The Seventh Most Important Thing Read online

  FOUR

  The hat in question had been missing from the hall closet, along with everything else that had belonged to his father, when Arthur got home from school that November day. It was November 8, just as the judge had said. A Friday.

  Arthur remembered opening the closet to hang up his stuff. He’d just taken off his coat and tossed his shoes inside when he realized something was different. The closet was tidy and half empty. It smelled like Murphy’s oil soap.

  With his heart hammering in his chest, he began pushing through the coats that were left, searching for his father’s old corduroy jacket. It was a big, faded coat that held the shape of his father’s shoulders and smelled of stale cigarette smoke and beer and motor oil, as if he’d just taken it off after getting home from work. (Arthur still liked to imagine that he had.)

  Nothing.

  Arthur’s eyes darted toward the row of hat pegs, looking for the motorcycle cap that had belonged to his father. It was one of those slick Harley-Davidson caps—black leather with a silver chain and the orange-winged logo on the brim.

  If you wanted to find Tom Owens in a crowd, all you had to do was look for that cap, sitting slightly to one side—never straight, always jaunty. He was wearing it in nearly every picture the family had of him.

  But except for the one with his little sister’s pink knit hat, all of the pegs were empty.

  Feeling more and more uneasy, Arthur pounded up the stairs to his parents’ room, making the walls of the small house shake. He and his sister shared one room at the top of the stairs. His parents shared the other. Both rooms were shabby. Arthur’s family had never had a lot of money.

  The door to his parents’ room stood open. Arthur saw that the old radio his dad used to listen to ball games on was missing. The wedding picture that had always been on his parents’ wall was gone. Even the ashtray on the windowsill—the one he’d made for his dad in art class in third grade, a hideous green-and-blue swirl of clay—wasn’t there.

  —

  Arthur had been afraid this was coming. It had been three months since his dad died, although it still felt like yesterday.

  Arthur hadn’t forgotten how upset his mom had been after the funeral, how she’d gone through the kitchen like a bulldozer when they got home.

  “I don’t want anything that reminds me of Tom left in this house! Nothing! Not one damn thing!” she’d shouted, half crying, half yelling, as she threw out everything she could find in the refrigerator and cupboards: His father’s booze. Bags of corn chips. Packs of cigarettes. Cans of pork and beans. Anything that had belonged to him. Anything he’d liked.

  Only Arthur’s begging and his sister’s tears had finally stopped her from clearing out even more that night.

  And now the rest of his father’s things were gone.

  For the past couple of weeks, his mom had been hinting that it was time for them to move on. “We need to make a new start,” she’d been saying.

  But he never thought she would do something like this without giving him some warning. Had she just packed up his dad’s stuff and thrown everything out while he was at school?

  Feeling sick, he pounded back down the stairs, yanked on his shoes, and ran outside to look.

  Up and down the street, the curbs were lined with empty metal garbage cans. Some of the lids were already rolling away in the gusty November wind. Leftover bits of trash stuck to the city street.

  Arthur began to sprint, careening madly down his block and around the corner, as if he could somehow catch the garbage truck and save his father.

  That was when he noticed the old man who often came through the neighborhood on trash day with his grocery cart, looking for junk. “Got any shiny stuff for me today?” he’d holler if people were outside. “Anything valuable you don’t want?”

  Everybody called him the Junk Man. They knew he picked through their garbage whether they let him or not. He’d been collecting junk for years—as far back as Arthur could remember. Always pushing the same rusty cart down the street, and always wearing the same filthy tan coat, summer or winter.

  Arthur had seen the guy take wine bottles out of the trash and put them straight into his coat pockets. Or sometimes he’d haul away people’s discarded furniture—broken chairs, headboards, small tables—in a teetering pile in his cart. One person even spotted him sitting on a piano bench in their yard once, playing an invisible piano.

  He was a crazy old drunk, people said.

  —

  Which was why, when Arthur saw his father’s motorcycle cap perched crookedly on the Junk Man’s head, he completely lost it. He knew the Junk Man had stolen it from them. He knew the worthless trash picker had gone through their garbage, piece by piece, and picked out the best things of his father’s to take with him.

  And in that moment, all of the fury that had been building inside Arthur since his father’s death came exploding out.

  It was bad enough that his mother had thrown away his father’s things without even asking him. Bad enough that most people thought his father had thrown away his life and didn’t deserve to be remembered. Bad enough that other kids had their fathers and his dad was dead.

  But when Arthur saw the crazy Junk Man wearing the most important thing of all to his dad…that was the final straw. Did the old man think it was okay to steal things from dead people? Did he wander around the neighborhood waiting for people to die so he could run off with their favorite possessions? Was that what he did? Or was he mocking Arthur’s dad by wearing his hat? Was it some kind of sick joke?

  Arthur knew his mind wasn’t thinking straight, but he couldn’t control it. It was like a runaway train, racing faster and faster toward a wall.

  He saw the pile of crumbled bricks next to a closed-down building on the street corner. He picked up one. It was the only thing he could think of doing. He would punish the old man for what he’d done. He would punish death for what it had done. He would punish everybody.

  The brick felt cold and rough in his hand. It was a dangerous thing to be holding—he recognized that much. A small voice in the back of Arthur’s mind tried to tell him to stop, to think about what he was doing.

  Arthur told the voice to go to hell.

  And then he raised his arm and threw.

  FIVE

  If it had been up to the judge, he would have thrown the book at Arthur T. Owens. He didn’t believe a word of the boy’s story.

  “So I think seeing him wearing my dad’s hat was what made me, you know, do what I did,” Arthur said, finishing his stumbling explanation.

  Right. The judge didn’t buy it. In his opinion, the boy was just using his father’s death as an excuse for causing trouble.

  All you had to do was look at the facts in the kid’s paperwork: Arthur had a father who’d dropped out of school, who’d been in jail a couple of times for minor crimes, and who’d died drunk. What were the chances his son would turn out any different? He was already heading down the same path.

  “In my experience, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” the judge said to Arthur.

  But James Hampton didn’t see it that way.

  After Arthur and the judge finished talking, Mr. Hampton stood up and asked the bailiff if he could have a quick word with the judge. The bailiff asked if it could wait, and James Hampton said as politely as an army soldier, “No, sir, with all due respect, it can’t.”

  Arthur was still having a hard time believing the Junk Man and James Hampton were the same person. He kept wondering if it was some kind of trick, if maybe the guy was an actor or something.

  The two men—James Hampton and the judge—stepped out of the room, and the “quick word” stretched into an hour. The courtroom was dismissed for lunch.

  Although he wasn’t the least bit hungry, Arthur sat in the courthouse hallway with his mother and ate the baloney and cheese sandwich she had brought for him. It tasted like baloney-flavored cardboard, but he didn’t want his mom to start crying again if he turned
it down.

  She looked like she’d been crying for a year. Usually, his mom’s makeup was perfect, and her dark hair never changed. It was always styled with the same big, glossy waves held in place with the same white velvet headband.

  But now her face was puffy and splotched with red. She kept twisting a pink tissue in her fingers, until it fell into shreds on the black dress she was wearing. Pretty soon, she looked as if she was covered in melting pink snowflakes.

  Arthur wasn’t sure why his mother had worn her funeral dress to court that day. Was she already expecting the worst? He’d had to wear his funeral suit because it was the only suit he owned.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” Arthur said for the thousandth time.

  He’d said it every day she’d come to visit him in juvie. He’d put it at the bottom of every letter he’d written to her. He’d repeated it that morning when she’d brought the suit for him to wear.

  “You should have let me know something was wrong,” his mother replied for the thousandth time. “Your sister lost a tooth and got an A in reading this week. Did I tell you that already?” she asked, her eyes spilling over with tears again. Sometimes when Arthur’s mom was upset, she didn’t make much sense.

  “No, you didn’t,” Arthur replied, even though she had already told him. Twice.

  “Do you think they’ll ever let you come home again?”

  Arthur sighed. “I don’t know, Mom.”

  But he didn’t think the chances were very good.

  —

  When court resumed after lunch, Arthur was called to the front. He figured he was doomed when the judge said, “This is a highly unconventional sentence, young man,” before he had reached the judge’s bench.

  Earlier that day, Arthur had seen kids who had stolen a few lousy bags of chips and candy get sent back to juvie for sixty days or more by Judge Warner. Everybody said he was one of the toughest judges around. So Arthur knew something “unconventional” had to be pretty bad.

  “In other words,” the judge continued sternly, glaring at Arthur, “it is not the punishment I would have chosen for you.”

  It wasn’t hard to imagine the various punishments the judge might have chosen. Arthur had already pictured all of them.

  The judge glanced toward the Junk Man, who had returned to his seat in the third row and was sitting with his hands folded in his lap. “However, Mr. Hampton has made it clear to me that he is not interested in retribution, but in redemption.” He looked at Arthur. “Do you know what redemption means?”

  Arthur thought it might have something to do with church, but he was pretty sure the judge wasn’t allowed to sentence people to go to church.

  He shook his head.

  “Well, you ought to know. Look it up later. Re-demp-tion.” The judge gestured impatiently at the courtroom. “I don’t have time to be everybody’s schoolteacher here. As you can see,” he continued, pointing toward the Junk Man, “you have left Mr. Hampton unable to do his work as a result of his injuries, so he has offered an unusual proposal for me to consider.”

  The judge fixed his gaze on Arthur. “Instead of sentencing you to the Juvenile Detention Home for an exceedingly long time—which I won’t hesitate to do if I ever see you in my courtroom again—Mr. Hampton has requested that you be assigned to work for him until his arm has healed.”

  The courtroom behind Arthur buzzed with confusion. What had the judge just said? The brick-throwing kid was being sentenced to work for the guy he’d tried to kill? Had Judge Warner completely lost his mind?

  Arthur stared at the judge, as confused and startled as everyone else. Work for the Junk Man? What could the judge possibly be thinking?

  In spite of himself, Arthur spoke up. He made sure to use the Junk Man’s real name, although it still seemed strangely unreal to him. “What sort of work does Mr. Hampton do, sir?”

  The judge arched his eyebrows. “You don’t know?”

  “I’m not sure,” Arthur mumbled. He couldn’t imagine any judge would knowingly sentence a kid to dig through people’s garbage looking for wine bottles and busted-up furniture. Did the old man have another job nobody knew about?

  The judge smiled in a rather smug way. “Well, I guess you’ll soon find out, won’t you, Mr. Owens?”

  And with that, Arthur Owens was allowed to go home.

  SIX

  Going home was the best part of Arthur’s sentence. He decided he’d worry about the other parts later. Anything was better than a ride back to juvie in the grim gray school bus with bars on the windows and a driver with a gun.

  For once, he didn’t mind having to kick his sister’s pile of stuffed animals out of the way when he walked into their bedroom. At least he had a bedroom he could walk into.

  The frosting-pink bedspread on Barbara’s side of the room didn’t bug him nearly as much as it usually did either. He didn’t even care that his sister had left a large crayon picture on his bed showing Barbara, frowning, with the words Don’t Do Any More Bad Things, Arthur underneath it.

  He was just glad to be home.

  —

  “We need to have a talk,” his mom said, sticking her head into the bedroom before he’d had time to unpack or get changed.

  “Now?” Arthur sighed. Couldn’t he have five minutes to himself?

  “I don’t want to let it wait.”

  His mom was like that. Whenever she had something on her mind, she had to talk about it right then. Arthur was the exact opposite. He could hold things inside forever.

  They sat on the saggy bed in his mom’s room, which still felt empty with all of his dad’s things gone. Although the door was half closed, Arthur could tell his little sister was sitting right outside. He could hear her fidgety feet on the stairway.

  “We’re going to have some new rules now that you’re home,” his mom said. She pulled a folded piece of notepaper from the pocket of her funeral dress. “I’ve written them down.”

  “Rules?” Arthur was surprised, because his mom had never been very strict.

  Arthur’s mom glanced down at her paper. “First rule. You are going to talk to me more when you are upset. I mean that, Artie.” She looked at Arthur, her mascara still smudged from the day in court. “You have to talk to me more about how you’re feeling and not just hold it inside. I don’t want to go through this again.” He could see her eyes starting to tear up.

  “Fine. Okay. I will,” he said, trying to get his mom to move on to another topic. He didn’t want to keep going over why he’d thrown the brick.

  “Second, no more getting into trouble with the police. That’s how your dad started when he was younger. Getting into fights at school or street racing or whatever else he did back then.”

  He glared at his mom. “I’m not like that.”

  It kind of made Arthur mad that she would say this to him, but deep down, he couldn’t help wondering if she was right. His middle name, Thomas, was from his dad, but that didn’t mean they were the same people. Or did it? Until he threw the brick, Arthur had never been in trouble with the cops before.

  “Well, I just want to make sure,” his mom said in a not-very-convincing voice. She looked down at her paper again. “Third, you will come straight home every day after school to watch Barbara.”

  “Okay.” Arthur wasn’t really sure why this was a new rule. He’d always watched Barbara.

  His mom folded up the paper and stuck it back in her dress pocket. “Last, and this is hard for me to say…” His mom’s voice shook a little. “We have a lot of bills right now. Until I find a new job, things are pretty tight, okay?” Arthur knew his mom was working a couple of waitressing jobs to make ends meet. He also knew that some of their money problems were due to him, since the court had said they had to pay the Junk Man’s hospital bills.

  “That’s it.” She reached out and gave him a hug. She smelled like soap and hair spray. “I love you and I’m glad you’re home.”

  “I’m glad to be home too,” Arthur said awkwardly
, feeling embarrassed.

  It felt like he’d been away for months.

  SEVEN

  “Were you scared?” Barbara asked, sucking on a grape lollipop as she watched Arthur unpack his paper bag of clothes later.

  The small paper bag was all he’d been allowed to bring when the cops had arrested him for throwing the brick after somebody had seen him running back home. You could take one toothbrush, one comb, and one set of street clothes to wear when you left juvie. That was it. In juvie, everybody wore the same olive-green jumpsuits. If you were lucky, the previous owner hadn’t died in them.

  Arthur shrugged. “No, I wasn’t scared. Not really.”

  “Did everybody in the jail have guns?”

  “I wasn’t in jail.”

  “Mom said you were.”

  “Well, I wasn’t.”

  Carefully, Arthur put his clothes in the two top drawers of the dresser he shared with his sister. It was odd how grateful he was for everything all of a sudden: The beat-up old dresser with Barbara’s Winnie the Pooh stickers on it. The clothes he hadn’t seen in three weeks. His sister. The disgusting smell of her grape lollipop.

  “Was it a school for bad kids?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Did you make any friends there?” Barbara stopped partway through licking her lollipop, as if this scary possibility had just occurred to her.

  Arthur had to stifle a sarcastic laugh. “No.”

  There were no friends in juvie, he thought. Just varying degrees of people you didn’t want to have as enemies.

  Arthur’s bunkmate had been a huge kid called Slash. On Arthur’s first day there, Slash had held a rusty razor to his neck and told him that if he farted, belched, barfed, or breathed too loudly in bed—Arthur was on the top bunk—he was dead.

  Fortunately, Slash had turned out to be the loudest snorer in the room, so Arthur still had a head attached to his shoulders, even if he hadn’t gotten much sleep.

  “You know, I can help you make better friends if you want,” Barbara said. “I have lots of them at school.” She began going through a long list of names on her fingers.