“A’ight, I’ll see y’all tomorrow.”
“A’ight, Patty.”
“Bye, Patty.”
“Yo, Patty!” Ghost was just coming off the track, wiping his face with the bottom of his shirt. “You out?”
“Yeah.”
“Without saying nothin’?” He cocked his head to the side. “So you ain’t one of us no more? You too good for Sunny, Lu, and me?” He smiled, making it clear he was joking.
“Sunny’s my guy. I love Sunny.”
“Oh you love Sunny, but not me and Lu?”
“I mean . . .” At that moment, Maddy’s arms wrapped around my waist. I could feel her rocking back, trying to get me to lift off my feet. I kissed her on the top of the head, immediately noticing fewer beads on her braids, which was normal. They fall off during the week like acorns from a tree. “Hey, hey.” I tried to get her to stop squeezing. “Tell Momly I’m coming. First, say hi to Ghost.” Maddy waved, then turned and ran back toward the car. Now, back to Ghost. “I mean . . . I wouldn’t wanna get in the middle of y’all relationship.”
“Stop.”
“Dancing so sweetly with each other.”
“Stop.”
“So precious.”
“I’m leaving.” Ghost turned around and walked toward Lu, who was sitting on a bench, unlacing his track shoes.
“C’mon, Ghost. Ghost! Don’t be that way!” I begged to his back.
“Bye, Patty.” He threw his hand up, dismissing me.
“I love you, Ghost!” I shouted. “But just not as much as I love Sunny!” Of course, Sunny heard me, which I wasn’t thinking about when I said it. We caught eyes, but I didn’t wanna make it weird, or for him to think it was anything more than a joke, so I added, “Because you pay attention to details.” Then held my hands up, spirit-finger style. “Thanks for noticing my Flo Jos. See you tomorrow.”
TO DO: Eat turkey wings (for the millionth day in a row)
THE RIDE HOME always goes like this:
Momly turns the radio news down, then asks how practice was. I tell her it was fine. She asks if I’m tired and even if I am, I tell her I’m not, just because I don’t want Maddy to hear that I’m tired and think I won’t be able to help her with stuff like her homework, which every day when I ask her about it, she tells me Momly already helped her, and before I can even say anything, Momly just says, “Didn’t want you to have to worry about it,” which I just nod at. Then I tell Momly I’ll help her make dinner as soon as my homework’s done, and she says, “I’ve already started cooking,” and by then, Maddy’s already started kicking the back of my seat for the rest of the ride, which drives me crazy, but also in some weird way, kinda relaxes me. Like a massage and a message—I’m here, Patty. And I’m fine.
And today was no different. I was tired. Acted like I wasn’t. Maddy’s homework was done, and I had a little left of mine to do before dinner. Nothing too major. I knocked out my math assignment. English homework was to think about cannons, which basically meant English homework was to think about history homework, which was going to be reading up more on Frida Kahlo so I could be ready to add some new information to our project. Not like anyone else was going to. I figured T-N-T and Becca were probably at home, I don’t know, tanning or something. It wouldn’t have surprised me if they had one of those skin cooker things in their houses. Those beds you lay on that come down over the top of you and roast you, and you come out looking like rotisserie chicken. Meanwhile, I was researching.
THINGS I LEARNED ABOUT FRIDA, so far:
(1) She was from Mexico.
(2) She was diagnosed with polio when she was six, which made her right leg skinnier than her left.
(3) When she was eighteen, she got into a bus accident that broke her spine, crushed her right leg and foot, and made it impossible for her to have babies. Doctors said she would never walk again.
“Patty? Um . . . Patty?” A squeaky voice, way too silly to be real, came from the other side of my bedroom door. Uncle Tony. He dropped the Daffy Duck talk. “Dinner’s almost ready. You almost done with your homework?” My uncle’s voice, when he’s speaking like a regular human being, is deep, but not in a scary way. He has one of those voices that you wish you could touch, wrap yourself up in like a blanket. A voice like a dad. And, I guess . . . like an uncle. A favorite uncle.
Me and Uncle Tony been close for forever. He’s one of these big-kid grown-ups, a goof troop, all jokes, all the time. And when I was younger, he was one of the only people who could make my mom laugh—like, a laugh that seem to come up from her feet—after we lost my father. And up from her belly, after she lost her feet. As a matter fact, he was one of the only people who could make any of us laugh back then.
“I’m almost done,” I said, bookmarking the websites I’d been browsing. “Tell Momly I’ll be right out to help.” I jotted one last note. Something I’d read that I didn’t think was that important to the project, but . . . maybe.
(4) Frida was close to her father.
And that, more than anything, was what me and Frida had in common. Only difference is, Frida’s dad didn’t die when she was young. So she didn’t know what that was like. She didn’t know what it felt like to be broken until she was older. And not only did I know the feeling of something breaking inside me, I also had to watch my mom go through it and basically get paralyzed in a whole different way. In her brain and in her heart. Matter of fact, after Dad passed, that’s when Ma got all churchy-churchy. The beginning of catching the spirit and dancing in the aisle and “praying for peace in the eye of the storm.”
But she had no idea the storm was just getting started, because that’s also when she started eating. Like, a lot. And not just regular food, but sweets. All my dad’s favorite recipes. Sweet potato cheesecake and peanut butter brownies and white chocolate cookies and, of course, the delicious yellow cupcake with strawberry icing.
“Your daddy used to say this thing was so good they’d make you slap your mama,” Ma would say, nibbling the top of the cupcake. “So you better not have too many of ’em.”
We’d do like a ha-ha-ha, and then she’d have too too many of them. I guess maybe the sweets were a way of staying kinda connected to my dad. Dessert for the deserted. And I’m not gonna pretend like it wasn’t amazing living in a house that always smelled like cooked sugar—which smelled like him. And heaven. It was great. But eventually, it wasn’t. Because diabetes came and took Ma’s legs. Took most of what was left of her laugh, too.
And that’s when the actual storm reached maximum storminess. And I was pretty messed up by the whole thing, but doing my best to be strong and brave and big, and all the other things I ain’t really feel like being at the time. I’d rather be sneaking lipstick on in the bathroom, sending Cotton selfies of how fly I looked, then washing it all off so my mother wouldn’t see it. Or sitting on the curb at Cotton’s, painting our nails with the nail polish I wasn’t allowed to wear that her big brother, Skunk, would steal from the beauty store, even though I would have to scrub mine clean before I came back home unless it was clear polish, but then, what’s the point? Or trying to convince my mother to let me use cucumber-mango or berry–rose water or kiwi-coconut or any other fruity-flowery good-smelling lotion on her swollen, cracked-up legs. Flipping through magazines, cringing at kitten heels, even though those were the only ones I ever had a shot of wearing in Bev Jones’s house.
That’s what I used to do, what I wanted to be doing, but I couldn’t do none of those things no more. At least, not like I wanted to, because now I had to look out for Maddy, who was just . . . confused. I think she had just turned four, too young to really understand what was going on with Ma’s health. And it was really hard to explain it all to her. So I told Maddy that Ma’s legs had to . . . go away. Looking back on it, maybe it wasn’t the best idea, but at the time it was all I had. And it seemed to help. And that’s when that crazy thing I was talking about earlier, that crazy moment with Maddy, happened.
S
he asked me to help her write a letter. She said it was for school, so of course, I grabbed a pencil and a sheet of paper from her backpack, set Maddy in the little chair at her desk, leaned over, and asked what she wanted the letter to say.
She wanted it to say this:
Dear Mommy legs,
I remember my hand instantly started shaking, and I was squeezing the pencil tight enough to snap it in half. But I kept writing what Maddy told me to write.
Where did you go, and why did you have to leave? And what are you doing? Are you having fun without us? Are you jumping? Are you dancing? Are you running fast? Please come back. We miss you.
Love,
Madison Jones
I dropped the pencil.
“Maddy, what . . . what you gon’ do with this?” I tried to clear the shake from my voice, and it took me flexing every muscle in my body—even cracked my toes—just to keep the tears inside my face. Thank goodness her back was to me.
“First, I’m gonna bring it to school for show-and-tell.”
“Oh . . . okay, um, and then what?”
“Well, after I show it to the class, I was gonna see if maybe you could send it.”
“Send it?”
“To the legs.” Maddy threw her head back, her big eyes staring up at me.
Hold it in, Patty. Hold it in. “Um . . . yeah, yes . . . I will . . . um, send it.” I kissed her forehead.
“Your legs ain’t gonna run away too, are they?” she asked, worry suddenly washing across her face.
“No, Maddy.” I slapped my legs. “These ain’t going nowhere.”
“How you know?” she asked.
I didn’t have a good answer to that, and instead toothed my bottom lip to keep it from quivering. “I just . . . I just do,” I eked out, barely. “I’ll prove it.”
“How?” she asked. “How you gonna prove it?”
“Well . . . I don’t know, but I’ll figure it out.” Don’t say it, Patty. Don’t say it. “I promise.” I said it. And instantly felt like I messed up. Like I said something wrong. I wished I had had an invisible cupcake to stuff in my mouth. Something. Some stupid pretend tea. Anything. I mean, how was I going to prove my legs weren’t going to run away from me? Would this be one of those things I was going to have to hope Maddy just forgot about? But the pressure of it all was worth it, because the worry on Maddy’s face unwound.
She nodded, then hit me with the gut punchiest of all gut punches. “Pinky promise?” Oh . . . no. Pinky promises, for us, ain’t no joke. They’re like contracts. Break a pinky promise and people will make you feel like you in jail or something. Friendship jail, or in this case, big sister jail.
Maddy held her pinky out. I hooked mine onto hers, touched thumbs. Now she knew there was no way I would let her down. Then she got back to business. She tapped the letter. “So, you know where to send this?” she followed—blow after blow after blow. Killing me, Waffle. But this one, I couldn’t answer. At all. I just couldn’t. So I just left, ran to my room, threw myself on the bed, and curled into a ball. Breathe, Patty. Breathe.
Crazy thing was, the next day at school we were having a field day, and I was paired on a relay race team with Lu. I know I said I never ran one, but this wasn’t like a real relay. This was more just slapping each other’s hands and running as fast as we could. And after our race, it was Lu who told me about his track club he was in at the time—the Sparks. That night, I went home and asked Uncle Tony and Momly, and all the dots connected. My first club team. The rest, as they say, is history. Or . . . present. All I know is it just seemed like something somewhere (um . . . legs don’t got souls, right?) was telling me to do it. Pushing me to do it. Not just for me. But for Dad. And for Ma. And for Maddy, who (bonus!) I suddenly—thankfully—had an answer for. Pinky promise and all.
Turkey wings. Momly made turkey wings every single night. Every. Single. Night. So it’s always funny because when Uncle Tony says things like, “Dinner’s almost ready,” I never have to ask what we having. I know what we having. Turkey wings. With rice and a veggie. Usually broccoli. Not even turkey breast, or a turkey leg, or even a turkey sandwich. Wings only. I had never had them before we came to live with them, and the first night Momly cooked them I told her I liked them, and that was it. It was set in stone. Turkey wings for life.
Momly kept the kitchen just like she kept the car. Clean. Germ free. Scrubbed from top to bottom with something sudsy and bright colored, like sun yellow that smelled like rotten lemon, or mutant green that smelled like if every flower in the world sneezed. I pulled up to the table; Maddy was peeling fat off the meat. Cauliflower tonight. White broccoli. But not nearly as white as the spotless dinner plates.
After I told Momly what I had to tell her every night, which was that I was sorry for not finishing my homework in time to help her, she kicked off the dinner small talk with telling us about her favorite patient. See, she got her own business (but it don’t make her boat money) where she takes care of sick people—Emily’s Expert Care, which I think is a terrible name, by the way. Ain’t got no warmth to it. No hug in it. I think it should be called something like, In Emily’s Arms, or Mobile Mom. Something like that. Maddy thinks it should be called Momly to the Rescue, and, well, even though I don’t like that name either, it would at least be a true statement. At least for Ma, because when me and Maddy went to go live with Momly and Uncle Tony, it just made sense for Momly to add Ma to her client list, along with the most-talked-about of them all, Mr. Warren, who Momly calls the sweetest old man alive. But I don’t really know if my mother is the sweetest old lady alive, and Ma wasn’t really happy about none of it at first, just because she don’t really like nobody taking care of her. But at least it’s family and not some stranger, even though she can definitely, uh . . . be a lot to deal with. Actually, now that I think about it, maybe a stranger would’ve been better. I bet during those first few visits, Ma almost drove Momly to Jesus too. Or off a cliff.
“Well, my favorite patient besides your mother,” Momly clarified about Mr. Warren. He was an old man who had Alzheimer’s, which basically just means he can’t really remember too much no more. She said sometimes random stuff popped into his head, but usually he doesn’t know where he is, even though he’s in his own house. So he just stays in the bed now. And Momly goes over there and feeds him, and makes sure he’s all cleaned up while his daughter runs around taking care of errands and stuff. Momly’s been looking out for him for a long time.
“I went to use the bathroom, and when I got back to the room, he was up out of the bed, tearing the room apart looking for something. He was yanking clothes out of the closet, and snatching pictures off the wall. So I asked him what he was looking for and he said, ‘Something to buff the floor with.’ ”
“Buff the floor?” Uncle Tony asked. I was just as confused.
“That’s what he said. And when I told him the floor didn’t need buffing, he explained that he had mouths to feed, and who was going to take care of his family?” Momly laid her napkin in her lap, all proper, like she was eating in front of folks she ain’t know. “Eventually I got him to calm down. Got him back in the bed, where he seemed to just melt back into himself. And I put everything back in the closet, and hung the pictures back on the wall.” She shook her head. “Just one of those days. Poor guy.” Momly took a breath, then turned to me. “Speaking of pictures on the wall, Patty, how’s the whole Frida thing going?” Momly now pushed her fork through one of the tiny trees. Tired seemed to sit in her cheeks, make her face look saggy. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she fell asleep right there at the table. “It’s Frida, right?”
I nodded. I’d asked her if she knew anything about Frida when we first got the assignment, but she said she didn’t. She had seen her in pictures, but that was pretty much it.
“It’s goin’ okay,” I told her. “She seemed like a cool lady.”
“But not as cool as you,” Uncle Tony said, wiggling his eyebrows. I wasn’t sure if Momly was done small
-talking me about my school project, but if she wasn’t, Uncle Tony definitely ended any chance of it continuing because he awkwardly made a hard left into a totally different conversation. “Um . . . how was practice?”
Frida to track practice? Worst transition of all time. This is why Momly’s the small-talk queen, and Uncle Tony’s the cartoon character.
But I knew Uncle Tony wasn’t trying to be rude, and that his jumpiness was all about my second-place loss at the meet on Saturday, which, by the way, he wasn’t at. Had an emergency at the office. He does something called Information Technology, which is IT for short, or “it” for even shorter (which is what he says), which all just means he works with computers. And apparently sometimes computers have emergencies. Anyway, all this weird dinnertime chat was his way of knocking on the door of my brain, like, Hey, is it okay to come in? And if it wasn’t for practice today, maybe I’d still be mad. I told him and Momly and Maddy about being chosen for the 4x800 relay team, and doing the waltz.
“The waltz? Like . . . the ball-gown, pinky-in-the-air dance?” Pinky-in-the-air was Uncle Tony’s way of saying fancy.
“Yep. It was to teach us something about being in tune with each other. Like knowing each other so well that we don’t even have to think about the handoff.”
“Maddy, sweetheart, eat your cauliflower,” Momly’s exhausted voice slid between me and Uncle Tony’s.
Maddy groaned. “Eat your cauliflower,” I repeated. “It’ll make you strong.” Uncle Tony, following my lead, curled his arms up, making his muscles jump. Maddy smiled.
“Well, if doing the waltz is all it takes, then let me show you how to run even faster,” Uncle Tony said. Then, as soon as he said it he braced himself, thinking I would catch feelings, as if I thought he was saying I don’t run fast enough, and judging by Saturday, I don’t. Not fast enough. But it was cool.
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