THE SPREAD FACTOR
It was weird. Justin couldn’t think of a single grown-up he could turn to with his problems, but it seemed like just about every grown-up he knew was getting involved—and not in particularly helpful ways.
The day after the scene with the sheriff and Mr. Grimsted, Kate told him that Ruby and Mr. Jackson had gotten into a big fight over him.
“You’re kidding!” Justin was sitting cross-legged on the ground beside his bike. The bike was upside down, minus one tire, the one that kept going flat. Justin was trying to find the leak by rotating the tube in a pan of water. “When was this?”
“Friday afternoon, while you were off with Dad. Mom was working late and I went down to the Wilsons’ to see Ruby. She was out on the porch with Mr. Jackson. They didn’t notice me at first. I guess they were too mad.”
“About what?” Justin asked. “What’s my life got to do with them?”
Kate squatted next to his upside-down bike and began spinning the wheel with the good tire. “Mr. Jackson said you were flunking math. Ruby said he ought to give you a passing grade anyway, so you wouldn’t get dropped from the ball team.”
Justin looked up in surprise. He’d always admired Ruby, but he thought of her as Kate’s friend. Mom’s friend, too, but not really his. He’d never talked to her seriously about anything.
Kate gave the wheel another spin. “Ruby said you needed to stay on the team in order to get a scholarship to college, and Mr. Jackson said if you didn’t get good grades in high school, you’d just flunk out of college when you got there. Ruby said he had an inflated notion of the importance of math. He called her an airhead, or something like that, and, well, that’s when they noticed I was there. I wasn’t eavesdropping or anything. Just standing at the bottom of the steps, trying to decide if I should stay or go.”
“Did you?”
“What?”
“Stay?” Justin put out his hand to stop Kate from spinning the tire.
She looked at him through the spokes. “Not long. But I told them you had problems. Not just studies, but real problems.”
“You what? What kind of problems did you tell them I had?” Justin asked in dismay.
“Not about Little Billy,” Kate said quickly. “About Dad, and about him wanting you to go live with him.”
“Awwwww!” Justin flopped backwards onto the ground. “I can’t believe you told them that!”
“You never told me not to!” Kate protested. “If you had asked me to keep it secret, I would’ve.”
“I didn’t think I had to ask you not to tell that,” Justin said. “It’s my business!
“Well, yes, I know, but—”
“What did they say?”
“Nothing. At least, nothing else about you. No, wait. Mr. Jackson did. He said, ‘That just proves my point. Justin has lost his focus.’ And Ruby said, ‘I think you’ve lost your focus, too, Mr. High-and-Mighty Math Teacher.’“
Kate wrapped her arms around herself the way she always did when she was upset. “Mr. Jackson looked like he’d been slapped,” Kate recalled. “And Ruby looked like she wanted to slap him, except she couldn’t because by then he’d gotten in his car and driven away. She went in the house crying.”
“I can’t believe any of this,” Justin said, shaking his head. He submerged another section of the tube in the water. A tiny bubble floated to the top. He had finally found the pinhole leak. He would patch it tomorrow, and that would put a stop to the bike tire going flat. But somehow knowing he could solve that one small problem didn’t make him feel any better.
Like spilled milk, Justin’s problems kept spreading. The very next day, while Mom was still at work and Justin was outside patching the leaky tube, Lily came trotting up.
“Ruby and your mom just had this big fight about you,” she reported.
“Oh, great,” Justin said with a sinking heart. He was pretty sure Ruby would tell Mom what Kate had told her. “What did they say?”
“Ruby said your dad wanted you to go live with him. Your mom totally flipped out. She called him a ‘race rat’ and some other worse things, too.”
“Did Ruby stick up for him?” Justin asked in surprise. As far as he knew, Ruby had never even met Charlie.
“No, she stuck up for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, first your mom said she never should’ve let you visit him. Then when she said if you went to live with him it’d be over her dead body, Ruby told her that where you live ought to be your decision.”
“Oh!” Justin was glad somebody saw it his way.
Lily was wound up. She wasn’t finished with her story. “Ruby started explaining why boys need to spend time with their dads, but your mom got all mad and told Ruby to mind her own business. Then she asked Ruby, ‘If you’re so big on boys and dads, how come I never see Luther with his dad then?’ Ruby didn’t even answer her. She just called Luther and told him to get home, she didn’t want him playing anywhere near these uptight honkies.” Lily stopped to take a breath. “What’s a honky anyway?”
“It’s a word you shouldn’t use,” Justin said. “It’s a race word that might hurt somebody’s feelings.”
“I guess it works,” Lily said. “It made your mom cry.”
Justin groaned. Didn’t he have enough problems without this? He didn’t want to hear any more. “Have you kids fed Little Billy this afternoon?” he asked, trying to think of a way to get rid of Lily without being too obvious.
“Long time ago,” she said. “When we first got home from school.”
“Oh. Then why don’t you go play with Chip? I think he’s in the duck pen, gathering the eggs.”
“Luther’s there, too,” Lily told him. “He’s just keeping out of sight so if his mother comes by she won’t see he’s still here.”
A short time later Mom came across the street from the nursery, but instead of going into the house she got into the car. On her way out to the road, she stopped by the duck pen and called, “Luther, I’m going down to your house. Come on, I’ll give you a ride home.”
Luther obviously didn’t want to go, but when Mom insisted, he got in the car. Justin wondered if Luther would get in trouble with Ruby just for riding home with Mom.
Justin finished patching the tube and replaced the tire on his bike, then went in to help Kate get supper started. After that he wandered back outside to wait for Mom to get home. He sat by his upside-down bike and spun the wheel around, the way Kate had the day before. It was getting dark, and he was worried. He wondered why Mom had gone to the Wilsons’ and what had happened down there.
Finally Mom pulled into the driveway and got out of the car. She walked over to Justin, carrying a basket of zucchini squash. “How’s the bike, son? Did you get the flat fixed?”
“Yes ma’am.” He lifted the bike and set it right side up. “Where’d you get the zucchini?”
“Ruby gave them to me. We—that is, uh, I said something that offended her, and she was sort of rude to me. I went over to apologize. She said she was sorry, too, and, well, it’s okay now.”
Justin shot her a quick look. Had Mom decided that Ruby was right, that he ought to go live with his dad? Somehow that upset Justin almost as much as the reverse. It was his life and he didn’t want people deciding anything about it behind his back!
Before Mom could say anything else, Justin rolled his bike over to the porch. “Supper’s ready,” he called, and hurried into the house before she could start quizzing him about what his dad had said.
Later, when Justin was trying to do his math homework, his mind kept drifting to his problems. There must be such a thing as a Spread Factor, he thought with a grim smile. It would explain how something, say, a glass of milk, could be an exact measurable amount, but if you spilled it, it spread out in a way that made it seem a lot bigger.
The Spread Factor would also explain why Mom always started off working a certain number of hours at her jobs, then gradually added more and more hours until neither she nor they knew exactly when she would get home. And it could also explain why the more Justin tried to catch up in math, the more he kept running into things that he didn’t understand.
Most of all, the Spread Factor would explain how his problems, which could be listed on half a single page of lined notepaper, once they got out, kept spreading like spilled milk, all over the neighborhood.