Dicey’s Song

DICEY LOOKED out the window and made her legs stay still. Outside, wind blew the branches of the two big oaks, ripping off the last of the brown leaves and carrying them away. The sky was a bright blue, and the sun shone with a diamond hardness. The brightness of the sun and the coldness of the wind combined to mark out sharply the edges of her view. She could see each individual brick on the old building, as if the cold made each brick contract into itself. The angles of the main entranceway, the clear edge of the cement sidewalk, the flat lawn, bare and brown now, all looked as if they would be cold to touch.

Dicey crossed her ankles again, containing her impatience. She was wearing jeans and one of the rough old boys’ sweaters, a bright red one that hung loose about her torso. She had chosen it because it seemed like the kind of color her Momma’s brother Bullet would have liked, if she was right about the kind of person he had been.

Mr. Chappelle was putting off returning their papers until he had told them about the mistakes most of them had made. They were supposed to be writing these things down, the list of misspelled words, the grammar errors, the kind of topic sentence every paragraph was supposed to have. He was explaining and explaining. Everybody was quiet, just waiting for him to get finished. The thing that got Dicey was that he pretended he was doing this stuff first because it was more important than the grades. That was what he said, that the papers were a learning situation, and the grades didn’t matter.

But Dicey suspected that he was doing this dull stuff first because he knew that once he handed the papers back nobody would pay any attention to him. It wasn’t his fault, it was just the way classes went. You worked hard (or not so hard) for something, and when you got the results that job was over. The teacher might not think it was over, but the students sure did. The grade told you how well you had done (or what you got away with). The grade was what you looked for — not the red circles around mistakes. Sometimes, a teacher wrote a comment, good work (or bad work), and you looked at that, too. But mostly, everything they had to say they said in the grade. If there was something more important than the grade, Dicey wanted to know why didn’t teachers ever say anything about that, like write you a note about it on your paper. If it wasn’t worth his time to write down, how could he say it was worth hers?

She sat forward and sat back and sat forward. She looked at the clock — only fifteen minutes left; he’d have to hand the papers back soon.

“Now,” Mr. Chappelle said, “you may be interested in seeing your essays.” He smiled at his own joke, so a few kids made little fake laughing noises.

“Before I hand them out, there are two I’d like to read aloud to you.” Dicey made herself lean back in her chair. She jammed her hands down into her pockets and stretched her legs out in front of her. “To share with you,” Mr. Chappelle said, and reached down into his briefcase. He took out the pile of papers. He ran his hand through his red hair and looked around at everyone, his eyes sliding along the rows. He tried another joke. “Both of these essays were written by girls, but I don’t want you boys to get discouraged. Everyone knows boys grow up more slowly.”

Who cares, Dicey demanded silently.

He took up a paper and began to read.

There’s this girl I know, you never know what she’s thinking, even though everybody thinks they know this girl. You look at her face, but that doesn’t tell you anything. Sometimes you know you don’t know what’s going on inside. Sometimes, you’re not sure you don’t know. I wonder about this girl. Here’s what I’ve noticed.

Dicey thought this girl could be just about anyone, even Dicey. She could tell by the way the rest of the class was listening, they had the same feeling. The way it was written, it was just like somebody talking.

She’s about the laughingest person you’re liable to meet, if you live forever. Nothing but sets her off laughing. You could tell her you were flunking every course and about to be booted out of home and into the unemployment lines, and she’d laugh. She’d laugh until you might start laughing too. You could tell her you just got elected president of your class and captain of the football team and Prince Charming, all at once, and you know what she’d do — she’d laugh. Everywhere she goes it’s nothing but laugh, laugh, until you feel like you’re caught out in a rainstorm that won’t never end. But I keep finding her crying when she thinks nobody’s there to see. I catch her. And when I ask her, “Honey, why you crying so bad?” she never says one word to tell me. I stand there, passing out the Kleenex, and she’s whooping and wailing and there’s nothing can stop her once she’s started.

By this time, Dicey thought she recognized who the person was describing: Mina. Because of the laughing. The crying wasn’t anything Dicey had seen, but she guessed this was a pretty close friend of Mina’s.

Another thing. She’s always talking about you. Not behind your back, but right when you’re having your conversation. “How are you, and what do you think, and what do you like?” She’s mighty easy to talk with, this girl, because she’s always interested in the other person. She listens and she remembers and she’ll ask you, two years later, “Remember that fight you had with your father about your allowance? Do you still feel the same way?” I guess she’s about the most unselfish person I know. But inside, she’s always thinking about herself, patting herself on the back for being a caring, remembering person. She’s got about the longest arms you’ll ever see for patting herself on the back. So while you’re telling her this sad, beautiful love story, and you’re saying everything you feel — but everything — she’s listening so hard you feel like she’s curled up inside your own head and you think there never was such a person for listening to you. All the time, part of her’s wondering if she’s ever been in love or if she ever will be, and how it’ll be for her, and she’s thinking how great you think she is. This girl is just about something, and I sometimes wonder if even she knows what’s going on.

But, Dicey thought, the only person who could know all that about Mina was Mina. Dicey sat forward in her chair. Was it Mina’s paper? She slipped her eye over to where Mina was sitting. The smooth brown cheeks looked as if they’d never heard this before. Mina was looking down at her open notebook. But she wasn’t smiling, the way the rest of the class was while they listened. The way Dicey started to smile, figuring out what Mina had done. Dicey was impressed by this paper, the way Mina wrote about herself. Boy was that an idea — that was an idea and a half.

To see her, she’s got all the answers. Everybody else has trouble making up their minds. Should I do this? Do I want to wear that? Is it the right answer? Not this girl, she just knows the heart out of everything and everybody. She doesn’t hesitate, she just puts her big feet out in front of her and gets going. And worry? That’s a word this girl never heard of. It’s not in her dictionary. She knows north from south, and she knows which way she wants to go. No regrets, not for her. If she makes a mistake — well she’s made a mistake and so what? Confident, you’d call her, and for all you know you’re one hundred percent right, there wasn’t anybody since the Garden of Eden as confident. But I’ve seen her do her hair one way then brush it out and do it another. I’ve seen her sit in one chair and then in another and then move to a bench and finally sit on the ground, until she hopped up to sit in the chair she tried first. I’ve seen her rip up ten starts on homework papers and only hand one in because she ran out of time to rip it up in.

By this time, the class had figured out that it was Mina the essay was about. They whispered it and looked at Mina. They wondered — interrupting Mr. Chappelle but he didn’t seem to mind, he seemed to want them to guess — who’d written it. They asked one another, “Did you?” and answered, “No not me, did you?” Mina just kept staring down, but she was having a hard time not laughing out loud. Dicey was sure Mina had written it about herself, but she didn’t know why she was so sure. She just knew it.

And all the time this girl’s listening and laughing, all the same. I’m watching her and I don’t know what she’s thinking, and then I’m thinking, Maybe I do. I guess by now you know who I’m talking about, you know it’s me, Wilhemina Smiths.

The class burst out laughing, and praised Mina. Mina looked around and pretended to take a bow. Mr. Chappelle told her to stand up. As she did, she caught Dicey’s eye. Dicey pursed her lips into a mute whistle, to try to say how impressed she was. Mr. Chappelle stepped forward and gave Mina her paper. Mina didn’t even unfold it to see the grade. She just sat down again.

After a minute, the noise in the room, and the occasional laugh, died away.

“Now for a horse of another color,” Mr. Chappelle announced. He began to read.

At the first words, Dicey recognized it as hers. She stared at Mr. Chappelle’s pale, impassive face as he read about Momma.

Mrs. Liza lived away up north, away out on Cape Cod, away in a town right at the end of the Cape. Her cabin was outside of town, right at the edge of the ocean. The ocean rolled up toward her rickety cabin, like it wanted to swallow it up; but it never did. Maybe it didn’t even want to. The wind was always blowing around the cabin, like it too wanted to have that little building gone.

Mrs. Liza had children, but she never had been married, and the man who was her children’s father had long ago gone and left her. She worked nights when the children were little, waiting tables in a restaurant, serving drinks in a bar, night-clerking in a motel. She always worked hard and was always willing to take days nobody else wanted, Christmas and Fourth of July, Easter. When the children got older, she switched to a daytime job, checkout in a supermarket. She hadn’t had any training for the kind of job that paid well, so she was always thinking about money, hoping she would have enough. Every sweater she owned had holes in it.

She had reasons to turn into a mean woman, but Mrs. Liza just couldn’t. She had a face made to smile, and her eyes always smiled with her mouth. She had long hair, the color of warm honey in the winter, the color of evening sunlight in the summer. She walked easy, high narrow shoulders, but loose, as if the joints of her body never got quite put together. She walked like a song sung without accompaniment.

Then slowly, so slowly she never really could find out the place where it began, life turned sour on Mrs. Liza. People said things. While she never heard them herself, her children heard them and got older and understood what people meant. Mrs. Liza loved her children, so that worried her. Money worried at her the way waves worry at the shoreline, always nibbling away at the soft sand. Her money seemed to run out earlier each week.

Mrs. Liza stood at the door of her cabin and looked out at the ocean. The ocean looked back at Mrs. Liza and rolled on toward her. She could see no end to the ocean. The wind that pulled at her hair was always blowing. She looked out at her children playing on the beach and reminded herself to get some tunafish for supper; but she forgot.

Her eyes stopped smiling first, and then her mouth. The holes in her sweaters got bigger. Meanwhile, people talked and she didn’t know what to say so they could understand. Meanwhile, quarters and dimes got lighter, smaller. Meanwhile, her children were growing bigger and they needed more food, more clothes. Meanwhile, nothing she did seemed to make any difference.

So Mrs. Liza did about the only thing left to her to do. She went away into the farthest place she could find. They cut her hair short. She didn’t notice that, lying there, nor when they fed her or changed the sheets. Her eyes never moved, as if what she was looking at was so far away small that if she looked off for a second, it would be gone.

Mr. Chappelle put the paper down and looked up. Dicey felt proud: it was just about as good as she’d thought it was. It was really good. But everybody was absolutely quiet. Didn’t they think it was good, too? She waited nervously. Maybe she just liked it because it was hers, the way you liked anything you had made yourself. Maybe Mr. Chappelle read it because it was so bad, to show the difference between hers and Mina’s. Still nobody spoke. Mr. Chappelle was staring down at the paper. He was wearing a green tie.

Dicey didn’t care if nobody liked it but her. She remembered how she had felt, writing it down. It was hard, and she kept scratching out sentences and beginning again. Yet it kind of came out, almost without her thinking of it, almost as if it had been already written inside her head, and she just had to find the door to open to let it out. She’d never felt that way about schoolwork before, and she wondered if she could do it again. She made her face quiet, not to show what she was thinking.

At last, Mina broke the silence. “That surely is a horse of another color,” she said. There was laughter in her voice. “I guess it about beat me around the track — before I even left the starting gate.” She looked around the class.

“Oh, yes, it’s very well written,” Mr. Chappelle agreed.

Dicey kept quiet.

“But who wrote it?” somebody asked, a boy. “And what happened at the end? It sounded like she died. But it didn’t say she died.”

The voices went on talking.

“It sounded like she was about to die.”

“No, she was already dead.”

“Where was she?”

“In jail? In a hospital? It said they fed her and changed the sheets.”

“But what happened?”

“She couldn’t support her family. She was poor, couldn’t you tell? And it just got her down.”

“Yeah, because she started out happy, didn’t she?”

“Why didn’t she get married?”

“The guy walked out, weren’t you listening?”

“Maybe he didn’t want to get married.”

“Maybe he didn’t want all those kids.”

“But it takes two — you know what I mean. It wasn’t just her fault.”

“It wasn’t fair what happened to her.”

“Fair — what difference does fair make?”

“Did she go crazy? I would.”

“And it’s a mental hospital at the end? But it sounded like a jail picture, at the end.”

“Who wrote it, Mr. Chappelle, tell us. You’re the one who knows.”

They stopped for his answer: “I do, and I don’t,” he said.

Dicey bit her lip. Now what did that mean?

“It’s like one of the stories in our book,” somebody said.

“What do you mean?” Mr. Chappelle asked quickly. “Did you read it in our text?”

How could she have? Dicey thought impatiently.

“No, I mean — it doesn’t sound like one of us wrote it. It doesn’t sound like anything I could write. I never knew anybody like Mrs. Liza. And even if I did, I couldn’t — say it like that. Tell us, did you write it?”

Mr. Chappelle came around to the front of the desk. He leaned back against it, half-sitting on it. “No, I didn’t. Dicey Tillerman did. Stand up, Dicey.”

Dicey stood up. She stood up straight and didn’t even lean her hand on her desk. Everybody stared at her. “I shoulda guessed,” Mina said. She smiled across the room at Dicey, congratulating.

“What did happen to her at the end?” somebody asked, but Mr. Chappelle cut off the question.

“Do you have anything to say?” he asked Dicey. She kept her mouth shut, and her face closed off. She knew now what he was thinking.

“No? But I’m afraid I do. I’m very much afraid I have a great deal to say. I’m not one of your great brains, but I’ve taught this course long enough to be able to tell the kind of work students can do.”

Dicey felt frozen. He wasn’t looking at her, but she was looking at him, at his pale, flabby mouth out of which words marched slowly.

“Now I can’t say what book this came out of — if it came out of a book. I can’t even say for sure that it did come out of a book. Maybe somebody else helped Dicey write it.”

He gave her time to say something there, but he didn’t look at her. Dicey didn’t say a word. In the first place, her tongue felt like it was frozen solid, and her head was a block of ice, and all the blood in her body had chilled and congealed. In the second place, he had more to say. She could guess what that was.

“But even if I can’t prove plagiarism, I can still smell it. Besides, there was a restriction on this assignment. It was supposed to be about someone you knew. A real person. On those grounds alone, the essay fails.”

Dicey should have known. She should have known this would happen, and everyone would believe him. The silence in the room told her what everyone was thinking. She was the only one standing up, for everyone to look at.

“What I primarily resent is the deceitfulness of it, the cheap trickery, the lies,” Mr. Chappelle declared.

“That’s not true.”

Dicey turned to see who had spoken. She thought she could hear her neck bones crackling, like ice, when she turned her head.

Mina was standing up. She looked around the room, her eyes dark as coffee and puzzled. “How can you believe that?” she demanded of Mr. Chappelle.

“Come now, Wilhemina,” he said.

“I don’t believe it,” she declared. Her voice sounded certain.

Mr. Chappelle looked around the classroom. Dicey could have laughed. He didn’t quite dare order Mina to sit down, because people listened to her and liked her.

“Dicey wouldn’t do that,” Mina went on. “She doesn’t care enough about what we think to cheat on something.”

How did Mina know that? Dicey wondered. She wondered it deep behind her icy face.

“Someone like Dicey — she’s too smart to worry about her grades; she doesn’t have to worry. And if she cared what we thought —” her hand sketched a circle including all the students — “she’d act different. Don’t you think?”

People rustled in their seats. They could think whatever they wanted. Now Dicey understood the C+ in English.

The bell rang, ending class, but Mina spoke before anybody could move to leave. “Stay here, I’ll prove it.”

“How can you prove it?” Mr. Chappelle asked. He had moved back behind his desk. “I’ve got these essays to hand out.”

“Wait,” Mina said.

They could stay or go for all Dicey cared.

“I can prove it,” Mina repeated. “Dicey?” She looked across the room at Dicey. Her eyes were filled with sympathy. Dicey didn’t need anybody’s pity. But behind the liquid darkness of Mina’s eyes, Dicey saw mischief. Mina knew she was right, and she was enjoying herself.

“Dicey? Is this someone you know?”

“Yes,” Dicey said. She was talking just to Mina.

“Did you write it yourself?”

“Yes,” Dicey said.

“What does that prove?” Mr. Chappelle muttered.

“Do you want to hear Dicey lie?” Mina asked him. “Dicey, is this someone you’re related to?”

Dicey lifted her chin. She didn’t answer. There was no way anybody could make her answer. In her mind, she made a picture: the little boat, she’d have painted it white by then, or maybe yellow — it was out on the Bay beyond Gram’s dock and the wind pulled at the sails. Dicey could feel the smooth tiller under her hand, she could feel the way the wooden hull flowed through the water.

“Dicey,” Mina asked, with no expression in her voice, “what are you thinking about?”

“About sailing,” Dicey answered. “About a boat and how it feels when you’re sailing it.” Those might be the last words she spoke in that class, and why should she bother to make them a lie.

Then people did get up and go. They didn’t look at Dicey, but they looked at Mr. Chappelle as they walked past his desk and picked out their papers.

Dicey was almost at the door when he stopped her and gave the paper to her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll change the grade — to an A+ — and I’ll change the mid-semester grade too, of course.”

Dicey didn’t say anything. She didn’t care what he said.

“It’s my mistake and I’m really very sorry,” he said again. “I’m giving you an A for the marking period, of course.”

It didn’t make any difference to Dicey what he said.

She sat through horrible home ec without any trouble at all. On the outside, she was paring carrots and slicing them thin to boil them at the stoves. She didn’t eat any, just scraped them into the garbage. She went to work, without even noticing if Jeff was outside playing his guitar. She did her work hard and fast and answered Millie’s questions without thinking. She rode home through a wind like a knife blade, but it didn’t make her cold. She put her bike in the barn and leaned her free hand against the boat for a minute before going on into the house. Gram was in the kitchen. Maybeth and James worked in the living room by the fire. Dicey put her books up in her bedroom and then came back downstairs. She peeled some potatoes for Gram, then cut them up into chunks for hash browns. Sammy came through, rubbing his hands and puffing out cold air. Dicey stood at the wooden countertop, slicing the potatoes first, then cutting across the slices, then cutting again perpendicularly. Slice after slice.

Gram was shaking chicken pieces in a brown paper bag. Dicey could hear the sound it made, like somebody brushing out a rhythm on drums. “How was school today?” Gram asked.

“Fine,” Dicey said. She cut slowly, carefully, making her squares as even as possible.

“How’s Millie?” Gram asked. There was a kind of sharpness in her voice, and alertness, but Dicey didn’t turn around to read the expression on her face. She heard the chicken pieces shaking, in flour, salt, and pepper.

“Fine.”

Gram was staring at her. She could feel it.

“You never said,” Gram said without breaking the rhythm of the shaking, “if you got your English grade changed.”

“Well,” Dicey said. Then she couldn’t think of how to finish the sentence.

“Well?” Gram asked after a while. “Was it a mistake? Were you right?”

Dicey picked up the last potato. She cut it into neat slices. She lay the slices down flat in front of her. “Yeah, it was a mistake. Boy was it a mistake.” She felt pretty calm again, cold and still.

“What happened?” Gram asked. For a second, Dicey was irritated. It wasn’t like Gram to insist on a subject Dicey didn’t want to talk about. Usually, Gram understood and stopped asking questions.

“We had an essay to write,” Dicey explained. She felt like she was talking to the potato, because that was what she looked at. Behind her, Gram moved around the kitchen, getting things ready. “A character sketch, about a real person and conflict. I wrote one, and thought it was pretty good. He handed them back today. He thought I’d copied mine. Or something. He thought the person wasn’t real. He thought I’d taken it out of a book.” She slowed her hands down. When she finished with this potato, what was she going to do about what to look at?

Gram’s voice came from behind her. “It must have been pretty good, if he thought it came out of a book.”

Dicey turned around. Gram was looking at her. “Yeah,” Dicey said, hearing how fierce her own voice sounded, “it was.”

“Did you tell him?” Gram asked.

Dicey shook her head.

“You mean he thinks you cheated?”

Dicey shook her head again.

“Exactly what happened?” Gram asked, sounding ready to get angry.

“He read a couple of the papers out loud, to everyone. Mine was one. Then he said, he thought I’d cheated but he couldn’t prove it. But he said I hadn’t done the assignment, because it was supposed to be a real person. So he was flunking it.”

“In front of the whole class?” Gram demanded.

“Yeah.”

Gram’s mouth moved and her eyes burned. That made Dicey feel warm, down deep in her stomach. Gram was angry for Dicey’s sake. “Can I read it?” Gram asked.

“Sure.”

“Now?”

“OK.”

“Will you get it, girl? I’ve got fat heating.”

So Dicey went upstairs to get her essay. She started the potatoes while Gram sat at the table and read. She placed the cubes of potato neatly in the hot bacon fat and turned the gas down to medium once she heard the fat start to sizzle under the layer of potatoes. She checked the lard in the other frying pan, to see if it was smoking hot yet. She got down a jar of tomatoes that Gram had put up that summer. Every now and then she glanced over to see what Gram was doing. Gram read the essay through once, and then again, and then again.

“Well,” Gram said at last, “I can see why he thought it came out of a book. I like it, Dicey. I like it very much. Your poor Momma. He couldn’t know she was real. It is hard to believe. Are you going to tell him?”

Dicey shook her head. “Anyway, he knows,” she told Gram. “He said he’ll change the grade — as if that mattered — and on the report card too.”

“Tell me what happened, Dicey,” Gram said.

“Well, there’s this girl in our class — we worked together on a science project, and she’s about the most popular girl I guess. Mina. He was yelling at me for cheating, and she said she didn’t believe it.” As she recalled it, Dicey saw the picture she and Mina must have made and she started to smile. “I was standing up, I was the only one. And she stood up too, and she’s — she’s tall and strong-looking. And her voice — I don’t know how to tell you, like an actress.”

Gram nodded, listening.

“She said she didn’t think I’d cheat or lie. Because I didn’t care enough about what people thought. Well, she’s right.” Dicey grinned now. “Then she said she could prove it. So she asked me a couple of questions — she ought to be a lawyer, really. The bell rang and she told everybody to stay put and they did. Anyway, she proved it, I guess, because before I left he told me about the grades and he said he was sorry.”

Gram was laughing. “I wish I’d been there,” she said. “I wish I’d seen this. I like the sound of this girl. She your friend?”

“No, not really. I mean — no, not really.”

“Hunh,” Gram said, getting up from the table and going to the stove. She started putting pieces of chicken into the fat. Dicey stepped back. “Must have been hard on you, though,” Gram remarked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Dicey said.

Then Gram started laughing again. “That teacher sure had his hands full, didn’t he, between you and this Mina character. I bet he was sorry the day he assigned that essay.” And Dicey joined in now that she could see the scene as if it was part of a movie. “Serves him right,” Gram added, “and will you put those tomatoes into a saucepan?”

When James read her essay about Momma, he was impressed. He didn’t say so, but Dicey could tell. He asked her why she had left things out, about what their house was like, or Momma losing her job. He asked why she hadn’t told about Momma’s kids more. “That’s not the way it really was,” he protested. “I mean — it is, it’s what it felt like. But there was a whole lot more, wasn’t there?”

“Yes,” Dicey agreed. She thought Gram might bring up the subject of Mr. Chappelle’s accusation, but Gram just sat there, knitting away on the start of Sammy’s blue sweater. She had finished Maybeth’s and then dampened it down and laid it on towels on the dining room table to block it into shape. When it dried, Maybeth could wear it. James went up to bed, and Dicey started to follow him, but Gram asked her to stay a while.

“I’ve got some reading to do,” Dicey protested.

“It won’t be long,” Gram said. “Sit down, girl.”

Dicey sat down cross-legged in front of the fire. Gram sat in an armchair a little farther back from the flames. She was knitting the ribbing, purl two, knit two. Her quick hands moved the yarn back and forth over the needles. Her eyes were dark and her hair, at the end of the day, curled around her head as if nobody ever had combed it.

“I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life,” Gram began.

“I don’t believe it,” Dicey answered.

Gram looked up briefly at her and smiled. “Well, I do, and I was there,” she said. “After my husband died, I had a lot of time for thinking. And then you all arrived, and if you think that hasn’t added things to think about you’re not as smart as I take you for. But especially after he died and I was alone.”

She looked up sharply to say, “Don’t think I minded being alone.”

“I don’t,” Dicey said, the smile she kept from her face showing in her voice and eyes.

“Good. I didn’t mind being alone, and I don’t mind you living here. But that’s not what I’m trying to say. I’m trying to say — I married John, and that wasn’t a mistake. But the way we stayed married, the way we lived, there were lots of mistakes. He was a stiff and proud man, John — a hard man.”

Dicey nodded, because Gram had said this once before.

“I stuck by him. But I got to thinking, after he died — whether there weren’t things I should have done. He wasn’t happy, not a happy man. I knew that, I got to know it. He wasn’t happy to be himself. And I just let him be, let him sit there, high and proud, in his life. I let the children go away from him. And from me. I got to thinking — when it was too late — you have to reach out to people. To your family too. You can’t just let them sit there, you should put your hand out. If they slap it back, well you reach out again if you care enough. If you don’t care enough, you forget about them, if you can. I don’t know, girl.”

Dicey watched into the fire, where blue-edged flames leaped up toward the chimney.

“I can’t say any more that Millie Tydings is stupid,” Gram said.

What did she mean by that? Dicey wondered. How did she get to Millie?

“Because Millie is always reaching out. She always had a hand out for me, not that I’ve taken it much. She’s got one out for you, hasn’t she, girl. I’m not saying that Millie’s thought this out, but she didn’t need to. Because there’s wisdom in her.”

Dicey didn’t say anything.

“And I see this paper of yours as a kind of reaching out,” Gram said. She stopped then, as if she was finished.

“What do you mean?” Dicey demanded. She wasn’t going to let Gram stop there, not until she understood.

“Think about it,” Gram said.

“No, you tell me. Reaching out? But for what?”

“I don’t know,” Gram said. “If I was sure, I’d say. For your Momma, maybe. For all of us, maybe, but I don’t think so. I think, maybe, it’s reaching out for that school. Somehow. I’m not saying that’s what you thought you were doing or what you even wanted to do. But it’s how it turned out. And I’m sorry, the way it turned out. Because somebody’s slapped your hand back good and hard. But I don’t want you to stop reaching, just because it didn’t come out the way it should have.”

Dicey stared at her grandmother. Her mind was whirling. “That’s why Mr. Lingerle —” she began.

Gram’s smile flashed across her face, under the golden color the fire painted there. “He’s met us halfway, hasn’t he?” she observed. “I took him — in the nature of an experiment. You know? I wondered if I could. I like him, don’t you?”

“Sure,” Dicey said. “We all do. But that’s why you told him how poor we are.”

“You don’t go reaching out with your hand closed up,” Gram said. “It worked out all right this time.”

Dicey thought.

“It took me so long to learn,” Gram explained. “I’d like you to have more of a head start.”

Dicey threw back her head and laughed. She didn’t know why, except the feelings inside her needed some expression. If she grabbed Gram’s hands and started dancing around the room, Gram would think she was crazy, for one, and she’d drop those stitches, for another. She was laughing because she couldn’t hug her grandmother, and because she’d figured out something else right then: that Gram was reaching out for her, Dicey. And Dicey was laughing for another reason, because she had a phone call to make.

She found the address and number in the directory they kept beside the phone. Gram was curious, but didn’t ask questions. Dicey knew Gram was curious so she didn’t wait to keep her phone call private.

A man answered the phone. “Is Wilhemina there, please?” Dicey asked.

“Do you know what time it is?” the man answered.

“No,” Dicey said. “I don’t. I’m sorry, is it too late to call?”

“When I was a boy, my mother told me you shouldn’t ever call after ten,” the voice instructed her.

“I’m sorry,” Dicey said again. She bit her lip to keep from giggling. He had a voice like Mina’s, just as rich, only deeper. “I didn’t know it was after ten.”

“It’s not exactly, not yet,” the voice told her, “but it will be in seven minutes. I’ll get Mina, but don’t be long.”

“Thank you,” Dicey said.

“Who shall I say is calling?”

“Dicey Tillerman.”

There was a short silence. “Ah,” he said. She heard the phone at his end clatter down onto a table.

“Dicey?” Mina’s voice came. “I won’t, Dad,” she called over her shoulder.

“I just wanted to say thank you,” Dicey said. “For helping out today.”

She could hear the smile in Mina’s voice as she answered. “That was some fun, wasn’t it?”

“Yes and no,” Dicey said.

“I can understand that,” Mina agreed. “I was thinking I ought to thank you for giving me such a good chance to show off. So I guess we’re about even. Talk to you tomorrow, OK?”

“OK,” Dicey said. “I really liked yours, you know.”

“We’ll form a mutual admiration society,” Mina answered. “See you.”

“See you,” Dicey answered. She turned back to meet Gram’s eyes. “Wilhemina Smiths,” she explained.

“Her father’s the preacher, isn’t he?” Gram asked.

“She’s the one who — ”

“I figured that out. I don’t know, Dicey —” Gram didn’t finish the sentence.

“You’ll like Mina, you’ll see,” Dicey reassured her.

“Of course I will; I already do. But I’m a crazy old bat and my opinion’s not worth a flea bite. I’m just wondering what her people will think. What they already think. About me.”

“Who says you’re a crazy old bat?” Dicey demanded. “James said you’re crazy like a fox, he said that right away. You can’t fool us, Gram.”

“Good,” Gram answered. “Are you going to bed or not? I thought you had reading to do.”