“My uncle’s invited us up to his cabin
in the Poconos—for three days.”
This is Carolann on the phone
the next morning. “I tried to get out of it, but Mom got
mad, so now I have to go. We leave after lunch.
You two won’t do anything about the … you know …
without me, right?”

I stretch the telephone cord across the kitchen
so I can flip our calendar to September
and the cold reality
of school.

“’Course not!” I hear myself answer. But there’s another,
louder voice in my head that says
we’ve been lucky so far. In a small town like this,
with the chest exposed in a hole that’s
not too far from a church—
how much longer can we leave it there before
someone else finds it?

I hang up with Carolann. I call Malcolm.
“Hey,” he whispers into the phone.
“I got some bad news—”

“Oh, swell,” I say, cutting Malcolm off.
“I was calling to tell you some …”

And suddenly I stop my stupid sentence
about Carolann’s family going to the Poconos and who knows
when or if we’ll get that wooden chest
free and out of that hole.
I stop saying anything about that because right then
I remember about Vietnam.
I remember about Dixon.

My heart pounding, I wait for Malcolm to say something—
anything—
back to me.