I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway

by Tracy McMillan

  “She gave it to me when she died,” he says evenly.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” I’m not sure what to say. The band is about to go on. “That’s sad.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “When did she die?”

  “Nineteen ninety-six.” That’s a long time ago. I know Paul just turned thirty-nine. That means he must have been in his mid-twenties when she died. “She was great. She always said, ‘You’re a lover, not a fighter, Paul.’” He pauses, looking at the picture of the car. “I’m almost done having it restored. I’ve got an Armenian guy in Pacoima who’s been working on it for more than a year. I know she wouldn’t want me to just let it sit there. She would want me to drive it.”

  He turns and gives me a vulnerable smile, a boy’s smile.

  It’s the most personal thing he’s said in my three days of knowing him, and I’m touched by it. But before the conversation can go any further, someone with an asymmetrical haircut steps onto the stage and begins strumming wildly on a Fender Stratocaster. The moment is gone.

  As we listen to the band, Paul takes my hand and my heart jumps a little. I hold my breath—it scares me sometimes, to make actual contact with another human being. Not in the way that a monster running after me would scare me. More like, What if I like him? What if I don’t? What if I don’t feel anything at all? What if I do?

  It’s immediately clear that he’s an excellent hand-holder. Expert, really. During the band’s set he takes me through his whole oeuvre: from mindless caressing to some quite sensuous finger-play. If this is a preview of coming attractions, I definitely want to see the movie.

  And it looks like I’m going to get the chance. As we pull up to his curb, he invites me upstairs.

  THE ERICSONS WERE GOING to put up a fight. They wanted to keep me, like my dad promised they could. But fate, or whatever, intervened. Years later, June told me what happened.

  “We went to the Hennepin County Welfare Department people and asked them what we could do,” she explained. “They said to gather all the information I could on the promises your daddy made to me that we could raise you until you were eighteen.”

  The promise had been part of the deal. When the Ericsons adopted Connie from a Korean orphanage (just four years before I came to live with them), they made a decision to stop doing foster care, to protect Connie’s sense of security in her new home. So when my social worker called June one night and told her there was this child—me—whose mother couldn’t care for her and whose father was in prison, June agreed to take me in. But only if the placement was permanent.

  “I stayed up late one night, going through all your daddy’s letters”—a long process, since June was a major letter writer—“looking for the places where he said he’d never try to take you out of our home. But before I even finished, Children’s Services called and told us we just weren’t going to win this. We had two big strikes against us: we weren’t your relatives, and we weren’t black.”

  With two strikes, there’s still hope, right?

  THEN COMES THE THIRD STRIKE.

  I literally stumble into the news. We are in Los Angeles, visiting June’s sister Auntie Anne. I have just come through the sliding back patio door, a contraption that, on the scale of Exotic California Things, falls somewhere between avocados and Jack in the Box. In Minnesota the indoor and the outdoor are kept as far apart as girls and boys in Saudi Arabia. And like girls and boys in Saudi Arabia, where they do come together, there is always some type of intermediary—a screen door, a foyer, a little porch—to run interference. That you can simply step across a threshold and be indoors seems…outrageous. And cool.

  It also makes it possible to hear something you’re not really old enough to process. As I enter the room at the far end, I see June hang up the phone and do one of her characteristic deep sighs, except deeper. Gene hovers protectively. He always looks different, less powerful, on vacations, probably because it’s the only time he’s not wearing his black pants, black shirt, and white minister’s collar. There’s a feeling in the room—it’s both electric and morbid.

  “He says it’s lupus,” June says simply.

  I’d been picking up a lot of chatter about this lupus lately, along with talk about prednisone, the room-a-tologist, staying out of the sun, and tests, tests, and more tests. I don’t know anything yet about lupus—that it’s an autoimmune disorder, that it could put you in the hospital ten times in one year, that it would cripple your hands, that you might have half your lung removed, that you could never cure it, that the drugs you have to take for it are nothing short of hideous. But I know it can’t be good.

  I linger just inside the door, near the sofa, trying to absorb as much information as I can. I must know it’s going to change my life.

  Gene just stands there, silently, one hand on June’s shoulder.

  Not that Gene says much even under normal circumstances. He doesn’t come home from church and gossip about what the secretaries in the office have going on in their marriages or what the deacons are doing to screw up the church. He’s a container. Strong and airtight.

  The most I ever hear Gene say outside the pulpit comes during Monday night devotions—the one we have at home, not the one at church (that’s on Wednesdays and it’s called Bible study, not devotions). After dinner he sits in his olive green upholstered rocker and we gather around. He says some stuff about the Lord, or maybe reads some of the Bible, or tells a story about Jonah, or Noah, or Moses, or some other guy who’ll have a ton of children named after him come the late 1990s. Then he prays. We know it’s praying time because he always bows his head and says, “Let us pray.”

  Also, Gene’s a busy guy—he’s got a whole congregation to deal with. Hundreds of people! All of them getting baptized, getting confirmed, getting married, having babies, getting sick, and dying. In that order. Because of his huge responsibilities at church, Gene and I don’t come into all that much direct contact unless I’m in big trouble. And then he’s a kind, gentle, patient teacher who usually offers me some version of what Jesus would have done, which is never ever what I just did. That’s because Jesus doesn’t steal candy, play with matches, or forget to take his Ritalin.

  But within the family, Gene communicates primarily through his presence, which is like a color or a tone—impossible to describe but completely tangible. When he’s in the room, you can feel it. And it’s comforting.

  So when he says to June, “The Lord is going to get us through this,” I know he’s just taken all that energy, his presence, the color and the tone, and distilled it into nine words.

  The Lord is going to get us through this.

  I’M DEFINITELY GONNA NEED A LORD. Because me and my new caseworker Ralph Timmons just parked in front of an uninspired two-story tract home in a place tragironically named New Hope. It’s a split-level ranch, a type of construction (architecture is too fancy a word) I have never seen before. I will come to dislike split-levels for the rest of my life, and this house is why.

  The Werners are professional foster parents, which means they do it for the money. They’ve got a gang of foster kids up in here: a twelve-or thirteen-year-old boy with a slight menace to him; a kid with cystic fibrosis who sleeps in a plastic tent; another girl a bit older than me who tells me she’s “an Israelite.” Her name is Laurie and she’s obviously the favorite here, probably because she’s part of the permanent collection; the rest of us are on loan. There’s also an older teenage girl whose name I never get but who listens obsessively to Cat Stevens’s Tea for the Tillerman.

  This is a halfway house for me. A transition between the Ericsons’ house and my dad’s, where I will be going on June 7. That is sixty-four days from today. (I have already counted.) I guess social workers think it’s a bad idea to have you just go straight from wherever you’ve been for the past four and a half years to wherever it is you’re going next. Probably because all the tears and shock and grief might bum the new people out. Better to get all that out of the way with
some family who is never going to see you again.

  Things at the Werners’ are different than things at the Ericsons’. For starters, they only give you half a Popsicle. I react to this with surprise and, I’ll admit, maybe a hint of indignation, which does not strike Mrs. Werner as particularly gracious or appreciative. I don’t know exactly what I just said to make her mad, but her jaw is set hard. Apparently she prefers her foster kids gracious and appreciative. And who wouldn’t?

  There’s another problem. They use this soap called Irish Spring, and it smells really strong, like kelly green. Neon kelly green. At the Ericsons’, we used Ivory. It smells like white. And it floats. If you also take into account that there are no trees and no sidewalks in this awful suburb, and I am the only brown person at school, things are not really off to a great start.

  My social worker, Ralph, checks in on me every week or so. He is low-key to the point of dolefulness, with a sad, stuffed-animal quality about him. At least he’s nice, but I prefer my old social worker, Constance Ryan, who smiled a lot and took me shopping.

  “How’s it going there, Tracy?” Ralph drones. His cadence is steady and even, and he overenunciates, like perfectly formed letters on a piece of lined elementary school practice paper. If he hadn’t gone into social work, Ralph probably would have made a halfway decent third-grade teacher. Or activities coordinator at a nursing home.

  I don’t have a lot of patience with Ralph’s questions. He means well, but there’s not a whole lot he can do about my situation and we both know it. “I’m fine,” I answer perfunctorily.

  “Good.” Pause. Beat. “Good.”

  Ralph is observing me very closely, which makes me nervous. I’d rather that he not see how they’re giving me only half a Popsicle or how I am crying my eyes out every night to “Diamond Girl” by Seals and Crofts.

  No one talks about the Ericsons. The Werners have given me stern warnings not to try to contact June or Gene. I think they are hoping that I will just forget about them.

  Ralph turns to Mrs. Werner and does some social working. “How’s she doing with her medication?” He means me. And my Ritalin.

  “Okay, I guess,” Mrs. Werner says in her scratchy Virginia Slims voice. “It doesn’t really seem to help all that much. Her teacher says she can’t sit still.” Mrs. Werner says this so matter-of-factly, I’m starting to think she’s a bitch. Doesn’t she know that eight days ago I had a mom and a dad and brothers and sisters and a best friend named Carrie and a Girl Scout troop? That I’d just sung the solo in the children’s choir at church? And that seven days ago it was all gone? But I don’t say anything. “Maybe she needs a higher dose,” Mrs. Werner offers.

  Ralph speaks up in my defense. Slowly. “Well. There’s definitely an adjustment period any time a child goes into a new home. Let’s see how she’s doing in a couple of weeks.” He turns to me. “Tracy, let’s see if you can listen better to your teacher, okay?”

  I’m thinking, Love to, mean it, but I just stare at the clock and swing my legs back and forth wildly. Ralph is looking at me again. I feel obliged to speak, to either stop him from looking at me or break the tension, I can’t tell which. Probably both.

  “Can I get a dog when I go to my dad’s house?” It’s the only thing I can think of to say. In the time since June told me I was leaving, I have added a dog to the very short list of two reasons that leaving the Ericsons isn’t going to suck as bad as it obviously already does. This list—the dog and the pierced ears—is pretty much the only thing keeping me going right now.

  Ralph smiles. It’s a kindly smile, but maybe it’s a brokenhearted smile, too. “We’ll have to see about that.”

  “My dad said I could.” This is meaningless, as Ralph and I both know my dad would lie to god. “Can I get my ears pierced, then?”

  “We’ll see.” Ralph, who has been taking notes in my file, places it back into his attaché, which he snaps shut. My stomach sinks. Ralph is kind of useless, but I feel better when he’s here. Like I’m not alone. “Time for me to get going,” he says. He places a hand on my narrow shoulder. “I’ll see you soon, Tracy. Be good for the Werners.”

  Mrs. Werner and Ralph have a little exchange sotto voce at the front door. I can’t hear exactly what they’re saying, but from their body language and facial expressions, I know that Mrs. Werner is not too hopeful about me, and Ralph is not too hopeful about Mrs. Werner.

  But the situation, in the scheme of things down at the Hennepin County Welfare Department, is not that bad. I’m not getting hit, and I am getting fed. That’s probably considered a rousing success. And, really, you can’t hope for a lot more from a place you’re only going to live in for sixty-four days.

  MY NEW HOME PAUL’S LOFT is spectacular. You open the door into a small foyer, then walk down a long, long narrow hallway, one wall of which is painted acid green. When you reach the end of the hall there’s this dramatic reveal: a whole floor of an old converted bank building, maybe three thousand square feet in all, looking exactly like something out of an interior design magazine. There are three huge sets of plate-glass windows across the front, with neat period hardware that makes them swing open wide into the room. The ceilings are tall enough for a trampoline. The floors are a beautiful polished concrete and the walls a mixture of wallboard and exposed concrete and brick. There are several massive paintings, which give the place the feel of an art gallery. And outside the window is a view of Los Angeles’s two tallest buildings, made of dark blue glass that gleams in the night light.

  There’s a word in the advertising business for this sort of thing: “aspirational.” It means you see it, and you want to be it. Boy, do I want to be it.

  The moment we are inside the loft everything shifts into another, sexier, gear. If there was little to say before, now there is nothing. He backs me up against the kitchen counter and starts kissing me. There is something so powerful about him. He dominates me—it’s not overt, it’s energetic—and I am willing to submit to him like I’ve never been willing to submit to a man before.

  The make-out session moves from the kitchen counter, to the other kitchen counter, to the exposed brick wall. Uh-oh. I am in trouble here and I know it. It is everything I can do to A) keep my clothes on, and B) leave, which is not a problem I usually have.

  “I have to go,” I say, barely. For a second I wonder what his reaction is going to be. Does he want me? Or does he just want me right now? It’s going to say a lot about his intentions.

  “Okay,” he says sweetly. “I don’t want to, but…I’ll let you go.” His voice is affectionate, and he’s touching my face like he already loves me. He kisses me a little bit more, just enough so that it’s not an overly abrupt ending. Then he takes me by the hand like a polite schoolboy.

  “I will see you to the door,” he says, smiling. I smile back.

  We walk down the long hallway and kiss as we ride the elevator to the front door.

  “I shall see you soon,” he says as I get into my car. He gives me one last, unforgettable kiss and I start the engine, forcing myself to be aware of every move necessary to get the car going, like a pilot running through a checklist. Because all I can really think about is him.

  I float home thinking, That is the best second date I’ve ever had.

  Five

  I Love You, Now Meet Your New Mom

  IT’S PROBABLY JUST AS WELL I’m not a minister’s daughter anymore. Because this outfit Daddy bought me is hot. I’ve never worn anything this hot, probably because the Ericsons don’t really do sexy. It’s superhot.

  Man alive hot.

  Daddy is taking me to the Cher concert tonight. That is, if I don’t die of excitement on the way to the arena.

  I’m wearing head-to-toe white. White halter! White elephant bells! White clogs! Daddy really knows how to dress a girl. The halter top shows off my bare back, tanned the color of fox fur, and even though there’s nothing in the front to speak of at the moment, the plunging neckline absolutely promises that befo
re you know it, there will be. My seersucker elephant bells are so wide I could pitch one of them into a tent. The bottom of the halter doesn’t quite reach the top of the pants, so there’s an alluring strip of abdomen peeking out whenever I move around, which is always. And on my feet are killer Swedish clogs—the near-certain genesis of a preference for high heels that I developed at the age of thirty-five, then avidly pursued into the gates of bone spurs and hammertoes.

  Daddy’s also wearing head-to-toe white—pants, shirt, and European-cut sport jacket—except for his two-inch platform shoes. Possibly the green ones. He has shaved, and cologned, and trimmed his mustache. He has stood before the bathroom mirror and carefully, obsessively, patted his medium-length Afro into absolute mathematical perfection. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory could probably do some calculations off that thing.

  Together we are pretty much the perfect couple. Except for one thing: we’re not alone on this date.

  Yvonne is coming.

  Yvonne is wearing white, too. Not like we are—her white is more like oyster bisque, and it has a print on it—but she tried. She’s wearing a chiffon top-and-skirt combo that obviously didn’t come from Dayton’s or anywhere else at the Brookdale Mall.

  “Do you like it?” she asks me in that obsequious way an adult who really really wants your approval talks to you.

  “Sure,” I say, underreacting. But the truth is, I really do like it. It’s sensational.

  “It’s from Cartwright’s,” she says reverently. “I get a lot of clothes there.”

  Cartwright’s is a place (it’s safe to say) June Ericson has never stepped foot into, since they probably don’t have much in a size sixteen. It’s on the Nicollet Mall, and the clothes are hella expensive, and they’re all “originals,” which I’m guessing means you can wear them to the Cher concert and be reasonably assured that the only person who’s going to be dressed better than you is Cher herself.