Smiles

A bird's song on a lonely road

Is your smile

To me

XXX

The IRS had begun to call, again and again and again so that Richard couldn't ignore them anymore.

They were polite, but they were firm. The tone of the messages seemed to say, we will get our money, whether you like it or not. Richard wasn't so sure about that. How, he'd always wondered, could they actually make you pay them.

Arrest, was the most plausible answer that usually flitted across his mind. There were others too, of course. hey could foreclose the house, couldn't they? They could seize everything he had left. They could probably even take Amethyst if it got bad enough.

So many bills had gone unpaid as well that there was no longer any heat in the house which became more and more apparent as winter came crawling ever closer and then was upon them. It was only a matter of time until the electricity got cut as well and the magic of light after darkness would be but a distant memory. The fridge would stop working and the stove. They would have to get coolers.

They'd make it work, though. Richard had already decided that. They would be okay.

XXX

"Hi."

Amethyst felt a tremor go through her at the sound of the familiar voice. She looked up from her book, trying not to shiver. "Hi," she said.

Brinley held her gaze, lips pursed. "Why don't you play anymore?" she demanded. "You just read books."

"Because I like books."

"Why?"

"Because."

"Come play with me," Brinley demanded.

Amethyst winced, hearing once again the crack of her head on the pavement, Brinley's tortured wails beneath her. The world had spun that day, the sharp edges slipping out of focus whenever she moved. "No thanks," she said.

Brinley's fury had a presence like another person standing beside her. Amethyst could feel it glaring down at her, eyes furious and wrought with warning. "Play with me," Brinley repeated. The fury reached its violent hands toward her and Aimee flinched.

"Fine," she said. She put down the book, another Dr. Seuss, called Mr. Brown Can. She looked for Miss Briggs and found her sitting at the table, eyes fixed on something in her lap. Save me, she wanted to cry. But with the Fury growling ahead of her, she could only take Brinley's waiting hand and hope it wouldn't be so bad this time.

XXX

Owl took with her a basket of fresh rolls that she couldn't afford, hoping it might make up for how late she was.

Eleven thirty, Amaya had said. Owl looked at the sun, now high in the sky as noon passed. She stepped up to the door and rang the bell.

Amaya lived in an awful little condominium on the right side of a little circle of equally ugly buildings. The sign in the front said, Riverside Condominiums even though they were not by a river. Owl glanced around at the beat up cars parked around the lot, trying not to look too uncomfortable. She could smell weed and gas all around her, cigarette butts stamped into the ground like drops of rain. She held the basket of bread close to her chest, looking left and right. Every time something moved, she twitched.

Finally, after what seemed like hours, the door creaked open and Amaya was there, her eyelids drooping haughtily downwards. "Good to see you finally showed up," she grunted.

Owl slipped inside without being invited. Amaya didn't notice. She shut the door behind Owl and took the basket out of her hands. "Those are fresh," Owl offered. "Got them from the bakery down the road."

"Well, that's nice."

Owl took her coat off and placed it carefully on the ground beside Amaya's. The building might have been ugly, but it was, at least, heated. She sighed in pleasure and let the warmth wash over her. "Sorry I'm so late," she called.

Amaya yelled back, "Come in here."

She made her way through the desolate living room, taking in the single ghostly lamp that lit the space, no TV, just a couch and a coffee table with nothing on it. She slipped through the room to the kitchen, which was equally sad. A table, little and wooden, two folding chairs pushed up to it. A sliding back door with a view of the weed-ridden backyard outside.

Owl thought it looked an awful lot like the Turner house, only cleaner.

That was why she'd come here, after all. Owl looked around the empty walls, wondering. She could see herself living here. Without having to worry about a moody man getting in her way, she could make these walls lovely with pictures and shelves and decorations. She could buy a rug for the living room and get a bigger table and rustle up some curtains for the window. She could see herself being happy here.

"Yoo hoo," said Amaya. "Hello?"

"Sorry," said Owl. She smiled. "Just thinking."

XXX

At recess that day, Amethyst didn't have a book open like usual. Instead, she was bent over a composition notebook, pen clutched in her hand.

Melissa crept closer as though approaching a wild animal. She tried to sit down as slowly as she could, but the girl still gave a startled shiver, dropping her pen in the grass. Melissa leaned down to pick it up. "I'm sorry, Honey," she said. "Didn't mean to scare you."

"It's okay." Amethyst took her pen back, mumbling a quiet, "Thank you."

"You look busy," said Melissa.

Aimee shrugged. "I guess."

"Can I look?"

"I guess," she repeated.

Melissa looked over her shoulder onto the almost-blank page open on her lap. All that was on it was Amethyst Turner in careful, round script, the letters floating farther and farther into the air as the name went on. Just beneath that was one word. Cat. "What are you writing?" she asked.

Amethyst flushed, tucking her chin further into her chest. "I'm trying to write a poem," she said.

"Are you? That's great!"

"But I don't really know how to."

Melissa ran her fingers over the page. "Well, this is a good start, I think. When I write poems, I like to write down lots of rhyming words first and then put them into sentences. Does that sound good?"

Aimee nodded. "So, cat rhymes with . . ."

"Bat."

She bent over the paper, writing in the three letters with painstaking effort. "And rat," she said. "And pat and fat." She giggled a little and scrawled them all onto the notebook, creating a little stack of "-at"s.

"How about splat?" said Melissa. "Or brat?" They hadn't yet studied words with blends at the beginning, words with br- and sp-, so Amethyst looked expectantly up at her for the spelling. Melissa shook her head. "You can sound it out."

"No, I can't."

"Yes, you can."

Amethyst turned back to the notebook, lip pressed together in concentration. "Br," she said. "Br-a-t. That's not a letter."

"It's two letters. Buh, er."

"Oh. B-r-a-t."

"Exactly." Melissa smiled. "You're getting the hang of this. That poem's going to be done in no time."

XXX

Amaya wondered if Owl had noticed the flowers on the table and if she thought they were weird. She'd gotten them at the grocery store and they were brown around the edges, leaves crinkly and brittle to the touch. Still, they made a burst of color in the otherwise gray room.

She'd made macaroni and cheese for lunch, which she also hoped Owl didn't find weird. It was homemade, of course, made carefully following a recipe from her mother's cookbook. Amaya thought it turned out okay, even if the color of the cheese was a dull beige.

Owl seemed to be in a good mood. She talked and laughed at Amaya's sarcasm. Amaya almost couldn't stop looking at her; that smile was addictive.

She knew Owl didn't like the neighborhood, but she could only hope that it measured up well against whatever shithole she was living in now. From what she could tell, Owl wasn't doing too hot herself. Amaya took another bite and thought how nice it would be to wake up and find another person in the room with her, to have dinner with a friend each night, to have someone to say goodbye to when she went off to work.

Could Owl be that person for her? Amaya smiled at her plate, trying not to look too hopeful.

XXX

Daniel's family always put up the Christmas tree during the first week of December. As a rule, they didn't have that many specific traditions, but this was one of them and one that they adhered to steadily year after year.

The tree was never real. Prickly metal and plastic assaulted Daniel's hands as he lifted the midsection of the false tree out of the box. It always started out fun: unpacking the ornaments, dragging the tree box out of the basement, making cocoa and listening to Christmas songs on the radio. It always ended up a little sour, though. Clarissa would grumble and pout when their parents made her help Daniel fluff up the stiff wire branches, thrusting their hands into the black holes of plastic pine needles and wincing.

This year, everyone seemed to be in a lackluster mood already, and they'd just begun. His mother hadn't made the hot cocoa yet and his father dragged the tree upstairs with a sigh. Clarissa was sitting on the stairs, talking to someone on the phone. Daniel looked through the years of Christmas ornaments on his own.

But before he could feel too down about it, Daniel began to wonder if Amethyst had any Christmas tree at all at her house. Did her family give gifts? Did they watch Rudolph and Frosty together on Christmas Eve and wake up to full stockings on Christmas morning?

Daniel leaned back and smiled at his subdued family. They might be a little dysfunctional, but at least they loved him and he loved them.

His mother walked by and reached down to ruffle his hair. "What are you smiling about?" she asked.

"Just Christmas," he said. "That's all."

XXX

Tell me all of your secrets
Cannot help but believe this is true
Tell me all of your secrets
I know, I know, I know
Should have listened when I was told

-Cherub Rock by The Smashing Pumpkins