Free Land of a Hundred Wonders by Lesley Kagen

friend, has this to say about their visits. “If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes . . . well, it’s a miracle.”
    Miss Cheryl’s right about that. Miss Lydia can perform miracles. During our VISITATIONS, and I’ll swear to this on my Bible, I can feel Mama’s presence so strongly. Miss Lydia makes Mama come alive again for me at Hundred Wonders.
    From outside the porch, there’s a rustle rustle and a snap . Clever is much earlier than usual. (I am not sure if I have mentioned this before, but her given name is Carol Lever. I saw it written down like this before I was properly introduced to her—C Lever—and I assumed, proof once again that the road to hell is paved with good assumptions, that her name was Clever. She liked it, so it stuck.)
    â€œWhatcha doin’?” she asks, separating the bushes and sliding up to the other side of the screen. She’s fussing with a sweetheart rose. She almost always has got one pinned to her hair. Her and Grampa love those flowers to death. If I was writing an article about Clever for the Gazette and had to come up with a hobby of hers, besides western-movie watching, of course, I’d say it’s either tending the gardens along with him, pruning and watering and pinching and all. Or attending funerals. (She finds the newly dead real interesting.) Or stealing. Clever is what one might call light-fingered.
    â€œI was tryin’ to get a few more words down in this story ’fore you showed up,” I tell her through the screen.
    â€œ ’Bout this evenin’ . . . ,” she says in a drawl so finger-lickin’ sweet you could frost a birthday cake with it.
    Almost every night that I can remember, and some I can’t, we perform what Clever has dubbed Gadabouts: Reckless adventures or escapes from confinement. This can mean anything from us taking the boat out on the lake during an electrical storm to trespassing where we’re not supposed to. Sometimes Billy still pals along if Clever gets it in her mind that she wants to steal something bulky, like that Jim Beam liquor sign off the highway. The girl truly excels at coming up with spine-thrilling activities.
    â€œWhat’d ya have in mind?” I ask her since there is no sense in my resisting. Clever is the boss of us this time of night and she has been since the old days. Only it was the four of us gadding about back then. We tried to come up with a good nickname for ourselves, you know, like, the Four Musketeers or Running Four Cover. Something snappy like that, but me, Clever, Georgie Malloy,and Little Billy could never agree, so we just quit trying. And then Cooter Smith, Miss Florida’s grandbaby? He started to tag along with us, so even if we coulda agreed upon one of those Four nicknames, it wouldn’ta worked out.
    â€œWe could play some cards with Willard,” Clever suggests, raggedy-looking in the lantern light. She’s a slip of a gal with tawny hair to her shoulders that waves like a piece of corrugated tin. Shallow-water eyes. Same age as me. Her front tooth’s chipped and her nose’s got a bump up top from when she fell off the side of the Leghorns’ silo during a previous gadabout.
    â€œCan’t play cards tonight. I really gotta get this story wrapped up,” I say, pressing my eraser to the paper. “What’s new?”
    â€œI mighta fallen in love.”
    This is NOT hot off the presses. Clever falls in and out of love faster than Miss Elizabeth Taylor. (That’s where I got my idea to move to Cairo, by the way. From that movie Cleopatra .)
    â€œAnd,” Clever says, “Mama kicked me out of the apartment this mornin’.”
    This also happens on a semiregular basis. Mostly right after Janice gets herself a new love interest. Grampa says the Lever girls remind him of oil and vinegar dressing. They’re hard to keep together and separate easy.
    â€œYa know, if I were you, I might