Read Online My One Hundred Adventures by Polly Horvath - Free Book Online

patches run across the wet sand, late to work. It is commuting mist.
    We sit on the cement dividers all morning and Mrs. Gourd still does not come. We have not taken sunscreen because somehow I thought Mrs. Gourd was coming at daybreak. Like the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. It is past noon when we see her old green station wagon pull up. All the little Gourds are in tow, armed with sand toys. They are already slapping each other with their shovels. The baby makes not a peep. It has a blanket over its carrier again. I wonder if this is like riding in a litter.
    Mrs. Gourd looks like she is going right past us and down to the beach but Ginny stops her with a raised hand.
    â€œMrs. Gourd!” she calls. “I have a proposition.”
    There is a man sitting on a cement divider in another part of the parking lot and he looks up with curiosity. He has been sitting there for the last ten minutes smoking cigarettes as if he, like us, is waiting for someone. But now when he looks at us it is as if he is satisfied; he was just waiting for
something
and all of us are as good as anything.
    Mrs. Gourd stops and looks at Ginny. “A what?” she asks.
    Ginny gets out her two handfuls of quarters. “These are for you,” she says.
    â€œWhat for?” asks Mrs. Gourd but before she gets the answer, takes and pockets them.
    â€œFor your baby,” Ginny says. “Instead of going to see Mrs. Fielding, why don’t you deal directly with us? Mrs. Fielding has no money anyway.”
    â€œYou again!” Mrs. Gourd says to Ginny. “You in that contraption dropping Bibles with this one?” She points at me.
    â€œI am Jane’s friend,” says Ginny. Everything is in this statement. “We will make payments until we pay off whatever you and Jane decide is fair. The only thing is, you can’t tell Mrs. Fielding or
anyone
anything about the baby. If you do, we get all our money back.”
    â€œWhere you going to get the money?” asks Mrs. Gourd. She puts the baby carrier down and stares challengingly at us.
    â€œWe’ll get jobs,” says Ginny.
    â€œPfff,” says Mrs. Gourd, picking up the baby carrier again and letting her eyes drop to me. They are like knives. “You can’t get no jobs.”
    â€œWe’ll get babysitting jobs,” says Ginny. “I’ve had the Red Cross babysitting course. You can make a lot of money babysitting.”
    Mrs. Gourd looks out over the sand. Her eyes start doing that thing again, moving back and forth, cranking her brain into gear.
    â€œBabysitting?” she says.
    â€œUh-huh,” says Ginny.
    Mrs. Gourd’s eyes dart, dart. “You babysit for me,” she says.
    â€œWHAT?” cries Ginny. She eyes those smelly, runny Gourd children.
    â€œThat’s what I said. You babysit for me. I want that job coming open at the Bluebird Café. That waitress job. You babysit for me and I’ll think about letting you pay off the debt this way. For now.”
    â€œI don’t know,” says Ginny. “How many hours a day is that? We’ve got school in the fall, you know.”
    â€œWell, we worry about that in the fall,” says Mrs. Gourd. Her mouth is closing in kind of a happy smile like she has opened chocolates and found one she likes. That is when I notice that among her other difficulties she has one long, yellow snaggle-tooth that sticks out from under her upper lip and sort of hangs there, threatening to pierce her lower lip. I can see her using it to poke holes in chocolates to suck out the filling and see if she likes it. She barks at me, “YOU’D BETTER,” as if I were thinking of saying no, and I can’t tell her I was just staring at the snaggle-tooth.
    â€œOh, I
will,
” I say. I will promise anything if she just doesn’t talk to my mother. If she just doesn’t sue us.
    I can’t figure out whether the man with the cigarettes is close enough to hear us.