“Good for him. Somebody wants him.”
She reached over and touched me on the head. No person had touched me since Mom. My hair was on its own devices at that point, and I knew the sorry sight I was. With every part of me growing out of my sleeves or growing fuzz or changing shape that year, even the bone part of my nose, some way. And I was still sleeping in Tommy’s shirt.
“Poor Demon,” she said quietly. “Can’t they find anybody to adopt you?”
She’d only ever called me Damon before, like Mrs. Peggot and Aunt June, to show she was taking their side. I didn’t want to be poor anybody. But I felt like kissing Emmy. Or throwing up, from how mixed up I was. Possibly both. You’d want to do it in the right order, though.
“Everybody thinks adoption is just automatic,” I said. “But there’s a lot more orphan kids in Lee County than people wanting them. My caseworker says it’s nothing personal.”
“Is she nice, at least? Your caseworker?”
Somehow, I knew not to mention that Miss Barks was a babe. Or that I saved up things to tell her week to week because she was the only person I talked to anymore. “She’s got a ton of kids she’s looking after. Mostly younger than me. So, you know. Nice, if she’s got a minute.”
“That must be so hard.”
We both lay back down, and she looked at me in the eyes, and we were sad together for a while. I’ll never forget how that
felt. Like not being hungry.
19
I was the person not invited at June’s house. That feeling hangs on you like a smell. I had put showers between myself and Creaky’s barn, but this is not something that washes off. You get used to it, not in the good way, to the extent of the entire world oftentimes feeling like a place where you weren’t invited. If you’ve been here, you know. If not, must be nice.
June didn’t mind me though, or was good at being sweet whether she felt like it or not. Which they probably do teach you in nurse school. She read my mind, same as she had with going to the ocean place. Again she took us places I liked. The skateboard park, even though Maggot and Emmy weren’t into it because all we did was watch. But Jesus God. For kids with zero sidewalks in our lives, watching skateboarders on TV is just cartoons or sci-fi, you don’t buy in. But seeing them in real life? Shit. I about died of happiness. Like boys could fly.
So that was June, seeing my little moments. Putting extra food on my plate at every meal. Not in the Lady Leaders way of “watch me being nice,” just on the quiet. I tried to use manners and not act like a person that’s been wanting seconds ever since around August.
What I dreaded was Christmas morning. The Peggots had brought presents they piled under Aunt June’s tree, but weirdly nobody discussed them, no shaking or checking tags to see who got the biggest. Because of me, the kid not supposed to be there. Awkward. I planned on making myself scarce Christmas morning. I’d fake a stomachache or take a really long shower until the presents all got opened. Mainly I just wished Christmas didn’t exist.
The worst was at night, with me and Maggot lying practically under the tree with the presents. Which wasn’t a tree, honestly, just fake, small, set up on a table. You’d expect better from somebody so classy. But where are you going to go cut a cedar in Knoxville? At home, any farmer will let you come get one out of his fencerow. At Creaky’s we cut cedars out of the pastures to pile up and burn, because they’re too many and a nuisance. Why Aunt June hated it in Knoxville, being so far away from everything: from free Christmas trees, just for example.
That’s where I was, thinking about shit like our last cedar bonfire at Creaky’s that got out of hand somewhat with Swap-Out and the gasoline. Maggot asleep. And all the sudden here’s Emmy touching my back. I almost shit myself, rolling over to see her lying two inches away. I’d not expected her to come back. She wasn’t just all about the murder baby this time, so that was a relief. We were quiet like before, and Maggot stayed asleep. Or else a good friend about it. He never said anything the next day, or any other day, because it happened every night after that. She didn’t surprise me again, either. I was always on the lookout.
We talked about everything under the sun, lying on those pillows. What we liked, what we hated. I told her my bathtub thing, due to my dad dying at a place called Devil’s Bathtub. Actually I said it was only whenever I was small, being scared of them. She didn’t laugh though. She was scared about moving, leaving Knoxville. I couldn’t believe it. I told her there’s trees, mountains, rivers, birds singing in your ears, we’ve got the whole rest of the world over there, other than people, which are only one thing. Going wherever we wanted to without adults, even at night. The woods. I got caught up in telling her all this and almost forgot my messed-up life, because in some ways she was worse off than me. She’d never even seen a lightning bug. That is just tragic. I told her the different ones. One kind goes totally dark, then they all blink together, thousands, one big sparkly pop all up and down the creek. It can thrill a person senseless.
In time we got into the darker side of things. My dead baby brother, for one. How Emmy ended up with Aunt June, for another. Complicated as hell. Turns out she had a mother out there at large all along, girlfriend of her dad, Humvee, that was killed. I’d heard people say a hunting accident. Emmy said yes, he was supposed to go get Pampers one day but instead ended up turkey hunting with some friends. Three men, three twelve-gauges, and a handle of fireball whiskey being one handle too many for the close quarters of a turkey blind, as anybody knows, except them evidently. Oh my Lord. She said it was Humvee’s shotgun but different stories, either he accidentally fired it or somebody sat on it. He was too messed up for the hospital in Pennington, they had to get him to Knoxville and too much blood loss on the way.
Poor Mrs. Peggot. Given the fireball whiskey aspects, no wonder her having her policies on what she called demon liquor. For Emmy’s part, she said she herself felt somewhat to blame, as far as the stresses and strains of a baby on such a young dad. His girlfriend was home with her at the time, so not involved, just probably waiting a long time for those diapers. But being a teen mom and then total wreck from the incident, she turned into the all-around bad-news type of mother, so. The Peggots had to step in and take Emmy. Then the next year after Humvee was killed, their daughter Mariah went to prison on her own matters, and Maggot turned up needing to be looked after also. The family you could say hit a bad patch.
This was news to me, that Mrs. Peggot had taken in not just Maggot but Emmy before him. Two tiny tots to raise. That’s the Peggots for you, doors wide open. I’d known them to take other cousins for whole summers before, including Hammerhead Kelly and his stepsisters after the parents split up, which was how Mr. Peg got him started on deer hunting. Emmy asked if Hammerhead still came around or had moved away with his dad in the split-up. I said he was still with the stepmom Ruby, June’s sister, and Mr. Peg’s favorite. I didn’t bring up hunting, given Emmy’s bad-luck dad, plus not knowing where she stood with the whole city-person outlook on shooting Bambi, but I knew Hammer and Mr. Peg still hunted together. Many a time in the fall I’d see Hammer dressing a buck in their driveway. It would kill you how big and gentle he looked, drawing his long knife up the middle of the carcass, easing the gut and lungs to slither out in a pile. Like he’s being sweet to that deer, even though dead.
I told Emmy he went by just Hammer now, and came over to help with things Mr. Peg had got too old for, like gutters. He was basically a Peggot grandson, even though technically not all that related. I told her I was basically one too, raised by them as far as the more solid parts. I admitted that for the longest time I’d thought Mrs. Peggot was my real mammaw.
Emmy put her eyes square on mine. It scared me almost, getting looked at like that. “You’re wishing she really was, aren’t you?” she said. “Then they’d have to adopt you.” She kissed her finger and touched my cheek.
“They probably wouldn’t, though.”
I wanted her to say I was wrong, but she rolled on her back, looking at the ceiling. I watched her thinking it over. I’d never had that close a look at another person’s face before. She had brown-sugar freckles and a little silver line through one eyebrow where she said a cat scratched her. The tiniest furrow plowed through her eyebrow hairs, never to grow back.
She rolled back to face me. “I don’t know. They didn’t legally adopt either one of us. For Matty they’re just guardians. His mom is still his mom.”
“Not that she’s doing much about it in Goochland,” I said. “No offense to anybody.”
But Emmy was off someplace else, thinking of her own messed-up past. I was pretty shocked of it. Given the Peggots being so decent. “Having both of us was too much,” she said. “Think about it, he’s a newborn and I’m a toddler. Poor Mammaw. She really needed Aunt June to take over with me. I never gave it much thought till lately, but I mean, who does that? Take over raising your dead brother’s two-year-old, while you’re still in nursing school.”
June Peggot, was the answer. The Peggots had brought in the trailer next door so she could have her own place with Emmy and still be all one family while June finished up school. That was the same trailer that soon would be Mom’s, then Mom’s and mine, after June got her hospital job and moved with Emmy to Knoxville. Emmy’s bad-news real mom still would turn up at the Peggots’ every so often, threatening to go to court and get Emmy back. She was in no position now as an IV drug user, homeless etc., but that didn’t stop her from showing up in the middle of the night, banging on the door, raising Cain to see her kid. The Peggots kept quiet about Emmy being in Tennessee so she wouldn’t go after June and try to steal Emmy back. That’s why the big secret. But Skank Mom had finally agreed to sign Emmy over for good. Amen and hallelujah on Aunt June finally winning the mom war.
I asked how that felt, given away by her real mother. Emmy said she had all the mom a person could want. She didn’t care if she ever laid eyes on the other one again.
The upshot of all this talking was me getting pretty much in love with Emmy. She was beautiful and like a grown person. In the daytime we didn’t let on. Hanging out with her and Maggot, I tried to be normal, but sometimes said things to impress her. Like how the other foster boys thought my cartoons were good. And the football hero Fast Forward that was my friend. She just said something polite, but Maggot chimed in on how awesome this guy was. I’d forgotten Maggot knew him from that time they came to the farm. This got Emmy interested to the extent of saying she’d like to meet this famous Fast Forward.
So we played it cool, and I wondered if the other was real or just some after-hours game she was playing. But then she would let me sit on the couch with her while she was reading, and under the blanket her feet would touch my feet. She’d look up from her book and smile at me and, oh man. Utterly wrecked. Back in the summer she’d announced the one time about us getting married, which was kid shit. Like somebody giving you Monopoly money and saying “Here, go buy a house.” But now all I had to do was think of Emmy, her face or her toothpaste smell, and it would give me these waking-up feelings as regards the guy downstairs. Not kid shit. At night we’d be talking and I’d get obsessed on kissing her, even though not having the nerve. It was her finally that did it. She asked if I wanted to go to second base, which of course I did, except for not knowing exactly where that base was located. I’d heard different things. I said okay, and she took my hand into the neck of her gown and put it on her chest. Nipple and everything, warm and soft. Christ. Now I had a whole new body function to be terrified of doing on accident, from being that mixed up and happy at the same time. But I held it together. I just told her I loved her and that kind of thing. I told her whenever she moved back to Lee County, we could take walks together with Aunt June’s dog Rufus.
After that I had a new brain-Lysol to calm myself down: walking in the woods with Emmy. I’d picture us holding hands, maybe with our own dog. Being grown-ups. It would be so much safer than being a kid.
For Christmas breakfast they invited Mrs. Gummidge, which was the cat lady downstairs where Emmy slept over on Aunt June’s night shifts. Emmy still wasn’t old enough to be on her own in the stranger-danger building overnight, even though graduated from daytime babysitting and Popsicle-stick-type shenanigans. I figured this cat lady wouldn’t get presents either, so we could sit together watching the others, and I wouldn’t have to stay in the shower.
Emmy warned me about Mrs. Gummidge being a sad human being and not to laugh at her, or Aunt June would kill us. I said I was in no position, being star player on the sad-sack team. But listen, this lady was in her own league. We were all, Merry Christmas Mrs. Gummidge! And she’s like, “Well, it might be, I don’t know. I been feeling so poorly.” Aunt June asked how are Cain and Abel, which were her cats, and she said, “Well, they’ve both been at death’s door for a good while. But it’s for the best. If I pass away first, I don’t know who would take them.”
Mrs. Gummidge was a sister of somebody the Peggots knew in Lee County, which was how they knew she was safe and not a stranger. She’d helped keep Emmy ever since they first moved here, so they were used to her, but man alive. She had a downer comment for every occasion. Wasn’t the Christmas tree pretty? Well, she said, a lot of times they started fires. Yes, the weather had been warm, but that meant winter would last longer. She had on these thick brown stockings rolled up under her knees that she had to wear night and day for her varicose veins that hurt her something awful. She had some name for them like compressure hose. I didn’t ask, trust me. It just came up. All through breakfast which was pancakes and bacon, Mrs. Gummidge discussed how she was forlorn in the world and too poorly to be fit company for anybody since Mr. Gummidge passed. Emmy stared at me with her shut mouth pulled wide like a fish, trying not to laugh. I don’t think Aunt June was too far behind her.
But they were all sweet to her. The time came for presents, and surprise, they had some for Mrs. Gummidge and also me. She got a fuzzy pink bathrobe that she said was so pretty she might ought to get buried in it. For me they had things from “Santa” that obviously got new tags put on them last minute, like socks (I wore the same size as Mr. Peg), a Stretch Armstrong, a Bop It, and Pokemon cards I’m sure were for Maggot, and he’d okayed them getting reassigned.
But Aunt June got me something amazing: a set of colored markers for making comics, fine-tip on one end and thick on the other, in more colors than you’d think there would be. Eight entire flesh tones. Also a real book for making comic strips, with the panel dividers printed in. I couldn’t believe my eyes. After Mom died I’d not wanted to draw any more at all, but now I couldn’t wait to run off someplace and get started. I would make one of Aunt June as Wonder Nurse, putting a new heart back inside a boy that had his own torn out.
The last night before we left, Emmy went to pieces. I told her we would see each other all the time whenever they moved to Lee County. But Aunt June had to finish out her hospital contract first, so it wouldn’t be till May. Forever, in other words. It had only been thirty-nine days since Mom and my brother died, and that felt like longer than the years I’d been alive.
I tried to dwell on the happier aspects, like being amazed of how the Peggots gave me presents. I asked her opinion of it being a sign they might want to adopt me. Emmy said I shouldn’t get my hopes up, but it wouldn’t hurt to ask. Too late, my hopes were up. Mrs. Peggot already had said I could stay at their house after we got back until school started up again, rather than go back to Creaky Farm. Which had to mean something.
