The Last Jeskey - Chapter 39

 

The Last Jeskey

By Karen Singer

 

Chapter 39

 

(Day 8 – Thursday)

 

Freaky

 

Shantel hugged that guitar thing all the way home.  I still didn’t know what it was for, except making noise of some sort.  Shantel said it needed tuning, but where did you get tuning?  I wasn’t aware of anything like that at the farm.

Once home, we got everything out of the car and Natalie took off, along with that cop car that insisted on following us all day.  I still hadn’t figured that out.  All three of us worked on putting everything away, but mostly it all got put where Shantel and Lisa decided they should put everything, and they started moving the few things that I had in those places instead.  How was I going to find those things when I needed them?  I had no clue what most of that stuff was that we had gotten from that store.

When we were done, the strangest thing to see was that new coffee machine sitting on the counter.  Lisa seemed to take real pride in setting it up, including filling it with water from the sink.  She put some brown stuff in it that she said was the coffee.  I thought the coffee was what the machine made.  I watched as she pushed a button, and then stood there watching it.  It didn’t do anything at all.  Was it broken?  And then it made a sound.  Then another sound.  Then more sounds.

Lisa started searching through the cabinets again.  The same cabinets they had just been through to put stuff away.  If she was looking for something, she shouldn’t have moved any of it.  Before that, I could have told her where anything she wanted was.  Now, I didn’t know myself.

“Where’s your coffee cups?” she asked me.

“Coffee cups?”

“You know, cups.  Mugs.  Something like that to drink hot drinks from.”

“We don’t have any,” I told her.

“What do you mean, you don’t have any?”

“We don’t have any.  Just glasses for the guys to drink their liquor from.”

She seemed angry at that, but she went back to the cabinet with the glasses and pulled three of them out.  When the coffee machine was done, she poured some of it out into two of the glasses.  “Want some?” she asked me.

“No!  I had some at Natalie’s.  It was awful!”

She laughed a bit.  “True,” she agreed.

Why did she drink it then?  She carried one of the hot glasses of coffee over to Shantel and gave it to her, then she went to the refrigerator and pulled out an orange bottle.  She poured some of it into the third glass and handed it to me.  “What’s this?” I asked.

“Orange juice.  Try it.”

I took a sip.  Oh my!  I took a bigger sip.  “This is good!” I told her.

“Yeah,” she replied.  “I thought you’d like that.  Drink up, it’s good for you.”

“Like my vitamins?”

“Uh…kind of.”

The two of us went into the living room where Shantel was making weird noises with that guitar thing.  She’d do something with one of the strings while she turned a knob at the end of the guitar and the weird sound from it seemed to go up and down.  Weird!

“I noticed there’s a fire area outside with some chairs around it,” Lisa said.  “Why don’t we build a fire tonight.”

“That might be nice,” Shantel agreed as she continued making her weird noises.

“What for?” I asked.

“To sit around it and enjoy it,” Lisa told me.  “Don’t you ever do that?  It looks like it’s been used quite a bit.”

“No.  That’s for the guys.  They talk men’s business out there.”

“So you never sit out by the fire with them?”

“I’m a girl.  Of course not.  All I do is chop the wood for them.”

“You…chop the wood.  Why not them?”

“Because I’m a girl.  It’s part of my job.”

Lisa shook her head.  “Freaky, I can’t begin to tell you all the things that are wrong with that.”

As usual, I had no idea what she was talking about.

Shantel made us dinner that night, and I stood by trying to help her.  I had never seen anyone do the things she was doing in my kitchen.  But when we ate, it was really, really good.  Why didn’t Bo ever teach me some of that stuff?  I know the guys would have loved it.

I washed the dishes that night and Lisa dried them.  But after that, Lisa pulled me into the living room and sat on the couch next to me.  She had that book she had bought earlier.

“I’m going to read to you tonight,” she told me.  “But I’m hoping that before long, you’re going to be able to read it to me.”

I was about to protest, when I remembered being in that restaurant place and looking at that weird book with all the food pictures and not knowing what they were.  “Will that help me with knowing what the pictures are in those food books like we had in that restaurant place today?”

It seemed to take her a moment to understand what I was asking.  “Yes!  Absolutely,” she told me.  “It will help with that and a thousand things more.”

I had no idea what a thousand was, but I didn’t tell her.

She said it was a story.  A children’s story.  I had never heard anyone reading a story before.  Ever!  It wasn’t very long, but I wanted it to go on, and on, and on.  Kind of like when Shantel sang for us.  It was a story about a little girl.  A child.  A kid.  Like one of the kids I had seen at that shelter place.  It was a story about the girl, and stars in the sky, and wishing for things.  And then suddenly Lisa said, “The end,” and I waited for her to continue.  I waited, but she closed the book.  There had been no more pages left in it.

“No!  There has to be more!”

Lisa did that little laugh thing she sometimes does.  “If you want more, then you’re just going to have to learn to read, so you can get all you want.”

“When?  How?” I asked desperately.

“We’ll do some more tomorrow,” she promised.

I couldn’t wait!

And then we all went out to the fire area, and we all grabbed some of the wood I had chopped and piled it where the fire was supposed to go.  Lisa lit it and before long we had a nice fire.  Lisa and I sat in the chairs while Shantel went back into the house.  I was a girl.  I wasn’t supposed to be sitting out there, but…it was nice.  Especially with Lisa there.

And then Shantel came back with that guitar thing they had gotten from that pawn shop place.  She sat down in another chair and her fingers did something against the strings of that guitar, and suddenly it didn’t sound bad anymore.  I was very surprised.  And then I saw Shantel do something with her other hand on the strings at the other end of the guitar, and then both hands were doing things at the same time, and I heard music coming from it.  How did it do that?  How did Shantel do that?  And it sounded really nice.  But not as nice as when Shantel kept doing those things with the guitar, and she started singing at the same time.

I always loved hearing Shantel sing, but now it was even better.