“I’ll be back soon,” I said. “Real soon.”
One week later, Mrs. M. sat beside me on her front porch, reading the contract. I was clutching the arms of the Adirondack chair, sweating bullets. She was surprised that I would ask her for something so huge—a place to live during my senior year. Her eyes were round as quarters behind her reading glasses, and she was scowling. But I remembered that a scowl from Mrs. M. didn’t necessarily mean she would say no.
She finished reading, put the paper onto her lap, and looked away from me. There was a part of me that wanted to wrap my arms around her knees and beg her to take pity on me. But another part of me that knew this request had to be a business exchange—no drama—or it would never happen. “Tell me something, Charlie,” she asked finally. “What will your dear father think about you moving in with me?”
“He won’t care,” I said. It was true; he had no use for me. He was completely distracted by a certain female teenager. And thirteen-year-old Liam hated me. I wouldn’t miss either one of them. My mind was made up. If I could just live somewhere else, just start over, reinvent myself. If I could find a job, make a little money, finish high school, hide. If I could just not be connected in any way to any other Porters. Especially my dad, his insane mix of ambition, blindness, and meanness. I had a hunger for a few normal friends, maybe even a girlfriend who wasn’t a fantasy. The chance to wake up anywhere, anywhere, but in that place, that bedroom I shared with Liam, that apartment, that drama queen Ruby, that sorry excuse for a father.
Mrs. M. interrupted my tortured thoughts. “You will not like living with me,” she said, “especially under the conditions of your contract.”
“Would you please just think about it, Mrs. M.?”
“You will be bored out of your mind here. And I am not fit company for most hours of most days.”
“I already know that about you. But you’re the only person on the whole planet that I could ask. Look, my dad is sleeping with a teenager, okay? It’s making my home life really depraved. Really depraved, Mrs. M., worse than ever before.”
This silenced her for a long minute. “Have you had any recent contact with your mother?” she asked.
“No, I have not.”
“And you wouldn’t consider asking her if she could help you with this situation?”
“I think you already know the answer to that question, Mrs. M.”
“Charlie, moving in with me is a bad idea.”
“Well, it’s my only idea. You’re my only hope. I swear to God I won’t be any trouble.”
“Well, I’m certainly not going to swear that I won’t be any trouble! You won’t like living with an old lady. It will drive you crazy.”
“I’m already crazy, Mrs. M. I just really, really, really need a different place to live if I’m going to make it through my senior year without completely losing my mind. Nine short months, that’s all I’m asking.”
She pursed her lips, weakening.
Just say yes, I pleaded silently.
She said. “I have a condition.”
I nodded, hope surging through my chest.
“If I am to be your new grandmother, then I require that you contact your mother and tell her what is happening to my other grandchild before you move in with me.”
“What? She doesn’t care about him! Nothing has changed.”
“You may be right. But if you are going to leave your brother alone with your father and this … teenager, I at least want your mother to know about it.”
“A big waste of time, Mrs. M.”
“Take it or leave it.”
I took it. “When can I move in?”
“When I have proof that you’ve contacted your mother.”
She wasn’t kidding. On the next Saturday, when I arrived with a trash bag full of belongings and a backpack stuffed with school supplies, she ordered me to write to my mother about Liam before I could take my things downstairs.
Grumbling, I sat down at her kitchen table and wrote this:
Mom [it killed me to call her “Mom,” but what was I supposed to call her?],
I am moving out because I can’t stand living with Dad. Liam will be stuck with him, and that will not be a good thing. You probably don’t care. I will be living with a friend.
—Charlie
I handed it to Mrs. M. without looking at her.
“You need to add something about your father having a teenage girlfriend,” she said.
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Oh, crap. All right. Give it back to me.” I took the note back and added, “P.S. Dad lives with a new girlfriend, who is still a teenager.”
“Much better,” she said.
She had tracked down an address for a Lucinda Jean Porter in Appleton, Wisconsin, the town I knew that Mom had moved to ten years ago. It had to be her. “Shall we put my return address on the envelope?” Mrs. M. asked.
“Hell, no!”
She frowned down at me in disapproval, and I glared back. Then she put the letter into an envelope with an exaggerated sigh. When I held out my hand for it, she said, “I will mail it, thank you very much. You may go downstairs and unpack now.”
I went down into the basement, to my new room. The cement walls were painted white, the carpeting was new—indoor-outdoor grayish purple. There was one small egress window with a screen. A dresser, made of particle board, stood in one corner—the drawers worked. I began to fill it. A cot had been newly placed along one wall. Mrs. M. had bought me a new pillow—it was still in plastic on the mattress beside a small stack of sheets and three folded blankets. A small fan was still in the box on the floor.
Clean sheets, decent blankets, a new pillow, and a fan.
I don’t know why exactly, but all of a sudden, I just lost it. I sat on the cot and cried with relief for what seemed like a whole hour. Then I couldn’t go upstairs right away, so I was looking for something to distract me, and I noticed that there was a utility closet in one corner of the little room with a wooden door. My own closet. There was a bar across the top of the closet with several hangers. On the cement floor, toward the back wall, were two stacked boxes. I pulled back the flap of the one on top. It was full of Franklin Firefly books. I put the rest of my things on top of this box and put a couple of shirts on hangers. Hangers! Then I made up the bed. Then I went upstairs to have lunch in the kitchen with my new grandmother.
“It was so busy at work! I’m exhausted. Let’s get takeout tonight, okay? Hey! Are you even listening to me?”
“Sorry, sorry, I was … I’ve been … I thought a lot about Mrs. M. today.”
“Me too! Didn’t you say that she was an author? We should Google her! Does she have a website?”
“She wouldn’t have a website. She hated that kind of stuff, and she quit writing completely about six years ago. She wrote this one book when she was younger. I can never remember the title—something with the words night writer. It was based on her dad being a reporter for the Detroit Free Press back in the sixties.”
“Not Every Night Writer? Oh my God, Charlie, I read that book! We read it in my AP English class when I was in high school. Oh my God, I never made the connection! M. M. Manning, of course it’s her!”
“Did you like the book?”
“I loved it. The girl’s dad was a reporter during the Detroit riots and he almost gets killed trying to help some people and the little girl ends up writing about it and learning what it means to write from the heart. The ending is sad, though.”
“Sad, how?”
“The father dies. The last chapter made me cry. God, how could somebody write something that good and then just decide not to write anymore?”
“She wrote some books after that. But she told me they didn’t mean anything to her. She said she had realized that she was one of those writers with only one good book in them—one pure book, as she put it, but before she figured that out, she got on the author bandwagon and couldn’t get off. So
she wrote about bugs. Same thing I was doing. She said it would have been better for everyone, including her, if she had only written one book.”
“You know what other book was like that? To Kill a Mockingbird. It was the only book Harper Lee ever wrote. Also Wuthering Heights. Two of my all-time favorite books.”
“Did you ever read Confederacy of Dunces? That was a onetime book too. The author committed suicide because he was so depressed about not getting his novel published. I’m telling you, Clara, the book world is a dangerous place.”
“Oh my God, Charlie, I just remembered something! At the end of Every Night Writer, the father gives the daughter his desk right before he dies!”
This silences me for a few beats. “Really?”
“Charlie, maybe Martha Manning gave you the same desk that her father gave to her! Like she totally believed you would become a famous writer! Probably because you were an author already!”
“No, I wasn’t,” I say quietly. “Not even close.”
“Here we go again. When somebody writes a book, Charlie, then they are an author!”
“Clara … for God’s sake—anybody can write anything and say it’s a book!”
We are arguing, and I stop myself. I remember that Clara doesn’t know the story behind the books. How much suffering they caused me. The real story. I haven’t taken her back this far in time.
She isn’t listening anymore; she’s distracted and tired and hungry, pulling on her lip, frowning. I suspect that she is trying to figure out how we will get that huge and very important desk out of Mrs. M.’s house and where in the world it would fit in her house. Nowhere. I don’t want it. I’m not a writer. I use a laptop, and I travel light. What on earth would I do with a desk like that?
NINETEEN
I notice a black trash bag under the table in one corner of Clara’s kitchen. The trash bag moves slightly, and I realize it is a gigantic beetle curled up and trying to hide from me by looking like a trash bag. Its legs are curled up tight around its body. I am not afraid. I am annoyed. In the dream, I cry, “Hey! You! Quit hiding, I can see you!”
“Charlie, who are you talking to now?”
I pretend to still be asleep, sensing that Clara is now sitting up beside me in her bed. She gives my shoulder a gentle shake.
“Who’s hiding, Charlie?”
I fake a soft snore. After a moment, Clara gives up and snuggles back in beside me. I am sleeping in her bed regularly now that my cast is off. It is the most wonderful thing, feeling her small perfect legs against my big hairy legs. My right ankle is still slightly sore, and she is always careful not to bump it. Maybe this is going to work, I think as I drift off. Maybe this will keep going even after my injury is healed.
Clara comes home from work that same day and tells me something that causes a meltdown. We are facing each other in the kitchen, and I am furious. She is struggling to stay calm and reasonable, she doesn’t understand my anger, and she doesn’t like it. I am not mad at her—I am mad at Liam. I am squeezing my head in anger and muttering abuse. He has been calling my girlfriend “just to chat.” He has called her three times on her cell phone since the time he broke into her house, which I haven’t ever told her about. Clara says she has been meaning to mention his calls, but she was nervous that it might upset me. Good call, Clara! Jesus!
So today he calls her at work and INVITES her to his next big violin concert in Grand Rapids!
“I know. I know. I knew you’d be upset. But honestly, Charlie, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with him calling me—he was just being friendly.”
“Aw, get a CLUE, Clara! And wait a minute, how does he even know you work at Rite Aid?”
“Would you stop yelling at me! Just stop it!”
“How does he know?”
“I guess I might have mentioned it when I was telling your mom where we met. I suppose he remembered.”
“You should have hung up on him the first time he called you! You should have at LEAST told him never to call you again! Don’t you see what he’s trying to do? God, you’re too nice, Clara! You’re just too damn NICE!”
“I said, don’t yell at me, Charlie Porter! Maybe I didn’t WANT to hang up on him. He was just being friendly, and for your information, he wasn’t just inviting ME to the concert, he was inviting both of us. And he said the whole thing was your mom’s idea.”
“That is such a fucking LIE!”
“Would you stop swearing? Why is it a lie? It could very well have been your mom’s idea. Your mom seemed so … I mean, it was obviously important to her that we all got together that one time.”
“Mom wouldn’t have invited us. She would have left it up to us when we wanted to see her again. She’d take it slow. She’s just really … shy.”
Shy. The small word hung in the air between us, and for a brief moment, I saw Mom’s face, her young face—pale, uncertain, shy. I was her helpful son, staying close to her skirts but helping her in the outside world, holding her hand, helping her with her new baby, finding her inhaler. What had Dad done to her to make her do something so irreversibly unmotherly as to leave her children behind? I knew what Dad had done to me and to Liam. What had he done to Mom?
Clara is watching me. She says softly, “You’re shy too, Charlie. You were really shy when we first met. I loved that about you.”
I don’t respond. I feel suddenly miserably sad. Too sad to move. Too sad to speak. Is it because I had an extended, sympathetic thought about my mother, something I have for so long made a point never to do? Now I’m thinking about her, seeing her. She is wearing a soft, tweedy sweater with leather buttons that I still remember. She called it her Mary Poppins sweater. Mary Poppins was her favorite movie. She is putting on the sweater, buttoning it up, and preparing to fly.
Clara touches my arm.
“Hey, you. Don’t look so sad. Look, if your brother calls me again, I’ll tell him I’m too busy to talk, okay?”
“Please don’t talk to him anymore.”
“I guess this means we won’t be going to his concert.”
“No, we are not going to his concert.”
I put my elbows on the table and lower my head into my arms. “I feel like too much is happening to me, Clara. Too many past disasters hanging over my head. Next thing you know, my dad will probably call us and say he’s back in the States and ask if he can live here with us. Seriously!”
Incredibly, at that exact moment, the phone rings. Clara’s eyes grow round in alarm. She gasps, “He can’t live here, Charlie!”
Then we start to laugh. Nervous laughter, because we don’t recognize the number on Clara’s caller ID.
“Oh my God, Charlie. Should I answer it?”
But she waits too long, and it goes into voice mail and we listen to the message and it is the Grandville Surgical Clinic, calling to tell Clara that in regards to a Mrs. Martha Manning in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the clinic is not able to give out phone numbers to nonpatients.
Clara looks guilty as charged. “I just thought … I just thought we should … I just wanted to …”
“Jesus, Clara. Why didn’t you just ask me for her number?”
“Oh, you have it? Could you go get it?”
I glare at her.
“Don’t look at me like that, Charlie, I wasn’t going to call her without telling you!”
“No, no, go ahead and call her,” I say. “I’ll get the number for you. Seriously, call her right now.”
“Charlie … don’t be like this. I just thought we should thank her.”
“Oh sure, thank her! Ask her if she wants to go with you to Liam’s concert. She loves violin music.” And this is true. She played violin concertos in the mornings—Mozart and Schumann and Liszt, part of her morning routine, which became my morning routine for that blissful year. And all that time, all those mornings, my brother was ten miles away, living with our mother, playing the violin every day, and waiting to get his revenge.
Clara is asking me something. �
��Cheese and mushrooms? Charlie? Where are you, Charlie? Oh, be that way. I’m ordering cheese and mushrooms. And get me that number—now!”
She orders the pizza. While she is on the phone, I retrieve Mrs. M.’s phone number—written on an index card in one of the boxes. She gave it to me before she left Michigan. Clara is on hold. I flash the number in front of her face. She snaps the card out of my hand. Frowning. Then takes a pen from her cup of pens and writes in large letters above the number: “MARTHA MANNING’S PHONE #.” The pen she is using just happens to be Mrs. M.’s diamond pen. Apparently, it still works.
Mrs. M. was wrong to think I wouldn’t like living with her. I liked it from day one. I liked her cozy house. I liked my room in the basement. I liked her simple cooking and her sandwiches. I liked watching TV with her in the evenings (she was obsessed with crime shows). I slept like a log on my little bed and appreciated not having to hear people having sex in the next room. My bathroom was a tad dingy, but I was used to a much worse one, and in the basement, I had complete privacy, nobody ever pounding on the door for me to hurry up and no female products overflowing from a shared cabinet.
During the first month, Mrs. M. bought a few other things for my room without asking—a little computer desk, a small bookshelf, an old stuffed chair, an alarm clock, and a clip-on lamp that could attach to the top of the stuffed chair for night reading. Whenever she would buy something for me, she would tell me that she bought it with her latest huge royalty check because she was such a successful author. It was a game with us.
The chores I had contracted to do were normal and finishable, especially compared to the unfixable mess I had come from. Taking out her trash took five minutes. Raking her leaves was a piece of cake—she had a nice new rake and a wheelbarrow. Apparently, her husband had been kind of a garage neat-nik, and she had the most well-stocked tool and yard shed that I could have ever imagined. Everything I did in that little house made sense and felt easy. My homework was easier. Sleeping was easier. I learned to cook a few simple things. I recycled. I learned how to use a food processor. Me!
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