“I’m not scared of you.” His voice, which lately has a mind of its own, cracks on the last word. She looks at him appraisingly, unloading tea bags, crackers, olives, broccoli.
Matty and his banana leave the kitchen. He eats it quickly, putting the peel in the pot of summer flowers outside the front door to be retrieved later. He laces up his running shoes and heads up the gravel driveway, then up again—a slight incline, up the fire road, nothing like the hills that are coming for him later in the run.
By the time he’s back at the house he’s logged six miles no problem, it’s noon, and he’s thoroughly soaked in sweat. He douses himself with the gardening hose and drinks from it too, wanting to avoid another Pauline kitchen encounter, and walks around to the back of the house. His sisters are on the rocks near the water, which means his mother or grandmother or both are there too because his sisters aren’t allowed to swim without supervision. He looks hopefully for Hazel but doesn’t see her.
He climbs the steps to the porch, and there, moving slowly back and forth in the swing, is his grandfather.
“Hi, Grandpa,” he says. He never knows if he should introduce himself again, never knows how tangled the brain is at any given time.
“Sit here, young man,” says his grandfather, and Matty hesitates—there’s the copious sweat, then the dousing from the hose—but sits anyway, leaving space between his body and his grandfather’s. His grandfather has a piece of paper in his hands. He’s folding it in half and in half again, then unfolding it and repeating the same actions. He’s looking out at the water, not down at the paper, while he does this.
Matty searches for something to say. A sailboat glides by, far out in the harbor, and he squints to see it. “Looks like theLazy Jack IIout of Camden,” he says.
“Ah!” says his grandfather. “So it is. So it is.” All the time continuing the gentle rocking and the folding and unfolding of the paper.
Eventually Matty says, “Whatcha got there?”
“Oh, this paper.” He considers it. “A young lady brought it to me.”
“A young lady? Abigail? Claire?” Maybe it’s a drawing. Claire is young enough still to give her little drawings out as gifts. Just yesterday she handed Matty a smiling turtle with a neon-pink shell.
“Maybe.” He holds the paper out to Matty, who takes it. There’s no drawing, just a parade of words across the center of the page, small block letters that Matty has to work to read. His glasses were so foggy from the run that he’d left them on the big flat rock in the garden when he hosed off and he forgot to pick them up.
“You can have it,” says his grandfather. “I don’t understand it.”
“Okay,” Matty says. “Okay, Grandpa. I’ll take it.” He narrows his eyes at the letters until he can see them.
Martin,
My name is Kristie Turner. I just want to talk to you. I’m not looking for anything more than that.
Then a number with an 814 area code.
Matty folds the paper along the lines that his grandfather has already created. It folds easily, the divisions already worn in the paper. He stands, still dripping water or sweat onto the ground, and says, “I’m going to take a shower, Grandpa.” He and Hazel are going to take one of the kayaks out.
“Okay, then,” says his grandfather. “Off you go, young man. Off you go.”
“Should I take this with me, Grandpa? The note? Or do you want it back?”
His grandfather waves his hand at him. “Yes, take it, please. It’s not meant for me.”
“It has your name—”
“It’s for you.”
Matty puts the paper in the top drawer in his room, underneaththe stack of running shorts, where nobody, not even Claire, who tends toward sneakiness, will look. He stands for a long time in the shower, letting the water run over him.
Now Matty has a secret. Now Matty hasthe responsibilityof a secret. But he doesn’t know what the secret is, so what does he do with that responsibility?
21.
Louisa
Dear Daddy,
Will you please come soon????? All Matty does is hang around with Hazel. All Claire does is follow Hazel and Matty around until they see her and Matty tells her to go away. Granny mostly sits on the porch with her book or does her cross-stitch or goes on errands with Mommy and when Mommy isn’t doing errands with Granny she’s working on her BORING book. Grandpa is only interesting if he goes wandering off because at least then there is the excitement of looking for him but that doesn’t happen very often because Barbara is with him most of the time or Pauline or Granny are watching him or he’s sleeping. They are VIGILANT after what happened last time. That is a word I just learned.
Yesterday Claire had to sit in the naughty chair in the diningroom for ten minutes for saying a bad word. I won’t write the word here because I’m not allowed but I will tell you that it starts with F and ends with K and rhymes with an animal you see mostly in the water. She was so mad about it that she kicked the wall and made a mark on it and then she had to stay for an extra ten minutes and then she had to clean the mark off the wall. I am glad I have outgrown the Naughty Chair.
