I hadn’t made any progress about the car, so for this trip, at least, bikes were our only option. I had called around this morning, but none of the local tow places that had been open had quoted anything that I could afford. But the El D couldn’t sit in the parking lot of Roy’s forever.
I didn’t have a car back up plan. Charlie could take the bus to school, but I had to get to work. And get Cassie to her appointments. Charlie had to get to practice too, and there wasnot a public transit option. There were definitely things I missed about Ann Arbor.
“Let’s walk our bikes up then coast down.” He looked at me, then nodded, and started trudging up the hill. He was a little trooper. “Tara will drive us home when she’s done with her shift at the hospital,” I called to him. I saw his head nod tiredly again.
Finally we got to the top. I was feeling really glad we didn’t live in Colorado or some place with serious mountains. Not that I had ever been farther than Indiana.
Charlie stopped again. “Emmy?” he said in a small voice.
Uh oh.“Yes?”
“Remember when you asked me if I had eaten anything weird?”
Yes, the night before I had been afraid he had gotten into some kind of poison left over from my Nana, who liked to store stuff like plant fertilizer in a bag labeled “flour”. “Yes?” I repeated.
He looked at the ground. “Well…I ate the butter.”
“What? What do you mean, you ate the butter?”
Charlie looked as if he was going to cry. “Remember I wanted to have some by itself? And you said no. So I thought I’d just have a little piece, but then I ate a lot.” His voice had dropped.
“How much is a lot?”
“The stick,” he whispered.
“Charles Garrett Finn! You ate a stick of butter? No wonder you got sick!” Holy Moses, I had turned into Loretta. I just called him by all three names. “Charlie!”
A big tear dripped down his cheek. “I’m sorry.”
I reached over and ruffled his hair. This was exactly why you shouldn’t leave a child alone. It was my fault as much as it was his. “Charlie, you know better. Don’t do anything like that again. But as miserable as you were last night, I think you’ve been punished enough.” Really, we had both been punished. As had the ancient plumbing system of our house.
He peeked at me through wet, spikey eyelashes. “I’m really sorry.”
“I know, sweet pea. And I know you’ll never eat another stick of butter. Mount up. We have a ways to go.”
By the time we made it to the grocery store for my shift, he was balanced on the seat of my bike and I was pushing both of them. We were both exhausted.
“Hi, hon,” my manager Martha called when we stumbled in. “Did you bring my favorite little boy with you?” She came to the front of the store to pass a cookie to Charlie, who took it and asked, “May I have some water, please?”
Martha stared at our red faces. “It must be warmer out than I thought.”
“No, it’s still pretty brisk,” I told her, heading to the back room to clock in. “But we had a little car trouble so we biked here.”
She eyed me. “Charlie, honey, Frankie came with me today. Can you give him his cookie, and maybe the two of you canhead to the playground?”
Charlie looked at me for guidance. “Sure, pal. Stay together.”
Martha’s 18-year-old son was in the back room. “Hey, Frankie,” I said, as I grabbed my timecard and slid it into the ancient machine.
“You’re Charlie’s aunt,” he told me.
“Yep. He’s out front and he has something for you.”
Frankie had autism, and he and Charlie got along great. Most Saturdays, if we didn’t have a swim meet, Charlie would come with me to the NGS so they could hang out and eat the cookies Martha invariably served to them at nine in the morning.
Martha and I watched as they crossed the street, holding hands, to the windswept playground. Early spring up north was a little bleak. We could both keep an eye out while Charlie played and Frankie looked for and identified rocks. It was kind of his thing.
“Now,” Martha said, turning to me, “tell me about the car.”
