Pieces of Georgia Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  For more than forty years,…

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part 2

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Part 3

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Part 4

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Jen Bryant

  Other Yearling Books You Will Enjoy

  Copyright

  For—

  Leigh, Jeffrey, Rachel, Michael, Maddie Jo, and Miles…

  and for young artists everywhere

  “Live your life. Write your life. Paint your life…

  very few people do that. They’re scared of it.”

  —Andrew Wyeth

  For more than forty years, Yearling has been the leading name in classic and award-winning literature for young readers.

  Yearling books feature children’s favorite authors and characters, providing dynamic stories of adventure, humor, history, mystery, and fantasy.

  Trust Yearling paperbacks to entertain, inspire, and promote the love of reading in all children.

  part 1

  “I was a rather silent child.”

  —Jamie Wyeth

  1.

  Mrs. Yocum called me

  down to her office today. She’s the counselor at school who I

  have to go to once a week ’cause I’m on

  some “At Risk” list that I saw once on the secretary’s desk.

  (Ronnie Kline, Marianne Ferlinghetti, Sam Katzenbach,

  Danita Brown—and some others I forget—are on it, too.)

  Most of them have substance abuse next to their names,

  but I have financial/single parent—father/possible medical?

  next to mine.

  Anyway, when Mrs. Yocum called me in, I sat

  in her big green chair, and she sat

  across from me in her big blue chair—

  blinking at me like a mother owl through her oversize glasses—

  and it all started off as it usually does,

  with her asking me about my stomachaches

  and if I had raised my hand more often in class

  and if there was anything particular on my mind I thought

  I needed to talk about.

  Then all of a sudden she asked me if I

  miss you. She never

  asked me that before, and I couldn’t make the words

  come out of my mouth, they seemed to be

  stuck in my throat, or maybe they were just tangled up

  with the rabbit I seemed to have swallowed

  that started kicking the sides of my stomach,

  desperate to get out.

  I guess it must have been four or five minutes we sat there,

  her making notes in her folder

  and me with that rabbit

  thrashing around my insides and still no

  words coming out.

  I started to draw on the top of my binder,

  like it seems I always do

  when I don’t know what else to do, so I

  didn’t notice that she was trying to hand me

  a red leather notebook (this very one I’m writing in),

  and she said: “Georgia, why don’t we make

  a deal? I will excuse you

  from coming to Guidance for a while, provided—

  you promise to write down your thoughts and feelings

  at least a few times a week

  in this diary. You don’t have to show it to me, or to anybody,

  unless you want to,

  and it might be a good idea if you tried—sometimes, or

  all the time if you want—

  to write down what you might tell, or what you might ask,

  your mother

  if she were here.”

  So, Momma, that’s how I’ve come to start

  writing to you in this pretty red leather diary

  that I keep in the drawer of my nightstand.

  But I’m not sure what I’m going to tell you, ’cause my life

  is not all that interesting, but anyway

  it will fill

  a few minutes after school

  or maybe that half hour or so after dinner,

  after homework, after doing the dishes,

  when I’m stretched out in the back of our trailer and Daddy

  is trying to keep the TV down so I can fall asleep

  but loud enough so he can still watch

  whatever game is on

  and I’m trying to remember what it was like six years ago

  when we were a family

  and Daddy was happy

  and you were here.

  2.

  Today I turned thirteen.

  As usual for mid-February, it snowed a little bit, then the

  sun came out like a tease, ’cause it never got above

  thirty-two degrees.

  As usual, it was just me and Daddy having my birthday dinner

  at the fold-down table in the kitchen.

  I said I could make chicken, baked potatoes, and peas,

  but he brought home a pizza after work

  (with anchovies and green peppers)

  and we ate it right out of the box so it’d stay hot,

  ’cause it wouldn’t fit inside our oven.

  Then Daddy carried in a cake

  he’d been hiding in the closet, but when he

  uncovered it, he got mad

  because a heat vent was right next to it

  and the icing around the edges melted

  and the “Happy Birthday” ran all

  over the middle until it looked like

  a big pink puddle.

  But I didn’t mind. Last year

  he forgot my birthday altogether until

  he saw the mail and the annual

  $20 bill from Great-Uncle Doug in Atlanta.

  The cake was good—chocolate with chocolate icing.

  I had seconds and Daddy did, too, and I know

  you would’ve joined us.

  Afterward, I went through the mail and I

  got a card and the $20 bill from Gre
at-Uncle Doug.

  The card had a clown and balloons and was really made

  for a little kid, but still,

  it was nice of him to remember.

  Daddy gave me those jeans I’d seen in the Army Navy Store,

  a new pair of shoes,

  and a “blank inside” card like he always does,

  one with a flower on the front, same as always,

  and his big, slanted lettering inside:

  Georgia—

  Happy Birthday.

  Daddy

  Can I tell you something, Momma?

  Every year since you died, I’ve been waiting for him

  to write Love, Daddy inside,

  but after all this time

  I think I should wake up and stop

  my dreaming.

  3.

  Today when the bus let me off at the end of the lane,

  I pulled the mail out of the split

  wooden box that says “Kesey/McCoy”

  and still has the “19 Slipstream Road” I painted on it

  when The Oaks development went up beside us

  and all of a sudden

  even those of us who’d been here for years

  got assigned new numbers. (We still live in our same trailer,

  but not long after you died, Daddy decided

  to move us out of the trailer park,

  where there were lots of good people but also

  a few of the other kind. Now we live on a sixty-acre horse farm

  near Longwood, where it’s a lot safer for me

  to stay alone when he’s working.)

  Anyway, in the mailbox there was a long cream-colored

  envelope addressed to Miss Georgia McCoy

  and up in the left-hand corner, in dark brown ink:

  The Brandywine River Museum, Route 1, Chadds Ford, PA 19317.

  I thought maybe it was

  a mistake. Not counting Great-Uncle Doug’s birthday card

  and the postcard I get every August from school

  with my new bus number on it, I get exactly

  zero mail. But there was nothing else

  written on it. I flipped it over a few times, read

  my name and address again, then

  opened it.

  Inside, there was this strange

  formal letter, all typed up and neat, that said:

  Dear Miss McCoy:

  Enclosed please find your annual membership card, which entitles you to all privileges listed below and which expires one year from date of purchase.

  The letter said I was entitled to

  free admission anytime the museum was open, plus

  “a ten percent discount to the museum shop.”

  At the bottom, it said:

  This Brandywine gift is from:___________

  And on that blank line, someone had typed

  anonymous.

  I put it in my backpack, but all afternoon,

  while I took Blake for a long run in the field,

  and walked up to buy milk and cereal at the convenience store,

  and watched Mr. Fitz, one of the horse boarders, try to

  catch his mare in the pasture, and started to look up

  stuff on the computer for my English paper,

  I kept wondering who

  anonymous was.

  Well, it’s surely not Daddy. He won’t talk about

  my sketching and drawing. He doesn’t try

  to stop me or anything, but I can tell

  he wishes I’d find something else I like to do better.

  After all this time, Momma, he still doesn’t like anything

  that reminds him

  of you.

  It’s not my art teacher, Miss Benedetto. Teachers aren’t allowed

  to give gifts to students.

  There’s Great-Uncle Doug in Atlanta. I’ve never met him,

  but you told me once how you were his

  favorite niece (I imagine him tall and slim

  with a slow smile and big blue eyes).

  But I don’t think he knows I like to draw, or anything at all about me,

  and anyway, he already

  sent my birthday money.

  I don’t have any other relatives except

  your folks,

  who have never sent me anything,

  and I suppose they don’t even know

  where we live.

  I was going to show the letter to Daddy before dinner, but he was

  worn-out when he got home. He and his crew

  are working at a new construction site out in Lancaster County.

  He leaves about 5:30 in the morning

  and doesn’t get back until 7:00 at night. He says

  the houses are selling as fast as they can build them,

  and with spring coming,

  they’re putting them up quick.

  He brought me a photo of the model home,

  and I could not believe

  how huge it was. It was even bigger than

  my friend Tiffany’s house. (She lives in the development

  next to us, where the houses are large enough for four families

  and you have to be real careful you go into

  your own front door ’cause each house

  has the same driveway, the same lawn, the same

  scraggly trees out front,

  and mostly the same kinds of cars in the garage.)

  Daddy and me—we don’t

  talk much anyway, but when he’s that tired, we

  hardly talk at all.

  It’s not that we don’t get along. I mean, we don’t

  fight or anything. But you know how quiet Daddy was even

  when you were here?

  Well, he’s even quieter now.

  And since I’ve started growing up a little, you know,

  “exhibiting the early signs of puberty”

  (that’s straight out of our seventh-grade health book, Chapter 11),

  it’s like suddenly I’m from a different country

  even though we’ve been living in this little trailer,

  just the two of us—

  and your crazy dog, Blake, of course—

  for the past six years.

  Anyway, I decided it was not a good night

  to bring up that membership. I’m gonna wait

  until tomorrow—I’m sure that’ll be

  a much better time.

  4.

  In art class, we saw slides

  of oil paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe. Miss Benedetto told us

  how the artist grew up on a farm in Wisconsin

  and then moved to Virginia

  (and later her mother died there, too)

  and then to Texas, where she fell in love with

  all that open space (she especially loved the thunderstorms),

  and then to New York, where she painted the Hudson River

  and skyscrapers as dark and tall as canyon walls,

  but the place she loved best

  was the wide, dry desert and red clay hills

  of New Mexico.

  Most of the slides were of flowers—really big ones—

  like lilies and peonies and orchids.

  Michael Stitt, who sits behind me,

  kept whispering about the center of the flowers looking like

  our health class handouts for “The Male Anatomy,”

  and everybody started giggling until Miss Benedetto told him

  he’d have to stay in for detention

  and draw some just like that

  unless he shut up fast.

  I thought the flowers were good, but I liked

  the bone paintings best. All those skulls and hips and ribs—

  she painted them so smooth and clean, it made me

  want to touch them.

  Miss B. let us look at a bunch of Georgia O’Keeffe books

  that she brought from home

  with more paintings of mons
ter-size flowers,

  bones and skulls, and sometimes flowers and bones together.

  There was one of a cow’s skull

  that reminded me of a page in your sketchbook—

  the one with with your name, Tamara Speare,

  stamped in gold on the front—

  that Daddy keeps in his truck.

  There was another picture, of black pears in a bowl,

  and one of a cottonwood tree,

  and I know you sketched those, too.

  All this time I thought you and Daddy named me

  for the state you were both born and raised in,

  but when I looked in those books

  and remembered your sketches, I wondered

  if maybe you named me Georgia

  for the artist who painted flowers and bones

  so that you see them fresh,

  like they are secret worlds you can lose yourself inside

  if the real one gets too bad.

  Momma, I am sure

  that’s the very first thing I’d ask,

  if you were here.

  5.

  The Oaks is the development next to us

  where Tiffany lives. The builders named it for

  the grove of giant trees that used to grow there before

  the bulldozers mowed them down.

  Last spring, when Tiffany moved in with her family,

  there was no one else in the whole development.

  We met by the pond, when she was wandering around

  and I was trying to sketch the old icehouse

  and the water with the geese drifting

  like slow white ghosts among the lilies.

  She sat right down next to me and started talking, telling me

  all about where she’d lived (five different states,

  and for one year in Mexico)

  and how she was almost thirteen—

  older than most kids in sixth grade—

  and how she was going to try out for all the sports teams at school

  and asking did I know of any place where she could buy

  a new lacrosse stick

  and what kind of horses were grazing in the field