Yes, I Know the Monkey Man Read online

  “I’ve got it,” she said.

  I heard a jingly tune coming from Sam’s purse. Still holding my bag with one arm, she reached into her purse and pulled out a cell phone. It was pink with butterflies on it. “Hello?” she said.

  “The car’s over there,” Suzanne said as she led the way to a dark blue Honda Civic that was parked at a meter in the next block.

  Whoever Sam was talking to must’ve been doing all the talking. All Sam said was, “Yeah … Yeah … Yeah … I don’t know … Okay, bye.”

  Suzanne popped the trunk and we put my duffel and my grocery bag inside.

  “Um, Sherlock probably has to go to the bathroom,” I said, looking around for some grass I could take him to.

  “There’s a bike trail back behind those buildings,” Sam said as she dropped her phone back into her purse. We walked around the corner and followed a driveway back to a grassy area that led downhill to the river.

  “So, how have you been, T.J.?” Suzanne asked when Sherlock stopped to do his business.

  “Fine.”

  “How’s…” Sam paused, glanced at her mother, then said, “Joe?”

  Did they know? Had Mrs. Morris called Suzanne after all to tell her Joe was in the hospital?

  Sam watched me expectantly, like she was waiting for an answer, but Suzanne just gazed out over the moving water. Maybe Sam was just making polite conversation. As in how are you and how is your family?

  “He’s … fine,” I said carefully. “I think Sherlock is done now. If you want to leave.”

  We headed back to the car. Along the way, Sam’s phone rang again. “Hello?” she said. She talked to this person in one-syllable words, too. “Yeah … No … No … Maybe.” She glanced at me when she said that. Was she talking about me? “I don’t know. I’ll see … Yeah … Yeah! Okay, bye.”

  By this time we were back at their car. Sam opened the back door and wow, I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a clean car before. There wasn’t a speck of dirt anywhere. Not even on the carpet. Sam motioned for me to get in, so I did. I slid all the way across the seat to make room for Sam, then pulled Sherlock onto my lap.

  Suzanne put her key in the ignition and we were off. But we didn’t even get out of town before Sam’s phone rang again.

  “Wow, you must have a lot of friends,” I said.

  “Samantha,” Suzanne said sharply. “Tell your friends to stop calling and then turn off that phone!”

  Whoa. I didn’t mean she shouldn’t talk to her friends; I just meant that if I had a cell phone, it wouldn’t ring nearly as often as hers did. But whatever. I patted my dog’s back and turned to look out the window.

  “I can’t talk right now,” Sam said in a low voice. “Yes … Yes … Okay, bye.” She clapped the phone closed and I heard the chime sound as it shut off.

  Now no one was saying anything. Which was worse than when Sam’s cell phone kept ringing. At least then it wasn’t so obvious that the three of us were total strangers who didn’t know what to say to each other.

  Sherlock crawled out of my lap and inched his way over to Sam’s side of the car. She eyed him warily.

  “He won’t hurt you,” I said. “He’s just checking you out.”

  Sam smiled weakly.

  “Are you hungry, T.J.?” Suzanne asked a little too cheerfully. She glanced at me through the rearview mirror. I couldn’t tell for sure, but I got the impression she didn’t like seeing Sherlock up on the seat, so I pulled him back onto my lap.

  “I don’t know. Maybe a little.” I should have been hungry. I hadn’t eaten since the bus stopped for a break in Mason City. But my stomach was turning somersaults.

  “I had thought we’d stop at a restaurant here in Cedar Rapids before heading back,” Suzanne said. “But maybe we’d better go all the way to Clearwater first, so we can drop your dog off.”

  “Aw,” Sam groaned. “We don’t have a Red Lobster in Clearwater.”

  “No, but we have other restaurants,” Suzanne said.

  “What do you like, T.J.?”

  “Anything,” I said. “I’m not picky. Except for eggs. I don’t like eggs.” Hopefully Suzanne wouldn’t make me a nice big scrambled egg breakfast tomorrow.

  “Do you like crab legs?” Sam asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve ever had them.”

  “You’ve never had crab legs?” Sam shrieked.

  “Well, maybe once. A long time ago. I don’t remember.” I was virtually positive I’d never had crab legs.

  “Crab legs are my favorite,” Sam said. “What’s your favorite food?”

  “Chili cheese burritos,” I said. When Sam looked at me blankly, I added, “From Taco Bell.”

  “Oh,” Sam said. “We don’t go to Taco Bell very much.”

  Well, I didn’t go to Red Lobster very much. In fact, I wasn’t sure I’d ever been to a Red Lobster.

  Sam and I kept sort of glancing at each other out the corners of our eyes, but we were both trying not to be obvious about it. I wondered if she was thinking the same thing I was: This girl is my sister? It was pretty obvious we weren’t anything alike. For one thing, she was a girly girl; I wasn’t. We hadn’t been on the road ten minutes before she whipped out a comb and small mirror from her purse. I don’t even own a mirror or a purse.

  “My hair is such a mess!” she whined.

  “Looks fine to me,” I said. I saw Suzanne smile a little in the rearview mirror.

  Sam spent the next fifteen minutes fussing with her hair, and even then she still wasn’t happy. “You’re so lucky you have short hair,” she said to me. She examined herself in her tiny mirror, moving it up and down to get a look at herself from all angles. “Maybe I should cut my hair like yours?”

  She had to be kidding. There’d be no telling us apart if she did that. “I’m actually thinking of growing mine out,” I said.

  “Really?” Sam squealed.

  “Yeah,” I said, though I had absolutely no intention of growing my hair out. I use Joe’s clippers and shave it down every few weeks. It’s easy to deal with, and well … Joe and I don’t have money for regular haircuts.

  “I think you’d look nice with longer hair, T.J.,” Suzanne put in. “Of course you wouldn’t have to wear it as long as Sam’s, just long enough to frame your face a little. Give you more of a feminine look.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said. I was tired of talking about hair.

  But none of us could come up with anything else to talk about, so we rode in awkward silence for the next few miles. I wondered how much longer it would be until we got to Clearwater. I felt like the weird new relative that nobody knew how to deal with. Of course, I was the weird new relative nobody knew how to deal with.

  Sam reached over and patted the top of my dog’s head. “Your dog’s name is Sherlock, right?” she asked. “Just like my cat.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “That’s so bizarre that we both named our pets Sherlock.” Sam smiled as my dog licked her hand.

  “Coincidence,” I said.

  “You think it’s a coincidence we both named our pets Sherlock?”

  “What else could it be?”

  “Well,” she smiled. “We’re twins, aren’t we? Twins usually have a kind of psychic connection between them.”

  Sure. Whatever.

  More awkward silence. But I was starting to see signs for motels, fast food restaurants, and gas stations in Clearwater now. Twelve miles ahead. Then seven miles. Then two miles.

  “Here we are,” Suzanne announced as we passed the city limits sign.

  Population 8,245. I’d never lived in a town that small. Not that I remembered, anyway. I had, of course, lived the first three years of my life right here. But nothing looked or felt at all familiar to me. I stared out the window as we passed a car dealership … a Hardee’s and a Pizza Hut … a bank … a school.

  “Is that where you go to school?” I asked Sam. Was that where I would’ve gone to school if—
>
  “No. That’s the Catholic school,” Sam said.

  We turned into a residential neighborhood. The houses were newer than the houses in Gram’s neighborhood. Suzanne made two more turns, then pulled up in front of a small two-story blue house with a FOR SALE sign in the middle of the yard.

  “This is where we live,” Sam said.

  “For another four days anyway,” Suzanne said, turning off the ignition.

  We all got out of the car, but I just stood there with Sherlock and all my stuff and stared at the house. It was bigger than Gram’s house. Cheerier, too. But that was only because there were flowers out front.

  “This is where—” The words caught in my throat.

  “Where you used to live?” Suzanne finished for me. “Yes.”

  I had no memory of that. None whatsoever.

  Chapter Eight

  It may have been a mistake to let Sherlock off his leash when we got inside the house. The biggest cat I’d ever seen in my life popped out from behind the couch and started prowling around him.

  I am not a cat person, but Sherlock walked right over to that cat and tried to make friends with it. The cat arched his back and hissed.

  “Sherlock!” Sam and I both screamed at the exact same time. I looked at her and she looked at me. That was weird.

  My dog dropped to the floor and lowered his head in shame, but no one was mad at him. It was that stupid cat. Sam tried to grab her cat, but he slipped out of her grasp and scurried away.

  “It may take a while for the two of them to get used to each other,” Suzanne said. “Our Sherlock isn’t used to dogs.”

  “And my Sherlock isn’t used to cats,” I said, trying to comfort my dog.

  “They’ll be fine once they get to know each other,” Sam said. “So does this house seem more familiar now that you’re inside? I mean, do you kind of remember living here?”

  “Not really,” I said. I glanced around the small living room, taking in the piles of moving boxes, the brown couch, the end tables. Their furniture looked a lot nicer than our furniture. I paused when noticed the wooden rocking chair.

  Did Suzanne rock me in that rocking chair when I was a baby? Did Joe?

  “We’ll show you around real quick and then you can put your things in the den,” Suzanne said. “That’s where you’ll be sleeping. Would you like to change before we go out to eat?”

  I looked down at my white shirt and cut-offs. They were old, but they were clean. “Do you want me to change?” I asked.

  “It’s up to you,” Suzanne said. “I think we’ll probably just go grab a pizza.”

  Well, if it was up to me, I wasn’t changing. “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Maybe once you’ve seen the rest of the house, it’ll start to feel more like home,” Sam said.

  Home? Not likely, I thought as I picked up my duffel bag.

  Sam and Suzanne gave me a quick tour of the first floor. Beyond the living room was your basic kitchen, bathroom, and family room. Every room except the bathroom was piled with boxes.

  They led me up the stairs to a hallway piled with even more boxes. Jeez! How much stuff did these people have? When Joe and I moved in with Gram, everything we owned fit in the camper on the back of our truck.

  The upstairs walls were bare, but I could tell by the holes in the walls that there used to be pictures hanging on both sides of the hallway. Lots of pictures.

  Suzanne stopped abruptly in front of a closet. “I want to show you something, T.J.,” she said.

  “Oh! Good idea, Mom,” Sam said as Suzanne slowly opened the door to the linen closet. They both stood back to watch my reaction.

  I didn’t get it. The closet was empty.

  “Look,” Sam gestured toward the inside of the door. “Proof that you lived here.”

  I stepped closer and peered at the door. There were pencil marks on it. Two columns of them. The marks in the outside column started at about my thigh level and went three quarters of the way up the door. They were labeled “Sam: 9 months,” “Sam: 15 months,” “Sam: 18 months,” etc., all the way up to 13 years. Which reminded me, I was thirteen, too. Not twelve.

  There were fewer pencil marks in the other column. They started at about the same place as the first marks, but they stopped below the doorknob. They were labeled like the other one—“Sarah: 9 months,” “Sarah: 15 months,” “Sarah: 18 months,” “Sarah: 2 years,” “Sarah: 2 ½ years,” and “Sarah: 3 years.”

  I bent down to take a closer look and my duffel bag fell off my shoulder. I touched the tip of my finger to the “Sarah: 3 years” mark. Was this me? Was this was how tall I was when Joe took me away?

  “You used to love to get measured,” Suzanne said. “You had a toy tape measure and you’d bring it to me and say, ‘Mommy measure.’”

  Joe and I never lived anywhere long enough to mark how tall I was on the inside of a door. I had no idea how tall I was when I was six or seven or ten years old.

  Does it really matter? I asked myself. Suzanne and Sam were moving out of this house in four days. They weren’t going to take the door with them, so after this week, no one would ever remember how tall Sam was when she was six or seven, either.

  I stood up and grabbed my duffel bag. “Well, where did you want me to put this?” I asked.

  “That’s the den right behind you,” Suzanne said.

  “My room’s right next door,” Sam said. “Mom’s room is over there.” She pointed across the hall. “And the bathroom is across from my room.”

  “Can I use the bathroom?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Suzanne said. “You don’t have to ask.”

  I left my duffel outside the den, then went into the bathroom. It was pink. Pink walls, pink carpet, pink toilet. Just like the bathroom I saw in my head when Sam showed up at my house. There was a white dish by the sink that had little pink soap pieces that were shaped like shells, and a pink basket with tubes and ointments next to the soap. No ballerina picture on the wall, though. There wasn’t anything on any of the walls except a mirror above the sink and two towel racks across from the toilet. Did I really remember this bathroom?

  No way. I was three years old when I lived here. I couldn’t possibly remember anything from that long ago.

  When I came out of the bathroom I had a perfect view right into Sam’s room. She wasn’t in there, but man, she was a slob. Like Joe. She had clothes, books, papers, and shoes strewn all over her unmade bed, a pile of boxes, and the floor. A fancy blue dress hung from the top of her closet door. Whoa. My black dress pants weren’t going to look very dressy next to that. But that was okay. At least they’d be comfortable.

  Suzanne came up behind me. “Would you like to call your dad before we go to dinner?” she asked. “To let him know you got here okay?”

  I did want to call him, more than anything. But not in front of Suzanne. “Can I call him when we get back?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Suzanne said. She actually looked a little relieved. “I think we’re all pretty hungry.”

  I followed her down the stairs and found Sam sitting on the floor petting her cat with one hand and my dog with the other. My Sherlock didn’t normally like strangers, but he sure seemed to like Sam. He was licking her hand and everything.

  “Are we going now?” Sam asked, pulling herself to her feet. Sherlock sniffed her ankles and sort of danced around her, wagging his tail like he wanted to know where we were all going.

  “Yes,” Suzanne said. She grabbed her keys from her purse. “Where do you want to go, Sam?”

  “I thought we were going for pizza,” Sam said. “That’s what you said before.”

  Suzanne looked at me. “Is that okay with you, T.J.?”

  “Fine.” I shrugged. I didn’t really care. I gave Sherlock a good-bye hug and kiss, then followed Suzanne and Sam back out to their car.

  The pizza place was decorated in a medieval theme. There were pictures of knights and coats of armor on the wall, and the pizzas had names lik
e the Excalibur and Guinevere’s Garden Special. Joe would’ve loved it. I felt an ache in my chest.

  “What’s your favorite kind of pizza, T.J.?” Suzanne asked once we all had paper menus.

  “I don’t really have a favorite,” I said. I seriously doubted they’d want to order bacon and pineapple. Most people thought that was weird.

  “Can we get bacon and pineapple?” Sam asked. “That’s my favorite,” she told me.

  No way.

  “T.J. may not like bacon and pineapple, Sam,” Suzanne said.

  “No, bacon and pineapple is fine,” I said, staring at my menu.

  When the waitress came back, we ordered a large bacon and pineapple. Then we were out of things to talk about again. Was it going to be like this the whole week? Nobody knowing what to say?

  “So,” I said, patting my hands against the table. “What all is going to happen while I’m here? I know you’re getting married on Saturday and I know you’re moving on Sunday. Is there anything else I need to know?”

  Suzanne and Sam looked at each other. “Well, my folks are coming tomorrow,” Suzanne told me. “They live in Florida, so we’ll have to go back to Cedar Rapids and pick them up at the airport. Do you remember your Grandma and Grandpa Sperling?”

  I had a Grandma and Grandpa Sperling? “No,” I said, slurping my pop. But as soon as I said it, I flashed on this huge, burly guy with whiskers who used to let me stand on his feet and we’d walk around the room like that. Was that Grandpa Sperling? Or was that Grandpa Wright, Gram’s husband? Grandpa Wright died when I was little, so it could have been either one.

  “Well, you’ll meet them tomorrow,” Suzanne said. Her smile seemed a little strained. “They’ll be staying at the house with us, so they’ll be there with you and Sam Saturday night when Bob and I are at the hotel.”

  If I remembered right, Bob was The Fiancé.

  “And lucky you,” Sam said, patting my arm. “You’ll get to meet all of Bob’s relatives tomorrow, too.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Suzanne said. “Mom’s having everyone over for a barbecue tomorrow night.”

  “At your house?” I said, wondering just how many people everyone was. I also wondered whether Grandma Sperling knew about all the boxes that were piled all over Suzanne’s house. Where were they going to put everyone for this barbecue?