White Sands, Red Menace

Dewey skipped down the alley from Owen’s house cradling a flat metal box of socket wrenches against her chest, feeling the vibration as the pieces inside rattled with each step. She kicked pebbles just to watch them skitter, tiny dust trails marking their trajectories, thoughts bouncing around her head.

She’d borrowed the tools to finish an addition to the Wall, a cantilever arm that would lower a little dumbwaiter box down to the bottom of the stairwell. That would be useful when they started packing next month. She envisioned the construction, how the parts would fit together, but underlying all that was a faint memory of spearmint that made her skip and skitter stones.

In Seventeen stories, a first kiss was supposed to be in all capital letters, violins playing, that sort of mush. Dewey knew she wasn’t a magazine kind of girl, but what happened in the projection booth was really nice. She just hadn’t expected it to change anything.

On the way home, Owen had started acting like a magazine boy, serious one minute, then goofy in a way he’d never been before. He called her “my girl,” two or three times, like she belonged to him now.

He was sweet, but she wasn’t “sweet on him.” Not that way. And she certainly didn’t belong to him, like a book or a truck or a set of wrenches.

She imagined telling Suze, later that night, when the house was quiet. Would Suze understand, or get all weird about it? Dewey and O-wen, sitting in a tree. K-I-SS-I-N-G. It hadn’t been like that.

Her shoes crunched on the pea gravel when she turned into the Gordons’ driveway. The Chevy was parked by the back door, and a potato lay near the front wheel. Must have fallen out of the grocery bag. Dewey picked it up, wedging it under her arm, and opened the screen door to the kitchen.

Terry Gordon stood by the sink, an expression on her face that Dewey didn’t recognize. She looked serious—very serious—but not sad, or at least not crying.

“You dropped this by the car.” Dewey put the potato on the counter. She laid the metal box down beside it.

Terry nodded. She started to say something—Dewey could see her mouth move, then close, her lips in a tight line, like she was trying to keep the words from coming out.

“Dewey?” Mrs. Gordon said, smoothing her hand on her pants. “Honey—?”

Dewey felt her armpits prickle with sweat, felt her throat tighten. She’d only heard those words, that tone of voice, once before, the afternoon that Oppie told her Papa was dead.

But there was no one left to die, no one who mattered that much to Dewey. Terry was here, standing in front of her, and if anything had happened to Suze—or Dr. Gordon—she’d be sobbing. And they were all the family Dewey had.

“Nothing’s wrong, exactly. It’s just, well, we’ve had a surprise, and—”

Dewey didn’t hear the rest of the sentence, if there was one. A woman in blue jeans and a light brown sweater walked in the door from the front hall. A stranger.

Dewey stands in the Gordons’ kitchen, light from the setting sun slanting red-gold through the window, her hand on the rough skin of a potato. She stares into the face of a stranger who is a version of herself and feels as if she is looking through the wrong end of a telescope, the life that had been ordinary a moment before now very far away.

Bye baby bunting, Daddy’s gone a-hunting, a faint voice sings in the back of her mind. It’s a soothing song, a lullaby, but it makes her stomach knot and flutter. The voice is not Papa’s and not Nana’s, and who else ever sang to her that way?

She knows that when this familiar stranger speaks, she will hear that voice, and she doesn’t want to. Dewey stands as still as a statue, but she can feel herself quivering. She does not want to get any closer. If the smell of Brylcreem at the drugstore can make her eyes sting, can conjure Papa, unbidden, what will her scent unleash?

She looks at Terry Gordon, standing next to the sink, and wants to run over and throw her arms around her, bury her head in that soft plaid shirt. You said no one could take me away. You promised.

But she does not move, because even Terry can’t help. This is the one person, the only person, who can claim that Dewey does belong to her, no questions asked.

“DeeDee,” the woman says, and inside Dewey, the ice breaks. Not a melting, but a glacier shearing off and floating away from safe anchor into the open sea. She tastes applesauce, and her leg aches in memory. She feels as if her skin is too tight, and will never fit again.