Promise (2 page)

Kaden ducked back out of sight until he heard the truck start up. Once again, he picked up the binoculars. In the summer it was hard, but if he got at just the right angle, he could see where the dirt road met the main road. Kaden wanted to see which way the truck turned.

If the truck turned right, it would go around the bend past the five stone cabins where Kaden lived with Gram. Disappointed hikers frequently stopped there to ask where the trailhead was. Gram always had a grumpy lecture waiting for Kaden if hikers stopped.

“A worthless lot,” she'd say. “They've got too much time on their hands if they can just go tromping aimlessly through the woods all day. What they need are jobs, but not one even offered to help. It's obvious the place could use some fixin' up.”

Not that Gram would accept help from strangers, and she certainly wouldn't pay anyone. She had Kaden, and when hikers bothered Gram, Kaden could expect extra chores to satisfy Gram's fight against laziness.

Kaden kept his binoculars aimed at the little spot of road. If the truck turned left, it would curve down the hill and drive by Emmett's. Emmett Adams was the only other person who lived this side of Promise. You couldn't see his house from the cabins, but the old man was their only neighbor.

Unlike Gram, Emmett enjoyed company and had hand-painted signs lined up by the road inviting people to stop. One had a horse's head with a cartoon bubble saying “Be Neigh . . . borly! Pull on in and have a chat.” Another had a dog saying “Come on in, I don't bite.” On a third was a stick figure in a T-shirt, shorts, and big hiking boots saying
“Hike on in—FREE DRINKS.” Not many stopped but when someone did, Emmett loved it.

“There's no hiking trail at the tower,” Emmett would say, “but there's the promise of a good time right down the hill.”

The hikers would politely chuckle at his lame joke but Emmett knew the hikers were good for business at the Big Apple Grocery Store and Pillie's Purple Cow.

Now Kaden saw the truck slow to a stop at the main road.

“Good, he turned left,” Kaden told Kubla, who had flown back to the tower and was now strutting around the floor, proud he had run off another intruder. “Gram's been grouchy enough lately without strangers irritating her.” Even as he said this, he wasn't convinced the man in the white truck was really a stranger, though.

Kaden put down the binoculars and looked absently at the vast view of the late summer forest that spread in all directions below him. Normally, he would have been dreading returning to school. This year should have been especially worrisome. He would be starting middle school. But today, the last Friday of summer vacation, all Kaden could think about was the letter. It had been four days since the letter arrived. Four days of being able to think of nothing else.

Monday, August 22

CHAPTER TWO

FOUR DAYS EARLIER

“Walk down to Emmett's and see if we got any mail over the weekend,” Gram said after lunch.

Their mailbox was in front of Emmett's, the result of one of Gram's irrational fights. Gram didn't want her mailbox on the side of the road. It was constantly being bashed in by teenagers with baseball bats. So she moved the mailbox next to her porch steps. But Mr. Schmerz, the mailman, refused to pull through the circle drive that curved in front of the cabins. A feud started between Gram and Mr. Schmerz. Knowing Gram could not win against the U.S. Postal Service, Emmett stepped in with a solution. Gram's mail would be delivered at Emmett's. Emmett had welded odd pieces of heavy steel
from old cars and tractors around his mailbox. It looked like a rusty piece of abstract art. Emmett called it the arm breaker and boasted he was never awakened by the sound of a bat hitting metal.

“It's too hot and we never get anything anyway,” Kaden told Gram. “Besides, you haven't seen Emmett for a couple of days.”

If there was any mail, Emmett would take an evening stroll to deliver it to Gram's door. Emmett was the only company Gram ever had.

“Well, you can't be loafing around here all day,” Gram replied. “There's wash to hang out.”

So instead of mail duty, Kaden got laundry duty. And Gram didn't believe in dryers.

“Why pay for something the sun can do for free?” Gram said.

Sweating out in the hot sun, Kaden hung shirts and pants on the clothesline. When the line could hold no more, he carried the rest to the porch, where he draped socks and underwear over the rails. Then he quickly went inside, grabbed a book, and spent the rest of the afternoon reading in the shade of the porch. He knew Gram wouldn't interrupt reading with more chores. Reading was about the only thing she deemed more important.

Just before supper, Gram called out, “Those clothes ought to be dry by now.”

Kaden went to the clothesline with two baskets, one for Gram's clothes, one for his. When the clothesline was empty, he moved to the porch. He rolled two socks together and tossed them into his basket. Gram sat opposite him on the old metal glider, husking corn. She looked at the spine of the book sitting next to her.

“I see you had letter ‘G' out again. Can't you read about anything besides Genghis Khan?” Gram asked.

Kaden knew Gram would quiz him and had an answer ready. “As a matter of fact, I read about gingko. It's a tree that grows in China and has leaves like little fans. It says the fruit smells putrid.”

Kaden pictured hurling a gingko fruit at Luke when school started, but he knew even if he had one, he'd never have the guts to plaster Luke with it. As Kaden rolled another ball of socks, Emmett sauntered up the circle drive.

“Mail call,” Emmett announced.

Climbing the squeaky porch steps, Emmett shoved a flyer announcing back-to-school sales into Kaden's hands.

“Look through this and circle what you'll need,” he stated. Then he handed Kaden another envelope. “This one's from the school. Probably has your class schedule in it.”

Emmett stepped past Kaden and handed Gram an envelope.

“It's from the Center,” he whispered, but Kaden heard anyway.

Gram opened the letter and quickly read the contents to herself.

“Is it from Dad?” Kaden asked. “What's it say?”

“Nothing important,” Gram answered. She got up and went in the cabin. Kaden heard her dresser drawer being pulled open, then closed shut.

“You need any squash, Emmett?” Gram said when she returned.

“I could do with a couple,” Emmett answered.

Kaden knew if the letter were nothing important, Gram would have just thrown it away. He also knew Emmett didn't need any vegetables. He had his own garden behind his shop. Gram always used the vegetable garden as a chance to talk to Emmett in private, and the only time she talked in private was when something was important.

“I'll help,” Kaden volunteered, hoping to hear the conversation.

“No,” Gram said, “go put away your clothes and wash up for supper.”

Kaden picked up his laundry basket and jumped off the
porch. The porch was part of Gram's cabin, not his. Gram's was Cabin Three, the biggest of the five. It was the only one with two rooms, if not counting the bathroom. It was also the only cabin with three windows, one on each side of the front door and one in back, in Gram's bedroom.

The front room was both living room and kitchen. A little table with a bright yellow tablecloth was pushed against the wall under the kitchen window. The living room had an easy chair, a couch, and a bookcase filled with a set of old encyclopedias. Two intercoms sat on the top of the bookcase, both with a dot of red light shining.

Kaden carried his clothes to the cabin next door. That was his cabin. Cabin Two. There was no porch on Kaden's cabin, and except for the small bathroom that had only a toilet and a sink, Kaden's cabin had only one room and one window. Kaden put the flyer and his schedule on his desk next to another set of intercoms. Both red lights on these intercoms were also lit.

When Kaden turned ten, Gram let him move into Cabin Two. Until then he had slept on the hide-a-bed couch in Gram's cabin. But part of the deal was there would be two sets of intercoms and they would both be permanently left on. From one, Kaden could always hear Gram as she puttered about in her living room–kitchen. From the other,
Gram could always hear Kaden, and the two could talk to each other just like people talking from two different rooms in a normal house.

Kaden turned up the volume on one of the intercoms and put his ear close. Other than the hum of Gram's fan, there was no sound. Rushing back to Gram's cabin, he quietly entered her room and opened the dresser drawer. There lay the opened envelope. It was addressed to Gram. In the upper left-hand corner, in scrawly handwriting, it said,
Dennis McCrory, #27665
. Below that was the preprinted return address of the Chapston City State Correctional Center.

Kaden pulled the letter out of the envelope but was only able to read the first few words before he heard the porch steps squeak. He stuffed the letter in the envelope, put it back in the dresser, and quietly pushed the drawer shut. Darting from the room, Kaden plopped into the easy chair and watched through the screen door as Gram waved good-bye to Emmett from the top of the porch steps.

“What did the letter say?” Kaden asked again when Gram came in.

“Nothing that concerns you,” Gram said.

“But—” When Kaden started to protest, Gram interrupted.

“I sure wish this heat wave would break,” she said, and
Kaden knew there would be no more discussion about the letter.

After dinner, Kaden automatically went to the sink and turned on the water. Unless he was sick, there was no getting around washing the dishes every evening. The screen door banged shut behind him and the springs on the porch chair moaned as Gram sat down. Soon Gram's humming came through the kitchen window. She did that when something weighed on her mind. Not a musical hum. More of a grumbly, muttering hum that almost sounded like words. A blurring of “I don't know” and “maybe if,” which slid into low guttural gratings. It reminded Kaden of Kubla's mutterings.

The grumbling hum stopped and the porch steps squeaked. Footsteps crunched across the gravel of the circle drive. Kaden looked out the window and saw Gram walking away from the cabin. Quickly, he sneaked back to Gram's bedroom. He knew it was wrong but he wanted to know what the letter said. After all, it was from his father. He quietly opened the drawer, but the letter was gone.

Kaden sighed and went back to the dishes. He knew the letter was curling to ash in the stone fireplace that sat like a monument on the crescent-shaped lawn. That was the place all letters went that had Chapston City State Correctional Center in the upper left-hand corner. But Kaden had
seen some of the words in this letter and they were distinctly burned into his mind.

        
Dear Mom,

        
It's been almost eight years now and my parole will be coming up. There's a few things I got to take care of first, but I should be at the cabins around …