Chase
“Isn’t that wild about Tara?” I ask, licking the chocolate ice cream as it melts. Allie Jo and I are sitting on a little porch in back of the hotel’s ice cream place; we’re taking a break from the brass. Some pigeons strut around, no doubt waiting on the bread Allie’s brought in a bag.
“Yeah,” she says, eating ice cream from a cup. Her advantage: she can eat it slowly. My advantage: I can eat with one hand. She takes a spoonful, swallows, and looks at me. “Have you ever thought about running away?”
I was seven years old. We’d spent the whole week in school making stuff for Mother’s Day. “Bring in your mom’s picture,” Mrs. Harris, my first-grade teacher, had said, “and we’ll paste it on the pots.”
I raised my hand. “What if you don’t have a mom?”
Her face collapsed. I didn’t know it then, but of course all the teachers knew about that; she’d just forgotten. Rushing to my desk, she put her hand on my shoulder and bent down to my level. “You can bring in a picture of your dad,” she said cheerfully.
“Dads don’t want flowers!” I knocked the pot off my desk. If it had been clay, it would’ve broken into a million pieces.
She picked up the plastic pot and said, “He’ll love it.” Then she clapped her hands at some other boys who were fooling around.
The tissue paper was dumb, only girl colors—mint green, soft pink, baby blue. I took some sheets of green, darkened them with a marker, and carefully cut the edges into three pointy shapes. A black pipe cleaner served as the stem.
Mrs. Harris waded through our desks, making admiring noises. “Roses,” “daffodils,” “daisies,” my classmates answered brightly when she asked about their cotton candy flowers.
Then she arrived at my desk. “Chase!” She did not sound pleased. “You were supposed to make flowers. What is that?”
I looked around the room at their stupid flowers. “Poison ivy,” I said.
A few kids laughed. I squinted my eyes at them and made them shut up.
“No,” she said, lifting my perfectly made plant from the desk. “You need to follow instructions.” After putting my poison ivy in her closet, she came back to me with pink, yellow, and blue tissue paper. “Even dads like pretty things.”
On the way home, I threw it into a creek.
“Yeah,” I say to Allie Jo now. “I’ve thought about running away before.”
She’s down to the bottom scoop in her cup. She plays with her spoon, then looks at me. “Did you ever do it?”
I shake my head.
“Why not?”
I shrug. “I didn’t want to leave my dad alone.”
She seems to think about that as we finish our ice cream. She grabs the bag of bread, hands me a few slices, and we start tossing shreds out. The pigeons flock in, the bigger ones pushing out the smaller ones.
Leaning forward on her rocking chair, Allie Jo asks, “Why do you think Tara ran away?”
“I don’t know.” I don’t know why people run away.
A fat pigeon with angry eyes waddles closer. He looks like a general. I give him a piece of crust. Pigeons have pink legs. No wonder he’s so mad.
“How come birds fly south for the winter?” she asks in a singsong voice.
I groan. “Okay, how come?”
She throws out a handful of bread, trying to reach the smaller birds in back. “Because it’s too far to walk.”
I drop my head, shake it, then look at her. “Allie Jo, we need to get you some new material.”