All Good Children - Catherine Austen [66]
She laughs. “No, sir. I’m up from Pittsburgh.”
I want to call Xavier and tell him the free media is in town, but I don’t know if he’d still care.
“Pittsburgh!” Mr. Graham scoffs. “Why would you cover an event like this?”
She smiles. “Great artists are discovered at events like this.”
Mr. Graham stares at my work, revolted. “Stand with what?” he asks.
“Withstand,” Rosemary corrects him. “Have you been inside?”
He cautiously nudges the tent flaps apart, but he doesn’t pass through. He lingers in the doorway, canvas draped over his bald white girth.
“Use a flashlight,” Rosemary says. She turns to me and smiles. “They’re a nice touch.”
Mr. Graham backs out without bothering. He walks up to me, stands far too close, and stares down into my eyes. “When did you make this, Connors?”
“I don’t remember, sir.”
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“It doesn’t make any sense to me. Does it make sense to you, boy?”
“Nothing makes sense to me, sir.”
He nods like that’s a good answer. “Pack it up, and I’ll take you home.”
THIRTEEN
Mom fries hamburgers at the stove while I sit at the kitchen table and lose my appetite. I have four hours of homework to suffer through, simple but repetitive: conjugate a hundred Spanish verbs, describe the probability of a hundred random events. They like to drive a point home, these teachers of the new economy.
Ally sits across from me, her nose half an inch from the table, her tongue poking between her teeth. Lucas came by with her homework—a set of intricate black and white designs on paper with numbers in every white space. Each number corresponds to a color, and Ally has to fill in each space appropriately. She starts out well in blue and brown, but then she thinks of Peanut and starts to cry, smearing her work.
Mom sets ketchup and milk in front of us. “I have a patient named Connors whose grandson visits every few weeks. He lives in town. He’s sixteen or seventeen, tall like Dallas, with black hair and blue eyes. I could get his id for Dallas to use in Atlanta. We could say he’s your half-brother, Daddy’s child from another marriage.”
“The fingerprints won’t match,” I say.
“They never check those unless you’re arrested.”
“The kid would report a lost id. We’d get caught the first place we flashed it. You need to get his passport instead. He won’t notice that’s missing. If you can get his birth certificate, too, we could put Dad’s name as his father.”
“Good idea. We could use them to get Dallas a new id in Atlanta.”
I shoot down her dream. “We’ll never get an id with a stolen passport. But we might get into Canada with it.”
“I don’t want to leave the country, Max!” she shouts.
“I don’t even want to leave this city.”
“We have no choice!”
“What on earth are we going to do in Canada? It’s freezing there. If we have to live in a car, I’d rather park it in Atlanta.”
Ally carefully picks up her pencils and takes her work to the living room. “I wish you’d put the tent back up!” she yells.
I take a breath and swallow all the sarcastic backtalk that rises up inside me. “At least you have a niece there. You don’t have anybody left in Atlanta.”
Mom swats the air. “I haven’t seen Rebecca since she was your age. I don’t even know her. And I don’t know anything about Canada. Not anything good anyway. How am I supposed to get a job there? What makes you think they’ll let us in?”
“They take anyone with a trade. Their economy’s weak and their population is even older than ours. They need nurses. They’ll probably pay us to move there.” I smile, but she doesn’t find it amusing. “They’ll let you in, Mom, and you’ll find work. We’ll be fine. And we can hide Dallas there. We just have to leave before January first or they won’t let him out.”
“We can leave whenever we like.”
“No, we can’t! They’ll give me another shot when the holiday’s over. We have to leave by Christmas. You said you’d take Dallas, and you’re not backing out. So get that kid’s passport and birth certificate to use at the border.”
She holds her hands over her face. “Oh my god, Max, what on earth are we heading