CHAPTER 22
Devon
Devon was starting to get edgy. Uncle T hadn’t returned.
As time passed, he found himself watching cars on the road, looking out for his uncle’s brown Cadillac.
Waiting. Dreading. Once he’d seen a brown car and almost wrecked his bike for real, but it was only an old Chevy, and when it passed, a big rusted panel on the side, Devon saw it looked nothing at all like T’s except the color.
“Careful you don’t feed your worries too much or they’ll grow fat on you,” Memaw used to tell him sometimes, when she’d catch him staring out the window, frowning.
Uncle T didn’t come around much back then, and certainly didn’t bring his friends over.
Memaw wouldn’t have stood for that. His biggest worries then were how to stop Marquis from picking on CJ, or staying on top of his homework.
Now his worries were far different. Far worse.
Though he didn’t let himself worry when he could help it.
The worries tended to sneak in, catch him unawares.
Like now, when he was supposed to be in the recliner doing his reading log but instead kept jumping every time he heard a car door slam outside at the neighbors’, or someone yell from across the way.
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart” came back to him then, and he sighed, fiddled with the pencil.
He’d told Miss Becca to give it to God, and he’d meant what he’d said.
For the most part, he tried to live that way, just throw himself into work and camp and church and anything else that came his way.
But sometimes like today, he’d find himself sitting there, staring out the front window, heart all tight and knotty, waiting to hear the familiar putt-putt of T’s engine, or the bang of the screen door.
He’d wake late at night sure he’d heard laughter or someone’s hand slam down hard on the kitchen table, then realize he’d dreamed it, and T really wasn’t there at all.
His bruises were almost gone now, and his ribs didn’t hurt whenever he lifted his arms. But he was afraid of letting his guard down, afraid to relax too deeply.
Like a caged rabbit, he didn’t want to sleep for fear the wolf would come and eat him alive.
If there was one big positive it was that Memaw was doing much better.
Yesterday, he’d come home from camp and found the bread on the counter instead of in the fridge where he’d left it, a knife with peanut butter in the sink.
When he’d checked on her, she was sleeping, but her hair smelled like shampoo, and he knew she’d been up, been moving around the house.
He’d gone back to sleeping in his own room again, and this morning, she’d been awake when he popped in to say goodbye before camp.
“Have a good day, honey,” she said, and she almost sounded like her old self.
But today she was sound asleep when he’d gotten home, and he realized that was the worst of it. The quiet. The absence of sound made him want for the sound.
That was it. He tucked the reading log in his backpack, then slipped out the door, turning the lock and pocketing his key. Five minutes later he was pedaling down Aberville Road.
For the next two hours he helped Mr. Allen stock shelves, sweep the floor, and wash the windows. After, Mr. Allen gave him a few dollars and a bag of apples.
“When you get old enough, you can come work here at the counter, like your mama did, Son,” Mr. Allen said in his raspy voice, smiled. “You’re a good boy, and a good worker.”
“Thanks, Mr. Allen.”
Devon smiled at him, but deep down, he didn’t want that at all.
He didn’t want to work at the corner shop, didn’t want to stay on in Dahlia.
He wanted to go to college like the kid in the book he was reading, the one whose brother was in a gang but who’d managed to “break the cycle” and achieve his dreams. “Breaking the cycle” was one of the things they talked about a lot at camp, that and staying in school and steering clear of drugs and alcohol, saying no to abuse, telling a trusted adult when they saw something they knew was wrong.
A lot of that stuff wouldn’t work at all in real life.
You didn’t go telling a trusted adult your uncle’s dealing drugs out of your house while your sick Memaw’s laying in the bed and you’re trying to sneak in through the window so you don’t get spotted and dragged into the whole mess.
You don’t tell a trusted adult unless you want the whole thing to go caving in on you and you’re yanked into some Home for Kids faster than you can snap.
But college, college was one of those things that would work.
He could picture himself there, on some fancy campus with his blue backpack and a nice fresh clean shirt.
A girl would come up and talk to him, a pretty girl, with good teeth and eyes that smiled along with her mouth, and they’d go to football games or sit in the center of one of those campus squares they talked about in the books, where people discussed philosophy or quizzed each other for exams.
Rev told him about college sometimes. He’d met Marla there, back before he was a preacher, and they’d go get ice cream and sit and stare at books together, not a care in the world beyond an A on a paper or getting to a part-time job on time.
“Those were the days,” Rev would say, shaking his head. “It’ll be strange when I finally finish seminary. I’ll have to go back and teach someday just ’cause I miss it!”
Devon had laughed, but privately he’d started to panic. What if Rev did leave one day, if he and Marla did move off and go teach someplace, left him far behind?
He’d be alone then, good and alone. Give it to God, he nodded to himself. No sense worrying about the future. God would provide, one way or the other.
He took the long way back, and it was almost dark when he got home. His eyes shot to the carport on reflex, and he breathed a sigh of relief, heart fluttering back to normal. No Cadillac.
And he hurried in to make him and Memaw some supper.