The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [14]
Grum looked up from her rat ball. “That’s ‘Spiderman and I,’ subject of the verb, and don’t be a lazy boy. Why should your mother waste gas when you have two good legs? By the way, did you ever tell her about that bad egg?”
“What bad egg?” Ma choked, trying to talk to us and exhale her smoke out the window at the same time. She’s always trying to quit, and when she’s not quitting she tries to keep us from breathing her second-hand smoke. But I figure if I can smell it I’m breathing it, and I even smell it upstairs in my bunk when she smokes in the basement. Our whole house is a smoker.
“Cigarettes cost more than eggs,” I said. I don’t know where that came from, but I had to do something quick to get the how-dare-you look off Ma’s face. “What I mean is, maybe Mr. Odum is willing to pay the price because it’s fair. Fresh organic eggs ought to be at least twice the price of those mass produced at a factory farm, if you ask me.”
Pa growled for attention. “Nobody asked you that, boy. Are those real ears on your head, or are they just painted on? Your mother wants to know about some bad egg.”
“Oh, right.” I’d forgotten that. “Yeah, Ma, there’s something wrong with the chickens. They’ve been laying funny—half the usual amount, today and yesterday, and one was just like a rock. One egg, I mean. I put it in the plant pot so it wouldn’t get mixed up with the others.” I didn’t tell her that the diminished amount problem might possibly be due to escaped chickens. (Oh yeah, which I planned to look for at the first available opportunity.)
Ma frowned hard, ground out her cigarette butt in her smiling-mouth ashtray, put her hand on her forehead, and stared at the bills on the table. Then she slowly got up and went to pluck the egg out of the plant pot.
“Barbie,” she said absently, staring at the egg, weighing it in her hand, “I want you to do the talking when you deliver the eggs. Sebby, you be polite, now, you hear me?”
“Are you sure you want to give Mr. Odum any more eggs?” said Barbie. “I mean, what if there’s something wrong with them?”
“You wouldn’t want Boots breaking one of his big shiny teeth on an omelet,” I said.
Ma sighed and tapped the rock egg on the counter. Thump, thump, thump. It didn’t even crack. “He was quite insistent that he wanted eggs laid fresh this morning. They ought to be all right. This bad egg is heavier than normal, really dense. The eggs I used in the cookies seemed perfectly fine.”
Another idea occurred to me, and it was a Grum-pleaser involving the use of my two legs. “Hey, Ma,” I said in my most reasonable voice, “Barbie doesn’t even have to come. She can stay home and help you, and I can—”
“Yep, just painted on for sure, those ears,” piped Pa. “You’d better start listening to your mother, or else I’ll change your channel.” He pointed the remote control at me like a gun. Then he laughed.
I closed my eyes and counted to ten and tried to think a happy thought about Pa to calm my thumping heart down, like Ma’s always telling me to do. I thought about how I used to follow him everywhere and he’d let me spread the mortar between rocks or hammer in the stake when we set up the tent. But that just made me miss the old Pa. All I wanted to do now was run at the Pa we had now and pound that smirk off his face. Instead I slammed out the door, grabbed my bike, and took a running start up the hill to Kettle Ridge.
Stupid hill. Stupid Shish. She was slowpoking her way after me. If I’d been going alone I could have cut through the gore to town. I’d have saved half an hour each way, to say nothing of both lungs. And had time to spare at the Hole in the Wall.
Kokadjo meant “kettle” in Abenaki Indian, and that’s exactly what the mountain looked like, an upside down kettle. After you got to the top, you’d ride straight across for a stretch, and then you’d coast down the other side of the kettle to Main