The Dollar Kids

  Lowen heard Clem come home and head up to his room.

  “Clem,” Lowen shouted from the bottom of the stairs, “do you want the first book or the last in the Winsome trilogy?”

  He could hear Clem’s voice, but he couldn’t discern the answer, so he climbed the stairs to Clem’s room to ask again.

  “I didn’t hear. Do you want —”

  “Get out of here!” said Clem. He was sprawled out on his bed, FaceTiming with Luna.

  Luna’s voice flowed through the speaker. “Is that Lowen?”

  “Uh, yeah,” said Clem, clearly surprised that Luna knew his little brother’s name. “He’s invading my space.”

  “Let me talk to him,” said Luna.

  “Talk to Lowen?” asked Clem. He started to object, but then he leaned over and held out the phone.

  Lowen didn’t know whether to be pleased or mortified, but he did manage to squeak out a “Hey.”

  “So, Lowen,” said Luna. “Clem says you’re an artist.”

  “Used to be!” Clem shouted.

  Lowen nodded, but then realized that Luna might not be able to detect a nod on the small screen and said, “I like to draw, or at least I used to.”

  “Will you draw me a picture?”

  His first reaction was a shrug, but again he figured Luna would just think he’d gone silent. “I wouldn’t know what to draw,” he said, and for the most part it was an honest answer. He hadn’t drawn anything but the Abe comics for nearly ten months; who knew if he even could draw something else, assuming he wanted to?

  “You said my cello was beautiful. Draw that.”

  Lowen hadn’t said that her cello was beautiful, he’d said that her playing was beautiful, but he wasn’t about to correct her — especially not in front of Clem. In fact, at that moment, Clem was holding out his hand, gesturing for Lowen to fork over the phone.

  “I gotta go,” Lowen said. “Here’s Clem.” He placed the phone in Clem’s hand and left the room.

  Lowen woke determined to work on the house. He’d overheard Sami telling Taylor all about the changes Rena was making to their home. They had put down new floors and updated all the lighting. It made Lowen nervous about the Albatross. So far they had accomplished little more than eradicating the mold and painting the interior rooms, and the requirements for fixing up the house had to be met by June.

  “When’s the porch going to be done?” Lowen asked Clem at breakfast.

  Clem looked at his brother as if to say, Who’s asking? But he answered him nevertheless. “I’ve got all of the wood cut, except for the railings — I don’t have the right machine for that.”

  “Can you build the floor this week?” Lowen asked. It would be great to cross this project off their list.

  “Are you the new building supervisor?”

  “I’m just wondering. I can help you.”

  “Unfortunately we can’t do anything until the ground thaws. The porch is built on posts that have to go into the ground.”

  “Can we paint the pieces you cut?”

  “Too cold for the paint to dry outside, and Mum doesn’t want us to do that in the house. So unless you can make me railings for a fifteen-foot porch, we’re out of luck. Anyway, Mum may have to settle for boards.”

  Lots of the porches in town, like their own collapsing porch, were enclosed by wooden panels, but Mum had wanted a porch with railings like the home she grew up in.

  Lowen couldn’t even imagine how railings were cut, but picturing them in his mind gave him an idea. Many homeowners had removed their rotted front porches. (Some folks just left them off and used their back doors. Those houses had front doors that floated above the ground.) Other folks, perhaps inspired by the Dollar Families, had begun to do some repairs on their homes. Those that could replaced their old porches with composite material that didn’t rot. (The Grovers couldn’t afford the composites.) Chances were, not all of those discarded railings were rotten. Maybe they could be salvaged — with the homeowners’ permission, of course? The houses in Millville were so similar in architecture; surely a lot of the porch railings were roughly the same shape and size, too? It was worth a try, at least. Clem would be so surprised.

  But Lowen had another motive for wanting to stay busy. It was the anniversary of Abe’s death. According to Mum, anniversaries often stirred up old grief. Anyway, he was tired of just sitting around, thinking about Abe.

  He threw on his coat and headed out the door to see if he could find old railings. He walked slowly, scanning yards as he walked up Beech and across Church. A couple of front yards still held the detached front steps he’d seen the day they arrived. Stairways leading nowhere.

  Heading down Cedar, he practically crashed into Sami.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  He shrugged. He wasn’t eager to share his idea, which was starting to feel not only improbable but also rather silly.

  “Why are you walking around town?”

  Sami could be so direct. He didn’t want to lie. “I’m looking for discarded porch railings. No one asked me to. I’m just exploring.”

  “I’ll help,” she volunteered.

  Something about the way she said it annoyed Lowen. Like she thought he wouldn’t do a good job without her help. She wasn’t older than he was, and even though she was smarter about some things, it didn’t mean he was stupid.

  “That’s OK,” he said. “I’ve got this.”

  “No, seriously,” Sami said.

  “Thanks anyway!” he said, and walked on.

  Around the corner, covered in snow, was a pile of lumber next to a porchless house. Lowen walked back and forth on the sidewalk, trying to determine whether the pile had railings. He didn’t want to trespass, and he certainly didn’t want to look like he was stealing anything. He’d have to ask. He went up the walkway and knocked on the door. No one was home.

  As he walked by the lumber, he got a little braver and lifted a large board to see what was underneath.

  “What is it you’re looking for?” asked a man coming out of the home next door.

  What could he say? “I thought folks in town might have wood — porch railings, actually — that they’re no longer using.”

  Thankfully, the guy nodded, and didn’t act like Lowen was being stupid or acting inappropriately at all.

  “Have you been to the Board Barn?”

  Lowen shook his head. “What’s that?”

  “Well, some people, like my neighbors, leave their wood in their yard knowing that eventually someone will come along and take what they need. But those that don’t want it lying around take it to the old barn up on Forest Street. There’s all kinds of discarded building materials there. You can help yourself to what you need. It’s all free.”

  “Seriously?”

  The guy laughed.

  “Seriously. I’m surprised you Dollar Families weren’t told about the barn when you arrived in town.”

  Lowen thanked the man and headed up to the Board Barn. It was a large, somewhat dilapidated building that looked more like a warehouse than a barn, but it had lots of random kitchen appliances in the front, so he guessed he was in the right place. It’s funny, he must have passed this building before, but he’d paid no attention.

  “Hello?” he called, but the building seemed to be unattended. There was some light coming in from the windows, but he took the liberty of turning on the lights.

  Like the man said, the building was full of random wood that someone had taken the time to sort according to type and size. In one aisle he passed sheets of paneling, wallboard, two-by-fours, and boards that looked as if they’d been used for flooring. At the back of the building, he found discarded clapboards, shingles, and some trellises. When he turned the corner, he saw what he’d come for — railings.

  As he had predicted, there was a predominant type of railing: square, around two feet long, painted white. The paint was chipped or faded on most, but if there were enough, they’d probably work.

&nbsp
; “Find what you’re looking for?”

  Lowen nearly jumped out of his skin. It was Sami. She was sitting on a pile of wood, her empty wheelbarrow beside her.

  “You knew about this place?”

  She smiled. “Coach showed us.”

  “Are you gathering supplies, too?”

  She shook her head and slid off the wood, then headed toward the door, leaving the wheelbarrow behind. “Just make sure it gets back to our garage.” And with that, she was gone.

  It was near the end of vacation when Lowen finally opened one of the boxes that had come from his old room. At the top were some worn and ragged stuffed animals. He didn’t know what to do with them. He was too old to play with them, but they’d been his companions for so long there was still a part of his brain that believed that they would feel sad and rejected if he threw them out. Maybe he’d give them to Rena to sell, though he couldn’t imagine who would want to buy a rabbit with only one ear.

  Below the stuffed animals were his sketchbooks. His breath caught for a moment as he lifted them out. His first inclination was to throw them all away. Why be constantly reminded of a prior life — a time when instead of being so wrapped up in drawing superheroes, he could have been acting like one? He could have been a superhero to one particular kid.

  The snake inside glided upward, wrapped itself around his heart. Tighter, tighter, tighter. Lowen slid to the floor and made himself open the book lying on top, made himself look inside. He thought, I deserve this pain.

  He found his most recent book, the one he’d been working on the day Abe had died. It was the story, as always, of Phenom (his version of Wonder Boy) and his trusty dog, Globber. In this episode, Phenom was tackling poverty. He was pulling up large mansions and tumbling them into areas where folks needed housing. Since Phenom could turn himself into any natural disaster, folks just assumed that tornadoes were lifting the houses and depositing them in other areas of the city, where several families could live together. (Of course, The Wave was trying to block his progress.)

  Lowen had to laugh at his own naïveté. It wasn’t the drawing that was simple but his thinking. Now that he’d moved to Millville, he knew that transferring a house from one owner to another and expecting life to go on as normal was silly. Sure, the owners of the mansions might collect insurance and build bigger, better homes. They might be fine. But the people who had lived in the poorer neighborhoods would no doubt be fighting over who got to live in the mansions. Even the people who already had homes would probably feel entitled to better digs — just as many of the homeowners in Millville were clearly envious of the fact that the Dollar Families could buy their houses so cheaply, when they themselves were struggling to pay their mortgages.

  Dad stood over Lowen’s shoulder. When he saw that Lowen had his sketchbooks spread out on the floor, he sat down beside him. “Ready to get back to these?”

  “Nope.”

  Dad inhaled. “You’re a sensitive kid, Lowen. . . . I’m worried that you think it should have been you on that day instead of Abe.”

  Lowen had heard all about survivor’s guilt in therapy — when someone feels bad because they survived a trauma when others didn’t. But it didn’t make sense. “I wasn’t even there!” said Lowen.

  “But perhaps you might have been,” said Dad.

  Lowen shook his head. Dad had it all wrong, wrong, wrong, and he didn’t want to talk about it any longer. But his father rarely let a subject drop unless he felt that he’d arrived at a satisfactory conclusion. So Lowen tried to say something helpful, something truthful. “It’s hard to draw now because it reminds me of Abe. It makes me too sad.”

  Dad nodded. “I get that. But you’re sacrificing who you are. I hate to see you bury that part of yourself along with Abe.”

  For a moment Lowen was tempted to tell Dad everything; everything that had happened on that awful day. He was tempted to say that he didn’t have survivor’s guilt but just plain guilt: that because of him, Abe had lost his whole life. It seemed only fair that he lose at least part of his.

  He closed his journal and went to put it back in the box. Below it was another journal, but this one wasn’t his. “Where did this come from?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Dad said. “Mrs. Siskin gave me this journal at Thanksgiving. She thought you’d like to have it. I forgot that I put it in the stack with yours.”

  “I gave this to Abe so he could draw comics, too.”

  “That was nice of you,” said Dad.

  Not really. It was annoyance that had prompted the gift-giving. Abe had been criticizing Lowen’s drawing, trying to get him to make corrections: Globber Dog’s nose was too square; Phenom should have longer arms. Finally, Lowen had gone into his room and brought out this sketchbook.

  “If you’re so clever,” Lowen had said to Abe, “draw your own!”

  Abe had created characters similar to Lowen’s. There was a dog, and a boy, and a villain. Only the names were different. A speech bubble over the boy’s head read, I’m Super Aberacadabra! The name was not a misspelling of abracadabra, but a play on Abe’s name: Abe-racadabra. Abe had been so pleased when he’d come up with it.

  “He wasn’t half bad.” Dad pointed to a dog as Lowen leafed through the sketchbook.

  Lowen didn’t have the heart to say that he’d drawn the dog. Abe was a beginning artist and he couldn’t make his characters come out the way he wanted them to. So he’d ask Lowen to draw an arm, or the angle of a tall building, or the nose of the dog. By the time he’d asked for the dog’s nose, Lowen had been so frustrated by the interruptions that he’d simply drawn the whole thing. He had to admit that “Abe’s” dog looked a lot like Globber Dog.

  “I wonder if Abe would have kept drawing if he had lived,” Dad said.

  Lowen shrugged, but doubted that Abe could have continued. He was too impatient. To become good at something, you had to be willing to live through the maddening time when you don’t have the skills, when you don’t come anywhere close to what you can picture in your head. You try, you struggle, your performance stinks. You fail. A lot. Drawing had taught him that. So had soccer and basketball. (Though he still mostly failed at both of those.)

  There were only a few pages of cartoons. Lowen studied the last one: a picture of another dog, a smiling dog, sleeping in the branch of a tree. The caption read, His bark was worse than his height. He chuckled.

  Abe was funny. And he didn’t care if you made fun of him, either. He laughed right along with you.

  “You know, Lowen,” Dad said, “drawing your comics might be one way of honoring Abe.”

  Ugh. Dad would never understand. But hopefully he’d give up.

  By all accounts, the Cornish Eatery was doing better. Staying open longer seemed to help. People stopped in after the Busy Bee closed and ordered food for take-out, or they sat around the big table in the middle, catching up on one another’s lives.

  In fact, the four tables pushed together, the thing Dad had done to outwit Mr. Avery and his codes, actually made Mum’s shop more popular. Unlike any of the tables at the Busy Bee, the entire garden club could fit around this large table and hear one another clearly. So could the birders and the folks who had begun to help Rena refashion clothes for the fun of it (and for a discount at her store).

  So it surprised them all when during the last week of January, an entire afternoon went by and only two customers had come into the shop.

  The next day there was only one.

  And the day after that? No one. Nada. Zilch.

  That Saturday, in the half hour time block between Lowen’s and Clem’s basketball practices, Dad called a family meeting at the shop.

  Mum set a platter of pasties on the table and sat down with the family. There wasn’t a customer in the eatery.

  Dad cleared his throat. “I called a meeting,” he said, “because, well, something’s changed.”

  Lowen put down the second half of his pasty.

  “Your mom has barely had a customer all week.??
?

  Mum looked down, fiddled with the strings on the front of her apron.

  “We thought one of you might’ve heard something . . . something that might shed some light on this sudden change in business,” Dad said. “A rumor, perhaps?”

  Mum raised her eyes to look at them. “You guys are out and about more than we are. Did someone get food poisoning? Have I offended anyone in town?”

  “Mum, no!” Clem said as the other two Grover kids shook their heads. “You haven’t done anything!”

  “Well, there must be some reason for the change,” Dad said.

  “It’s only been one quiet week,” Anneth said. “Every business has some weeks that are less busy than others.”

  “True,” Mum said. “But there’s usually a reason.”

  Both Clem and Lowen reached for their phones (Lowen’s being a new birthday present from his parents).

  “Leave them alone,” Dad said. “We’re having a family discussion.”

  “I was going to text Coach,” Clem said. Lowen nodded. He’d had the same plan.

  “I said —”

  “Dad,” said Anneth. “If anyone can tell us what’s going on, it’s Coach.”

  His father waited a moment and then gave Clem a nod.

  Clem read a return text from Coach: Busy Bee is selling tailgate boxes.

  Tailgate boxes?

  Dad raised his eyebrows. “Ask him what the heck that means.”

  Rather than keep texting back and forth, Clem decided just to call Coach. Now on speakerphone, Coach explained to the family that once the holidays were over, nearly everyone in Millville attended the high-school basketball games. And they didn’t just attend home games; they followed the Cougars to their away games. And on the days of the week when the Cougars weren’t playing, they drove to watch teams in other divisions — to predict which teams might have the best chance of ending up in the state tournament.

  “But you would think all that driving would increase business,” Dad said. “People like take-out for road trips.”