The Memory Jar by Elissa Janine Hoole Page B

to make me carry all their bats, so I put them in my metal wagon and dragged them up the alley and across Fourth Avenue. All the older ladies doing their gardening would hear those rattling bats and come out to say hello.
    Sometimes they would give me coins that I could take down to the gas station on the corner of the alley and buy enough candy to give me a belly ache. This was pure heaven for a country kid who’d never had access to a corner store before, and who was under the supervision of a great aunt who had no desire to care for children. “Home by dark, and nothing broken,” was her daily command. My great uncle occasionally took us fishing, but mostly he spent his days stomping around that old stale-smelling bedroom and growling at anyone who got in his way.
    The older boys got mad that I was holding up their game talking with the neighbors, so they started hauling their own bats, but I didn’t care. I decided to fill my wagon with something else. Something I could sell.
    I thought about taking garden tools and offering my services as a weed-puller, but that sounded like a lot of work, and also, all these old ladies really seemed to love scooting around on those little rolling garden benches, digging in the dirt with their big hats on. I thought about what old ladies might want to buy. I thought about my granny, who liked reading books about the covered wagon days and dusting the mantel and cooking weird-smelling versions of the things my mom told her I liked, and then I remembered she was losing her little house, that my parents were taking her to that place that smelled kind of like pee. I missed her terribly. My great aunt was no substitute, and my great uncle was just plain mean.
    Some of the ladies talked to me like I was a grown-up, using big words and asking what I was thinking about. One of the women always sang to me, religious songs. Her voice was high and thin and warbly, like a fragile bird, and I didn’t like to leave her yard because she kept on singing while she waved goodbye. Scott and his friends thought I was stupid. They couldn’t imagine talking to a bunch of old people. As nice as he always was to everyone else, Scott was the first one to say, “Hey, Monkey Boy, smells like you forgot to change your Depends,” which started everyone saying that.
    But one morning it rained, hard and windy, with a dangerous storm predicted, and there was no baseball, no prowling the town for us. My brother and I were fighting in the living room, trying to wrestle each other into the scratchy orange rug. Scott pushed my face into the floor, scrubbing my cheekbone hard enough against the rug to give me a big red mark, and when I jumped up and ran to show Aunt Thea, she was completely exasperated. She looked out at the rain falling from the sky in sheets, and I know she was considering sending us out in it anyway.
    â€œI’d like you boys to make a house-warming card for Grandma Wendy,” she said, and she got a sad plastic bag of markers out of her kitchen junk drawer and a packet of construction paper. As I sat there scribbling slap-dash, dry-markered flowers, an idea occurred to me that would, for the first time in my life, give me the upper hand over my big brother. I sort of thought it would be the kind of thing that would make Scott start taking me seriously, as a person.
    As soon as the sun came out again, I carefully dried out my red wagon and filled it with Auntie’s markers, the packet of paper, a pair of scissors from the kitchen drawer, and a set of pinking shears I stole out of her sewing basket. As usual, the ladies came flocking to meet me, many of them with extra smiles since they hadn’t seen me the day before. They were all charmed by my entrepreneurial spirit. I told them they could order a greeting card, tell me what they wanted me to write and what kind of design they would like (though I strongly suggested motorcycles, dragons, or ninjas, if the