BY THE NEXT DAY the muscles in Dani’s legs and back were pretty sore, and Stormy was walking strangely too.
“I’m stiff,” he told Dani and Linda. “Gus said he thought I needed a grease job.”
“Oh yeah, when did old Greasy Gus tell you that?” Dani asked.
“This morning, at the bar,” Stormy said. “I saw him in the bar.”
Linda raised her eyebrows at Dani and sighed. Dani knew what that meant. Linda didn’t like the way Stormy was allowed to spend so much time in the bar. “Why were you in the bar this morning?” she asked.
“To get some money,” Stormy said. “My mom gave me money for breakfast. I got a Butterfinger and some potato chips.”
Linda didn’t say anything but her lips tightened as she got down the box of oatmeal and poured it into a pan. Stormy was about to get a second breakfast of good, healthy oatmeal.
When the oatmeal was gone and Linda had gone off to work, Dani and Stormy went out to sit on the front porch, where, in the early morning, there was still a little bit of shade. They were planning to sit on the steps and talk, and maybe read another chapter of The Jungle Book. But the talk came first and most of it was about Pixie.
“I was really mad at her right at first,” Dani said. “I thought she just went ahead and got that really expensive bike with the money she’d promised us for tickets. I was so angry. Weren’t …”
What she had started to say was, “Weren’t you?” but remembering how Stormy had looked when he came into the house pushing the Black Phantom bicycle, she realized the fact that they’d just lost their ticket money probably hadn’t even occurred to him. At least not at that moment.
Actually he still wasn’t looking particularly angry. Worried, maybe. “Are you still mad at her?” he asked.
Dani sniffed. “Not much, I guess. Looks like she really didn’t plan for it to happen that way. Like, maybe she really didn’t figure her father would just up and buy her a bicycle instead of giving her the money.”
Stormy looked relieved. “I guess she didn’t.” He bit his lip, rolled his eyes and leaned forward to look up Silver Avenue. “I wonder when she’ll come back,” he said.
“Huh!” Dani said indignantly. “Is that all you can think about? Well, I guess I’ll just go on in then and find something better to do. And you can just—”
“No. No,” Stormy said. “Don’t go in. Let’s read the last chapter. Let’s see if Mowgli runs away.”
So Dani started to read but it was a long chapter and she noticed that Stormy wasn’t really into it, the way he usually was when he was being read to. Every once in a while she caught him leaning out to look past her up Silver Avenue. For some reason it bothered her a lot.
“Okay,” she said finally, when she caught him staring up the road for about the umpteenth time, “what did I just read? I’ll bet you weren’t even listening.”
“I was,” he said. “I was too. Mowgli and the wolf were talking about the tiger. But I was just looking …”
“Yeah? What were you looking for?”
Stormy did his guilty, squinty-eyed thing. “For the Black Phantom,” he confessed. “I was looking to see if she’s going to come on the Black Phantom.”
So Dani told him he could just go on out to the road then, and wait for his beloved Phantom. Or he could settle down and listen. But not both.
After that Stormy did stop looking, but Dani thought he was still listening because his ears seemed to be quivering. Sometimes in the past when she’d been reading a really exciting part Dani had thought she could see his ears quivering, but this time she wasn’t sure if his ears were tuned in to the story or to the whirr of bicycle wheels. It wasn’t until Shere Khan was about to be trampled to death by the buffalo that, for a little while at least, they both forgot about Pixie and the Black Phantom and started concentrating on the story.
It was a good thing they forgot too, because Pixie didn’t show up at all that day. And not the next day either. For those two days Stormy was at Dani’s house even more than ever, doing all his usual things. Things such as eating and bugging Dani to read to him. All his usual activities with a few more or less unusual ones thrown in for good measure—like running to the front window every few minutes and asking Dani over and over again if she thought Pixie was all right.
“Sure, she’s all right,” Dani kept telling him. “Why wouldn’t she be?” She went on, using her most sarcastic tone of voice. “If a person could die from skinned knees I’d have been dead years ago.”
“No. It’s not that.”
Dani frowned and shook her head disbelievingly. “You’re not still worrying about her folks chopping her up, are you?”
Stormy looked embarrassed. “No,” he said. “Course not.” But Dani didn’t know if she believed him.
“Look,” she told him. “Forget all that Frankenstein stuff. Okay? I mean, you saw her parents. Both of them. And they didn’t look anything like crazy scientists, did they?”
Stormy shook his head thoughtfully. “Nooo,” he said, dragging the word out in an uncertain way. “Not crazy, I guess. But strange. They did look kind of strange.”
Dani thought of saying that a lot of people had strange parents and that didn’t mean they were about to get chopped up into monster parts. But instead she just shrugged and changed the subject.
Pixie didn’t show up at all the rest of that day either, but when Linda came home from work she had news. She said that Pixie was fine and that she would be visiting tomorrow. All day tomorrow. “Mr. Smithson stopped by the bookstore this afternoon,” Linda said, “to ask if it would be all right if Portia spent the day with us tomorrow while he and Mrs. Smithson were away. He said her knees were healing up nicely, and they wanted to thank you for doing such a good job with the Mercurochrome.”
Dani gave Stormy a “See, what did I tell you” look, but he ignored her. “Did he say anything about the—Black Phantom?” he asked.
“The Black …,” Linda started to ask before her question turned into, “Ohhh. You mean the bicycle. As a matter of fact Mr. Smithson did mention the bicycle. He asked if it would be all right if Portia brought it with her when she comes tomorrow.”
Stormy lit up like a Las Vegas casino. “Will it?” he asked. “Did you say it would be all right?” And when Linda said she’d told Mr. Smithson it would be, he ran around the room a couple of times, and then said he was going home and go to bed early, so morning would come faster.
Things were different that evening with no Stormy hanging around, and one of the differences was a long talk Dani had with Linda.
It started when Dani came into the living room to look for a book of puzzles and noticed that her mother, who had been curled up on the daybed, was acting kind of strange. The first strange thing she did was to turn her face away when Dani came in. And then, while Dani was squatting in front of the bookcase, there was a sniffing noise, and when she turned around quickly, Linda was wiping her eyes.
Right at first Dani just went on looking through the shelves, pretending she hadn’t seen anything, but she couldn’t help wondering. She couldn’t remember seeing her mother cry before, at least not very much. Perhaps she’d cried a little, way back when they heard that Chance had died, and maybe some angry tears once when the Grablers had refused to mend the cabin’s leaky roof and then raised the rent. But those were the only times Dani could remember. More often, when she’d worried about her mother, it was just the other way around. Like worrying how she could go around being so cheerful when there was absolutely nothing to be cheerful about.
Dani decided she would pretend she hadn’t noticed. She found the puzzle book and started to leave the room when all of a sudden, without even deciding to, she found herself saying, “What’s the matter?”
Right at first Linda insisted that nothing was. “I’m just feeling a little down today,” she said. “It’s the heat, I guess.” But when Dani went on staring at her she sighed shakily and said she was worried about her job with Mr. Cooley. “He’s thinking of selling the bookstore,” she said with a strange catch in her voice. “He’s probably going to move to Arizona to live with his daughter. And if he does, there goes my job. And just when I was hoping we could get in better shape financially, now that we have the rent money from the ranch and all.” She sniffed again and wiped her eyes before she sighed and said, “And now just today, when I was in the market I saw Brenda and she said she and Howie might have to raise the rent again.”
So then Dani said in what she hoped was a “well, then, that’s settled” tone of voice, “Well then, it sounds to me like it’s the perfect time for us to pack up and go back to Sea Grove.” But that just got them started on the same old argument they’d had so many times before. Linda started the way she always did by saying, “But we can’t just go off and leave a bunch of debts here in Rattler Springs.” She sighed again. “Just a few more months with the extra money for the ranch, and I could have paid everything off. But now …” She waved her hands in a shaky “who knows” gesture. “Without a truck, or even a car, we’d have to leave everything behind. And how could we manage in Sea Grove with no money and no place to live and not even any furniture?”
Dani had heard it all before and as far as she was concerned none of it made much of a difference. She was sure that once they got to Sea Grove, Heather’s family would let them visit for a while. And Linda would be able to get a good job and people would let them charge things until they got settled. The important thing was for them to get out of the desert.
So the argument went around and around in the same old way, the only difference being that this time Linda complicated everything by crying. Dani wished she could cry too just to even things up, but for some reason she couldn’t. She just didn’t seem to be the crying type.
It didn’t seem fair. None of it seemed fair. After a while Dani got so frustrated that she slammed out of the house. Out on Silver Avenue she stopped for a moment to consider where to go. Not out across the desert toward the graveyard. Not now when the reddish twilight was already fading away toward darkness. Instead she would go down to the General Store and maybe do a little shopping. Fishing in her pocket, she found a nickel and two pennies. Well, maybe not much actual shopping, but a little “just looking” would give her something to do while she calmed down, and while Linda had time to start wondering where she had gone.
Walking against a grating, sandy wind, she reached the corner and turned down past the Grand Hotel’s bar, where bright lights and loud music were still spilling out of the open door. But a few yards farther on the General Store was closed and dark. She hadn’t realized how late it was.
She went on then, past the post office, but just as she turned to take the path that led back through the vacant lot, something made her look back toward Gus’s place. And there it was. Silhouetted by a dim glow that oozed out through the gas station’s greasy windows, a beat-up old truck was parked at an angle, its large, lumpy load covered by a flapping tarp. Dani whirled and ran for home.
Later that night, lying in bed in her stuffy room, with the window tightly shut against the blowing sand, Dani pounded her pillow in frustration. Everything, it seemed, was falling apart at once. Pixie’s offer to provide ticket money by asking for a bike, Stormy’s interest in the running-away plan, and now maybe even Linda’s job at the bookstore. Everything seemed to be slipping away.
And there was something else that seemed to be slipping away too. Something important that she couldn’t quite put her finger on, but what it felt like was a kind of—certainty. A conviction that she’d had ever since that day in the old graveyard when she’d decided she really was going to run away. But she wasn’t going to let that happen. Grabbing her pillow with both hands, she held on tightly, telling herself over and over again that she was going to leave before—before the end of June. She held on to that idea and the edge of the pillow until she went to sleep.