Do Not Pass Go, page 13
Dad had had a letter from his roommate, the bank robber, who’d been sent to the States to a federal prison, and he said it wasn’t so bad there. But he was homesick and missed his wife and kids. And his dog. Ronny had been sent to another prison too, but Dad had Ronny’s address, and he sent magazines to him every month. Not much he could do for Ronny, he said, but he could do that.
“Whatever happened to the guy who just wanted a house and a dog?” asked Deet.
“I don’t know,” said Dad. “I’d sure like to believe he got them. But people get in the habit of screwing up, and they just can’t break it.”
“Like Ronny,” said Deet.
Dad looked at Deet with the sorrowful expression he always had when he thought of Ronny. “Yeah,” Dad said. “Like Ronny.”
Sheena’s brother was sent to the prison near Anchorage. She wrote to him twice a week. Deet wondered what she found to write to him about, when he’d been so hard to talk to.
“Well, I write like you did for Mr. Hodges,” she said. “I just write down anything I think about anything, and that can fill up a long letter. Maybe none of it will be interesting to him, but I don’t want him to be alone in the world.”
“Does he write back?”
Sheena smiled, a real smile, not just her face-tightening thing. “I just got a letter from him yesterday. And he wrote what he thought about everything I wrote. It was like having a real conversation with him, and not like any I ever had with him before. He’s like a different person when he writes. Isn’t that funny?” She smiled at Deet. “And I sent him a quote book, too. I hope he enjoys it as much as you did.”
Deet took Ronny the cat to the vet to have him neutered, and the vet gave him some special food to make up for the long period of malnutrition. After a few months Ronny’s coat was sleek and glossy, and he purred all the time. Not the usual cat purr, but some kind of jerky, erratic, loud noise, more like an engine breaking down. It always made people laugh when they heard him the first time. Ronny especially liked Sheena.
Mom said that she’d gotten used to working again and she liked her job, so she was going to work for a while longer, to finish paying the lawyer’s bills. Deet said he didn’t mind doing the housework and cooking and that he didn’t mind taking care of the girls in the afternoon when Mom was at work. He could go to the garage in the mornings now that school was out for the summer, and he and the girls could ride their bikes to the library. They’d stick to the budget that Mom and Deet had made up so that they’d get the credit card paid off. And they’d never go into debt again.
Mr. Hodges sent a postcard from the Rockies, where he’d gone on a canoe trip. He didn’t write anything, just drew a picture of himself in a canoe, paddling like mad and looking terrified.
Sheena came to the house a few afternoons a week, and she helped Deet bake brownies and things he hadn’t tried to cook yet. The girls were pleased to have her there, a big girl, even when she wouldn’t play Barbies with them. In fact, when Sheena told them she thought Barbies were stupid, the girls stopped playing with them so much. Mom always asked Sheena to eat dinner with them when she was there on the weekends, and Deet liked to hear the two of them in the kitchen together, laughing. It seemed to Deet that Mom had taught Sheena to laugh.
Sometimes when it was raining they called Nelly to come over. He taught them to play poker, which was a lot of fun, and sometimes they played Monopoly. The first time Deet got the card that said, “Go directly to jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200,” he and Sheena looked at each other, but it didn’t hurt like it used to.
They knew jail wasn’t funny, and maybe they would always wince when people made a joke of it, but they were a lot tougher than they used to be.
Jail wasn’t the end of the world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kirkpatrick Hill lives in Fairbanks, Alaska. She was an elementary school teacher for more than thirty years, most of that time in the Alaskan “bush.” Hill is the mother of six children and the grandmother of eight. Her three earlier books, Toughboy and Sister, Winter Camp, and The Year of Miss Agnes, have all been immensely popular. Her fourth book with McElderry Books, Dancing at the Odinochka, was a Junior Library Guild Selection. Hill’s visits to a family member in jail inspired her to write Do Not Pass Go.
Kirkpatrick Hill, Do Not Pass Go
