just stared at him, so he let the crumpled money fall to the floor. "Suit
yourself," he said.
"Why are you doing this to us, Dad?" I asked. "Why?"
His face tightened with anger, then he staggered to the sofa bed and
passed out.
"I'll never get out of here," Lori kept saying. "I'll never get out of here."
"You will," I said. "I swear it." I believed she would. Because I knew that
if Lori never got out of Welch, neither would I. I went back to G. C.
Murphy the next day and stared at the shelf of piggy banks. They were
all either plastic or porcelain or glass, easily broken. I studied a
collection of metal boxes with locks and keys. The hinges were too
flimsy. Dad could pry them apart. I bought a blue change purse. I wore it
on a belt under my clothes at all times. When it got too full, I put the
money in a sock that I hid in a hole in the wall below my bunk.
We started saving again, but Lori felt too defeated to paint much, and the
money didn't come as quickly. A week before school was out, we had
only $37.20 in the sock. Then one of the women I'd been babysitting for,
a teacher named Mrs. Sanders, told me she and her family were moving
back to their hometown in Iowa and asked if I wanted to spend the
summer with them there. If I came along and helped look after her two
toddlers, she said she'd pay me two hundred dollars at the end of the
summer and buy me a bus ticket back to Welch.
I thought about her offer. "Take Lori instead of me," I said. "And at the
end of the summer, buy her a bus ticket to New York City."
Mrs. Sanders agreed. Low-lying pewter-colored clouds rested on the
mountaintops around Welch on the morning of Lori's departure. They
were there most mornings, and when I noticed them, they reminded me