Tumbleweeds by Leila Meacham Page A

Church, by the way, Trey’s aunt.”
    “I’ve heard so many nice things about you,” Cathy said, extending her small hand from beneath the blanket, and John thought how polite and grown-up she was as Aunt Mabel shook it. “It’s lovely to meet you at last. Thank Trey for me, will you? And John—” She turned to him, and he had trouble with his breath again when she looked into his eyes. “Thank you, too, so much. I just love him.”
    “Well, on that perfect note, I’ll be on my way,” Mabel said.
    Emma followed her to the door, and John stood awkwardly, his glance going from Cathy’s blond head bent over the puppy swaddled in her arms to the kitchen window. John was still holding the box and didn’t know where to set it. Three bowls and spoons had been arranged on the table for supper, along with an extra place mat across from where he supposed he was to sit.
    He knew who the place mat was laid for when Emma returned to the kitchen and said, “John, poke your head out and tell Trey Don to come in. We don’t want him to freeze to death out there.”

Chapter Nine
     
    S he was sure once her newness wore off, the boys would forget about her. After all, she was a girl and boys did not play with girls. “How long are Trey and John to look after me?” she asked her grandmother. It was the end of February. The daffodils were up. All their delicate golden heads had broken through the soil, and Rufus had been taught to stay away from them. The boys had helped her train him most afternoons.
    “No, no, Rufus!” they would say when they saw him heading for the beds, clapping their hands softly so as not to scare him. “Over here, boy. Over here,” and they would pat a tree or coax him to another spot.
    “Why? Are you getting tired of them?” her grandmother asked.
    “Oh no. I just wondered when they didn’t have to be with me anymore.”
    “If anything was said about a set time, it’s passed, sweetheart. The boys like being with you. They enjoy being your friend.”
    She found it odd having two big boys as her friends, but it was also nice. Without Trey and John, she would have missed Laura and her home even more. Her classmates at Kersey Elementary School were friendly enough, but they were shy of her. It didn’t take longfor them to notice she was smart. She finished tests before everyone else and read library books when she wasn’t working, and the teachers called on her for answers when nobody else knew them and read her themes before the class as an example of how they should be written. The teachers praised the neatness of her papers and her penmanship while she burned with embarrassment under her classmates’ sidelong gazes, but not enough to make herself one of them by doing sloppy work.
    Trey and John were perfectly comfortable with her and didn’t mind that she was “gifted and talented” and wanted to be a doctor and could speak French. They did not think it strange that she sat with her back straight in class and her feet crossed at the ankles. Good posture, she’d been taught, could improve your height.
    It was not yet time for baseball season, when the boys would attend practice after school, so they had time on their hands to spend with her. They popped up everywhere, wearing silly grins, trying to make her think they were just passing by and in the neighborhood. It was not unusual to see them stroll into the county library, where her grandmother worked, if the bus dropped Cathy there after school, or in the park where she’d taken Rufus, or at the First Baptist Church, where her grandmother had arranged for her to practice on the piano in the sanctuary. They seemed to manufacture every excuse and invitation to be with her.
    “Trey and I need help with math, Cathy. Is it okay if we come to your house after school?”
    “Of course, John.”
    “My aunt has an attic full of old hunting trophies. Want to see them, Catherine Ann?”
    “I’d love to, Trey.”
    “Let’s play Frisbees