“Well, then, you’re going to really like this,” she announced before kicking him firmly in his shin.
Clayton fell back in pain, shouting expletives in her direction. But Katie hardly heard him. She’d already taken off toward the pool. She had worked far too hard to get the lifeguarding job that summer. It was the most coveted summer job in town, a stepping stone to high school popularity. Nothing was going to stop her. No one, not even a bunch of annoying boys, was going to threaten to take that away from her.
CHAPTER 33
THE BOYS FOUND THE SITE FOR THEIR FORT AFTER SURVEYINGthe woods for nearly an hour. Clayton wanted to pick a place that was slightly elevated, and Buddy wanted one that was built into a part of recessed earth. Both agreed that it couldn’t be too near the entrance, where it might be seen by people in the parking lot, nor could it be too close to the reservoir, in case it ever overflowed.
In the end, Buddy deferred to Clayton for instruction, as he had never built anything like this before. He welcomed the architecture to his afternoons, the structure to have something to do in his endless free hours that summer that set him apart from his classmates. But perhaps even more enticing to Buddy was the fact that the fortress was his and Clayton’s shared secret.
Over the course of the afternoon, they would bring saws and cut the trees into logs and begin layering the branches to start creating the structure.
“We’ll bring a radio,” Clayton announced, “so we can listen to any music we want.”
“Too bad we can’t sleep here,” Buddy lamented. “I’d do anything to spend a night away from my house.”
“Agreed,” Clayton muttered as he pulled out a handsaw from his rucksack, the silver teeth reflecting in the low forest light. He’d taken a few of his father’s tools, ones he’d yet to unpack from the boxes in their shed, knowing they’d hardly be missed. “We just need to put the work into it, and we’ll finish soon enough. He slid the saw into a treeand moved the blade back and forth. Buddy watched as Clayton’s face intensified as he worked.
“Don’t just stand there, you lazy ass,” he ordered, looking up after cutting three logs. “Go make yourself useful.” So Buddy went to collect more branches and various odds-and-ends materials that were left in the woods. He found a piece of plywood and some discarded Coke bottles and stacked them in a pile with sticky pine branches and other dried twigs.
At one point, Buddy felt tired. He wasn’t used to so much exercise. The back of his T-shirt was sweaty; his face was streaked with dirt. His skin glimmered with an impressive clamminess. Unable to keep up with Clayton’s endurance (he had already cut seven long straight logs for the foundation), he sat down on one of the tree stumps to catch his breath.
Clayton approached and went over to size up the branches Buddy had found. “Good job. If we can’t find a tarp, maybe we use these for a roof,” he said, appraising the bounty. “We’ll want to make sure we have our privacy.”
They walked out of the forest smellier and dirtier than they had been since either of them could remember, and they savored every bit of what they knew their mothers would want them to scrub clean. Buddy’s T-shirt was ripped in the back from where the thin material had come into contact with a low-hanging branch. They had leaves and small twigs in their hair, and their faces were smeared with soil.
The heat lifting off the asphalt parking lot made the air ripple, and the boys watched the shoppers come and go as if they were viewing them through thick lead-paned glass.
“When do you want to meet next?” Clayton asked as he lifted a freckled arm and wiped the perspiration from his brow.
“How about tomorrow?” Buddy grinned.
Clayton took a branch and started drawing in the ground. “I’m thinking we should give ourselves a name, like a secret society or something.”
Buddy pondered the idea for a moment. “How about the Wolf Pack or the Dragon Teeth?”
“Those sound pretty stupid.” Clayton shut him down quickly. “How about the Viper Squad? That sounds pretty intimidating, if you ask me.”
Buddy shook his head. “Yeah … we could carve the initials ‘VS’ above the entrance of the fort.”
“Cool,” Clayton said. “This beats that dumb pool any day.”
CHAPTER 34
GRACE FELT SHE HAD A NEW SENSE OF PURPOSE EVER SINCE SHEstarted visiting the motherhouse and tutoring there once a week. And for the first time since she’d become a parent, she’d even discovered the positive impact of television. She could see how B?o was learning English far more quickly than many of the others because of his obsession with watching Saturday-morning cartoons.
“The middle school is arranging for a proper ESL teacher to start coming by soon,” Sister Mary Alice updated Grace. “We’re hoping the children will be able to start there in September, and the ESL will help bring them up to grade level. It’s more the adults we don’t want left behind.” She looked at Grace. “So, I was hoping you could help Anh more with her conversational English. She’s the one we’re all concerned about, since she’ll basically be a single mother to B?o once the official adoption gets worked out. She’ll have to go out into the work world to support the two of them.”
“Of course,” Grace said. “But I’m thinking it might be better to make things a little more hands-on for her. Maybe I could take her out for the day … like a trip to the grocery store so she could learn how one asks for things or hear a typical exchange with the cashier. You know, simple exchanges … but stuff we all have to do during our day.”
“An excellent idea!” Sister Mary Alice chirped. Soon Grace found herself with a weekly appointment with Anh. Every Tuesday, she’d remind Katie that Molly would be at the pool club with the Connor family, but that she should routinely check on her youngersister when she was not perched on her lifeguard tower. Katie reluctantly agreed.
In the beginning, Anh remained quiet as she shadowed Grace in her daily errands, merely nodding as Grace went about her routine.
“Do you have change for a ten-dollar bill?” Grace asked the cashier when she went to pay for her items. She wanted Anh to hear the conversation so that soon she’d have the confidence to do it on her own.
The next time they were scheduled to go out together, Grace found Anh waiting in the common room, all dressed up for their excursion. Anh was wearing a yellow cotton sundress with little white daisies embroidered into the fabric that Grace had given her along with some other hand-me-downs from her closet. The dress, which was one of many that now no longer fit Grace, had once been one of her favorites, one she wore before she became pregnant with Katie. Now when she saw it on the younger Anh, she could hardly believe she’d ever been that thin. Had her waist really ever been that small?
“You look lovely, Anh. The yellow color really suits you.”
