The King of Jam Sandwiches

by Eric Walters

  “I’m not different, I’m just angry. I’m angry all the time. You, you’re really different. I don’t know why, but you are.”

  She was right—I was different. Different from my friends, my father and even her. I’d known that for a long time. I just hadn’t thought anybody else could see it.

  It felt like we’d both said too much, so we rode along in silence for a while.

  “I was wondering, where are we going to look for your mother?”

  “She has a few places, a few bars, that she likes. We’ll start with one and then move on to the next.”

  “But if you know about these places, why didn’t you just tell your social worker, and she could have looked or asked the people at the rehab place to look?”

  “It doesn’t work that way. If she leaves, they let her leave. My grandmother used to say, ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.’ Do you know what that means?”

  “Sure. You can’t force people to do something they don’t want to do.”

  “I figured you’d know that one too.” Suddenly Harmony looked really sad. “I miss her a lot,” she said quietly.

  This shift from angry to sad surprised me. “With any luck we’ll find her.”

  “I didn’t mean my mother. My grandmother. She was a good person.”

  “I know she was,” I said.

  “How could you know that?” Harmony asked.

  “She raised you, and you turned out pretty good, so she must have been a good person.”

  “You think I’m pretty good?”

  “Don’t let it go to your head, but yeah, sure, you’re pretty good.”

  Harmony smiled, reached out and gave my hand a little squeeze. I felt embarrassed. I think she did too, because silence came between us again. I needed to break it, change the direction again.

  “That was a pretty stupid assignment Ms. Gay gave us,” I said.

  “Which one?”

  “I guess both of them.”

  “I saw you writing away. What did you pick to represent you, a jam sandwich?” Harmony asked.

  “It sounds like some of the girls in the class think I’m pretty sweet.”

  “Bad joke. What did you pick?”

  “A cheetah.”

  “Because you’re so fast and elegant, have a spotted fur coat and like to eat gazelle?”

  “And impalas. I put down that I kill impalas. At least tomorrow’s assignment is better. It’s just writing about ourselves.”

  “Do you really think she wants me to write about my mother being a drunk and a druggie, or you about your father being a jerk?”

  Harmony didn’t even know how big a jerk he was.

  “Can you imagine how Ms. Gay would react if you told her the truth and wrote about what our lives are really about?” Harmony asked.

  I knew she was right about that—not just about how Ms. Gay would react but also that she really didn’t want us to write about the real things in our lives.

  “Of course, if you told her about your plans for university, she’d love that. Teachers like to talk about how we can all become anything we want, how the sky’s the limit. That works for maybe three people in the school. The rest of us, well… we’re going to be lucky to just get by.”

  “You’ll do more than just get by,” I said.

  “Because I’m doing great so far, just like my mother.”

  We’d waded into another minefield.

  “What did you choose to represent you in today’s assignment?” I asked, pretending I hadn’t seen the empty page she’d handed in.

  “I didn’t write down anything, but I did decide.”

  “And?” I asked.

  She reached down, grabbed her backpack and started rummaging around. She pulled out a box of crayons and removed a red one. “This is me.”

  “You’re a crayon?”

  She snapped it in two. “Not a crayon. I’m a broken crayon.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “I’m broken. I’m not whole. I’m just like a broken crayon. And so are you.”

  “I’m not any type of crayon.”

  “You’re certainly not a cheetah,” she said.

  “I’m more a cheetah than I am a crayon!”

  People had turned around to look at us. I hadn’t realized how loud I had gotten.

  “This is one of the dumbest conversations I’ve ever had,” I said, deliberately lowering my voice.

  “It might be the least dumb conversation we’ve ever had,” Harmony countered. “Are you saying your life isn’t screwed up?”

  Nobody had ever said anything like this to me before. I was sure some people had thought it, but none of them knew the whole truth, how bad it was. Nobody. It was part of what I had to hide. Harmony knew better. Somehow I’d told her almost all my secrets. I’d seen her as safe because she was only going to be here for a while but she’d gotten too close because she’d stayed too long.

  “Okay, maybe that isn’t fair,” she said. “You probably aren’t as screwed up as me. We had one parent each that wasn’t there, even if they weren’t there for different reasons. But I had a second who didn’t care enough to stick around. At least, in his own strange way, your father is there.”

  I gasped and felt my entire body shudder.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  She’d noticed. How could she not?

  I shook my head. My life was screwed up. As much as her life. Maybe more.

  “My father didn’t come home last night.”

  There. I’d said it. Words I’d never said to anybody. One of the few remaining secrets I’d kept.

  “What?”

  “He didn’t come home last night.”

  “At all?”

  I tried to speak, but all I could do was shake my head.

  “But where was he?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes he just doesn’t come home.”

  “He’s done this before.”

  “Yes,” I whispered. “Yes.”

  “A lot?”

  “Not a lot. A few times a year…or more sometimes.” If you added up the times he’d only been gone overnight, it came to eleven. Eleven times he just hadn’t shown up and I was left alone.

  “The first time I got taken away by child welfare, it was because my mother left me alone almost all day by myself. I don’t think I have ever been so scared.”

  “Scared that she was dead and scared just because you were alone, right?”

  “Yes, both,” she said.

  “I was eight the first time he left for the entire night.”

  Harmony let out a little stream of air, as if she were leaking. “I didn’t think anybody could top my stories. And you have no idea where he is?”

  “He could be anywhere. Once he called when he was more than a three-day drive away. He’d just started driving and kept going.”

  “At least that I understand.”

  “You do?” I asked.

  “Sure. That’s why I go on the run sometimes. I only come back if they catch me, because really, I have no place to go.”

  I almost said, I have a place. But I needed at least one secret.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this last night when I called? Or at least today, before now?” she asked.

  “I’ve never told anybody about him taking off,” I said. “And you can’t tell anybody else. You have to promise.”

  “You know I won’t tell anybody. I owe you too much.”

  “You don’t owe me anything.”

  “Really? Your father has taken off, and you don’t know where he is or when he’ll come back, and you’re going with me to try to find my mother.”

  “At least you think you know where to find her.”

  She shook her head. “Your father is an even bigger jerk than I thought. The thing I don’t understand is how you can be so calm.”

  “You get used to it, I guess. He always comes back.”

  “I don’t mean just ab
out this. About everything. You should be angry, like, all the time.”

  “I used to be.”

  “I heard that,” she said.

  “From who?”

  “Mostly from Sal.”

  I felt a rush of anger. He’d had no right to tell her about me.

  “I’d heard things about how you used to be different, so I bugged him to tell me what you were like,” she said. “He didn’t want to, but I kept at him until he did. He said you used to be in fights all the time.”

  I swallowed back my anger. No point in being angry at her or at him.

  “He told me what a terror you were in school, how you got suspended for fighting in first grade, how you broke somebody’s windshield with a baseball bat and how you just walked out of class sometimes.”

  “Sal should have shut up.”

  “I think he only told me so I’d shut up,” she said. “So what changed?”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “We have time.”

  I shrugged. “Getting angry wasn’t getting me anywhere. It just got me in more trouble. You’d know about that.”

  “Knowing it doesn’t mean I can stop it. How do you do it?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve just stopped showing how I feel.”

  “I don’t think I could do that.” She paused. “Here,” she said, holding out her hand.

  I held out my hand, and she dropped half of the broken crayon into it.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” I asked.

  “You should just keep it. You may be even more broken than me.”

  I didn’t want to argue anymore. Especially when I thought she was right. I tucked the piece into my pocket.

  FIFTEEN

  I followed Harmony into the bar. It was the fourth place we’d been into. They were each completely different but exactly the same. Harmony explained that they all had cheap beer and a regular customer could run a “tab”—drink and pay up at the end of the month. This one, like the others, was dimly lit, had worn carpet and smelled bad.

  There was some heavy metal sort of music playing. It got louder as we pushed through swinging double doors and entered into a large main room. There were lots of tables and a big bar that ran the length of the back wall. Off to the far side was a small stage. I was surprised at how many people were here already—it wasn’t even six o’clock. I was glad my father hardly ever drank.

  “Do you see her?” I asked.

  “Not yet, but I’m pretty sure there’s a back room in this place, so she might be there.”

  “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” a loud voice called out.

  I turned to see a large, scary-looking man coming toward us.

  “You kids can’t be in here!”

  “We’re looking for my mother,” Harmony said.

  “I don’t care if you’re looking for Santa Claus! You can’t be in here! We’ll lose our license if an inspector comes in and sees two kids in a strip bar!”

  A strip bar? Another song started playing—a Katy Perry song that I knew—and I turned around. A woman walked up onto the stage. She wasn’t wearing much, and she started to dance.

  “Harmony, we have to get out of here,” I pleaded.

  “Valerie!” Harmony screamed. “Valerie, are you here?”

  People turned to look at us—at Harmony. She called out louder still. Even the woman onstage turned in our direction as she continued to dance.

  “Shut up, kid. Just shut up and get out of here.”

  “Valerie!”

  The big guy came a few steps closer, like he was going to grab her.

  Harmony put up a hand and waved a finger in his face. “You touch me and I’ll scream that you assaulted me. You want to explain to the police why you were touching a fourteen-year-old girl?”

  He backed off, looking like he’d been scolded by his mother.

  “Help me find her or convince me she isn’t here, and we’ll go,” she said.

  He nodded. “Valerie…is your mother Val Stewart?”

  “Yes! Is she here?”

  “She was here. About half an hour ago.”

  “Do you know where she went?”

  He shook his head. “No, but the bartender might. Look, I’ll go talk to him. You two wait out front, and I’ll come out and tell you what he says.”

  “If you don’t come out, we’ll just come right back in,” Harmony said.

  “I’ll come out. Just go. Please.” The big scary man looked a bit scared himself.

  Harmony spun around and headed for the door, leaving me staring up at the guy, who towered over me. I offered a weak little smile and headed after her. I couldn’t help but look out of the corner of my eye at the stage. The dancer was already wearing less clothing than she had been a minute ago.

  I caught up with Harmony just as she got to the front door. She opened it, and sunlight and fresh air flooded over us.

  “At least you know your mother is okay,” I said.

  “She’s never been okay. What do you know about your mother?” Harmony asked.

  “Nothing, really.”

  “I know you were young, but your father must have told you some things about her.”

  “He doesn’t like to talk about her.”

  “At all?”

  I shook my head. “He says it’s too hard for him to talk about her.”

  “He really is a jerk—a big jerk. You should be allowed to ask him questions.”

  “Why? What difference would it make?” I asked.

  “Because then you’d know more about her. You must know something.”

  “I was told she was a very good person.”

  “At least your father told you that much.”

  “I didn’t hear it from him. I told you he doesn’t ever say anything about her, good or bad. He even put away all the pictures of her.”

  “You don’t have a picture of her?”

  “There are some in the cedar chest.” When I was little I used to look at them when my father wasn’t around. I hadn’t done that for years.

  “Do you remember anything about her?”

  “I was four. So nothing.”

  “Not a thing?”

  “Well, one thing. At least, I think I have one memory. It was her pushing me in a wheelbarrow.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Pretty well. She loved gardening. Our backyard used to be nothing but tulips in the spring.”

  “Then you remember her gardening.”

  “No. I was told about the gardening. Tulips come up year after year if you care for them. When I was five and six the whole backyard was blooming. But each year there were fewer and fewer, and now just a handful pop up.”

  “Somebody who took care of a garden would take care of her kid. You’re lucky she wasn’t like your father.”

  “How about your father?” I asked. “What do you know about him?”

  “He was never around, right from the beginning.”

  “Do you know anything about him?” I asked.

  “I know he was a loser.”

  “Your mother told you that?”

  “She didn’t have to. I’ve seen all the guys she’s dated since then, and they’ve all been losers. Why would my father be any different?” Harmony turned and looked toward the door. “If he doesn’t come out in the next two minutes, I’m going to—”

  The door opened. Outside in the light of day, the man somehow looked even larger.

  “Tim, he’s the bartender, said he cut her off about thirty minutes ago.”

  “What does that mean?” Harmony asked.

  “It means he wouldn’t serve her any more alcohol. He told her to go get some coffee. He thought she was headed to Coffee Time. It’s down that way.”

  “I know there’s one on the corner of Broadway and Jarvis—wait, are you just making this up to get us to go away?”

  “I’m not lying. Look, I got somebody to cover for me so I can walk you over.”

  “I think
we can find it on our own,” Harmony said.

  “I bet you can, but I need a cup of coffee. By the way, my name is Jeff. And you are…?”

  “Um, I’m Robert, and this is Harmony.”

  “Good to meet you.”

  We started walking. I still felt a bit intimidated by the guy, but it also felt like we had a bodyguard. In this neighborhood that might be a good thing.

  “I didn’t put it together at first,” he said. “Valerie. We all call her Val.”

  “Yeah, that’s a pretty tricky one, Val being short for Valerie. You didn’t go very far in school, did you?” said Harmony.

  He laughed. I hadn’t expected that. “Not only do you look like her, but you sound like her too. She’s pretty quick on the comebacks.”

  “She’s even quick when she’s sober, but you probably haven’t seen that. So why really are you escorting us?”

  “I told you. I want a coffee.”

  “I’m pretty sure the bar serves coffee too, so why don’t you tell us the real reason?”

  “Your mother didn’t leave alone.”

  “What’s his name?” Harmony asked.

  “Um…Vance. How did you know it was a he?”

  “It’s always a he.”

  “Yeah. Well, Vance can get a little mean.”

  “Why did you let her mother leave with him?” I asked. I hadn’t meant to say anything, but it just popped out.

  “What was I supposed to do? Tell them they couldn’t leave? Look, your girlfriend has a bit of a smart mouth, and this Vance has no sense of humor. So do you want me to come or not?”

  “I’d like you along.” I turned to Harmony, and she gave me a subtle nod of the head.

  “Then let’s go.”

  We walked the block without talking. As we crossed the street, I got the feeling that Jeff was leaving it up to the traffic to avoid him, not the other way around.

  He held open the door to the coffee shop, and Harmony walked in. I followed. The place was almost empty.

  “There she is,” Harmony said. She walked—no, marched—toward a woman sitting in a corner at the back. The guy she was with looked tough. He had slicked-back hair, a scruffy beard, black leather jacket, thick black boots and torn jeans.

  “I’m going to wait here,” Jeff said, stopping just inside the door.

  I kept walking but hung back slightly.

  “Honey, what are you doing here?” Harmony’s mother exclaimed. She got up from her seat and tottered a few steps, swaying as she moved. She gave Harmony an awkward hug. Harmony didn’t hug her back.