The girl stomped into the field, ripping wildflowers off their roots with both fists, muttering: Stupid! Nearly twelve and still I got to deal with grown-ups too dumb to see I can do for myself! Did fine with a crazy mama and no daddy, and I don’t need him!
The cat took in her meaning through every pore and trailed her back across the field, drawn as a thirst to water. The wind was picking up, and her hair blew about her angry face. She stormed over the rise and down the hill into the woods, but once inside the little fence she grew still and solemn. She set one fistful of flowers on the mounded dirt and the other against a carved stone beside it.
Hey, Daddy, she told the stone. Sorry we never met. And to the fresh-dug earth she said: Bye, Mama. You got your wish.
The air was heavy and cool and smelled of rain. Winds tossed the treetops, thunder sounded, and lightning veined the sky. Unafraid, the girl roamed the open field and scowled at each of the man’s makings while the cat followed in secret. Near the house she stopped and lifted her nose, as though she caught his scent on the air. She stared straight at his hiding place, then turned suddenly and ran inside. The screen door slammed, and that instant it poured.
1
I’d hoped for better, Henry’s being a heart doctor. A job like that, you’d think he might actually have a heart.
As usual, I pushed the cart down the aisle myself, taking what I needed off the shelves, the new grown-up as useless as those before him. Negative help, as Mama’s friend Manny used to say, negative being less than none. No big deal. Grocery shopping and I were old friends, along with toilet scrubbing, vacuuming, and wash.
Said grown-up—my before-last-Monday-never-heard-of uncle Henry—trailed behind, scowling and muttering, not seeming to know what to do with himself, alternating between keeping five or six paces back like I was contagious and breathing down my neck in the unlikely event I needed him for something. I wondered why he’d claimed me at all.
At first I thought he’d been charitable to adopt me just shy of a foster home and kind to bury Mama, seeing how she wasn’t even his kin. I mean, isn’t that what every orphan dreams of? A big, strong, important man to swoop in at the last hour and say, “Don’t worry, darling girl, I’ll be your new daddy. I’ll take care of every little thing.” Yeah, right.
For the two days I’d known Henry Augustus Royster, my half-uncle on my daddy’s side, he’d been irritation in the flesh—fidgety and frowning, taking his big, grimy hands in and out of his even grimier jeans pockets, rubbing his red-gray beard or the red bandanna tied around his bald head, adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses, eyeing the exits and looking sore when I caught him. Plotting his escape already, I could tell. No different from Lester or Manny, Charlie, Harlan, or Ray. None of them had stuck. Neither would he.
“Be sure to get whatever you want,” he said for the forty-third time. At least he was buying, unusual in adults of my acquaintance. “Anything at all.”
“Okay,” I said, testing him. “Run get me a twelve-pack of beer and a carton of cigarettes. Lights,” I added. “I need to cut down.”
“You don’t smoke or drink,” he scoffed. “You’re only eleven years old.”
“Sneaking up on twelve. And I’ve cut way back,” I said, studying the cereal shelf. “Used to be a real chimney when I was six.”
I suspected he had a good laugh inside him, but it was hidden under an outside as prickly as a cactus. He just glared.
I glared right back. “You wouldn’t know a joke if it bit you on the butt.”
“Is that so?”
“Bet you’re a Cancer.”
“What?”
“Your astrological sign. Sign of the crab.”
“Do tell.”
“Like I said.”
He was big-chested, muscular, and okay handsome for a fossil of fifty-some. He dressed strange for an old man, though: muscle shirts, dirty jeans, heavy boots, a bandanna or rag tied around his bald head, and a ruby stud in one earlobe like a pirate. His upper arms were as big around as fence posts, and he could’ve picked me up easy with one catcher’s-mitt-sized hand. He had a belly, but it looked good on him, made him seem sturdy, like he could stand a storm. He’d be better looking if he laughed, though, and I decided to make it my personal mission to loosen him up.
“I got to be a regular chain-smoker by the time I was eight,” I said, switching the subject back, “but it was cutting my wind, hurting my kickball game.”
Henry smirked.
“Reach me one of those raisin brans on the top shelf,” I told him, pointing up at the cereal boxes. He was more tolerable when he had an activity to distract him, something to do with his hands, like when Mama’d made potholders and ashtrays at the hospital to keep her mind off being mental.
“What else?” he said impatiently.
I headed down the health and beauty aisle toward the shampoos, and felt him take in my scrawny self: jeans, T-shirt, flip-flops, the major mane of curly red hair that no amount of conditioner ever tamed. It was the exact same color as the red parts of Henry’s beard. Okay, so we had one thing in common.
“I’m getting the good kind, since you’re buying.”
“Whatever.”
I took down the pricey brand and glanced back. He’d tossed six or eight more boxes of cereal in the cart, all the raisin bran on the shelf. I’d read artists were weird, but Henry was starting to worry me. Last thing I needed was Mama all over again.
A woman shopper came down the aisle and smiled flirtatiously at him as she passed. He snarled, I swear.
“Regular meat market in here,” I said, loud so she’d hear. “That’s the fourth time that’s happened.”
Like it or not, Henry drew people’s attention. He
