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  “That’s okay,” Ricky Ray said, staring at his sandwich. “I don’t care.”

  Crystal put down her sandwich and pulled a pack of cigarettes from her pocket. “Can I smoke in here?” she asked a passing waitress, who shook her head no. Crystal turned back to us. “You pay half your wages in taxes, but the government don’t let you smoke nowhere,” she complained. “Those guys starting armies out in Idaho are onto something. I can’t blame ’em a bit.”

  “Smoking’s bad,” Ricky Ray said. “You shouldn’t smoke.”

  “Stress is what’ll kill you,” Crystal said, pointing at him with her cigarette pack. “I know a woman, ninety-three years old and still smoking. Never worried about a thing a day in her life. It’s the stress what gets you, not the cigarettes.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “You’ll understand in a few years, little girl. Believe me, it’ll all come clear to you then.”

  Crystal stuffed her cigarettes back in her pocket and lowered her head into her jacket. “Are you cold?” I asked. “Because if you’re cold, maybe you ought to get some hot tea instead of iced tea.”

  “I ain’t cold,” came out her muffled answer. Then she turned her turtle head toward Ricky. “They going to give you a birthday party over there? They ought to. Taxpayers’ dollars are going to support that home. They ought to give little children birthday parties.”

  You ought to give a little child a birthday party, I thought. When I looked at Ricky Ray, he appeared to be shrinking in his seat. I wondered if he was thinking the same thing.

  “You know, one of the reasons I wish your no-account daddy would have come today is that we have something important to talk about,” Crystal said after waving to the waitress for the check.

  Ricky Ray sat up straight again, and I leaned toward Crystal. Had she come to take Ricky Ray home? The very thought made me feel shaky in my hands and knees.

  “I was talking to Mrs. Weston over at the Children’s Home,” Crystal went on, “and, well, I think that if someone wants to adopt you, then they ought to let you be adopted. I’m on disability for my bad knee right now, and your daddy ain’t going to take you, so maybe you ought to have a chance to be with a family that wants you.”

  I put my hand on Ricky Ray’s shoulder. I wanted so bad for him not to cry. I just plain hated the thought of Crystal Jenkins going back home to tell everyone how her little boy bust out sobbing when she let him go.

  But Ricky Ray’s eyes got wide and filled with water, and the big, fat tears trickled down his cheeks. “I don’t really like peanut butter all that much,” he told his mama, his voice breaking with a sob. “So if you ever stop by to take me out for lunch again, maybe you could order me something else.”

  And then he took off like a shot, scattering a flock of ladies heading for their table and sending a waitress reeling back toward the kitchen, her tray going this way and that.

  “You’d think she’d know how old I am,” he yelled as I followed him out the door. He torpedoed up Allen Avenue toward the Home, and I had to sprint to keep up with him. “You’d think she’d know I don’t like peanut-butter sandwiches.”

  Then he pulled up short and turned to point at me. “You know I don’t like peanut butter, Maddie. You wouldn’t forget that.”

  “I never would,” I promised him.

  All the way home, all I could think about was how at least my mama made a clean break and didn’t leave me hanging on the way Crystal did Ricky Ray. At least my mama had had the good sense to leave early and make it clear she was never coming back. Someone really ought to write a rule book, I thought. You know, Proper Etiquette for Neglecting and Abandoning Your Child. And rule one should be: If you’re going, get out early and stay gone.

  So there you have it. My mama did one thing right. Now if she’d only hung around long enough to show me how to sew a simple pair of curtains, I’d be all set, I told myself, ripping out the hem of my curtains for the millionth time, Murphy’s chatter about Olivia’s castle swirling around me like a song I didn’t want to hear but couldn’t get out of my head.

  Chapter 14

  Logan pointed to a picture of a ranch house that someone had pasted into the book. The house was made of red brick, and part of its front was blocked from view by a stand of pines.

  “Man, my grandparents’ house was just like that,” he said, jabbing hard at the picture a couple of times with his finger. “We’d have Sunday dinner over there every week. It was just over behind North American Rayon, off of Sycamore Shoals. Every Sunday as we were leaving, my grandfather would give me and Marcy a dollar. ‘Buy yourself a gum ball,’ he’d say.”

  You could tell it was real important for Logan that all of us knew about his granddaddy’s after-dinner dollars. I thought that was interesting, since Logan’s family seemed like the type that had a whole lot of money, and a dollar couldn’t mean all that much to him. I remember once when Aunt Fonda lost a five-dollar bill, she spent the afternoon in a frantic search. She went so far as to unzip the sofa cushions looking for it. I couldn’t imagine Mrs. Parrish doing much more than checking under a pillow or two before she shrugged her shoulders and went on with her life.

  “He was really great,” Logan continued, shaking his head like he couldn’t believe how wonderful his granddaddy had been. “A great, great guy. Sometimes in the summers, before Granddaddy died, I’d stay over there at my grandparents’ for a week. We’d work on Granddaddy’s truck and go fishing down at the creek. Did you know I know how to tie thirteen different kinds of knots? Granddaddy taught me that.”

  Logan picked up the Book of People and flipped it open to the middle. “This is one I cut out,” he said, pointing to a picture of a man and a boy wearing orange hunting vests and camouflage pants. “The man’s a little young, but it made me think of Granddaddy.”

  Ricky Ray moved in closer to get a better look at the picture. “Did you ever go camping?”

  “No, though once I went on a trip with Granddaddy and Gram in a rented RV. That stands for recreational vehicle,” he explained to Ricky Ray, not sounding the least bit know-it-all about it. “Mostly we hung around outside the house. Actually, once or twice we set up the tent in the backyard, if that counts as camping out.”

  “Sounds like camping out to me,” Donita said, and Ricky Ray nodded in agreement. I expected Murphy to join in with some story about camping with her parents on a big research trip, but she didn’t seem to be paying much attention. She was staring out the window, a faraway look on her face, like she was waiting for the moon to show up.

  “I guess this picture reminds me a lot of Granddaddy because he really liked the outdoors,” Logan said. “He worked outdoors practically all his life.”

  A smile broke over Logan’s face, like he was about to tell us something good, but the sound of sticks crunching and leaves crackling made us all turn to the window. The woods were usually pretty quiet. The rustling of squirrels scampering over the leaves, a crow cawing, those were the only sounds that broke the air most afternoons. Crunching and crackling definitely meant something—or someone—was afoot.

  Sure enough, Mrs. Parrish stood outside the fort, a plate wrapped in foil in her hands. She was wearing a smart, red plaid jacket, black slacks, and fashionable hiking boots. I’ll say this for Mrs. Parrish, she always had a look.

  “Hello there,” she called through the door. “I had some leftover goodies from my book club and thought you children might enjoy them. I’ve been looking for an excuse to come out and meet everyone.”

  “All right!” Ricky Ray yelled and scampered out of the fort. Everyone followed him except Logan, who went back to looking at the ranch house pasted in the Book of Houses. I hung back a second, wondering if I should stay with him, but when Mrs. Parrish called, “Hello, Maddie. It’s nice to see you. Introduce me to your friends,” I didn’t have any choice but to go.

  It was clear to me something wasn’t right between Logan and his mother.
I’d told him once I thought his mother was nice, and he’d said, “She’s okay. She’s good at going to meetings and volunteering at stuff.”

  “How’s she at being your mama?” I’d asked.

  Logan didn’t answer at first. He bent over his magazine to cut out another picture for the books. Finally he looked up and said, “She’d be good at being my mom if I were someone else.”

  When Mrs. Parrish finished chatting to us about school and the weather, she handed Ricky Ray her nice tray of cookies. “Logan can bring the plate back when you’re through,” she said.

  I thought it was strange how she didn’t bother to stick her head inside of the fort just to give Logan a “Hey” before she went back to the house. Come to think of it, I couldn’t recall either of Logan’s parents coming inside and admiring all the hard work we’d done. It was like it was enough for them that Logan had finally participated in a normal activity by building the fort and making some friends. Maybe now that Mrs. Parrish had seen all of us together, she would check “Get L. some friends” off her list and go to work on persuading him to trade his trumpet for a football helmet.

  Ricky Ray turned to go back into the fort, with Donita on his heels saying, “I might as well have that last chocolate-chip one if no one else’s gonna eat it.”

  I was about to follow Donita inside when Murphy grabbed my arm. “Listen, Maddie, I’ve got to go,” she said in a half-whisper. “I want to go see if Corinne will drive me over to Olivia’s.”

  “Why don’t you just go over there after school tomorrow?”

  “I need to do it now,” she said, sounding impatient. “I’m the sort of person that when I need to do something, I can’t wait around.”

  “Well, if you think Olivia Woods is such a big ball of cheese, I guess you ought to go over there then.” I turned to go back inside the fort, feeling a buzz of irritation down to my toes. It was one thing for Murphy to go over to Olivia’s to work on her math project. It was another thing for her to take off without any warning in the middle of an afternoon at the fort.

  Murphy’s grip on my arm grew tighter. “Sometimes when I’m in her house, I feel like I used to live there, a long time ago. I can’t explain it, but that’s how it feels to me.”

  She glanced back at the fort. “Listen, could you just say I forgot a book at school? That I’m going to see if Corinne will drive me over to pick it up?”

  “You want me to lie?”

  “Not everyone understands about houses,” Murphy said, dropping my arm like it had caught on fire. “But I was sure you did.”

  She turned and started running toward the wooded path. “Oh, go ahead and do what you want; it doesn’t matter,” she called.

  When I walked back into the fort, Logan, Donita, and Ricky Ray were sitting on the floor, the books in the center of the small circle they made. The Book of Houses was still open to the picture of the red brick ranch. Logan was threading a shoelace through the eyelets of his left sneaker.

  “Logan showed us a granny knot, which is the easy one,” Ricky Ray told me when I walked back inside the fort. “And a bowline knot, which is hard. And did you know his granddaddy was Lowell Fraley of Fraley’s Feeds? That’s where Logan got his hat.”

  Logan was concentrating on his shoelace. Donita looked up at me and said, “Logan helped his granddaddy build a room onto his house last year. Says it took them a lot longer to build that room than it did to build this fort. Logan helped him lay the brick for it.”

  “That’s neat, Logan,” I said, but he didn’t say anything back. For the first time since we built the fort, I felt something tight in the air, like Murphy had broken a rule by leaving. “Hey,” I said, trying to sound light-hearted. “Murphy just remembered she left a book at school that she needs tonight. She’s hoping Corinne will give her a ride over there.”

  “Corinne’s gonna give her a lecture about responsibility,” Donita said. “That’s one of her favorite ones, along with her lecture on the topic of lying.”

  I sat down in one of the folding chairs and looked at my feet. Then I looked over at Logan. “I spent three weeks at Girl Scouts once before they kicked me out, so I can do a square knot. Probably a thousand times better than you can.”

  A grin fought its way onto Logan’s face. “Oh, yeah? Why’d they kick you out of Girl Scouts then?”

  “Dress code violation. I wore my rodeo belt buckle with my uniform; said it was a real big badge.”

  “Maddie, not really!” Ricky Ray cried. “You really didn’t get kicked out of Girl Scouts, did you?”

  “Maybe I didn’t,” I admitted. “Maybe I just quit out of pure boredom. But I still can tie a square knot. My granny taught me.”

  We messed around awhile tying knots and telling dumb jokes, and the whole time all I could think was Murphy shouldn’t have left that way. That’s one thing I learned from Granny Lane and Mr. Willis. It’s not polite to stop listening right in the middle of a story, especially when someone’s trying to tell you something important.

  Chapter 15

  The fort was starting to fill up with all kinds of stuff, the way I suspect any house will do once you’ve lived in it awhile. There were the chairs that Logan had brought up from his house, always pushed here and there, never in the same spot two days in a row. Donita had gotten permission to take a carpet remnant from backstage at the school auditorium, and we’d laid it out in the middle of the room, careful not to cross its primrose border with muddy feet.

  The north wall of the fort was filling up with pictures we’d pulled out of magazines and taped to it. Everybody had his or her own specialty. I had taken to cutting out pictures of pictures, so that my little corner of the north wall was like a miniature art gallery. I had a tiny blue Picasso painting and a picture of a framed Norman Rockwell I was real proud of.

  Ricky Ray liked frogs, and Logan tore out ads for junk food because he claimed his mama was always on a diet and never had anything fun to eat in the house. Donita had different moods when it came to taping pictures on the wall. For a while she was putting up real fancy furniture, and then she got on a famous people kick. Lately she’d been in a sports car mood.

  Murphy always cut out words. Enchanted. Allure. Soar.

  We had boxes for our stuff, the blue box for the books, and a box Murphy had painted blue with yellow flowers to hold my curtains with the halfway-sewn hems. There was Murphy’s gold trash can filled to the brim with little scraps of paper.

  Some days the fort filled up with other stuff, too. If someone did poorly on a test or had gotten yelled at by a teacher, then a corner would fill up with that person’s sadness for the afternoon. When one of us came in with an A math quiz to our credit or a good day on the soccer field, the walls of the fort seemed to scoop up the joy and spread it around.

  One afternoon the fort got so filled up with Ricky Ray’s knock-knock jokes, I thought if the walls didn’t explode, I surely would. A six-year-old, even one who’s almost seven, will knock-knock joke you to death if you’re not careful.

  “Knock knock!” Ricky Ray yelled from where he was lying on the middle of the carpet. He was wearing the red-and-white scarf I’d bought him at Wal-Mart and looking mighty smart. He sounded cheerful as always, like that lunch with his mama had never occurred. But one afternoon when he was cutting out a picture for the Book of People, he pointed to the blonde-haired model and said, “Now this girl, her name is Amy, and she’s a famous movie star.”

  Don’t ask me why, but that made me sadder than I’d been in a long time.

  “Knock knock!” he called out again, not letting us pretend we didn’t hear him.

  “Who’s there?” Donita, me, and Logan asked in a chorus, our voices dragging down low to the floorboards.

  “Banana!”

  “Oh, man,” Donita groaned. “Not this one again. Ricky Ray, can’t you get a book out of the library, figure out some new jokes?”

  “Just say it, Donita!” Ricky Ray called out.

  Donita sighe
d. “Banana who?”

  “Banana banana.”

  “You’re killing me, Ricky Ray,” Logan said from the armchair. “Please, could we get this over with?”

  “Okay,” Ricky Ray said. “Orange you glad I’m not a banana?” He broke up in a fit of giggles and rolled around on the ground. “Okay,” he said, rolling into a sitting position and catching his breath. “I’ve got another one. Knock knock!”

  Logan, Donita, and me all looked at each other and shook our heads. “Who’s there?” we answered.

  I could tell you who wasn’t there, and that was Murphy. It had been a week since she’d been up to the fort. The math project she had been working on with Olivia, a report on the subject of infinity, was due on Friday, so they’d been working on it every day after school. “I guess that could take an awful long time,” I’d joked when she’d told me about it.

  “Don’t confuse infinity with eternity,” she’d told me, all serious. “It’s mathematically unsound.”

  I had two thoughts when she finally showed up later that afternoon. The first one was it had seemed like an infinite number of days since Murphy had last been at the fort. The second one was Thank goodness. Now Murphy could take her turn answering those dagblasted knock-knock jokes.

  Sure enough, Ricky Ray was the first one to greet her. “Knock knock, Murphy!”

  “Who’s there?” she asked, still standing in the doorway.

  “What’s black and white and red all over?” Ricky Ray asked her.

  “That’s not a knock-knock joke, Ricky Ray,” Logan said. “That’s a black-and-white-and-red joke.”

  “Oh,” said Ricky Ray, looking confused. “Well, the answer is a zebra with diaper rash.”

  “I don’t know why that can’t be a knock-knock joke,” Murphy said. “Is there a rule that all knock-knock jokes have to be exactly the same?”