Small as an Elephant - Jennifer Richard Jacobson [41]
Sometimes he would tell his mother all he had done for Mrs. Harris in a single afternoon.
“And she only paid you five dollars? Child-labor laws exist for a reason,” his mother had said one time. “I think I may need to remind her.”
Five dollars was not going to pay the rent.
And what would he do when he wasn’t working? He couldn’t go to school. No doubt, everyone at Curley Middle School had already heard about his summer vacation. The moment he showed up there, someone was bound to call DSS.
But she could come back.
Shut up.
Headlights were approaching.
She could.
Shut up!
The headlights came closer.
Jack jumped up and down, waving his hands over his head.
The headlights glared.
“Stop!” he yelled.
But the tanker went right on by.
It was music that made him slow down. There was a church — the Safe Harbor Church, according to the sign — up on the hill to his right, and there was singing coming from inside. Jack had to think a moment. It wasn’t Sunday, was it? And besides, services were held in the morning, not at night. Even a nonchurchgoer like him knew that much. So why the singing on a — on a Thursday night? It could be a performance, but the singing started and stopped, started and stopped. Each time it stopped, someone shouted.
It wasn’t a performance, he realized. It was a rehearsal. These singers were practicing.
The windows were brightly lit, and he was cold. It was hard to believe that just an hour ago, he was being cooked alive. The moment the sun went down, the heat shut off. He might not have known his future, but at least he knew what he was going to do next.
He waited until the singing resumed; then he opened the large church door and crept inside. Having been to a couple of weddings, both times as his mother’s date, he knew what to expect. He knew there would be a big entryway before the main part of the church. And there would be stairs if he was lucky — and he was. Jack tiptoed up the stairs to a small balcony, which mostly housed the organ pipes, but there were also a few rows of seats.
Jack didn’t need a seat. He crawled to the front of the balcony, which was surprisingly warm, and stretched out on the floor. Song rose up, and, even though he was too tired to concentrate on the words, it tucked in around him like a soft blanket. He pulled his elephant out and held her above his eyes.
What would his mother say about this elephant? He could no longer predict her reactions (though she’d be furious if she learned he stole it). When he was little, she used to bring him something elephant almost every week: pictures from the newspaper, elephant Pez, elephant lollipops. Once, she swapped a necklace she was wearing for an elephant key chain owned by a kid in their apartment building. Another time, a guest had told her about a bakery that sold elephant-shaped raspberry tarts, and she drove the Intown Inn van all the way to the North End to buy him one. It had almost gotten her fired. But as he got older, she seemed to get impatient with his obsession — like he should have outgrown it or something.
He wished that elephants were still something they shared. Maybe that was why he’d told her about elephant poo power on the ride up. He’d wanted to remind her one last time about Lydia . . . wanted her to respond like her old self — like the mom who loved to make him happy. He wanted to give her the opportunity to pull off the highway in York and surprise him. But mentioning elephants had only irritated her.
The music climbed right up to the church rafters and swelled. Jack could distinguish the sound of one female singer with a high voice and one male with a very low voice. All of the other voices seemed to blend into one.
He thought about Lydia, the one and only elephant in Maine. He had discovered her existence on the day he and his mother had left for Mount Desert Island. He and Nina had been goofing around on the Internet and did what he often did: searched for elephant and ____________ (whatever interested him or came to mind). He’d searched using the terms elephants and comics,