Part 3 — Junies Red Scarf Key
I put Junie in the front seat of my car and took the back roads. From a gas station lot I called the York police on their non-emergency line. The officer who came was the same one who had saluted at the Logan Elementary corner that morning. Sergeant Ortiz listened with his hat in his hand.
The gray sedan did follow us for a few blocks. Sergeant Ortiz ran the plate while I waited. The man behind the sunglasses was Phil Kessler, the former boyfriend of Junies mother, who had a protection order against him that he had ignored for a year.
Gus told me the rest in the station hallway, ashamed, hands in his pockets. Dad had asked him months before to help find a safe place for Junie. Her mother was in a treatment program in Harrisburg, and there was nobody else. Gus was afraid of Phil and too embarrassed to admit it.
So the nod at the cemetery was not a signal. It was fear. He had been trying to keep Phil from following the child to me. He had snapped at me to leave because he was scared of making everything worse. I stood there and understood my brother better than I had in forty years.
The key on the paper tag opened a lockbox at the bank on George Street. Sergeant Ortiz and a caseworker went with me. Inside was a manila folder in my fathers careful block letters. It held a notarized guardianship nomination from Junies mother, naming Dad as guardian and me as successor.
Dad had written me a letter as well. It began, Celeste, I am sorry to leave you carrying this. Under it was a log. For three years he had walked Junie across that street every school morning and written down each day she arrived in a clean coat. A crossing guard sees every child twice a day, and my father looked at this one with open eyes.
Phil Kessler was arrested that afternoon for violating the protective order and following a minor. A judge extended the order for five years. He was barred from coming within a thousand feet of the school or of our house.
The family court approved the guardianship in eleven days. Junie came to live with my husband and me. We had bought her a red scarf of her own the same week, and when she unfolded it, she laughed and cried in one breath.
Gus paid the court fees and then sat at my kitchen table for an hour in silence. At last he said, Dad would not have been ashamed of me for being afraid. He would have said call Celeste. I told him that was exactly what Dad would have said.
Junies mother finished her program in spring and sees her every Sunday under the caseworkers plan. She is steady, kind, and grateful. On the first day of the new school year, Junie asked to walk the last block alone. The new crossing guard held up a freshly painted stop sign, and the traffic stopped for her.
