“So you know that’s not good enough,” I said to her. “The way my social worker wants to take care of it. Right?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I do know that’s not enough for you.”
“Then what are you even doing here? Aren’t you afraid to be driving around this neighborhood with your baby after what happened?”
My grandpa always taught me that it’s stupid to be that way, like leaving your front door unlocked because you think you’ll never get robbed, but then after you get robbed putting ten locks on the door. By then it’s too late, because you were robbed already, and you’re no more likely to get robbed again just because you were that one time. He said it was stupid but it was just part of how people’s brains were made. Like, if it never happened before, you think it never will, and that’s wrong, but if it just happened, you think it always will, and that’s wrong, too. He called it locking the barn door after the horse was stolen.
I looked up at her eyes in the rearview mirror.
“Why do you think I’m driving around with a can of pepper spray between my knees?” she asked me.
“Didn’t know you were,” I said.
So she held it up and showed me, and it was big. Not like those little cans you keep on your key chain or stick in your pocket. It was probably seven or eight inches long.
“Looks like something you’d use to scare off a grizzly bear,” I said.
In the mirror I saw her eyes get softer, and saw her do something like a smile, even though I couldn’t see her mouth. But it turns out you can see a smile on other parts of a person’s face and I just hadn’t known it.
“Let me drive you where you’re going,” she said.
“You can’t really.”
“Why can’t I?”
“It’s not just one single spot that you drive somebody to. It’s like a route I walk for most of the day, where I stop at all the trash bins and pick out bottles and cans to take to the recycling place.”
“I can drive from one trash container to the next,” she said.
And, like she needed to show me how that was possible, she stepped on the gas and drove to the next corner and stopped right next to the trash bin. But I knew there wouldn’t be anything in it, because I’d been by it late in the afternoon the day before, and besides, this was one of the streets where hardly anybody ever walked around on their feet. If you wanted bottles and cans you at least had to go six or seven blocks to one of the busy avenues where people walk around and wait for their buses and stuff like that.
I didn’t want to explain all that to her, so I just got out and looked around in there and found nothing. I heard her lock the doors after I got out and then unlock them when I was ready to get back in again.
“This is weird,” I said, and got into the back seat with the baby again.
“What’s weird about it?”
“Driving around in a Mercedes to pick up recycling,” I said, because I knew by then that it was a Mercedes, because I had eyes in my head. “I mean, who does that? And also, what’s wrong with the paint on this car? Why would you have it like this? Don’t people stare at you wherever you go?”
She wasn’t driving to the next corner—she was just sitting there behind the wheel, listening to me complain about her car.
“This is the one that got carjacked,” she said. “It’s my mother’s car. The guy who stole it took it to a chop shop and they started to repaint it. And then I guess they got interrupted by the police. My mother just got it back. She’s in this fight with her insurance company to try to get them to cover repainting it.”
“Oh,” I said. I didn’t know what more to say about a thing like that.
I was staring through the windshield at the hood of the car, and the way the solid-yellow paint faded into this sort of mist of tiny drops, the way paint does when you’re spraying and haven’t had a chance to go back over it with the sprayer again. And at the same time I was wondering why she wasn’t talking and also wasn’t driving.
“You need to put on your seat belt,” she said after a while.
“That’ll take all day! Every time I get out I have to take it off, and then every time I get in again I have to put it on, and we’re stopping at just about every corner. It’ll take forever!”
“It’s still faster than walking,” she said.
I couldn’t argue with that, even though I wished I could have because it all sounded like a lot of trouble. Also I guess I wasn’t used to having somebody looking over my shoulder while I picked through the trash, especially not some regular clean person with a nice house. I guess I was wishing I could just do this on my own like every other day.
While I was thinking all this, she still wasn’t driving.
“I had a thought,” she said.
I could just tell by the way she said it that this was going to be the heart of the thing—like all my wondering about why she was here again was about to be answered by this thought.
“Okay . . . ,” I said. But I said it like it wasn’t really very okay, because I had no idea if it was okay until I heard it.
“I was thinking maybe I could drive you home. But I don’t mean to where you’ve been staying. And I don’t mean the foster place. I mean actually home.”
I burst out laughing, and it made the baby laugh, too, and bounce her hands up and down against the padded bar that held her into her car seat.
“What’s so funny?” the Brooke lady asked, and she sounded a little hurt or offended that I was laughing at her idea—or maybe both.
“You think the only thing keeping me from going home is that I don’t have a ride?”
“No. I don’t think that. I know there was trouble between you and your mother. I don’t know what kind of trouble, because you won’t tell me. And I guess that’s okay. Because what business is it of mine, really? But I just know she’s your mother. And I know how much I love my daughter. And I just think there’s a chance it’s something that can be worked out.”
I didn’t answer, because I was thinking about what she’d just said, and for a minute I was wondering if she was right. It was a dangerous thought and I knew it, because I knew my mother and she didn’t. But you know how sometimes a person will tell you how they look at something, and it’s totally different from how you see it, but their view of things starts to seem just as right as yours, and then you don’t know which to believe? It was like that.
“Where’s home?” she asked me, because I still wasn’t saying anything.
“Utah.”
“Oh,” she said, and I could tell she was disappointed. “I was hoping you’d say something closer, like Orange County or Sacramento.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter,” I said, “because you don’t have to do it.”
“No, I’ll still do it,” she said.
Then she started driving again, driving me to all my regular trash bins in that wild blue-and-yellow half-repainted Mercedes-Benz.
It was just such a weird thing and I didn’t know what to say about it. So we drove around and stopped at every trash bin, and I put on and took off my seat belt every time, and I just kept avoiding saying yes or no to her idea, because I had no idea what to say.
“I came out to her,” I said.
It was maybe half an hour later when I told her the thing I didn’t want to tell her. I’d found a big paper grocery sack in one of the garbage bins and I had it in the back with me, half full of bottles and cans.
The reason I said the thing I didn’t want to say is because I was tired of wondering if I could believe in her version of things—that my problems with my mother could be worked out. If she thought this was a deal breaker and she decided never mind about trying, then I could stop going back and forth about it in my head. And then I would know not to get my hopes up any higher for any longer.
“Wait,” she said. “What now?”
“My mother. I came out to her. That’s what happened.”
The baby was falling asleep. The driving was put
ting her into a nap mode, and her eyes kept flickering from most of the way closed to all the way closed. It was the sweetest thing I’d seen in a very long time. Then again, that wasn’t a hard contest to win.
“There must have been more to it than that,” she said.
Then I got mad again, because she didn’t know anything—she hadn’t even been there, and I had, so who was she to tell me I was wrong?
“There wasn’t,” I said. “I told you exactly what happened, and I wish you would give me credit for having eyes and ears and having been there.”
I wasn’t being loud, but the baby’s eyes shot open again because, even though I was saying words quietly, she knew they were mad words.
“How can a mother put her daughter out on the street just for that?”
“Wow, you don’t know much,” I said, and the baby started to fuss and cry because I was even madder, and keeping even less of a secret about it. “Because kids are getting turned out on the street every day for being gay. It happens all the time, and just because you live in a comfy little world where you don’t have to know about it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. My parents are very religious. You know, like fundamentalist religious. To them everything is black and white and exactly what the Bible says it is.”
“But the Bible can say pretty much anything you want it to say.”
“Don’t tell me, tell my parents. I’m not the one who needs convincing.”
I had settled a little by then, so the baby settled, too, and we drove along and she didn’t cry anymore.
Also we weren’t stopping at any trash bins, so I figured Brooke had gotten all wrapped up in what we were talking about and forgotten about what we were doing out there. I didn’t remind her, because it was a stupid thing to be doing. I mean, all she had to do was give me a dollar and I’d be better off for that whole day than if we finished checking all my usual trash bins. It probably cost more in gas than I could earn.
“Mormon?” she asked after a time.
“No, not Mormon. Everybody says that. Everybody figures if you’re from Utah your family has to be Mormon, but they have other religions there, too, you know. They’re Baptist, actually, and they go to this church where the preacher is pretty hard-nosed about stuff like that. Whatever he tells them, they just automatically believe him, which I think is sad. It’s like they don’t even think for themselves anymore. So now you know my story and now you know why it would be a stupid idea to try to go back there.”
“Actually . . . ,” she said. And then she didn’t go on for a minute. Like what she was saying had gotten ahead of her thinking about it, and she needed time to catch up. “If what you say is the whole truth, and there really isn’t anything else that happened . . .”
Then I got a little mad again, because she wouldn’t believe me.
“You still think it’s my fault,” I said. “With everything you know about me you still won’t believe me.”
The baby started to fuss and cry again.
And then I realized I’d said a really stupid thing, because she didn’t know me at all. I was just some kid on the street, and even if I hadn’t been on the street, some kids just lie, especially when you ask them if something was their fault or not. All of a sudden I could see it from her eyes, how she’d just met me and I could be anything. But I didn’t say any of that, because it was all a jumble in my head, and besides, it seemed more important to comfort the baby.
“Okay,” she said, and I caught her eyes again in the rearview mirror. “Okay. Let’s just take you at your word on that. Nothing else happened. Then I think it’s more important than ever that we try to get you home. Sometimes a thing like that . . . and by ‘that’ I mean something where you turn out to be different than what they thought you were . . . different from them and different from what they were expecting . . . there might be some time required. Like it might be an idea they could adjust to over time. And we should at least try. Oh,” she added suddenly. “I’m sorry. I’m forgetting to stop.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “If you buy me a hot dog I’m in better shape than I would be with every bit of recycling from every one of those trash cans.”
I didn’t answer that other thing, because I didn’t dare. Because I would get my hopes up, and then she might turn out to be wrong, and then it would be a long fall down to that crate on the street again.
“Where can you get a hot dog around here? At this hour?”
“Straight down three blocks,” I said. “On the right.”
Just as we were getting out of the car and walking up to the hot dog place, I asked her my really important question. I was scared to ask, because I was about to find out what she really thought of me. The real me, on the inside. Not just the stupid unimportant stuff like whether I had a house to go home to, or if my hair was clean, because that’s all stuff that can be temporary. I was about to hear her thoughts about the real parts of me that I could never change even if I wanted to.
“What would you do?” I asked her.
“What would I do about what?”
She was bouncing the baby on her hip, and acting like her mind was a million miles away.
There was no line, so we stepped right up to the window. The place was open twenty-four hours a day, so even though it was pretty weird to want a hot dog for breakfast, you could get one if that’s what you wanted.
I ordered one with chili and cheese and tomatoes and onions, and she paid for it, and then we sat at one of the outside tables to wait. She was nervous, and looking around, and she still had the pepper spray tight in one hand. The benches were stone and really cold right through my pants.
“What would I do about what?” she asked again.
“What if Etta grew up and came out to you? What would you do?”
She answered without taking any time to think, and her face didn’t change at all. The question was nothing to her. Nowhere near the everything it was to me.
“Oh, hell, I don’t care,” she said. “So long as she’s happy. I don’t care how she’s happy.”
I knew then. I knew I was okay being with her, but . . . more than okay. Almost like I was home with her, in a weird way. I mean, it wasn’t as good as having a real home, because I couldn’t actually live in a thing like I’d found with her, but it still felt something like home, because it was a place where I could bring my whole self.
“Okay,” I said, “let’s try it. Let’s go back to Utah and see if she got used to the idea at all by now.”
I didn’t really think it would work, because I knew my mother better than that. I didn’t say yes because I thought I’d get to stay in our house in Utah with my little sisters. I said yes because it was a few more days I’d get to stay with Brooke, who would buy me meals, and let me be around her little daughter, and who wouldn’t care at all if Etta came out to her later when she was older.
Maybe she’d even get to know me too well to throw me back out on the street again.
“What changed your mind?” she asked me.
“Just sounds like a better few days than what I had planned.”
“What did you have planned?”
“Pretty much this,” I said.
And I put my arms out wide, like I was a tour guide showing her my world.
“Got it,” she said. “We’ll leave tomorrow. Hell, what am I waiting for? We’ll leave today.”
Chapter Seventeen
Brooke: Fool
I guess we’d been driving for about an hour when it hit me. I was a complete idiot. A total, unmitigated fool.
It was as though the truth had been there all along. Hanging over my head like a bunch of sandbags. Totally real. Totally present. But not touching me in any way. And then it all just let go and landed on me.
There was no way the truth could have been as simple as her story had made it out to be.
I mean, you ask a teenager, “What did you do?” And they say, “Nothing. Honest. I was perfect. I was just being myself, which is a p
erfectly reasonable thing to be. And then this totally unfair adult just punished me for something that nobody in their right mind would punish a kid for, and I was completely right and they were completely wrong, and it wasn’t my fault in any way.”
Now I ask you: What kind of fool believes a story like that?
I glanced at her in the rearview mirror and accepted the truth: that I would likely show up at her mother’s door and be faced with a reality quite different from the one I’d been sold.
But I wasn’t turning back. Mostly because I needed to feel I’d done my part for the girl. After everything she’d done for Etta and me, it wasn’t too much to ask. Especially when I had no job from which I was missing time. And I had the car for as long as I needed it because my mother refused to drive it until the paint situation was sorted out.
And maybe, just maybe . . . because there was a one percent of one percent chance she might be telling the truth. But that was a damn slim chance. Based on my experience with the world, the truth is never as simple as the answer you get when you ask one of the two parties to tell you their side of a thing.
Molly was riding in the back seat with Etta. As though I were their chauffeur. But I knew she didn’t mean it that way. She just wanted time with the baby and vice versa.
When I’d told my mom about the trip, she not only hadn’t argued with me over the use of her car, she’d seemed more than a little bit relieved. I guess we all needed time alone.
While I’d packed the trunk full of necessary items, nine-tenths of them for the baby, Molly had walked to a gas station restroom and cleaned herself, and washed her clothes out in the sink. She had showed up back at the car wearing sopping-wet clothes, but smelling decent. Her hair was still filthy.
I’d made a mental note to stop and buy her at least one change of clothes.
She caught my eye in the rearview mirror. Caught me staring at her. I could tell it made her feel a little defensive.
I looked away.
I watched the road over the ridiculous half-yellow hood of the Mercedes. I still hadn’t gotten used to that. In fact, by then I might even have accepted the simple truth: there was no getting used to it.
Brave Girl, Quiet Girl: A Novel Page 17