The Seventh Most Important Thing Read online

  “Okay. Thanks.” Arthur forced himself to smile at his sister. Despite everything that had happened, somehow she was the only one in the family who seemed to have stayed fairly okay. Normal. And right now, he didn’t mind sharing a room with a normal kid, even if she was a curly-haired seven-year-old who played with Barbies. At least her name wasn’t Slash.

  —

  That night, after Arthur crawled into his bed, he was surprised when his little sister whispered from the darkness on her side of the room, “You awake, Arthur?” She’d gone to bed hours before him.

  “It’s late. Aren’t you supposed to be asleep?” he replied, trying to sound big-brotherly. It was past eleven.

  “Yes, but I can’t.”

  “Well, try.” Arthur turned to face the wall and tugged the covers over his shoulders, as if the conversation was finished.

  “Are you going to die, Arthur?”

  Arthur’s head snapped back toward his sister’s side of the room. “What?”

  “Some of my friends said Daddy died because he was bad and drank too much and went too fast and crashed his motorcycle, and now you’ve been bad and you had to go to jail, so are you going to die too?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Barbara,” Arthur blurted out. “I wasn’t in jail. I’m not going to die. Just be quiet and go to sleep, will you?”

  Arthur knew he should have been more understanding. His sister was only a little kid trying to get some answers.

  There was a long silence. Now Arthur couldn’t sleep. His bed felt too soft. The room seemed too weirdly quiet after juvie. Barbara had started him thinking about death and his dad.

  Then Barbara spoke up again—almost a whisper.

  “Do you think Daddy’s in heaven?”

  Arthur gave an aggravated sigh. “Of course he is. Where else do you think he’d be? God, you’re driving me nuts with your questions tonight, Barbara. I’m tired and I want to go to sleep, so just shut up and stop talking, okay?” He smacked his pillow and turned toward the wall again. Thankfully, Barbara seemed to get the message this time.

  —

  But the truth was, Arthur wasn’t sure. About heaven or anything else. He had a lot of doubts. The doubts often kept him awake. Sometimes they gave him nightmares. He could see the cops at their door, with little drops of rain glistening like glass on their shoulders, saying the word instantly again and again. His father had died instantly.

  He remembered overhearing one of his aunts talking at the funeral home, saying how it was too bad her brother—Arthur’s dad—hadn’t been more of a religious person in life because heaven was such a beautiful place for believers to spend eternity.

  She never did say where she thought everybody else went.

  After about fifteen minutes of lying there in the darkness, thinking about heaven and his dad and the word instantly and how he probably shouldn’t have been so mean to Barbara the first night he was home, he threw off the covers and got out of bed.

  He had just reached the door when Barbara whispered, “Where are you going?”

  “To get a book downstairs.”

  “Why?”

  “To look up something. Go to sleep,” he said firmly, shutting the door behind him.

  His mother’s bedroom door was already closed. He padded softly down the steps to the small bookshelf in the living room—the one that was stuffed with mail and bills. Somewhere on the shelves was a dictionary, he remembered. His mother’s high school name, Linda Wesley, was on the inside. That was how old it was.

  He turned to the word he was looking for:

  redemption (ri-demp'-shun) n. 1. The act of being rescued or set free. 2. The act of being saved from consequences. 3. The payment of an obligation. 4. Salvation from sin.

  If he was supposed to understand what redemption meant after reading the definitions, he didn’t. How could the judge think working for the Junk Man would rescue him and set him free? What did “the payment of an obligation” mean? And what consequences, other than juvie, was he being saved from?

  None of it made any sense. Irritated, he pushed the dictionary onto the shelf and went back to bed.

  —

  The next morning, when he walked outside to get the newspaper for his mother, he found something else he didn’t understand.

  At first he thought there was a deflated balloon on the porch steps. Then he realized, no—it was a hat. A black leather motorcycle cap missing the orange Harley-Davidson wings on its brim.

  Arthur’s heart pounded as he picked it up. It was his father’s old hat, he was almost certain. Underneath the cap was a note scrawled on a scrap of cardboard:

  Arthur looked up and down his street, which was empty. He had no idea what to think.

  EIGHT

  Arthur wondered if he should tell someone about the note, especially the weird part about the wings and St. James. Had the Junk Man left it for him? And if so, why had he signed it St. James?

  He considered bringing the note to his probation officer when he went for his first appointment a few days later, but after meeting her, he was glad he hadn’t. In juvie, he’d heard that some officers were nice and some were complete jerks. His officer turned out to be a short, box-shaped woman named Wanda Billie who didn’t seem to have much patience for anything.

  Her office was in the basement of the courthouse. Arthur’s mother dropped him off while she went to look for free parking, and it took him forever to find the right hallway and the right numbered door. The whole place appeared to have been designed as a human maze.

  “You’re late,” Officer Billie said when he walked into her office fifteen minutes past his two o’clock appointment time.

  Arthur glanced at the clock above the officer’s head and tried to explain. “I couldn’t find—”

  “Stop.” The officer held up her square-fingered hand. “Are you late or are you not late, Mr. Owens?”

  “The elevator wasn’t—”

  “Stop.”

  Already the hand thing was getting old. Arthur wondered if the lady had been a traffic cop in a previous life.

  “Did I ask you what made you late?” The officer chomped on her gum.

  “No, ma’am.” Arthur shook his head.

  “Have a seat.” Officer Billie gestured to the cracked black plastic chair in front of her desk. Everything in the room appeared to be broken. The wall next to him had a spiderweb of cracks in it, as if someone had tried (and failed) to put their fist through it. He sat down gingerly on the broken chair. He kept his hands in his lap.

  “So.” Officer Billie leaned back in her chair. “You’re the kid with the anger problems who threw a rock at a black man’s head.”

  “Brick,” Arthur tried to explain. “And it wasn’t because—”

  “Stop.” The officer put up her hand again. “I don’t care about the details. All I care about is you, buddy. Right here. Right now.” She leaned forward and rapped her knuckles on the desk. “How are you going to change your life?”

  Arthur didn’t answer, and he didn’t think Officer Billie was expecting an answer, because she pushed on without waiting for his reply.

  “You understand you’ve been given a second chance, right? I’m in charge of overseeing your second chance.” She pointed to her barrel-shaped self. “And you better not mess up. None of my kids ever messes up. Got that?”

  Arthur nodded.

  Putting on a pair of reading glasses, she picked up the single sheet of paper that was sitting in the middle of her desk. Arthur had never seen anybody with such an empty desk. He hoped he wasn’t her only project.

  “Now, it says here you’ll be working four hours a week for Mr. Hampton until you complete the one hundred and twenty hours required by the court.” The officer stopped reading and glared at Arthur over the top of her glasses. “That doesn’t mean a hundred and eighteen hours or a hundred and nineteen and a half hours or a hundred and nineteen and three-quarters hours, got it? I don’t care whether you get lost, sick, tired, or your d
og dies. You are required to finish a hundred and twenty hours, no excuses.”

  Arthur managed to resist saying that he didn’t have a dog. “What sort of work will I be doing?” he asked politely.

  “Whatever you are told to do, buddy.”

  He knew he shouldn’t keep going with this futile line of conversation, but he did. “I’m not sure the judge knows that sometimes…” He hesitated. “The Junk Man—well, Mr. Hampton—goes through people’s garbage looking for stuff, so I just wanted to make sure that I’m not—”

  “Stop.” Officer Billie held up her hand. “Who is the one with the problem here?”

  Arthur had to try very hard not to sigh out loud. “Me?”

  “That’s right. Did Mr. Hampton throw the brick?”

  “No.”

  “Did Mr. Hampton get himself arrested and sent to the detention home?”

  “No.”

  The officer jabbed her finger toward Arthur. “Then I don’t think he’s the one we should be worrying about here, do you?”

  “No, probably not,” Arthur mumbled. He stared at the scratched wooden top of the desk, wondering how many times he had to meet with Officer Billie. He hoped it wasn’t very often.

  As if she’d read his mind, the woman said, “Once a month. You come here once a month—next time, be on time—and we’ll talk about how your assignment is progressing. Mr. Hampton will record your hours and report to me also. Then I report to the judge. The buck stops with me. That’s it. Pretty simple. Got it?”

  “Yes,” Arthur replied, desperately hoping the meeting was over.

  Officer Billie held a crisply folded piece of paper toward him. “Here’s the address where you are to meet Mr. Hampton on Saturday for your first day of work. Be on time. Work hard. Four hours, no excuses, remember?”

  Arthur took the paper and nodded. “Yes, ma’am.” He stood up and started to ease toward the door.

  “Stop,” the officer called out behind him. Arthur didn’t even need to look to know she had her hand up. He turned around reluctantly.

  “Don’t forget,” she said, pointing a warning finger at him. “Don’t mess up.”

  NINE

  Arthur kept hearing Officer Billie’s words in his head as he walked to James Hampton’s house on the first Saturday in December. Don’t mess up.

  A miserable, pebbly white sleet was coming down from the colorless sky. Arthur had told his mom he wanted to walk. It was only a few blocks to the address on the paper, he’d insisted. Plus, he knew they didn’t have the money to waste on gas.

  Arthur wiped his cold and already-running nose on his sleeve. Stupidly, he hadn’t thought to wear gloves or bring a hat. He’d just wanted to get out of the house that morning and get his first four hours over with. At least there would only be 116 more to go after that.

  He had no clue what to expect. Would Mr. Hampton have him running errands or cleaning toilets or what? He wasn’t even sure who to expect. The crazy Junk Man with the ragged tan coat and fogged eyeglasses? Or the polite, soft-spoken man in the brown tweed suit?

  He pulled Officer Billie’s paper out of his pocket and checked the address again. On the back of the same page, Arthur’s mother had drawn a pretty lame map of how to get to Seventh Street, where he was supposed to go.

  Arthur shook his head. It wasn’t like he needed a map. His school bus drove past these neighborhoods every day, although he’d never actually walked around in them. At the next street, he had to make a left.

  Arthur squinted at the numbers as he walked. Unlike his street, where the small bungalows and square yards were almost all the same, the houses on Seventh Street were old two-story ones, jammed together like mismatched puzzle pieces. Some had porches in front and leaning garages in the back. Others had only a narrow patch of yard with a gravel driveway between them.

  Scattered along the street were some neighborhood businesses that looked as if they’d been there for years: A gas station on the corner. An auto repair shop with a couple of rusty cars in its side lot. A tattoo shop called Groovy Jim’s Tattoos. And a small grocery store.

  The only thing missing was the address he was trying to find.

  Arthur walked up and down both sides of the street. There wasn’t much traffic for a Saturday morning. A few city buses drove by without stopping. He folded and unfolded the paper in his pocket, checking it over and over again, until the ink was smeared and the sleet had turned the page into a soggy mess. He was freezing and losing time.

  The closest address to the one on his page was the tattoo shop’s. He remembered Officer Billie’s warning: No excuses. I don’t care whether you get lost, sick, tired, or your dog dies.

  He decided to pull open the door of Groovy Jim’s Tattoos.

  A blast of warm air hit his face. The weird antiseptic smell of the place made his eyes water. He blinked, trying to see if anybody was around. Hawaiian-sounding ukulele music was playing somewhere. A black-and-white cat came over and rubbed against his ankles.

  “Can I help you?”

  All Arthur saw at first was a frizzy mop of hair behind the counter. Then the rest of the guy emerged from where he’d been sitting. There was no question this was Groovy Jim. Arthur didn’t even have to ask. The guy wore a T-shirt with the words Ban the Bomb across the front. Green tattoos spiraled up his skinny white arms.

  Reluctantly, Arthur pulled the scrap of paper out of his pocket, wishing he didn’t have to look so stupid in front of a stranger. With the way his eyes were watering, he knew the guy was probably going to think he’d been crying.

  “I’m trying to find this address,” he mumbled, holding the page toward Groovy Jim. “You know where it is?”

  The guy glanced at the paper briefly and handed it back to him. “So how long have you been looking?”

  Arthur stretched the time only a little bit. “About an hour or two.”

  That was what it had felt like, anyhow.

  The guy laughed. “That’s all?”

  Arthur couldn’t tell if he was joking. When he didn’t smile, Groovy Jim gave him an odd look. “Okay.” He motioned toward a door at the back. “Follow me. I’ll show you where it is, kiddo.”

  Arthur didn’t really like being called kiddo, but he didn’t think the guy meant it as an insult. Groovy Jim seemed like the kind of person who probably called everybody kiddo. Even the cat.

  He also didn’t appear to be in much of a hurry. He moved through his shop as if he was on a Sunday stroll in the park.

  None of this was helping Arthur get his four hours started any sooner.

  When they finally reached the back of the shop, it took Groovy Jim another few minutes to unlock and push open the metal door. A gust of cold air rushed in.

  “The place you were trying to find is in the back. See the garage?” As he leaned against the heavy door to keep it open, Groovy Jim pointed to a small brick building standing by itself at the end of the gravel alley. “That’s the place you’re looking for.”

  A garage? Arthur balked. He hadn’t expected a garage. Had he been given the wrong address? How was a garage somebody’s house?

  Groovy Jim glanced at him curiously, maybe wondering what was up. “You know Mr. Hampton, right?”

  “Kind of,” Arthur replied, tugging at the jagged front of his hair uncertainly. He looked at the garage again, making sure it really was a garage. There were no front doors or windows or anything, were there?

  “Does he live there?” he asked.

  Groovy Jim shook his head. “Don’t think so. He just comes here to work. I see him a lot in the evenings, carrying things in and out with his grocery cart. I guess he builds or fixes things or something back there.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  Groovy Jim shrugged. “Don’t know. Never asked.” He waved a tattooed arm at the garage. “Go ahead and knock. If he’s there, I’m sure he’ll answer. He seems like a nice enough guy. But I gotta go back inside. I’m freezing out here, kiddo.”

  “Okay, thank
s.” Arthur forced a smile.

  “Good luck.”

  The door closed behind Groovy Jim with a hard slam, and Arthur was left on his own in a swirl of spitting snow.

  TEN

  A garage. Arthur still had no idea what to do.

  He wandered slowly down the gravel alleyway toward the building. It was your typical brick garage with one of those big corrugated metal doors. Someone had painted the address over the door, but they hadn’t done a very good job of it. Long drips ran down the bricks, so the numbers almost looked as if they were melting. Since none of the address was visible from the street, Arthur wasn’t sure why anybody had bothered.

  On the far side of the garage, Arthur noticed another door. It had a real doorknob, at least, which gave him a little bit of hope. Maybe if he knocked on it…

  As he stepped over broken bits of concrete and coils of rusted wire to reach the side door, he tried not to think about how dangerous all of this seemed: An out-of-the-way garage. A run-down neighborhood. Nobody around. He knew he should probably go back home and call Officer Billie or the judge or somebody.

  But if he complained, it was possible—no, extremely likely—that they’d send him back to juvie. And which was worse: wandering around deserted alleys or having rusty razors held to your neck?

  He knocked on the side door cautiously. Just a few knocks to see if anybody answered.

  No one did.

  He pounded on the door a little harder and tried the doorknob.

  It didn’t budge.

  Feeling more irritated, he walked around to the front of the garage and banged his fist on the corrugated door—which turned out to be a really dumb idea, because the door was freezing cold and a lot more painful to hit than you’d think. He could hear the hollow thumps of his fist echoing inside the building. If James Hampton was working inside, he was either completely deaf or ignoring him.

  —