Chapter 131
It seemed that Ms. Janette was driving a lot faster than the other cars around them the few times that they encountered one out in the country, but it was hard for Elliott to tell since he had only ridden in a car the few times his mom had gotten one of her boyfriends to take them over to her dad’s house in Tulsa. Other than that, the school bus was his best comparison, and that was slow and always stopping. Still, he thought he should be able to see the cows and horses out the window, but mostly, they just looked blurry. He chalked it up to riding in a new car and tried not to think about it.
Eventually, they turned onto a dirt lane that went over a railroad track and wound passed a few fields and some wooded areas now and again. About a mile or so from where they turned, by his best estimate, they pulled down a drive. They were going much slower now, and he could see some cows out in a pasture on his side of the car. Jimmy slapped frantically on his arm, and when he turned, it was to see him pointing out his window at six or seven horses of all colors, but mostly black and brown, eating from a bale of hay. Wherever they were, Ms. Janette had been right about the animals.
The car came to a stop in front of a two-story farmhouse. It was a crisp white, despite the dust coming up from the road, with a wraparound porch and a gray-shingled roof. The sound of dogs barking greeted the doors opening, and Jimmy laughed in glee when a large Labrador Retriever began to lick his hand.
A screen door creaked, and Elliott looked up to see a woman a little younger-looking than his mom. She had on a pair of white pants that reached to mid-calf and a light blue blouse with flowers on it. Her hair was styled like one of his teachers at school, one of the younger modern ones who always wore nice clothes. It came up around her head and tipped out just past her ears, and the color reminded Elliott of the sunflowers they’d seen growing along the drive as they approached the house.
She had an odd look on her face, something between smiling and bursting into tears, but she didn’t say anything, not at first. A second later, a man came up behind her. He was tall and rail thin, though not as skinny as Jimmy. His dark hair covered the tops of his ears, and the stubble on his chin announced he hadn’t shaved since that morning at least.
The man, Frank, Elliott recalled, looked at the woman—Peggy—and they both smiled at each other, like there was some sort of secret only they knew about, and a tear trickled down her face.
Elliott studied Frank for a long moment as the dog continued to lick Jimmy’s hand. Over the years, Elliott had developed a system for assessing the possibilities that a man was a drunk, a skunk, or just an all-around asshole. Pretty much every man his mother had ever brought home fell into one of those categories, sometimes overlapping, and the ones who didn’t never stayed. While Elliott had a bit of experience with other men, such as a couple of his friends’ dads and a male teacher now and again, for the most part, the only men he knew were the kind that came over to drink booze with his mom, went into her bedroom for a while to play some game that made the bed creak, and then headed out the door. Sometime, the same man would come back enough that Elliott would have to talk to him at dinner or breakfast. Sometimes he’d move in for a while. Those were the ones that usually ended up knocking him across the room for having a smart mouth. None of them lasted long, though, not even the ones that made his mom shout their names real loud while they were playing that game. He vowed, when he got a little older and a little bigger, he wouldn’t take getting punched in the face sitting down. But now, none of that mattered. He could tell from here that Frank was not the type of man who would punch a twelve-year-old boy in the face.
Elliott clutched the pillow case tightly as he came around the side of the car, and Janette put her arm around his shoulders. Jimmy finally looked up from the licking, and his giggling stopped as he stared at Peggy.
Tentatively, she walked down the steps, Frank’s hands never leaving her shoulders, and stopped a few feet in front of them. She looked from Elliott to Jimmy and back again a few times before she finally looked Jimmy in the eye and said, “Hi.” It was quiet, almost like she thought if she said it any louder he’d break away into a thousand pieces and be lost forever.
Jimmy tipped his head to the side and stared at her. “Are you… Ms. Peggy?”
“I am,” she said, a bit louder now. “I… uh… you must be Jimmy.” He nodded, and she smiled, reaching up to pat Frank’s hand. Elliott had no idea what was happening. Why did she look at Jimmy like he was somebody she knew a long time ago who she thought she’d never see again?
She turned her face toward him now, and studying him with cornflower blue eyes, she said, “And you must be Elliott.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied, not moving, not quite sure what to make of any of this.
“We’d love it if y’all would like to come in,” Frank said, his accent thick and clearly Southern, even more Southern than the Oklahoma accent nearly everyone Elliott had ever met spoke with.
“They’re a little… confused, I think,” Janette said, and that word didn’t quite hit the nail on the head for how Elliott was thinking, but he would go with that for now. More like… skeptical. Why would a pretty lady and her husband with all this land and this big house want to take in two ragamuffin kids with nothing but a ratty pillowcase half-full of junk?
“That’s completely understandable,” Peggy said, though the way she looked at Janette raised more questions in Elliott’s mind than her response answered. “Please, come on in.” She was looking at Jimmy when she said that, and Elliott’s feet started moving as soon as his brother’s did, coming around the car to take his little sticky hand in his bigger one.
