ONE OCEAN AVENUE
The apartment upstairs goes vacant every few months. Someone gets a new job across town, finds a better place, or gets kicked out. Every time it happens, my parents ask me if we should take it.
“We’d have a better view,” Mom says. “I bet you can see all the way to Wing Island from the second floor.”
“We’d have a second bathroom,” Dad says. “That might be nice.”
Nice? It would be heaven. Every morning, Dad gets shaving cream all over the sink. He never notices it, not even when I scrape CLEAN ME! into the scum with my fingernail. And if I leave my toothbrush anywhere in sight, Mom will accidentally use it. Every. Single. Time. Though I’ve never had a bathroom of my own, I know exactly what it would feel like. It wouldn’t feel nice. It would feel like freedom.
But even after we all agree that the second-floor apartment is the way to go, no one ever calls the landlord. Instead, we sit in the rocking chairs on the rickety first-floor porch of the two-story house and hash out all the downsides and what-ifs.
We’d have to box everything up again and carry it upstairs. We’d have to rearrange furniture. And what if it didn’t pan out? What if the kitchen was too small or we didn’t like the color? What if the view wasn’t that great, and you couldn’t see Wing Island after all?
Which always leads to the same conclusion. We’d already moved halfway across the country. Wasn’t that enough? One fresh start was plenty for any family. Especially ours.
We were having this exact conversation the day Kris and Ekta Anand first pulled their tiny green car up to the curb of One Ocean Avenue. Ekta had to duck her head and inch her way out of the driver’s seat. It was like a magic trick, watching her long brown limbs unfold out of that jelly-bean car. When she finally stood up to her full height, she stretched, shaded the sun from her eyes, and squinted toward the porch. Almost in unison, all three of our chairs stopped rocking.
“Enjoying the view?” Ekta asked, nodding across the street toward Hilltop Memorial Park and the sparkling bay.
Dad gave an awkward half smile but kept his ocean-blue eyes fixed on the water. Mom wiggled her fingers in the air, then bent down to tie her shoe, her hair conveniently falling forward to hide her face. I squirmed. They could have at least said “Hello.”
Kris waved a hand at us from the back seat of the car, and it’s hard to remember what I thought of him then. Probably not much beyond “bathroom-stealer.” Maybe I would have waved back if their friends hadn’t showed up to help them unpack. A minivan arrived first, with a mom, daughter, dad, and son laughing and smiling as they got out of the car. It was impossible to look at that family of four and not think about the person missing from ours. So instead of waving at Kris or shouting out “Welcome to the neighborhood!” I concentrated on picking at the peeling paint on the half-rotted handrail of the porch and waited to see what my parents would do.
I might have gotten up and introduced myself when the driver of the minivan—a teenager with giant red glasses, light brown skin, and brown-black curls—waved at me, too. Her smile was so big that the sunlight glinted off her braces. Like the twinkle of a star. Or a flash of lightning. Or maybe that’s only how I’m remembering it now. But that was when the girl’s mom hopped out of the passenger seat, blond curls bouncing, and started talking a mile a minute about what a great driver her daughter had become and wasn’t this the perfect place and couldn’t you just eat up that view.
Mom and Dad exchanged a look.
Dad stretched, stood up, and turned toward our door.
“I guess that settles that,” he said. All nonchalant. Like he’d barely noticed that more people were arriving. A pickup truck piled high with furniture practically drove right up on the front lawn.
Back in Wisconsin, we were the kind of family who would walk down to the cars, ask if we could help, and offer to carry some boxes. We’d make the Anands feel welcome. Lighten their load. But things were different now.
I stood up, too. Mom pushed her hair behind the pink tips of her ears, and we followed Dad inside. It wasn’t anything against Ekta or Kris or the friends who’d come to help them move. We weren’t trying to be rude. It’s just that new people always ask questions that make Mom squirm and Dad pull at his chin until his face slowly morphs from white to flaming red.
It starts out easy-breezy enough. “Where are you from?” and “What brought you to Maine?” Eventually, though, no matter how hard they try to avoid it, conversation always turns to Wally. Smiles disappear. Eyes get droopy. And the frowns turn in my direction. “How’s she holding up?” and “Does she miss him?” Like I’m not standing right there.
Of course I miss my brother. But it’s not like what people think. Not like what you see in the movies, all dramatic, with some tearful goodbye that I’m always replaying in my mind. It was a regular Sunday. We went to church. Had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. It was the last day in September, but we went down to the lake anyway. Made a cold sandcastle. Sat in the canoe and went on one of Wally’s “adventures.” Except we didn’t actually go anywhere because he was seven and I was ten and the canoe was tied to the dock. That night, Mom and Wally went to the hospital like they’d done dozens of times. Only this time Wally didn’t come home.
Of course it’s sad. My universe is completely different now that I don’t have a little brother constantly asking me to write down stories. But sad doesn’t change what happened. Like Dad says, sometimes there’s nothing you can do but move on.
We’d thought moving to Maine would make it easier. We’d thought it would be a fresh start away from all the looks and whispers. But it turns out that new people aren’t much different from the ones you’ve known all your life. To new people, it’s still a big deal. A big, hairy deal. And they can’t move on. So it’s better to go inside.
* * *
What I didn’t realize when I followed Mom and Dad through the front door is that even the smallest action—or inaction—has an effect.
It can change the direction of someone else’s story.
Or spark a new chapter of your own.
GOODWILL
“Zinnia!”
Mom grabbed at my arm like I was milliseconds away from being roadkill. Even though I was solidly on the sidewalk. Nowhere near the slug-speed traffic that was inching its way through the intersection of Union Street and Chamberlain Avenue.
“You’re too close to the curb,” Mom said, snugging my arm into hers so she could pull me back to the safe zone.
Walking with my mom in Port City is like being in the middle of a high-stakes video game with fireballs and land mines popping up every few feet. And Mom is In. The. Zone. Three steps ahead of the game, ready to crush every obstacle in her path without using a single turbo-boost or extra life.
“Dog poo!” She jerked me to the left to avoid a steaming pile I wasn’t even close to stepping in.
“Eyes straight ahead!” She steered me away from some strangely dressed people crouched in the stairwell of a building.
“Don’t even think about it. You don’t know where that’s been.” Someone had dropped a set of keys outside Bagel King. I’d barely even glanced at them, but Mom’s sixth sense knew I was planning to pick them up.
“What if someone needs them?” I asked.
“What are you going to do? Call up everyone in this city and ask if they lost their keys? Trust me. They’ve got a spare.”
In our old town, she would have let me pick up the keys. There were only a thousand people in Grand Lake, Wisconsin. That town was so small, we probably would have known who the keys belonged to anyway, or at least we could have narrowed it down by the type of car it was. In Port City, there were almost a thousand kids just in my elementary school.
“Okay. It’s a big sale, so it’s going to be crowded,” Mom said as we neared the Goodwill. “You’ve got your list? And Dad’s phone? Set the alarm for one hour and meet me at the checkout. Text me if you want me to come look at anything.”
I nodded and followed her into the massive store. Even though it was a zoo, with people everywhere pulling stuff off racks and tables, Mom’s shoulders relaxed. As if in here, she knew exactly what to expect, and she didn’t have to worry about keeping me safe. She turned toward Housewares and nudged me in the opposite direction toward a bright BACK TO SCHOOL SALE banner.
I unfolded the list Mom had given me and tried to make a plan of action.
winter boots
tennis shoes
jeans
mittens
sweaters
shirts
dress (for Grandma)
I had a twenty-dollar bill from Mom and a twenty from Grandma. It was a rip, but every year, I had to use most of Grandma’s birthday money to buy a dress for the first day of school so she could have a photo of me looking “pretty and prepared.” She kept a photo album of every first day I’d ever had. She’d started one for Wally, too, but we didn’t get to put a lot of pictures in it. Mom says it doesn’t matter how much I hate dresses. Sometimes you have to do things you hate for the people you love. Especially grandmas.
I made my way toward a $1.00 SHIRTS table where shoppers were pawing through messy piles of clothes that had probably been neatly folded only an hour ago. There was a line twelve people deep for the changing rooms. This was not going to be a try-it-on situation.
I waited for an opening, then picked through the shirts until I hit the jackpot: a stash of brand-new, plain, long-sleeved T-shirts in multiple colors. I chose seven, one for each day of the week, in every color of the rainbow (I had to substitute aqua for indigo and black for violet, but close enough). I stuffed them into my shopping bag, and checked shirts off my list.
I moved on to the jeans and had just maneuvered my way to a decent view of the KIDS’ SIZES L–XL table when I spotted a pair of black Doc Martens boots. I picked them up, ran the numbers in my head, and immediately set them down again. The second they hit the table, a girl my age lunged at them. I stepped backward to get out of her way.
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
But instead of taking the boots for herself, she pushed them back into my hands.
“What are you doing? You have to try these on.”
“What?”
The girl eyed me. Her hair was tied up into an Afro puff with purple tints hidden in some of her curls. “I’ve seen you before. Did you go to Oceanside? What size are you?” She didn’t take a breath between questions.
I nodded yes to Oceanside Elementary, but I didn’t have an answer for the second question. I’d grown an embarrassing two and a half inches since June, and all I knew about my foot size was that my heels were hanging off the backs of my flip-flops.
“Never mind, just try them on. If they fit, you have to get them. Good eye, by the way!”
She grabbed my elbow and sat down on the floor, dragging me under the jeans table with her so we’d be out of the way of the frenzied shoppers while I tried on the boots.
“They’re twenty dollars,” I said, knowing exactly what Mom would say. I could fill my whole bag with one-dollar shirts for the same price as one scuffed-up pair of combat boots.
“I know!” the girl said. She loosened the laces on one of the boots and handed it to me with the confidence of a shoe salesperson. “And they’re half off. Ten dollars for a pair of Doc Martens!”
I removed my sandal and pulled on the boot. It wasn’t exactly comfortable—especially in bare feet—but it fit. And it looked great. The girl grinned.
“You’re so lucky,” she said. “I’m still in kids’ sizes. It’s embarrassing.”
I needed winter boots, but these didn’t look warm at all. There was no lining or insulation. I wasn’t even sure if they were waterproof.
“They’re really scuffed up,” I said, trying to think of an excuse. I had to put them back.
“That’s a good thing! You’ve got to buy them. It’ll kill me if you don’t.”
I believed her. She seemed like she was in agony, looking at those shoes. I had a harder time believing that she’d recognized me out of all the other 999 students at Oceanside Elementary. I’d only gone there for one semester of fifth grade, and I was pretty sure most of the kids in my own classroom didn’t know who I was.
“Okay.” I knew I wasn’t going to leave the store with them, but I put the pair in my shopping bag and checked winter boots off my list. It would be easier to put them back after she left.
“I’m Jade.” The girl popped a green Jolly Rancher in her mouth and held one out to me.
“No, thanks,” I said, even though green Jolly Ranchers are my favorite. I could practically feel the sour apple taste puckering my cheeks. It seemed more polite to say no.
Jade and I crawled out from under the table, and several old ladies scolded us for getting in the way.
“Jade!” A woman with a toddler waved frantically. “I’ve been looking everywhere! We’ve got to pick up Bennie!”
Jade said, “See you in school next week, I hope. I’ll keep my eye out for those boots!”
I knew it was the kind of thing people say to be nice, but I glanced down at my shopping bag. Maybe I’d hold on to the Docs for a few minutes more.
By the time I got through Mom’s list, I was six dollars over budget. Mom found me in the back of the checkout line, sorting through my bag, eyeing the ten-dollar boots and the twelve-dollar dress I’d picked out for Grandma.
Mom picked up the boots and inspected them.
“I know,” I said. “They’re not practical. I’ll put them back.”
But she surprised me. “No way. Doc Martens? These are too cool to lose. Here, I found this.”
She dug through her overflowing shopping cart and handed me a plain black cotton dress. Five dollars.
“Chuck that other one. You’re only going to wear it once.”
I grinned. That left me with enough cash to run back and get the pair of rainbow-striped leggings I’d had my eye on. We left the store with our arms full of bags and something close to a warm, hopeful feeling.
As we stepped onto the sidewalk, a red-faced man leaned over in front of Bagel King to pick up the set of keys I’d almost touched. His face lit up like he’d found gold. He was mumbling Thank the lord and crossing himself like Catholics do.
“See?” Mom said. “If we’d moved those keys, that guy wouldn’t have known where to find them again. Sometimes not helping is really helpful.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said, laughing because we could barely see each other around all the bags we were carrying.
“It’s like Grandpa always says. ‘You’ve got enough to take care of in your own backyard.’ Don’t you think he’s right?”
“I guess,” I said. But it didn’t seem right not to help.
On the other hand, the red-faced guy had already jogged a block ahead of us and was happily getting in his car, so maybe she had a point.
I was watching him drive away when a young guy in a black sweat suit and a silver helmet smiled and waved at us. The helmet looked old-fashioned, like a gladiator’s. It had eyeholes and covered the whole top half of his face, rounding over his nose, and ending in a point shaped like a bird’s beak.
The bird-dude said something as we walked past. Not necessarily to us. He said it quietly. Thoughtfully.
“Ka-kaw!”
“Eyes straight ahead,” Mom said, switching back into video-game mode, and we quickened our pace.
Text copyright © 2021 by Josephine Cameron
