I want to ask her a thousand questions about what my dad used to do, but my embarrassment keeps me silent.
“These books might not be age-appropriate for you,” she says, “but if you are reading them, you might want to ask me some questions about, you know, whatever…”
“Have you read The Valiant Rake?”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“Wash up and come downstairs for breakfast,” she says.
She tucks a strand of hair behind my ear and says my name. Sarah. That is all. Questions line up in my brain again, but there’s no place for them to go. I wonder if there is a limit to how many questions a person’s brain will hold. It seems so.
Chapter 32
At breakfast, there are blueberry pancakes, bacon, and bad news. You can tell from the way my grandmother says good morning and how there is no place setting for my dad.
“Where’s Dad?” I ask. She loads my plate with blueberry pancakes, then takes her napkin and smoothes it across her lap. Without even looking up, she says, “Your father fell asleep on the couch while watching TV.”
Well, I already know why. It is the same at home. Nothing is ever going to change. Will she speak the actual words? Drunk or drunkenness or passed out are all trouble words for her. She prefers overindulged.
“Unfortunately, he overindulged a bit,” she says. “Would you pass the butter?”
Well, doesn’t that just put a cherry on top of my life. I am so mad at him I could hit something. You would think he would pull himself together in front of his own mother and his sick father. But no, he is bringing all his bad habits from Garland, unpacking them from his duffel bag, making a big mess.
“I would like to have some coffee,” I say.
“Aren’t you a little young for that?” she wants to know. No, I am not. I am trying to get my life going in a positive way, steer the DNA inside me away from alcohol and toward caffeine. I go into the kitchen, grab a mug, fill it full, and carry it back to the table.
“Sarah, you might be too young to understand this, but your father has a problem with drinking.”
If I told her all I knew, it would change the shape of her face. It would be an entire paragraph of trouble words like passing out, hitting walls, forgetting birthdays, and wearing mismatched clothes to work. But I don’t want to change her face. It is already wrinkled with disappointment.
“What I want to say is, I’m thinking of asking your father to go get some help in a treatment center of some sort,” she says. “What do you think about that? You would need to stay here for a while.”
“For how long?” I ask.
“Well, we’ll have to see how things go,” she says.
The summer is not even over and here is Problem 3 for me to figure out. You can try to hide one parent with a problem that sends them to a hospital, but not two.
My grandmother adds another pancake to my untouched stack and another to her own. We sit in silence, watching syrup inch its way into the blue flowers at the edge of our plates.
“We’ll have fun.” No, we will not. It will not be fun by any definition of the word. I am so angry at my dad.
“Oh, this is for you,” she says, passing an envelope across the yellow tablecloth. “Your father said he forgot to give it to you.”
I take a long sip of coffee and open the letter. Grandma will not like me reading at the breakfast table, but I don’t care.
Dear Sarah,
What’s up? This camp is SO BORING right now, but I have HUGE news. I have a boyfriend. His name is Marcus and he’s so sweet. BTW—he’s not the one I told you about before who only knew how to use the smiley face on his texts! Geesh! Learn a new emoticon already! New guy goes to the boys’ camp and we had a joint event one night last week. He was one of the boys who knew how to make a fire, just like that. He is also the cutest boy you’ve ever seen, way better than Jimmy Leighton, I promise. Go check him out on my Facebook page. I just changed my status to ‘in a relationship’ and he did, too! The problem is, he lives in Tyler, so we will have to be long distance. I also have to tell you that I have finally FRENCH-KISSED. Don’t ever tell my mother! I didn’t text this because she is checking my phone now. She would freak out. It feels risky even writing it here to you. DESTROY this letter after you’ve read it, okay. Promise? So, it was kinda weird at first, but he seemed like he knew how and I just stood there and tried to do the same thing. That was the first night, but the second night, I was just as good, I think. I never knew I had this talent before and now I’m sure I do.
So, I figure if I have found a boyfriend and had my first kiss all the way out here in the sticks, you must have too since you didn’t have to go to your grandparents’!
Oh, and Renee told me that her dad finally asked my mom out. I don’t know if I think that’s gross yet. Have you heard anything from her? Has she kissed Steven Ng again?
That’s all now. Remember to DESTROY this letter. And check Facebook!!
Xoxoxo,
Lisa
Well, there it is. She has kept up her part of the pact and has had two boyfriends. I’ve gotten my period, been to a funeral, and my dad is drunk on the couch. How can a summer that started out so promising turn around, put on its sneakers, and leave? I have a theory, and its name is Jane Nelson Ruins Everything. If it weren’t for my mother, my dad wouldn’t be a drunk and I wouldn’t be the girl with the crazy mother.
I pass through the living room and see him there, snoring and sweating. Normally this would be the time I brought him a glass of water and aspirin, but he will have to tough this out on his own. If I had a glass of water, you can bet I would just pour it over him. I should take a picture, let him see his awful self, e-mail it to PBroom. Ha! That would teach him a lesson. He is sloppy with his hair a mess, his face unshaved, his awful one-dollar shirt.
I stand over him, wonder if he will wake up and apologize to his own mother. It comes to me how much I all of a sudden miss Atticus, which is another sure sign I am going to go crazy. How can you miss someone you’ve never met? Someone you only think you know because they walked off the page and into your room? I close my eyes and see the movie version of Atticus, let my brain go there.
Hey, Atticus,
It’s me, Sarah. I am in a new place that is the same as the old place. We packed in Garland, but everything came with us. Our troubles. Our problems. Well, that is not what I want to talk to you about. I was just remembering that Mr. Wistler’s assignment said to be sure to include why we chose the character we did. To write our favorite thing about them. I know I explained this once before, but now that I’m standing here in front of my sleeping, drunk, no-good dad, well, my favorite thing about you is that you are not Tom Nelson. Believe me, I am not being too harsh. You know Scout said about you that you could make a person feel right when everything goes wrong. That is true. Thinking of you makes me feel a little better. You know how to say the right things, do the right things even if there is a big injustice around you. Right now, I see an injustice in front of me, and he is asleep on the couch, folded over into flowery cushions. What a mess. He is a father only because he has children, not because he acts like it. That is an injustice in my book. And my mother, well, you know why she is not a mother to me. So what do I have, Atticus? I have myself to count on and no one else. Except you. You are the one true person I know. I can always count on you even though you aren’t even real. How sad is that? At least I know you will always be the same every time I open the book. So it’s just me. And my book. And Plant, if she survives out in the wild.
Thanks for listening.
Sarah
“Sarah,” he says. “Good morning, kiddo.”
I guess I am like a zombie, sitting there with Lisa’s letter in my hand, looking out into space. He has to say my name three more times before I come out of my head and back into my real life.
In my mind, I say I hate you. What I say out loud is, “You’re making my life more embarrassing, and I didn’t k
now it was possible to make it worse. I don’t want to live with you. Nothing ever changes. You say you will be different, and you never are!”
“Sarah, calm down,” my grandmother says, stepping up behind me.
“It’s okay,” he says. “I’m sorry. I will make this up to you, kiddo.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep. I already have enough IOUs from you. And don’t call me kiddo. I hate that!”
Well, I am making a scene, being dramatic, but I don’t care. Even Atticus had a courtroom voice that made you sit up and notice. I am using my own new voice. The words shoot out of me quick and sharp. I’ve never seen his face so wet with tears, but his game of being pathetic will not work with me. I reload my mental rifle and fill it with every complaint I’ve had.
“… and you always, always forget to take the clothes from the dryer and send me to school looking like a stupid raisin.”
He gets up, places his hands around mine, but I jerk back quickly.
“Sarah,” he starts. “I am at my end.”
“The end of what?”
“Myself, I guess.”
“Maybe it was all your fault. Maybe you made her crazy, and that’s what happened to her, and that’s why you won’t talk about it!”
“Sarah!” My grandmother pulls my arm with more force than I knew she had. “That is enough.”
Fine by me. I am finished talking to him forever. If a person can fold like paper, then he just did. He slides back down to the couch. I’ve seen the bad guys in Westerns. They always fold.
“I understand why you think that, but it’s not true. Falling asleep and waking up were the hardest parts of the day. So I drank. There’s no excuse for it, but that’s why. I felt guilty for what happened, you know. And now, I do this damage…”
Damage, I think, is a fitting word. He is damage walking down the street.
All three of us stay there for a long minute until Grandma breaks the silence. Do I want to go to the hospital with her? Where will my dad be? I want to know. I want to be at the place he is not. It is decided. She and I will go see Gramps and then to a free presentation at the fabric store, How to Turn Fabric Scraps into Fun. Dad will drink a lot of coffee and research rehabilitation facilities that teach people how not to drive to the liquor store. It is hard to believe we are all related, we are so different. In fact, if I’d done the class Family Tree Project, people would say, “You are joking, where is your real family?”
Chapter 33
Once Dad made me afraid to say things. Now, I have this other girl speaking for me. She is brave. She says things out loud. She sticks with her plans.
I am sticking with my plans.
I am careful to delete the search history after I am done. When Gramps gets home, I would not want him to see the Greyhound schedules from Houston to Wichita Falls or the way I used his credit card to buy a ticket. But what am I going to do? I don’t have all my cash with me in Houston and I want to get this done. The bus leaves at 11:15 p.m. and arrives by 8:15 in the morning. I’ll be there before they even realize I’m gone. A taxi will pick me up at the entrance to my grandparents’ neighborhood. Gramps and I used to take a taxi to the mall just for fun. He said he liked being chauffeured around. I can’t say I’m not a tiny bit scared, but I know what to expect. I’ve ridden in a taxi and I’ve been to the bus station. I just wish I had my black pillbox hat. It would make me look older.
I knock on Dad’s bedroom door.
“Come in.” He’s sitting on his bed, dressed and neat. All the morning washed off him. He’s wearing one of Gramps’s plaid shirts and it hangs loose on him. He says he found a place to go to rehab, it’s only two weeks I’ll have to stay in Houston and then there are meetings he can attend near Garland and isn’t that a good thing, he wants to know. I tell him, “That’s good to do for yourself, but I need you to do something for me.” By the way I say it, you can tell I’ve capitalized the word me.
“Okay.”
“I’m going to go see her so I can talk. Just to her. I have things I need to say.”
“Couldn’t we talk—”
“No,” I cut him off.
“Maybe a counselor…”
“No,” I tell him again. I want to cry, but the brave girl won’t let me. “You are evading. Atticus says a child can spot an evasion quicker than grown-ups. You are supposed to answer my questions.”
“Who? Atticus?”
“Atticus Finch,” I say. I toss Mr. Dupree’s hardback copy of To Kill a Mockingbird at him. He barely catches it. I tell him, read it, you might learn something.
“We’ve done everything your way, and now it is my turn. I don’t think I could screw things up any more. I don’t need to talk to you or to counselors or anyone. There are some things I need to say to her.”
“Sarah, she might not be able to understand,” he says, and I say I know, but I have to do it anyway.
“You said you’d make it up to me, and this is what I want. Were you lying about that?”
He passes the test, because he says yes to my plan. He says he will go, too, but why do we have to take the bus when he can drive? No, I tell him. You need to buy a ticket for the bus, I already have mine. Plus, I can’t trust that you will be a safe driver in your condition. This last bit seals the deal. I’ve used logic to support my argument.
I tell him he can’t sit next to me and must pretend not to know me.
“It should be easy,” I say. “With all the experience you have ignoring me.” The knife goes in. I sense its painful stab as I step out of the room and I am not sorry. You have to tell people the truth.
The Greyhound station smells of diesel fuel and armpit. In the departure area I sit in a hard plastic spoon-shaped chair. It is the most uncomfortable seat, yet a woman and child across from me manage to sleep sitting up. I plan to act as old as I can and not talk to anyone. I sprayed on my grandmother’s perfume and stole one of her beige sweater sets, which gives me the appearance of someone at least three years older than I am. I would have stolen a pair of her reading glasses to enhance my look, but they make everything blurry to me so it was no good. I left a note for Gramps, too. So sorry we are leaving now. You know why. I will pay you back. I love you.
Dad goes off to buy his ticket. All over his face, you can tell he doesn’t want to leave me alone. I start looking around for the kind of person I will sit next to on the bus. Someone Charlotte’s age would be good. Even better, someone like Mrs. Dupree. From what I can see, my choices are a girl with a screaming baby or an old woman wearing a roll of packing tape as a bracelet. What did I expect? People traveling by bus to Wichita Falls in the middle of the night are not going to look like celebrities.
The number for my trip is called and I am on the bus, seeking out a place to sit before you can say french fry. I can’t find anyone who looks clean or even makes eye contact. So I sit in the window seat right behind the bus driver’s chair. When he checked my ticket, I noticed his shoes were clean, so I know he is a detailed person. On a crime show I watched the other night, the lead investigator said to judge a man by the cleanliness of his shoes and his car. These are signs of a person who takes pride in his work.
A man in jeans and a yellow T-shirt sits in the seat next to me. He wears thick hiking boots. I hope he won’t talk to me or look at me much. He smells of gasoline, but it’s not too bad. He has a tattoo on his arm of a growling bulldog and the letters USMC underneath it. Good. He is a Marine. Gramps has a similar tattoo, only it has a black panther instead of a bulldog. I take this as a good sign for my trip.
I spy Dad’s reflection in the window as he walks by, but I don’t turn. He can worry about me from the back, wonder if this Marine is flirting with his daughter. At least he brought Harper Lee’s book to read. I wish he had the paperback copy with all my circles and underlines in it so he could learn how to be dependable like Atticus.
When we are safe on the road, I open my composition book and write until the Marine is snoring. The growling
bulldog moves up and down with each breath. I try to make a sketch of it on the page so I can have a souvenir of this trip. But it is no good. I am not an artist. I am a girl with notebooks full of questions.
Then I write to her, long and true, as I’ve never done before. She wants to know about my new self—well, here I am. Have a look. Read it and fold it into a paper bird if you want.
Dear Jane,
My English teacher, Mr. Wistler, told us to write a letter this summer. I’ve been doing that a lot. He suggested that we write to our favorite character or someone we wanted to meet. Well, I would like to meet you. I would like you to know me. It is weird that you are more like a fiction character to me than a real mother. I can only remember seeing you two times since you went away.
You wrote that you wanted to know about my new self. I am writing to tell you all you are missing and more. This is everything I would say to you if you were sitting across from me at our kitchen table. You have missed out on a lot of things.
For example, if you were here, you would have picked me up from the car line at the end of the school year like all the other moms. We would have gone out and had ice cream at Sonic, sitting outside on those red plastic seats that leave crisscross imprints in the back of your legs. You would have ordered chocolate and shared yours with me, too. I would have told you about Mr. Wistler’s assignment, and you would have been excited.
If you were here, you’d know I want my birthday to be the opposite of what it is, maybe having a three-layer ice-cream cake and a pizza-party sleepover with two girlfriends, and you coming in with bowls of popcorn and Coke in glass bottles and a stack of Seventeen magazines and not worrying if we don’t go to sleep until four a.m. You’d understand that it is so hard for me to get the birthday cards you send, to hold something that only days before your hands were touching, too.
Did you know I used to look for Simon’s name on the back because it just seemed like something you would do? You might write his name last minute and tell me something wonderful you remembered about him. Or you might simply say, I’m sorry, which I’ve never heard you say, but I think I know that you are.
Sure Signs of Crazy Page 16