Tumbleweeds by Leila Meacham Page B

with Rufus after school today. What do you say?”
    “Fine with me, boys.”
    “Aunt Mabel has a sack of old lettuce for Sampson. Mind if we feed it to him?”
    “What a splendid idea.”
    She expected they’d be gone by the time the daffodils died, but they were not.
    One afternoon they found her morose. “What’s the matter?” John asked, sitting down beside her on the front porch swing of her grandmother’s house. Trey took the other side, next to Rufus.
    “My daddy did not leave any money for my care, and now I’m a financial burden on my grandmother,” she said.
    “Ah, how do you know?” Trey asked.
    Cathy related her grandmother’s conversation with Miss Mabel she’d overheard. “As I suspected, Sonny was completely broke when he died,” Emma had confided when she’d thought Cathy was out of the house. “They lived entirely beyond their means, and their lifestyle was supported on credit. He let his life insurance premiums lapse, and everything was mortgaged to the hilt. The money from the sale of the house and possessions will go to his creditors. There’s nothing left.”
    She had gone on to say that now she’d really have to watch her pennies to provide properly for Cathy, but she would manage. She still had Buddy’s insurance money put away and that would help toward college expenses. She’d ask the county to waive the retirement age for her job, and so what if she didn’t take the trip to England she’d planned?
    Cathy had already realized her grandmother did not have much money. She never failed to check the prices of things and served leftovers and turned off lights when they weren’t needed—things Cathy’s family never had bothered to do. It hurt her dreadfully to know her grandmother would have to give up things because of her.
    “She loves you, Catherine Ann,” John said. “That will make her sacrifices easier.”
    “Yeah,” Trey said. “You’re better to spend money on than a dumb ol’ trip to England.”
    A warmth spread through her, easing her hurt. Sometimes she felt like a valley sitting between the boys. They blocked the wind and storms like friendly mountains. “You really think so?”
    “
Yes!
” the boys said together.
    They were as different from each other as bacon and eggs, but they went together as nicely. John was quiet and calm, patient and steady. He blended in. Trey was someone who stood out. You knew he was there—in the classroom, hallways, cafeteria, school bus. You couldn’t miss him. “Tempestuous,” she’d heard his aunt describe him, and Cathy agreed. Her grandmother had explained that Trey’s brash attitude was a shield against the hurt and humiliation of his parents not wanting him. If his uncle had lived, Trey might have grown up a different boy. Harvey Church had been a man’s man, a big-game hunter and fisherman who would have taken him in hand, and Trey was of the nature who would have adored him for doing it. But four months after Trey had come to live with them, his hale and hearty uncle had died unexpectedly of a heart attack and Trey had been left in the sole care of a retiring aunt ill-equipped to handle a precocious, willful nephew.
    And poor John’s mother had died when he was seven, leaving him to the mercy of his hard-drinking father.
    So Trey’s remark had been right that day in Miss Whitby’s class. They were all orphans one way or the other, and that created a special bond among them. Without Trey and John, she couldn’t have endured attending Kersey Elementary School.
    The winter thawed to spring, and the trio turned twelve. For two weeks in March, Trey was older than John. Trey looked upon the fourteen-day age difference as a cause for celebration at least in his own mind, for it gave him some sort of edge over his friend.
    The boys were shooting up in height, and—just as Cathy waslosing her little-girl shape—so maturity was slowly chiseling the boyishness from their features. To mark their last year of innocence,