The Chicken Dance Page 10

Mr. Bufford rubbed my head and asked, “How’s Horse Island’s newest celebrity doing this evening?”

  I told him fine, and then my mother walked into the foyer without her apron and said, “I’m so glad you could all make it.”

  A couple of the ladies blinked their eyes and Mr. Leonard sneezed. I think it was because of my mother’s hair spray and perfume, because I almost sneezed too. Mr. Bufford didn’t sneeze, though. His eyes got real big, and then my mother’s eyes got real big too. I looked at all the other people to see if their eyes got big, but nobody else’s did. My father’s eyes got a little smaller and then he looked at Mr. Bufford and then at my mother. Then she looked at my father looking at her and her eyes got even bigger and she said, “Well, dinner’s almost ready. If you want to wait in the sitting room, Dick will fix you all some drinks.”

  We had never called any room “the sitting room,” and when my mother said it, my father peered down through his glasses at her. She gave him a big smile and looked toward the living room. He blinked his eyes and then walked in there.

  My mother smiled and said, “I’ll join all of you in the sitting room in a minute. Don, show Leon your room.”

  Leon and I walked to my room, and when we got in there, he looked around and then asked, “Who was that trophy for in your sitting room?”

  “My sister, Dawn,” I told him, and then I asked, “What’s a sitting room?”

  He shrugged and said, “I don’t know. That’s what your mom called it. It looked like a living room to me.”

  Leon kept looking around my room, and when he saw my blue ribbon tacked on the wall above my door, he asked, “Why isn’t your blue ribbon in the sitting room with your sister’s trophy?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I like it better in here.”

  Leon pointed to the ribbon and said, “Why did you put it all the way up there above the door?”

  I had put the ribbon above the door because anytime someone opened it, the air made the ribbon fly a little, so it kind of looked like it was dancing. I thought Leon might think that was stupid so I told him, “I don’t know. I just like it there. It’s above everything else.”

  “That’s kind of stupid,” he told me. “You can’t even read what it says.”

  “I know what it says,” I told him, and he looked up at it for a few seconds and then turned to me like he’d just figured something out.

  “Where’s your sister now?” he asked.

  I told him that she had died and he said, “Oh,” and then looked through the drawers of my desk until my mother shouted, “Don, dinner’s ready!”

  Leon and I went to the dining room/big closet where the grown-ups were sitting. My mother told us that we’d have to eat in the kitchen, so we went in there and sat down at the table and started eating the food my mother had set out for us. Leon cut a piece of the steak and sniffed it and then took a bite of it. While he was chewing he said, “Tina Touchet wants to go out with you. I think she looks like a horse, but some guys think she’s pretty.”

  I told Leon, “She’s okay, I guess, but she’s a lot taller than me.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” he told me. “You don’t want to go out with a girl who’s taller than you.”

  Leon kept talking about different things like who he was going to hit at school on Monday and what girls he’d kissed and who he was going to hit at school on Tuesday. From our seats in the kitchen, I could hear the grown-ups talking in the living room. I heard Mrs. Simon say, “These plates look brand new as if you’ve never used them.”

  That’s because we had never used them because we’d always used paper plates or ate out of the trays from our TV dinners, but my mother didn’t say that. Instead she said, “Well, I only use them for special occasions.”

  Leon punched me in the arm and asked, “So, what do you think, Don?”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about so I asked, “What?”

  “You hard of hearing?” Leon asked. “Do you want me to start talking louder?” and then he did and said, “I might shave my head ’cause it will make me look tougher. What do you think?”

  I told him, “Yeah, it would make you look tougher,” and then he said, “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

  I started listening to the grown-ups again and heard Mrs. Simon say, “Sammy always makes us sit in front of the television when we eat. It’s such a treat to sit and talk. You see, Sammy, the Schmidts are civilized people. They don’t eat with the television on.”

  “Well,” my mother said, “we think talking is important.”

  Leon started hitting his fork on the table and then asked real loud, “What’s the matter with you? I keep asking you questions, and you don’t answer me.”

  I hadn’t heard anything he’d told me and hadn’t even realized that he was talking. I put my head down and said, “I’m sorry. I thought I heard my mother calling me.”

  Leon tapped his fork a couple more times and then asked, “Why do you call her your mother and not your mom?”

  “That’s what she told me to call her,” I told him and then he asked, “Do you call your dad, ‘father’?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  I had always called my parents “Mother” and “Father.” When I’d hear other kids call their parents “Mom” and “Dad,” I wondered why they didn’t call them “Mother” and “Father” like I did. I tried calling my mother “Mom” one day and she asked me, “What did you call me?”

  “Mom.”

  “Don’t ever call me that again,” she told me. “Call me ‘Mother’ and your father, ‘Father.’ Do you understand me?”

  Then I asked why and she sent me to my room, and so I never called her “Mom” again.

  Leon told me it was strange that I called my mother “Mother” and then said, “Anyway, so on Wednesday, I think I’m going to hit Christopher Chesternut. He’s in the sixth grade, but I can handle him.”

  I tried to listen to Leon because I didn’t want to become the guy he was going to hit on Thursday. It was hard for me to listen to him, though, because I could hear the adults talking and I wondered if my parents were going to tell them about my twin brother. Since I was trying to listen to both Leon and the adults, I only caught bits of what they were saying.

  Mr. Bufford: “I knew your uncle Sam real well. He told me a lot of things about you before you moved here.”

  Leon: “I hate our teacher. When the school year is over, I’m going to tell her she’s fat.”

  Mrs. Leonard: “These steaks are delicious. You’ll have to give me the recipe.”

  Leon: “I stuck my finger in a chicken’s butt the other day.”

  When Leon said that, I stopped listening to the grown-ups talking and asked him, “What?”

  Leon’s face was all red and he said, “I’ve been trying to talk to you all night and you’re not listening. Do you want me to start dancing on the table or something?”

  I didn’t know what to tell him. I had never had anyone try to get my attention as much as he was trying to that night. I was so scared that I had made him mad at me and he’d no longer meet me to ride bikes to school or invite me to chase the stray pig and dog around the playground, and I’d go back to being the kid I was before I won the chicken contest. I had to make him like me again and so I told him, “I think I have a twin brother who was kidnapped. Can you help me find him?”

  Thirteen

  The week after my mother’s dinner party was Christmas vacation so we didn’t have school. Leon and his parents went to visit his aunt in Mississippi so I didn’t see him until after New Years. As soon as he got back to Horse Island, he came over to my house so we could talk about Stanley. It was our secret, which was kind of cool because I had never had a secret with anyone before, except my chickens, and I liked being able to talk to someone and have him talk back to me.

  We went out to the chicken yard so we could talk about Stanley and collect the eggs.

  “That’s like something you see in the movies,”
Leon said. “I bet you could get any girl you wanted if she knew you had a brother who was kidnapped.”

  I heard a car start up, and so I turned and saw my mother driving off. I smiled at Leon and said, “Yeah, I guess so. I wish he was here now, though.”

  And then Leon said, “He’ll be here soon ’cause we’re going to find him.”

  I put down the bucket of eggs I’d collected and told Leon, “I’ve been thinking about that and I’m not sure we can do it. I mean, my parents had a private detective trying to find him.”

  Leon looked up in the air like he’d heard a noise and then said, “Well, I saw this movie one time where this guy was trying to find some girl he used to go out with because he loved her, and so he hired this private detective to find her, and anyway, the private detective told the guy he was looking for her, but he wasn’t. He was just trying to get money out of the guy. Maybe that Mr. Munson guy is doing the same thing to your parents and not even looking for your brother.”

  I had never thought that my brother, Stanley, was out there waiting to be found and nobody was looking for him. So I asked Leon, “What do you think we should do first?”

  Leon folded his arms and said, “We need to find that metal box that had the detective’s name and address.”

  I hadn’t seen the metal box since the day I’d found it and didn’t know where my parents had hidden it. Since my father was at work and my mother had just driven off, I said, “Well, maybe we can go look for it now. Can you keep an eye out for my parents?”

  Leon rubbed his hands together like he was about to eat something and said, “This is awesome!” and then the two of us ran into the house.

  Leon stood by the front window in the living room, and I went to the dining room/big closet. I put my hand on the doorknob and then yelled out to Leon, “Holler out to me if one of them comes!”

  “What do you think, I’m stupid?” Leon shouted back. “I know what to do!”

  I told him I was sorry and then opened the door of the dining room/big closet. It was filled again with empty boxes and folders the way it had been before the dinner party with the Power Couples. I didn’t know which box to look in first, so I closed my eyes and then spun around and pointed to pick one.

  The metal box wasn’t in it or in any of the other boxes I looked through, so I looked in the cabinet my mother called an armoire. There was nothing in there, either, and so I thought about looking through the boxes again. But then I heard, “Don!”

  I ran to the living room and asked Leon, “Are they here?”

  He shook his head and said, “No. Did you find anything?”

  “No,” I told him. “You scared me.”

  He smiled and said, “Yeah, I can tell. You’re pretty funny when you’re scared.”

  “It’s not in the dining room,” I told him. “Where do you think they put it?”

  Leon kind of shrugged his shoulders and said, “I don’t know. They’re your parents. Look in their bedroom.”

  I had only gone into my parents’ bedroom a few times because my mother told me that it was her room and that there was no reason for me to ever be in there. When I was younger I had run into my parents’ room in the middle of the night because of a thunder and lightning storm. My mother yelled at me and told me that I had invaded her and my father’s privacy.

  Since then I hadn’t gone into my parents’ room unless one of them had called me in there. This time was different, though, because I had to find the metal box so I could find my twin brother.

  I walked over to my parents’ bedroom door, put my hand on the doorknob, and turned it. Before I opened it, though, Leon screamed, “Don!”

  I pulled my hand away and ran back into the living room and Leon asked, “Did you find anything?”

  I told him not yet, and then I said, “Stop yelling my name. It’s freaking me out.”

  He laughed and said, “Yeah, I can tell. You’re pretty funny when you’re freaked.”

  I was really scared to go into my parents’ room and because Leon kept calling my name, I was getting even more scared. So I told him, “Don’t call my name again unless you see them.”

  Leon smiled and said, “Okay, I won’t. But hurry up. I have to go to the bathroom.”

  I opened the door this time and walked into my parents’ room and turned on the light. There was a dresser against the wall on the right, a bed on my left, and a small table by the bed. On it was an angel with a lightbulb sticking out of its head.

  I walked over to the dresser and started looking through the drawers. I went through every one, but I didn’t find anything except clothes, so I went to look under the bed.

  There was nothing under there, either, except some pieces of dust, but while I was looking, my foot hit the little table next to the bed and the angel lamp fell. It scared me a lot and I got up real fast and hit my head on the edge of the bed. It hurt so bad and for a few seconds I had a hard time seeing. I blinked my eyes a couple of times and wondered if I’d gone blind, but then I started to see things and I saw the angel lamp on the floor. I had never seen it before, so I thought that maybe my mother had traded it for some eggs. I picked it up and didn’t see anything broken, but then I heard something move and I wondered if there was something broken inside of it. So I looked on the bottom of it and saw a small round hole like one in a piggy bank and inside there was a folded piece of paper.

  I took it out because I thought it might be Stanley’s birth certificate. But it wasn’t. It was a hand-written note that said, “Janice, you are my beautiful angel. I can hardly wait to see you and kiss you. Meet me tomorrow. R. B.”

  I didn’t understand what it meant because my father’s initials were D. S., and I didn’t think he would write a note to my mother, and I was just starting to realize that my father hadn’t written the note when I heard, “Crap! Your mom’s here!”

  I stuffed the note back into the lamp, put it on the table, turned off the lights, and ran out of my parents’ bedroom. Right when I closed the bedroom door, I heard my mother open the front door of the house and yell, “Don!”

  I walked into the living room and said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Were you just in my room?” she asked.

  I stared at her not understanding how she knew, or what I should tell her, and so to buy some time I asked, “What?”

  She put her purse on the sofa and said, “I thought I saw a light on in there when I drove up.”

  I looked at Leon, who was standing on the side of me with his pants unzipped, and my mother yelled, “Don, answer me!”

  Before I said anything, though, Leon stepped forward and said, “It was me. I thought it was the bathroom but when I saw it was your bedroom, I left.”

  I looked at my mother to see if she believed Leon, because he seemed like he was telling the truth. My mother looked at him for a few seconds and then at me and said, “Oh,” and then walked to the kitchen.

  I went to my room and Leon followed me. As soon as we got in my room, I closed the door and asked him, “Why didn’t you tell me my mother was coming?”

  He shook his head and said, “I’m sorry, dude. I had to go to the bathroom and I didn’t think she’d come when I was taking a leak. What are the chances, huh?”

  My head still kind of hurt and I put my hand on it and felt a bump. I was kind of mad at Leon and I guess he could tell because he said, “Come on, Don. Don’t be mad. I covered for you, and I don’t think she knows you were in there.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m not mad at you.”

  Leon put his hand out for me to shake and then said, “Good. Now did you find anything?”

  I didn’t know what to tell Leon because even though I kind of knew what I had found, I wasn’t sure. So I looked at him and said, “No. I didn’t find anything.”

  Fourteen

  The note I’d found in the angel lamp was all I could think about for the next few weeks. I had seen enough soap operas on television to figure out that the note was from a man wh
o was in love with my mother, and that maybe she was doing stuff with him that she probably wasn’t supposed to be doing. I didn’t know who the man was, though, and I didn’t know anyone with the initials R. B. in Horse Island. Every time my mother spoke on the phone, I listened to see if I could hear clues. There were a few times I could hear her whispering, but I could never make out what she was saying. I even looked through the phone book, but there was no one with the initials R. B. Most people’s first name began with the same letter as their last name. For example, there was Ross Roberts, Nicolas Newman, Bobby Bufford, and Ashley Aprils. But there was no one with the initials R. B. Then something happened and I was too busy to look for the note anymore.

  You see, during breakfast one day, a few weeks after I found the note, my mother told me she was going to pick me up from school. She said she had some errands to run in town and had a surprise for me, and that kind of surprised me because my mother never had surprises for me. Even for Christmas and birthdays, she’d just let me pick out my own gift, or tell me what I was getting before I opened the present.

  I was really excited about getting a surprise, but that afternoon when I found out what it was, I realized that I didn’t want it. You see her surprise was that she had signed me up for a dance class.

  “Can you believe it, Don?” she said. “You’re going to be a dancer. Just like me and Dawn. Lucky for you, I was almost a famous dancer in Las Vegas, so I can help you with your homework. Oh, and the best part is, we only have to give them three dozen eggs a week for it. You’re not saying anything. Is it because you’re speechless? I thought you would be.”

  I didn’t say anything because my mother didn’t stop talking. Even if she had stopped talking, I don’t think I would have said anything. I didn’t want to take a dance class because I didn’t want to have to wear a pink tutu and learn to spin the baton or lift one leg up in the air. I didn’t know how to tell my mother that, though, and I knew that even if I did, she’d still make me take the dance class. I talked to Stanley in my head while my mother talked about how great dance class was going to be.