Crenshaw

10

After I got ready for bed, I lay on my mattress and thought things over.

I thought about the stuff I’d put in my keepsakes bag. Some photos. A spelling bee trophy. A bunch of nature books. My teddy bear. A clay statue of Crenshaw that I’d made when I was in second grade. My worn-out copy of A Hole Is To Dig.

I thought about Crenshaw and the surfboard.

I thought about the purple jelly beans.

Mostly, though, I thought about the signs I’d been noticing.

I am very observant, which is a useful thing for a scientist to be. Here’s what I’d been observing:

Big piles of bills.

Parents whispering.

Parents arguing.

Stuff getting sold, like the silver teapot my grandma gave my mom and our laptop computer.

The power going off for two days because we hadn’t paid the bill.

Not much food except peanut butter and mac and cheese and Cup O Noodles.

My mom digging under the couch cushions for quarters.

My dad digging under the couch cushions for dimes.

My mom borrowing toilet paper rolls from work.

The landlord coming over and saying “I’m sorry” and shaking his head a lot.

It didn’t make sense. My mom had three part-time jobs. My dad had two part-time jobs. You’d think that would add up to two whole actual jobs, but it didn’t seem to.

My mom used to teach music at a middle school until they cut her job. Now she worked as a waitress at two restaurants and as a cashier at a drugstore. She wanted to get another job teaching music, but so far nothing had come up.

After my dad had to quit construction work, he started a handyman business. He did small fix-it stuff, but sometimes he wasn’t feeling well and had to cancel appointments. He also gave private guitar lessons. And he was hoping to go to community college part-time to learn computer programming.

I figured my parents had a plan for making everything okay, because parents always have a plan. But when I asked them what it was, they said stuff like maybe they could plant a money tree in the backyard. Or maybe they could start their rock band up again and win a Grammy Award.

I didn’t want to leave our apartment, but I could feel it coming, even if nobody said anything. I knew how things worked. I’d been through this before.

It was too bad, because I really liked where we lived, even though we’d only been there a couple of years. Swanlake Village was the name of our neighborhood. It didn’t have any real swans. But all the mailboxes had swans on them, and the community pool had a swan painted on the bottom.

The pool water was always warm. Mom said it was from the sun, but I suspected illegal peeing.

All the streets in Swanlake Village had two words in their names. Ours was Quiet Moon. But there were others, like Sleepy Dove and Weeping Wood and Sunny Glen. My school, Swanlake Elementary, was only two blocks from my house. It didn’t have anything with swans on it.

Swanlake Village wasn’t a fancy place at all, just a regular old neighborhood. But it was friendly. It was the kind of place where you could smell hot dogs and burgers grilling every weekend. Where kids rode their scooters on the sidewalk and sold lousy lemonade for a quarter a cup. It was a place where you had friends you could count on, like Marisol.

You wouldn’t have thought it was a place where people were worried or hungry or sad.

Our school librarian likes to say you can’t judge a book by its cover. Maybe it’s the same way with neighborhoods. Maybe you can’t judge a place by its swans.