EIGHT

A few days later that redheaded boy from the library came strolling up the driveway, leading a mule and trailed by a bunch of girls in assorted sizes and colors. The second I saw that flash of red hair against the background of green trees by the road, I leaped from the porch swing and made a mad dash for the front door, hoping to disappear before he caught sight of me. No such luck.

“Look, James, there she is!” One of the girls had spotted me.

James smiled and waved. How the heck did he know where I lived? Now I had to be polite. I started over to meet them, but stopped short at the bottom of the porch steps when I saw a shiny stick thing stuck to his leg, making him limp.

“Hi, Maggie with two g’s,” he said.

I couldn’t answer. I just couldn’t, because it wasn’t something stuck to his leg, there was no leg. I hadn’t noticed at the library when he was wearing jeans, but now, in shorts, I saw he was missing part of one leg from just above where a knee should have been.

A chunky girl with thick bangs cut straight across her forehead watched me staring.

“I don’t think she’s ever seen someone who lost a leg before.”

I forced my eyes to move to James’s face. Two girls on the back of the mule snickered, and heat rose up my neck. I wished I’d agreed to go with Mama to pick out paint colors. I even wished she’d come home right then. I’d have to help her carry the buckets into the house, these people would have to leave, and this awkward moment would be over.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to stare.”

James hadn’t stopped smiling. “It’s okay, it’s not really lost.”

All four girls giggled.

“It’s not?”

“Nope, I know exactly where it is,” he said.

“You do?”

“Yup. Buried in the backyard alongside two cats, one guinea pig, and Rugby. That was our dog. He died right after we buried the leg.”

The girls laughed together. I hate that feeling, being the odd one on the outside looking in. It was the same way Irene made me feel when she wanted to be mean, which happened whenever her big brother was nasty to her. The two girls slid off the mule’s back and stood with the others. I wanted to run inside and never come out again.

“Buried?” I sounded like a frog croaking.

James sat down in the grass and unbuckled the silver thing from his thigh. A black sneaker poked off the other end.

“Take a look,” he said, holding the whole contraption out. “Go ahead.”

I shrank back and crossed my arms over my chest. “That’s okay—thank you anyway.”

The chunky girl took the leg from James and knocked her knuckles just above the sneaker. “It’s titanium. It’s really cool.”

“Oh, I see.”

She passed the leg back to James and thrust her hands on her hips. “You’re Magnolia Grace.”

I nodded. “Yes, I am.”

“Well, I’m Biz and I have two moms.”

Nothing—ever—in any of Mama’s manners lessons I’d endured over the years could have prepared me for how to answer an introduction like that. Especially coming from a little kid who looked like she might be going into first grade in the fall. If so, this was no ordinary first grader.

Biz pulled another girl forward who looked a little older than me. She was the exact opposite of Biz; tall, with straight black hair and large brown eyes that slanted slightly at the corners.

“This is my sister Sonnet,” she said. “But she’s not Portuguese.”

Biz and Sonnet giggled.

A girl with tawny skin and wiry brown hair as wild as Benjamin’s raised her hand. “I’m Kendra,” she said.

Then the tiniest girl stepped beside James and studied me with clear, blue eyes under a mop of tight, yellow curls. James ruffled the top of her head.

“This is Lucy, the baby.”

Lucy dug her elbow into his thigh. “I’m not a baby. I’m five and three quarters. I only look little because I was a preemie and my birth mother left me at the hospital so my real moms could come and get me.”

Preemie? Birth mother? What five-and-three-quarter-aged kid knew those kinds of things, let alone said them out loud?

“And there’s one more sister,” Biz said. “Haily.”

“She’s at the store today,” James said.

“She’s ‘working,’” Biz said, air-quoting the word working.

Kendra rolled her eyes. “Working means she’s waiting for this boy to show up so she can flirt!”

“She has a bf! That means boyfriend,” Lucy chimed in.

“The girls are more excited about him than Haily is,” James said.

“Not me,” grumbled Kendra. “Sonnet doesn’t care either.”

Sonnet nodded silently.

“What store?” I asked.

“Our moms own Parker’s Country Store just this side of town. You’ll get to meet them soon,” said James.

“That’s how we knew you were here,” Lucy said.

My head flipped from one kid to another, settling on James. “Do I know them?”

“No, Deacon helps them at the store a few days a week,” he said. “He told us back when he first found out you were coming.”

Biz crossed her arms over her chest. “Yeah, but he said we had to wait for you to get settled before we came over.”

Lucy crossed her arms like Biz. “Yeah. Settled means at least two weeks. Sometimes more, like with you.”

Kendra nudged James. “We have to go.”

Lucy and Biz started talking at the same time.

“Aren’t you going to ask her?”

“It’s getting hot.”

“I’m itchy. I wanna go.”

Lucy tried to yank off her T-shirt. James quickly pulled it down over her body. “Okay, okay.”

“Ask her!” Biz demanded.

“We’re on our way to the river to swim. Wanna go with us?”

And then I was crowded into the middle of a circle of James and the two littlest girls, who talked at the same time, telling me about the rope swing at the river, and who was the best swimmer and the worst, and all the reasons I should come with them, and how we could go to their house afterward and eat all the ice cream we wanted because their moms owned the store. Sonnet stood apart, watching us and scribbling something in a pocket-sized notebook.

“I’d have to ask and Mama’s not home,” I said, secretly relieved. There were so many of them.

“You say I funny, like there’s an a with it,” Biz chided.

Lucy elbowed her. “Shhh.”

I didn’t want to go with them. I didn’t want to have to wait and introduce Mama to this strange family and see her try to hide her disapproval. She’d be real nice to their faces, but afterward, when it was just the two of us, she’d call them bumpkins. When she learned they had two moms, she might call them something worse. Mama’s judgment of other people always made me feel less than, like I probably came up short in her eyes too.

But I didn’t have a choice about asking or not because right then, a brand-new, fire-engine-red Mustang convertible spewed gravel under shiny black tires on the driveway and came to a screeching halt in front of the house.

Mama was back.