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  Donita buried her head in her hands. “Oh, man, here we go again. Madam Weird is back.”

  “I think any kind of joke could be a knock-knock joke,” Ricky Ray said, and he was the only one who spoke. Now instead of jokes, the fort was filled with an uneasy feeling. “What?” Murphy asked, turning around to look at everyone. “Why’s it so quiet all of a sudden?”

  Logan shrugged. “No reason. Ricky Ray just ran out of knock-knock jokes, I guess.”

  Murphy began pacing the room, her mouth pulled into a tight frown. I wished I could explain to her that you just can’t abandon people for a week and expect them to take you back with open arms. Especially not a bunch of abandoned and neglected kids. We’re real sensitive to it.

  After a few minutes of pacing, Murphy broke into the circle and picked up the Book of Houses, which she shoved into Donita’s hands. “It’s your turn to tell a story, Donita. So quit being mad at me and start talking.”

  Donita took the book from Murphy, her expression moving from irritation to uncertainty and back again. But she began turning pages, and when she stopped turning pages, she started talking.

  Chapter 16

  I stopped talking to the world exactly one week before I arrived at the East Tennessee Children’s Home. That’s when Mrs. Estep decided she didn’t want to be a foster parent anymore, no matter how much the monthly checks from the state of Tennessee improved her financial picture.

  “What good does it do me to get a check from the state if them children are stealing from me?” I overheard her complain to her best friend, Mary Gaye Gaskins, over glasses of Diet RC in Mrs. Estep’s spotless kitchen. I’d been coming down the hallway to tell Mrs. Estep we needed to take a trip to the laundromat if she expected me to get dressed for school in the morning. When I heard her say that about state checks and children stealing, I stopped dead in my tracks. My arms and legs felt shot full of electricity. She couldn’t mean me and Randy, could she?

  She most certainly could.

  “I feel sorry for the girl,” Mrs. Estep continued to her friend. “It’s that boy’s influence; I don’t doubt that for a minute. Why, he’s in trouble over at that school every other day. Tardy for class, stealing some child’s pencil, not doing his homework.”

  “I don’t know how you put up with it,” Mrs. Gaskins said. “I’ve always said you were one of God’s angels, taking these children in the way you do. And then they rob you blind.”

  I stood frozen to the carpet. Half of me wanted to rush into the kitchen and beg for forgiveness, and the other half of me was ready to run out the front door, never to darken the entrance to Mrs. Estep’s house again.

  The only thing was, I hadn’t stolen anything from anyone.

  Mrs. Estep sighed in the kitchen. “What breaks my heart is, I’d been saving that cash to take James and Ronnie to Bristol to do some clothes shopping. Seems like so much of the money around here goes to children who ain’t even blood kin to us. But James and Ronnie don’t ever complain about it.”

  James and Ronnie were Mrs. Estep’s sons. Nine and ten, neither of them had the least bit of interest in clothes or in anything besides television wrestling and firing off their BB guns at the neighborhood squirrels. If they had any idea a shopping trip to Bristol was in the works, they’d probably hightail it to the hills with their guns and a portable TV in hand.

  When the front door opened and James and Ronnie themselves bolted inside, a plastic shopping bag dangling from Ronnie’s wrist, I quick made my way back down the hallway. I didn’t want them to know I’d been listening to their mama’s conversation. I heard them turn on the TV in the front room, and then the sounds of them wrestling over something and shouting, “Give me that!” flew through the air. It didn’t take me long to figure out what was going on.

  “What did y’all get?” I asked casually, leaning over the back of an easy chair. “It looks to me like you been out to the mall.”

  James held up several cartridges. “Video games. This one’s called ‘Mortal Victory.’ I’m about to set it up if old fart-breath over here would let me handle it.”

  Ronnie lunged for the game, and the two fell to the ground in another battle.

  I waited until they were done fighting before I said anything else. “So where did you get the money for it?”

  “Uncle Pete,” James said.

  “Collected some cans,” Ronnie said at exactly the same time.

  “Well, it’s always nice to have some extra cash,” I told them.

  James and Ronnie looked confused. Then they smiled, thinking they had gotten one over on me. I left the room, my mind in a jumble.

  I didn’t know what to do first: Go tell Mrs. Estep that it was her own children, not me and Randy, who had stolen her money, or find Randy so we could have a laugh over the whole situation. I decided to go tell Randy.

  “You might as well start packing your bags,” he said after I had finished. “We’ll be out of here by tomorrow.”

  “What do you mean? All we have to do is tell Mrs. Estep what really happened. It’s obvious those boys stole the money and bought themselves new video games.”

  We were sitting on the carpet of the room Randy shared with James and Ronnie. Randy had a sketchbook in his lap. He turned it to a fresh page.

  “Let’s map this one out, okay? You and me, we’re over here,” he said, drawing two Xs and circling them. “And James and Ronnie, they’re over there.”

  He drew two more Xs on the other side of the page and circled them. “Now here’s Mrs. Estep,” he said. With a few quick strokes of his pencil, Randy made a perfect study of our foster-care mother. She sat at the bottom of the page, holding her hands over her heart and looking adoringly toward her two boys.

  “Now it don’t matter to Mrs. Estep if we’re no good or not,” Randy continued, looking up at me. “She didn’t raise us and she can’t be blamed for our bad behavior, though I’ve heard her take credit for your good grades a time or two.

  “On the other hand, she did raise them two boys, and besides that, she’s pretty sure they hung the moon, not to mention the stars. You tell her they stole the money she was saving to buy them some new BVDs and tube socks, and she’ll probably call the police and have ’em arrest you for maligning her boys’ characters.”

  “But if I don’t tell her, she’s going to get rid of us and say we’re thieves.”

  “Honey, she’s going to get rid of us and say we robbed her no matter what you do.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Mrs. Theresa Estep was no saint, and she hadn’t impressed me with the overall quality of her care, but she wasn’t a mean woman to my knowledge. She wasn’t even all that unreasonable, unless the subject was her boys. Besides, Randy had been there for two years and I’d been there over a year and a half, and that had to count for something.

  “I’m going to talk to her,” I told Randy, standing up.

  “Suit yourself,” Randy said. “Like I said, it won’t make no difference one way or another.” He drew a mushroom cloud over the circle that held the two of us together. “Mrs. Estep can’t afford to think ill of them boys of hers. They’re all she has. Us—she can think the worst of us. It won’t cost her a dime.”

  I stomped down the hallway to the kitchen and demanded that Mrs. Estep face the truth: Her boys were the only thieves in that house. As soon as I spoke, I saw her face close to my words like a plant at nightfall, and then it bloomed again in rage.

  “Why, I ought to slap your face,” she hissed at me through clenched teeth. “You better go get your things, missy. I’ll have Social Services over here to fetch you and that juvenile delinquent in there directly.”

  No one could come pick us up until the next day. By then, my eyes were so swollen from crying I could barely see out of them. “I demand a trial!” I screamed as soon as the grim-looking social worker appeared at the door.

  She grabbed me by the wrist. “You hush up now, young lady. You’re in enough trouble as it is.”

  So I
hushed. And I stayed hushed all the way over to the halfway house where they put me and Randy until they found new placements for us, and I stayed hushed on the trip to the East Tennessee Children’s Home in Elizabethton, my sorry-looking Barbie suitcase by my side, an old Raggedy Ann doll stuffed inside it, and Randy Nidiffer’s grandmother’s address in my pocket.

  What was the use of talking if no one was willing to listen to the truth? And why would I talk to people who didn’t understand you don’t just tear two kids apart like a sheet of paper. Me and Randy were family. I was all he had and he was all I had. We had each other, and we had the books. And nobody in the world cared. So why bother to say a word to anyone?

  I didn’t intend to say a word to Donita when I first met her, that was for sure. If I was the quietest person in our room, she was the loudest, cutting up with Kandy and giving Corinne a hard time in a joking sort of way—like why didn’t Corinne ever take us out to dinner at some fancy restaurant instead of making us eat the horrible dining hall food? That first night at dinner, Donita’d described five different business plans she had for getting rich before she turned twenty-five, and you could tell by the confidence in her tone that she was sure she’d be successful one way or another. There was no way on earth someone like Donita could ever understand what I’d been through.

  “You sure don’t talk much,” Donita said to me after I’d been there for a couple of days. She’d been giving me a tour of the Home, showing me all of those mismatched buildings.

  “I hate to tell you, but Corinne likes folks to talk,” Donita said. “You don’t talk, she’s going to send you to this therapist from our church, Dr. Pender. He does Bible therapy, quotes you the Psalms, reads Proverbs. It’s like getting an extra dose of church-going every week.”

  I looked at her. She sounded like she knew a lot about it.

  “Yeah, I went to see Dr. Pender,” she said, reading my expression. “Most people here do. Bunch of crazy kids running around here. I ain’t crazy, but I come from a crazy situation.”

  I didn’t say a word. This is how I discovered that sometimes if you’re real quiet, people will tell you stories that they might not tell you otherwise.

  Donita led me to a spot of grass beside a row of newly sprouted seedlings. “Our dorm planted those flowers,” she said, sitting down. “Me, I love sunflower seeds, so Corinne thought it’d be nice if we planted sunflower plants. Maybe she’s just trying to save some money on snacks, though; I don’t know.”

  She lay back on the grass, her arms crossed behind her head. “By the way, the food here is real bad. Lotta good things about this place, but the food ain’t one of them. Now my mama, she could cook. That’s what I miss most about things, my mama’s cooking. You’d come home from playing outside sometimes, and the house would just smell so good, you would not believe it. Biscuits and gravy, that was my favorite. My sister, Rita, she liked her a good piece of ham and a bowl full of butter beans, and my brother, Russell, he liked pinto beans.”

  I leaned back on my elbows and looked up at the sky. I used to get pintos and corn bread when Granny Lane felt rich and took us to dinner at the K&W Cafeteria. I took in a deep breath and breathed out more quiet.

  “Where we used to live, it was a real nice house,” Donita told me, pulling up a handful of grass and throwing it toward the garden. “Painted white, fresh right when we moved in. It was me and Mama, Rita and Russell, and out back we kept a nice garden. Grew everything in it: beans, tomatoes, squash, lettuce when it got a little cooler. Russell grew sunflowers, too, just like here.”

  Donita propped herself up on her elbows. “I think about that garden every time it’s my turn to come over here and do the watering. Think we ought to put a scarecrow up to keep the birds out. Russell made a scarecrow for our garden. Took Mama’s old, wore-out gardening hat and stuck it to the end of a rake. Then he got some of my cousin’s overalls and stuffed them overalls with hay, and he tied pie pans to the overalls. It was the craziest thing. Made Mama laugh and laugh.”

  It seemed to me that for every word I didn’t say, Donita said five. She reminded me of Randy, who would start telling you a story the second you walked into the room, no matter if it was first thing in the morning or the last thing at the end of the day.

  “Feel free to add a word here and there,” Donita said, reading my thoughts again. “If you got any questions or anything.”

  I shook my head. I didn’t have any questions.

  “You like videos? We rent a lot of videos on weekends. Only G-rated ones, though. They’re real religious here. It’s okay if you ain’t. Nobody’s gonna force you to believe anything you don’t want to. My mama, she was religious, but not as religious as some. Some folks on our street spent every free moment at church. Mama spent all her free time in the garden. Russell too. He loved the outside. He was real special.”

  I turned and studied Donita’s face. She was smiling at her memories, but it was the sort of smile that you might call brave, like it was working extra hard to stay on her face.

  That’s when I said my first words in seven days. “What happened to Russell?”

  Donita stared straight ahead. “You think nine is too young to get real sick, but it ain’t.”

  Then she turned to me. “You should have seen his room in that house. He painted it himself. He was a real good painter. You never would’ve believed how good that room looked.”

  Chapter 17

  That’s exactly how Donita told her story in the fort that day. She talked about her house and Russell’s paintings and how Russell was in the hospital for three months before he died.

  “Leukemia,” Donita told us. “That’s what he had. He was real brave about it, though. He said mostly he was sad about not having more time to paint his pictures. That’s what he loved doing best of all.”

  Donita traced her finger along a picture of a small, white house with a flower garden blooming beside the front walk.

  “On one wall of his room, he painted a scarecrow, just like the one in the garden,” she said, staring hard at that picture. “And on another wall, he painted a row of sunflowers and a big fat sun hanging over ’em. That was my favorite. And on the door, he painted a picture of our entire family, me and Mama, Russell and Rita, all dressed up like Christmas.”

  Then she looked over to Murphy. “Bet you didn’t know I was going to tell such a sad story. You probably wouldn’t have asked if you’d known.”

  “I wish I could see those paintings,” Murphy said to her.

  “Well, I’ll be going back there one of these days to see ’em again myself. Mama’s still in that house, and Rita’s living with a family not three blocks away. Just as soon as Mama can get Russell’s medical bills paid off, she won’t have to work so much. And then she can take care of us better. That’s what happened, case you were wondering. Rita started a fire on the stove one night when Mama was working third shift. Social Services got called in, said Mama wasn’t fit to raise no children if she wasn’t ever home.”

  Donita picked up a magazine and flipped through the pages without really looking at them. “I never saw anything like that fire,” she said after a minute. “It started out this tiny little flame you could probably spit on and put out, except it just sort of exploded before Rita knew what to do about it. Rita, she was all upset about ruining Mama’s kitchen, but me, all I could think about was that Russell would’ve loved to have seen that fire.”

  “He wouldn’t mind your house burning down?” Ricky Ray asked.

  “Nah, that ain’t what I mean,” Donita told him. “He just loved excitement. Loved big, dramatic things, and there ain’t nothing more dramatic than a fire. If you hung around with Russell, you started seeing the excitement in everything. He could find it, boy. He’d find it, he’d study it, and then he’d paint it.”

  “He sounds like he was a born artist,” Murphy said. “You can always tell.”

  “Yeah,” Donita said, nodding. “Yeah, I guess he was.”

  I couldn�
�t tell if Donita was softening to Murphy or not. Sometimes telling a sad story can make you feel more open to other people, but Donita was stubborn. It might take more than Murphy wanting to see Russell’s paintings to make Donita like her again.

  Murphy turned around slowly, examining the walls. “We ought to paint a mural in here,” she said. “I’ve been thinking for a while we ought to do something more in here to give it more of a feeling.”

  “What kind of feeling?” Logan asked, giving Murphy one of those googly-eyed looks he hadn’t had much time to practice on her lately. “How can a fort have feelings?”

  “Any place can have a feeling to it,” Murphy said, beginning to pace. “The library at school has a different feeling than the Elizabethton library, right? My dorm room feels a lot different from my old bedroom.”

  “My old bedroom had brown carpet in it,” Ricky Ray said. “It felt a lot different from the floors at the Home.”

  “That’s not quite what I mean,” Murphy said, stopping by the door and poking her head out for a second. “But imagine if we had wall-to-wall carpet in here. A soft, white carpet and big, silky pillows you could lean back against. You’d feel like you were in an ancient story, ‘Aladdin and the Magic Lamp,’ something like that.”

  “This fort’s fine the way it is,” Donita said. But then her voice softened. “Though I suppose a mural might be nice. Maybe some sunflowers on it.”

  “And a scarecrow,” Ricky Ray added. “I like scarecrows.”

  Murphy turned around and faced us. “Okay, it’s my turn to tell a story. I’ve been trying to think up a good one for a while, and I think I’ve almost got it.” She turned to Ricky Ray. “I’ll need a helper, though.”

  Ricky Ray nodded. “I’m good at helping.”

  Murphy settled herself in front of the easy chair and patted the space beside her where she wanted Ricky Ray to sit down. Then she pulled a folded manila envelope from her back pocket and opened the clasp. Ricky Ray brought her the Book of Houses, and then sat down beside her chair, posture-perfect and ready to be of assistance.