Cousins Read online

  2

  BEYOND THE GLASS DOOR was bright sunshine and summer. Shade trees and woods surrounded the Care on three sides. Outside, Cammy wondered why all of the folks didn’t just walk on away and live under the trees in the woods. Now and then, one of them would go off looking for the house they once owned. But after a couple of times, they didn’t wander anymore. She knew why.

  “They just get lost. They don’t have a place to go,” she whispered. Some of them like Gram Tut can’t get up and out under their own power, she decided. I know something. I bet if I could drive a bus, I could take a lot of ’em on out of there.

  Where would I take them, where would they all go? She couldn’t think of a place to take them. But then, she did.

  “I’ll lead them off into the thickest trees. I’ll be the Pied Piper! Or Moses!” Cammy grinned.

  She thought of a big tent amongst tall maples where they could all stay and have birthday parties. With that many old folks, there’d probably be a birthday party every day. She loved parties. But any party she’d ever had, had been just awful. She was working on having a good one, though. Maybe someday, she thought.

  Cammy took a deep breath. No sunlight now. Hot today, maybe over ninety, she thought. You couldn’t tell in the Care, in the rooms, which were air conditioned. There was a long rumble of thunder not far off.

  Ooh! I hate thunder! She began to run. She had to cross the grassy space inside the oval drive of the Care. Then she hit the street in front of the Health Center. On down the road there and across the avenue. She looked both ways. It was then she sensed the dark clouds and forced herself not to look at them. There was no way she could not see the gray light. Before she knew it, there were a few drops of rain.

  Darn!

  She watched, half scared, as low, slithery rain clouds sped overhead faster than the fluffy white clouds they blotted out above them.

  Fascinating, she thought, getting up her courage, and stuck her nose in the air.

  The clouds whipped from the west, the direction she was going.

  Then, she felt the wind on her face. And the rain came down with a wallop, falling into her eyes.

  Ooh! Mama? Oh, it’s going to get lightning on me!

  The lightning lit the way. Thunder made her knees buckle. She was scared and felt alone in the world.

  Cammy knew better than to take shelter under one of the shade trees along the road. But it looked dry under there.

  It looks so safe! she thought.

  She was feeling a little sick to her stomach. She would have cried in the next minute, ready to race for a large pine tree along the road. But then she realized where she was.

  Oh, my goodness! Well, thank my lucky stars.

  The drenching rain was running down her socks and into her sneakers. She was soaked. In one leap up a set of wood steps, she was on a familiar porch of a house painted sky blue with white trim. She stood there, hunched against the screen when a hand unlocked it and hauled her inside.

  “Thanks, Aunt Effie,” Cammy said.

  “Anybody out in a storm like this on foot hasn’t got good sense,” Aunt Effie said, by way of greeting. She didn’t smile.

  Cammy would have explained that she’d been inside at the Care when she caught herself in time. Aunt Effie never gave her the chance, anyway.

  “Don’t stand there dripping on my rug. Here.” Effie, her mama’s oldest sister, flung a bath mat at her.

  Cammy felt so ashamed. Orphan. She dropped the mat and quickly stepped on it, wishing she could just disappear. If she just could, she would escape out the door. Eyes downcast, she caught a glimpse of the massive couch and twin club chairs under sleek plastic covers. Cost a fortune, her mama said.

  “Give me your wet clothes,” Effie demanded. She shut the front door. She made Cammy undress right there on the mat clear down to her undershirt and pink panties, and took her socks and sneakers.

  “I’m putting this whole mess in the dryer,” Effie said, “even though they’re none too clean. See that you tell my sister that your Aunt Effie took care of her child. I’d never work so much that I’d have to leave my own child with just a sixteen-year-old boy!”

  Meaning my brother, Andrew, Cammy thought. Bet you hate him even more than you hate me. Aunt Effie wouldn’t know how to do a day’s work, Mama says.

  Chin on her chest, Cammy felt close to tears again. Why couldn’t everybody be nice? She sighed in a deep breath.

  Her undershirt was white with a tiny hole in front. Didn’t match her panties at all. Cammy folded her arms over herself and tried not to shiver. She wasn’t cold. Just clammy.

  She heard her sneakers clomping in the dryer, from the kitchen. Hope they don’t tear up my blouse, she thought.

  “Don’t sit down in just your underwears.” Effie was back, acting like a dump truck, Cammy thought.

  “I wasn’t going to …”

  Effie pushed a towel at her. “You can dry off with that and sit on it, too. You may sit in there but don’t bother her.”

  The door was closed to “in there.” Cammy had to leave this front room and go through a short, dark hall to another door, then open it to get to the sacred “in there.”

  Funny, she hadn’t noticed the sound until Aunt Effie said that she wasn’t to bother her. Now Cammy heard it.

  Wouldn’t it be nice if her cousin would vaporize the way people did on Star Trek? Beam me up, Scotty! Cammy thought. Coo-el if little her beamed up to a big blue star or to the moon or somewhere.

  “Well, go on,” Effie said. And as Cammy got up and went, Effie added, “Your legs is ashy. Tell your mama to buy you some hand cream.”

  I’ve got some, you fat pig! I hate hogs! Cammy thought.

  She went in there and the sound floated around the room. It bounced off the walls and, softly, down from the ceiling.

  Cammy took a seat behind the piano player, who was her cousin, Patricia Ann. She held the towel tightly around her shoulders. It fitted over her head like a hood. Cammy sighed into the music, which was nice. But it made her feel just so tired. She looked at Patricia Ann’s long, crinkly hair, so pretty, way down her back. It was the color of maple syrup left in the sun. It was let out from her usual long French braid. Patty Ann’s hair always was out on the day of her piano lesson. She must’ve had her lesson and was now practicing.

  Can you wonder? Cammy thought. A kid comes home from her lesson and practices? When she took lessons once, Cammy never thought of practicing until a day or two before the next lesson.

  “Oh, Patty Ann does everything just right,” Cammy’s mama said. “Effie sees to that. I never saw a child more afraid of somebody than that baby is of my own sister. Cammy, you should feel sorry for your cousin.”

  “I hate her,” Cammy had said.

  “Well …” Maylene said no more. Cammy was used to her mama not finishing what she would start to say.

  Patricia Ann didn’t turn around from the piano until she finished another song after the one she’d been playing when Cammy came in. She had to have heard Cammy come in. But Patty Ann wouldn’t be disturbed until she had practiced her entire lesson.

  The whole time, Cammy sat there, clutching the towel around her and trying to get the ash off her legs by rubbing her feet down them. All she managed to do was spread dirt to her calves and ankles. She kept it up anyway. She couldn’t sit still. Being there with her cousin made her as angry as she could be.

  Good at everything, Cammy thought to Patty Ann’s back. In school, at home, at her piano. Miss Goody-goody. Well, I am also good in lots of things, Andrew says.

  The music stopped abruptly. Patty Ann turned the page of a small notebook next to her music. The page was blank. She’d come to the end of her lessons. She closed the book. Closed her music books, too. She closed the piano top over the piano keys. To Cammy, everything she did was like chalk scraping on a blackboard. The way Patty Ann looked, even her expression, made Cammy fit to be tied.

  Patty Ann slid around on the piano seat. Fa
cing Cammy, she turned her head to one side. After the first glance, she wouldn’t look directly at Cammy.

  “What in the world happened to you?” Patty Ann asked. Her voice was surprising, a low, husky alto. Naturally, she was a good singer, too. Patty Ann touched her new plaid dress. It was shades of wine, yellow and soft green with blue. It had a pleated skirt.

  To look at it made a lump grow in Cammy’s throat. She decided just to shrug her shoulders. A few seconds later she couldn’t keep her mouth shut. “I got wet,” Cammy said.

  “I figured that!” Patty Ann said. She touched the gold locket around her throat and the gold bracelet on her right wrist. She had a watch with a black leather band on her left wrist. “I knew it was going to rain even before my lesson was over. I could smell the rain in the air. I always can,” Patty Ann said.

  She swung her legs from one side of the piano bench to the other. This way, Cammy was sure to catch her full effect. Patty Ann’s face was made even prettier by the wine shade of her dress. Carefully, she crossed her ankles so as not to touch her wine-colored socks with her patent-leather shoes.

  Lordy, Cammy thought. “Do you always have to get so dressed up for your lessons? I mean, can’t you ever relax?” Cammy asked.

  Patty Ann raised her eyebrows. “Ho-hum, I am relaxed,” she said. “Some people I know wouldn’t never know how to be relaxed in pretty clothes, if they ever had any pretty clothes.”

  Cammy’s ears felt hot. Anger flashed in her eyes. “You know what you look like in that brand new dress?”

  “It’s not so new,” Patty Ann said. “I’ve had it a week. Mama says not every girl can have a dress like this because it costs high. You know, expensive. She says but I’m not just every girl.”

  You’re trying to make me feel small, Cammy thought. Well, you won’t!

  “You look like death,” Cammy told her. “Like you are going to a funeral, which is your own.” Once she got started, she couldn’t stop herself. She saw Patty Ann’s mouth turn down. “You look like a skeleton. I’ve never seen anybody that bony outside of a Halloween white cardboard skeleton.”

  “You are so jealous just because I can sit on my hair and I get all A’s,” Patty Ann remarked. “I got my picture in the paper for never having below a B plus, and you have never had your picture in the paper.” She said this while looking out of the window and swinging her legs. Her voice was up high on itself but still husky.

  “They’ll spread your hair out on that little satin pillow,” Cammy went on, heart beating fast. “They’ll pin your eyelids back with glue and make your eyeballs look down at some toy piano in your lap. They’ll break your fingers to curl them so it looks like you are playing the keys.”

  Cammy even shocked herself with her own meanness.

  “You are just so stupid,” Patty Ann said. “It’s your loved one, Gram Tut, that smelly old bag of bones, that’s dying.”

  “You shut up!” Cammy whispered. They had both been talking softly, in case Aunt Effie passed by the door.

  “If you weren’t so dumb,” said Patty Ann, “you’d know she’s gone into a fate-all position.”

  “A fate—what?” Cammy said, alarmed. She didn’t know what a fate-all position was. Never had heard of it. “You take that back!”

  “It’s true. She’s beginning to curl up like an unborn baby,” Patty Ann said. “That’s the way real old folks do before they pass away.

  “And by the way,” added Patty Ann, staring down her nose at Cammy, “where are your clothes, did you forget to wear them? Or did they just rot off you?” Patty Ann turned on Cammy in triumph.

  Cammy got to her feet. If she ever doubted that Patty Ann was some enemy cousin, she didn’t now. She shook her head. “You are trying to make me mad and you use Gram Tut, which is no fair. She’s old,” Cammy said.

  “By now, she’s about dead, too,” Patty Ann said.

  “Stop it!”

  “You stop it. You started it.”

  Cammy smiled, her heart swelling for Gram Tut. “I know all about you,” Cammy said, quietly. “I know what you do in the bathroom when you think nobody can see.”

  Patty Ann grew still. Cammy knew she ought to stop, but she couldn’t help it. She had to finish, for Gram Tut’s sake. “You stick your finger down your throat,” Cammy said. “You force up all the food old Aunt Effie makes you take for lunch to camp. Kids say you did that a couple times last week. I know all about you.”

  Patty Ann’s chest heaved. She looked sickly thin and strange to Cammy. Tears filled her eyes.

  Cammy went on, although her heart wasn’t in it. What good was it if Patty Ann was going to cry?

  “You think you are fat. You’re afraid of your own mama, afraid of doing anything wrong. That’s why you get all A’s. Andrew said so. You’re afraid of what mean Effie will do to you if you don’t. Wonder what she’d do if she knew you upchucked your food on purpose.”

  Patty Ann covered her face with her hands and sobbed.

  “I don’t care,” Cammy said. “You just better learn to keep your mouth off Gram Tut, you hear? You don’t say nothing bad about her or I’ll come while you’re asleep and cut your hair off!”

  Patty Ann screamed, “Moooother!” at the top of her lungs. She ran for the door but Cammy beat her to it. Cammy heard Aunt Effie upstairs, heading for the steps.

  Cammy forced Patty Ann away with a thrust of her hip. She got out of there and sprinted to the kitchen. She turned off the dryer and got her clothes out.

  “What’s going on?” cried Effie, coming down the stairs.

  “She made fun of me, Mother,” Patty Ann called.

  “Heifer,” she heard Aunt Effie say.

  I’m outta here! Cammy flew out the back door, clutching her clothes in her arms. She forgot about the missing bottom cement step and fell to her knees. “Ouch!” She got right back up, though, no matter that the pain was awful.

  She came around the house just as Aunt Effie with Patty Ann on her heels burst from the screen door. But by then, Cammy was on the street and on her way. They couldn’t catch her, she didn’t think. Oh-my-lordy! Aunt Effie was coming across the lawn. Cammy sprinted away.

  The still warm clothes in her arms made her all hot and sweaty. She ran around some trees and dressed behind a tree trunk. Lordy, what if folks have seen me out here half nekkid? she thought. They’ll just think I have on a swimsuit.

  Cammy looked around to see where Aunt Effie was. She held her breath to listen. But it seemed Effie hadn’t gone any farther than the curb.

  Cammy got everything back on again. Even her sneakers. It was then she noticed it was still raining and she was wet all over again. Well, let lightning hit me, I don’t care, she thought. She was burning mad, boy. Anything’s better than that enemy place! she thought.

  She raced the weather halfway home. A truck was coming toward her and slid to a stop next to her, spraying puddle water practically over her head. She recognized the two guys inside and grinned. Stuck her thumb out, real sassy. The door opened on the passenger side and a strong arm hauled her in. Today, it seemed that people were hauling her, one way or another.

  3

  Long Sleek Roads

  ANDREW CALLED THE pickup his pup. It was named P’up for short by the car maker, he told Cammy. And it was smaller than a full-size pickup. It was spiffy and Andrew drove it fast down roads shining almost forever. Silver band roads. It could still be raining, or storming, too. Andrew didn’t mind. He liked the way the tires sounded on the wet blacktop. He was a good driver, even though he was only sixteen. He never drove too fast in a storm; he didn’t slow down, either.

  “You watch. That child’s in for some serious trouble,” Aunt Effie said to Maylene. “No boy at that age has any business with a car.”

  Cammy had been right there. What she forgot about the conversation, Andrew remembered. “Shows how much she knows—it’s not even a car,” later Andrew told Cammy. “And I’m not any boy,” he said. “I’m a young adult.”

>   “My dad gave me the pickup as a gift,” he told Aunt Effie, “so you just mind your business.” She didn’t scare him one bit.

  But she went on just as if he weren’t there. That was the insulting part, Cammy’s mama said later. “Oh, I know all about his dad,” Effie said. “His big-shot dad’s too good for this town and this family.”

  “All right, Effie, that’s enough,” Maylene told her.

  “You better keep your mouth off my father,” Andrew told Aunt Effie, “or I’ll tell you all about your own self, too.”

  Cammy recalled how shocked she had been at her brother’s boldness.

  “Disrespectful. Just smart aleck,” Aunt Effie said.

  “I’ve never known another family that is always at one another, like this one,” Maylene said. “Effie, you started it and it’s finished, now. Not another word.”

  But Effie went on. She said it was up to her to say something when her own son was sitting in a cheap truck, in the death seat next to a sixteen-year-old driver.

  “Nobody’s making Richie ride in my pup,” Andrew told her.

  “If you didn’t have it, he couldn’t ride in it!” Aunt Effie had shot back.

  And then Cammy’s mama said something about what were they supposed to do. “Not have any transportation? Not ride for fear something bad might happen?” Maylene had said.

  In the pup now with her brother, Cammy couldn’t help smiling. Old Maylene was something. Cammy felt bold, calling her own mama “Old Maylene”!

  Cammy was fairly soaked again from the rain. Andrew had reached over and hauled her up off the road. She’d climbed over Richie to take a seat in the middle.

  Andrew’d brought a towel for her, too. And turned on the heat a moment over their cousin Richie’s protesting. “It’s too hot for heat, man. It’s summer—man?” Whining Richie, Aunt Effie’s only son. He was in the passenger seat by the window.

  “My sister’s wet, dork,” Andrew told him. “She’ll catch a cold and I’ll get blamed.”

  “I’d blame Richie before I’d blame you,” Cammy said.