Free Dandelion Summer by Lisa Wingate

trouble so I’d give up. But I was supposed to get twenty dollars for fixing him supper and cleaning up his kitchen—eight dollars each for two hours’ work, and another four just for walking over here from school, then riding the city bus home. That wasn’t bad money for a little cooking, and I liked to cook, because I used to do it with Mrs. Lora.
    That look he gave me made Epie pop right to the surface. She worked up some major attitude, just like the mean girls at school would’ve. Sounded like them, too. “Mister, I ain’t no Girl Scout. I’m here to cook your dinner. My mama cleaned your house yesta’day.”
    “Yes- ter- day.” He spit out the middle of that word like he was making sure I knew how to say it right. Then he looked me over again, and I could tell what he had on his mind. I’d been getting that look my whole life. You’d think it wouldn’t be too hard for people to figure how a white woman gets a brown baby, but people, especially old people, always looked at me like it was some kind of surprise.
    “Mmm-hmm, yes- ter- day af- ter- noon.” I put on the voice we’d learned in after-school enrichment last year, when we got to spend a week pretending we were news broadcasters. “Your daugh- ter said to come at four th ir ty.” I’m not so dumb, when I don’t want to be, but you go talking all proper around the kids in school and somebody’ll jump you, thinking you’re trying to act like you’re too good. This old dude wouldn’t know one thing about that.
    He kept an arm stretched across from his shoulder to the doorframe, like a bar to shut me out. “I’m not hungry.”
    Mama was right about Mr. Al-vord. “Well, your daughter says you are.” I bent down, ducked under his arm, and ended up on the other side of him, in the hallway. All of a sudden, even if I didn’t want this job, I was gonna show him he couldn’t go trashin’ on me. I got a stubborn streak that doesn’t give in easy, especially not to some old rich dude with his nose in the air, telling me not to come in his big house.
    He turned around, his mouth popping open and shut like one of the little tadpoles the country boys used to catch in the creek behind my old school. They’d hold those things out of the water just to watch them squirm and try to get a breath. I never did know why they did that, but with Mr. J. Norman Alvord, it was kind of funny. He looked like he didn’t have a clue what to do now.
    He coughed, and then pulled out a hankie and coughed some more, then folded whatever he’d hocked up inside the hankie and tucked it in the waistband of his pajamas. That was about the nastiest thing I’d ever seen. And these old dudes were the ones complaining about boys wearing their pants sagging? Least people my age didn’t hock one up and keep it for later.
    “Come back another day,” he barked. “I have work to do. I’m in the middle of a project.”
    I turned my shoulder to him and went a couple more steps into the house. The hallway was big, with paintings hanging in fancy gold frames, like you’d see in a museum. Off to the right side, there was a room with flowered couches and little chairs. That room had doorways to other rooms, and then to the left, a hallway stretched way too far to be in any one person’s house. Ahead was a huge staircase with a big stained-glass window halfway up, and what looked like another big room sat off to the right. This guy was seriously loaded, but the place felt like Dracula’s castle, with all the shades pulled, shadows everywhere, and the air stale and quiet.
    “Tell you what,” I said to Mr. J. Norman Alvord. “You go do your work, and I’m gonna do my work, and we won’t bother each other, huh? House like this, you prob’ly won’t even know I’m here.”
    “Most pro- ba- bly I will,” he grumbled, pronouncing the word like I hadn’t said it good enough. Then he smacked the front door shut and headed for the stairs without saying another thing.
    “Hey,