“Dear Mom,” I scribble in my notebook, then tighten up my face as I wait for the words to start flowing. I think if I were to tell her some of what’s happening—with Lexie or the church or school—it might be different, somehow. Maybe she’d show up, and I’d find out that a mother’s shoulder feels different than a grampa’s. That it’s softer and stronger all at once.
But I’m not quite sure how to cram all this into a letter, so I put my notebook down, and set up the TV trays in the living room: one in front of Gus’s chair and one in front of mine. We play tug-of-war over what we watch during dinner. When I win, we watch game shows. When Gus wins, we watch the news.
As I lay our silverware out, the station’s already tuned in with the help of our duct-taped rabbit ears. The news. I wrinkle my nose, disappointed, until halfway through my corn bread and beans, when Chuck’s face fills the jerky screen.
“Our church family will be having a huge rummage sale,” Chuck says. “The money from the sale will be put toward rebuilding Hopewell. We’re taking donations for the sale, which can be dropped off at any time in a bin I’ve set up in the parking lot of the old Montgomery Elementary School. As the church pastor, I’m also seeking donations on a larger scale—from construction companies and the like—anyone willing to provide building materials, or their time. This is going to be an enormous project. Our recent storm hit Hopewell harder than any other building in Willow Grove, and it’s going to take time to secure funds for a renovation. But I’m confident we’ll meet our goals, with a generous community like ours.”
He smiles at the camera, and even though I can feel Gus brightening beside me, I accidentally let out a low, wordless grumble.
“What’s that all about, Little Sister?” he asks.
“Things don’t get fixed,” I say. “When something’s broken, it’s broken.”
“Everything that gets broken can be fixed,” Gus tries to assure me.
“With what?” I snap. “Glue? Tape? With some stupid mismatched patch?”
I hadn’t meant to let my sourness leak out, but now that I have, I can’t hold any of it back, not anymore. “It’s like—” I go on, “like when something’s old.” Finally, I say the word like I’ve been feeling it the past few days. Like it’s a scaly, nasty patch of dead skin. “When something’s old, it’s never new again.”
“Nothing wrong with a thing being a little old,” he says.
I grimace.
“Poor folks have poor ways, Little Sister,” he insists, using the same words that I’ve heard hundreds of times, but have never really thought about until now. “Folks around here,” he goes on, “they might not have a lot of money, but they’ve got pride. Everybody keeps their houses tidy. There’s not one linoleum floor in this entire neighborhood that I’d have to think twice about eating off of.”
That much is true. Every single day, somebody’s mom is outside beating rugs or hanging sheets or scrubbing windows, big streams of white soap running down her arms. But I don’t want to admit he’s right. I shake my head hard enough to make my braids ripple like tall grass in the breeze.
“Little Sister,” he starts.
“Why do you call me that?” I blurt. “I’m not your little sister. I’m nobody’s little sister.”
He leans back in his chair, eyes me suspiciously. “I call you that,” he says softly, “because you’re mine, every bit as much as your mom was. Child number two. A little sister.”
I feel even worse than before, because now I’ve hurt Gus. I think I can hear his heart cracking inside his chest.
“Where’s all this coming from?” he asks.
“It came from the fact that they shut down Montgomery and sent me to Dickerson,” I say. “It came from the fact that Victoria Cole’s in my class, and she’s on the House Beautification Committee with her dad. And she—” But I can’t finish: She’s got Lexie. The sting is too fresh.
I steer around that to go on, “. . . and her hair is straight and she’s like a magazine picture, and we live in a neighborhood that’s—old.” I don’t say anything about wishing Old Glory would stop picking me up in the afternoon with a wrecked car attached to her back, or how I think it’s a little embarrassing now that he’s a trash hauler. I’ve hurt him enough already.
“Well,” Gus says. “Maybe we could do our own renovations.”
A tiny ray of hope appears inside me, the same way a little stream of light pours from the hallway through my bedroom door’s keyhole at night.
Gus must see that burst of light right away, because he instantly warns, “Remember, we’re not the kind of people who can go hire some ritzy interior decorator.”
“I don’t care so much about the inside,” I say. “I care more about what’s on the outside.”
Sure, Gus and my teachers and Chuck like to talk about how the outside of a person doesn’t matter as much as the inside. But all Victoria’s passed judgment on are my outsides—my clothes, my grampa, Old Glory. If I ever want her to think of me differently, the outside is what I’ve got to fix.
“Think about it, Gus,” I say. “Somebody who doesn’t know us, who’s just passing by, they look at the front of our house, and maybe they think we’re run-down people. If anybody’s inside our house—well, then, they know us. They know we’re not run-down.”
Gus smiles and nods in agreement before he offers me a big helping of his hearty pumpkin pie laugh.