The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [53]
Anyway, I tried his advice and sat straight up without jiggling. It made Barbie seem awfully short all of a sudden. But the hour lasted just as long as ever.
My teacher said hello in the vestibule after the sermon. Ms. Byron goes to the same church we do. Pa had been surprised to hear that a kneejerk liberal feminazi even went to church. Funny, I didn’t see him there.
“Why, Sebastian, I think you’ve grown six inches since Friday,” Ms. Byron said. Her eyebrows nearly hit her Sunday hat.
“Only three inches,” Barbie said.
“He’s finally decided to listen to his old grandmother and stand up straight,” Grum said proudly. “Praise the Lord.”
As we crossed Kettle Ridge on the way home, I couldn’t resist staring out at the gore, as usual. Barbie craned her neck to look out my side, too, squinting with her hand over her eyes. Remembering yesterday, I scanned the faraway cliff on the narrow end, looking for the tunnel we’d nearly fallen out of, but it just blended into the mass of endless grayness. The boulder in its mouth probably made the tunnel impossible to see from the outside anyway.
A motion in the middle of the stripped area caught my eye, though. A silver car on Odum’s Gash. And a black one. And a red truck. A whole scattering of vehicles, heading in. You could see them blipping between the slag piles. Barbie leaned closer. She practically climbed on my lap, pressing her nose against the window.
“What do you see?” I said, resisting the urge to shove her back over to her own seat. We were nearing the edge of the kettle top now and would soon lose the view.
“What do you see?” Ma echoed, looking at us through the rear-view mirror. The SUV made the turn down the hill, and the road weaved through pines intertwined with viney shrubs.
Barbie punched my arm. I guess I shouldn’t have said that. “Oh, just some cars in the gore,” she answered Ma.
“That’s unusual for a Sunday,” said Ma. True. ORC never saw much activity on the weekends. Just a goon here and there, changing guard shifts, and Boots Odum himself went in sometimes to check on things. Most of the employees had weekends off and never went near the place until Monday morning.
“They must be godless heathens,” said Grum.
Ma laughed but said, “Now now. Judge not lest ye be judged.”
They had themselves a fine time exchanging Bible verses the rest of the way home, and I kept thinking about Jed. If Barbie had been right, if he’d been keeping an eye on us from the tunnels, he could be living way over on the other side of the mountain behind us. Those tunnels could go for miles and miles.
We made the turn past Ma’s sign:
SORRY, NO EGGS
and instantly I realized what Barbie had been gawking at in the gore. That was Pa’s truck I’d seen blipping between slag piles! It had been in the driveway when we left, but not now.
“How did Pa get past the security gate at ORC?” I whispered in Barbie’s ear as we walked to the house. “Do you think he finally got himself a job there?”
“Seb, it’s Sunday. He has no reason whatsoever to be at ORC.”
She had a really good point. That couldn’t have been Pa. “Don’t worry, Shish, there are lots of red trucks in the world. Pa’s probably over at the Do-Drop-Inn as usual.”
“Probably,” Barbie said. But she didn’t sound convinced.
I barely tasted the weekly Crock-Pot roast and potatoes we had after church, I ate so fast. Barbie was shoveling the food in too. We were in a hurry to get going. Besides, swallowing without chewing made the food less painful. And that wasn’t a joke about Ma’s cooking. I felt like I had four hundred new molars.
“All right,” said Ma the second I took my plate to the sink, “it’s Sunday afternoon and I haven’t seen anybody named Sebby doing any homework all weekend.”
“I was planning on getting that done tonight,” I said. Assuming Barbie would tell me the assignments. While my classmates had copied them into their agendas on Friday, cartoon superheroes jumped out of my pencil. Don’t blame me. I am weak and superheroes are strong.
“You were, were you?” said Ma. “I was planning on your getting that done