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  Jolene hitched a shoulder to the Grotto Bar. “Walter.”

  “What are they, anyway? The picture on the cans looks like bark. What do they taste like?”

  Jolene wobbled the hammer in the air, as if asking the universe for help. “They taste, they taste . . . like bacon and peanuts and french fries, all at the same time.”

  That sounded too good to be true. He put the can down and picked up his cause again.

  “Polluted water will smell awful. And if it smells, someone will complain. And if someone complains . . .”

  “Oh, all right!” Jolene got to her feet. She slapped on her hat and holstered her trowel. “What kind of plants?”

  Ware began to list the ones he’d found in his research. But when Jolene blew out her bangs with an impatient puff after just a few examples, he quit. “Basically, we need the kind that grows where there’s water sometimes, but sometimes not.”

  “Well, I know a place like that,” Jolene grumbled, as if she were admitting it at gunpoint. “Behind the school. It’s got water after it rains, but then it goes dry.”

  “Sounds like a detention pond. Let’s go see it.”

  Jolene said okay, but then she ducked into the hedge.

  “I meant today,” Ware called.

  Jolene reappeared, patted the bib of her overalls, then trotted down to the front of the lot.

  Ware followed and they climbed over the fence.

  Jolene stopped at the notice. She shuddered.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Ware said. “We’ll make the moat, and then Ashley will get her father to stop the auction.” He nodded as if it were a great plan.

  But inside he wondered.

  Thirty-Nine

  Jolene stuck her pointer finger through the chain-link fence.

  Ware peered down the slope. An oval pond nestled alongside a road. “That’s a detention pond, all right. I can see the overflow grate from here. That plant down there, whatever it is, that’s what we need.” He worked a sneaker toe into the wire and scaled the fence.

  At the marshy edge of the water, he crouched and splayed a little plant across his fingers. “Waterweed,” he announced.

  “Looks like the stuff in aquariums,” Jolene said, coming up behind him.

  Ware nodded gloomily. “That’s probably where we’d have to get it—a pet supply place. I hope we can buy enough. I only have forty-seven dollars.”

  “Buy enough?” Jolene sputtered. She slid her black garbage bag out of her bib pocket and produced her trowel.

  Ware batted them away. “That’s stealing!” he hissed.

  Jolene snorted. She fell to her knees and troweled out a ragged circle of turf, then dropped the clump, ripe with the scent of mud, into the bag.

  Ware jumped into guard position between Jolene and the road. “Okay, but if anyone stops us, we’ll put it all back.”

  “No one will stop us.”

  And Jolene was right—no one did. Not that trip, and not on the other three trips they made, although Ware’s heart pounded every step. “You know what this bag looks like it’s full of? A human body, that’s what,” he warned each time. “You’d better hope we don’t get stopped by the police.”

  “You spend a lot of time imagining things that aren’t going to happen,” Jolene said.

  Ware thought he heard a hint of admiration in the complaint. Of course, maybe he imagined it.

  They tucked the tufts around the edges of the foundation. Jolene donated a shovelful of compost to feed each clump, but you could see how it cost her.

  “We have to water them now,” she said.

  “Maybe not.” Ware pointed to the sky. Piles of black clouds were rolling in from the west. Evening thunderstorm, coming early.

  He glanced over at the community center. It was dry inside, but . . .

  He saw Jolene look up at the door at the top of the stairs beside the Grotto Bar’s sign. He knew she was weighing the same trade-off about her apartment.

  “Nope,” he said. “Follow me.”

  Jolene shot him a skeptical look, but she followed him onto the foundation and over to the big kitchen table. A crack of lightning split the dark sky, and she scrambled under.

  Ware hurried over to the wall of closets. He grabbed a couple of tablecloths and the box with the candle stubs and lighter, and ran back.

  He draped the cloths over the table, weighted them with bricks, and ducked in as the first drops hit his shoulders.

  Jolene sat with her knees drawn up to her chin. “Under the Table,” she said in a voice that clearly implied both capitalization and italics, as if she were christening the spot. She watched as one by one he melted the candles’ bases and stuck them to the floor in an arc on his left side, an arc on Jolene’s right, and then lit them all.

  Rain drummed on the tabletop. Wind gusted shingles around the deck and flickered the candles. A curl of air blew a fresh earth smell from Jolene’s garden into the wax-scented cave. Ware pulled the tablecloth snug. “Think your papayas will be okay? They’re kind of . . . floppy.”

  “Sometimes it’s good to be floppy. The wind can’t snap you.”

  A lightning bolt struck so close that the air under the table flared silver. The smell changed to something blue and electric. Thunder cracked, a deep thud Ware felt in his chest. He edged the slightest bit closer to Jolene.

  The arcs of candles surrounded them like parentheses. As if he and Jolene were extra information.

  “Extra information,” he risked, eyes on his knees. “My parents wish they had a different kid.”

  “Extra information,” Jolene replied, as if she understood parentheses, too. “My aunt wishes she didn’t have a kid at all.”

  Forty

  “Cutworms.” Jolene glowered down at the papayas she’d planted a few days before. Half of them were crumpled to the ground. She let out a string of swears.

  “I don’t think you should say those things here,” Ware muttered.

  “I told you, the holy’s gone.” She swore again. “They’re chewing through the stems. Mrs. Stavros says I need collars around them. She says make the collars out of paper cups. Do you have any?”

  “Maybe.” Ware climbed onto the foundation and rummaged through the kitchen junk. He trotted back with a box labeled Communion Cups. “Are they too small?”

  “Nuh-uh. Cutworms are caterpillars. Caterpillars have pretty short legs.” She handed Ware a rusty knife. “Cut off the bottoms, slit the sides.”

  Ware placed one of the miniature plastic cups on a cinder block and started sawing.

  Jolene knelt and troweled out a dandelion, then carried it over to the front walkway to transplant. “They’re nice flowers. Not their fault they got born in the wrong place,” she’d answered when he first asked her about it. “They shouldn’t get killed for it.”

  Ware thought the dandelion saving was ridiculous, but he did like how it dressed up the front of his castle.

  A minute later, she came back. “Know how they got rid of trash in New York City, back in the day?”

  Ware wasn’t in the mood. He bent over his knife. Dripping sweat stung his eyes, the blade was dull, and the cups too slippery. He was wrecking about half the ones he attempted.

  “Pigs, that’s how,” Jolene said, as if he’d begged her to go on. “Like, on Mondays, the people in one neighborhood threw their garbage into the street and the city sent a herd of pigs through. On Tuesdays, another neighborhood. Like that.”

  “Well, great,” Ware said, not looking up. “How many of these do you need? I’m getting a blister.”

  “Great? Great? No, not so great for the pigs. Can you imagine the kind of stuff people threw away back then?”

  Ware shrugged and kept on butchering cups. Communion cups were supposed to hold the blood of Jesus—he knew that much. He dropped the knife and looked up at the queen palms. They seemed to shake their fronds in disapproval.

  “Jolene, do you ever think the holiness is still here, but it’s hiding? And we’re
supposed to find it?”

  Jolene smacked his sneaker with her trowel. “How would a pig know if someone threw out something poisonous?”

  Ware went back to his sawing.

  “Or gross. Like . . .”

  Ware realized too late where she was heading.

  “Like a human hip?”

  He finally looked at her. “You’re obsessed.”

  “Yes!” She was beaming in smug victory. “So give up. Call her and ask her where they are.”

  “I can’t. She’s at some rehab place near here, but she doesn’t have a phone.” Ware poked at the new blister, raw on the ball of his thumb.

  Jolene sat back on her heels. “Is that where they took them out?”

  Surrounded by mutilated communion cups, Ware felt uneasy at the question. “No. That was somewhere else. She’s just there now.”

  “Well, what about other people there? Do they have stuff gone?”

  Ware squirmed. “Her roommate only has one kidney. But maybe she was born without the other one.”

  Jolene’s eyes lit up. “A kidney,” she mused. “Anyone else?”

  Nothing good would come from answering Jolene’s question. Ware knew this. But he’d overheard his mother tell his father something last night, and out it came. “An old guy there is missing a leg. He rolls his wheelchair over to my grandmother at lunch and invites her to go horizontal dancing. She throws her Jell-O at him.”

  Jolene dropped the cup she was holding. “A hip, a kidney, and a leg?” she demanded. “All in one place?”

  Ware nodded again. He squeezed his eyes shut and waited.

  “Get the address,” Jolene said. “We go there tomorrow.”

  Forty-One

  “What? What’s so interesting about a candy bar wrapper?”

  Jolene flattened the wrapper on the bench as carefully as if it were a treasure map.

  Ware pulled his cap down. He’d been nervous every minute since Jolene’s decision, worrying about everything that could go wrong. As long as Jolene and Big Deal never met, he reassured himself for the hundredth time, things would probably be fine.

  He risked a glance back at the community center. At noontime Ms. Sanchez should be busy trying to keep milk carton missiles from launching, but you never knew.

  Beside him, Jolene bent over the wrapper.

  “There was a cat that lived next door once,” he said. “He used to stare at the wall. For hours. We think he must have been hit on the head when he was a kitten.” Number five in the Knights’ Code was: Thou shalt never give wanton offense. Ware knew he was giving wanton offense right now, but he couldn’t help it.

  Jolene placed a finger on the wrapper. She raised her head. Her sunglasses looked like discs of ice. “Or maybe he was a genius cat. Maybe he figured out that if he stared at the wall long enough, you’d quit bothering him, let him be a cat, instead of wanting him to be something else.”

  Ware checked his watch. Still two minutes before the bus. “I wouldn’t do that. I don’t do that.”

  “Yes, you do. You want a wrecked church to be a castle. You want a bunch of busted cookie sheets to be a suit of armor. I saw that screen—you want some broken glass to be a jewel-y window. You want the world to be fair, when it’s not.”

  Ware couldn’t argue the last point. He did want the world to be fair. It wasn’t fair that more people didn’t want the world to be fair. “You think my window looks jewel-y?”

  Jolene smoothed the wrapper, bent even closer.

  “Seriously. What are you doing?”

  She sputtered up her bangs. “I’m trying to know where this has been. Before. Like, did the paper come from an apple tree way up north? This blue color, did it come from turquoise out west? Everything was something else before. Sometimes, if you look hard enough, you can see it. The whole story of a thing.”

  The bus fumed up then. Jolene dropped the wrapper in the trash. Ware followed her onto the bus, thinking. He watched the buildings roll by, each built of things that used to be something else.

  “Jolene, if everything was something else before, then everything will be something else afterward.”

  “Of course. Recycling.”

  “Even people.”

  “Especially people.”

  Forty-Two

  Everything was something else before and will be something else after. The concept had expanded so explosively in his brain on the bus ride that Ware forgot to worry about bringing Jolene to the rehab place.

  As soon as he walked into the bright lobby of the New Horizons Rehabilitation Center, though, he remembered. He aimed a warning look over his shoulder.

  Jolene raised clasped hands to her chin and fluttered her lids innocently. Which was the opposite of reassuring.

  “We’re here to visit my grandmother,” he told the woman behind the registration desk, who was eating an egg salad sandwich.

  The woman paused with her sandwich in midair. She wore a pale blue scarf splotched with yellow stains, as if she ate egg salad sandwiches a lot. Her eyes were squinty chips behind crinkly black lashes. It looked as if she was peering at him through a nest of spiders.

  “My grandmother. We’re here to visit her,” Ware repeated. Then he gave her Big Deal’s name. Spiders made him nervous.

  The woman put down her sandwich. “Isn’t that the nicest thing.” Somehow, she made it sound as if what she really meant was Now, here’s a big pain in the neck, just when I’m trying to have my lunch. She pushed a clipboard across the desk. “Sign in here.”

  Ware filled in their names, then turned.

  Jolene was halfway through the lobby. Ware dropped the pen and caught up with her.

  “No fooling around. You’re just here to get that . . . information you want. Now, we should meet back in the lobby by—”

  “Trash can!” Jolene pointed down a side hall.

  And she was off.

  Forty-Three

  Ware stood in the doorway, overwhelmed by how much he’d missed his grandmother.

  The beds in the room had metal rails, like giant cribs. Lying in hers, Big Deal looked too small, like a wrinkled baby. Her hair, which until this moment he had not suspected was a wig, hung off a lamp on the bedside table. Her scalp was covered with soft gray fuzz, as if the wrinkled baby were dusty.

  As she whuffled a small snore, the skin on her neck trembled. The tremble hurt something in his chest. He hadn’t constituted himself the defender of his grandmother’s weakness when it counted, but he could do it now. He tiptoed in and eased the sheet up to her chin.

  Big Deal startled awake. “Oh, Ware! What a nice surprise.” She looked toward the door.

  “I came by myself. Mom’s working a million hours.”

  “She is. They both are. Poor them.” Big Deal plucked her wig off the lamp and tugged it on. She looked like herself instantly. The magic of hair.

  “I’m sorry I left you alone that night, Big Deal,” he plunged in. “I should have known you might fall. I should have—”

  Big Deal waved it off. “That’s ridiculous. How could you have known?”

  How could he have known? That was the question, all right. “I wish I had, though. Maybe you wouldn’t be here now. Is it terrible here, Big Deal?”

  “Oh, no, it’s all right here.” Big Deal craned her head toward the door. “Although a person would think she could get a little bacon now and then,” she added, loud enough that a passing orderly chuckled.

  Ware dropped into the red plastic chair beside the bed. He tipped his head to the other crib. “Where’s your roommate?”

  “Dialysis.”

  He pointed to what looked like a television screen behind his grandmother, glowing with squiggly lines. “What’s that?”

  “That? Oh, that’s proof.”

  “Proof?”

  “That I’m alive. I got a little dizzy this morning, so they hooked me up. This is the kind of place”—she leaned to the door again and cupped a hand around her mouth—“the kind of place where yo
u can’t get any bacon, where you need to prove you’re alive. Hand me my bag, would you, Ware?”

  Ware passed her the purse, and she dug around until she found a lipstick. While she was applying it, he thought about the kind of place that would require a person to prove she was alive. Not a good one. “Were you scared?”

  “You mean about this?” She patted her sides.

  Ware nodded.

  “I suppose a bit. But then your mother came. It helps a lot not to be alone. Also Mrs. Sauer—she barely left my side. She visits me twice a week, too. That’s something—a two-hour drive, each way.”

  Ware scowled, then quickly rearranged his face.

  “I saw that look. What do you have against Rita?”

  Ware twitched. “She has something against me.”

  Big Deal waved a hand. “Oh, she’s a little vinegary is all.”

  Ware knew he should drop it. He was here to make his grandmother feel better, not get her stirred up. But number eight in the Knights’ Code was Thou shalt do battle against unfairness whenever faced with it, and he was faced with it now. “What about those twin girls visiting next door? Mrs. Sauer made them a cake. I saw her bring it over. So she’s nice to girls.”

  Big Deal patted the sheet until she found the bed remote. She pressed a button and rose majestically until she was looking right in Ware’s face. “Those girls were quiet. Barely came outside, except to make a puzzle on the patio the one time. Who knows, maybe Rita likes quiet and out of sight is all.”

  Ware tapped his fingers on the chair arm. He really should let it go, but he couldn’t. “No. I think she doesn’t like me.” Suddenly, he remembered who it was who’d said Off in his own world about him in that blaming way. Mrs. Sauer, when he’d climbed out of the pool. “She acted as if I’d done something wrong, Big Deal.”

  “If you think that, you should ask her next time you see her. Now, speaking of girls who are quiet and out of sight, who’s your friend?”