“The girl from therapy?”
I nodded. When you only lie with your neck it’s easier.
Mom told me to have a good time and sped off, and when I turned to tell Carolina good game she was already gone. The only person left in the lot was Nikki, walking dejectedly to her car, her spikes still shiny and new since she didn’t get any playing time. I considered calling out to her but settled for a wave, thinking that next time maybe she’d play it smart and get on the bus with the JV.
Then I went home and swiped Mom’s wedding ring from her jewelry drawer, hawked it at a pawn shop, and drove here to Edith’s, ready to get high and forget everything. Forget the curveball from Carolina that I almost dropped because I’d been adjusting my stance to take some weight off my hip. Forget how she didn’t even glance my way when we left the field. Forget how Nikki’s face had gone from hopeful to shattered as the innings wore on and I didn’t wear down. Forget the quarter-carat wedding ring that once meant so much to two people, and now means so little that it was jammed under cheap Mardi Gras beads.
Forget that I stole from my mom.
Forget that I don’t have the cash to keep this going.
Forget to be awkward when I nestle against Luther.
Forget.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
habit: a fixed or established custom; the involuntary tendency to perform certain actions
I wake to midafternoon light filtered through cracked blinds, the sound of the toilet flushing, and Josie complaining about her own morning breath. Edith wanders out of the bathroom, her clothes rumpled from sleeping in the chair, her face betraying her age. I know she loves having us here, but right now she looks like all she wants to do is go back to bed, but she’s too good of a hostess to do it.
“C’mon.” I give Luther a nudge and his eyes come open with effort. Derrick’s on the floor, refusing to do much more than huddle into a tighter ball and insist that everything hurts and he’s dying the more we try to wake him.
“Derrick, I’ll let you drive my car if you get up,” Josie says, and that does the trick. He’s up in a second, revitalized—whether at the thought of driving her car or getting some alone time with Josie is hard to say. Either way, he’s got a second wind and the two of them are out the door before I get a chance in the bathroom.
Luther emerges, water still running down his face from where he splashed himself. With Josie gone, Edith’s mood drops visibly and I move quickly in the bathroom, as eager to get out of her house as she is to have us gone. I eye the lone toothbrush, but it’s definitely old and certainly Edith’s, the bristles so worn they’re splayed, a small white explosion that looks too soft to do any good.
I squeeze some toothpaste onto my finger and do the best I can, scrubbing my face with some horrific old-lady soap and drying my hands on a towel with a monogram on it. ELH and BEH are the matching pairs, and I’m thinking what it must feel like for Edith to look at her dead husband’s initials every time she’s in here, and why she didn’t just put them away.
“Yo, Catalan. Get a move on,” Luther calls from the living room, and I finish up, touched that he’s waiting on me.
“See you kids later,” Edith says, shepherding us to the door. “Drive safe. Tell Josie to call me.”
We promise to do both and duck out the back. Winter hasn’t quite let go in Ohio yet, and a stiff breeze hits us in the face when we come around the corner of the house, Luther wrapping one arm around me as I turn into him, both of us shielding the other from the chill. It’s nice.
“I s’pose you all are her grandkids too?” A voice asks, and we both jump, a little guiltily. Edith’s neighbor is on the other side of the fence, gathering up dead limbs that have been knocked from trees by the wind.
“Yep,” Luther says, recovering first, not taking his arm from around me. “Big genes run in our family.”
I choke on a laugh and the guy gives us a glare before going about his business, muttering something under his breath that I’m sure isn’t complimentary. But I’m too sluggish to take offense, too comfortable with Luther, too relieved at the thought of an entire day to myself to really care.
I say goodbye to Luther and head home, a playlist that Josie made for me filling the car. It’s light and silly, pop music that Carolina would unplug a speaker from if anyone dared to play it in the locker room. I would too, usually. But today it feels right, with the sun breaking through clouds and a belated text from Josie warning me about the nosy neighbor. I’m not worried about anything or thinking too hard.
We won our first game. I’ve got friends outside of softball. My leg doesn’t hurt too bad. I’m happy.
Who says drugs are bad?
Mom’s napping hard when I get home, both of us having had a long night. I pull her bedroom door shut with a click so that the noise of my shower won’t wake her. I take my time under the hot water, finding all the knots in my muscles and working them out slowly, concentrating on my quads especially. The ropy muscles of my hips have grown since I got back to working out, and I can’t get past them to the screws anymore, no matter how hard I dig. I give up once I’ve raised a bruise, aware that I’ll probably have to explain it next time we’re stripping down in the locker room.
I’ve already slept most of the daylight away, and the shower boiled away any residual sleepiness. It’s a wet spring day, the kind where you curl up in your bed with earbuds and a laptop, find something to sling on Netflix and commit to being lazy. That’s what normal teenagers would do, anyway. I end up cruising the obituaries again, but this time I’m in the archives.
I know Edith’s last name from her mailbox—Holmbach—and that her husband was named Bob. I find him on the second try—forgetting that Bob is short for Robert—and learn that he died at the age of forty-five, from an aneurysm.
“Oh, Edith,” I say quietly, scrolling past the list of surviving family members, her son and grandchildren still alive at the time. Edith had chosen to publish their wedding picture alongside the obit.
She looks young, confident, happy. Her face is unlined and her hair magnificently large, everything about her broadcasting that she’s on her way up. She doesn’t suspect that all she’s going to do in life is cross the river, trade West Virginia for Ohio, and sell prescription pills to teenagers to supplement her income and—I think—her family.
Bob, too, seems to think things are going to turn out okay. He looks proud, both in the woman he’s married and who he himself is. I recognize the suit he’s wearing, having been pressed up against it when it was Luther inside those powder-blue sleeves. I minimize the screen quickly, a bubble in my throat that refuses to either rise or pop, all my happiness of the morning evaporated.
I’ve used that man’s towels. Shit, I’ve used his toilet. Neither of the people in this picture have any business knowing me, and I’ve got no claim on their lives, or any reason to read about his death. I pull the browser back up, ready to erase my history and hopefully this morbid curiosity along with it, but accidentally refresh the page instead, and recognize a name in the new obits.
Betsy Vellon.
I know for a fact that one of the lines that went up my nose last night was courtesy of Betsy, and that whatever Edith’s legal prescription is, it’s more than likely all in her bloodstream a few days after she gets it filled. There’s no way she can keep up with her own habit and supply the rest of us.
Jesus, habit. I just said that word like it fits one of us, or all of us.
I want to close the browser window, close my eyes, not look at anything else, but there are more names today. The recently dead stare me down, and I can’t not see them, or the words printed next to their pictures, in stark black and white. Some of the obituaries stick to the euphemisms—suddenly, unexpectedly, tragically—but more are using stark language, not open to interpretation. Addiction. Opioids. Heroin.
I snap the laptop shut, fear spiking adrenaline in my veins. I call Josie, who answers on the first ring.
“Hey, bab
y doll, nobody calls anymore. Text me if—”
“Betsy Vellon’s dead,” I interrupt her.
There’s a pause, followed by what I think is the sound of her shifting around in bed, where she probably went as soon as she got home. “Wait—who?”
“Betsy Vellon,” I say, more slowly, realizing that her speech is slow and she might have kept last night’s party going into today.
“Do we, like, know her or something?”
“Betsy Vellon,” I say again, though the words apparently don’t carry the same weight with her as they do with me. “Edith’s friend? One of the people she gets the . . .” I drop my voice, aware that my volume has risen with every repetition of Betsy’s name. I crack my door and peek into the hallway, but Mom’s door is still closed.
“The Oxy?” Josie supplies. “Shit.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“You know what this means, right?”
The truth is, I don’t—other than the fact that me, Edith, Josie, Luther, and Derrick have all been cut off.
“It means Edes is going to drag me to another fucking funeral.”
I count out what I’ve got left from Ronald Wagner. It’s not much. Five 80s, which will only get me through a couple days, and that’s only if I decrease my dosage. I slide the pills back into the bottle, my body crashing after the rush from seeing Betsy’s name. I’m tired, and overwhelmed, my emotions going someplace that not even the memory of Josie’s laugh or Luther’s arm can follow. I’ve almost drifted off into something I’d forgotten existed—a natural sleep—when Mom knocks on the door.
“Late night?” she asks. She’s perky and smiling, thrilled that I have friends.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Don’t forget you’ve got dinner with your dad and Devra and your baby brother tonight.”
Baby brother. I’m suddenly angry at the phrase, all my anxiety and fear coupling together to lash out at the idea of him.
“He’s not actually my brother,” I snap. “I mean, I don’t even know what to call him. My half adopted brother? And what’s Dad if he’s not married to you and we’re not actually related? What’s Devra? My adopted dad’s second wife?”
Mom’s face is going hard, the way it does right before she’s either going to start crying or start yelling. I have no idea which one to expect, but I keep going, all my frustration finding a target in my family, or the closest version of that I have.
“Why do you have to pretend to be so happy for him?”
“Enough.” She puts out one hand, palm facing me. Her tone is sharp and concise, the two syllables tearing the air between us. She only puts her hand down once she sees I’m done, and when she speaks again her tone is softer, different, and I can’t help but wonder if this is how she speaks to the little ones right after they’re born.
“Mickey,” she says, coming to sit next to me on the bed. “I am not pretending to be happy for your father.”
“He’s not—” The hand goes up again.
“Whatever you want to call him is your choice, but that man raised you. I raised you. We did it together and it was a beautiful thing, and now he’s doing that with someone else. Does it hurt? Yes. But how I feel about it doesn’t factor into your relationship with him. I promised myself I wouldn’t let it.”
She’s switched from angry to sad, the tears rising, though she doesn’t let them fall. “Do you think of me as anything other than your mother?”
“No,” I say automatically, and it’s true. When the divorce came there was never any question for me of who I was going to live with. I love my dad—if that’s what I’m going to continue calling him—but it was Mom who took care of me.
“You’re my mom,” I say, my voice cracking on the last word.
Her tears finally fall, and she wipes them away. “Good,” she says, reaching for my hand. “Because you’re my daughter.”
I half choke, half sob, and fall into her, everything I’m feeling rushing out in a hot swell of tears, reminding me of the vomit I left behind on the road two weeks ago. She wraps her arms around me and rocks me for a little while, back and forth, the ancient calming movement so natural to mothers doing its job. I pull back finally, wiping my own face.
“You totally still have to go to your dad’s,” she says, and I laugh, a harsh sound that can’t quite find its way up my swollen throat.
“Yeah, I’ll go,” I say. “It’s not that I didn’t want to. I just . . .”
But I don’t know what I just.
“It’s okay,” Mom says quickly, one arm going back around me. “You were in an accident. You went through trauma, hon. But you kept your grades up, and you were still behind the plate for your first game. If you lose your temper over a little family drama, I can live with that.”
I go back into the hug, eager for her warmth.
“I don’t expect you to be perfect,” she says into my ear.
My eyes stray to the pill bottle.
“Good,” I say.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
broken: separated into pieces by force
Mom had lingered in my room after our talk, enjoying our closeness, so I had no time to slip a pill before I left for Dad’s. I was nowhere near nauseous, or in any pain, but my anxiety flew through the roof the second Devra opened the door.
“Hey, Mickey,” she says. “Come on in.”
The baby—Chad—is attached to her left breast, and she’s making no attempt whatsoever to hide that fact. I don’t care, exactly. I just didn’t expect to get a boob in my face first thing. I don’t know where to look, my eyes tracing down the length of Chad’s tiny, perfect leg, rolling to the side of Devra’s elbow. My face is flaming red, so hot I can feel it, which only makes it worse.
“Where’s Dad?” I say quickly, searching for the one familiar thing in their house.
Devra’s face tightens, and I realize I didn’t even say hi to her. She’s got deep bags under her eyes, and while her cheeks still hold a trace of the fullness of pregnancy, it looks like the skin is just hanging from her bones. She’s lost the baby weight in the past two months, for sure, but I can’t say she looks good, either.
“He’s in the kitchen,” she says, turning her back on me to close the front door.
I feel off, thrown the second I walk in. As usual I said the wrong thing or looked the wrong way. Their front hall is small and I bump into a table, my ridiculously large body not made to pass through here. A small bowl flies off, shatters on the floor, spilling keys and spare change. Startled, Chad jumps in Devra’s arms. His feeding interrupted, he starts to scream.
“Sorry,” I say, dropping to the floor to pick up what I’ve broken.
“It’s okay—” Devra wants to say more, but she’s prevented by the small, angry fists pummeling her face.
“Dev? Everything okay?” Dad’s voice calls, and I follow it to find him, carrying shards of broken glass in my hands.
“Sorry. I broke . . .” I look down at them, unsure how to describe what I destroyed. “Something.”
“No worries,” Dad says, pulling out the trash can with one foot, both hands full as he stands at the stove. “Nothing in this place is priceless except the people.”
“Really, Dad? Lame,” I tell him, but I appreciate his effort.
“Where’s Dev?” he asks, stirring one pot while lowering the flame under another.
“There was a thing, with the baby,” I say. “I think I scared him.”
Saying it puts me right back where I was two seconds ago, large and ungainly, a girl who isn’t related to anyone in this house and who ruins things when she tries to be a part of it.
“Mick,” Dad says, following my thoughts. “You’re good. It’s a cheap plate, probably something Devra picked up at a garage sale. Throw it away. Stop thinking about it.”
I do as he says, all but the last part. It’s not exactly something I can control. With no Oxy in my system and no dirt under my shoes, Dad’s house has me wanting to break for the exit.
/> “Sit,” Dad says, pulling a trivet from the wall and taking the last steaming pot to the table. “It’s my night to cook, so . . .”
“Spaghetti,” I say, a smile tugging on the corners of my mouth. Dad has no problem with being asked to cook; you just have to be cool with eating spaghetti. Often.
Dad hands me a plate and I scoop some noodles onto it, then sauce, then meatballs. I haven’t eaten since . . . weird. I actually don’t know. The first bite sends an almost painful jolt into my mouth, my taste buds waking up after being fed only Oxy for a while. Dad’s three forkfuls in before he even tries to make conversation. It doesn’t get far when I notice a drop of spaghetti sauce on his chin and point to my own, making a swiping gesture. He keeps missing it on purpose, dabbing his forehead or his cheek instead, then asking, “Did I get it?”
“You’re an idiot,” I say.
“I’m sorry I missed your first game,” Dad says, and the way he drops his eyes tells me he’s way more bothered by it than I was.
“It’s fine.” I shrug. “You’ve got . . .” I wave my hands around his new house, taking in the baby monitors and still unpacked boxes stacked in a corner. “Stuff.”
“I do have stuff,” he agrees. “But I told myself I could manage two families and I’ve already failed.”
My eyebrows come together, and I try not to rake my fork through the cooling mass of noodles on my plate. “You don’t have two families.”
Dad nods his head like he’s trying to think of a better way to phrase it, but I’ve already beaten him to it, thinking of Mom’s face drawn in a tight mask of forced pleasantry when she sees him with Devra.
“You left her, Dad. You left Mom. You can’t just think of her and me still waiting at home, like you can bounce back and forth between us all.”
“That’s not . . .” He’s got his hand out to stop my words. Just like Mom. Just like Coach Mattix. “Mickey, that’s not what I meant.”
I can’t answer. I don’t know how else to feel about what he said.
“Yes,” he says carefully. “I left your mother, okay? But I didn’t leave you.”
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