Page 9 of Counting Backwards

“You’re not taking a break, girl,” she said. “You’re finished with your schooling for good. You’ll be focusing your time on helping around the house now. No need to wait for the end of the school year. You’ve completed enough of the sixth grade to get credit for it.”

“But why? Have I done something wrong?” I was already thinking of all I would miss if Mrs. Alice made good on her threat. Our teacher had been reading to us fromThe Story of Doctor Dolittle, and we weren’t nearly finished. Each student had also been working on a special presentation for the last day of school, and I’d been excited about mine, preparing to show how I could fly clothespin airplanes.

“No, nothing wrong. But Mr. John and I, we need your help with the farm now that it’s coming on late spring and we’ve got the new crops this year. You’ve done all the learning you require. A girl like you has no need for junior high.”

Now, I knew I wasn’t the smartest girl. Mrs. Alice certainly told me so often enough. But I kept up fine with the lessons in class.

When I didn’t just answer “yes, ma’am” to her like usual, Mrs. Alice added, “You’ll be fine. Getting through most of the sixthgrade is plenty enough of an accomplishment, especially for a foster. It’s far more than you’d have done without us, so chin up.”

She said that last bit like I ought to have been grateful. I suppose I was glad that I’d been able to spend the last several years living there, having school, staying out of trouble, away from the drunks and the crime on the other side of town. But I didn’t think the Dobbses had done anything so special. I earned my keep with them, worked hard seven days a week. It wasn’t like they was just giving me everything for free. If there weren’t to be no more school, there was hardly reason at all for me to stay with the Dobbses anymore. What good would it be, picking up after them and Loretta all the time, keeping everything just so?

I looked out to the lawn beside the house, or the “farm,” as the family called it. It was pretty much just a regular yard, except it was filled with an oversized vegetable garden and a couple of outbuildings for livestock. It wasn’t anything like the pictures I’d seen of real farms, tobacco plantations out in the Virginia country, with them sprawling fields of sand lugs all lined up in perfect, neat rows. Even the local peach and apple orchards were more sizable than the dusty plot of land on which the Dobbs family relied. Even so, since he was often busy at his day job doing maintenance for the town’s railcars, Mr. John hired a boy or two from time to time to help out with the chickens and goats. The boys would come each day, sweating and grunting out there in the coop, or huffing to themselves in the dry grass while they mended fences.

“But that’s the whole reason I even came to stay here in the first,” I argued, “so as I could go to the school over here.”

“And you did,” Mrs. Alice said. “It’s been years you’ve been going. You can still see your friend Billy, if that’s what you’re worried about. After you finish chores and he’s done with his school day.”

She was always making comments about me being sweet on Billy, even though I wasn’t. I suppose she couldn’t imagine that itmight be the other way around, that maybe a boy, even a freckled, gangly one like Billy, could take a cotton to a girl with shoulders so broad or a face as plain as mine. I didn’t know for sure if Billy liked me that way or not. We didn’t talk about those things, and it didn’t matter to me anyhow.

“When can I go back to my own mama?” I asked. I’d never said something like that to her before. I didn’t know if she knew about Ma being at the Colony, but I figured if Billy knew, maybe someone had told Mrs. Alice too.

She let out a long sigh at my question, like she was trying to blow away all the Virginia dust with that one breath.

“I didn’t want to mention it,” she said. Then she glanced over her shoulder toward the street, as if to make sure there weren’t no one else within earshot before she looked back at me. “Your mother has been committed to a facility. You understand what that means? It was high time somebody intervened. At least she’ll have guidance and care in the institution.”

“She don’t need that kind of help.” I couldn’t hold my thoughts inside. Without school, there wasn’t nothing at the Dobbs house I was scared to lose. “Who’s looking after Doris and Roy?” I asked.

I hadn’t thought about them at first, when Billy told me the news earlier, but once they came to my mind, it was like they started pounding against my insides with metal spoons.

Mrs. Alice pushed her lips together like she didn’t want to talk about Doris or Roy at all.

“I want to go back to my ma’s house,” I said. “You can tell that lady, Miss Drummond, to come and get me.”

I had pushed too far, and now Mrs. Alice turned redder than the Tommy Toes growing in that garden behind me.

“You listen good and close, Carrie.” She leaned in and pointed a finger at me. “There is nowhere else for you to go. You leave this farm, and you’ll be on the streets, keeping time with men just likeyour mother did. If you must know about Doris and Roy, I’m told they’ve been placed in private homes too. At least now you three will stand a chance.”

Her words about my brother and sister stopped me short. I wondered if I’d be able to find them, if maybe they’d been put somewhere nearby and might be getting set to attend the same school I was just leaving. They’d be so grown already, I realized, and I worried I mightn’t even recognize them. But then I figured a body always has to know her own family. Nothing was more important than blood kin. My mind set to racing, and when Mrs. Alice walked away from me, I was already working on a plan to get my little family back together.

5

Jessa

February 2022

As I stepped into the Dreamland Diner, I was greeted by the familiar scent of sizzling bacon. I scanned the restaurant until my eyes landed on my grandmother, who was already nestled into a booth beside a large picture window that looked out onto Lexington Avenue. People outside hurried along the street, but Gram had her eyes trained on the Kindle in her lap. Having spent forty years working as a librarian, she could rarely be found without her e-reader, and its extra-large font, somewhere close by.

“Anything good?” I asked as I reached the table.

“Meh.” Gram waved a hand in the air. “A thriller, but I knew where it was going by the end of the second chapter.” Her blue eyes were bright with triumph beneath her penciled-in eyebrows. People often remarked that my grandmother resembled the dowager countess fromDownton Abbey, and I agreed. With her wry sense of humor and a watchful gaze that never seemed to miss a trick, ole Betty Gregory could have given Maggie Smith a run for her money.

Gram barely waited for me to slide into my seat on the worn leather banquette before launching into a barrage of questions.

“So tell me about the immigration case,” she said as she pushed a large laminated menu across the table. I had to resist the urge to roll my eyes at her question.

Gram had been flush with delight when she heard I would be doing more pro bono work. “Focusing on more altruistic work” was how she’d put it a few days earlier, right before she told me it was nice to see me “finally following a more righteous path, like you were meant for.”

I knew she was thinking of her father when she said things like that. Though I’d never known my great-grandfather, I was well aware that he’d devoted much of his life to helping others, starting with the subsidized medical clinic he’d opened in a rural Massachusetts town near where Gram grew up. I’d always enjoyed listening to stories about the welcoming place her father created and the crucial medical care they provided for people who couldn’t afford services elsewhere. Grandpa Harry had worked himself to the bone so he and the other doctors at the clinic could improve countless lives. In recent years, it had become increasingly clear that Gram didn’t think I was living up to the same standards. The times she’d suggested I consider a lateral move to a firm more focused on public interest were too numerous to count. Or she’d bring up Jiyana’s job as a social worker and say, “Maybe something more like that.” It didn’t seem to matter to her that I’d wanted to be a corporate attorney, like my dad, ever since I was a little kid.