Chapter 3 - The Blue Crayon
The second week of November brought the first frost.
It wasn't proper snow, just a white, salty crust that covered the trash cans and made the grass in the park snap under their shoes like thin glass.
Emma’s hands were red. The duct tape on her right sneaker had begun to peel back, exposing the frayed canvas beneath, and every time she stepped into a puddle, cold water soaked through her sock. She didn't complain because Lily was crying quietly behind her, her small boots sliding on the icy pavement as they hauled their third bag of the day.
This bag was heavier. They had found twelve heavy soup tins in the dumpsters behind the Italian restaurant on 4th Street. The tins were greasy and smelled of old garlic and tomato paste, but they were thick metal.
"How many today?" Lily sniffled, wiping her nose on the sleeve of her coat.
"A lot," Emma said. "Maybe a whole dollar."
They didn't go to Barlow Recycling.
Two days after Ray Barlow had mocked them, Emma had decided they were done with him. She had asked a man collecting cardboard behind the grocery store where else they could take metal, and he had pointed his yellow-stained finger five blocks south, toward a smaller, dirtier yard called Miller’s Scrap.
Miller’s was run by an old man named Arthur who had no teeth in the front of his mouth and wore three sweaters at the same time, even in summer. He didn't laugh at them. He didn't speak much at all, except to grunt when he tossed a nickel into Emma’s palm or handed her a damp green bill if they had brought copper pipe they’d found in vacant lots.
When they reached the scrap yard, the old man was sitting in a wooden shed heated by a rusty oil drum stove.
He looked at the two little girls through the smoke.
"What you got, small ones?"
"Tins," Emma said. She dragged the heavy bag onto his platform scale. "And four copper wires from the telephone pole that fell on 6th."
Arthur spat a brown stream of tobacco juice into an empty coffee tin. He stepped out of the shed, his knees cracking like dry pine, and looked down at the scale.
"Wire’s good," he growled. He reached into his deep canvas apron and pulled out a small handful of coins and a crumpled two-dollar bill. "Two seventy-five."
Emma took the money. "Thank you, Mr. Arthur."
"Your ma still sick?" he asked, not looking at them as he tipped their bag into a massive iron hopper.
"Yes," Emma said.
"Pneumonia?"
"The doctor said her lungs are wet," Emma said, using the words she had remembered from the woman who came to check their radiator three weeks ago. "She needs the medicine with the long name."
Arthur grunted again. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a bright red peppermint, covered in lint, and pushed it into Lily’s hand. "Get home before the sun goes down. The river men come up this way after four."
They walked back through the alleyways, staying off the main road where the wind blew hardest.
When they reached the back stairs of their building, Emma stopped.
"Wait here," she told Lily.
She sat on the cold concrete step, pulled the ruled paper from her pocket, and flattened it against her knee. Her hands were trembling from the cold, making it hard to hold the blue crayon.
She didn't write down the money this time.
She had already counted it in her head. They had eighty-two dollars now. Eighty-two dollars after three weeks of freezing rain, cut fingers, and walking five miles a day after school.
Eighty-two dollars was a huge pile of paper, but it was still so far from three hundred.
The doctor had said three hundred dollars for the antibiotic injection and the oxygen machine rental for one month. Without it, Clara wouldn't make it to Christmas. Emma knew what Christmas was, but she couldn't picture it this year. All she could picture was the gray bed, the thin sheets, and her mother’s hands getting lighter every morning.
Emma smoothed the paper against her coat.
Dear Mister, she wrote.
Her handwriting was small, strained, each letter pressed so hard into the page that the paper almost tore.
We have $82.16. We need $300 for Mommy’s lungs. We have 400 cans in the alley behind the butcher. We cannot carry them all because the bag rips. If you take the cans you can have the money. Please bring the green bottle to 412 Elm Street Apartment 2B. Mommy is Clara. She is very nice. She works at the laundry when her chest does not hurt.
Emma and Lily Wilson (age 5)
Lily looked over her sister’s shoulder, her chin resting on Emma’s coat. "Who are you giving that to?"
"To the man with the big truck," Emma said.
"Which man?"
"The one who drives the long black car with the shiny wheels," Emma said, looking toward the corner of 4th Street where, once or twice a week, a heavy, silent automobile with tinted windows would park outside the Oakwood Bank while a man in a gray coat went inside.
She didn't know who he was. But his car was clean. His coat was smooth, like the fur on a cat that lived inside a warm house. Anyone who drove a car that quiet had to have three hundred dollars.
May you like
Emma folded the paper into a tiny square, no bigger than a matchbox. She wrapped a piece of copper wire around it so the wind wouldn't carry it away, then tucked it into the pocket of her pink jacket.
"Come on," she said, standing up and pulling Lily by the hand. "We have to go find his car."
