Liz was still asleep, but I kept nudging her until she finally rolled onto her back and looked up at the ceiling.
“How do you feel?” I asked.
“How do you think I feel?”
“Pretty awful,” I said. “Here, drink this.”
Liz sat up and took a sip of orange juice. I told her about Mom’s idea for the road trip and the possibility of moving to the Catskills near that spiritual retreat of hers. Liz didn’t say anything. In any event, I went on, Mom said she had to get out of Byler, so we had to decide what we were going to do.
“You’re the older one, but here’s how I see it,” I said. Mom’s roadtrip idea was just as cockamamie as all her other ideas. And the Catskills plan was downright wacky. I didn’t want to go off to some spiritual retreat and live with a bunch of Buddhist monks. And what if Mom took off or had another one of her meltdowns when we got there? Were the monks going to take care of us? Also, there were only three months of school left. We should at least finish out the school year in Byler. It wasn’t such a bad place. We had Uncle Tinsley and we had the Wyatts. They weren’t going to take off. Finally, the business with Maddox was over. We might not like how it ended, but it had ended.
“I don’t know,” Liz said. “This all makes my brain hurt.” She set her orange juice down on the nightstand. “I just want to sleep.”
I went back downstairs. Uncle Tinsley was building another fire in the living room, and Mom was sitting in the wing chair. Her eyes were a little puffy from that crying jag. She seemed unusually calm but also sad, and I realized I was no longer angry. “Mom, I’m sorry about some of those things I said. I know it hurt.”
“It wouldn’t hurt if weren’t all so true,” Mom said.
“I can be a jerk sometimes,” I said.
“Don’t apologize for who you are,” she said. “And don’t ever be afraid to tell the truth.”
“Miss Clay at school says I got myself one ugly mouth.”
“She’s right,” Mom said. “And if you can make it work for you, that ugly mouth will get you far.”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Liz stayed in bed all that day and slept through the night. The next morning, she still refused to get up. After breakfast, Uncle Tinsley asked me to help him clean the gutters. We were walking back from the barn, each carrying one end of the aluminum extension ladder, when all of a sudden those two emus came wandering up the driveway. The birds didn’t seem afraid at all, cocking their heads and looking around with their enormous caramel-colored eyes.
“They must have gotten loose from Scruggs’s field,” Uncle Tinsley said. “Scruggs never did tend his fences.”
We set the ladder on the ground, the emus studied it warily, and I ran inside to get Liz, who pulled on a pair of jeans and rushed down the stairs. By then, the emus were moseying up toward the barn, making that gurgly drumming noise deep in their throats. They took those long, deliberate steps, bobbing their heads each time they raised a leg. The smaller emu had one foot that turned to the side and dragged slightly when it walked, as if the foot had once been injured. Their movements were somehow both awkward and graceful, and they kept glancing back and forth as if to reassure each other that it was safe.
Uncle Tinsley decided he’d better get in touch with Scruggs, who needed to know about any loose livestock, and he went inside to make the call. When he came back out, he said he’d spoken with Scruggs and the emus actually belonged to Scruggs’s son-in-law, Tater, who was working a job over in the valley and wouldn’t be back until the day after tomorrow. Tater was the only one who knew how to catch the birds, so Scruggs had asked if it wouldn’t be too much of an imposition for us to keep them until Tater returned.
“I reckon that’s the neighborly thing to do,” Uncle Tinsley said. “But we’ll need to get them into the pasture.”
The emus had meandered past the barn into the orchard. They were a few feet from the gate that led into the main pasture, which was surrounded by old three-board fencing. Walking slowly behind the emus, our arms stretched out, we were able to herd them the short distance to the open gate. Once they had gone through, Liz quickly shut the gate and latched it.
Later that morning, we brought Mom up to the field to show her the emus, but when she got a good look at them up close, the size of their talons unnerved her, and she said she wanted nothing to do with them. Liz, however, found them captivating. While Uncle Tinsley and I got back to the business of cleaning the gutters, which were so clogged that little green sprouts were growing out of them, Liz spent the whole afternoon leaning on the fence, watching the emus. She couldn’t believe anything so strange-looking as those two emus would just show up. They seemed not of this world, she said, like creatures from a prehistoric era, or aliens from another planet, or maybe even angels. She decided that the bigger one was a male and the smaller was a female, and she named them Eugene and Eunice.