Carry Me Home by Janet Fox

Author:Janet Fox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Published: 2021-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

37

SERENA SLEPT much of the weekend. Lulu was able to give her some soup, and by Monday Lulu thought she was well enough to go back to school.

“You should go to the school nurse only if you feel really bad,” Lulu said. “Because the school nurse will want to call Daddy, and then what?” Lulu chewed her lip. “We don’t want the school nurse to know that Daddy’s not here, do we? Or that we’ve been living in the Suburban alone, right?”

Serena shuffled along, clutching Lulu’s hand.

“I can’t leave you in the Suburban all alone all day,” Lulu said. “And if we don’t show up to school someone might ask questions.”

“And then what?” Serena murmured. Lulu thought Serena might be thinking that if someone came asking questions, that would be a good thing. But Lulu knew otherwise.

Yellow and orange leaves pinwheeled down around them, blowing into the gutter.

“It’s just a cold, Reenie. You’ll be okay.”

Lulu had taken the ten dollars to Mrs. Rogers on Sunday afternoon, and told her that “the rest was coming.” Mrs. Rogers squinted and asked again, “Where’s your daddy?” And Lulu had said again, “Working extra. Comes in late at night and leaves real early in the morning.” Mrs. Rogers had started in on not being a charity, and that she wasn’t at all sure about any of this since she hadn’t seen Lulu’s daddy in days, and the whole time Mrs. Rogers talked Lulu was backing away, off the trailer’s porch and up the dirt road. Mrs. Rogers was following and talking louder and louder and the only reason Lulu got away was that Mrs. Rogers was wearing hair curlers and must not have wanted everyone to see her like that, so she eventually gave up and went back to her trailer muttering.

“It’s just a cold,” Lulu said again to her sister.

Serena coughed, as if to make a point.

“I’ll see you in after-school, okay?” Lulu stood at the door of the elementary and watched her sister plod away heavy-footed. Serena’s hair hung down her back and over her Hello Kitty pack in messy strings.

The whole entire weekend Lulu had made paper cranes. She made paper cranes until she ran out of paper. Then she counted them up and found that she’d made one hundred and forty-seven. They were piled on the dash of the Suburban all the way up the window to the top, and then some.

It was a lot of paper cranes but it wasn’t even close to one thousand.

And what about her wish, the one for which she was making all those paper cranes?

She wished that Daddy would come back. That was her first and most pressing wish.

But now she also wished that Serena would be okay. And she wished that she had money for boots for both of them. And money for laundry and the car and other things. And even money to buy chocolate chip cookies, which they didn’t have at the food pantry, where the food was good but not great.

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