James nodded.
“Apologize, James,” Dicey ordered.
He had to obey her, so he apologized, looking into the empty fireplace. “I’m sorry.”
“Okay. Let’s go,” Dicey said to her family. She felt sick inside.
“Why?” Windy unexpectedly spoke. He bent down and picked up the bill, smoothed it with his fingers and held it out to Stewart, who came forward to take it. “As far as I’m concerned, we found Stew’s money. Right, Stew?”
“No,” Stewart said. “But you did want to borrow it, didn’t you?” He handed it back to Windy.
Dicey wished they were out of the room and on their way again, on their own.
“Dicey?” Stewart said her name. She looked at him. “What did Sammy steal?”
“Some lunchbags at a park,” Dicey said. “Two. It was different. We needed food, sort of. He thought we did, anyway. He doesn’t understand. He did it to help. There was a wallet in one bag, but we took that back. Sort of. Not just because it was stealing money though. Really because we didn’t want to have police coming in. I guess James doesn’t understand either. He’s not bad.”
Stewart looked at her and she looked right back at him. James was her brother and she would have to stick by him; and she wanted to stick by him. How could Stewart know James? He couldn’t, but Dicey could.
“It does matter, James,” said Stewart.
“Why? We all die anyway,” James said.
“Sure, but you can see to it that you like yourself when you die,” Stewart answered. “You can be sure you don’t hurt anybody while you’re alive. Especially, you can be sure you don’t hurt yourself. Are you a thief?”
James shook his head.
“But you stole,” Stewart said. “Who did you hurt? You’re right about me; I’m not rich but I can go to the bank and take out another twenty. So you didn’t hurt me very much. You hurt yourself. More than anyone you hurt yourself.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Nothing matters. There’s nothing you can count on—except the speed of light. And dying,” James said.
“So that’s what it is,” Stewart said. He studied James’s face. “Well that may be true but it’s not a big enough truth to contain me. I plan to be a man when I get through. Not only a man, I plan to be a good man.”
“Why?” James asked.
“Because I owe it to myself,” Stewart said.
“Is that all?”
“No,” Stewart said, but he didn’t add anything to it.
“I don’t understand,” James said.
Stewart didn’t answer him.
“Can I learn to understand?”
“Maybe,” Stewart said.
“I’m smart,” James said. “Will that help?”
“Maybe,” Stewart said. “Maybe not.”
James nodded.
Dicey waited for the conversation to continue, but it didn’t, and James just stood there looking at Stewart as if Stewart were a mountain or something terribly large. So she began to move toward the door, pulling Sammy with her.
“Hold it,” Windy said. “Where are you going? Dicey? We’ve got breakfast to get and then Stew’s going to drive you to Bridgeport. That’s right, isn’t it, Stew?” His eyebrows moved as he spoke, emphasizing his words.
“Of course,” Stewart answered. “Get me some doughnuts and coffee, will you?”
Windy took the Tillermans to the diner they had eaten at the night before. Dicey followed along, as quiet as Maybeth. She felt as if she was no longer in charge. In a way, she was relieved to let somebody else give directions and make decisions. In another way she was angry at these young men for taking over their lives, for telling them when and where to eat, for leaving her out of the conversation with James.
In the diner, which looked dingy by daylight, Dicey had fried eggs, while the others had pancakes. She had time now to enjoy the taste of her food. When she had eaten both eggs, she took one piece of toast and mopped up some yolk onto it.
Never had she enjoyed a meal more. She said so to Windy and he told her she looked like she’d like to climb onto the plate and roll around in the eggs. Dicey giggled and said she guessed she might. Windy finished his own breakfast and Maybeth’s. Dicey took part of Sammy’s pancakes and gave the rest to James, who was never full. They all drank milk.
When they returned to the room and Windy had given Stewart his coffee and doughnuts, he said good-bye to the Tillermans. “I’ve got a lab this morning and you’ll probably be gone when I return,” he said, shaking hands solemnly with each of them.
They thanked him, but he waved the words aside. “Any time,” he said. “It was fun.” He grinned at them and his eyebrows arched.
Stewart quickly wolfed down the four doughnuts and while he was sipping coffee he pulled out a guitar and played. The Tillermans sat quietly and listened.
His was not an ordinary guitar, although it looked like one; it had a belly and neck and six strings like ordinary guitars, but instead of cradling it against his arm, Stewart laid it on his lap. He held a metal bar to the strings of the neck and plucked the strings over the belly. The sound this odd guitar made was metallic and round and slidy. When he reached over for his coffee cup, Dicey asked him what it was.
“A Dobro,” he answered. He explained how it was made and how he played it. Then he played a slow, mournful melody on it, concentrating hard, biting his lip, leaning over the instrument and moving his shoulders with the rhythm.
Maybeth stood beside him and watched. “That’s ‘Greensleeves,’ ” she said.
Stewart nodded. “Do you know it? You want to sing it?”
Maybeth sang the old song in her clear voice. “ ‘Alas, my love, you do me wrong, to cast me off discourteously.’ ”
At the conclusion, Stewart smiled at her. “You do know it.”
“Momma sang to us,” Maybeth said. “We know a lot of songs.”
“What else do you sing?” Stewart asked. He looked around at all of them.
“Play something you like,” Dicey answered him.
“I play blue grass,” Stewart said. “You know what that is?”
They didn’t, so he played a song about a miner’s child who dreamed her daddy would die if he went to the mines that day, but he went anyway.
“That’s silly,” Maybeth said, when he had finished.
“Okay, then, what about this?” Stewart asked. “ ‘Oft I sing for my friends,’ ” he sang. His voice was soft as clouds and clear as the sky could be. “ ‘When death’s dark form I see. When I reach my journey’s end, who will sing for me?’ ”
It was a short song, and Maybeth asked him to sing it again, and she joined in with him.
When that was finished, he looked at them. “Do you all sing? Like that?”
Dicey nodded.
Then Stewart put down the Dobro and said he had to go to class, but as soon as he got back he’d take them to Bridgeport. He went into his room and came back with a guitar case, out of which he took a regular guitar. “You can mess around on these if you like,” he said. Even after he left, the room was filled with the harmony they had made, and the singing.
James picked up the Dobro and plucked at it with his fingers. “Dicey? I’m sorry. Really. I won’t ever do anything like that again.”
“I know,” Dicey said. Her anger was entirely forgotten. “I didn’t mean most of what I said.”
“You think Stewart is smarter than Louis?” James asked. “I do,” he said.
“How should I know that?” Dicey asked. “I like him a lot better. I like Windy too. Maybeth?”
Maybeth nodded. She was looking at a book of pictures.
“Sammy?”
Sammy stared out the window. “How long do you think it’ll be? Until we get there?”
“Not long. They said an hour.”
“What’s it like there?”
“I dunno, Sammy. Why?”
“Will Momma be there?”
Dicey looked at the back of his round litt
le head, where the yellow hair stood out at crazy angles. No, her heart said inside her. “I dunno, Sammy,” she said aloud. He didn’t answer, just stood looking out.
Stewart’s car was a battered old black VW bug. The three little ones sat in the backseat, crowded together. James sat in the middle because he could see out easiest. Dicey was in the front seat. “It’s a good thing you don’t have luggage,” Stewart said. “We’d never fit it in.”
The day had grown hot and muggy. City smells hung heavy on the air. The little car clattered, like a giant sewing machine.
They made their way onto the Thruway and joined the cars hurtling along there. Stewart stayed in the middle lane. Cars passed them on both sides.
“I left my map,” Dicey said.
“We’ll get another,” Stewart answered her, without moving his eyes from the road. “I don’t know Bridgeport at all. Do you?”
“How could we?”
They drove with the windows open. The air roared in their ears. Things went by so fast when you were in a car, you could barely look at anything before it was gone. But this area, all concrete and sad little houses, was the kind you liked to pass by quickly.
Dicey leaned over and said loudly: “I don’t know where we would have slept along this road.”
“Where’d you sleep when you came to New Haven?” Stewart glanced quickly in the rearview mirror.
“Behind some stores. In a little park. Once in a carwash,” Dicey told him.
“Then you’d have found someplace along here,” Stewart said.
They went through a toll booth where Stewart paid a quarter, and then after a while saw signs saying: BRIDGEPORT. Stewart kept to the middle lane.
“Aren’t we going to get off?” Dicey asked.
“Not yet. I’m hungry, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Dicey said, “but—”
“I thought we’d go down to Fairfield—it’s only ten or twenty miles on—and eat at McDonald’s there. I know where that is, and I like going someplace that I know where it is. We can pick up a map of Bridgeport too, so we can see how to get there, to your aunt’s house.”
Ten or twenty miles, two days’ walk. Four days there and back. Dicey just nodded. “If you want to,” she said.
“What I don’t want to do is drive into a strange city without a map,” Stewart said. He studied the traffic behind him in the rearview mirror and turned on his signal blinker. “Besides, Fairfield’s pretty.”
“Do you live there?” Dicey asked.
He shook his head. They pulled off the Thruway and onto a four-lane road lined with low buildings, hung over with stoplights, bleached white by the heat.
“This is Route One,” Dicey said.
“You know it?”
“We’ve been on it most of the time.”
“That’s too bad.”
Stewart stopped at a gas station and came back with a map. He pulled into the nearby McDonald’s and they all ordered lunch. He carried their tray to a big table back in a corner. Dicey handed out the wrapped hamburgers and the parcels of french fries. She jammed straws into the Cokes.
Stewart had ordered two Big Macs. He ate them as if he were starving. When Dicey told him this, he said he felt like he was starving, most of the time. “But I’ll outgrow it,” he said. “It used to be worse. I used to eat much more—a whole large pizza—and still not be full. Now I’m sometimes full. When I was in high school, I felt like I could eat all day long and never fill up.”
James nodded at him, chewing.
After they had cleared the table and thrown out the wrapping papers, Stewart unfolded his map. Dicey told him the address and he found the street easily. It was one of many little streets running across the map of the city.
“But it’s not near the water,” Dicey said.
“Why should it be?”
“It’s called Ocean Drive. I thought it would be near the water. A big white house.”
“Ocean Drive runs through the heart of town, a few blocks from the downtown section. But the street goes down to a main street that ends up at the harbor,” Stewart pointed out. Dicey was unreasonably disappointed. “Maybe it was a joke,” he suggested.
“Some joke.”
“You like being near the water.”
“In Provincetown, we were right next to it. Behind the dunes, but next to it. I’m used to it. Yeah, I like it. I don’t feel right unless I’m near the ocean.”
“You feel that way and you’re going to Bridgeport? You’re in trouble,” Stewart said. “Listen, are you in a big hurry? Do you want to go to a beach for a while before you go to your aunt’s?”
“Yes,” James and Dicey said.
“No,” Sammy said. “I want to see Momma. Right away.”
“We don’t even know whether she’s there, Sammy,” James argued. “You can wait an hour, can’t you?”
“I don’t want to wait anymore,” Sammy said. “Dicey?”
“Just for an hour, Sammy. Please?” she said. His face grew stubborn. “I’ve decided,” Dicey said. “For an hour. No more.”
Once they got off Route 1 in Fairfield, everything was clean and neat. The houses all looked freshly painted. The lawns all looked freshly mown. The cars all looked just washed. It was the kind of place where all the door handles shone with polishing.
They drove through a little village and then down by some big houses around some curves—and then Dicey could see the water. At first she only glimpsed it in the spaces between the large trees that grew around the houses; then she could see a long narrow beach ahead, with marshlands on the other side of the road.
Sammy wanted to stay in the car, but Dicey insisted that he come out with them at least to begin with. “Then you can go back and wait in the car if you want,” she said. “That’s fair, isn’t it?”
They spent an hour at the beach, no more. Sammy kept track of the time on Stewart’s watch. They waded and dug. The children wandered up and down while Stewart and Dicey sat watching the little waves that meandered up onto the smooth sand. Dicey stared out over the quiet blue water, knowing that although the surface was calm, the great tides were moving underneath. She listened to the rippling waves mingled with the voices of the other people at the beach. They didn’t talk much. Stewart didn’t seem to be a talkative person, and Dicey didn’t mind. He only asked her one question:
“What’ll you do if things don’t work out at your aunt’s?”
He could have been reading Dicey’s mind. She turned quickly to look at his face, but he was looking out over the water, his gray-blue eyes glinting in its reflections.
“I don’t expect Momma to be there, you know,” she said. He nodded. “Aunt Cilla must be pretty old now. She’s really Momma’s aunt, not ours. So she might not want a mess of kids. Is that what you mean?” He nodded. “I don’t know what I’ll do. Or if she’s not even there. I guess I’ll have to go to the police then, won’t I? Or somebody. For help.” He nodded. “What do you think I should do if—”
His eyes turned to her. “I honestly don’t know. Except stick together, all of you. That’s the most important thing.”
Dicey agreed.
“If you can,” he said. “If you are able to. You might not be able to.”
“You and Windy—you were a big help to us,” Dicey said.
“That’s okay,” Stewart said.
“Especially Windy.”
“Windy had a good time. You brightened up his life.”
“Especially you, too.”
“I didn’t do anything. Sang you a couple of songs. Got you some bad hamburgers.”
“And took us to the beach, don’t forget that.”
They found 1724 Ocean Drive without any trouble. It was one of a long row of houses that stretched down treeless streets. It was a small house, shingled with gray asphalt. Three concrete steps led up to the plain front door. On one side of the door, two windows faced the street. There were thin curtains on the windows and you couldn’t see in. The house loo
ked flat-faced and empty. Dicey sat in the car and studied it before she got out. Was this going to be their home?
They clambered out of the car and said good-bye to Stewart. He left the motor running while he climbed out himself to shake hands with each one of them, James last, and wish them good luck.
Then he drove off, down the street, away, the little black car clattering busily. Dicey waved to him, but he must not have seen her because he didn’t wave back. She turned to the closed door. She was nervous, but not in any way she had been nervous before. She looked at James and Maybeth and Sammy standing in a silent row and tried to smile at them. Then she went up the steps, hoping she looked more confident than she felt. At least they were all freshly washed. Dicey knocked on the door.
CHAPTER 9
Nobody answered Dicey’s knock. She could hear the echoes of her knockings inside, so she knew that she would have heard footsteps if someone had been hurrying to answer the door.
She knocked again, louder. While she waited, to be sure no one was at home, she studied the brown paint on the door. It was a thick reddish-brown color and in the inset panels you could see brush strokes.
Nobody was there. Dicey swallowed, as much in relief as in disappointment, and turned to face her family. “I guess we wait,” she said. She sat on the bottom step. They sat behind her and beside her.
They had nothing other than what they wore. Even Dicey’s map, rain-soaked and ripped, had been lost. Stewart had taken his with him.
“I thought Aunt Cilla was rich,” James said. “This isn’t a rich person’s house.”
“I must have been wrong about that,” Dicey said.
“Momma said she was,” James insisted.
“Then Momma was wrong.”
“Do you think Momma’s here?” Sammy asked. “If she’s here why isn’t she here?”
“I dunno,” Dicey said. “It’s Thursday, a working day, isn’t it? So if she’s got a job she’d be there, wouldn’t she?”
“What about Aunt Cilla? Is she too old to work?” James asked.
“I don’t know anything about her except what she wrote in her letters—and that wasn’t true.”