Read an Excerpt
1
What You Notice, What You Say
You see people doing things they shouldn’t. Sometimes you mind your own business. Other times you might say something, but it’s hard to do that if you’ve just been caught red-handed yourself.
Of course, Aunt Terry pulls her car right up on the lawn to get my mom close to the house. Gather lets out his little woof, and even as I’m shoving the propane heater, which I’ve had the sense to turn off, into the junk closet, I’m trying to figure out how to hide the dog. So I push the junk door shut with my foot and let Gather out the back kitchen door. But he runs around and greets Aunt Terry with a big woof. At least it’s friendly.
She scruffles Gather’s head. “When’d you get the dog?”
“He’s a stray,” I tell her. “He’s living out back in the shed.”
“Airedale?” she asks.
I’m like, “What?”
“Think he’s got some Airedale in him? Dog breed?”
I have no idea. I want to know about my mom a whole lot more than Aunt Terry wants to know about Gather, but it’s the dog we talk about. She goes around to open the passenger-side door. Gather follows her.
“He is one big dog,” Aunt Terry says. “Definitely not a Saint Bernard, though. Still, looks like he might drool a bit. What’s he eating?”
“I’ve been bringing him scraps,” I say.
I’m pretty sure she doesn’t have fresh needle marks, my mom, but there’s gauze and tape on the back of her hand where an IV must have been. She’s tired, but she’s not high. I can tell from her eyes.
Then my mom says, “Hi, baby.”
“Give us a hand, Ian,” Aunt Terry says. “Go easy. She’s unsteady on her feet. She’s finally had some work done on that bad back of hers.”
You can see Aunt Terry looking at my mom like this is the story she, meaning Aunt Terry, wants to feed me. I know it’s bullshit, but I can’t think of a good way to ask anything.
***
My mom carried her own weight just fine. We were on either side of her, her elbows in our palms. I held the screen door.
First thing I see in the kitchen when we step inside is Gather’s bowl on the floor. A little soup comes right up into the back of my mouth. If we fight about the dog being in the house, I know I’m going to make things much worse. He’s been here. She hasn’t. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to be. She was.
“Do you want to sit on the sofa, Mom?” I ask, pointing to the living room, like it’s someplace she’s never seen before. Me, I’m just hoping she doesn’t see the dog’s bowl. Terry says it’s a good idea, the sofa, and if either of them sees the bowl, neither says so.
They didn’t say anything, either, when they saw that needle right where they left it. Neither did I.
I asked my mom if I could get her a glass of water. She said yes, and when I was in the kitchen, I took care of Gather’s bowl, made sure the heater hadn’t caught the closet on fire, and poured the rest of my soup right down my own gullet. When I came back into the living room with the water, the needle was gone.
And the dog’s bowl was gone. I guess we had an agreement about saying nothing, but my whole mind was like mud season, trying to figure out how to get any traction on finding out about the last few days.
Because here’s how you have to think about it. Things might suck, but if you get people all riled up, you’re going to make it a whole lot worse.
***
So much had happened, with both the dog and my mom. I guess if there was one thing I learned from Aunt Terry that’s worth remembering: it’s just easier to talk about the dog. A dog that big is bound to get you into trouble worth telling about, so I’m going to back up a few days.
2
The Sharpe
It’s due to the dog, I’m stopping to catch my breath at the corner of the road and the front parking lot of school, behind the sports sign and the little copse of junipers there. It’s seven days to Thanksgiving, and I’m standing in the cold November rain, looking at the main entrance to school, watching the doors with nobody going in and nobody going out. I realize I’ll be sitting out preseason hoops again.
So this is why, when even though you miss the bus and you run more than two miles down a dirt road, and it’s pouring rain and every passing car splashes, and you look like a drowned rat but you keep running anyway, this is why once you finally get yourself to school, you get it in your head you’re not going in. Maybe you wonder why you ever bother going in the first place.
I tug the hood of my jacket forward so the rain will stop landing on my eyebrows and dripping off the tip of my nose. And then what? The seam where the hood attaches pulls apart and a freezing stream of water slips through. Like hell I’m going in looking like I’ve got a sweat streak down my back. It’s a sign for me to find someplace else to be, but that’s just when The Sharpe, tenth-grade history, she walks out of the main entrance. Doesn’t even have a jacket on.
The Sharpe, she’s always leaving school and coming back with carrots and celery and broccoli and dip or cut-up pears and apples or trail mix. On Fridays, it’s donuts. She tells us, “I’m not giving you sugar on Monday to have you jumping off the walls of my classroom all week. You make it to Friday with me, I’ll get sweets. You can run out that sugar high over the weekend.”
You’d never think I’d say this, but on Fridays, I miss the veggies. I move a little bit to put the junipers more between her and me. Well, that just turns out to be useless. I figure she’s heading for her F-150, which she always parks about six feet from the agpole, but when I peek from behind the shrubs, she’s maybe thirty feet away and striding right at me. How the hell she saw me, I don’t know. Her windows look over the playing fields.
“Ian. What are you doing,” The Sharpe says more than asks with her accent I hadn’t figured out yet. “Come inside.”
***
As to how you say her name, some of us were saying “Sharpie,” like the permanent magic marker, and others were saying just “Sharp.” So finally one day I asked her, “How do you say your name?” Why the hell people have to talk about it in back corners, I don’t know.
But what does she say? She says she doesn’t care. If it’s “Sharpie,” she’s happy with the notion that the things she helps us write into our own brains won’t ever wash off. If it’s “Sharp,” she says she doesn’t mind at all if people associate that with her own brilliant mind.
So I’m like, “Okay, but which is it to you?” To which she says “Sharp” is what she grew up with.
At some point, I’ll also get to telling you about why it’s “The” instead of Ms. or whatever. But for now, all you need to know is how you don’t say no to her unless something’s wrong with you. I said nothing at all. But I didn’t wait too long, either, because The Sharpe, you’ve got to know, if she’s trying to get you to do something, she might yank your sleeve or grab your shoulder, and Albertson, the principal, his office looks right out on the parking lot.
I know teachers aren’t supposed to touch the kids. Nobody’s supposed to touch us. But I didn’t want Albertson to have reason to freak out on her. The man is an ass, in my opinion. The Sharpe, she wouldn’t put up with it, and then she might quit or move away. She won’t let you walk behind her, either—says you’re not allowed to walk in her blind spot.
“What are you doing?” she asked again.
“I missed the bus,” I said.
“You told me you have an alarm clock. Did you set it?”
I nodded yes, and she held the door into the main office for me.
There was no way I was going to tell her about the dog, either. Even good people can get you into trouble.
