“Look, Ellie, I don’t want a fight. I just—I just want to be left alone.” He takes his tree back and sets it in a patch of light near the lake. I reverse back out into the yard. I want to hit something.

“It happened just before Christmas. It’s why I stopped riding the bus.”

Oh.

“Like I said, I’m working on fixing it. Dad ordered me new plaster, and the new blackjacks just came in to paint.”

“Can I help?” It’s the least I can do if I can’t punch somebody.

“You want to?”

“Sure.”

And so for the next two hours, we sit in the sun and I paint trees in greens and golds. The breeze is cool and we don’t talk. For a little while I forget about anything else but the tiny leaves. It’s like baking—a totally mesmerizing act of creation.

14 A Revelation

I wake up with waxed paper stuck to my cheek. I fell asleep at the kitchen table last night after testing a gazillion recipes. It’s less than a week until the fish fry, and I’ve still got no clue what I’m going to do. And now I’m waking up to one less day, and the birds are tweeting outside like this is a Disney movie.

I had that dream again, the one where I can walk.

I wake up in my bed at home, but home is back in my pink room in Nashville. And instead of reaching out for my wheelchair like I always do, I sit up and swing my legs over the side of the bed instead. Just like that, I am up.

Mom is yelling from the living room to “get a move on it” or we’ll be late, and so I run down the hall into the bathroom. And this is the beauty of it all: I take a shower. I stand under the water and let it fall all down me and swirl around my toes. I look down and my legs are strong, like with actual muscles, and my kneecaps don’t stick out like knots on a tree. I start singing some Carrie Underwood song, which is proof this is a dream because, hello, country music is not my thing.

And then when I come out, Mom is in the kitchen sipping coffee by the stove, and her hair is long again, and when I go to hug her, I can look right in her eyes because I am almost as tall. I am almost as tall.

I hate that dream. Because most times the wheelchair just mildly sucks. But after those nights it sucks big-time.

Mom walks in while I’m peeling the waxed paper off my face.

“There you are! I can’t believe you slept in here.”

“Yeah.”