A Guard Dog Named Honey Read online

  For Mimi Trotta, beloved friend

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One: Down Under

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Two: Voices

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Part Three: Honey

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Part Four: Shepherds

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Epilogue

  Dirt Preview

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Until one has loved an animal, a part of

  one’s soul remains unawakened.

  —Anatole France

  My brother was arrested on my eleventh birthday.

  Sheriff Ernestine Cobbs showed up at our door, just as we were sitting down to cut into my tutti-frutti three-layer cake, the kind my mother made me every year. She always hid gummy bears in each layer, and back when we were little kids, Willis and I fought over the biggest slice.

  Now Willis is grown, almost seventeen. He’s tall and skinny—“Just real fit, not skinny, sis,” he’d insist whenever I teased him about his bony frame. My brother is straight-up handsome, unlike the friends who slouched alongside him, their faces dotted with gross pimples, their eyes half-closed, thin mouths clamped into sneers. Willis stood above the rest, his shoulders squared, head held high, his tanned face smooth as the lagoon water down the road from our house, and his eyes that same bluish-green lagoon color too. He was usually smiling or laughing, but not in a wannabe way. Willis wore his face like someone who knew what was up and was happy about it.

  So when Sheriff Cobbs knocked and the three of us noticed her broad hat and small frame through the battered screen door, I saw Willis’s eyes narrow. My brother stood up quickly. His fork clattered to the floor.

  “Ernestine, please,” my mother said slowly. “Now’s not the time. It’s Bean’s birthday.”

  Three green cans of Mountain Dew trembled on the kitchen counter. The pile of dirty dishes in the sink shifted. A rubber band in my mother’s hand snapped.

  The vinegar scent of sweat filled the air.

  I don’t remember how long it took for the sheriff to clip Willis’s wrists into handcuffs or if anyone said anything more. The afternoon slowly turned a weepy green, right inside my birthday kitchen, a yellowish, pukish green just like the rain clouds outside.

  I might have gotten kinda dizzy then, kinda wobbly on my feet as the sheriff led Willis slowly out the door. Reaching for the back of a kitchen chair to steady myself, I stumbled, then sat down quickly. My mother looked at me blankly, then poured a glass of water from the sink into an old jelly jar.

  “Doing okay, Bean? You don’t look so great.”

  “Feels like the room’s moving all around,” I whispered. “Feels like I’m getting sick.”

  “Coming down with something? Maybe a cold?”

  I shook my head, which didn’t help matters one bit. My mother seemed so cool and collected, as if Willis’s arrest had never happened. Of course I wasn’t feeling okay and it wasn’t because of a stupid cold. “Kind of like everything’s spinning.”

  “Feeling dizzy?”

  I nodded. The room heaved and then dipped like a boat.

  “Vertigo,” my mother said softly, handing me the water. “You look pale as all get out. I used to get it myself from time to time after your father left.”

  “What’s vertigo?” My voice sounded hollow, as if coming from a deep tunnel, from far away.

  “It means losing your balance,” my mother said. “It’s the sense that your world has turned upside down. Like everything around you is moving and just won’t stop. Put your head down for a second, Bean, and drink up. That should do the trick.”

  So I laid my head down on the square oak table in front of me and closed my eyes. Our house was so small that the living room and kitchen were really just one room, and we used the old table for most everything—eating, cooking, folding clothes, studying, painting projects, and more. The scratched-up wood surface felt rough against my cheek, so I sat up slowly again, then drank the cold water in two large gulps. Blurry plywood walls and squat windows came back into focus, and the floor steadied. But when I turned to tell my mother that I felt better, I saw that she was washing dishes left from breakfast, the rush of water from the faucet so loud that I knew she wouldn’t be able to hear me.

  I live on Rock Haven Island in Massachusetts, a place known for pretty beaches and as a fancy summer vacation spot. Most think Rock Haven is just for the rich and famous, for their giant gray-shingled houses with winding, endless porches. Come Memorial Day, these folks begin jamming our ferries or flying right on island in private planes. Sometimes there’s even a yacht or two docked in Rock Haven’s main harbor. Once, I saw one with a French flag at its mast. But most who visit Rock Haven for a vacation never even know where the real islanders live. And it’s not in those mansions perched at the ocean’s edge, I can tell you that.

  Real islanders, not the wealthy and not the wash ashores, have called Rock Haven home for years and years. Fishermen, construction workers, teachers, shopkeepers, nurses, police officers, and regular folks like that. We have what Willis calls a cool hodgepodge population: African Americans, Wampanoag Native Americans, Portuguese, Jamaicans, Brazilians, Whites, and more have long histories on island, making it a pretty interesting place. Last spring, the town council voted us a sanctuary community, meaning anyone in need, anyone from anywhere, could come live here at any time. No questions asked.

  And us islanders stick it out together, no matter what—during the winters, no matter how cold the winds and no matter how deep the snow. We don’t pack our bags and leave just as the weather is getting rough. Rock Haven is our home in every single season, whatever comes our way.

  Unless they’re like my father. He used to head to what we called America whenever he got a chance. (Of course, we all knew that Rock Haven is a part of the United States of America, but most of us felt so different, so far away from the mainland cities and towns, that it seemed more like we were living in an entirely separate country, or our own separate continent.)

  “There’s more work off island,” my mother always told me. “Your father’s just trying to help support all of us.”

  Funny, it seemed that my father slowly faded from our lives until one day, about a year ago, he decided to not ever come back to Rock Haven or to us. Maybe he found another family somewhere in America, another daughter and son. Maybe he just got sick of island life and sick of us too. My mother told Willis and me that our father couldn’t hack living in such a remote place. “It’s real hard to make a decent living here,” she said, avoiding our eyes. “We’ll be fine. Just wait and see. He’ll still send us money, whenever he finds good work.”

  That’s when my hives first started. Round red spots that itched like crazy and came and went with no warning. But I didn’t tell anyone about them except for my brother. I didn’t want anyone else to know.

  Willis promised me that the hives were only temporary and that they’d disappear once I got older and learned how to deal. I didn’t exactly know what that meant but was glad that I wouldn’t be covered with the itchy things forever.

  And what I also didn’t understand was this: What did my mother mean about “a decent living”? And how the heck can a family live “decently” when the father’s gone? But I guess we did. We managed kinda okay, my mother, Willis, and I.

  At least I thought we did.

  Our little house was crammed in along with a bunch of others on the lagoon side of the island. Low slung, paint worn off, one-story frame houses battered with age and bad weather. On narrow streets without sidewalks, clumps of beach grass growing out of the concrete, old cars and trailers hunched together on sandy slivers of lawn. Peeling skiffs and rowboats, their wooden frames shaped like crooked smiles; rusted pails; car wheels; tin cans; and sometimes an old doll, painted face worn off. Stones, pebbles, oily fish skeletons, and fading seashells.

  But where others might see old junk, Willis and I noticed bits of colors in all those worn and broken things, and where others might see sad and ugly, my brother taught me to make out the bright, speckled shape of our island home. The sparkle of mica in rocks and the jade green of crushed shell rot. My brother would point out all this to me so that I’d always see the best in everything. But after he was arrested that became pretty hard.

  My mother has worked at the Rock Haven Stop & Shop supermarket for over fifteen years, long before I was even born. She could usually be found at the first-aisle cash register in her stiff dark-green uniform, wearing her name tag with NELL WRIGHT printed in black letters, chatting
it up with anyone who came her way. She’d always be right there during those crazy-busy times in the summer, when she “hardly has a minute to breathe,” and also in the slow times during the winter when I’ve seen her huddled out front in the cold with Sally Owens and Jake Cobbs (the sheriff’s husband), drinking coffee out of paper cups and shooting the breeze. Sometimes she’d see me and yell, “Get yourself home right now, Bean Wright! It’s getting late and you should be doing your homework with your brother.”

  Fat chance. Willis and I never did our homework until the last minute, long after my mother got home. We’d sit together at the old oak table and watch her warm up an extra bowl of ramen noodle soup or make us grilled cheese sandwiches for a late-evening snack. Then Willis would pull out his thick books from his backpack and quiet would fall.

  This was my favorite time of day, when I got to sit right next to my brother, neither of us saying much of anything but still together. The sound of Willis’s pencil scratching away on lined paper and the sight of his large, knobby hands clutching a book were comforting to me, and it was the only time I got my brother all to myself, without his girlfriends or tagalongs. But I really didn’t care for books, although I was pretty good at math. Somehow anything with numbers made sense to me.

  “Wake up and smell the coffee, little dudette,” my brother would say to me when my eyes would start to close those long evenings. “Can’t go to sleep until all your homework is done.” And so I’d try to stay awake and finish every assignment, read every handout, and answer every question on every take-home test. I never wanted to disappoint Willis.

  The night of my eleventh birthday, the winds started up right after Sheriff Cobb took Willis in handcuffs to jail. Then came the hard rain, the horizontal kind. My mother and I stood by the window, where we watched the sky widen, spreading its bruised chest.

  “Some birthday,” my mother said, her hand on my back.

  I nodded.

  “Try not to worry too much, Bean. You know that this has been coming for a long time. Almost a relief. At least I’ll know where he is nights.” Then my mother turned to the old table, still set for my birthday, the cake tilted to one side where Willis had stuck in a finger on the hunt for gummy bears. She glanced back at me with a weak smile. “I’ll go down to the jail first thing in the morning and see if I can rustle up the money for bail, but let’s not count on it.”

  My mother looked old then; her whole face drooped as if it didn’t have any bones to hang itself on. Her hazel eyes sunk, her mouth sagged at the corners, and her complexion turned ash. But it was only for a minute. Soon, she looked like my mother again. She combed her straight salt-and-pepper hair with her fingers, then gathered it into the rubber band that she always wore on her wrist. Her hands shook.

  I started to walk away toward my bedroom, but when she called me, I turned back. My mother was pretty tall, almost as tall as Willis, and she had the same broad shoulders and wiry frame. She was wearing a pair of blue jeans rolled up at the ankles and her favorite black-and-green flannel shirt, the wrist cuffs soggy with dishwater. Neither of us moved for a minute.

  “It will be okay, Bean,” she finally whispered into the air, then repeated to herself in a louder voice, “It will be okay if I can get the bail cash.”

  I wasn’t exactly sure what bail was, but I did know that “rustling up” cash wasn’t going to be easy. There was barely extra money for everyday things.

  That night, I locked the door of the bedroom that Willis and I shared. I didn’t want my mother coming in to sit by my side like she sometimes did when she knew I was upset. I didn’t want to be comforted.

  Our bedroom was so cramped that the heads of our mattresses touched. No way was I going to look at the empty bed next to me, and I sure didn’t want to see our two fishing rods crossed together in a corner like a towering X or the pile of schoolbooks and novels Willis had left on the floor—that might send me over the edge. So I covered my face with the blue knit blanket as I lay down, still fully dressed.

  But through the loopy weave of the blanket, I could see my brother’s banner on the opposite wall. He’d ordered the banner a few years ago from Harvard University, where he planned to go after his high school graduation. I hadn’t wanted to think of Willis going away to college, even though that had always been his dream, but now that he’d been arrested, who knew if he was going to even complete his senior year. Everything had changed without any warning, and I didn’t know what I hoped for anymore.

  I pulled the blanket off my face, sneezed, and looked carefully at the banner. It was decorated with what Willis said was the university’s coat of arms, the word veritas spelled out in the middle. When I’d asked Willis what a coat of arms was, he had pointed to the triangular shape inside the banner. “Check it out,” he’d replied. “See, it’s a white shield. A coat of arms protects your identity, who you really are.”

  I’d wondered then what my identity really was, other than sister to the smartest and coolest person on island, and was glad that my brother was always there to protect me. But that was before.

  Later, I’d asked my mother what veritas meant. It was a word I’d stared at every day but never thought to wonder about. My mother just shrugged and said she thought it meant something about the truth.

  A lone pillow lay on the floor between our beds. The one that Willis always folded in half and stuck behind his head when he read late into the night. I leaned over to pick it up but started to feel dizzy all over again, the way I’d felt after seeing my brother taken to jail. And then the itching began; I didn’t need to look down at my chest and arms to know that flame-red hives were beginning to pop up.

  I always thought that Willis was pretty perfect and could handle anything that came his way. When he was younger, he’d say that he wanted to be a firefighter when he grew up, someone who rescued children and families from burning buildings. His dream changed when he got to high school and he read some book he really loved. Willis said that the dude in the book wasn’t a firefighter but that he rescued people in a different kind of way, although he never really explained how. Not that it made any difference, anyway. Now that Willis was locked up in jail, it would be up to me to do the rescuing. It was right then when I made my birthday vow:

  I would get Willis out of jail, no matter what.

  We had pretended for a long time, my mother, Willis, and I. Nobody in my family had the guts to spit out the truth, but we’d all known that something was very wrong. My brother had changed right before our eyes and still we’d acted as if nothing had happened.

  It wasn’t that Willis had lied outright, but he hadn’t told the truth either, and when the truth isn’t told, something sticks in the air. Kinda like a cloud ready to burst or an extraterrestrial spaceship of some kind. The ones that hover there, just waiting to explode.

  The hovering started slowly, then began to take up more and more room in our island sky.

  Maybe my mother had been right that Willis’s arrest had been a long time coming. The truth was that my mother and I knew that something was up, although we never spoke to each other about it. Willis had hardly been home anymore, and he seemed more and more distant, rarely ever wanting to wrestle with me on the floor or take me fishing, the way he used to, or even stay up late playing board games, school night or not. He barely answered when we asked him questions. He hardly said anything at all.

  Once, he fell asleep at breakfast, his head falling plop into the Rock Haven Register newspaper that my mother read each morning. Once, he went to bed right after school, at three o’clock, and wasn’t even sick. Twice, he stayed out all night. Soon, he was staying out all night again and again, although my mother begged him not to. When she tried to ground him as a punishment, he just smiled, hugged her, and then spent the whole night out all over again.

  “Your brother’s having a real hard time,” my mother had whispered to me one night, sitting on the edge of my bed. It was very late, and Willis still hadn’t come home. “It’s tough on a son when his father’s not around.”

  I guess she forgot that it was tough on a daughter too.

  But Willis was still my brother and I loved him. I wanted everything to be back the way it used to be and for him to be the same brother I had always known.