One day, without saying a word to me about it, Murphy showed up at the fort with the Book of Houses and the Book of People in her backpack. “If it’s okay with Maddie, I think we should all work on the books together,” she told us. “It will help us think about the houses we might live in someday. We could also make up our own city and tell stories about it. That’s something I’ve always wanted to do.”
Donita walked over and took the books from Murphy. She leafed through the Book of Houses. “These the scrapbooks you and Ricky Ray used to work on all the time?” she asked me. “They’re for pictures of houses?”
“And people,” I told her, feeling nervous, worried she might make fun of them.
“Well, y’all obviously been working hard,” she said. She sounded like she approved. “That’s the most houses I ever saw in one place.”
She closed the book and looked at Murphy. “I don’t know about making up a city, though. We already built a fort. Ain’t that creative enough for you?”
“That’s my point,” Murphy said. “The fort is built, and now we need something else to do. We don’t have to make up a city. That’s just one idea for what we could do with the books.”
Donita handed them back to her. “I’ll cut out pictures of houses. Like I said, I don’t know about no city.”
“We’ll be spontaneous about it,” Murphy said. “We’ll just do whatever comes to mind. If it’s okay with Maddie, that is.”
I looked around the room at each and every one of them, face by face. Donita had her practical look on, a look that made it clear she thought the rest of us needed her to keep our feet on the ground. Logan’s expression went this way and that, like he wasn’t sure someone signed up for Algebra I next year should be playing cut-outs—but if Murphy wanted him to, did he really have a choice? Ricky Ray’s face was as eager as a puppy’s.
Murphy was holding the books close to her chest. She looked at me solemnly, with the smallest of smiles, and I thought right then she knew how important those books were to me, and that she wouldn’t ever let anything happen to them.
After a long minute I nodded my head. “It’s okay with me,” I said.
Logan went to his house and came back with scissors and copies of Southern Living and Good Housekeeping. “This is the best I can do right now,” he said. “All the other stuff we have is Sports Illustrated and National Geographic.”
That’s how it became our routine, to meet at the fort and cut out pictures and put them in the books.
Now I figured we’d spend most of our time making up a city, just like Murphy wanted. But the day Ricky Ray cut out a picture of a modular home from the newspaper and stuck it into the book, making Donita laugh and say, “That thing ain’t nothing but a gussied-up double-wide. Just a big hunk of junk by the side of the road.” I couldn’t help but tell the story of living with my Aunt Fonda, who was really one of Mr. Willis’s cousin’s daughters.
“If you don’t count Granny Lane’s trailer as a house, then the first house I ever lived in was a modular home,” I said. I turned to Logan and Murphy and explained, “That’s the kind of house you buy at a dealership, and they ship it to your empty yard on a flatbed trailer. But it wasn’t a bad place to live at all.”
I’d just turned eight when I moved down to Blountville to live with Fonda. Even back then I knew there were pluses and minuses to every situation. On the minus side of this one, I’d had to leave Granny Lane and Mr. Willis, the only family I’d ever known. On the plus side, I had my very own room for the first time in my life.
“It was on the far left side of the house,” I told everyone, pointing to where my room would have been in Ricky Ray’s picture. “And right outside the window was a black walnut tree. You could sell those walnuts unshelled for ten cents a pound over at Blountville Herb and Metal.”
“Was it a big room?” Ricky Ray asked. “Big as this fort?”
I shook my head. “If you spit across it, you’d better watch out, because that spit would bounce right back in your eye.”
Fonda’s girls, Peyton and Tiffany, had a bunk bed in the room across the hall from me. Ten-year-old twins, they were about the most glamorous girls I’d ever known. They liked giving their old things to me, torn dress-up clothes, junky tea party dishes, coloring books with almost all the pictures colored in. After only a month at Aunt Fonda’s, I had that room of mine so done up with odds and ends, including a play oven and a small but real refrigerator without a cord, that I could stay in it all day, playing house. I could barely turn around in that room, but in my mind it was the size of a mansion.
Only problem was, I had that room done up a little too nice. When summer came around, Peyton and Tiffany started edging me out, telling me I could go sit on the top bunk all by myself, while they doodled and dawdled in my room, making up phony conversations like they were married and having dinner parties. “Oh, Justin is going to turn purple when he sees I burnt the roast,” I remember Peyton exclaiming during one game of Dinner Party. “I reckon he’ll want a divorce,” Tiffany agreed.
“The kicker was,” I concluded, “they liked that room so much, they decided I was in the way. They got talking to their mama, and the day after Labor Day I met my first social worker walking down Aunt Fonda’s gravel drive.”
“Social workers,” Ricky Ray said, sighing. Everyone but Logan nodded glumly. “But I’m glad you got kicked out of your Aunt Fonda’s so you could come over here.”
“I had a lot of stops in between here and there,” I reminded him. Before I could tick all the places off on my fingers, Ricky Ray counted them out for me. “Three homes in one year,” he said. “The Grindstaffs, the Honey-cutts, and the Fulks. And then Mrs. Estep’s for a long stretch before coming to the Children’s Home.”
I couldn’t help but think of my life at Mrs. Estep’s as I watched Ricky Ray a few days later kneeling over an old copy of Seventeen magazine, clipping out a picture of a girl with pink hair and a dragon tattoo on her shoulder. You could tell he was serious about cutting her out exactly right. Ricky Ray did not take his role as a contributor to the books lightly, no sir.
“Now this girl, her name is Crystal, and once upon a time she had a little boy with blonde hair,” Ricky Ray said, taking one last snip. He held the paper girl at arm’s length and admired his handiwork.
Rain tapped on the roof of the fort but didn’t come in, a fact we were real proud of. It was the first week of October and the sky had been sending down rain steadily since Thursday, but here it was Saturday and not a drop had made it inside. Donita and Logan had taken plastic wrap and a staple gun to close the windows against the nonstop drizzle.
“What happened to the little boy?” Donita asked from where she was curled up in an old armchair with fluff coming out of its cushions. It was one of a bunch of chairs Logan had contributed from his parents’ garage. Three of them were folding chairs, two were chairs that went with a dining room table that Judge Parrish was using in his study, and one was the armchair where Donita sat. She had the Book of Houses in her lap and was pasting in a picture of a Williamsburg colonial.
“He ran away,” Ricky Ray told her. “See, Crystal, his mama, was a princess, only she had been stolen by bad fairies when she was just a little girl. She missed her own folks real bad, but she didn’t know what had become of them or where their castle was or anything. She just cried and cried about it. So her little boy, when he got big enough, decided to go find the castle that was his mama’s true home.”
“He was on a quest,” Logan said from where he sat on a folding chair in the corner, leafing through an old copy of Family Circle.
Ricky Ray leaned back and considered this. “I guess that’s what you might call it. He went off looking for something. Is that a quest?”
Logan nodded. “You got it.”
“Then he was on a quest,” Ricky Ray agreed. He turned to me and grinned. “You know what the boy’s name was, Maddie?”
I shook my head. “Was it Ricky Ray?”
Ricky Ray looked at me like he couldn’t believe I didn’t know the right answer.
“No way,” he said. “The boy’s name was Randy. Why, it was Randy Nidiffer.”