Stewie stopped.
He hung there in the kitchen doorway, waiting. In his head, he was seeing a picture of a knight in a suit of armor. It was something he’d seen once in a museum on a school field trip. He tried to imagine himself safe like that. Inside the thing.
“What?” he said.
“What’s this thing she wants you to do? I didn’t like the sound of it.”
“It’s nothing. She just wants me to bring her something. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“I don’t know, Stewie. I don’t like it. I’m losing patience with that woman. Her name isn’t what she said it was, and she just got arrested. She said it was for running away from assisted living, but I honestly don’t think they arrest people for that. And now I hear you saying that wasn’t even her daughter and granddaughter she was living with. We don’t really even know who she is. And I think she asks too much of you. You do so much for her, and I don’t think you get much in return. I don’t want you being used.”
“She’s not using me!” he shouted. It came out on a surprising burst of anger. “She cares about me. She just almost said so. And she does plenty for me in return.”
“Like what?”
Stewie opened his mouth to say she was teaching him to read. Then he closed it again. Stacey would have been shocked to hear that he didn’t already know how. She would be hurt. She would feel she had fallen down on the job of raising him.
He couldn’t do that to her.
He opened his mouth again, and took the argument in a slightly different direction.
“She bought me that book for a present. The one about the mouse with my same name. Just to be nice, she did that. And she came to see me when Mabel died.”
“Oh,” Stacey said. “That’s true.”
Stewie thought she sounded almost disappointed to have to say so.
They both just hovered there for a moment, looking away from each other. Though he could not have put the thought into words, Stewie was noticing how hard it was for two people to really talk to each other. Even when they’re supposed to be closer to each other than to anybody else in the world. Or maybe especially then.
“What does she want you to bring her?” Stacey asked. She was still looking away. Down at the kitchen linoleum, as if noticing a spot she had missed on the last mopping.
“Just a pair of shoes,” he said.
He felt bad about leaving out as much information as he did. As it stood, what he had told her was sort of the truth but also sort of a lie. But there are some things everybody knows are better left unsaid.
“It’s up to you,” Stacey said. “I don’t have time to drive you. You’ll have to take the bus into the city. But if it’s really what you want to do . . .”
“I already said I would,” Stewie said quietly.
“Yeah, I heard that. That’s what I was a little unhappy about.”
“I can’t go back on my word.”
“I know you can’t.”
“I never go back on my word.”
“I know you don’t. I guess you can go after school tomorrow, and after your egg route. But it’ll be dark by the time you get home. Are you sure you’re up for that?”
“It’s only a half day of school tomorrow. It’s the last day before summer.”
“I thought that was the next day.”
“No. Tomorrow.”
“Well, okay then,” she said. “I guess that’s what you’ll do.”
He slunk off to his room, wondering exactly how furious she would be if she ever found out that he had failed to mention the more than five thousand dollars hidden in the shoes. He hoped he would never have to find out.
He showed up on the lady’s doorstep—that lady he had been so sure was Marilyn’s daughter—at a little after seven the following morning, his stomach buzzing with nerves. The whole thing about the money and the shoes made him edgy, and he wanted to get them and stash them away properly before his half day of school.
He had to knock three times, and when she finally came to the door, it was clear he had wakened her. She did not look happy.
“Oh, you,” she said. And she did not make it sound like a good thing. “What do you want?”
She was wearing a faded corduroy robe over a blue nightgown, and her hair looked a fright. She seemed nearly unable to look out her open door into the light of morning. It made her squint and blink.
“I came to get some of Marilyn’s stuff.”
“Whose stuff?”
“Marilyn’s.”
“You miss my point, kid. We thought her name was Marilyn. Now it turns out it was Jean Clements, and she was lying to us the whole time. And to think I left my daughter with that woman. I don’t know what I was thinking. Total stranger. She just took my number off that bulletin board outside the market. I was looking for a babysitter, but I expected somebody from town to offer. She seemed okay enough. But why did I let her move in? We could’ve been murdered in our sleep! And now it turns out she didn’t even give her real name.”
It made his stomach buzz harder, but he ignored it as best he could and stood his ground in the conversation. He had to. He had as good as promised.
“Whatever,” Stewie said. “Whatever her name is. I have to get some of her stuff.”
She squinted hard at him, then pointed over his shoulder toward the street.
He spun around to look.
The trash cans had been hauled out to the street, and the area around them was strewn with items that apparently had not been able to fit in the cans. Clothing, and a cardboard carton of ladies’ toiletry items. Two small suitcases, which definitely looked nice enough to keep. A purse. Another box of something, but Stewie couldn’t make out its contents.
He briefly wondered why he hadn’t registered their presence on his way up to her doorstep. Too much intense focus on confronting her, he figured.
“You threw her stuff away?” he asked, genuinely shocked.
“You bet I did. And it’s trash day. If you’re going to rescue her things, you’d better hurry up and do that.”
And with that she slammed the door in his face. Well, not literally in his face. But close enough to his face to leave him with that uncomfortable sensation.
Stewie ran down to the street.
He rummaged around in the two cartons, but found no shoes. He looked under all the clothes, which were mostly just stacked on the sidewalk, getting dirty.
Finally, desperately, he began plowing through the two trash cans themselves.
In the second one, he found a pair of shoes. They were pushed halfway down to the bottom of the can, and covered with coffee grounds and eggshells, and what looked like the peelings from the outsides of carrots. He brushed them off as best he could. Set them on the curb with the rest of her belongings. There were no orthopedic insoles in them. There was no money.
He kept digging, growing more desperate, thinking there must be another pair of shoes. But there was only the one pair. And he remembered her saying she only had the one spare pair of shoes.
He straightened up, closed the lids of the cans again, and stood panting, trying to shake the coffee grounds and other wet garbage off his hands.
He wiped them off as best he could on the weedy, overgrown grass of the lady’s lawn.
Marilyn must have forgotten where she’d hidden the money.
Of course. It made perfect sense to think so, and explained everything. She forgot all kinds of things, all the time.
He would have to go get his wagon and take all of her belongings home. Then he could go through it all and find where she had really hidden all that cash.
Unless she’d stashed it in the bed, or someplace that was still inside the house. That would present a thornier problem.
He pushed the thought away again, wanting to believe it wouldn’t come to that.
He carefully moved all of her belongings, in two separate trips, to a spot in the side yard where they would be hidden from the street by a hedge.
Then he ran all the way home.