Heading Out to Wonderful by Robert Goolrick

Author:Robert Goolrick [Goolrick, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2012-01-16T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

HE KNEW IT was all part of the promise he’d made to Charlie, part of the secret. He had to forget. It took an effort every time he sat down with his mother and father, but he could never mention that he had been with Charlie in the Glass house and eaten Mrs. Glass’s cookies and read her funny books and heard what he’d heard, not that he knew exactly what it was.

But he couldn’t forget. He thought about it all the time. The warm kitchen, the oilcloth, the sounds from upstairs, sounds meaning what? No, he couldn’t forget, and he couldn’t stop being afraid. Afraid for Charlie.

What if something bad happened, the way Charlie had said it would? What if Charlie died? Who would take care of Jackie?

At night, after he had said his prayers and his mother had left him alone in the dark, he saw it all in his mind, happening over and over again, and he prayed his own prayer to the same Jesus, that Charlie would not die. If Charlie died, it would be his fault, he knew, because the only thing that could make Charlie die was telling the secret he knew, and knew he could not tell.

And he wanted to go back, he wanted to go back again and again until he knew it all, until he was sure Charlie was safe. So he woke early on Wednesdays, and waited patiently while his father read the papers to him and Charlie served the customers, then they walked home to a lunch his mother threw together, now that school was back on, and then they walked back to the shop, and everything between his father and Charlie was no different, as though this thing Sam knew was going to happen was not going to happen. Charlie didn’t rush, he just went about his business and sharpened his rosewood-handled knives on the whetstone and the butcher’s steel until the edge was fine as a razor, and then finally he said, “You ready, Sam?” and Sam would answer, as though it wasn’t a big thing when it fact it was everything, “Sure, Beebo,” and they would take Jackie Robinson and get into the truck, which took longer and longer to start in the cold now, and then they would go do the butchering, a thing Charlie did quickly now, still careful, still expert, but quick; then, on the way back, they would pull into her drive and up and behind the house.

It was always the same, and it was always different. Jackie came in the house with them now, because of the cold. She didn’t wear those red lips, after that first time, but she was always dressed in a beautiful dress, none of them the same, none like anything he’d ever seen before, and there were always cookies and milk, and new funny books, and those magazines with the beautiful women on the covers, wrapped in fur or filmy cloth, always the big eyes, the hopeful, waiting mouth.

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