Free Middle of Nowhere by Caroline Adderson Page B

seat, Artie played with Happy and the china figurines while I watched out the window. Sometimes there were cows.
    I started to feel like I was watching a movie on TV. Even though there weren’t any characters, there was action. We were escaping! And the countryside was changing. The desert hills flattened out and got greener. Farms and towns appeared and disappeared. The forest spread out across the land.
    I asked Mrs. Burt about the car, and she said that Mr. Burt had bought it new in 1957.
    â€œWhere is Mr. Burt?” Artie asked.
    â€œHe’s deceased. Do you know what that means?”
    â€œHe has rickets?”
    â€œNot diseased.
Deceased
. He’s dead.”
    Artie started to wail. It seemed out of the blue, but probably wasn’t. You never know what’s going on in a little kid’s head. Maybe all this time he’d been thinking of what I had been trying so hard not to think.
    That Mom was dead. That that was why she never came home.
    â€œDon’t worry,” Mrs. Burt said. “It was a long time ago. He’s in heaven. I think.”
    â€œWhere’s my mom?” Artie asked. “Where is she?”
    Mrs. Burt turned to me. “Should I pull over?”
    I told her to keep driving. Then I undid my seatbelt and crawled over the back of the seat to be with Artie. That’s something you can do in a big old car like a Bel Air.
    To change the subject, Mrs. Burt asked Artie if he wanted to hear about his namesake, King Arthur, and the sword in the stone. Hundreds of years ago, in England, a wizard put it there.
    â€œOnly the true king of England would be able to pull that sword out. Everybody tried. They tugged away on the thing, grunting and groaning, but it wouldn’t budge. Then this boy by the name of Arthur — Artie for short — swaggered up and just plucked the darn thing out. What do you think of that?”
    â€œI like it,” Artie said.
    â€œHe got together some knights who would meet at a big stone table in the woods. It was round, which was why they were called the Knights of the Round Table. Around this table the knights planned their deeds.”
    â€œWhat are deeds?”
    â€œBrave acts.”
    â€œLike what you did, Mrs. Burt,” Artie said. “Like when you chased that man away with your walker.”
    Mrs. Burt got a big chuckle out of that.
    We stopped for lunch, which was breakfast again. Before we got back in the car, Mrs. Burt got Artie to thump her back. She said the grease was killing her. But it wasn’t killing her enough to order something besides breakfast.
    Just before suppertime, we arrived in a big town.
    â€œHo, ho,” she said, peering all around. “Has this place ever changed.” Rather than check right into a motel, we drove around so she could exclaim over and over that everything had gone to pot.
    â€œThere used to be a store right here on Main Street where you could buy everything you needed. Dishes. Kerosene. Dried beans. Flour. Canoe paddles. It was what we called a dry goods store. You ever heard of that?”
    â€œNo,” we said.
    â€œYou got your stuff on credit. That meant you didn’t have to pay up front. But not like with a credit card, where they charge interest. It was an honor system. I would order all the stuff we needed for the camp. I’d sign the book. Mr. Taggart would ship it off to me. At the end of the season when the logs were all bought up and there was money, Taggart would get paid. Everybody got paid. We knew each other and everybody was honest. Not like today.”
    We drove all the way to the end of the street, but there was no Taggart’s Store. What there was was a huge mall with a Canadian Tire and a supermarket.
    Mrs. Burt sniffed and said that was what the world had come to: tires and shopping carts.
    The motel we stayed in that night was right in town. There wasn’t any vibrator bed.
    That night Mrs. Burt was so excited about seeing the