Closer To Heaven - Patrick Sean Lee (rosie project .txt) 📗

“Yes!” Lashawna Freeman said. “I’ll go with you. I know where everything is in the rectory. Jerrick, you stay here and listen. We’ll be right back. Don’t move. If you hear anyone come in, crawl under the pew and don’t say a word.”

“Okay,” Jerrick answered. “But hurry up. Bring me a Coke, too.”

“They’re all GONE! You drank the last one yesterday. You know that.”

Jerrick Freeman was awfully tall. He didn’t stand up, but I could see he was much taller than his sister. He had very long fingers. His skin was dark shiny, and the candlelight flickering on it made it seem like it was dancing. He didn’t say anything else, just sat back against the pew seat, looking straight ahead. Lashawna Freeman grabbed hold of my hand, and together we went through the opening of the communion rail, across the floor by the altar, and into the room where Father Kenney and the altar boys would come out of when Mass started.

Lashawna knew her way through the room, which was much darker than the church, and I was glad for that. I would have bumped into everything if she hadn’t been leading me by the hand. I could smell things in that room as we went along. Nice things. Much later Lashawna told me those smells were incense, and big candles that had been burned way down a long time ago. But I didn’t know that as we hurried through the room. She called it the sacristy.

Lashawna was smart. She knew lots of things about the church, almost as though she and Jerrick had grown up in it.

We left the sacristy through the back door. Lashawna kicked a stone into the opening so that the door wouldn’t shut and lock behind us, and then down the steps we went, across the lawn on a stone path, and into Father Kenney’s house that was called the rectory.

Lashawna took a box of matches off a table just inside the door and lit one of the big candles, like the ones back in the church on the altar. Papers were thrown all over the floor. Father Kenney’s desk was on the far side of the room, and it was all messy, and his chair with wheels on the legs was lying on its side beside it. I wondered why Lashawna and Jerrick would make such a mess?

There were no bodies, at least none that I could see, and I didn’t smell any ugly rotting smells. Lashawna led me to a hall where there was a cupboard, and inside it there were towels and washcloths and sheets. She pulled a towel out and handed it to me.

“Here you go. You have to take your wet clothes off. I’ll go find something left by Father for you to wear until your clothes dry. There are some crackers left in the kitchen. Some peanut butter and cans of other food. I’ll get them. Do you like sardines?” She was walking away as I began to get out of my soaking wet clothes.

“I’ve never had sardines. I don’t think I’d like them, though,” I said. “They’re fish. I don’t like fish.” She didn’t answer. “I can’t wear Father’s clothes. They’re too big, and they’re not girl’s clothes!” I shouted that because I was afraid she wouldn’t hear me otherwise.

I dried off and felt better. Lashawna came back carrying some of Father Kenney’s clothes, and stood in front of me laughing as I put on Father’s big pair of pants, his big white shirt, and then the black jacket he used to wear whenever he came out of his house. It wasn’t what he wore to Mass, and I laughed, too, because I would look so silly in those robes. Lashawna helped me roll up the pants so that my ankles weren’t covered by the bottoms of the legs, and then we rolled up the jacket arms. The jacket hung down to my knees, and all of it made me laugh with her. Father’s pants kept falling down, too, and his belt was way too long for me, and so Lashawna tied it in a knot at my tummy, and we laughed even more.

“There,” she said, “you look just like a priest!”

I hoped I didn’t. Girls aren’t priests.

She had a small box filled with cans of food and no Coke for Jerrick, and we left the rectory to return to her brother back in the church. On the way I asked her why she and Jerrick had made such a mess in Father’s house. I don’t know why the big mess bothered me, but it did. My daddy’s garage was sometimes all messy, but that was because he worked in it on his car and other stuff sometimes. Momma would never let him…or me…turn over chairs or throw paper on the floor inside our house.

“We didn’t do it,” she said. “Someone else must have been here before we came last week.”

That made me think of the man who murdered Munster back at the mini-mart. If Lashawna and Jerrick, or me or Munster had never been here before, who else could it have been? But maybe there were other people alive, and they were hiding, and maybe, too, they’d come back! I was scared all over again and didn’t want to think of another murderer being alive, but I was glad to have found Lashawna and Jerrick Freeman.

We ran through the sacristy back into the church. Jerrick heard us and crawled out from underneath the front pew, and then sat up with one leg tucked under the other. Lashawna didn’t say anything as she plopped the box of food onto the floor in front of him. I sat down beside the box with her and I waited politely. It was her box of food, and even though I was hungry, I didn’t want to seem too anxious. Lashawna was waiting as well. Maybe she was being polite, too.

“Well?” she finally said. I knew what that meant, and so I pushed my sleeve up and dug my hand into the box, pulling one thing after another out, and plonked them into my lap. There were three cans of sardines, an opened package of crackers, a small jar of peanut butter…Skippy, too, and I liked that because it was my favorite, and Momma had always bought Skippy. She’d packed some other kind of crackers, but I didn’t know if I’d like them because I’d never heard of them before. A plastic bottle of orange juice instead of Coke for Jerrick. A few cans of tomatoes and other vegetables. I wasn’t crazy about those. A small bag of potato chips, but they were all crushed. She’d put the cans on top of them.

“Why did you bring these?” I said holding up one of the cans of tomatoes.

“They’re good for you. They’re filled with vitamins. They’re fruit, too. I’ll bet you didn’t know that, Amelia.”

“I don’t like tomatoes in a can, and besides, I can’t open them even if I did like them. And you’re wrong, I’ve known forever that tomatoes are fruit. Momma told me a long time ago.”

Jerrick spoke, then. “Don’t you like fruit?”

“Of course I like fruit! Apples and oranges and bananas. Yes, I like them. I just don’t like tomatoes in a can because they remind me of spinach or beets. That stuff, and I don’t like them.”

“Well, you might if there isn’t anything left to eat someday,” Jerrick said.

I hadn’t thought about that. Not until then, anyway. It seemed to me there would always be stores with food in them, and after we ate all that, there would still be hundreds and hundreds of houses with more food, and by then maybe all the dead bodies inside them would have been eaten by germy flies, and so we could go in and get food without holding our noses.

There would be a million million tomorrows, and we’d grow up, and when we ate all the food in Marysville, we could drive to cities that were far away and eat the food there. But not canned tomatoes or beets.

I shrugged my shoulders at Jerrick, but he couldn’t see me do it I knew. “Doesn’t matter. There’s no way to open them unless I pound them open with a hammer or a rock.” I laughed, and so did Jerrick and Lashawna.

My daddy did that once when Momma wasn’t home and he was hungry, but our can opener was gone. He looked for the can opener everywhere, but he couldn’t find it, and I could see he was getting really mad, so I got out of his way. He grabbed a steak knife, and he was cussing. He jabbed the steak knife into the lid over and over, but that didn’t work, so he threw the steak knife across the room and went into the garage. That’s where he worked on really hard things. I followed him. He put the can on his workbench. I remember that so well. He grabbed a big screwdriver and a hammer and started poking holes in the top. He had a mean scowl on his face, and his tongue stuck out a little bit between his teeth. That didn’t work…punching holes in it…so he threw the big screwdriver away and turned the can on its side. I ran behind a stack of old tires and peeked over the top because I knew what was going to happen, and it did. He lifted the hammer way up, with the claws pointing down, and then he HIT the can.

I ran after that happened. I knew he was “mad as a wet hen”—that’s what Momma used to say when he got really mad—and he was covered with Campbell’s soup, and I didn’t want to be anywhere near Daddy after that, until Momma came home.

Lashawna reached into the box. She pulled out a can opener and handed it to me. “You missed this.” Jerrick was smiling, and he turned his head sideways, I think to hear his sister handing me the can opener.

Our dinner was very nice. We sat in a circle under the candles and ate, but I didn’t eat any tomatoes. The fish were okay, but I had to close my eyes and pinch my nose when Lashawna made me try the first one. Jerrick was funny. He said lots of funny things. He asked me, too, if I would mind if he touched my face with his fingers so that he would know if I was smiling, and so he could see what I looked like. I had to think about that. I felt sorry for Jerrick because he couldn’t see, but I didn’t like the idea of letting a boy touch my face. Momma told me never to let a boy touch me. Lashawna smiled and shook her head yes to me, and so I decided it was probably okay. So he did.

Later, after Jerrick knew what I looked like, I asked what book Lashawna had been reading. She told me that it was a children’s classic—I didn’t know what that meant—and its name was A Wrinkle In Time. I didn’t know that book.

“I like Ivy and Bean,” I said.

“I read that one,” she said. “It’s very good, but it isn’t a classic yet.”

“What’s a classic?” I asked.

She answered me, and that’s how I knew Lashawna was very smart. “It’s a book that’s very old, and lots of people still read it.”

“Do you read lots of books, Lashawna?” I asked.

“Oh yes! My mother and father used to read to me, and I liked that so much. Jerrick, too. Did your momma and papa read to you?”

“Sometimes. My daddy not so much because he flew rocket ships and he didn’t have time enough when he came home at night.” And I told Lashawna and Jerrick about Daddy and his job. Lashawna got a funny look in her eyes. I don’t know if she believed me, but she didn’t say I was crazy like Munster did.

I was