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visits.
    “I’ve got this idea for how I can adapt a bicycle,” he told me one day as summer was coming to an end. Then he pulled a folded paper from his shirt pocket. It turned out to be a complete mechanical drawing of his plans.
    “Joey, that’s great.”
    “Yeah, I figure I can get around town better on this, and I won’t always have to ask my mom to drive me around.”
    I hoped that meant he could come over and visit more often.
    “Of course my mom’s not too crazy about this idea, but I think I can talk my dad into it.” He then explained how the bike would work technically, with one pedal removed and a hand-braking device and all sorts of other things. And I think that’s when I first began to realize Joey’s mental superiority, and I wondered if he might not actually be a genius like Mr. Albert Einstein.
    If not for Joey’s visits and my transistor radio, it would’ve been a bleak summer. Like Joey had said, I could insert that little earplug right into my ear and listen to my favorite popular station without disturbing Grandma with “all that noise they call music” as she liked to say. But whenever I was alone I’d crank that little radio up as loud as it would go. Still I could barely make out the words of some of the songs with all the static and crackling that was on the air in those days. As a result, I mixed up a lot of the lyrics, and I actually thought the Beatles were singing “Lucy in disguise with diamonds…” Of course it made perfect sense to me, and I still like the image it brings. I see this bag lady who’s all dressed up and dripping in diamonds, and I think, What a great disguise! And maybe my misunderstanding of those lyrics actually brought out some hidden creativity in me, because I’d just sing right along with the radio, making up my own version of the words when I couldn’t quite make them out.
    The downside of listening to the radio so much was coming up with funds to replace those expensive little transistor batteries. Finally I finagled a deal with Grandma to mind the store for her in trade for batteries. I knew Grandma wanted to do more for me, but she was barely getting by just then with her little store barely holding its own. But at least we had peace and quiet and good food to eat, and that’s a lot more than I can say for living with my daddy.
    While I tried real hard not to think about him too much, he came to mind fairly often, and my thoughts about him were somewhat confusing. Sometimes I even felt guilty, as if it were my fault that he’d beaten on me and gotten himself locked up. I thought that if I’d maybe handled things differently he’d still be a free man. But then in the next moment, I’d have to admit that I felt much safer knowing he was behind bars. He sent me a number of letters, all eloquently written and amazingly apologetic, and each time he begged me to write back to him and tell him that I’d forgiven him. Naturally since he was locked up he was forced to remain clean and sober (I knew they weren’t supposed to drink liquor in there) but he promised over and over that he would never go back to the drink. I just wasn’t sure what to believe, and as a result, I never did answer his letters. Over a period of time, he ceased to write to me altogether. Which I suppose was for the best.
    By the time I hit fifth grade, I’d pretty much given up on ever being the kind of girl that went off to slumber parties or giggled with her friends at recess or had money in her pocket to go buy soft-swirl cones at the Dairy Maid after school. My grandma took me shopping for clothes at places like the Goodwill Store, and I would try real hard not to pick out pieces of clothing that I’d previously seen on my classmates at school (since I knew from experience what happens when someone like Sally Roberts recognizes you wearing an old green-and-red-plaid skirt that used to belong to her). And yet finding an item of clothing that no one would recognize seemed