Promises to Keep - Ann Tatlock [42]
“All right. Good night, Tillie.”
“Good night, Roz. Sleep well.”
I gathered all my books and papers and laid them on the small table in the front hall, ready to go in the morning. At the top of the stairs I peeked into Wally’s room. He was at his desk by the window, drawing lines with a ruler on a sheet of graph paper. He sat with his back to me and couldn’t see me watching him from the doorway.
“Wally?”
Startled, he turned his head. “Yeah?”
“What are you doing?”
“My mechanical drawing assignment. Why?”
I shrugged. “Just wondering.”
He tapped the desk with the ruler a moment, then went back to work.
“Are you going to need that kind of thing where you’re going?” I asked.
He laughed lightly. “It might come in handy.” He drew a long line, the point of his pencil moving as slowly as a surgeon’s scalpel. When he finished, he turned back around. “You need something?”
“No.”
“You just feel like standing there staring at me?”
I pressed my lips together. He raised his brows. For a moment he looked like the Wally I used to know, when we were friends.
“Wally?”
“Yeah?”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Can I stop you?”
He smiled. I felt encouraged to go on. “There must have been something good about Daddy, wasn’t there? I mean, I remember some good things . . .”
My words tapered off as the smile slid from his face. “Listen,” he said quietly, “the best thing you can do is forget about Alan. Forget he’s your father. Forget he ever existed.”
My throat was tight. I didn’t want to cry. “But, I mean, there was something good about him, wasn’t there?”
Wally sat without speaking for what seemed like a long time. Finally he said, “Tell you what, Roz, if I can think of anything good about Alan, I’ll let you know, all right? I promise. Now, I’ve got a lot of homework. You need to go away and let me finish.”
I nodded. “All right.” I took a step backward. “Good night, Wally. And thanks for thinking about it.”
But he had already turned back to his homework and didn’t respond.
chapter
16
Mom gave me permission to go to the public library with Mara after school on Friday. Though we’d lived in Mills River since the summer, I hadn’t yet been to the downtown library. Mara claimed she knew the place better than her own house; she had worked hard to memorize the exact location of all her favorite books, both fiction and nonfiction. When new books came into the library and old books were removed, shifting the shelf location of Mara’s favorites, it left her feeling out of sorts. “I can’t afford to buy all the books I want,” she told me, “but I pretend the library copies are mine and I’m just letting other people use them.”
The librarians all knew Mara by name, and when we arrived that Friday afternoon, the head librarian, a Mrs. Tisdale, presented Mara with two books that had the word Withdrawn stamped across the cover.
“I thought you might like these, Mara,” Mrs. Tisdale said. She smiled as she slid them across the counter.
Mara picked them up and squealed quietly, fully aware that we had entered a sanctuary of near silence. “Thank you, Mrs. Tisdale!” she said, hugging the books to her chest.
“The library recently purchased new copies, so I saved these for you.”
Both books were paperbacks, dog-eared from use. One was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, the other Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington. The second book made me think about how, in some places not too long ago, Mara couldn’t have even come into the library through the front door. She would have had to use the colored entrance, and once inside, she would have had to sit in separate rooms from the whites. Thoughts like that always hit me with a jolt. When I looked at Mara, I didn’t see a Negro, I just saw Mara. Only at certain moments – like this one – did I remember that her skin was darker than mine.
“Are you here for anything in particular?” Mrs. Tisdale asked.
“We have to write a history paper on an invention. Any invention we want. I’m going to write about the printing press, and – oh yeah, this is my friend,