[Jennifer Cloud 01.0] The Shoes Come First Read online

  “Hooray, I’m getting a car!” I cried out as I ran past Eli.

  “In your dreams,” Eli responded, running after me. But when we arrived out back, there was no car. Instead, there was a huge crate being unloaded by the deliveryman; his name tag read Frank. Apparently, Frank was the deliverer not of new cars but of large crates.

  “Where do you want it?” Frank asked, scratching his large beer belly. The buttons down the front of his brown shirt looked like they were going to pop off at any second from the strain of holding his shirt closed.

  “I guess you could put it in the backyard.” I pointed to the gate.

  Frank gave a grunt as he wheeled the crate to the backyard. I signed the paperwork, and he said, “It’s all yours. Oh yeah, this also goes with it.” He handed me an envelope—one of the kind that are stuffed so the contents don’t get squashed during shipping. There was no return address. I figured it had my name on it, so what the heck. I tore open the envelope and read the letter inside.

  Dear Miss Cloud,

  Before the death of your great-aunt Elma Jean Cloud, she bequeathed the items below to you in her will.

  1. Outhouse from her garden passed from several generations of Clouds

  2. Antique necklace given to her by her mother

  Regards,

  Mr. Nolan Smythe, Executor

  Eli was busy trying to pry the crate open with the back end of a hammer. “Got it,” he said, and all four sides of the crate fell down simultaneously, revealing the outhouse. “Whoa!” Eli said, jumping back out of the way. He regained his balance and slowly walked around until he was standing in front of the structure. “What’s that?”

  “It’s an outhouse,” I answered matter-of-factly.

  “Someone gave you a toilet?” Eli said with a mischievous grin spreading across his face.

  My mom appeared in the back doorway holding her black binder she used to schedule her clients. “What is that?” she asked, waving her empty hand at the outhouse.

  “Someone gave Jen a toilet.” Eli was now holding his sides and laughing hysterically.

  “What on earth? Who would give you such a thing?”

  “It’s all in the letter,” I said, handing my mom the letter from the deliveryman.

  “Oh my goodness, I will have to let your father handle this one,” she said, pressing her lips together in a firm line. This usually meant she knew something but didn’t know if she should explain it to the children. I got this same look when I was younger and asked where babies came from and what happened to Cousin Trish’s second husband.

  “Children, you go on to school.” My mom tucked the letter in her binder, turned back toward the house, and gave us a wave.

  “What are you going to do with it?” Eli asked. “It smells weird.”

  “Not any worse than your gym socks,” I responded. The thing kinda creeped me out. I walked around it trying to decide why Aint Elma wanted me to have the scary old outhouse. Maybe there is a treasure inside, my inner voice suggested. I am definitely not sharing the treasure with Eli. My inner voice agreed. I tried the door. It must have been nailed shut, because it wouldn’t budge.

  “I think the outhouse looks rustic; maybe we could plant a garden around it.”

  That freaked Eli out—this was the end of his junior year, and he had better things to do than help his little sister plant a garden around some old shed.

  Eli paused at the door. “Sorry, Jen, I won’t have time to help. This is the last week of school before summer break, and I have to get ready for my senior year. I’m working at the store all summer. There will be football practice and SAT preparation and, um, everything else. My senior year is a real busy time, you know?”

  Yes, I knew this, because he had told me at least a dozen times in the last week. “You don’t say,” I chided.

  “I have to make good grades so I can get in medical school,” he said as he disappeared into the house to retrieve his backpack.

  I had forgotten about the envelope still in my hands. I turned it upside down, and out fell the necklace Aint Elma had been wearing on her birthday. Well, at least I got some jewelry out of the deal. It was the moon hung on a silver chain. The medallion itself was made out of some kind of rock that was inlaid on metal. The crescent moon was engraved in the stone. Tiny stars inset with twinkling blue and white stones were dancing around the moon.

  “Do you think these are real diamonds?” I asked no one in particular. The necklace was pretty but a little big for my taste.

  “Get a move on, kids!” Mom yelled from the kitchen. I dropped the necklace in my book bag and headed off to school.

  We lived in a rural suburb of Dallas, Texas, called Sunnyside. Most of the people in my town were farmers or drove the twenty-minute commute to Dallas to work behind a desk. Although most of the houses in Sunnyside sat on a few acres, there was a small section of town that consisted of a neighborhood with single-family brick houses and two streets of townhouses. I lived on Rollingwood Court in one of the townhouses.

  Our town was small. There was a Baptist church, my dad’s feed store, and an Exxon gas station out by the highway. We had an elementary and middle school but didn’t have a high school. Eli and I drove ten miles into the neighboring city of Mesquite to go to school. Mesquite was mostly a blue-collar town famous for the rodeo. Cowboys came from across the nation to compete at the Resistol Arena, made famous by cowboy Neal Gay. Going from a small country school to the jam-packed halls of my high school was a big adjustment. Luckily my brother, Eli, was the quarterback of the football team. This earned me a little respect from a few of the bullies and immediate friendships with popular girls trying to climb the social ladder by dating Eli. My older sister, Melody, was a very talented dancer, so she had a scholarship to an arts magnet school in Dallas and didn’t have to put up with the riffraff from my high school. She graduated last year and went on to study dance at what my relatives referred to as “some fancy-schmancy school in New York City.”

  Eli spent his summers working in my dad’s store and saved up enough money to buy a car. He had just turned eighteen, and I thought he was pretty full of himself, but I loved his car, a 1992 dark-blue Ford Mustang GT.

  The Mustang had originally belonged to Mr. Schwartz, who lived down the street. Mr. Schwartz had been saving the car for his son, Zach. However, Zach marched to the beat of his own drum. He dropped out of high school, joined a rock band, and drove a rusted 1972 Volkswagen bus that was missing the back door and had floor-to-ceiling purple shag carpet. Zach told his dad Mustangs were for pussies and took off with his band for LA.

  Mr. Schwartz upgraded to a new Mercedes and sold the Mustang to my brother. The car oozed coolness. Eli replaced the radio and the muffler. The speakers thumped so hard, it felt like the bass was beating right through your heart and coming out your ears. We listened to U2 on the way to school. My brother’s taste in music was fine with me. We both thought the old rock was good, and we usually agreed on most top-forty hits. Eli practiced football after school, so I usually rode home with my best friend, Jake.

  Jacob McCoy was tall, and lean from running track, and he had big, brown puppy-dog eyes. His sandy-brown hair hung low over one eye. He had huge dimples, and all the girls thought he was “sooo cute!” I thought he was “just Jake.”

  In fourth grade he asked if I stuffed my bra, and I politely socked him in the nose. Both of us were sent to the principal’s office and served detention for a week together. We became fast friends. He told me he thought I had a great right hook. I thought he didn’t want his friends to know he was taken down by a girl. Besides, in fourth grade all the other boys threw rocks at me, so it was nice having one on my team.

  Jake drove a black Jeep Wrangler, which only enhanced his status as a chick magnet. Every day after school, I had to walk through a nest of cheerleaders to get to my ride.

  “Honestly, Jake, why don’t you just pick one?” I would ask pretty much on a daily basis.

  “I like ke
eping my options open,” would be his response. “If one is busy, I can just call another.” Like any one of them would be too busy for Jake.

  I told Jake about my gift on the way home. He parked in front of my townhouse. Our house was connected on either side by an adjoining townhouse. The entire neighborhood was made up of rows of four townhouses joined together. Every three years there was a big meeting to decide what color to paint the houses so they would all match. My mom called this “the battle of the bullshit.” I overheard her tell my dad she would rather try to get Paula Dean to give up butter than argue with the neighbors. This year we were painted a nice olive green. I thought it covered the ugly mustard yellow from the previous painting very well. As we walked in the front door and through the kitchen, I could see the outhouse beyond the sliding-glass door hovering over the small set of patio furniture on the back porch.

  “Cool,” Jake said as he grabbed an apple out of the fruit basket my dad kept on the counter in the kitchen. Fruit was always kept in arm’s reach in case we needed a “healthy snack,” as Dad would say. What he didn’t know was my mom hid a stash of Ding Dongs in the laundry room.

  We went out the sliding door and into the backyard. “My great-grandma had one of these—we used to play hide-and-seek in it,” Jake said as he opened the outhouse door. “Radical, two seats.” He stepped inside.

  “Jake, I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” I said cautiously.

  “Oh come on, it’s kind of like being in a tree house.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me inside. We both sat down on the bench, being careful to straddle the holes. I noticed there were two small handles on either side of the seat. I didn’t remember seeing them before, but I grabbed hold just in case the ground decided to have another quake. Jake closed the door.

  “Jake, it’s dark in here,” I protested.

  “Yeah,” he said with a mouth full of apple and scooted closer to me. “Do you know what people do in the dark?” he asked, dropping his voice really low. But before I could figure out why he was acting so strangely, the ground began to rumble and the entire outhouse began to shake. The door flew open. I had a death grip on the handles. Jake was catapulted across the yard. The apple he had been eating went flying from his hand like it was shot out of a twenty-two-barrel shotgun and smashed into the sliding-glass door. There was a loud crack, and the glass promptly shattered into a million tiny pieces.

  “Oh damn, what happened?” Jake asked, choking out bits of apple.

  I scrambled out of the outhouse. “Are you all right?” I asked, helping Jake to his feet. We looked back at the outhouse. The door was once again shut, and I swear the little moon was smiling at us. Mom came running to the back door.

  “Mother Mary Francis, what in God’s name happened?” Mom, having been raised Catholic, always started calling out the saints when there was some kind of excitement.

  “Um, we had an accident?” I half asked, hoping not to get in trouble.

  “With an apple,” Jake added.

  “Well, next time you are going to play baseball with an apple, do it in the front yard,” Mom scolded.

  I didn’t see the need to try to explain what really happened. Jake and I cleaned up the glass and promised to work at my dad’s store to pay for the damage. Jake thought it must have been some kind of instability in the ground under the outhouse. I thought the thing was possessed, and I didn’t want to get near it again.

  After dinner my dad called for a family meeting. We gathered around the glass-top kitchen table. My dad sat at the head of the table in a yellow padded cane chair, and the rest of us filed in around the table for our typical family meeting. These were held when there was a major crisis in the family, when a major decision needed to be voted on, or when someone died. I assumed this was about my gift, because Mom made cookies. If someone had died, there would be pudding (a comfort dessert), and a major crisis usually got us chocolate cake.

  Dad reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the letter I had received that morning. “It seems Jennifer has been given a very special gift from Aint Elma.”

  “Yeah, a toilet.” Eli laughed and made farting sounds with his armpit.

  My dad cleared his throat and looked at Eli over the rim of his glasses. Eli went into sulk mode, and my dad sighed.

  “I called Mamma Bea, and she said all Aint Elma could talk about the last month before she died was how important it was for Jennifer to have the outhouse if something were to happen to her.” Dad looked me square in the eyes. “It was almost as if she knew her time was coming to an end.”

  I remembered the funeral. It was the middle of May in the tiny Baptist church in Mount Pleasant. The entire family was crowded into the small sanctuary, fanning themselves with the program adorned with a picture of a smiling Aunt Elma on the front. She looked happy. For a woman of her age, she was quite spry, and her death was a mystery. My family sat ass to elbows in the church pew listening to Uncle Durr speak of his late sister. He was mopping his brow with a handkerchief and pounding on the podium, ranting on about the unfairness of life. The service was closed casket, which raised my curiosity about my great-aunt’s demise.

  Apparently Aint Elma had been up on her roof fixing a leak when she fell off.

  “Dad,” I whispered, “how did Aint Elma fall off the roof?”

  He looked down at me with glassy eyes and pulled me in close for a hug. “She just lost her grip and tumbled off. If it hadn’t been for her broken arm, she might have lived.”

  “She broke her arm in the fall and died?” I asked uncertain.

  “No,” Dad answered. “Apparently she was mowing the lawn a week earlier and tripped. She broke her arm, but the weight of the cast she was wearing kept her from grabbing on for support when she fell off the house. She landed on her head and broke her neck.” OK, I thought, this is scary—she was really old. What was an elderly lady doing on top of a house with a broken arm anyway?

  My mom leaned in from the other side of me, rattled off a few saints, and made the sign of the cross. “I feel terrible,” she said, full of Catholic guilt. “She called every summer for the kids, especially you, Jennifer, to come stay with her. We always had so much going on, and I wasn’t sure she could take care of you at her age. Now it’s too late.”

  My dad reached behind me and squeezed my mother’s shoulder. She rested her free hand on his and reached up to dab her eyes with a Kleenex.

  After the funeral services we drove to spread her ashes at the ancient burial grounds of the Indian tribe of her mother, Mahalo Jane.

  “Earth to Jen.” Eli waved his smelly armpit hands in front of my face.

  “Why did Aint Elma leave Jen a toilet?” Eli asked Dad.

  “It’s an outhouse,” I corrected him.

  Dad shrugged. “I don’t know, but she really wanted her to have it, so we should make room in the backyard, maybe plant a garden around it.”

  Eli immediately remembered some homework he had forgotten to finish and left the room.

  I didn’t want to explain the strange things that happened when you went inside the outhouse. I had visions of my Uncle Buster coming by after a few drinks, using our outdoor facilities, and getting rocketed into the Blaylocks’ yard three doors down. I agreed planting a garden around it was a good idea.

  “We could set it way back in the corner and plant all around it. People would think it was kind of like garden art,” I suggested. Maybe the garden would keep people a stone’s throw from the outhouse. My mom frowned at the idea of having an outhouse in her backyard, but dad promised to plant the herb garden she had been asking for, and it was a done deal.

  Later in the week, my dad bought some herbs and tomato plants. We spent a weekend digging up the yard around the outhouse, and pretty soon we had grown an amazing garden. Mom starting using the herbs in her recipes, and life was good. When spring came the following year, flowers in all colors started to bloom. And like in Aunt Elma’s garden, the Blue Moon roses grew around the base of the little hou
se. Dad figured the seeds must have blown in from a neighbor’s garden. I hated to tell him the only thing our neighbors had blooming was a wild honeysuckle vine on Mrs. Dombrowsky’s fence.

  Chapter 3

  Eli graduated high school and decided he wanted to study chiropractic. He moved to Iowa to go to chiropractic school. I had never been to a chiropractor, but Dad took Eli once when he injured his shoulder in football practice. Mamma Bea told us those chiropractors were like witches laying their hands on your bones and making them go pop.

  I devoted the next two years to getting through school. I never made grades as good as Eli’s or Melody’s. My mom always said I was too busy thinking about my next pair of shoes or trying to coordinate my outfits.

  I spent the summers reading fashion magazines and lying around Jake’s pool, talking about what we wanted to do after graduation. Jake had a scholarship to run track at Texas Tech University. This was great for him but several hours away from me. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. Probably I would pursue something in fashion. My parents thought it would be good for me to start out at junior college since my grades wouldn’t get me in a four-year school.

  I overheard Mamma Bea ask once, “The first two were so smart; what happened to that one?”

  My dad just smiled and replied, “Jennifer will figure things out in time.” Go, Dad.

  One Saturday afternoon, in the first part of May, Jake and I were lying out by his pool. The early-summer sun was giving us a day of eighty-degree weather. It was the perfect temperature for relaxing outside in Texas, because in a few weeks it would be escalating up to our summer boil. It was nearing the end of our senior year. A gaggle of girls had just left to go do whatever the cheerleaders normally do, leaving Jake and I alone.

  “You know, Jake, the only reason you run so fast is because you always have so many girls chasing you,” I said. “If you would just pick one…I noticed you were paying special attention to Sarah Montgomery.”