The Dollar Kids

Questions filled Lowen’s mind: what would happen if neither Mum nor Dad could find work? Would they move back to Flintlock? Could Mum and Dad get their old jobs back? What about their apartment? Could they get that back, too? Even if the answer to all three questions was yes (which was highly unlikely), he would feel no comfort. He liked his new life — all the Grovers did — and didn’t want to give it up. That made him more determined than ever to keep trying. So during spring break, he completed scraping the lower clapboards. (Dad insisted on going up on the ladder himself when the sun was barely rising.) Lowen used wood putty to plug some of the larger holes in the old porch rails, and he stained the porch floor with Anneth.

  At noon each day, he’d head down to the Cornish Eatery to have lunch with Mum. While they sat at the table together, Lowen would try to get Mom back to her “there’s got to be a way” self. “What if you offered other dinner options?” he asked. “Like deep-dish pizza?”

  “Oh, now, that’s Cornish,” she said, with only half a smile.

  Lowen thought harder. “All right, then, how about stargazy pie?”

  That got a chuckle out of Mum. Stargazy pie was a whole-fish pie with the fish heads poking out of the top crust, staring skyward. All of the Grover kids refused to eat it.

  Lowen knew it wasn’t the solution, but it sure did his heart good to see Mum laugh.

  Just then the door of the shop opened and in came Sami, with Dylan close behind her. “Hey,” she said. “We thought you could use a break from house chores.” She held up a bag. “Dylan has to put these flags on grave sites.”

  “To get ready for Memorial Day,” Dylan added.

  “But Memorial Day’s not for weeks,” Lowen said.

  “I know. But Field’s Funeral has a lot to do to prepare.”

  “Translation,” said Sami, “they have to bury all the people who died over the winter.”

  “I have to get back to the —”

  “No, you don’t,” Mum said. “You need to go do something else for a while. Dad found a used dishwasher today — you can help him install it when he gets back from Ranger tonight.”

  Lowen hesitated.

  “Go!” she said, with a little more fire than he’d seen in a while. He was glad for it.

  On the way to the cemetery, they stopped into Restored Riches so Sami could update her mom on her whereabouts. There were plenty of people poking through the recycled clothing, marveling at the ways Rena (with the help of Anneth) had made the clothing new again. Lowen noticed that a lot of the “junk” that had been left in the house the Doshis purchased — curtains, ribbons, paper clips, lampshades — had found its way into the clothing.

  Along the back wall, there were paintings that Lowen had never seen. He wandered closer. They were acrylic paintings of random objects — and they were good. Really good. He was so intent on studying the paintings, noticing the technique and the details, that he almost tripped over the painter!

  There was Mrs. Lavasseur sitting in the corner of Restored Riches, painting a picture of a chipped cup that was on the shelf in front of her. Somehow she had made the chip the most beautiful part of the painting.

  “I didn’t know you were a painter!” he said.

  She smiled. “And I didn’t know you were a cartoonist!” she said. “That is, until the Firebrand boy brought me the tourtière pie your mom made especially for me. He told me about your caric —”

  “Excuse me,” said a man Lowen didn’t recognize. “I wonder if you could tell me more about that painting over there? The one of the Princess phone on lace?”

  Lowen waved good-bye to Mrs. Lavasseur. He hoped she’d sell the man a painting or two; she was really very good.

  The winter months may have broken records for the coldest temperatures, but April was no doubt in the running for one of the warmest spring months in Millville history. When they arrived at the cemetery, several people were milling around the graves, cleaning off the winter debris and planting spring annuals.

  Dylan led them to a partially underground vault that looked like a little cottage and was built into a hill in the cemetery. The door was shut tight. “The bodies are in there,” he said. At first Lowen imagined frozen bodies piled on top of one another, but then he realized that they were most likely in coffins. He wondered how many coffins the vault could hold.

  “Did you know that the early Saxons were so afraid of ghosts returning to haunt them that they cut off the feet of the dead?” Sami asked them.

  Lowen’s mouth dropped open. “What?”

  Dylan chuckled. “You’re making that up!”

  “I’m not. And some Aboriginal tribes used to cut off the heads of the dead. They thought that the ghost would be so busy searching for its head that it wouldn’t have time to haunt them.”

  Lowen and Dylan just stared at her.

  “I read it in Psychology Today.”

  “Guess I missed that issue,” Dylan quipped.

  “Har, har,” said Sami. She opened up the bag of flags. “We’d better do this systematically or we’re bound to miss some.”

  She divvied up the flags and the cemetery, and then each of them set out.

  Lowen tried to keep his eyes searching for veterans’ headstones — he could imagine how upset the family of a veteran might feel if they visited their loved one’s grave on Memorial Day and there wasn’t a flag — but his eye was drawn more readily to the tombstones of children.

  They were easy to spot: most had pictures carved into them — things like teddy bears, lambs, babies in blanket hammocks, and starry nights. He wondered if any of the kids buried in this cemetery had died in a terrible accident, the way Abe had.

  He’d worked on his Abe comics the night before. He’d decided to start over, trying to draw as realistically as possible.

  All right. The truth. Lowen was going back to the beginning because he had no idea how Abe and Oliver’s story should end. It was particularly frustrating because he had to admit that when it came to envisioning an afterlife, he was no more imaginative than anyone who’d come before him. There seemed to be only two ways to go: one or both of the boys could go to heaven (and what kind of heavenly setting would be right for both Abe and Oliver?), or they were destined to wander around this earth as ghosts. So redrawing the art made him feel as if he were getting somewhere, when quite possibly he was getting nowhere at all.

  “Hey, Lowen! Come check this out!” Dylan was calling him over from a distance.

  Lowen quickly scanned the area to make sure that he hadn’t overlooked any of the veterans’ graves and then headed over the small hill to where Dylan was waving.

  He and Sami were standing next to an open grave. A large hole had been dug — large enough to bury a cement box (also known as a vault) that would contain and protect the coffin. A few hundred feet away, they could see the vault that would be lowered into this grave; it was secured on the back of a flatbed truck. But none of the graveside workers were in sight.

  “The diggers probably went to lunch,” said Dylan.

  “I thought the hole would be deeper,” said Lowen, looking from the vault to the hole and back again.

  “Graves used to be six feet or deeper, but now they’re only about four,” Dylan said.

  “How come?” Sami asked.

  “Vaults protect the coffins and the body inside. But before people started using vaults, all kinds of stuff could happen: decaying bodies could spread diseases, they could wash away in a rainstorm, and animals could dig them up. So people buried the dead deeper then.”

  “Makes sense,” said Lowen. “But this hole looks a whole lot deeper than four feet, doesn’t it? I mean, I’m five foot eight —”

  “Try it,” said Dylan. “See if it’s as deep as you are tall.”

  Lowen was about to say, Yeah, right. But he didn’t. Instead, he thought about Abe resting in a grave just like this one, and then he squatted next to the hole and slipped down inside.

  The fall took longer than expected. He landed in a c
rouched position, using his hands to stop himself from toppling over.

  “Whoa!” Dylan shouted. “You’re in a grave, Grover!”

  “Stand up. How tall is it?” Sami asked.

  Lowen heard the question, but he couldn’t bring himself to stand up. Instead he lay down on the dirt and looked up at the partially cloudy sky.

  The next thing he knew, Dylan and Sami had jumped into the grave, too, and were now standing over him.

  Lowen spoke softly. “Remember when Mrs. K. told us about tying a string to the toe of a dead person?”

  “The string led to a bell,” said Dylan as he lay down on one side of Lowen, “in case the person was buried alive.”

  “Can you imagine that? Being buried alive, I mean?” Lowen said.

  “I think that would be the worst thing that could happen to a person,” said Sami, lying down on Lowen’s other side.

  All three quietly looked up.

  “Do you think it would be the very worst?” asked Dylan after a few moments. “I mean, would it be worse than standing in front of a firing squad? Or hiding in a room when you know that a killer is looking for you?”

  Again they went quiet, until Lowen’s voice rose up on the thinnest wisp of a whisper: “How about knowing you’re responsible for the death of someone else?”

  He hadn’t known he was going to say it. The snake rose up, threatening to choke him.

  Dylan pulled himself up on one elbow. “That kid?” he said quietly, his words like an arrow. “The one who got shot?”

  Lowen felt a wave of revulsion — not just a single snake, but a whole nest.

  “You?” asked Dylan. “You were responsible?”

  Lowen bit his bottom lip and nodded.

  “No way!” said Sami. “Unless you plotted with the kid who pulled the trigger, there’s no way you had anything to do with your friend’s death.”

  “I’m serious, Sami,” he said.

  But she shook her head. “Kids always think things are their fault. Like when parents get divorced. But it’s not true.”

  “What happened?” Dylan asked softly.

  And so Lowen told them. As the three of them lay side by side, staring up at the cumulus clouds, he told them how Abe had come over to his house that Saturday afternoon. That was unusual. Abe always invited himself over after school, but hardly ever on weekends. Lowen assumed that on weekends Abe did things with his mom, or had piano lessons. And most of the time, Lowen was occupied, too. He was expected to help with the laundry (which was in the basement of their building), or the grocery shopping (which had to be pulled home in a rolling cart), or the light dusting (which was a huge pain because Anneth always had a million things on her bureau). But this particular Saturday he didn’t have to do any of those things because he was still getting over a cold. And therefore it doubly annoyed him when Abe showed up during this bonus time.

  Anyway, on that Saturday, Lowen was sitting up at the kitchen counter working on a new comic — one about a superhero who could read minds. Abe slid up on the stool next to him, looked over his shoulder, made some comment, and then slid down to wander around the kitchen . . . until he popped up a minute later to give his two cents again: What’s so great about reading people’s minds? By the time he reads the villain’s mind, the guy will have shut down the city. You should create a superhero who can reverse people’s thinking. . . . Or one who can muddle a mind so the villain gets all confused and doesn’t even recall the awful thing he’s about to do! “The Unseen Force.” Lowen said these last three words in the same deep voice that Abe would have used.

  “Those are cool ideas,” said Dylan.

  “I know,” said Lowen, “but I didn’t want to draw Abe’s ideas. I wanted to draw my own. I wanted this story to be mine alone.”

  Lowen paused and took a deep breath.

  “Keep going, Lowdown. What did you do?”

  “Abe loved one thing more than hanging over my shoulder, and that was candy. Especially Twizzlers. Strawberry Twizzlers. So I went to my room, pulled out my birthday money, and sent him to the store to buy one of those gigantic bags of licorice.” Lowen waited until he could speak again without crying. “I was actually happy that it was taking him so long to return.”

  That was all he could say.

  It was all any of them could say. But Sami placed her hand on one of his arms, and Dylan placed his hand on his other arm, and they stayed that way until Lowen no longer felt as if the walls of the grave were falling in on him, burying him alive.

  After a time, Dylan hoisted Sami and Lowen out of the grave, then Lowen and Sami pulled Dylan out. They finished putting flags in the holders, and then took off. Dylan headed in the direction of his house, while Lowen and Sami walked toward the Albatross. Rena had texted Sami to say that she had left the younger girls with Anneth, and Sami was to pick them up there.

  “Coach talked me into trying out for baseball tomorrow,” Sami told Lowen.

  Lowen was both surprised and a little hurt. Had Coach really given up on him? “Oh?” he asked, hoping he sounded casual.

  “He said that the team needed me.”

  Then she lowered her voice and added, “He also said that I was too responsible for my own good. That I should relax, take some time to be a kid. Apparently, in his mind, baseball is relaxing.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I told him that most of my mom’s boyfriends don’t stay around long enough for me to relax.”

  “Whoa — what did Coach say to that?”

  “He said” — a smile started on the edges of Sami’s mouth, though she tried to squelch it — “he said he was up for the challenge.”

  It was in that moment that Lowen realized that Coach could one day be Sami’s stepfather, and even though he himself had a perfectly fine father, his feelings of jealousy increased.

  As Lowen and Sami approached the Albatross, they could hear Mr. Field directing, out behind the house. Curious, they wandered out back to check it out.

  Clem and Mr. Field were in the parking lot trying to straighten the crooked basketball hoop. Luna was standing to the side.

  “Hey, Lowen, Sami,” said Mr. Field. “Want to help?”

  “Can’t,” Sami said. “Meera has T-ball, so I have to get her home and into her T-shirt.”

  “I’m going inside to practice,” said Luna. “There’s a funeral this afternoon and the family has asked me to play. Lowen, would you like to come hear me warm up? I’ll play Gadfly for you,” she said.

  Clem, who was squatting, holding the pole at its base so Mr. Field could check to make sure it was perfectly straight, looked up and scowled.

  Lowen felt his heart leap.

  “Sports aren’t the be-all and end-all for you.” Luna placed her hand on Lowen’s forearm, giving him goose bumps. “You have an appreciation for lots of things,” she said, “like art and music.”

  He couldn’t help it. He began to sweat.

  “Cut it out, Luna,” Clem said.

  Lowen glanced at his brother. He could see the anger in his taut legs and arms, the redness of his neck. Was it possible that Luna did like him better than Clem?

  A twinge of guilt crept in, but he slapped it back down. Why should he care about Clem? What kind of brother had Clem been to him?

  “I especially like your music,” he said. He was surprised at how cool he sounded. He pulled his shoulders back a bit.

  “See, Clem. Your brother is sweet,” she said, reaching down and giving Lowen’s hand a squeeze.

  Lowen couldn’t believe what was happening. He glanced at Clem, fearing signs of hurt on his face — he didn’t think he could take hurt — but Clem didn’t seem hurt at all. Just angry.

  Clem stood. “Stop messin’ with Lowen,” he said.

  “I’m not messing —”

  “It’s cruel.”

  Luna pulled her hand away. “I was just having some fun,” she said, pouting. “You’ve been ignoring me.”

  And just like that, al
l the warmth seeped right out of Lowen. The rush of hope was replaced by a tidal wave of embarrassment.

  Cruel to him.

  She was playing him. Playing him like a cello. Playing with both of them, really.

  He turned and took off for his room, first at a fast pace, then a trot, and then a sprint. He hurled his ridiculously gangly body onto his bed and buried his head in his pillow.

  Luna.

  She’d been this little patch of light for him, this little bit of magic.

  But that was stupid. There was nothing magical about Luna. And now he wouldn’t be able to be near her without being reminded of what a dumbass he’d been.

  Lowen didn’t go downstairs for dinner that night. He said he was too tired to eat. Clem knocked on his door, tried to talk to him, but he couldn’t stand the further humiliation, the smugness of his older brother.

  Lying there, in the dimness, he thought about lying in the grave with Sami and Dylan. Of how they had listened to what had happened with Abe, but they hadn’t judged him. Telling them had helped.

  But only for a little bit. All his guilt rose to the surface again. It was as if every bad feeling — in this case, embarrassment over Luna — led him back to the horror of Abe’s death, and the part he’d played in it.

  He was tired. Tired of keeping his secret.

  He thought of getting up, of telling his parents the way he had his friends, but he didn’t think he could bear to see the look on their faces. He knew from that moment on he’d no longer be their insightful peacemaker, their sensitive and caring son.

  The mass of the secret — not snakes, but the secret itself — seemed to rise in his chest, cut off his air. He couldn’t stand it. He might never tell his parents, but he could tell Mrs. Siskin. He could at least be honest with her.

  He got out of bed, dug in his closet for the letter. Reread it. Told himself that it wasn’t enough to be truthful. He had to be honest.

  Giving Mrs. Siskin this information might make things worse. A whole lot worse.

  But she deserved to know that Abe had not acted on his own accord. That he’d been put up to going to the store by someone older, someone who should have known better, someone who should have been a better friend.