Where I'd Like to Be (16 page)

“You think she’ll ever come back, Maddie?” Ricky Ray asked. “You think we’ll ever see her again?”

“Who cares?” Logan said. “She was a liar and a fraud.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But she knew how to tell good stories.”

That cracked Donita up. She laughed so hard
she was wiping tears out of her eyes. “I guess you got a point, Maddie,” she said finally. “Liar, storyteller . . . it’s all the same thing, ain’t it?”

“It kind of is,” I insisted, not sure what I was trying to say. “Maybe she had to tell those lies to make herself feel better. And after awhile she believed them so much they were the truth to her.”

“But they were still lies,” Logan said, not budging. “She wanted us to believe things about her that weren’t true.”

“No,” said Donita, serious now, figuring things out. “
She
wanted to believe things that weren’t true. Maybe it wasn’t all that important whether we believed ’em or not.”

I nodded my head. That was it. That’s why I couldn’t hate Murphy. All those stories she told, each one was a little dream she had about herself, about who she might’ve been, if her luck had been better, if those parents she wanted to believe in so badly had ever come back to get her.

“I heard you’re getting adopted,” Donita said, turning back to her notebook. “By that lady who ate dinner with us last night. Is that true?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Can I come stay with you sometimes?” Ricky Ray asked.

“Just you wait and see,” I told him, leaning into him.

I picked up my notebook and reached over Donita to grab a pencil. I smiled at her as I sat back down, and she smiled at me. “My mama’s coming to see me next weekend,” she told me. “Maybe I’ll get to go home before too long.”

“Is Rita coming too?” I asked.

Donita rolled her eyes. “That girl is such a mess. She better come. But she’s got this boy now; he’s all she can talk about.”

Logan laughed. “You’re just jealous she’s got a boyfriend and you don’t,” he said. Donita leaned over and socked him on the arm, and I opened my notebook to the first page. I was going to try to draw a picture of Penny Korda’s face from memory. I’d give it to her when she came to pick me up to take me to her house in Knoxville, and she’d be so impressed she wouldn’t mind that Ricky Ray was coming along for the ride.

I drew one picture and then I drew another. First I drew Penny’s face, and then, for the first time since I don’t know when, I made a sketch of Granny Lane, her hand on her hip, her mouth opening to give Mr. Willis some sass. A parade of people started coming out of my pencil: Randy Nidiffer, Mr. Willis, Logan and Donita, the two of them cutting up about something as usual.

I drew as fast as I could, trying to keep up with my imagination. A house burst onto the paper. That’s where everyone was walking to, and there was me and Ricky Ray on the front porch, waving as they strolled up the driveway.

In my mind I could see my mama walking up the street, her light brown hair floating around her face, and there was a man behind her who I just knew was my daddy, his blue eyes just like mine.

It was a family reunion; I saw it clear as day. Which was why it was no surprise when Murphy flew onto my paper, her head thrown back, her arms stretched out against the sky.

Atheneum Books for Young Readers

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2003 by Frances O’Roark Dowell

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Book design by Russell Gordon

The text of this book is set in Aldine 401.

ISBN 978-1-4391-3227-2 (eBook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dowell, Frances O’Roark.

Where I’d like to be / Frances O’Roark Dowell.

p.   cm.

Summary: A group of foster children build a home of their own.

ISBN 0-689-84420-4

[1. Home—Fiction. 2. Foster home care—Fiction. 3. Orphans—Fiction. 4. Tennessee—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7 .D75455 Bo 2003

[Fic]—dc21   2002002183