This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [112]
“Spank. Spank,” I said in a serious tone, but she just smiled. Something about that smile made the spank bounce off her and back to me.
I sat between Papa and Gerry in the front seat of the Silver Bullet. Gerry didn’t know to let me sit by the window so the fresh air would settle my stomach, and if it didn’t, I could lean out and throw up over the side. She also didn’t know not to let me drink red grape juice in the car. For some reason Gerry wore a white coat with white gloves. I’d have to remember to spank her for both things when I felt better. White clothes were stupid because they get dirty, and she shouldn’t put me in the middle.
Papa was in his driving bubble, somewhere far away in his mind, but his eyes were watching the curves of the road as he went over hills too fast, a grape juice bottle in the V of his legs. It was his favorite juice because it was one of the few bottled drinks with no added sugar. The hills made my head heavy. A soft thing like a baby rabbit crawled up from my stomach and waited in my throat. No, baby rabbit. It got bigger, swelling with grape juice.
“Papa,” I said, meekly.
“Uh-oh,” Papa said. “Roll down the windows.”
Papa and Gerry turned shoulders and their arms moved fast, elbow over hand, working the widow cranks. Cold air smacked in from either side, scattering my hair. I turned to my right where the window was supposed to be, but instead there was Gerry. The vomit landed right on her.
“I’m pulling over,” Papa grunted.
The car slowed to a stop, but the red oatmeal continued to gush onto Gerry’s white coat. Gerry escaped the car, peeling off gloves, unbuttoning buttons. Then she bent and looked in at Papa with the hint of a smile, the ball of her coat folded around the gloves, all traces of red buried inside.
“That was the most of it,” she said.
I was the only one with any vomit left on me, wet on my cheeks.
“Here,” Gerry said, wiping my face and handing me a mason bottle of water, not grape juice, this time. “This will wash it all down.”
By November, most of the leaves were gone and the garden beds olive with seaweed, nights cooling. Mama was entering her “hibernation mode,” which meant lots of naps and checked-out time. Papa and Gerry were packing for the European farm tour, and Gerry asked me to take care of Pussy Tats while they were gone.
“Pussy Tats is my all-time favorite cat,” Gerry said. “Take good care of him.” Sleek black with a perfect white star of fur at his throat, he was quite handsome, especially compared to Helen’s hairball striped coon cats, but Pussy Tats was not my all-time favorite cat. In fact, I didn’t much like cats at all. I didn’t like the way he purred and kneaded his claws into my lap when he wanted attention or sat in the sun in the farmhouse and licked his fur until it shone. In general cats seemed needy, like when Mama said, “You’re being needy,” if I hung all over her. But I did try to take good care of Pussy Tats.
When Pussy Tats had not come to the house for a couple of days, I looked everywhere for the black shape of him with his short stub of tail. We found him lying in the woodshed, cold and stiff in an area under the workbench where he liked to sleep. You could tell he was no longer alive just by the way his fur was not shiny from licking but dull and dirty. It had been cold enough that there was no smell.
I think it was Chip who helped me bury the body by the spring, digging a hole in the nearly frozen peat moss. Pussy Tats lay in the position I had found him as we covered his body with the stiff earth.
“Was it my fault?” I asked Chip. Keith and Jean were still in the process of splitting up, but Chip would eventually take Jean’s place as Keith’s wife.
“No, no, he must have been sick,” she said, but it didn