge passed. Emmy stared at me with her shut mouth pulled wide like a fish, trying not to laugh. I don’t think Aunt June was too far behind her.
But they were all sweet to her. The time came for presents, and surprise, they had some for Mrs. Gummidge and also me. She got a fuzzy pink
bathrobe that she said was so pretty she might ought to get buried in it. For me they had things from “Santa” that obviously got new tags put on them last minute, like socks (I wore the same size as Mr. Peg), a Stretch Armstrong, a Bop It, and Pokemon cards I’m sure were for Maggot, and he’d okayed them getting reassigned.
But Aunt June got me something amazing: a set of colored markers for making comics, fine-tip on one end and thick on the other, in more colors than you’d think there would be. Eight entire flesh tones. Also a real book for making comic strips, with the panel dividers printed in. I couldn’t
believe my eyes. After Mom died I’d not wanted to draw any more at all, but now I couldn’t wait to run off someplace and get started. I would make one of Aunt June as Wonder Nurse, putting a new heart back inside a boy that had his own torn out.
The last night before we left, Emmy went to pieces. I told her we would see each other all the time whenever they moved to Lee County. But Aunt June had to finish out her hospital contract first, so it wouldn’t be till May. Forever, in other words. It had only been thirty-nine days since Mom and my brother died, and that felt like longer than the years I’d been alive.
I tried to dwell on the happier aspects, like being amazed of how the
Peggots gave me presents. I asked her opinion of it being a sign they might want to adopt me. Emmy said I shouldn’t get my hopes up, but it wouldn’t hurt to ask. Too late, my hopes were up. Mrs. Peggot already had said I could stay at their house after we got back until school started up again, rather than go back to Creaky Farm. Which had to mean something.
Emmy though got all mournful, lying on her back with tears running down sideways, which pretty much killed me. She asked would I wait for her and not get another girlfriend in the meantime before May. I told her no worries on that. I used an old-lady voice and said “I’m too forlorn to be fit company, unless I can find me some almost dead cats.” And she laughed, so that was good. We cheered ourselves up then by making fun of Mrs.
Gummidge, and got tickled. Which is terrible, but you know. We’re kids. I asked how long ago Mr. Gummidge died.
“No idea,” she said. “We’ve known her forever, and there’s never been any Mr. Gummidge in the picture. I don’t even know what he died of.”
“He probably hung himself,” I said. “With her compressure hose.” That cracked all of us up. Maggot included. He’d been awake all along.
We were back at the Peggots’ a few days before I got up my nerve, but the time came. The house was quiet. Mr. Peg took Maggot and some cousins to go bowling with their church youth league. They invited me, but I said I didn’t feel like it. After they left, I went downstairs to the kitchen where Mrs. Peggot was cooking her big pot of blackeye peas they always had for New Year’s, for a year of good luck. A Peggot thing. Mom always said she’d never heard of that. But then, look at her luck.
I hung around the kitchen watching Mrs. Peggot put things in her soup. Onions, carrots, a lot more than blackeye peas, plus it had to cook all day and then some. She always put in the big bone from the country ham they
ate at Christmas. This year they’d taken the ham to Knoxville for Christmas dinner, then wrapped the bone in foil and brought it back. So that bone had more miles on it than most people I knew. All that, for the luck. Steam
rolled out of the pot, fogging up the window and making the kitchen smell amazing. I told her she was the best cook and this was the best house I was ever in. She looked over her shoulder at me, then went back to stirring. I thanked her for the presents she and Mr. Peg gave me for Christmas, that I wasn’t expecting. I’d said thank you at the time, but I wanted to use all my manners before I got to the main question.
“We had us a good Christmas, didn’t we?” she asked, and I told her yes, I’d had the biggest time in Knoxville and was glad she let me come. She went on stirring. I told her the soup smelled so good, I wished I wouldn’t ever have to leave.
She set down her big spoon and stood still, looking out the foggy
window. Then untied her apron and came and sat down at the table. Her glasses were so foggy I couldn’t see her eyes, and for a second I got terrified. Thinking of Stoner in his reflectors and all other adults that
seemed like they went blind if they really had to look at me. Then the steam cleared and I could see her blue eyes, still kind of cloudy. Maggot had told me she had the cataracts and needed an operation on her eyes. But she was looking at me straight.
“Damon, are you asking if we can keep you permanent?”
I was afraid to tell her yes. Because then I knew the answer would be no.
It turned out she and Mr. Peg had already discussed it. The week after the funeral Miss Barks came over to meet with them about a possible foster placement, since I was more comfortable with them than anyplace else. The DSS evidently had cleared up the Stoner lies, and they’d decided the
Peggots were my best shot. So she and Mr. Peg had talked it over. Talked and talked, she said. But decided they couldn’t. Not as guardians or fosters or anything official.
I hated Miss Barks for not telling me this. I wanted to die of embarrassment. Mrs. Peggot looked sad, and kept rubbing her head. Her gray hair stuck out this way and that, like she’d forgotten to comb it that morning, which maybe it didn’t matter. Nobody really looked that much at a lady her age, including me usually. But I did now. She was my only chance.
She said I would always be welcome to visit. But she and Mr. Peg were getting old, with him having the arthritis so bad his leg hurt him day and night. Plus he had the sugar, that he took shots for in his stomach. She didn’t mention her eye thing, but I got the picture. She said it was only two more years until Maggot’s mom was getting released, maybe sooner for
good behavior. Not likely, considering it’s Mariah. But at some point, she would come take Maggot and finish up raising him. I asked where, and Mrs. Peggot said they would have their own place.
I couldn’t even imagine Maggot not living in that house. “Does he know about it? That he’s going to have to move out?”
“Yes, honey. He does. We’ll be a little sad, but a boy ought to be raised by his mother, and that’s what she wants. Mr. Peg and I can’t always do for him now that he’s getting so big.”
Maggot wasn’t that big, to be honest. For his age. I was, though. I kept quiet.
“You and Matty will be teenagers here before you know it. Learning to drive, courting girls. Lord have mercy.” She smiled and looked sad at the same time, waving one hand like shooing away mosquitoes. That hand looked a hundred years old. Knuckles and gristle.
I’d given no thought to what lay up the road for us. Maggot learning to drive, courting whatever he had in mind, disaster possibly. He was already in a war with Mr. Peg over his long hair, the music he liked, some of his weirder magazines. Attitude in general. Nothing like the attitude wars of Stoner and me. But you could see how low-level fighting went step by step, with more hazards at the higher levels like in Super Mario.
I wondered if Miss Barks had told the Peggots I was a hard kid to handle. “I won’t do any of those teenager things,” I told her. “I would mind you.
You and Mr. Peg both, I promise. I could probably get Maggot to do better.”
Mrs. Peggot looked at the window instead of me. Snow was starting to fall, the whole world so damn quiet. I could hear their big clock ticking from the other room where it sat on the mantel with the picture of Holy Aunt June. She wasn’t going to save me, either.
“But what if,” I started, and backed up, started again. “I can be a lot of help, like carrying in groceries and heavy things. What if I just stayed until Maggot’s mom gets out, and whenever he moves, I’d find another home
too?”
Mrs. Peggot said they had discussed this too with Miss Barks. But she gave them the advice that it wasn’t a great idea. She said teenage boys are the hardest of all to find homes for, and it was better to get them in some
kind of permanent situation while younger if at all possible. She’d promised the Peggots she would keep working on it.
And that was it. Mr. and Mrs. Peggot wanted to try out being regular
grandparents for a change, and not be parents anymore. I needed to let Miss Barks find me some nice people that were younger and could take me in for good.
I shouldn’t have been shocked. Emmy had warned me, and honestly I knew better, but something in me was holding out. Now it fell to pieces. I cried in front of Mrs. Peggot. That was horrible. She had to go hunt up a box of tissues and then rub me on the back like a baby.
“Honey, I’m sorry,” she said, over and over. Words I hated so much I wanted to smash them with my fists.
Crying was the sickest part, in how shamefaced I felt. Even at Mom’s funeral I never shed a tear, because of hating everybody. Hard as a rock. But with Aunt June being so nice and Emmy in love with me, I’d let myself get soft. Thinking the Peggots were not like everybody else, but special, as
regards the Jesus thing of loving your neighbor as much as you love yourself. For fuck’s sake, hadn’t I learned that lesson? Sunday school
stories are just another type of superhero comic. Counting on Jesus to save the day is no more real than sending up the Batman signal.
