Genuine Sweet Page 12

  “Mm. So she does. I want to talk about that over dinner, Genuine. Whatever happened to my wish?” She said it with a smile, though, so I knew she remembered I’d told her to be patient.

  In all my born days, I’d never had such a supper! Travis heaped up so much spaghetti onto my plate, there was barely enough room for fancified greens and bread with olive paste—which may sound peculiar but nearly brought tears of joy to my eyes. When he got to serving the meatballs, one actually rolled off my mountain of food. Thankfully, I caught it with my napkin before it hit the floor.

  “Uh, maybe I’ll just take this one to Gram,” I said and set it aside.

  Full up and feelin’ fine, Travis and I did the dishes while Miz Tromp packaged the leftovers—including a whole bag of goodies for me to take home. Then I quick ran out to whistle down some starlight, and Travis and I got to baking.

  We were pulling our first triple-sized batch of biscuits from the oven when there came a knock at the door.

  “I’ll get it,” Miz Tromp said. “I wonder if it’s the Teagues, changed their mind about the wedding cake.”

  “Tell ’em they’re too late!” Travis called. He’d managed two slices, even after his own outsized dinner.

  We heard some mumbling in the hall, and then Miz Tromp reappeared with Edie Walton, Penny’s daughter, and a man I’d never seen before.

  “Some folks to see you, Genuine,” Travis’s ma told me.

  “Edie! What are you doing here?” With the upscuddle between her ma and me, I was fairly certain it was nothing good.

  Edie, who’d graduated from Sass Public only last June, was the prettiest girl in town. She had long blond hair and dimpled cheeks and a smile so sweet folks said she could charm the moon from the sky.

  But she wasn’t smiling now.

  “I need to talk to you, Genuine,” was all she said.

  “Your grandma told us we might find you here,” the man said to me. Giving the Tromps a regretful smile, he added, “Sorry to interrupt your evening.”

  “We ’preciate the apology, but who are you?” Travis asked, stepping between the man and me.

  “My name’s Tom Holt.” He offered Travis his hand. Travis shook, wary but civil.

  “Please, both of you, sit down,” Miz Tromp said. “You, too, Genuine. Can we get y’all something to drink?”

  The man said he’d be glad for some water, but Edie only shook her head and sat. With nothing else to do, I took a seat, watching helplessly as Miz Tromp pulled Travis with her into the kitchen.

  “What’s all this about, Edie?” I asked.

  Edie opened her mouth, tried to say something, and started to cry. I rushed into the kitchen, grabbed a handful of Miz Tromp’s fancy paper napkins, and offered them to her.

  When she finally collected herself, Edie said, “My mother didn’t want me to talk to you, but Tom—Tom saw you on the news and he said, Aren’t you neighbors? What could it hurt? And so here we are, you know?”

  “Sure.” I nodded encouragingly. “That makes sense.” Though, I confess, I was hoping it would make more sense soon.

  Tom spoke up. “I work at the Ardenville Cancer Center. I’m a nurse there.”

  Edie slapped her fistful of tear-damp napkins on the table. “My mom is sick, Genuine! Really, really sick!”

  “I—I’m sorry, Edie,” I said, and I meant it.

  “We thought she was going to get better, but all at once, it struck her worse than ever. The pain—it hurts her so bad she cries, Genuine!”

  I tried to imagine a pain that terrible. Even when I had broken my arm—and that smarted something terrible—I shouted, but I never bawled.

  Miz Tromp drifted in and set a glass of water before Tom. Travis, I saw, lingered within hearing, leaning just inside the kitchen door frame.

  “We—Tom and me—we were hoping you might come and talk to her.” Edie sniffed. “See if you can wage some kind of peace between you two, so maybe she’d accept one of your wishes.” She leaned forward. “A wish would fix her, right?”

  “Truly? I don’t know, Edie,” I told her. “Maybe. I’ve never tried to fix a sickness before.”

  “But you could try, couldn’t you?” Edie asked.

  I dropped my chin to my chest. Could I?

  Part of me wanted to. After all, I knew what it was like to be bad off and alone, wishing like mad for some prospect of help.

  “Even if you could just help the pain some,” Edie pleaded. “She’s so tired with it. She can’t even sleep!”

  “Late last night,” Tom said, “I went in to check on Penny. She wasn’t in her bed. Finally, I found her in another room, sitting with another patient—a girl who was sick from her treatments. Penny was hollow-eyed and trembling with her own pain, but there she was stroking this girl’s back, whispering, You can do this, sugar. You’re a fighter. She stayed there till the girl nodded off.” Tom pressed his lips together. “Penny made me swear I wouldn’t sneak in one of my alternative medicine ‘crazies’ for her. But seeing her caring for that girl . . . Please try, Genuine. Talk to Penny. And if she’s willing, use whatever tools you have—”

  I looked at Edie. Her lip trembled, but besides that, she’d gone utterly still.

  The smell of fresh-baked wish biscuits hung in the air.

  “Can I say—nobody here is asking for a miracle.” Tom seemed to think something over, then went on, “Well, maybe we are. Asking for one. But we’re not expecting it. Some treatments work. Some don’t. We know that. We accept it.”

  Edie nodded.

  I searched out Miz Tromp, who stood in the corner, expression heavy, hand resting over her heart.

  I said to her, “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  “Sure, honey.” Her voice was soft.

  She led me into the kitchen, past a worried-looking Travis, and out onto a little porch.

  She’d barely closed the door behind us when I blurted, “I’ve got biscuits to bake and send!”

  “I know,” Miz Tromp replied. “You’ve been working hard.”

  “But I have to go. Don’t I?” I asked. “I can’t just leave Penny to suffer.”

  “I’m sure we can arrange—”

  “But, then, what if I go to her, get Edie and Tom’s hopes all up, and Penny Walton turns me away? Or what if I can’t do it at all? What if the stars don’t have that kind of power?” My ma never did try her shine against Loreen Walton’s sickness.

  Miz Tromp stood with me, sturdy as an oak. “How can I help?”

  I squinched up my face. “Could you come with me? Tonight? You and Travis both? And—also—could we drop off this first batch of biscuits at Jura’s?” Was it too much to ask? I wasn’t sure.

  “I can be ready and out the door in under three minutes. Travis, too, I imagine. Isn’t that so?” Miz Tromp knocked on a nearby window. I hadn’t noticed it was open just a crack.

  Travis’s face appeared. He nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Jura’s, then Ardenville.”

  I let out a sigh. “Thanks, y’all. To go off to a big city, not a friendly face around me—I don’t know if I could do it!”

  I was headed back inside when Miz Tromp said, “You are gonna give your grandma a call before we go, aren’t you?”

  “I’ll have plenty of time to call from the road,” I replied. “Tom surely has a cell phone he can lend me. If I can help Penny, I want to get on with it.” Besides, I didn’t want to give Gram the chance to forbid my going. After her secret-keeping about the Waltons, it was hard to know what she’d say.

  Miz Tromp pursed her lips. “All right. Let’s go.”

  16

  What Comes of It

  TOM, MIZ TROMP, TRAVIS, AND I PILED INTO TOM’S jeep. Edie took her own car; she’d be staying there with her mother till the end, one way or the other.

  After we dropped off the biscuits at Jura’s, it was nearly nine. The night air was thick with an unseasonable fog.

  “Curious weather,” Miz Tromp said. “Do you mind if I—?” She pointe
d at the radio.

  Tom said that would be fine.

  “. . . thirty percent chance of snow with temperatures dipping below freezing,” the radio announcer said. “The Department of Transportation warns commuters to expect delays in the morning. Y’all be sure to drive careful.”

  “I’m glad we left when we did,” Tom observed. “As it is, you three might need to stay overnight.”

  Stirring things up with Penny Walton and spending the whole night out? Gram would be beside herself!

  I reckoned there was no point in putting it off now. “Tom, could I borrow your phone?”

  He passed it to me gladly enough, but it took some help from Travis to figure out how the dang thing worked. Finally, though, I managed to dial home.

  Gram answered on the eleventh ring.

  “You all right, Gram?” I asked.

  “Fine, fine. I was just nodding off,” she replied. “What time is it?”

  “It’s late,” I replied. “Listen. I need to tell you something, so try not to worry, all right?”

  That caught her attention. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

  “No, I’m fine. Everything’s fine. It’s just, um, I may be spending the night out.”

  “Out! Don’t be silly! Out!” She laughed.

  “I mean it, Gram. Something’s come up.” And then I told it to her. All of it. Edie’s tears, Penny’s sickness, the bad weather. “We might have to wait for the roads to thaw in the morning.”

  Gram was silent for a time.

  You could have knocked me over with a feather when she finally said, “That’s a good idea, Gen. You don’t want to be traveling if the roads get icy.”

  “So—you’re not mad?” I asked.

  “Mad that my girl wants to help a neighbor? Mad that she can’t let the suffering of another human soul pass her by? This is what the legacy’s for, Gen. To help. To heal.”

  “B-but what about Loreen Walton, and Ma, and all that big to-do?” I protested. “What about small wishes and not offending folks?”

  She sighed. “I was being silly.”

  “Gram, you’re never silly!”

  “Not true! Remember the year I decorated my Easter hat with caladium leaves because the lilies didn’t bloom? That was downright silly, if you ask me.”

  That had been silly, but still—“Gram, what on earth has gotten into you? Just a few days ago, you were full of dire warnings and woeful tales!”

  “Life is short, Gen. We got to do what good we can,” was all she said.

  “What about Penny’s sickness?” I wanted to know. “Can the stars cure it?”

  “Truthfully, Gen, I think they can do most anything,” Gram replied. “But we have to let them. If Penny is willing, the stars’ll answer. If she’s not, well then, bless her heart and come on home.”

  I thought that over. “Some people think when it’s your time to go, you ought to face your destiny with your head held high.”

  “So they do.”

  “How’s a person to know which is which? When it’s destiny and when to let the stars help out?”

  “I reckon . . . there’s a certain quiet knowing,” she told me.

  I looked over to see the glint of the streetlights reflected in Travis’s eyes. I reached out and poked him in the knee. Not sure why. Maybe I wanted to check-see if he was really there.

  “You’re sure this is all right with you?” I asked Gram. “Will you be all right alone tonight?”

  A little snappishly, she replied, “I’m a grown woman, ain’t I?”

  “Well . . . all right, then,” I said. “See you around lunchtime, prob’ly.”

  “Come at your own gait, honey.”

  She hung up.

  I held out the phone so Travis could shut it off.

  “Everything fine?” he asked.

  “Ye-ah.” I gave an uneasy shrug. “Something just feels, I dunno, peculiar.”

  He glanced at Tom and Miz Tromp in the front of the jeep. “I know what you mean.”

  Somewhere about midway through the drive, I drifted off. When I woke, my head was on Travis’s shoulder.

  “Sorry,” I said, peering through my unruly hair. “I didn’t drool on you or anything, did I?”

  He laughed. “No.”

  Up front, Miz Tromp rifled through her bag and came out with a water bottle for each of us. She handed one apiece to Travis and me, then murmured something to Tom. He smiled and took a bottle.

  “Can I ask you something?” Travis asked me.

  “Sure.”

  “How come you wanted me to come along tonight?”

  “I couldn’t very well invite your ma and leave you sitting at home,” I teased.

  “Naw. Really.”

  The truth was, it had just seemed like the natural thing to do. I was getting used to having Travis around. If I was gonna do something hard, he should be there.

  “I reckon it’s because”—I chewed on my lip—“you help me feel strong.”

  For a second, I thought he was going to try to hold my hand. He seemed to think better of it, though, and gently bumped me on the arm with his fist.

  “Someday soon, I’m gonna ask you to wish-fetch me a new pair of pants,” he said.

  “Oh? Why’s that?” I asked.

  “’Cause you sure do make a fella feel like he’s too big for his britches.”

  It was deep dark when Tom pulled his jeep into the Ardenville Cancer Center. The halls were quiet, and most of the patients were asleep. When I glimpsed Penny from the hallway, though, she sat wide awake, a mound of pillows and plush toys threatening to crowd her off her own bed. In the harsh hospital lights, her skin had a troubling, greenish cast. But it was still Penny, poised with a pen over one of those sudoku books, looking as angry as I’d ever seen her.

  I was crossing her threshold when she swore, “Dang fool thing!” and threw the booklet across the room. It landed at my feet.

  Penny saw me and snarled. “You!”

  I picked up her game book and set it on a table. “Miz, uh—”

  “W-who! Who told you?”

  Edie stepped forward. “I brought her here, Mama.”

  Penny turned three shades of red, huffed twice, and swallowed down what was clearly an uprush of pain. “You brought her? Then you get rid of her!” She turned her face away.

  I can’t explain how, but right then, I had the clearest knowing that, as angry as Penny was, she was far angrier at herself than she was at either me or Edie.

  “Miz Walton, please—” I tried.

  “Get out!” she roared, then grunted—with the strain of shouting, I imagined. “I don’t want to hear a word you have to say! Nurse!” She reached for her call button and mashed it with both thumbs. “Nurse!”

  Tom stepped forward. “Penny, please, hear us out.”

  “Oh-ho! You’re behind this! Mister Alternative Treatment! Mister Fluff-My-Aura Man! Tell you what.” She pointed a trembling finger. “You’re fired. I want a new day nurse. Get your supervisor. We’ll deal with this right now.” Penny mashed the button again. “Nurse! A real nurse, please!”

  A real nurse did come in, and a supervisor, and two other folks who I reckoned were some kind of orderlies.

  Penny waved an arm. “I want these five, including my daughter and this—this nurse-of-false-hopes, out of my room! I told you people I didn’t want any homeopathic pseudo-medicine anything, and I meant it!”

  And there it was. Just as fast as we came, a security guard was muscling us out of Penny’s room.

  I was so stunned, I nearly let it happen.

  But all at once, I saw a glint of silver through the window. The sky was blanketed with glowing clouds, as if a full moon hung beyond them. One lone star, just one, shone out.

  A wisp of music, the faintest breath of it, whispered behind my ear. All shall be well.

  “Waaaaait!” I bellowed.

  Everybody—Penny, nurses, guard man, everyone—froze.

  Now what?

&nbs
p; I had one chance to get this right. I had to let Penny know that a wish might yet heal her.

  “Please! Miz Walton!” I called. “My ma never tried to cure your sister. Loreen asked my ma to let her die!”

  As soon as the words were out, I knew I’d yapped up heartily.

  Penny turned small and smaller, folding in on herself. Sass’s bold real estate lady was gone. The tiny woman who took her place was something like the husk of a person who’d wandered a desert for weeks but never found a watering hole. She didn’t even seem angry anymore. Just . . . empty.

  “That’s enough from you,” muttered the guard. “Let’s go.”

  As he strode us down the hall and toward the lobby, Edie called back to her mama, but Penny didn’t reply.

  It was a fairly bleak scene, there in that lobby, with Edie sobbing her eyes out and Tom standing stiff as a statue while his supervisor fired him on the spot.

  Here’s what comes of it, I recalled Gram saying.

  I could only nod and agree.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to no one in particular.

  Then I walked out.

  I didn’t know where I was going, precisely, so I wandered for a time. Around the parking lot, into a pretty little garden that—if the cold kept coming—wouldn’t make it through the night. On the far side of some roses, a staircase clung to the outside wall of the building. I squinted at it, following it up to a landing on the roof. Again, there shone a bit of silver, that same lonely star overhead.

  I climbed the stairs like a sleepwalker, dazed. I wasn’t sure why I bothered. High up or down low, this would still be my biggest gaum-up yet.

  I just had to come, I poked myself. All for the sake of fixin’ things that wasn’t mine to fix. Edie’s ma not speaking to her. Tom fired. Penny’s spark snuffed out, maybe for good. Not to mention the starving folks whose biscuits didn’t get made tonight!

  I glanced up and around, as if the night sky might hold some answer as to how things had gotten so strained. Of course, it didn’t. And as for the rooftop, there were only a few flower pots and a bench for sitting. Ardenville was prettier than I imagined a city could be, though. From up high, its lights twinkled like low-to-earth stars.