The Dollar Kids

  “Yeah,” said Coach. “That’s why the Busy Bee started offering tailgate boxes. The boxes have a sandwich, macaroni salad, and a basketball-shaped cookie. Plus, ten percent of the proceeds go toward the basketball team. I feel bad. I probably should have let you know this was coming.”

  Mum heaved a great sigh.

  “Thanks, Coach,” said Dad. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  “Sorry, Mum,” said Anneth when Clem had hung up. “I guess I’ve been too busy this week to notice that things have gotten that bad.”

  “I realize now that I’ve been seeing the tailgate boxes at games,” Lowen said. “But I didn’t even think to ask what they were.”

  “It’s not your fault!” Mum said. “You have your lives to live here in Millville. You shouldn’t have to be thinking of the next big roadblock Virginia Corbeau or Mr. Avery is going to put in our way.”

  “I don’t get it. Without the Dollar Kids, there wouldn’t even be a high-school basketball team,” said Clem.

  Dad agreed. “If more Dollar Kids leave, there won’t be a Central School. As it is, this town and several others should have merged their schools, made one consolidated school. But folks here want things to stay the way they’ve always been.”

  “No kidding,” Anneth said.

  “I can help,” said a quiet voice.

  The family erupted out of their huddle to see Dylan standing in the doorway. How long had he been there? Had he been listening to the entire conversation?

  There was an awkward silence and then Mum said, “We’ll take all the help we can get, Dylan. Come. Join us.”

  “I’m free after school,” said Dylan, coming closer but still standing. “I could make deliveries.”

  “Deliveries?” asked Mum. “But don’t you have after-school activities?”

  “I heard you quit basketball,” Clem said.

  “I had to.”

  “Forget about deliveries,” Lowen said. “You should come back to the basketball team, Dylan. You’re good. The team needs you. Heck, I could quit the team and start making deliveries.”

  Dylan looked down. “I know where everyone lives,” he said.

  “The town’s not that big,” said Lowen. “I can learn.”

  “That aside, I’m not sure deliveries could compete with these tailgate boxes,” Dad said.

  “There’re lots of old people who aren’t able to go to the games,” said Dylan. “Like Mrs. Lavasseur, and Mr. and Mrs. Owens.”

  Lowen remembered Mrs. Lavasseur — she was the one who liked that French pie: tour —, tour — ? He couldn’t pull the name of it.

  “Some don’t get out a lot,” Dylan continued, “especially in the winter. Seems like they might like to have a pasty delivered.”

  “That’s a good point, Dylan,” said Mum, her face scrunched with the effort of calculating. “And offering free delivery might help with those holdouts who are afraid that Virginia Woolf will see them stepping foot in here.”

  “Virginia Woolf?” asked Anneth.

  Mum laughed. “I meant Virginia Corbeau. But sometimes I do feel as if she’s the wolf at the door.”

  Dad, still pondering the logistics of Dylan’s proposal, interrupted: “Do we really want to offer free delivery?”

  “It seems like the only way to compete,” said Clem.

  Dylan lifted his head and looked Mum right in the eye. “I need a job, Mrs. Grover, and because I’m only twelve, delivery is the only real paying job that I’m allowed to do. By law, that is.”

  “By law?” asked Dad.

  “Yeah, kids my age have always been allowed to make deliveries so they could get jobs as paperboys — or girls. Only not that many people get the paper anymore.”

  “I think you have an idea worth considering,” Mum said. “Mr. Grover and I will talk about it — see if we can pay to have food delivered — and I’ll get in touch with you either way.”

  As if he were releasing a heavy load, Dylan’s shoulders dropped and his face lit up. Lowen wondered again about Dylan’s family situation. He couldn’t imagine that he needed money living with Mr. Avery. From the looks of his house, Mr. Avery seemed to be the only one in town with any money at all. Dylan said his father was working for another mill. . . . Did his dad need extra money? Would he really bother his twelve-year-old son for help with his bills? And what about his mother? He’d said that his mother was gone. Did that mean she was living somewhere else or . . . ? Lowen suddenly recalled the argument he and Dylan had had in the gym, the one in which Dylan defended heaven (and called him pathetic). Of course, he thought. Dylan’s mother must have died.

  Mum gave Dylan an encouraging smile.

  Lowen was glad.

  “Yikes! I got to get to basketball practice!” Clem shouted, and that was the end of the family meeting.

  Lowen routinely took a shower at home after basketball practice. But on this particular day, he was greeted with a large pool of water on the cold tile floor. His first thought was that Clem had been careless, but that didn’t make sense. Clem didn’t shower until after his practice. And Anneth, who frequently complained of having to share a bathroom with two slobs, wouldn’t have left water on the floor.

  Looking up, he spotted water dripping from the ceiling and a large stain similar to the one that had formed over the kitchen after the pipe broke.

  “Dad! You better get up here!” he shouted.

  After examining the dripping water for a moment, Dad directed Lowen to turn the water valve off the way Dylan had the last time something like this happened.

  But when Lowen returned to the bathroom, the water was still dripping. “Did you turn it in the right direction?” his father asked.

  “I think so,” he said. “Righty tighty.”

  “Then why is the water still coming?” Dad asked. If anything, it was dripping faster.

  “Maybe it’s not a leaking pipe,” said Anneth, joining them in the bathroom.

  Dad thought for a moment and then walked downstairs and outside. He didn’t even stop to put on a jacket or boots. The kids followed.

  Looking up, they could see the likely problem. Heaps of snow and ice had collected on the roof over the bathroom.

  “It must be melting into our bathroom,” said Anneth.

  “But it’s freezing out here.” Lowen rubbed his hands over his bare forearms. “Why would it melt?”

  “The rising heat from inside the house,” said Dad. “I’m guessing that there’s not enough insulation to keep the heat inside and prevent the ice from melting.”

  “What do we do?” Anneth asked.

  “We’ve got to find a way to get the snow and ice off the roof,” said Dad, “or we’re going to have another ceiling falling down on top of us.”

  Lowen looked over at Field’s Funeral Home. He could tell that they used some tool to remove the snow on their roof’s edge. He shared this observation with his father, who sent him over to Field’s to find out what it was.

  After slipping on his boots and jacket, he walked around to the Fields’ back door and rang the bell. No one answered, though Lowen was quite certain he could hear voices downstairs and thought they might be coming from the serving kitchen. He opened the door just a crack and called out, “Hello?”

  Still no one answered, but certain now that he could hear someone talking, he let himself in, slipped off his wet boots, and called out once more, hoping he wasn’t interrupting a conversation between Mr. Field and the loved one of a newly dead person.

  No answer.

  He followed the sound down the long hall and into the viewing room on the left. There wasn’t a coffin in the room, and Lowen could see, for the first time, that the paneling on the viewing wall hid a cupboard at one end. Inside the cupboard was a sound system and a control panel. Lowen recognized the radio program that was currently being broadcast through the speakers — it was the same news program his father liked to listen to from time to time. He stood there and tried to figure out what all of the buttons
on the panel could possibly control.

  Without Lowen touching anything, the paneled wall began to move. Lowen jumped back and prepared to run.

  “Why, hello there!” said Mr. Field as the wall opened to reveal an elevator. Mr. Field was pushing a closed coffin on a rolling cart. “I didn’t expect to see you here, Lowen.”

  “I didn’t expect to see you here, either! I mean, not in a hidden elevator.” It felt funny to be talking in such a normal way with a coffin between them.

  “Yes, well, we do try to keep the nuts and bolts of the operation out of sight. We need the elevator to get the coffins upstairs.”

  “I never thought about it,” Lowen said, but it was clear now that a coffin couldn’t be carried up those narrow basement steps.

  “We operate all sorts of things from this paneled wall.” Mr. Field walked over to the cupboard, switched off the radio, and turned on soothing organ music. Then he turned a knob that changed the overhead lighting from a bright yellow glare to a soft pink glow.

  “Cool!” said Lowen.

  Again Mr. Field adjusted the sound system, changing the music to some sort of singing, a deep rhythmic sound that was less familiar to Lowen. “What’s that?”

  “Greek monks chanting,” Mr. Field said as he turned the lighting from a rosy pink to a sea blue.

  “Eerie.”

  “I like this one.” Mr. Field switched the chanting to a more familiar type of music, a deep and soulful sound that opened something up in Lowen’s belly, lifted his heart, and sent vibrations pulsing through his veins.

  “That’s a cello!” Lowen whispered as the string sound climbed higher.

  “Good for you,” Mr. Field said. “Which reminds me, have you heard Luna Muñoz play?”

  Lowen nodded, not trusting his voice.

  “The family of the deceased — of Mr. Rossi here,” he said, tapping the top of the coffin, “have asked her to play at the service. Mr. Rossi was postmaster here in town for many, many years. It should be a packed house. But,” he said, shaking his head, “I bet you came over here for reasons other than a friendly chat about Mr. Rossi.”

  Lowen explained about the roof leak, and Mr. Field told him about the long-handled rake he used specifically for pulling snow and ice off the shingles. “You’re welcome to borrow it, but would you mind going out to the garage and getting it on your own?” he asked. “This is a three-coffin week for me.”

  “No problem,” said Lowen. He headed down the stairs to the basement, past the embalming room, and out to the garage. There was the big black hearse and the enormous refrigerator. He recalled Mr. Field saying that it was a three-coffin week and wondered if either of the other two bodies was currently stored in there. He was tempted to open the door and peek. What would he see? The tops of heads? The bottoms of feet? He didn’t think Clem could ignore him at dinner if he told the story of opening the funeral home fridge. He wrapped his fingers around the handle and . . .

  Stopped.

  It wasn’t that he was scared. It really wasn’t. It was that one minute his brain thought of the dead as something creepy — stiff blue bodies, half-dead zombies, ghosts — and the next minute he was remembering that the dead are someone’s loved ones, someone’s son or sister or friend.

  A new Abe comic came to mind. He imagined Oliver Jensen as having a similar kind of split brain — only he was realizing that the living had been someone’s loved ones.

  The rake worked well. The Grovers kept the snow and ice off the roof of the Albatross, but a week later, when Mum returned home from the shop, she reported that the gutter had fallen off the front of the house and was lying in the front yard.

  “Water must have been dripping and freezing inside the gutter,” said Dad during a Skype call. Once again, he had to work on the weekend. “And the weight was too much. Though you’d think that everyone would be having this problem.”

  “It’s probably just one more thing that wasn’t installed properly,” said Mum, who had saved a piece of the gutter for Dylan. Now, in addition to all of the jobs they had put on the to-do list in June, she had added repair dining room and bathroom ceilings and replace all the gutters. The only thing they had crossed off was eradicate mold, though the bathroom tiles had still not been replaced. The way Lowen figured it, they had about three and a half more months to finish everything on their list. Was that even possible?

  After dinner, Anneth pulled out her sketches of refashioned clothing and spread them out on the table. Whereas before she had gotten her ideas from the Internet, she was now experimenting with her own designs. She had fashioned a dress from a man’s hunting jacket and a scarf from a fisherman’s sweater. And her sketches? They weren’t half bad. Three faceless girls stood together, one with her toes turned in, another slouching with her hand in her pocket, and the third standing sideways, her chin tilted in such a way that you knew this girl had the most confidence.

  “Wow,” Clem said, pausing on his way out the back door. “You can tell the girls’ personalities just by the way they’re standing.”

  Mum leaned over to look. “We have another artist in the family!” she said.

  The comments made Lowen feel strange . . . as if he’d given something away — something precious.

  “Thanks,” said Anneth, “but I wish I could draw faces. All of my models look the same.” She turned to Lowen. “Will you help me? Will you show me how to draw expressions?”

  “Wonderful idea!” Mum said, heading into the kitchen to finish the dishes. “Lowen has always been able to capture the essence of a person in their face.”

  Lowen allowed his own face to distort into a decisive and emphatic NO. He hadn’t drawn anything but the Abe comics for ten whole months now. In this one small, probably ridiculous, way, he had honored Abe. On top of all of the other hard feelings he had about Abe’s death, he didn’t want to feel weak, too.

  “Please, Lowen?” Anneth asked.

  Did Mum or Dad put her up to this?

  “I’ve tried watching videos, but my girls’ expressions make them all look like paper dolls. It’s the angle of their eyes, right?”

  Her question seemed sincere. He’d had the same trouble when he made his first comics. Every character looked the same.

  It occurred to him that by refusing to help Anneth, he was being just like Clem. He was withholding. Would she think it was because he didn’t want her to become a decent artist? (Was that why Clem didn’t want to show him how to play soccer? Was it Sami’s scarcity principle again? Was there only enough room in a family for one athlete, one upstylist, one artist?)

  “I used to think that all of a person’s personality came from the eyes, too,” he said, coming closer. “But in cartooning, which may be different from drawing more realistic faces, the feelings are shown more with the mouth.”

  “The mouth? Really? Like in the shape of the lips?”

  He paused, started to speak, paused again.

  “Here,” she said, thrusting the pencil into his hands. “Show me.”

  The way she insisted reminded him of Abe: Draw a better ear, draw action lines, make things go flying more. The snake rose to his throat.

  He took the pencil.

  He sketched two identical faces with two identical eyes and noses. Then on one face, he drew a mouth that was sort of smirky, with one side higher than the other. He added an eyebrow that lifted up on the same side. On the other face he drew a wide smile, with a couple of laugh lines. Not bad!

  “Cool! The eyes almost seem to be twinkling, even though you didn’t touch them!” Anneth said.

  Lowen straightened and twirled the pencil in his fingers. He wondered if his own eyes were twinkling, too; drawing those two faces for Anneth had been like drinking a tall glass of cool water on a sweltering day.

  He returned to his room and, pulling out his unused sketchbook, decided to take one more sip. Sure, drawing his old Phenom comics brought on horrible memories, but maybe he could satisfy his itch by drawing something else. S
omething entirely unrelated. Recalling a challenge his art teacher used to give him, he drew a random squiggle. What did this look like? How could he incorporate the scribble into a drawing?

  The line sort of looked like a man lying down, he decided. Like his dad, the last time he was in Millville. “I’m glad it’s impossible to get this chair up to your room, Clem,” Dad had said as he stretched out in the brown corduroy recliner and rested his eyes. “I’ve become accustomed to its comfort.”

  The truth was, Dad almost never relaxed. Ever since they moved into this house, all Lowen’s parents did was try to figure out ways to keep the Eatery running in order to earn the money to make the repairs to the house. So far, not so good.

  But Lowen had liked seeing the rare contented look on his father’s face and decided now to draw him. While drawing the chair, it occurred to him that it might be more fun to make this picture cartoony rather than realistic. He exaggerated the puffiness of the chair, his father’s belly, the droopiness of his eyelids, and his smile.

  His pencil darted up and down, in and out, like a puppy rediscovering all its favorite places at a park.

  “You’ve done a caricature!” said Mum when he showed it to her.

  Lowen recalled a man at the Flintlock school fair who drew funny drawings of people and remembered that he had called them caricatures. The name reminded him of the word characters. He smiled and wrote Dad Chillin’ at the bottom.

  Mum laughed.

  “May I have this drawing, Lowen?” asked Mum. “I know just what to do with it.”

  Later that night, Lowen watched some videos on how to draw caricatures and realized these types of drawings had a lot in common with comics. Both required fewer lines and used exaggerated facial features to demonstrate emotion.

  While waiting for basketball practice the next day, he took out his sketchpad (what could it hurt?) and drew a caricature of Coach as he dismissed the bus lines. He gave him a large forehead, big ears, and a wide toothy smile. Then he gave him a disproportionately tiny, but muscular, body, as he’d seen other artists do. Around his neck he added a large whistle, and under one arm a basketball.