They look skeptical. I know how they feel. “How?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m working on it. But I can’t get him to help us if you won’t leave him alone.”
“Are you sure he’s helping?”
I’m not. “I think he’s trying.”
“He might be lying to you, Mab.”
“Maybe,” I admit.
They consider the matter between them.
“Plus, Mirabel says,” I add. My ace in the hole.
Their faces light up. They emerge from their huddle, nodding.
“We’ll stop for the moment,” says Kyle M., “if you promise to let us know when it’s time to start up again.”
“And,” adds Kyle R., “if you promise to tell Mirabel we did what she said.”
* * *
On my way home, I stop by Pooh’s to bring her a loaf of zucchini bread my mother put into the oven when it was raining but didn’t remove until after it stopped, so Monday wouldn’t eat it. Pooh, of course, doesn’t care.
“Who pooped in your pi?a colada?” she says when she buzzes me in and sees my face. I follow her into the kitchen where she opens her fridge, inserts the zucchini bread, and swaps it for a heap of meats and sauces she starts piling on the counter.
“Tutoring sucked,” I tell her.
“Poor baby. You need animal flesh.” She puts a plate of galbi—her mother’s recipe—in front of me, then starts setting up a steamer for dumplings.
“I don’t think that’s the problem.”
“Then what?”
“The Kyles are beating River up because his dad gave their dads jobs.”
She nods. This makes sense to her, a strange kind of warped Bourne logic, whack-a-mole revenge. “And you want to save him.” She’s grinning at the bossam she’s wrapping in cabbage leaves. “That’s very sweet.”
“Not me. Mirabel.”
“Bullshit. You love him.”
“You wish.” Everyone could do with a little excitement around here. “I’m telling you it’s Mirabel. She pled his case. She begged me to help him.”
“Why?”
“She’s nicer than I am.”
“Well, that’s certainly true. Whereas you, you think you’ll let the kid keep getting the shit beat out of him?” She’s half teasing, half making a point, though I don’t know what point.
Until I say it out loud, I don’t even know it’s in my head. “He thinks we’re so fucked up.”
“I bet. Who cares what he thinks?”
I do. “He thinks we’re this tiny backwards, backwoods, backwater town, stupid and pathetic and hopeless. Crazy. South of crazy. Beggarly. Lugubrious.”
“You and Petra might have studied enough now.”
“He feels sorry for us.” I sound bitter as orange rind.
“Not sorry enough,” she says.
“It’s not his fault.” I keep saying that.
“Not yours either.”
“Sure, but no one’s blaming me.”
“You inherited his father’s father’s mess,” Pooh says, “and so did he. It should be his burden at least as much as yours, don’t you think? He needs to see what we are. He needs to know it in his bones. Maybe the Kyles’ll knock some sense into him.”
“The Kyles don’t have enough sense to knock between them,” I say, and she nods, and she’s quiet, and then she says, “But you know what else?”
“What?”
“He needs to see how we’re broken maybe. But you? You need the opposite. You need to see how we’re whole.”
“A hole?”
Pooh has been in Bourne as long as anyone. She needs a wheelchair just because she’s old. You forget, living here, that some of us falter before it’s time, but if we’re lucky and live long enough, we’ll all wind up there in the end. What’s different about Pooh is she’s so old that even though she’s been here forever, she hasn’t been here forever. There was a time before. Pooh has lived in two different countries and four different states. She’s visited family in Korea, California, and Hawaii. She went to college and drove cross-country once with her roommate. She knows about the world out there. She’s the only one I know who does. Except River.
“Bourne’s on the small end of town-sized and a bit too powder-keg-y at the moment for my taste, but there’s a lot that’s really nice about this town. We’re not especially wonderful maybe, but we’re not especially miserable either. How it is here is how it is everywhere.”