The Silver Star(7)

The next day, when I turned down the block on my way home from school, I saw a squad car parked outside the bungalow. A policeman in a blue uniform was cupping his hands around his eyes and peering through the picture window. That Mr. Spinelli had ratted us out after all. Trying to think what Liz would do in the same situation, I slapped my head to show anyone who happened to be watching that I had forgotten something. “I left my homework in my desk!” I cried out for good measure, turned around, and headed back up the block.

I was waiting outside the high school when Liz came down the steps. “What are you so bug-eyed about?” she asked.

“Cops,” I whispered.

Liz pulled me away from the other students streaming past, and I told her about the policeman peering through the window.

“That’s it,” Liz said. “Beaner, we’re going to Virginia.”

Liz always carried our money under the lining in her shoe, so we went straight to the bus depot. Since the school year was almost over, Liz said, none of our teachers would miss us. After all, we’d shown up in the middle of the year. Also, it was high picking season for strawberries, apricots, and peaches, and the teachers were used to the way the migrant families were always coming and going at harvest time.

I stayed outside the depot, studying the silver sign of the running greyhound on the roof, while Liz bought the tickets. It was early June, the streets were quiet, and the sky was pure California blue. After a couple of minutes, Liz came back out. We’d been afraid that the clerk might raise questions about a kid buying tickets, but Liz said the woman had slid them across the counter without batting an eye. Some grown-ups, at least, knew how to mind their own business.

The bus left at six forty-five the following morning. “Shouldn’t we call Uncle Tinsley?” I asked.

“I think it’s better if we just show up,” Liz said. “That way, he can’t say no.”


That night, after finishing off our chicken potpies, Liz and I got out the suitcases left from what Mom called her deb days. They were a matching set in a sort of tweedy tan with dark brown crocodile trim and straps, and brass hinges and locks. They were monogrammed with Mom’s initials: CAH, for Charlotte Anne Holladay.

“What should we take?” I asked.

“Clothes but no stuff,” Liz said.

“What about Fido?”

“Leave him here,” Liz said, “with extra food and water. He’ll be fine until Mom comes back.”

“What if Mom doesn’t come back?”

“She’ll be back. She’s not abandoning us.”

“And I don’t want to abandon Fido.”

What could Liz say to that? She sighed and shook her head. Fido was coming to Virginia.


Packing those deb-days suitcases got me to thinking about all the other times we’d picked up and moved on short notice. That was what Mom did whenever she got fed up with the way things were going. “We’re in a rut,” she’d announce, or “This town is full of losers,” or “The air has gone stale here,” or “We’ve hit a dead end.” Sometimes it was arguments with neighbors, sometimes it was boyfriends who took a powder. Sometimes the place we’d moved to didn’t meet her expectations, and sometimes she simply seemed to get bored with her own life. Whatever the case, she would announce that it was time for a fresh start.

Over the years, we’d moved to Venice Beach, Taos, San Jose, Tucson, plus these smaller places most folks had never heard of, like Bisbee and Lost Lake. Before moving to Pasadena, we’d moved to Seattle because Mom thought that living on a houseboat on the Sound would get her creative juices flowing. Once we got there, we discovered that houseboats were more expensive than you’d think, and we ended up in a moldy apartment with Mom constantly complaining about the rain. Three months later we were gone.

While Liz and I had been on our own plenty of times, we’d never taken a trip without Mom. That didn’t seem like such a big deal, but I kept wondering what to expect once we got to Virginia. Mom never had anything good to say about the place. She was always going on about the backward-thinking lintheads who drove cars with duct-taped fenders, and also about the mint-julep set who lived in the big old houses, selling off ancestor portraits to pay their taxes and feed their foxhounds, all the while reminiscing about the days when the coloreds knew their place. That was a long time ago, when Mom was growing up. Things had changed a lot since then, and I figured Byler must have, too.

After turning off the lights, Liz and I lay side by side. I’d been sharing a bed with Liz for as long as I could remember. It started after we left Virginia when I was a baby, and Mom found that putting me in with Liz made me stop crying. Later on, we sometimes lived for pretty long stretches in motels with only two beds or in furnished apartments with a pull-down Murphy bed. In Lost Lake, we shared a bed so small we had to face the same direction, the person behind wrapping her arms around the person in front, because otherwise we’d end up pulling the covers off each other. If my arm was going numb, I’d gently nudge Liz, even asleep, and we’d both roll over simultaneously. Most kids had their own beds, and some people might have thought sleeping with your sister was peculiar—not to mention crowded—but I loved it. You never felt lonely at night, and you always had someone to talk to. In fact, that was when you had your best conversations, lying spoon-style in the dark, talking just above a whisper.