The Mighty Miss Malone

The house at 541 Jackson Street is beautiful and perfect, even though it doesn’t yet have any furniture in it. Deza and Mrs. Malone spend their first night there sleeping on the floor. After the past year, they don’t mind too much. Deza feels excited, but Mrs. Malone knows that they still face difficulties and uncertainty. She’ll have to find work, and they don’t know what has happened to their friends in the months since they left.

The next day, while Mrs. Malone looks for work, Deza discovers just how much has changed. Mrs. Needham is gone. Clarice’s family is gone, too, and Deza doesn’t know where they went. Still, things aren’t all bad: Mrs. Ashton lets Deza check out books at the library, even though Deza doesn’t have a card under her new address yet.

When Deza gets home from the library, Mrs. Malone is waiting in a taxicab out front. She tells Deza that she has reason to believe that Mr. Malone might be in a poor house in Lansing. They’re going to check. Deza asks, what about the letters? How can Mr. Malone be in a Michigan poor house when he’s been sending them letters—and money—for months? Mrs. Malone says that if Deza really considers the letters, she’ll have to admit that they’re suspicious. They don’t sound like Roscoe Malone wrote them, and their story doesn’t add up. If he’s too injured to hold a pen, how can he be working as a carpenter, for instance?

Long before they left Gary, when Mr. Malone didn’t write, Mrs. Malone suspected that something had gone horribly wrong. She started writing letters to every police station, poor house, hospital, and morgue in the area. Eventually, she got a description of a man who sounded something like her husband, although the people who are taking care of him call him Jonah Blackbeard.

The poor house is a dreadful place, full of despair and horrible smells. The inmates there barely seem to be human. Sure enough, Mrs. Malone and Deza find Mr. Malone in their midst. It seems that he suffered some kind of accident or asthma attack on his way to Flint. He woke up, delirious, in a hospital in Lansing, and from there was taken to the poor house. He tried writing to Mrs. Malone, but in his confusion, he sent the letters to the wrong address, and they were returned.

Deza’s reunion with Mr. Malone doesn’t go the way she’s been imagining it, but in the end she doesn’t care. She’s just happy to have her father back, even though Mrs. Malone warns her that they still have a long way to go to recover as a family—if that’s even possible. Mrs. Malone sends Deza to wait in the cab while she helps Mr. Malone get cleaned up for the trip back to Gary—he is dirty, and his hair and beard are matted and ratty after months of neglect. While she waits, Deza slowly realizes that her mother was right about the letters. And if they didn’t come from her father, they must have come from Jimmie. Once again, he’s proven to be the best big brother in the whole world. Deza weeps in gratitude.

Mr. Malone mostly dozes on the cab ride back to Gary, but he starts to perk up as they get closer to the city. He, Mrs. Malone, and Deza amuse themselves by reading the silly Burma Shave billboards aloud. Then, as they pass a field of cows, Mr. Malone asks if his family can see the last and best set of billboards. Deza and her mother worry that he’s losing his mind—but he’s not. Pretending to read it along the side of the road, he makes up a poem on the spot about hope and the lessons the past difficult year has taught him.