Runaways (Orphans 5)

"Are you sure you should go with him?" Raven asked me as the mechanic walked back to his car.

"I'll be fine. He's gone out of his way to help us," I pointed out. "Besides, he seems really nice."

"Brooke, I of all people can warn you about 'nice boys.' Don't follow my

mistake," Raven warned. I blushed and quickly walked over to the car.

"I'm Todd by the way," he said, "Todd Mayton."

"My name's Brooke," I said.

"Glad to know you," he said, nodding as he backed out. Raven stood there looking after us, her face a mask of worry.

Todd did most of the talking on our way to the junkyard. I found out that he was the youngest of three children, all boys, and his brothers were living and working for an uncle in Indianapolis. His mother had left his father four years ago and she and her new husband lived close to his brothers. It was obvious from the way he talked about her that he resented her for what she had done to his father.

"He was always a hard-working guy, my old man, and I guess our lives were never very glamorous. She claimed life with him made her ten years older than she was. She's a good-looking woman, my mother. When we had the pumps, men used to drive an extra ten, fifteen miles to get gas at our station because she was out there pumping gas, wearing these abbreviated shorts and a halter," he said with some bitterness. "I was just a kid, but I knew what their remarks meant and I hated the way they looked at her.

"Jeeze," he said after a moment's pause, "look at me running at the mouth like this. I never do that. You must be special, all right," he added with a smile.

I knew from the heat that traveled up my neck and into my cheeks that I was blushing like a fullblown red rose.

"So what about you?" he asked when I didn't reply.

"What about me?"

"How do four young girls come to be on America's highways by themselves, for starters?" he asked.

I hesitated. There was something about him, something about the way he had opened his own heart to me so willingly and without fear that made me resist lying.

"We're runaways," I said, taking a chance with the truth. The others would kill me.

He started to smile, looked at me and then stopped, his face suddenly serious.

"No kidding?"

"No kidding. We're foster children. We have no families. We've been living in a home for years, actually, and for a variety of reasons, we decided it was time to move on."

His eyes narrowed as he studied me closer. "This is a joke, right?"

"It's getting to be. We were robbed along the way, accused of stealing and now have car trouble. We can't go back so we're caught in a vise that keeps squeezing us tighter and tighter."

He was silent.

"There's the junkyard," he indicated, nodding at the fenced-in yard directly ahead of us.

A man who looked close to seventy was piling some tires just inside the entrance. He wore a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows and a pair of jeans with a rather significant hole in the rear end that revealed his faded boxer shorts. The lines in his face looked etched by a scalpel. He had a complexion the color of burnt toast. When he smiled, he showed a mouth with a number of teeth gone.

"What are you doin' here so late?" he asked as we pulled up. Todd had his window down.

"Breakdown. I need a water pump for a 90 Buick Wagon. Think you've got one, Lefty?" he asked.

The old man turned, squeezed his grimy jaw between his left forefinger and thumb and thought a moment. I gazed at the pile of wrecks, the sea of metal, rubber and glass. To my eye there was no order or reason to why anything was where it was. I saw older wrecks mixed in with new vehicles, trucks with cars, a school bus turned on its side near a John Deere tractor and a recreational vehicle that looked like it had been on fire. In some of the wrecks, birds had made themselves homes.

"Take the freeway to the Golden Gate," Lefty instructed. "Seems I remember a Buick in there about that age. Johnny picked it up near Cranberry Lake a year or so ago."

"Thanks."

Todd drove in.