style="font-size:15px;"> Like always.
When she rounded the corner Belle was sitting on concrete steps leading up to what seemed to be a back door into the building where the church offices were. Man was sitting just below her on the concrete pad at the bottom. Dougie was nowhere in sight.
“Where’s Dougie?” Shiloh asked.
Belle didn’t answer. She looked from side to side, as if expecting the boy to materialize out of the shadows.
Man cleared his throat. “He’s looking around. He’ll be back.”
Shiloh was afraid that meant her brother was relieving himself behind some of the massive bushes providing a barrier between the area where they sat and the deserted school beyond. “Most everybody was gone. The secretary gave me ten dollars, but that was all she could do.”
If possible Man looked more dejected. “You shouldn’t oughta have asked.”
“I didn’t! She offered it, and when I didn’t take it, she made me.”
Man had always been slight and stooped from long hours on a factory line. But now, after eighteen months of trying to reestablish the family somewhere with a future, he looked haggard, even emaciated. Shiloh was reminded of a skeleton from a middle-school biology textbook, and her words seemed to make his flesh shrink even tighter against his bones.
“We’ll pass it on when we can,” he said.
“We can buy Mama some cough syrup.” Shiloh’s gaze flicked to her mother, who didn’t register her words.
“We’d best get going.” Man got to his feet. “Dougie!”
“I think we should stay here,” Shiloh said, after he had called her brother again. “We’re tucked away, nice and cozy, and nobody’s going to see us. Mama can sleep in the car by herself, and you, me and Dougie can put up our tent against that wall. We don’t have money to pay for a campsite, and with what the lady gave me and what little we have left we can get food and some medicine for Mama.”
“This is a churchyard, Shiloh. They won’t want us hanging out here tonight. It was okay while I was off looking for work this afternoon, but now we need to find a quiet place to sleep in the car.”
“Mama’s going to cough all night, even with medicine. Nobody’s going to sleep if we’re all crowded up in the car together. We won’t hurt anything back here. We can go in the morning before it gets light and nobody will ever know. And you know that door Mama’s practically leaning against? It’s not locked. I tried it earlier. I bet it’s supposed to be, but somebody forgot. So we can go inside and use the restroom, wash up and stuff before we go to sleep. Maybe even move inside tonight if it gets too cold.”
“We don’t break into buildings.”
“I didn’t say anything about breaking in. But this building’s not locked, and that’s kind of like an invitation. Besides, we’ll only go inside if we have to. Mama’s too sick to drive all over looking for a place to stay. Looks to me like we got one already.”
As if on cue Belle broke her silence by coughing. The cough was deep and ragged, like a chained pit bull straining for freedom. She had a constant cough from too many years of smoking, but in the past week the cough had gone from a warning to an alarm. It wasn’t worse than yesterday, though, and Shiloh was heartened by that.
“I saw a drugstore and a Taco Bell not far away,” Shiloh said when her father didn’t answer. “You can set up the tent and get out the sleeping bags while I get supper, and after we eat, Mama can get comfortable in the car.” Which was a stupid thing to say, because nobody, especially a woman as overweight as Belle, could get comfortable on the Ford’s backseat.
Dougie took that moment to appear, breaking into the clearing at a run. He skidded to a stop just in front of his sister and made a face at her.
Shiloh and her brother shared a family resemblance. They had the same medium-brown hair with just a trace of the red that liberally threaded Man’s. They had the same brown eyes and upwardly tilted brows above them. The similarities stopped there, though. Shiloh was small-boned like their father, and showed no signs of growing taller than the five foot three she had reached a year ago at thirteen. Even at nine Dougie was broad-shouldered and broad-chested, and he was already just inches shorter than his sister. He was going to be big, like his uncles, Belle’s hulking brothers, and like them he would need to be. Because Dougie’s greatest talent was getting into trouble.
“We’re going to stay here tonight,” Shiloh told him, because Man said nothing. “Can you help Daddy put up the tent where nobody can see it? I’m going to get Mama some medicine and all of us some food.”
“What kind of food?”
“Tacos.”
Dougie looked interested. He was always hungry, just like Belle, only he was growing up, not out like their mother. “I want a lot.”
“I’ll get as much as I can, but you have to help here.”
Dougie was a pain, but most of the time he was good-natured. He shrugged.
Belle coughed again, and Dougie went up the steps to sit beside her. Her arm crept around him, and she pulled him close as she covered her mouth with her other hand.
“Daddy, it’s the best thing,” Shiloh said. “You can see that, right?”
Man didn’t smile and he didn’t nod. He shrank into himself even more, as if this was indeed a new low in a recent history replete with them.
“I’ll be back as fast as I can,” she said. “We’ll eat, then maybe wash up a little inside, and then we can go to sleep until morning. That’s a school back there, but tomorrow’s Saturday. Things will look brighter then.”
Belle spoke at last. “You go on now. We’ll wait.”
Shiloh managed not to roll her eyes. Of course they would wait. What else were they going to do? Belle didn’t seem to grasp their situation, but that wasn’t unusual. She made a point of not trying to understand anything new although everything about their lives was new and unpredictable. Somewhere on the road from Ohio Shiloh’s mother had simply shut down and turned over everything to Man and Shiloh.
And these days Man had to struggle not to simply opt out and shut down himself.
Tonight everything was up to Shiloh. No decisions would be made without her leadership. “You’ll get everything ready while I’m gone?” she asked her father.
He gave one nod, like a man agreeing it was time to walk the plank.
For just a moment Shiloh wondered what life would be like if she didn’t return, if she kept walking after she fed herself at Taco Bell and set out to make a life away from them. Would her mother or father look for her? Without her to take charge would they simply fade away? Or would one or the other of her parents begin to take care of the family again and find a way to make everything right?
She didn’t know the answer. The only thing she did know was that the risk of finding a new life alone was too great. She had to keep struggling, because right now she was the only Fowler still capable of doing so.
