My only consolation that day was that Zach could never again make fun of me for the afghan/mooseslipper thing. Not when he was wrapped in a quilt that had bonneted dolls in every square and his feet were covered in hand-knit lime green socks. I almost choked on my cookie when I saw him waddle out of the bathroom.
“What are these, anyway?” I asked Mrs. Minton, biting into the hard, crunchy cookie.
“Biscotti. They’re Italian and very good for dunking.” She took hers and plunked it into her mug.
Zach and I dunked ours into our hot chocolate. She was right. The hot liquid made them soft and delicious.
“So,” I said, almost afraid to ask, “are you going to tell our moms?”
Mrs. Minton looked thoughtful. “Well, I can’t get one of you into trouble without getting the other one in it too. And I’m not too fond of the idea of bothering your mother with this, Wesley.” She put her coffee down and looked across the room at a picture of a young man in army uniform. I was pretty sure it was Mr. Minton.
“The first couple of years after a woman loses her husband are very hard. Your mother certainly doesn’t need any extra worries right now.” She looked back at me. “But honestly, Wesley, you need to tone it down a bit. My hip surgery has been moved up to the week after next, so I’ll be out of commission for a while. I won’t be able to rescue you for at least a couple of months.”
I nodded, but Mrs. Minton’s face clouded over.
“It’ll be good to have the surgery over with, won’t it?” Zach asked, seeing her face.
“Oh yes, but I was planning on going to Chile to watch Rachel’s race. I had my ticket and everything. The surgery was originally scheduled for after I got back.” She sighed. “I had to cancel all my plans, but the doctor said I was lucky to get in early. Still, I hate to disappoint Rachel. Now I’ll have to just watch it on tv, I guess.” She looked over at the small set. “I just hope the picture will come in clearly. Maybe I need new rabbit ears?”
“Why don’t you get a satellite dish, Mrs. M.? We get two hundred channels!” Zach said.
“Do you know what a fixed income is, Zachariah?” she asked.
Zach shook his head.
“It means that even if I could figure out those remote control things, I couldn’t afford satellite. Besides, rabbit ears aren’t so bad. I get most of the programs I like to watch on the six channels I pick up with them. I can even get channel fifty-six if the wind is blowing in the right direction.”
We left Mrs. Minton’s feeling guilty but smelling mountain-fresh.
I spent the rest of the night at home jumping out of my skin every time the phone rang, sure that the Delanys would call. But my mother never came into my room with that look on her face—the look that said my summer would be better spent helping around the house than having fun. The look that said I needed to build my character and learn some responsibility.
There was one tense moment after breakfast the next morning when I saw my mom in the laundry room smelling my T-shirt from the day before. Her forehead wrinkled as she sniffed it and held it up to the light.
I froze.
After a moment, she shook her head and threw the T-shirt in the machine. I didn’t know I could sweat so early in the day.
By the end of the week the Delanys hadn’t called, so I figured we were home free.
“See, I told you the Delanys would forget all about it,” Zach said as we headed to Lee’s Gas and Grub Saturday morning to see if the new magazines were in yet.
“I think we were just lucky the Delanys were busy with their race. And my mom was a bit suspicious, but I think I fooled her. How about you?”
“I think so. But Mom did keep running my shirt through her fingers like it felt funny. Do you think moms take espionage classes before having children?”
I shrugged, my mind already wondering if the value of the Spider-Man comic my dad had given me had gone up since the last issue of Wizard magazine.
“So have you thought about how are you going to do it?” he asked.
“Do what?”
“Pay your life debt to Mrs. Minton.”
“My what?”
Zach sometimes came up with the weirdest ideas. I think it was from watching too many National Geographic specials.
“I was watching this show about it last night. A life debt is created when someone saves your life. Mrs. Minton saved you from drowning in the creek, and now you have to pay her back,” he said.
“Where do you get these ideas? I’ve never heard of a life debt. Besides, it was weeks ago.”
“Life debts don’t expire, you know,” Zach said.
“Well, don’t you owe her, too, after the whole muddy clothes episode?”
“I only owe her a laundry debt. A few trips taking her stuff to the dry cleaners should cover it.”
“How do you pay back a life debt, anyway?” I asked.
“Well, in some cultures the ‘savee’—that’s you— has to spend his life protecting and looking after the ‘saver’—that would be Mrs. Minton—even if it means your own death.” He paused for dramatic effect. I was starting to sweat again. All I could hear were my dad’s words in my head. A man always pays his debts, Wes.
Most guys only have to hear that kind of fatherly advice once in a while. Usually when they get in trouble. When my dad knew he wasn’t going to be around all that long, he started throwing around advice at every possible opportunity. It was like an avalanche of wisdom on everything from why I shouldn’t throw spitballs at girls (A man always treats a woman with respect, Wes. You’ll understand why that’s important someday) to why I had to turn in the lottery ticket I found outside Lee’s (A man doesn’t keep what doesn’t belong to him, Wes).
“In other cultures,” Zach said, “you’d be her slave, forced to do chores like cleaning her dentures and vacuuming.” He looked like he was enjoying this.
“She doesn’t have false teeth,” I said. I knew he was going to ask me how I knew that, but we had arrived at Lee’s, and I quickly opened the door and went inside. With any luck, Zach would forget all about my debt to Mrs. Minton.
Mrs. Lee was at her usual post behind the counter. “Hi, boys! We got new magazines in.”
Mrs. Lee ran the store like a garage sale. Everything was jumbled up and stuffed in wherever it fit. She didn’t believe in throwing anything away either. The bells that rang when you ran over the cable at the gas pumps came off the old Nice’n Icy ice-cream truck parked out back. The rags Mr. Lee used to wipe off his squeegee looked like cut-up flannel nighties.
I passed the empty chocolate-bar boxes filled with fishing lures, and the postcard rack stuffed with packages of spices and rolled-up Chinese calendars, and went straight for the magazines, hoping the new Wizard was in. Wizard is all about comic books. At the back, it lists how much you can get for some really old ones. It was there on the rack, and I opened it to the price lists.
“Holy crow, Zach! My comic is up to eight hundred dollars already!”
“You gonna sell?”
“Nah. I want to wait till it’s worth enough to buy a dirt bike.”
He looked over at me, his forehead crinkled. “But eight hundred dollars can get you a bike right now, and Frank would snap up your comic in a second. I think that’s the only issue he doesn’t have.”
“I know, I know. Every time I go near him, he asks me. But it’s still not enough for a two-fifty-cc Hummer. Even used, they’re about twice that.”
Zach just shrugged. He wouldn’t know a 250cc Hummer if he tripped over one. One dirt bike was just like the next to him. But ask him about fiberglass versus wooden hockey sticks, and he would go on for about an hour. He was a hockey nut, even though he hadn’t played since he was little.
I wasn’t going to settle for just any dirt bike though. My dad and I had spent hours going over all the brochures. We had worked out what permits I’d need and where I would ride. He was going to supervise because I was still underage. That wasn’t going to happen now. By the time I got my bike though, I’d probably be old enough to ride wherever I wanted. If I closed my eyes, I could almost feel myself racing across the fields with the hum of the engine in my ears.
I grabbed some nacho chips. As I headed for the cash, the ground shook. Without lifting her eyes from the newspaper she was reading, Mrs. Lee reached out to the shelf behind her to keep the jars of olives from falling.
“Daryl,” she said shaking her head.
Everyone in Six Roads was used to Daryl and his explosions. People didn’t rush outside anymore thinking it was an earthquake.
Another blast shook the ground. This time it seemed a lot bigger. Then we heard a huge bang, and the ground shook again.
“That sounds no good.” Mrs. Lee looked worried. “I hope Daryl is okay.”
You wouldn’t think Mrs. Lee would have a soft spot for someone like Daryl, especially after all the jars of pickles and salsa that had fallen and broken because of the blasts, but she did. She said he reminded her of her brother in China.
“We’ll check it out, Mrs. Lee,” I said as Zach and I took off out of the store.
“You make sure Daryl okay, okay?” she called after us as we hopped on our bikes.
Daryl’s place wasn’t too far out of town, but when we finally got there, the house was deserted.
“I think the blast came from back that way,” I said, pointing to the hayfield at the far end of Daryl’s property.
We raced down the tractor path to the back forty. When we reached the field, we spotted him. He was at the base of the hill just past his property line. Mrs. Lee was right. What we saw was definitely no good.