Excerpt: The Things That Stick

Bad things happen in real life. I’m not talking about things like not being able to have another cookie before dinner, I’m talking about real bad things. Sometimes people are lucky enough not to find out about the real bad things until they’re older. That was not the case with the Maxwell children.
They found out about bad things on January 14, 1986. On that day, the children of Miriam and Samuel Maxwell became parentless.
A lot of people think (usually the ones who didn’t find out about real bad things until they were older) that children are ill equipped to handle bad things, that they’re too fragile. Children can be fragile, but they can also be flexible and smart and very, very creative.
The Maxwell children continued to live at home in their four-bedroom, two-story, country house so that none of the adults around them—the mail carrier, the grocer, the superintendent of the school district, even the neighbors—knew they were there all alone.
At first most of the credit for that went to Sylvie, the oldest. She had learned enough about bills and errands and school administration to keep them all above suspicion. Later, Jeremiah (called Jerm for short) and Jolie contributed their particular talents to preserving the lifestyle they had created for themselves and desperately wanted to keep. Not only were they comfortable in their own home, but they loved each other. Not only did they love each other, but they were afraid of what might happen to them in Foster Care or an Orphanage. Every kid knows enough to be afraid of those things, even if they’ve never heard of them before. Every kid, whether they’ve experienced them or not, knows about the existence of real bad things. Foster Care and Orphanages were obviously real bad things.
But for kids in a real bad situation, Sylvie, Jerm, and Jolie did very well for themselves. They ate what they liked where they liked when they liked, having all learned to cook enough for their own tastes. Jerm could prepare gourmet Mediterranean dishes when he felt like it, but Sylvie had never gotten past macaroni and cheese, Everything Nachos, and tuna noodle casserole. Jolie made the desserts, cakes and banana breads and muffins and apple strudels and cookies of all kinds.
At first they had eaten only those things that could be made with flour, sugar, rice, canned vegetables, apples from the apple tree in their yard, and jars of homemade applesauce. These were the only foods in the house when the real bad thing happened. Then Sylvie learned to mow lawns and shovel driveways to earn some cash. Soon people were asking her to babysit. Jerm and Jolie pulled weeds in other people’s gardens and painted furniture.
The bills back then had been small, but overwhelming. Sylvie bought more candles than they had ever seen, and candle holders to go with them, and told her younger sibling they would not use electricity any more. Jerm and Jolie thought it was fun. They learned the dangers of open flames and kept buckets of water ready in the laundry room, just in case. The local newspaper subscription was cancelled, their father’s old car was sold, and eventually (as Sylvie found out about them) all the unnecessary expenses were eliminated. They held a yard sale once, selling enough of their old things to pay for some lingering bills but not enough to make any adults suspicious.
Of course they didn’t buy birthday or any other kind of gifts for each other at first. They learned to make beautiful candles out of old dripped wax, interesting baked goods using only three ingredients, and homemade books to give each other. They made secret paths and hiding places in the five acres around their home to present to each other on special holidays. One year, Sylvie planted a large vegetable garden for all of them for their combined birthdays. The next year, Jolie showed them the patch of strawberries she’d added.
They went to bed whenever they felt like it in those days, but since they all worked and played hard during the day and could only use candlelight at night, they usually ended up sleeping early. They cleaned up only when they felt like it, but since every day was free and open except for their odd jobs and keeping up with the garden, they had plenty of time to keep the house kind of neat.
After a year off school, when Sylvie convinced the school board through written correspondence that the Maxwells were homeschooling their children, she and Jerm went back and Jolie started school for the first time. They made a pact with each other that they would behave and do well enough on their schoolwork that their teachers would never have cause to try to contact parents. Soon they also learned to do less than their best so they would not be chosen for special programs that needed parental permission.
Although they worked harder than any other children they knew, they had each other and they were happy. Years passed. Sylvie went to high school, Jerm entered middle school, and Jolie graduated fourth grade.
Then other real bad things began to happen