Jumping the Scratch Read Free Page A

away, and when Old Gray asked me what my favorite candy was, I was the one who told him butterscotch.

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    IN SPITE OF WHAT HAD HAPPENED TO SAPPHY, RIGHT after we got to Traverse City my mother took a job herself at the Cheery Cherry canning factory. She didn’t have any choice; it was the only place in town that was hiring. She worked the late shift because it paid more, but it meant I barely saw her. She went to work at eight o’clock at night and didn’t come home until four the next morning. It was pitch-dark when she came in, and she was always careful not to wake me as she tiptoed through the kitchen and on into the back where her room was. When I got up in the morning, I’d find my toothbrush laid out on the edge of the bathroom sink with a fresh stripe of toothpaste she’d squeezed onto it for me.
    Money was tight. The only extras my mother allowed herself were cartons of menthol Kools andsix-packs of diet cola because she was addicted to both. Every day she sent me to school with a bag lunch containing a peanut butter sandwich, a can opener, and a can of cherries with a damaged label, which she got for free at work. The cherries were for dessert, and I was supposed to use the juice to help wash down the sandwich.
    â€œTwo birds with one stone,” she told me.
    Eating cherries day after day, I developed a deep hatred for them, but at least later on I found a use for the empty cans.
    In case you don’t know, northern Michigan is cherry country. Seventy-five percent of the country’s tart cherries are grown there. Whether they want to or not, anybody who ever lives in northern Michigan carries around a bushel of cherry facts in his head for life. Here’s another one: The average cherry tree produces approximately seven thousand cherries a year, which is enough to make twenty-eight deep-dish cherry pies.
    There was no TV reception at Wondrous Acres, so it wasn’t even worth trying to watch. We had a radio, though. When I got up, I’d turn that on low so I wouldn’t wake anybody, tune in one of the Detroit stations, and read while I ate my breakfastalone at the little table in the corner of the kitchen.
    That year I became what I guess you would call a reader. I took tons of books out of the library at school, plus I read whatever my mother left lying around, even the sappy paperback romance novels she bought off the spinning wire racks at Kresge’s. I read because the words made noise, and the noise filled my head, and that gave me at least a little break from having to think about the dumb things I’d done to mess up what had been a perfectly good, normal-as-cornflakes life.
    That afternoon, I was standing at the counter, pouring myself a glass of milk, when Sapphy appeared, wearing her pajamas and a nubby old pink robe. Her hair had grown back, but it was uneven and short, and she didn’t like to comb it because she said it hurt her head. She always looked like she’d just woken up, and the only time she ever bothered to get dressed was when my mother took her downtown to see the doctor.
    â€œIs that you, Jamie?” Sapphy said. “Golly, how you’ve grown. What on earth are you doing here, sweet thing? I wasn’t expecting you, was I?”
    I was used to this. Sapphy was always surprised to see me when I came home from school each day,even though my mom and I had been living there with her for months. I opened The Hobbit, pulled out the gum wrapper I’d found on the bus, and handed it to her.
    â€œI brought you something,” I said.
    She laughed.
    â€œI used to collect these when I was a little girl, did you know that?” she said, taking the wrapper from me and holding it up to admire it as if it were something special.
    â€œHe knows about your wrappers,” said Marge, coming into the room with a gossip magazine in one hand and one of my mother’s diet colas in the other. “We all know about your