“I thought …”
“What?”
“Nothing.” Leaving me hadn’t occurred to him. Not today, anyway.
But he knew without my saying it. “I won’t abandon you, Zoë, not intentionally. Some of the legal papers I signed today—” He glanced at the clock on his night table. It was after one in the morning. “Some of the legal papers I signed yesterday insure that if anything unintentional ever happens to me, everything I have belongs to you. Everything. This house, the land, the unsold work. Susan’s on the installment plan only as long as I’m alive.”
I nodded a little and stared into his tired gray eyes. I wanted to believe him, but I’d believed too many grown-ups’ promises, all broken. What grown-ups said and what they actually did never matched or even came close. I tried to be happy for all Henry had done, but I knew he’d change his mind in the end, move on, chump out like all the rest.
“I’m real appreciative for all the money you’ve paid, everything you’ve done.”
He sighed. “I wasn’t asking for gratitude,” he said. “I was trying—”
The phone rang like a shrill voice. Anger flared in Henry’s eyes, and he seemed to forget I was standing there. He snatched up the receiver and held it away from his ear. A raging female shrieked, “How dare you hang up on me, you miserable—” Henry slammed down the phone, wrapped the cord twice around his hand, and yanked that sucker right out of the wall.
Just like that.
I must’ve looked scared, because he glanced at the severed cord and looked embarrassed. “Sorry about that,” he said. “What were we saying?”
“It wasn’t important,” I said. I headed for the stairs so my clear-as-glass expression wouldn’t show what else I was thinking: That if he’d hung up on her, he might hang up on me. “Night, Uncle Henry.”
“Sweet dreams, Zo’.”
“Yeah,” I whispered. “Sweet as they can be.”
4
“Do I get a last request?”
Henry was leaning back in his captain’s chair at the dinner table, his feet in the chair beside him, sipping a cup of coffee. “You have to go to school.”
I poked at my untouched dinner with a fork and didn’t answer. I’d decided on a hunger strike, though Fred had cooked meat loaf, creamed potatoes, and buttered baby peas and I could’ve eaten every bite.
“Did you hear me?”
“I’m not deaf,” I said. “Or dumb.”
“No one said you were.”
“Then I don’t see why I have to go. I tested higher than anybody ever has on those tests. That guidance lady said so. She said I did as well as a high school kid.”
“On some parts, not others.”
“I never had to go before. I learned fine on my own. I can do that here. You can check me.”
“I’m not arguing about this anymore,” Henry said. “We each have our work to do. I’m going to my studio every morning, and you’re going to school. Even if there’s nothing they can teach you, it will be good for you to be with other kids.”
“You don’t spend time with anybody but me and Fred and those stupid sculptures!”
“I don’t claim to be a role model. But I’m responsible for you now. And I’ll be taking you to school at seven-thirty tomorrow morning.”
“You promised you wouldn’t leave me!”
“Abandonment and education are not the same thing.”
I folded my arms across my chest and narrowed my eyes. “I don’t feel good. I feel a fatal and highly contagious disease coming on.”
Henry seemed to be expecting this. “That I know something about.”
He got his medical bag from the top shelf of the hall closet and slipped a thermometer in my 98.6° mouth, took my perfectly normal blood pressure, and checked my angry heartbeat with an ice-cold stethoscope.
“I’ll just leave my bag out in case you’re not feeling well in the morning,” he said, and it took all my willpower not to smack him.
“I have some paperwork to do,” he said then, and headed to his study. He left the door open so he could keep tabs on me.
“I’ll run off,” I whispered when I knew he couldn’t hear. “And you won’t find me.”
I stayed in my room while he worked late. Around eleven, I crept downstairs. He was busy at his computer but turned an ear to the creaking stairs. I ran back up, closed my bedroom door, and stewed in my window seat, plotting my escape. I thought of the cat outside in the weeds. He and I both had experience making ourselves scarce. Henry didn’t understand who he was dealing with. But he’d soon see.
Henry climbed the stairs near midnight, but he didn’t go right to bed. His silhouette stretched black against the light from his windows in the backyard below. His looming shadow gave me the creeps. I imagined myself a condemned prisoner in the Henry Royster Maximum Security Prison, complete with searchlights, sirens, guard towers, and vicious, patrolling dogs. Plus the sheriff had my fingerprints. I was doomed.
Others had tried and failed to make me go to school, starting with Lester when I was six. Fourteen stitches and a perfect, permanent impression of my teeth in his right arm had shown him the error of his thinking. A year and a half later, sixty percent of my track winnings convinced Manny that the school of life was as good as formal education. Charlie liked that I read to his mother, and reasoned that I was learning plenty while I did. After that, none of the others cared if I went to school or spent my mornings reading and writing at home, my afternoons and evenings in the library. They liked having the housework done, and Mama sure wasn’t going to do it. They’d all skipped school when they were kids, so why shouldn’t I? Heck, most of them didn’t even wonder where I was unless dishes piled up in the sink, their underwear drawer went empty, or there wasn’t any coffee to ease their morning hangovers.
Henry was
