Here to Stay Read Free Page B

he’s poor?” Sissy said in disbelief.
    “No, not that. Darling, it doesn’t seem important to you now, but little things may matter to you later. For instance, if a person says, ‘I says’ or ‘So I tells him.’”
    Sissy tried to remember if Elijah ever spoke that way. She knew his father did. Her mother was right about one thing; it didn’t seem important.
    “Think what his uncle is like,” Heloise said. “Imagine him being your relative. Do they even have a telephone?”
    Sissy scoffed. She could remember when the Workmans hadn’t had a phone, either. “Of course they do.”No television, though, and his father’s work truck the only car. “Elijah’s smart,” she insisted. “Anyway, to set your mind at rest, I don’t think he knows I’m a girl.”
    Her mother said nothing. Rather than seeming satisfied by this, she just appeared more quietly fretful, as though something very troubling was brewing beneath her calm exterior.
    A few minutes later, as she let Ruby into the run, she said, “Sissy, my ugly duckling, I don’t think you realize yet that you are becoming the loveliest of swans.”
    Eldon, Missouri
June 13, 1959

    “H OW DO I LOOK ?” Sissy demanded, pirouetting for Elijah, an action he found completely at odds with her appearance. Tight pink pants, black leather jacket, lots of bright red lipstick and black mascara, her hair, naturally straight, in a high ponytail. “Cheap?” she inquired.
    Actually, Elijah thought she looked sexy but still a little too upmarket for where they were headed. And he was furious that she was here. “How did you get out of the house like that?”
    “Changed at a gas station outside Echo Springs.”
    “You know you could blow this entire thing. You’re not supposed to be here.”
    “Nobody in Eldon knows me, and I want to be part of this. I’m the whole reason you’re here.”
    “I don’t want to be here,” he said. “I’m only here because I have to be.” He held Satchmo’s leash. The dog was lean, muscular and strangely eager. He knew what they were there to do, and the dog was keen for it.
    Which didn’t make it remotely all right.
    Sissy was certainly right that she was why Elijah was at the pit fight at Jackson’s Dock. It was Sissy who’d found Lucky, after all. Lucky, who had been so disfigured in a staged dogfight. Lucky had become Elijah’s first dog. And Elijah and Sissy had become friends. Sort of.
    This had been her idea. You can do something about it, Elijah. You can find out from your uncle where the fights are.
    At first he hadn’t believed he could do it. Deceive Uncle Silas? Not to mention his own parents? The first thing he would have to hide was that he was interested in dogfights. Then he would have to tell Uncle Silas that he was interested in dogfights—and yet not explain why.
    He’d told Sissy he didn’t think these were nice people.
    It had taken him a year to work up his courage, then another year of being taken into his uncle’s confidence without once being invited to a pit fight. During that time, he’d learned a lot about himself—that he could become someone else at will. He felt anger toward his uncle; Silas Workman wasn’t the person Elijah had believed him to be. Ella had died as the result of a staged fight. When he was alone, Elijah had wept about this, and then he’d very coolly assume a false enthusiasm for fights, determined to find a way to stop them.
    Finally, not knowing what to do if he could find out where dogs were being matched, he had gone to the Humane Society in Osage Beach with Sissy. Her father had driven them, convinced that they simply wanted to volunteer there. Elijah had persuaded him not to talk about it with Elijah’s parents, saying it might causesome conflict in his own family. He just, he said, wanted to see what it was all about.
    Deceiving Mr. Atherton was definitely the worst.
    After three visits to the place, Sissy and Elijah met a man named Don Slocum, who was an agent