Cheating for the Chicken Man Read Free Page A

nights were cool, and a propane heater had been blowing hot air intothe building for twenty-four hours so it would be a toasty ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit for the chicks, most of whom were only hours old.
    Kate stepped out of the way a second time. She wanted to tell the men that they didn’t have to throw the chicks at the feed line the way they did. It seemed so cruel. But she didn’t say anything or interfere. She wasn’t supposed to get involved—just keep the dog away, open the doors, and check on the delivery afterward.
    While she waited for the two workers to finish dumping their delicate cargo, Kate sat on the toolshed’s cement steps. Arms crossed and hugging her elbows, she thought about her father. She was glad he wasn’t suffering anymore, but she was going to miss him so much. All those long Scrabble games, his corny jokes and hearty laugh, his big bear hugs, even the war-injured knee that gave him a heads-up when it was going to rain.
    And J.T. Was he back at the detention center? Had he and Miss Laurie stopped somewhere for lunch? It was a long way out to western Maryland. Was he glad he had come to the funeral? Had he seen them? Did he have any idea what Kate had done to find that trumpet and get him there . . . ?
    *
    Kate thought back to the day her father died and how, the same afternoon, she had defied her mother by unlocking her brother’s bedroom to begin her search for the instrument.
    She understood why her mother had closed up J.T.’s room after his conviction in juvenile court. “No one goes in there, do you hear?” Red-rimmed eyes and the way her mother held a hand, limp on her chest, were clues that beneath a hard shell ofanger, a heart had been broken. But hers wasn’t the only heart to break. Downstairs on the couch, Kate’s father, too sick to go to court, didn’t speak until the next day. And Kate was left to wonder if hearing about how they took J.T. away in handcuffs hadn’t hastened her father’s death seven weeks later.
    Kate’s world had been tipped upside down, too. And while she knew why J.T.’s room was shut off, she also knew there was a key to unlock all the bedroom doors in her mother’s jewelry box. The top tray of necklaces, rings, and pins lifted out. Underneath was where her mother stored important things like keys, baby teeth, old silver dollars, and the Purple Heart Kate’s father had been awarded after he was wounded. Kate and her brother had secretly examined these treasures many times. Kate simply plucked out the key she needed.
    She had only an hour that day to get into J.T.’s room and find the trumpet before her family returned from the hospital where Kate’s father had died. Still, she hesitated once more before putting the key into the lock. She didn’t want to disobey. She loved her mother, even if her mother had changed. Kate thought to herself that she would gently explain how it was her father’s wish, whispered to her during a final visit, that J.T. would play taps at his funeral—even though Kate suspected her mother would forbid it. But this is what made it so hard: While it was true that her brother had made a terrible mistake that shamed the family, it wasn’t his fault that their father got sick. It wasn’t right for their mother to blame him for that, too! But she did, forbidding him to be at the funeral.
    It was a tough call going against her mother’s orders, but Kate was changing as well. She had already started doing things—adult things—that most kids her age didn’t do. She put the key into the lock and turned it.
    When she entered J.T.’s bedroom that day, a wall of stuffy, hot air hit her because both of the windows had been closed and the air-conditioning unit turned off. She hadn’t been in the room for weeks—no one had since J.T. left—and it startled Kate to see that her brother’s bed had never