by Jamie Sumner
“Hey.”
“You hungry? Ginger decided she’s Martha Stewart today, so we’re finally using all the pots and pans we got for our wedding, five years later.”
I tuck my hands inside the sleeves of my sweatshirt and stare at my feet. I wonder if Mom even knows Ginger is married. She must if she had a number to put on her emergency contact sheet.
“You know, we could, uh, wash those for you.” He points at my clothes. “Or take you shopping if you don’t like what Ginger picked out.”
“Uh, maybe later.”
I refuse to change into the leggings and black sweater Ginger set out for me on my dresser, no matter how soft they are. This sweatshirt and jeans are the last things I have from home. It’s what I was wearing the last time I saw Mom.
“Breakfast! Or lunch or brunch or whatever it is!” Ginger calls from the kitchen, and I’m glad for the escape.
The big wooden table in the kitchen seats eight, and there are already places set for us with a vase of pansies in the middle. It’s so formal, I’m afraid I’m going to break something. I miss Mom’s Styrofoam boxes of cold hash browns with a dash of Tabasco, just the way I like them.
I wait until they both sit so I know where to go. In front of us are steaming plates of eggs and bacon and blueberry muffins. I consider not eating, out of solidarity with Mom, but my stomach growls so loud it sounds like a dog under the table.
“Oh, wait!” Ginger jumps up as I’m unfolding my napkin. “I forgot the juice!” She seems frazzled, or maybe this is how she always is. I study her as she walks toward the kitchen island. I know she’s three years older than Mom, but she looks so much younger. Her hair is more orangey than red in this light. I think it’s natural. And there’re no lines around her eyes.
I start to take a forkful of eggs, but then I hear it. Whir-whir-buzzzzzzz. Whir-whir-clink! It’s the blender. I drop my fork on the floor, spilling goopy eggs all over the nice rug. I grab my napkin and duck down to try to clean it, but the blender is still going and I have to stop and plug my ears. It goes on and on and on, and I am still under the table. I see Dan’s knee bouncing in his chair, but he doesn’t lean down and look at me. I want to cry. It’s embarrassing, but it also hurts. That’s what nobody gets. The sounds actually hurt, like knives someone is throwing at me.
And then it stops. Very slowly, I get up and sit back down. My face is hot, and I can tell Dan’s watching me but pretending not to. Please don’t let me have ruined their rug. Ginger comes in without a clue and hands me a glass of blood-red juice.
“Fresh tomato juice! Full of vitamins!”
Clumps of seeds and pulpy chunks are floating on the top like algae on a pond. I want to crawl back under the table. She waits until I take a teeny-tiny sip before she sits.
We eat mostly in silence. I push my juice to the farthest corner of my place mat. Dan tries to talk to me about Chickering Academy, the middle school I’ll be starting, but I don’t want to think about that yet. I’m still hoping all of this will be over before Monday.
I hear a bump and then another, and the dishes on the table rattle. I can’t figure out where it’s coming from until Ginger says, “Dan,” in that voice you use to wake someone up from a bad dream.
“What? Oh sorry, I’ll stop.”
Apparently, Dan’s knee-bouncing is a regular thing. Mom used to hate it when I jiggled my legs on long drives. She said being still was a skill. But the wiggling was (and still is) soothing, like letting out little flares of nervous energy. I study Dan across the table. He’s all elbows and glasses and ears. He’s exactly like a kid with too much energy. I wonder if I’m supposed to call him “Uncle” Dan. I hope not.
The big wooden clock in the hall chimes twice, and Ginger stands up to take my dishes. I’m reminded that most people don’t always eat off plates you throw away.
“Your new caseworker will be here in an hour. Want me to run you a bath?” she asks.
“No, thank you.” It’s weird having someone cook for me and lay out clothes and try to talk to me about school. That’s not how Mom and I function. We’re a team, but we know how to take care of ourselves.
I shower in my new bathroom and put the old Hard Rock Cafe sweatshirt back on. That’s two showers in two days. A record. Then I sit on the big white bed and hold Mom’s guitar. I don’t play it—just close my eyes and let my fingers feel the strings, the back of the neck, the upper frets. I sing an old Willie Nelson song that was one of Mom’s favorites to pass the time and calm my mind.
When the doorbell rings a half hour later, it’s a symphony of bells. I walk out onto the landing and peek down at the top of Ginger’s and Dan’s heads. They give each other a look like they’re starting a relay race, and Dan tugs on the end of Ginger’s ponytail before she opens the door. Mom never dated, not really. I’ve never lived with two grown-ups under one roof.
Ginger is saying, “Please, please come in,” and I sneak forward to get a better look. Dan spots me and waves me down. If having two adults around means two sets of eyes, maybe it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. I shake my head and take a step backward toward my room, but then Ginger turns now too and waves at me.
“Lou, come on down and meet Melissa!” she says in this weird high-pitched voice I haven’t heard her use yet.
I tuck my hands into my sleeves and shuffle down the stairs as slowly as possible. If Mom were here, she’d tell me to “stop draggin’ your feet” and “walk like you’ve got places to go,” but I don’t think she meant places like this.
Melissa, my new caseworker, is not what I expected. She has a pixie haircut and earrings that run up and down both ears. There’s one in her nose, too. She’s also wearing all black. I see a motorcycle in the driveway behind her. Melissa is cool. Maybe she’ll get where Mom and I are coming from.
She walks straight past Dan and Ginger and makes a beeline for me. I back up against the stair post.
“Hi. You must be Lou.” She cocks her head at me. “Maria’s talked you up.”
I swallow and nod. What am I supposed to say?
“Why don’t we all go in the living room?” Dan suggests, because Ginger doesn’t seem to know what to do with herself. She keeps smoothing down her sweater.
“I’d like to see Lou’s room first,” Melissa says, all business, like Maria. Ginger points up the stairs, and we all take our places to follow Melissa like kids. She sticks her head in the blue room. “Nice digs.” And then she spots the guitar on the bed and asks, “You play?”
“A little. It’s my mom’s.”
“Well, you’re in the right place if you want to learn. This is the music capital of the world.”
She turns to Ginger and Dan and says without a pause, “No kids, Mr. and Mrs. Latimer?”
“What? Oh, no. Not yet.” Ginger puts a hand to her ponytail. “We thought we’d enjoy married life a bit first. I mean, not that kids aren’t wonderful…” She trails off and looks horrified that she just implied she didn’t want kids running around her nice house. She’s got nothing to worry about. I don’t want to be here either. But the thought that I’m in the way pinches a little.
Melissa raises her eyebrows but carries on. “Right, well, let’s go back downstairs and have a chat.” We follow her and sit on the brown leather couches around the empty fireplace.
“When can I see my mom?” I haven’t asked the question in more than twelve hours. It feels like if I don’t, she’ll start to fade away. I need someone to tell me something that matters.
Melissa looks up from where she’s laying out several folders on the coffee table and smiles. “I guess we’ll get to it, then.”
She folds her hands in her lap and leans back. “This is just an initial home inspection, to make sure you’re comfortable and have everything you need. Now…” She pauses and gives me one of those up-and-down looks. “You want me to shoot you straight?” I nod. Ginger and Dan scoot closer together on the couch, making it squeak. “Your mom is currently under investigation for child neglect.”
I start to open my mouth. Melissa presses on. “I know. I know. It was a complicated situation. You were parked at a campsite. She couldn’t get to and from work without transportation. And she needed to work to keep you fed. But she should never have relied on a minor to pick her up in the middle of the night, especially in those conditions. And you should have been in school instead of singing on street corners.”
Laid out like that, it sounds worse than when Maria said it. I feel my head getting lighter and lighter, like it might just float away. I wish it would. I reach back and tug at the ends of my hair just once, hard, to keep myself from crying.
Ginger leans forward and puts her elbows on her knees. “My sister is a lot of things, but neglectful of her child is not one of them.” She points at me. “She loves this girl. She has from the moment she was born, and I know she’d do anything to protect her.” Something in her voice has shifted. It’s steadier and louder. “Under California law, you can’t keep her over seventy-two hours without formal charges. It’s been three days. Have you charged her?”
Maybe’s there’s more to Ginger than a Lexus and lumpy tomato juice.
“As the investigation is still ongoing, Ms. Montgomery is required to remain in Tahoe City until both the police and social services have closed their cases. But she’s not being held anywhere. She is free to work and go about her business. In fact, we encourage it. She needs a steady job, a home—evidence that she can provide a stable environment.”
So Mom is okay. I let out a little sigh of relief. But then… why hasn’t she called? And how is she going to get a home when she can’t even afford the gas to LA without working double shifts?
“Everything looks good here for now,” Melissa continues. “I’ll be in touch at the end of the week once Lou gets settled in at…” She looks down at her papers and then raises her eyebrows. “Chickering Academy. Swanky.” And then she’s standing, and I’m still not any closer to seeing Mom. Things have gone off the rails. As if they weren’t already.
Melissa shakes hands with Dan and Ginger, and then winks at me. I bet Maria put a note in my file about what happened at the airport. I bet there’s a big Do Not Touch! warning all over those pages. Fine, let her get all the dirt she wants on me. Just give me my mom back!
“Good luck at school, Lou,” she says, and gives me her card. “Call me if you need me. You’re going to be all right. I will see to that. You hear me?”
“I hear you,” I say, and I do. But it doesn’t mean anything. Everybody says I’m going to be fine, but they just keep trading me off from person to person. She doesn’t care any more than Maria did. They all leave and forget about me.
“Good,” she says, and, no surprise, leaves. I watch her ride away on her motorcycle.
I run upstairs so I don’t have to say another single thing to another person. I throw myself on the bed. It’s so soft. I hate it. I mean, I hate that I like it. There are so many things I should have told Melissa. So far she only knows Mom as the woman who lets her daughter drive a pickup truck in the snow in the middle of the night and doesn’t make her go to school, but does make her sing in front of strangers. There’s so much more, though! Like when I was ten and dying to see the Country Music Awards. We were camping just outside Oklahoma City and didn’t have a TV. But she made friends with the family in the fancy RV next door, and we got to watch the show on their plasma screen. We sat on their couch in that RV and analyzed Carrie Underwood’s new guitar and Kacey Musgraves’s orange pantsuit. We watched all the way until the end. I’d never been so tired and happy in my life.
I sigh and roll over, catching sight of Mom’s guitar by the door. It’s like having a piece of her here, which is great, but not enough. It’s not nearly enough. Why did she send me here?
There’s a knock, and Ginger peeks her head in. “Dan has tennis with the team this afternoon. Want to go for a walk?”
“Uh, sure.” I really don’t, but it’s either that or stare at the guitar.
We leave Dan on the bottom step pulling on his very white tennis shoes and head into the late September sunshine. They live on a quiet street that backs up to a thicket of trees. At its edge there is a little wooden gate, like the kind you’d find in The Secret Garden. Ginger leads me through it. We leave the sunshine behind and wind our way under a canopy of maples and pines. It’s quiet as we walk, just the crunch crunch of red and yellow leaves under our shoes. It’s funny the sounds my body finds calming and the ones it doesn’t. What glitch in my brain decided crunchy leaves are good and blenders and airplanes are bad?
“I like it here, away from the sound of traffic and people,” Ginger says like she’s reading my mind. After a few minutes we stop at a footbridge that runs over a little creek. She leans on the railing and rubs her head like it hurts and then lets down her ponytail.
I ask the question that I’ve been wondering about since Melissa left. “How’d you know that stuff about California law?”
For a second Ginger looks confused, then surprised. “Didn’t your mom tell you I’m a lawyer? I work in estate law, but I know enough about custody cases to ask the right questions.” She looks at me a beat longer. “She didn’t tell you anything about me, did she?”
“What’s estate law?” I ask instead of admitting that no, my mom has hardly mentioned you in my entire life.
Ginger isn’t fooled, but she answers anyway. “Estate law is managing other people’s assets—houses, property, businesses. It’s your net worth. Whatever you can rightfully call yours.”
I think about my net worth. Borrowed guitar. Donated iPod. Clothes on my back. Imagine having enough that you’d need someone to keep track of it for you. I pick a yellow leaf off the rail of the bridge and tear it into tiny pieces. “Do you talk to my grandparents?”
She laughs, but she doesn’t sound happy. “No. They weren’t exactly thrilled when I got a scholarship to college, or what they called… and I quote… ‘that highfalutin place.’ They felt like I chose school over them.”
“That’s nuts.”
She laughs again. “Yes, nuts is a good word for it. Lou, your grandparents are proud people. But they’re proud about the wrong things. They wanted us both in our rightful places, whatever they decided those were.”
“It doesn’t make sense.” I shake my head.
Ginger picks up her own leaf to shred. “I was a sophomore at the state college back in Arkansas when your mom told me she was going to have you. But she didn’t tell our parents until after she dropped out of her senior year of high school. It was a sticky situation. Next thing I knew, she sent me a postcard from Little Rock saying she’d left home.”
“Did you know my dad?”
This is a sneaky question, and I know it, because Mom has never answered this one either in the handful of times I’ve bugged her about it. But this is already more information than I’ve had on my family in twelve years, and I’m greedy for it. If Ginger’s willing to talk, I’m going to ask.
She sighs. “Did you know I was named after Ginger on Gilligan’s Island? Mama used to call me the red-haired starlet. But your mom, she was the knockout of the family, with that blond hair down to her waist and legs for miles. By the time she turned fifteen, the boys were lined up.” She looks at me sideways. “She always told me she wasn’t sure who your daddy was, and she didn’t want to be sure either.”
I already knew about the long line of boys and the fact that my dad could have been any one of them. But I had secretly hoped Mom might have said that to protect me, and really she knew. I hoped Ginger would know, that Mom had confessed it to her, and now I’d get my big reveal. There are too many big black holes in my life, and I’m starting to see it’s because Mom chose to keep it that way. I don’t get it. I don’t get why everything has to be so hard.
I glance at Ginger. She’s staring into the water, and her hair’s blowing a little in the breeze. She looks different after her talk with Melissa. Like she’s found her regular setting and isn’t so jumpy around me. An
d if she’s anything like Mom, I bet she knows more than she’s letting on.
“Do you still have that postcard from Little Rock?”
“Oh sure. And a few from Memphis and Lexington that your mom sent before you all moved west.” She straightens up. “Want to see them sometime?”
That surprises me. She’s actually going to let me see them. Mom would have hidden them or burned them on sight. She isn’t one for mementos or anything that makes you remember, really.
“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”
As we make our way back out of the trees and into the backyard, I do the math I always have to do when I count through all the places we’ve lived. I was only five when we left Lexington. Why did Mom stop writing after? Why send all those postcards before that and then just… nothing? Why didn’t we visit? If she wanted me to “make it big,” why not come to the music capital of the world? It doesn’t make sense. None of this makes sense.
I slip off my shoes at the back door and say bye to Ginger before going upstairs. Gilligan’s Island was that show about the people who got shipwrecked on an island. There were always old reruns in the motels where we stayed. Their little boat ride was only supposed to be a three-hour trip before the storm sent them spinning. Then they were castaways. Away from home for years and years.
7 Get Well Soon
I am on an island. I am on an island floating in a sea. It’s not hard to imagine in this blue sea of a room with the light streaming through the lacy curtains like reflected waves. My mother is free, but she hasn’t called. I keep circling back to that. Is she not allowed to? Is that it? Some rule Melissa didn’t mention? Or am I the castaway now? I remember how Ginger described Mom’s wild teenage self. It makes sense when I think of her like that. And now she’s finally gotten the chance to cut loose from the thing that got her caught up all those years ago at seventeen. Me. I squeeze my eyes shut, but still a tear leaks out. It hurts. It hurts like sounds hurt. Like a physical punch.
But a memory floats to the surface, one late summer afternoon in Tahoe. We’d just finished a show for the lunch crowd down by the pier. It was a small group, thankfully, and I was proud of myself for keeping it together all the way to the end.