Brady was waiting for us out in the parking lot behind the school, leaning up against the front of his car with his hands in his pockets. He smiled and waved when he saw us. Me and Ruby waved back.
Mrs. Davis was at the front of the line, but she stopped when she got to Brady, and she looked over at Selena. “If anybody wants to go down to the ball field then y’all go ahead and follow Selena. The rest of you can head out to the playground, and I’ll be out there in a second.” Selena led some of the kids down the stairs to the field, and the rest of them started walking toward the playground. A couple of them turned around and stared at Brady while they walked off. I’m sure they were wondering who he was and why he’d been out there waiting on us. They’d had all kinds of questions for me and Ruby once we’d come back. They’d seen us on the news when we were missing, and a couple of them had brought in our pictures from the newspaper and showed them to us.
But Mrs. Davis already knew who Brady was. Right before school had started in August, Brady had brought me and Ruby to meet all of our teachers, and he told them about us having to move into the home after what happened to Mom. We’d even gotten to meet the principal.
Brady reached out and shook Mrs. Davis’s hand. “How are you doing?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said, smiling. “I’m doing even better now that we’ve got our girls back home.” She reached down and squeezed my shoulder and put her hand on Ruby’s head. Ruby looked at her. “Y’all have fun,” Mrs. Davis said. She walked off toward the playground.
“Where are we going?” Ruby asked.
Brady opened the car door and folded the seat back. “I thought we’d do something fun, like go to the park,” he said. “Y’all are going to be leaving next week, and I figured this might be one of the last days we’ll get to see each other.”
Ruby climbed into the backseat and buckled herself in, and I pushed the seat back into place and got in the front. I’d ridden in the back with Ruby on the whole ride from St. Louis back to Gastonia, but now I felt like riding up front with Brady. His car was little and old, not quite as old as Wade’s, and it smelled a little bit like cigarettes. Brady started up the engine and rolled down the windows. Then he turned the radio on and looked at the clock. Then he looked at me. “All right, copilot,” he said. “Where to first?”
Our first stop was at the Dairy Queen right beside the school. Brady let me and Ruby both order whatever we wanted. I got a vanilla ice cream cone dipped in red shell, and Ruby got the same thing dipped in the chocolate. “Does Miss Crawford let y’all have ice cream?” Brady asked.
“Sometimes,” I said. “But only after dinner.”
“Well, maybe we shouldn’t tell her about this.”
We headed down Union Road and turned onto Garrison and headed toward Lineberger Park, but right when Brady turned on his blinker to pull into the parking lot, I decided I wanted to do something else first. “Can we drive past our old house?” I asked him.
Brady sat there with his blinker on for a second, and then he looked at the clock on the radio and turned and looked out at the park.
“It’s just right up the street,” I said. “It won’t take but just a second.”
“Okay,” he finally said. He flipped his blinker the other way, and he pulled back into traffic and turned left off Garrison and onto Chestnut.
As we turned I looked out at the pay phone on the corner of the parking lot at Fayles’ and saw that it had been fixed.
“What are you looking at?” Brady asked.
“Nothing,” I said. I turned back around and looked out at the houses as we passed them on the way to our street. “We ain’t seen our old house since we moved into the home.”
“I bet it feels like that’s been a long time,” Brady said.
“But everything looks the same,” Ruby said from the backseat. She’d taken off her seat belt, and she was leaning forward in between me and Brady and looking out the windshield. I thought about telling her to put her seat belt back on, but we were going so slow now that I figured it didn’t matter one way or the other whether she had it on or not.
I showed Brady which house had been ours, and he slowed down and stopped his car in front of it and leaned toward me to look out my window. It still looked like the same little white house it had been when we’d lived there. Aside from the plastic chair that was missing from the porch, it looked like we’d never left. And then I started to notice little things about it that were different. A set of pale blue curtains were pulled closed in the living room, and a red plastic cup sat on the windowsill on the other side of the glass. The screen was missing from the bottom half of the screen door, and a couple of old newspapers that still had the rubber bands around them had been left on the porch. There was no car in the driveway, which wasn’t any different because we’d never had one either, but in the high grass at the end of the driveway a new tricycle was turned over on its side. I figured it belonged to whoever was living there now.
We must’ve been sitting there for close to a minute when a man opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch in his bare feet, letting the screen door slam shut behind him. He was about Mom’s age, and he had on a white tank top and blue jeans. He used his shoulder to hold a portable phone up against his ear while he took out a cigarette and lit it. The three of us just sat there staring at him, and I figured he wondered what in the world we were doing out there. He nodded his head at us, and I waved.
“We’d better go,” Brady said.
“Okay,” I said.
Brady turned around in the neighbor’s driveway, and when we passed the house I turned around in my seat to look back at it, and I saw that Ruby was looking back at it too.
Something felt different when we pulled off our old street and turned left onto Chestnut. The day had changed somehow. Brady had turned off the radio and rolled up the windows, and none of us said a word on the way back down to the park. Maybe it was seeing our old house that made us so quiet, or maybe it was seeing a stranger standing on the front porch of a place where we’d never live again, especially now that we were on our way to Alaska, that made me and Ruby feel something that we didn’t quite understand.
But as soon as Brady pulled into the parking lot at Lineberger Park and turned off the engine, it was clear exactly what was on his mind. “I want to go ahead and let y’all know that you might see your daddy today.” He looked at me, and then he turned toward the backseat and looked at Ruby.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“He’s here,” Brady said, nodding toward the park. “I mean, he might be here. I don’t know. I just wanted you both to know that you might see him. And I didn’t want it to scare you.”
“We’re not scared of him,” Ruby said. “He’s our dad.”
“I know,” Brady said. He reached out and opened his door, and then he looked back at Ruby again. “I know.”
It had been two weeks since we’d left with Wade, and now it was the middle of September and the summer was definitely over. Even though the past couple of days had been hot ones, it was almost cool out there in the park with all that shade and all those tall trees around us. The park was full of people, and me and Ruby held hands and followed Brady toward the playground. He sat down on a bench, and we went and stood in front of him. Ruby looked at everybody around her like she expected Wade to walk up and say “hey” at any second, but I only looked at Brady.