Here in the Real World Read online

  The bird-bone-breaking pavement—walkways front and sides, and the back parking lot—circled the church like a moat.

  Like a moat.

  Twenty-Three

  Ware pointed to the inner corner of the parking area, where a couple of inches of water had pooled. “That’s from last night’s rain. The drain is clogged with building junk. We’ll clog up the other drains, too.”

  “What about, you know, gravity?” Jolene blurted beside him, wiping her cheeks.

  “Gravity?”

  Jolene waved her arms over the outer sides of the parking area. “What’s going to hold the water in over there? And all around?” Her arms kept up the waving, almost hysterically.

  Ware waved his own arms toward the foundation. “There must be a million concrete blocks up there. We’ll build a wall. All the way around. We’re making a moat.”

  Jolene’s arms dropped as though they were too stunned to hold themselves up. “Could we really do that?”

  Ware imagined it. Water stretching into an immense pool, three feet deep at the back, guarding his castle. You see that? Wow.

  The queen palms seemed to be nodding encouragement, as if hoping to see themselves reflected in the water’s surface.

  Two kids build a moat, Ware voice-overed in his head. Can they do it?

  “Okay, yeah, I guess we have to,” Jolene said.

  Ware froze. Had he spoken it aloud?

  And then an even more shocking thought struck him. It wasn’t just a bird-protecting moat they’d be making.

  It was a giant get-born-again, penny-in-Coke, do-over tub.

  Holy water—whatever it was—he was sure going to need a lot of it.

  Twenty-Four

  The problem was that the wrecking ball hadn’t knocked the walls down into nice clean individual concrete blocks. Ware lugged out maybe a dozen singles before running out. There were a few two- and three-block chunks, but the rest were mortared together in big slabs, some the size of cars, with twisted metal rods spiking out of them.

  Ware bent to a five-block hunk and pulled with everything he had. The hunk did not budge. It seemed to be smirking. “Can we crack it apart up here?”

  “Better not,” Jolene decided. “That front opening is pretty big. We can’t let anyone see. Down in the parking lot.”

  Ware retrieved his rope and tied it around the hunk. After five minutes of pulling together, they managed to drag it to the back doorway. After another mighty tug, it smashed down into the parking area.

  Ware followed, staggered to a patch of grass, and collapsed. He wished he’d played a sport, any sport, and grown some muscles.

  Jolene snapped her safety glasses down and wedged her spike into a crack in the center. When it was upright, she hoisted the sledgehammer. For a moment it waggled above her head on her spaghetti arms. But then she got control and the hammer smashed down true. The chunk split in half.

  “You look . . . ,” Ware began, then searched for a word up to the task. “Heroic” came up and that word was right, but his shocked mouth refused to utter it.

  “I know what I look like,” Jolene grumbled. She stretched the glasses off her face and scowled at them, then let them snap onto the top of her head. “But Mrs. Stavros says if I don’t wear them, she’ll take back her tools. Plus she says I’ll never get another rotten banana from her.”

  “What? Who?” Ware asked, still dazed that he’d nearly called this grubby girl heroic.

  “Mrs. Stavros, remember? The lady that gives me all the rotten fruit.”

  Ware corrected her absently, “Who.”

  “Mrs. Stavros. I already told you about her.”

  “No, I mean it’s ‘who,’ not ‘that.’”

  The instant he said the words, he regretted them—it irritated him when his mother corrected his grammar. But Jolene was staring at him for an explanation, and there was no exit sign in that stare.

  “‘Who’ is for people and ‘that’ is for things. So it’s ‘Mrs. Stavros is the lady who,’ not ‘the lady that.’”

  Jolene dropped her hammer and fell back on her butt.

  “Sorry,” Ware said. “It doesn’t matter.” He walked over to the broken chunk of wall and grabbed hold of the smaller piece—a double block. He risked a glance at her, still on the ground.

  Her knuckles whitened around the spike. “No one ever told me that rule.”

  “For real, it doesn’t matter. Lots of people make that mistake.” Ware locked his knees and hoisted the chunk to his shins. Before he could attempt a step, his legs started shaking. He dropped the chunk and wiped his brow.

  “It’s a good rule.” Jolene fumed as if he hadn’t spoken, as if he weren’t even there. “Because people aren’t things. You can throw things away. Usually you shouldn’t. But sometimes, things are trash. But people are never trash. So it’s good that people get a different word. I am a person who knows that.”

  Twenty-Five

  Jolene shot the hose stream straight up in a spray that spattered the queen palms’ fronds. The palms fluttered delightedly in the reverse rain and dripped over Ware and Jolene lying underneath.

  While they cooled off, Ware made some calculations. “We built five feet of wall this morning, and it’s in the back, where it needs to be tallest. The perimeter is around four hundred feet, but the front and the sides will go faster, since the wall can be shorter there. If you really can get a shopping cart from the Greek Market lady, we can get it done in four weeks.”

  “What about . . .” Jolene’s hand drifted toward the community center.

  “So . . .” Ware considered. He hadn’t meant to quit entirely, but he couldn’t see himself going back, so there it was. “It’s great there, of course. Lots of funnation. But I don’t have to go.”

  Jolene puffed out her bangs and raised a pale eyebrow.

  “My grandmother’s in the hospital, and my parents don’t want to have to worry about me, too. Being alone and having nothing to do. I’m not alone here, and there’s plenty to do, so it’s okay with them.”

  “What’s she in the hospital for?”

  “She fell. She broke her hips.”

  “Why’d she fall?”

  “Why? No why. She just fell.”

  “People don’t just fall.” Jolene took off her hat and waved it around. “One minute you’re standing, then boom, you’re down, broken bones. Something happened. What happened?”

  “Well . . . I don’t know, I wasn’t there.” Ware turned his head. He felt a wave of revulsion sweep through him, as if he’d lifted a rock and found maggots. He’d been in a pool, floating around, waiting for some silly lights to come on. Had something happened to Big Deal? Something from her condition, being old? Something he should have protected her from?

  He rolled away and tugged up some grass. “She broke both her hips and had to have them replaced. That’s all.”

  Jolene propped herself up on her elbows and flung off her shades. Her eyes gleamed in a way that made Ware feel queasier. “What did they do with them?”

  “With what?” he asked. Although he knew.

  “Her old hips. The bones, right? I never thought about people parts.”

  “They got rid of them, I guess. It doesn’t matter. We should get back to work.”

  “It doesn’t matter?” Jolene’s eyes bugged out at the depth of Ware’s ignorance. “In lots of places, they just leave stuff out for buzzards or rats. How about that for your grandmother’s old bones? Or how about landfills? People break in, looking for stuff they can sell. How about if someone found her hips, put them up for sale?”

  “That couldn’t happen. That would be terrible.”

  “Oh, right. I forgot, you live in Magic Fairness Land.” She lay back and covered her face with her hat. “But here in the real world, bad things happen.”

  Ware jumped up. “Break’s over. Back to work.”

  Twenty-Six

  Ware gave Jolene the silent treatment, which she didn’t seem to notice, for the rest of
the morning. But when she pitched her tools into the hedge to leave, he found he didn’t want to be alone. “So . . . you want to go home and make lunch? I’ll wait.”

  “Not going home.” She pulled out the garbage bag, then headed for the rear driveway. As she passed her compost piles, she waved toward them. “Need more stuff.”

  “Okay, wait. I’ll go with you.”

  “Nope.” And she was gone.

  Ware retrieved his lunch, although he wasn’t hungry, and climbed the tower. He forced down the peanut butter sandwiches, stiff and dry, and drank the juice, hot as soup.

  In the heat, the banana had browned. He flung it hard over the edge of the tower wall. As he watched it fall, he remembered: People don’t just fall, Jolene said. Something had happened to Big Deal.

  Ware had handwritten the Knights’ Code in his report, on the last page, page eleven. It had taken so long to get it looking just right that he’d memorized all thirteen rules. Number three was: Thou shalt respect all weaknesses and constitute thyself the defender of them.

  He hadn’t constituted himself the defender of his own grandmother’s weakness. “Big Deal, I notice you aren’t feeling well today,” he could have said. “Plus there’s your condition of being pretty old. Let’s call the doctor.”

  It would have been so easy.

  Across the parking lot, the queen palms drooped as though they were ashamed for him.

  Below, though, the growing wall gave him hope. The do-over moat would be full soon. He could be reborn. This time, besides being normal, he’d be the kind of kid who would notice when his grandmother wasn’t feeling well. The kind of kid who would do something about it.

  Twenty-Seven

  One week later, the days had fallen into a routine.

  In the mornings, when the three queen palms shaded Jolene’s garden, Ware helped her. Jolene kept up a running lecture on the history of trash management, and Ware always cut her off when she suggested some horrific possibility for the disposal of Big Deal’s old hip bones. Otherwise he liked being there.

  The first papayas were studded with tiny fruits; the second crop was shooting leaves out left and right in their joy at escaping their cans and landing in the nice, rich compost. Another thirty ChipNutz cans had joined the forty-seven emptied ones, and Jolene had hammered nail holes into their bottoms and planted a seed in each. The seventy-seven brand-new papayas were already poking up little green nubs, as if they wanted to know what all the celebrating was about.

  Once the shade left, it was wall time.

  When Ware first offered Jolene his sunscreen, she looked at him as if it were a tube of warm spit, but after that she seemed to enjoy the wafting coconut scent as much as he did.

  Together, they lassoed big hunks of masonry and dragged them over the edge. They kept the hose beside them and took long guzzles of the hot-rubber-tasting water when the heat blasting off the foundation parched their throats to sandpaper.

  Jolene never gave up control of Mrs. Stavros’s sledgehammer, and Ware always pretended this was a painful injustice. In truth, he was relieved. What if he couldn’t swing it?

  Once Jolene had busted a hunk of wall into smaller blocks, his job was to wheel them away in the shopping cart, then stack them. He liked this best, fitting the blocks together, filling the gaps with plastic bags full of gravel and then sealing those in with the caulking he’d found in his shed.

  Like Jolene’s plants, the wall grew a little every day.

  Quitting time was always around one o’clock, when Jolene headed off to the Greek Market with her garbage bag.

  Ware always tried to go with her, and she always refused to allow it. The more she refused, the more he wanted to go.

  “Why not?” he complained after a couple of days.

  “Because I say.”

  “You can’t make up the rules. It isn’t fair.”

  Jolene rolled her eyes—“There you go again, Magic Fairness Land!”—and walked around him.

  He gave up after that. For the rest of each afternoon, he felt alone, but it was the peaceful kind of alone, not the lonely kind. He ate his lunch in the tower, then overlapped the new stretch of wall with garbage bags filled with gravel. He worked on his stained-glass window, or cleared and mopped an area of floor. He finished the sundial and started building a throne.

  Another week passed, same, same, same.

  Then came Friday.

  Twenty-Eight

  Friday, Ware was in the tower when he heard a car pull up in front of the church.

  The car was large and sleek, a serious-looking charcoal color. A man wearing a serious-looking charcoal-colored suit got out. Even from up in the tower, Ware could see that his shoes were extremely shiny.

  This, he thought, was a good sign. Nobody with shoes that shiny would come into a lot this dirty.

  The man didn’t. He strode in a very purpose-driven way to the center of the construction fencing, set a briefcase on the sidewalk, and opened it.

  He drew out a bright yellow sign and attached it to the chain-link fence. Then he snapped his briefcase shut, strode back to his car, and took off.

  Ware ran down the stairs, over to Jolene. He pointed out to the street and she seemed to understand.

  The bright yellow notice was attached to the fence top and bottom, as if it wasn’t going anywhere.

  PUBLIC AUCTION

  Parcel #788

  Zoned Commercial .75 Acre

  COMING THIS FALL

  Ware glanced at Jolene beside him. Her face wore a look of terror. He clutched his chest at the full hundred-arrow volley. “It’s okay, Jolene. It’s going to be okay.”

  Jolene shook her head at the empty words, kept on shaking it. After a moment, she turned and ran down the street to the backyard of the Greek Market. He watched her shove through the bushes and disappear.

  Standing alone on the wrong side of the fence, Ware felt exposed. He climbed back over and headed up the front walkway in shock.

  Everything looked different now. The wrecked church, the growing garden, the whole lot, all looked fragile. They looked as if they were begging for help.

  His eye caught a flash of metal from under a holly bush near the drawbridge.

  Ware crouched and found a surprise: an A-frame sandwich board. He dragged it free.

  Spelled out in black plastic letters, on both sides of the sign, was a message: BE NOT AFRAID.

  And it was back in his head: the fear on Jolene’s face when she’d read the auction notice, complete with another thunk to his heart.

  Ware carried the sign around to her garden and planted it beside her papayas.

  BE NOT AFRAID, Jolene.

  Twenty-Nine

  “What’s this supposed to mean?” Jolene’s hands were balled on her hips.

  Ware took a step back. “What it says. Don’t be afraid.”

  Jolene’s knuckles whitened. “Who says I’m afraid?”

  “Come on. I saw your face when you read that sign.”

  She looked over to where the notice gleamed. Her whole skeleton seemed to collapse. “They’ll never get ripe. I’ll never sell them and get the money I need. I was so stupid.” She kicked over a papaya seedling.

  Ware hurried to tip up the can. He patted the soil around the little plant as best he could. “It isn’t right. We made this such a good place.”

  Jolene shook her head in disgust. “Maybe in Magic Fairness Land the right thing happens. But not here.”

  She kicked over another can. “I’m not going to leave them here to get killed by a bulldozer. I’ll do it myself.”

  “Stop it.”

  Jolene didn’t. She kicked another one, and another. “And then I’ll have to get some jobs.”

  “No, Jolene. We won’t let it happen. You won’t lose this garden.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  What was he talking about?

  Ware suddenly saw page eleven in his report. Number twelve seemed to be lit up. Thou shalt be always the c
hampion of the Right and the Good, against Injustice.

  That’s what he was talking about.

  This was Injustice, all right. He needed to be a champion of the Right and the Good.

  This was, in fact, the purpose that would drive his life, he was suddenly certain.

  He pulled himself up tall. “I won’t let it happen, Jolene. I will save your garden.”

  Jolene snorted. “How are you going to do that?”

  “I don’t know yet. But I will. You won’t lose your garden. I pledge.”

  “You pledge?”

  “Promise. I promise.”

  “For real?”

  “For real.”

  Jolene eyed him hard for a long time. Then she carefully righted the cans. Her hands, as she patted the plants back into place, looked like she was praying.

  When she walked out of the lot, Ware was left alone with his vow.

  It was an insane, impossible-to-keep promise, of course.

  But he didn’t care. Because when he’d made it, his heart—which, he suddenly understood, had been useless up until now, just killing time pumping his blood around—his heart had lifted right out of his chest, as if it had been reborn as a bird, and was now soaring somewhere near the top of the watchtower.

  And the view from there was terrific.

  Thirty

  Friday was different at home, too.

  “You moved her into the rehab place?” Ware asked his mother when he found her in the kitchen. “Is she okay?”

  “More than okay,” she answered. “The doctors say she’s healing well. And she’s like her old self already. We hadn’t been in the room an hour before she was telling the staff how to schedule her roommate’s kidney dialysis. Who else but Big Deal, huh?”

  The knot of worry Ware had been carrying loosened a little. “Actually, I can think of one other person. . . .”

  “Fair enough, I guess I did inherit that gene,” she admitted with a laugh. “Now, let me make you something to eat. I’ve missed you.” She opened the fridge and frowned. “Not a fruit or vegetable in sight.”