Goldeline by Jimmy Cajoleas (i read books txt) 📕

me. A sun shaft hits him bright on the face and makes him glow a little like a saint in a picture book.

“Are we dead?” he says.

“Nope,” I say.

“My stomach hurts.”

“Yep.”

“My head hurts too.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I didn’t get to finish dessert.”

“Better be glad about that.”

Tommy sits awake. He looks scared.

“Where is she?”

I shrug.

“This is the same house, right?” he says.

“I’m not sure.”

“But it’s got to be. It’s the same size and everything.” He sniffs the air and coughs. “Why is it so horrible now?”

“I don’t know, Tommy,” I say. “It’s like Bobba could control it. What it looked like to us, how it felt. Like she was giving us whatever we wanted.”

“She was all in my dreams,” he says. “She was huge, like a big old walrus. She kept saying, ‘Eat a biscuit! Put some jelly on it! Get a little sugar in your blood!’” He shakes his head. “I don’t feel too good.”

“Let’s get on out of here, Tommy. The rope ladder still works, I think.”

I try it out. The rope is scraggled and rough and it cuts my hands, but I make it down okay. Tommy takes a step and falls smack down in the tall grass. He stands up, then topples over and vomits. I let him finish, and then I pat him on the back.

“Was that magic?” Tommy says, wiping drool from his chin. “Last night I mean?”

“Yes, Tommy,” I say. “You believe yet?”

Even the field looks different today. Spiderwebs, maybe a hundred of them, stretch from grass blade to grass blade, and the dew makes little jewels across the thread. Bobba’s house hangs sad on the tree, drooping like a bowed old-lady head. There isn’t any book in the tree either, not like in my dream. How can this be the same place as yesterday? Other than the spider diamonds, there’s nothing magic about this meadow. It’s just weeds and ugly. Not even any real flowers, only anthills and a weird dead-skunk smell.

I don’t know what to make of my dream. No, it wasn’t a dream. It was a memory, real as I just lived it. I was remembering something fierce, something lovely and awful. I know it was important.

Then I remember Momma, her cheek against mine, being safe, a baby in her arms. I drop my hair over my face so Tommy can’t see me cry.

“I’m thirsty,” he says.

“Hold up a minute and let me get you some water.”

I’m glad to get away. My pack’s lying over in the grass, the canteen spilled out next to it. Guess Bobba chucked it out the tree house when she left. The stopper’s off. I pick it up and shake it. Empty. We don’t have any food either. I feel awful all over. But all of Zeb’s money is still there, so at least Bobba didn’t rob us.

“Old ugly warthog,” I say, and wince as a pain flashes through my skull. She tricked me, yep, maybe even poisoned me. But she gave me something too, something important. I just got to figure out what it means.

I got to get to Moon Haven, to Gruff. He’ll know what to do. If I can get to Gruff then everything will be okay. He knew Momma, he was around her even when I wasn’t. Maybe he knows who the man in my memory was. Maybe Gruff will know what to do.

“I’m hungry,” says Tommy.

“I guess I would be too if I just yucked up my whole dinner.”

“Thirsty too.”

“Then get up,” I say, “and let’s get to walking. No food here, unless you want to kill and cook a crow.”

“Not on your life,” he says. He looks woozy and I think he might puke again.

I don’t know why, but in this moment I’ve never been more grateful for Tommy. I run over and give him a hug. He smells awful and I kind of regret it but also I kind of don’t, not at all.

“What was that for?” he says.

“You looked like you needed it.”

“What does that mean?”

“Hush up and walk, it means,” I say.

Tommy follows me out of the clearing and back into the dark creeping woods.

We’ve been walking a few hours, and we’re pretty bad lost. Tommy keeps throwing rocks in the woods, following behind me, humming to himself. I found us some berries, but they were sour, and we haven’t come to any water anywhere. I keep saying I know where we are and I know where we’re going, and Tommy keeps acting like he believes me.

But the nice thing about being lost is that, you wander far enough, you always wind up somewhere. That’s what Gruff used to say. If you’re lost, Goldy darlin’, all you gotta do is keep going. So long as you’re moving, you ain’t lost. You’re getting somewhere. I can already see the Half-Moon Inn, where Gruff will be waiting, a plate of hot chicken and mashed potatoes in front of him, a mug of ale in his hand, a fat cigar clenched in his teeth, laughing about how couldn’t anybody catch him, not some sucker Preacher anyhow. You couldn’t catch him because he was a ghost, how women trembled and men turned up their collars when they passed through our woods. That’s how he used to brag when he was good and laughing by the fire. That’s how he’d brag when he picked me up and spun me and held me close to him and we were like a family. Or at least the closest thing I’ve come to a family since my momma died.

But you can’t replace a momma. Nothing can ever fix that. It’s the kind of cut that throbs in your sleep, gets hurting with the wind and with a memory, that splits open all the time and spills blood all over the place just when you think you finally got it healed. That’s what I know about losing a momma. And I’m starting to understand that maybe I’m going to have to keep knowing it for the rest of my