Here's to You, Zeb Pike

by Johanna Parkhurst

  The house was quiet when he got back home. Matt and Julia were watching some cartoon on TV, and his mother was in the bathroom painstakingly doing her makeup. “Dusty! You’re home, good. Did you see your dad?”

  Dusty nodded and held up the cash he’d gotten at the park. “Excellent.” His mother swooped into the room and grabbed it out of his hands. “I’ll pay the rent. Then I’m going out with Sammy, so I need you to watch Matt and Julia, okay?”

  Dusty groaned. He had a big test in a few days, and there were parent-teacher conferences coming up that she really needed to be there for. “Mom? With Sammy? You can’t be gone too long this time. Conferences are on Friday, and if you aren’t there, Mrs. Sabring will start asking me all kinds of weird questions again.” Just like she had when their mom had missed the last conference.

  “Dusty….” His mom trailed off. “Look, I just need some time away once in a while, okay? It’s not easy being a single mom. This is hard for me.” Her eyes welled up, and Dusty felt like screaming. He took a deep breath instead. If he yelled at her, she’d either start yelling back in front of Matt and Julia or disappear for who knew how long. “Once in a while is okay, mom. Even if you want to be gone all night tonight, that’s okay. I can take care of them. But you really have to stop leaving for longer than that. Somebody’s gonna notice soon.”

  Dusty’s mom waved him off with a laugh. “Dusty, you worry far too much! Mothers leave their younger kids with their perfectly capable—” She leaned over to kiss Dusty’s cheek. “—older children all the time. It will be fine, I promise.”

  She was out the door before Dusty could even finish saying good-bye.

  I FIND Jack in his study that night, grading papers. I’ve just read the kids a story and Beth has tucked them in. Ever since I came back, Beth and I have started falling into a pattern of taking care of the kids together. It takes a lot of cooperation on both our parts, but it’s working. Or at least, it seems to be.

  “Hey, Jack?” I feel almost weird interrupting him. The study’s really his space, just like Beth’s office is hers. I don’t really go into either one much.

  “Hey Dusty.” Jack smiles. “What’s up?”

  “Umm… are you busy? Can I talk to you a minute?”

  “Of course we can talk.” He puts down his pen and swirls his chair around to fully face me. “Drag up that old ottoman.”

  I don’t know where to start. He stares at me easily, waiting. He’s a teacher, I remember. He could probably wait for me all day.

  “I… uh… I wanted to let you know that Emmitt and I talked today.” Jack nods. “We’re not going to tell anyone at school or anything, but I think he’s sort of my boyfriend now.” If feels strange saying that word out loud, labeling Emmitt like that. It’s like the first time I said the word “gay” to Jack to describe myself: weird, but not wrong.

  Jack’s expression is unreadable. “I’m really glad you guys worked it out and all… but Dusty, are you going to be okay with keeping your relationship hidden? It’s not going to be easy.”

  I know he’s right, but I’ve thought about this. “Yeah, I really think I will. I mean, you and Casey know, and I’m going to tell Beth and Matt and Julia, so it will only be at school that we really keep it a secret. Plus, I’m new to this whole thing. I’m new to having a boyfriend, and I’m really new to being….” Somehow, I can’t bring myself to say the word out loud again. “For now, at least, I think it will actually be easier for both of us this way.”

  Jack looks really happy now, and I wonder what the best way is to transition into a very different topic of conversation. I decide to go with blunt. “I was also wondering how my grandparents died.”

  Jack’s face changes completely. . “I guess your mom never talked very much about them, huh?” I shake my head. “Well, they were great people, Dusty. Your grandmother was a homemaker and your grandfather owned the farm this house used to go with. He gave it up when I was a kid and went to work for the post office—that’s why the barn is gone—but he was always a farmer at heart. He kept a few chickens and whatnot in the shed. That’s Beth’s office now.

  “I’d just left for college, and your mother was barely a freshman in high school, when he and your grandmother got into a car accident coming home from the store. Another car hit some ice and couldn’t stop in time—a complete and utter accident.”

  “Oh,” I say. It’s like I’m being told the story of some far-off distant strangers, but these were my grandparents. In a lot of families, grandparents are a big part of kids’ lives. Maybe they would have been part of mine too.

  Jack turns back to his desk and pulls down a framed photo. “Those are your grandparents, Dusty.”

  They look… familiar. The picture is in black and white, but my grandfather seems to look just like Jack and I. So that’s where it all started.

  “Uh… Jack… did you take care of my mom after that?”

  Jack bites his lip. “Yep, I did. I dropped out of BU to come back here, and I took part-time courses at UVM while she was still in school.”

  “Did you have to quit hockey?”

  Jack sighs. “I suppose I didn’t have to. But I was going to school part-time and working, and it was hard enough doing that and taking care of your mom at once. I decided taking care of my sister was more important than hockey, I guess.” He stands and stretches. “We have more in common than you think, Dusty.”

  I stand too. “Wait, Jack, I don’t get it… if you took care of my mom like that… why didn’t you guys ever talk? Why didn’t Mom tell us about you?”

  Jack stands there, not answering, for a while. Finally he smiles. “Dusty… you know how close you are to Matt and Julia?”

  “Well, yeah. I mean, that’s why I have a hard time letting you and Beth take care of them, I guess.”

  “Well… with your mom and me, it was sort of the opposite situation. She hated and resented that I was taking care of her. She thought I was overbearing and suffocating, and she ran away from me the second she had her high school degree and enough money.”

  “My mom ran away?” This is kind of expected, actually. After all, she’s been running away from the three of us for years. But it does make me think. I mean, what if Matt and Julia felt that way about me? What was so different between my mom and her kids that she couldn’t enjoy having an older brother to watch out for her? “Were you?”

  “Was I what?” Jack looks wholly confused by my question.

  “Were you overbearing? Did you suffocate her?” I know it’s a dangerous question, and I can tell from Jack’s look that he’s surprised I asked it, but somehow I have to know. Was it something I’ve done differently, or is it really that my Mom doesn’t know how to do anything but run away?

  Jack considers the questions carefully. “I guess…. I thought that all we had left was each other, and I acted that way. She saw the world a little differently…. She seemed to know she’d always have more than just me.”

  For the first time in my life, I feel like I understand my mother. But it isn’t as good a feeling as I’ve always thought it would be.

  Maybe I’m finally starting to understand Jack a little bit better too.

  Jack keeps going. “At any rate, Abby ran away. I never heard from her again, and I didn’t even know she’d had children until Ms. Davies called Beth and me. I loved your mother very much, Dusty. Very much. I can’t tell you how happy I was to hear your middle name, to know there was some part of her that still loved me too.”

  We sit in that room for a while. Jack pulls out some old pictures of him and my mom as a child, and I tell him some stories from when Jules and Matt were younger, and even a few stories from when I was younger. It feels good. There’s one picture Jack shows me that I may hold forever in my head—my mom sitting by the back shed, long hair swinging in her face. She’s laughing hard, holding onto a pair of ice skates, and Jack is hugging her, grinning. It sticks with me because she once took a picture of me and Matt, when he was really young
, with Matt hugging me just like that, and I remember distinctly how much that picture made her smile. I tell Jack about that.

  Finally it’s late, and it seems like it’s time to leave. “Oh,” I say, halfway out the door, “you can call me Dustin. It’s okay.”

  Jack raises an eyebrow. “Why? Why couldn’t we call you that before?”

  “Well… I dunno. It’s just that Dad never called me anything but Dusty…. I sorta thought it should stay that way. Like Julia being Jules and all. But I think I’m ready for something different.

  Jack nods. “I’ll call you anything you want to be called, bud.”

  “GO, EMMITT, go!” Casey yells.

  It’s turning into a great afternoon. Casey and I are watching Emmitt work out with some of the other hockey players at the rink. They’re getting ready for the season to start soon, and I’m already starting to realize that there isn’t much I’d rather do than watch Emmitt skate around in a hockey uniform. I could do without watching him slam other guys into walls. Oh well. You can’t have everything.

  It’s starting to feel like this thing between Emmitt and me is something real. I told Beth about Emmitt a few nights ago. She just hugged me and told me how happy she was for me; then she cried. I think she was so happy I was sharing something important with her that I probably could have told her I was dating a mutant and she would have been fine with it. I still haven’t told Matt and Julia, mostly because I’m not sure how yet. Jack and Beth haven’t pushed me to. They seem to think I’ll figure it out on my own.

  Icing on the cake to how well things are going? There’s still no Rick around to hassle us. Word on Colby’s one tiny street (that might be a little bit of an exaggeration) is that he’s still in juvie. It’s easier to keep enjoying his absence than worry about the day he shows back up at school.

  Practice ends, and I try to not drool as I watch Emmitt tear off his helmet and skate over to the locker room. Casey just rolls his eyes. He has proven to be really good about us being together, but every now and then he likes to give us crap about it. “Dude, don’t get your panties all in a twist,” he says, poking me. “You get to hang out with him now, remember?” He pantomimes a kissy face, and I glare at him until he stops. We’re still in public, after all, even if there aren’t too many people around.

  “Shuddup. Just because you can’t get Rebecca Holstead to give you the time of day….”

  He blushes and goes back to telling me, for the tenth time, why he just needs to get her to go out with him once and then he’ll have her hooked.

  Casey and I wait for Emmitt in the rink, and he drives us back to my house, where we’re planning to watch movies, eat too much, and generally hang out. Casey has been complaining that Emmitt and I spend too much time without him now, so planning this evening was our way of getting him to shut up. We’ll see if he’s still so excited once he remembers that Matt has killer hero worship for Casey and will probably spend the entire night following him around everywhere he goes.

  We pull up into the driveway and I zip up my jacket tightly around me in anticipation of the Vermont cold, which I am finally starting to get used to. We trudge through some snow piles. Casey is still going on about Rebecca. “Look, all I’m saying is that she doesn’t know what I have to offer her yet….”

  He’s still talking, I think, but I’ve stopped listening, because I’ve just swung open the back door open and seen something I never thought I would see again. Sitting at the table, drinking a cup of coffee and holding Julia on her lap, is my mother.

  Julia hops off of Mom’s lap and comes running over to tug on my hand. “Dusty, Dusty! Mom’s here! She’s here and she likes my dogs!”

  “Hello, Dusty.” Mom is standing behind Jules now, smiling. “God, I’ve missed you.” She reaches over for a hug and I immediately stiffen. Call it conditioning from years of being abandoned by this woman.

  She turns to Emmitt and Casey and flashes them the sweet I-could-rob-a-bank-and-you’d-forgive-me-instantly-if-I-smiled smile that I know all too well. “Who are you?”

  Emmitt, ever polite and respectful, pulls himself together the fastest. “Hello, Mrs. Porter. I’m Emmitt, and this is Casey. We’re… friends with Dusty.”

  The door swings open behind us, and then Jack’s home from the workout as well. He stops, stares an appropriate length of time, and then gathers his breath. “Abby. It’s wonderful to see you.”

  “Jack! I’ve missed you so much!” She crosses the room and leans in for an enthusiastic hug, but when he hugs back, questions are written all over his face.

  Jack glances over at me. I wonder what my face looks like right at that moment.

  “Uh… Dustin, this might not be the best night for Emmitt and Casey to hang out with us. Boys, would you mind if we took a rain check?”

  Emmitt nods; Casey is still frozen in place. Emmitt propels him toward the door. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he calls over his shoulder, and he looks kind of anxious. Probably wondering if this means I’m going back to Colorado.

  “Abby, it’s been so long.” Jack leaves his coat and hat in the mudroom, pulls off his boots, and walks into the kitchen to sit down across from Mom. Beth is sort of hiding by the sink, clutching at a cup of coffee. And I mean clutching—her knuckles are so white they look like they could burst open at any moment.

  “I know, darling.” She reaches over to squeeze his hand. “I really hadn’t ever meant to be gone this long, but Colorado sort of became home. I got married, I had these three….” She gestures at Julia and me, and I realize I don’t actually know where Matt is. “But I recently heard there was a mix-up when Julia got sick while Dusty was taking care of them. Is that true? Is that how they ended up here?”

  A mix-up? Is she serious? She’s got to be on drugs about as hard-core as whatever my Dad’s on. I’m just about to pipe in with something when Jack interrupts me. “Dustin? Will you take Julia upstairs?”

  “Dustin? What happened to Dusty?” Mom looks over at me, puzzled.

  I ignore her and grab Jules’s hand. “Sure, Jack.”

  I start leading Julia upstairs and stop next to Beth. “Where’s Matt?” I whisper to her.

  Beth seems surprised to find me standing in front of her. “Oh… he ran up to his room when your mom got here. I went to go talk to him, but he said he wanted to be alone.” This is disconcerting. I nod at Beth, hoping she’ll know what that means better than I do, and I take off up the stairs with Julia struggling to keep up.

  Matt is face-down on his bed when we get there. I grab his shoulder. “Matt, are you okay? What’s wrong?”

  When he finally looks up at me, his face is bright red. He’s obviously been crying. “What do you think? Mom’s back!”

  I’ve already figured that out, but I’m still not sure why Matt is crying. He’s always been pretty excited to see Mom before.

  Matt flips over on his back. “She’s going to take us away, Dusty! Back to Colorado! And I won’t get to play soccer anymore, and you’ll have to go back to cooking dinner and cleaning, we’ll never see Aunt Beth and Uncle Jack again, just like we never did before.”

  I could feel a frown slipping across my face. “Did you hate it there, Matt? With just the three of us? Was it that bad?”

  Matt reads my mind instantly. “Dusty, I didn’t mean that! I liked living with you! But I like it here too, and here I get to play soccer!”

  That makes me smile. It’s true. We never had money for Matt to play soccer in Colorado.

  “I hate her!” he pronounces fervently. “She can’t just come and go when she wants! Parents have to stay with their kids!” He says it with such gusto that I don’t really know how to respond.

  Julia pulls on my shirtsleeve. “Dusty? I love Mom, but I love Beth too. Can we stay with them both?”

  No use lying now, I figure. “Julia… probably not.”

  “Oh.” She frowns, and her face crinkles up before she starts to cry. “Matt’s right. I don’t wanna go home! And I don’t wan
t Mom to leave again!”

  Great. Five minutes into this conversation and I’ve got one of them in tears and the other on the brink.

  By the time I finally get Matt and Julia calmed down and convince Matt to read Julia a story, I’ve decided I’d like to know more about what Mom’s plans are.

  Beth is sitting alone at the kitchen table, still clutching that coffee mug. I can hear Mom and Jack talking in the study, but all I can make out are strange, toneless whispers.

  “Hi, Beth.”

  She looks up at me. “They’re in the study, Dustin… if you want to talk to them.”

  “Yeah, I will. Uh, Beth… just so you know… Matt’s pretty upset about Mom coming back… and then Jules was too…. Maybe you could go upstairs and read with them?”

  Beth’s eyes sag with happiness. “Thank you, Dustin,” she whispers. “You have no idea how much that means to me.”

  Actually, I’m pretty sure I do.

  I head to the study door. I barely have my hand on the door handle when the voices inside suddenly become loud enough for me to make out exactly what everyone is saying.

  “Jack, I know I haven’t been the best mother in the world, but I don’t see what you’re so upset about. I don’t see what anyone is so upset about. For crying out loud, I wouldn’t have left them alone if I didn’t think Dusty could handle it!”

  “Abby, he’s fourteen! You don’t leave a fourteen-year-old alone with little kids! What if he hadn’t known enough to take Julia to the hospital when she had appendicitis? What would have happened?”

  “Jack, you always think like that! You can never just look on the bright side! That didn’t happen, all right? Julia’s fine! She’s fine, and she wants to see me!”

  “Yeah, because she hasn’t seen you in months! It’s amazing she remembers who you are!”

  “I can’t believe you would say something like that! You know how much I love my kids!”

  “No, Abby, I don’t! In fact, I have very little idea, because up until a few months ago, I didn’t know they existed!”