Free Keeping Secrets by Sarah Shankman Page B

under the register. Every couple of months she carried the box downtown to the bank for them to put the money into their vault. The teller initialed the amount and the date with a fountain pen in tiny little numbers in her dark-blue savings book.
    “It’s important to learn to save,” Momma always said. “There’s nothing more important than saving.”
    Emma kept the little book in her bottom dresser drawer. There was her name, Emma Rochelle Fine, written in ink on the first page. Then all those little bitty lines with dates, and numbers, and initials. The total was the best part: ninety-six dollars. Her mother said it was the money she was going to use toward college.
    She guessed college cost a lot. For as long as she could remember her mother had gone to college over in Cypress to finish her degree. Until one Sunday afternoon last spring when she and Daddy had sat on folding chairs in the sun and watched Momma dressed up in a long black robe like the church choir wore and a funny hat with a tassel. The diploma and the tassel were hanging on the wall in their bedroom now.
    In the store Rosalie looked up from her conversation with Jake and saw Emma. Her face was red. Was she hot or angry? “Did you finish your breakfast?” she asked.
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “Good. Now put on your sun hat and you can go out and play before it gets too hot.”
    “And then swimming?”
    “We’ll see. If the Cloutiers go and Anne promises to watch you. Are you going over to their house now?”
    “Yes, ma’am. Mike and I are going to play in the canal.” And then she bit her tongue.
    “Remember what I told you about that.”
    “Oh, Ro,” her father grumbled from behind the meat counter. “They’re just kids.”
    “Jake, I told you what I saw.”
    “And I’m telling you you’re imagining things. Kids will play.”
    Emma flushed with the memory of what her momma had seen a couple of days before. She had been playing with the water hose out in the backyard they shared with the Cloutiers. She and Mike were in their underpants, Anne and Wayne in their bathing suits. They’d been spraying one another, screaming, jumping at the delicious shock when the cold water hit their hot skins. All of a sudden Mike stopped, pulled down his pants, and peed against the trunk of the catalpa tree.
    Anne, his older sister, said, “Mike, don’t!”
    “Oh, leave him alone,” Wayne laughed, showing his broad white teeth in what Emma thought was a movie-star face. She always felt excited around Wayne, the same way she did when she was close to her cousin J.D. who lived out in the country.
    Emma turned from Wayne’s laughter and stared at Mike with her mouth loosely parted. She’d sneaked looks when he was wet in his underwear, but she had never seen a boy naked except for little babies getting their diapers changed. Mike’s pee made an arc like the water spurting out of the fish’s mouth that the mermaid held in the baby pool.
    Then Rosalie had turned the corner around the side of the yard, coming to get Emma for something.
    “What on earth are you doing!” she’d yelled at Mike, then grabbed Emma by the hand and jerked her into the house. “What were you doing?” she demanded again inside the dark cool apartment as she shook her.
    “Nothing.”
    Then Emma had stared at the brown and yellow squares of the linoleum on her bedroom floor. This had something to do with down there. She didn’t know what exactly, but Momma always made her feel ashamed about down there. When she mentioned it, it made her feel queasy in her stomach, almost exactly like when Momma gave her an enema. Momma had said, “Mike is a nasty little boy,” and she wouldn’t let her play alone with him anymore.
    Now Emma, who really wanted to go down to the canal to play with Mike, said, “Linda and Mo Moore are coming over, too, Momma. They said so.”
    Her mother looked at her sharply. “You just make sure that they do.” She straightened the straps of the sunsuit