by Susan Juby
“Oh,” Alex said, then started the car.
He drove the rumbling muscle car around the RV as slowly as possible, nervous even though his father’s truck wasn’t in the driveway.
“Don’t worry. He’s not home,” said May.
“I think he’s out with that rich lady again,” said Maggie.
“Have you seen her?” asked May. “She needs Hair Club for Men like no woman I’ve ever seen.”
“She’s rich, though,” said Maggie. “I’m hoping she’ll want to adopt us. I think it would be a good move for us financially. If she does adopt us, I’m going to ask for a motorcycle.”
“My guess is that we’ll be too busy holding Ms. Reed’s hand at her hair transplant surgery for you to have much time for motorcycles,” said May, who was more practical than her sister, but not much.
“I bet the doctors could take the hair from Dad’s chest and graft it onto Ms. Reed’s head!” mused Maggie. “Then Grace would just have to dye it.”
“What’s that smell?” asked May, who wasn’t one to give much notice before changing subjects.
Alex didn’t answer. His rapidly intensifying headache made speaking seem like a bad idea.
“Is that Stetson?”
“Lawdy, lawdy,” yelled May, “Hawg ain’t a cowboy no more, but he sure smells like one.”
Alex hunched lower in his seat and put on his signal for the turn coming up a mere half mile away.
In spite of their offer to accompany him, Alex left the twins in the car and walked to Stoneleigh’s main building by himself. He slowly followed the woman who answered the door down the hallway. The floor was old linoleum and the dull green wall paint looked like it dated back to the 1970s. Stoneleigh might be a private school for the wealthy, but it was dowdy.
“I can wait here,” Alex protested, as the plaid-skirted woman with swollen ankles and hair in an untidy bun started to lead him into the dining hall.
“That’s fine, dear. Cleo asked me to bring you right in.” The woman lowered her voice and leaned in, bathing him with her cigarette breath. “I think she wants to show you off.”
She pushed open fake wood-paneled double doors to reveal a cafeteria that seemed to be on the edge of a riot. Girls’ voices and laughter and shouts and shrieks echoed around the room. Dishes crashed and scraped, and cutlery clanked. The place smelled like boiled hot dogs and old gerbil cages.
After she opened the door, Alex’s escort stepped aside, leaving him completely exposed. A sea of darkblue school sweaters shifted, and a hundred, two hundred, a thousand heads turned to look at him. There, in the middle, sat Cleo—a patch of bright green—Dear God, what on earth was she wearing?—in a sea of navy-blue school sweaters. The cafeteria went quiet.
From where he stood, Alex saw a little smile curl onto Cleo’s lips. She made no move to get up.
He started to panic. She had another thing coming if she thought he was going to impersonate Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman and stride over and carry her out.
Luckily his heavy-ankled escort took pity on him, perhaps sensing that he was about to cut and run.
“Miss O’Shea. You have a visitor,” she announced.
Slowly, Cleo rose from her seat, causing her green paisley blouse to billow and ripple around her. She wore a very small white denim skirt. It looked like she’d raided some family’s closet and had the mom’s clothes on top and the little girl’s clothes on the bottom. Head held high, she moved toward the door.
“Hey, O’Shea—you forgot your tray!” said a long-faced girl with brown hair, smirking at the other girls at her table.
Cleo turned, grabbed her meal tray, and set it firmly down in front of the girl who’d spoken.
“Drop that off for me, would you, Bronwen? I’ve got a date.”
Then Cleo, finally smiling, strode to meet Alex. And in that moment, Alex felt like he could love Cleo O’Shea.
The feeling only lasted until Cleo got in the car, or rather until Cleo threw herself into the car. She must have been a little keyed up, because she nearly hit the roof when one of the twins gave a discreet little cough in the backseat. Cleo twisted around to stare at the twins. Alex suddenly saw his sisters through Cleo’s eyes: two identical females with brown hair in tangled ponytails, wearing white pajamas and carrying…knives? Swords? Sticks? Weaponry of some kind. He considered being embarrassed, but then decided he was too tired. He fit the key into the ignition and the IROC’s engine resisted once, twice. On the third try it turned over and roared to life.
Maggie leaned forward and stuck a hand over the seat at Cleo. “Hi, I’m…”
Her voice startled Alex into remembering his manners.
“These are my…” he said, raising his voice over the engine, so that he was almost shouting.
“Hi, I’m…” bellowed May.
“You must be…” yelled Cleo.
“Maggie.”
“Sisters.”
“May.”
“Alex’s sisters.”
“I think I saw you guys at a horse show once,” said Cleo, cranking her head around. “I just didn’t realize you were Alex’s sisters.”
“That’s because we’re allowed to roam freely over a wide area,” said May. “But we are available should a situation arise,” added Maggie mysteriously.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that,” said Cleo.
The twins’ reply was lost beneath the roar of the car’s engine as Alex drove slowly out of the Stoneleigh parking lot.
SEPTEMBER 30
10
Cleo
I CAN’T PRETEND I wasn’t weirded out. He brought his sisters. On a date. And they were armed. Was Alex Ford from a military family or something? I wasn’t even aware that Canada had a military. I thought they were one of those pacifist countries. Like Switzerland.
I considered asking Alex about Canada’s military, you know, so he’d think I was one of those people who is interested in other countries. I’d keep it quiet so the junior commandos-in-training in the backseat wouldn’t hear and think I was stupid, but then I noticed that driving, even at tranquilized granny speed, took all of Alex’s concentration. It’s a good thing he doesn’t ride like he drives. I may have had a driver most of the time, but I do know how to drive, which is more than Alex can say.
Then there was the issue of his car. Now I know why he rides his horse over to a barn for lessons. The noise alone would be enough to send Tandava through a fence. The car doesn’t suit him at all. I may not know him well enough to make those kinds of judgments, but the whole point of our date was to fix that. If we hook up I’m going to advise him to get a new car.
“So you ride with Alex?” yelled one of his sisters from the backseat.
“Yeah,” I said.
“But isn’t Stoneleigh a girls’ riding school or something? Why don’t you ride there?”
I turned to answer and then realized that my seat belt had pulled open my shirt so that my bra was showing. When I bought it I thought my shirt looked sort of peasant chic, but now I think it makes me look more homeless and color blind than anything else. I tried to be subtle about pulling it closed, but I didn’t need to worry. I could have stripped naked and Alex wouldn’t have taken his eyes off the road. He looked straight ahead as if the street were lined with improvised explosive devices or something. His white-knuckled hands gripped the steering wheel at precisely ten and two and he seemed afraid to shift, maybe because that would have meant taking his hands off the steering wheel. The engine screamed as we roared along in low gear.
“They mostly teach jumping at school,” I yelled back. “I ride dressage. Same as Alex.” The noise from the engine was brutal.
“Do you think maybe you should shift?” I asked him.
Alex didn’t react. The left-hand turn signal had been on for at least three blocks.
“Dressage, dressage, dressage,” said one of the twins in an exaggerated French accent.
The other one joined in. “Passage, pi
affe, renvers.”
I turned around, thinking they were laughing at me.
“Sorry,” one of them apologized. “It’s just that when Alex was little he used to wander around muttering those words to himself.”
I glanced over at Alex. He was ignoring all of us.
“Dressage, half pass, oui?” said a twin.
“Piaffe et volte et dressage,” said the other one.
“You speak French?” I asked, just to be polite. It was pretty obvious they didn’t know French.
“We like to think we speak dressage.”
We drove from Yellow Point, where Stoneleigh is located, into downtown Cedar, which basically consists of a baseball field across from a mini-mall.
I looked around as we drove and it occurred to me that there was a good chance Alex was a have-not. I knew he wasn’t rich or anything, but I thought he’d be at least middle class. What if he lived in one of these falling-down trailers? What if his mom was one of those hugely obese ladies who can’t fit out the front door of her double-wide and wears a stained housedress and eats Cheetos all day? What if his dad has no teeth? I quickly practiced my not-horrified face so that I wouldn’t betray my real feelings when we finally got to his tar-sided shack with the inbred, handicapped chickens flapping around in the dust outside.
Suddenly one of the twins shrieked, “Left! Oh my God! Left! Alex—turn here! Now!” which scared Alex so much that his foot came off the gas, the car stalled, and we coasted silently into a pothole-filled little parking lot.
“Good thing you have that N on the rear window,” said one of his sisters as Alex brought the car to a stop in front of a plain white building with a garage on one side and a small doorway on the other.
“It’s a good thing he’s a better rider than he is driver, eh, Cleo?”
I saw my chance to score points.
“Oh, he is,” I gushed. “He’s a really great rider.”
We all sat in silence for a few seconds.
“Uh, you’re going to have to move so we can get out,” said one of the twins.
“Sorry,” I said as I scrambled out of the car and pushed the seat forward.
“Imagine if someone attacked Alex for his bad driving,” said one twin as she tried to push some of her weapons out the door, “and they forced him off the road so they could give him a beating.”
“That would be so cool,” said the other one, who was trapped behind a wall of swords and sticks. “At first they’d think he was a tough guy because of the car. Then they’d see that he’s all sweaters and cords and rubber boots. So they’d be like, ‘Let’s get him. He’s a gentleman farmer! He’s no threat.’”
“Yeah! They’d try to pull him out through the front window by his hair.”
“Only we would pop out of the backseat where we’d been hiding. We’d come flying out like ninjas!”
At this point, they were both still trapped by their equipment but seemed too busy babbling about their violent fantasy to notice. Alex sat with his head resting on the steering wheel.
“The guys wouldn’t believe their bad luck for picking the deadliest car in all of Cedar. Maybe even all of Nanaimo!”
“Yeah!”
Still talking about the epic beating they were going to inflict on their brother’s fictional attackers, the twins finally freed themselves and piled out of the car, half their gear clattering to the pavement as they went.
“See you at nine-thirty!” said the one wearing a camouflage-patterned terry-cloth headband. She and her sister flashed supersized grins at Alex and me as they disappeared into the building. I got back into the car and shut the door.
The car seemed very quiet without them.
After Alex dropped off his sisters he drove us back to his house.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go to a movie, or something?” he asked.
I was all, No, no, that’s fine. We can hang at your house. Even though your mom probably weighs 450 pounds and your dad weighs 80 and has no teeth and lost his job at the chicken manure factory a while ago and hasn’t gotten back on his feet since.
I was all geared up to show him that I have no problem with poor country folk. Still, I was pretty relieved when we stopped at a regular-type house. In Cedar, people with lots of money live right next door to people who have none. The Fords’ place was somewhere in the middle. Their house was big and fairly new, your basic white box. They must have some money because they had a speedboat parked in the driveway and a trampoline on the front lawn, and a huge motor home, the kind used as dressing rooms on movie sets, parked right beside their house.
Inside, the house was messy. Seriously messy. Alex could have had a 450-pound mother buried somewhere under one of the giant piles of clothes that lay everywhere and no one would ever know. Also, from what I could see beneath all the clothes, the decorating was tragic. Somebody had a major jones for homemade dried-flower arrangements and pictures of sad-eyed clowns.
“Don’t take off your shoes,” said Alex, when I went to bend down. “I haven’t had a chance to do the floors.”
He hadn’t done the floors? I’m not one of those insensitive Paris Hilton types who thinks every family has help, but didn’t his mother do the floors?
“It’s the girls’ week to do laundry. They haven’t quite gotten around to folding yet,” he said.
Or picking it up off the floor, I thought.
I followed him through the living room, and all the sad clown eyes seemed to follow us. The kitchen was airy and bright and even messier than the living room. It was occupied by a woman in her twenties who had the biggest hair I’ve ever seen.
“This is my aunt Grace. Grace, this is Cleo,” said Alex.
“Have a Samosa,” she said, like she was giving me an order. She seemed to be in the middle of some sort of severe ethnic identity crisis. She wore a bright blue sari with silver trim. A bindi had fallen off her forehead and was stuck in her eyebrow.
“You made these?” I said, trying to give the impression that I was impressed. Alex’s aunt made his sisters look practically normal. She wasn’t quite as well armed, but her hands—or one hand, anyway—was absolutely filthy, disgustingly, revoltingly dirty—and she was offering me food with it.
No wonder Alex seems to like cleaning stalls so much. Horses are models of cleanliness compared with his aunt and sisters.
“Well?” Grace asked, impatiently shaking her giant hair so that the three or four shades of noncomplementary highlights shimmered. “Do you like it?”
I looked around for someplace to hide the Samosa. I considered dropping it down the gaping hole at the front of my shirt, but I knew it would leave a big telltale grease trail.
“I’m a superdomestic person,” said Grace, staring at me. “I love my career as a hairstylist, but I would also jump at the chance to have my own cooking show.” As she spoke the bindi fell out of her eyebrow and landed precariously on her chin.
I tried to catch Alex’s eye, but he seemed lost in thought as he stared out the window.
Realizing I was going to be forced to taste the brown lump, I took a deep breath and raised it to my mouth. I was shocked to discover that it actually tasted good. I took a second bite. It had some kind of curry mixture inside. On the third bite something pierced the roof of my mouth.
“Ow!” I said, and then tried to cover with an “Mmm.” I began feeling around the roof of my mouth with my tongue.
“Can you taste the rosemary?” asked Grace. “I picked some from one of the flowerpots outside the courthouse when I was paying my parking tickets. At least, I think it was rosemary.”
“I, uh…,” I said. “There’s something…” I opened my mouth and pointed inside.
“Oh, damn. Did you get a splinter?”
I nodded, my mouth still open.
“Would you mind getting it out, Alex?” Grace said, unconcerned that her food had just attacked me. “It took me like half an hour to get that last one out of May’s mouth. In the meantime, I’ve go
t about a hundred more Samosas to deep-fry.”
She reached over and grabbed up a pair of tweezers resting on a piece of tinfoil butter wrapper. “Here, use these.”
I stared at the tweezers. No way was anyone getting near me with those things—not even Alex.
“Come on,” he said, tugging at my dangling peasant sleeve.
For a moment, I forgot the pain. He touched me! Well, he touched my sleeve, anyway. I was halfway to having a regular, noncriminal boyfriend who was my age. Man, when I put my mind to something, I amaze even myself.
I started to get a little concerned when Alex didn’t lead me into a bathroom or a nearby surgical unit, but headed outside. We walked into a field where Turnip stood near the gate, watching us with that slightly quizzical look he always has.
I told myself this was normal. Lots of dates end up in a barn or, you know, some other private space. I was probably just experiencing nerves due to the pain of the splinter and anxiety about the health implications of possibly having those nasty tweezers in my mouth.
I stood in the doorway of the small two-stall barn while Alex turned on the lights. The little barn wasn’t fancy but it was spotless and perfectly organized. There wasn’t a stray piece of hay on the floor. It smelled of fresh shavings and leather. Alex fiddled with something at a small worktable.
“Thith is tho cute,” I said, lisping due to the pain from the rosemary barb. “I mean the barn. It’th really nithe.” I didn’t say it was nicer than the house, even though it was.
“Don’t worry. I won’t use the tweezers Grace gave me,” he said. “We don’t want you to catch some flesh-eating disease. I just want to make sure mine are sterilized.” He pulled a pair of tweezers from a large plastic first-aid box. He opened the bottle, poured some of the contents into the plastic lid, and dipped the tweezers into the liquid. Then he wiped them off with a fresh piece of paper towel. Watching him took my mind off my pain. His movements were so precise and careful.
He turned and walked over to me. He was tall enough that he could look into my mouth when my head was tilted up.