Rabble Starkey Read Free Page A

that in.
    I watched while Veronica printed in her mama's name real careful, and nobody, not me or Sweet-Ho or Veronica herself, said a word. Alice Mayhew Bigelow was the name of Veronica's mama.
    And then, as if writing the name had made it happen, the door to the kitchen came open and Veronica's mama came walking in. It was her house, where she lived, of course, so no real surprise that she should be walking about the rooms in the evening. But somehow Mrs. Bigelow always came as a strange surprise anyway. And lately her strangeness had been getting worse.
    She didn't say nothing, just walked through the kitchen, smiling real pretty. She looked down at the table where Veronica and me was working, but she didn't ask questions—you'd think she would ask questions, seeing those foolish trees and apples, and one of them with 'Alice Mayhew Bigelow' printed on it plain as anything. But she just walked past. She picked up a blue crayon off the table and held it in her hand, rubbing at it with her fingers, so that some of the blue came right off on her skin. She looked at that blue fingertip and smiled. Then she put the crayon into the pocket of her dress and went away.
    "Good night, Mama," Veronica called after her, in a sweet voice. Her mama didn't answer and for a minute the kitchen was quiet.
    "Now I'm going to do one for my grandma," I said,
to do away with the quiet because it was making me feel funny, the way I always felt when Mrs. Bigelow was around. Then I drew a nice round apple for my grandma, Sweet-Ho's mama, the one who gave me my name.
    "How do I spell Gnomie, Sweet-Ho?" I asked. Gnomie was what we all called my grandma, and it always made me think of them painted clay creatures some people put in their yards, holding a fishline into a little pond, some of them, and wearing pointy hats. Gnomes. My grandma was little and squat, like them.
    But Sweet-Ho spelled it out for me, and I was downright startled. It wasn't Gnomie at all. It was Naomi. All those years I had the thought wrong in my head.
    I printed "Naomi Jones" in my grandma's apple, real careful. Under her name I printed in "Dec." Then I drew another special apple underneath.
    "'Sweet Hosanna Jones Starkey.' There you are, Sweet-Ho. See how I did that? Now look, how I draw a line over, joining you up to this apple here. This one's gonna be Ginger Starkey."
    "He could be dec for all we know," Sweet-Ho commented.
    Veronica looked up from her paper. "Of course he isn't," she said. "He's out seeking his fortune somewhere. Someday he'll come back. You just wait and see."
    Sweet-Ho and I didn't say nothing to argue with her. Veronica was the nicest person we knew, and if she wanted to believe old Ginger Starkey would come
back, that was okay. Me and Sweet-Ho knew better, though. We had talked about it lots, at night before we went to sleep, and we had decided long ago that we wouldn't be seeing Ginger Starkey again probably ever. Twelve years he'd been gone and no word. Sweet-Ho thought he might even be in Hollywood, with his name changed, he was that handsome; sometimes, she said, she watched all the unimportant characters in movies, thinking she might catch a glimpse of him.
    Other times, she said he could be just a dumb old bum somewhere by now, maybe with all his teeth fallen out. But I don't think she believed that, and I know I didn't.
    Sometimes me and Veronica, in thinking about things, used to wonder if Sweet-Ho ever got lonely for a man around. We asked her once, but she said no. She said she had some boyfriends now and then after I was born and she left me at my grandma's. She said she had some good times and all.
    But then she got tired of it, and she missed me, she said, and finally Gnomie—I have to call her that still, because the thought was so strong all those years, I don't expect I will ever adjust to the startlement of it being wrong—died after being sick with poisonous kidneys for a while. So Sweet-Ho she came and got me and brought