Free Verse

by Sarah Dooley

  Sara opens and closes her hands in a baby wave, and I wave back. I watch the door behind her. When Mikey comes out, he’s wearing a suit like his father’s. His hair is so gelled it looks like a solid thing. His face is red and tear-streaked, and I feel a pang of sympathy for him.

  “It’s a prayer vigil,” Hubert’s saying as Mikey follows him down the steps. “You can’t wear sneakers to a prayer vigil, son. I’m sorry.”

  “We’re taking the car,” Shirley says when Mikey darts past her to his father’s pickup.

  “I will rot in hell before I ride in that car!” These are the first words I have ever heard Mikey say.

  “Mikey,” his father warns. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a father, but I had a big brother recently enough that I recognize that tone of voice. I figure Mikey ought to listen.

  But he doesn’t. “If you try to make me go in Shirley’s car, I’ll die and I’ll rot in hell and then you’ll have to get dressed up and go to my funeral!”

  “William Michael Harless!” I’m relieved to learn that Mikey is his middle name. I want my Michael to be the only Michael. When Hubert speaks again, his voice has already lowered. “Please get in the car.”

  Mikey backs away, shaking his head. His chin is high. I sit up straighter. Something about how stiffly he’s holding his shoulders, something about the way he keeps shaking his head, is familiar. I can feel it in my own chin, in my own bones. All at once, I have an opinion on the situation next door.

  “He can stay with me,” I call.

  Mikey’s head whips around so fast his gelled hair moves an inch. “I don’t know you,” he says. But he doesn’t sound quite as fierce as before.

  “I’m Sasha,” I explain, although I’m sure he knows at least that. “Your father’s father and my father’s father were brothers. That makes us . . . something. Some sort of cousins. First cousins twice removed.”

  “Second cousins,” Hubert corrects. “You and I are first cousins once removed. You and Mikey are second cousins.”

  “See? I’m your cousin. Hubert says.”

  Mikey studies me for a long moment. Then he nods.

  “Guess I’ll stay, then.” Like he’s doing me a favor.

  • • •

  Phyllis is trying to teach us to cook.

  “You could stand to eat something more solid than egg salad and oatmeal,” she tells me.

  “But why can’t you just cook it?”

  “Because.” She points to the sink. I wash my hands, with a lot of soap because I know she’s watching. Mikey shuffles in behind me. He’s taken off the tie and the jacket. Now he’s only wearing an undershirt. It looks weird with his black slacks and bare feet. Mikey has black road dirt tattooed on his feet the way Hubert’s hands wear permanent coal dust. I wonder how long it took Hubert to get shoes on him.

  “Because is not an answer,” I say, echoing my English teacher. Phyllis flips the dish towel at me. The first time she did this, I wasn’t sure what she meant by it. Ben and Judy weren’t the dish-towel-flipping type. I wasn’t sure if having a dish towel flipped at me was a good thing or a bad thing. Since then, I’ve figured out that it’s one of the ways Phyllis teases me, like when she tugs my braid or when she calls me “Sasha Serious.” Phyllis doesn’t tease the way Anthony does. With Phyllis, it’s all right.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” I ask when it looks like Phyllis is getting down to business about this cooking thing. When I was little, my parents worked so much that we mostly ate dinners Judy brought home from the Burger Bargain. Then when I got older, and it was just me and Ben and Michael, Michael did all the cooking, and he didn’t always have the patience to teach me. Later, when me and Michael were alone in the first little house we shared, we didn’t have a good working kitchen. And by the time we moved to the apartment, I’d done enough stupid things just with the microwave and hot plate that Michael didn’t really want me anywhere near an actual stove. Not with him seeing the things he saw from the fire truck on a weekly basis.

  Phyllis says we’re going to cook muffins with anything we want in them. “Not anything,” she stops herself. “Y’all two, who knows what you’d throw in there. You can have walnuts, chocolate chips, or strawberries. That’s all I’ve got that would make sense in muffins.”

  “Yes, please,” I say. Mikey nods his approval.

  “All three, then.” She sets them one by one on the counter, then begins whipping around the kitchen so quickly I’m sure I’m going to be knocked on the head by a cabinet door.

  “Where’s the recipe?” I ask, retreating to safety near the sink. I pull Mikey with me so he won’t be killed. He is mostly bone and empty space and he pulls easily. He looks taller today than usual with his dark hair standing stiff. His face is all cheekbone and freckle. He actually looks a lot like me.

  “Pffsh,” Phyllis says. She whips out a mixing bowl and a measuring cup. “Preheat the oven to three fifty.”

  “I don’t know how to do that.”

  With a twitch of her eyebrow, Phyllis shows me how to spin the dial. At the last minute, she remembers to pull the pizza pans out of the oven, where they’ve been stored.

  “Wash your hands again,” Phyllis instructs. “You’ve been playing with your hair.” My hair is on day two of a braid. It’s nearly all frizz at this point, the core of the braid hidden by loose tangles. The rubber band at the bottom is barely hanging on.

  I wash my hands again. Phyllis isn’t watching as closely, so I don’t use as much soap.

  “When you’re finished, you can grease the tin,” she tells me.

  “I don’t know how to do that.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Phyllis puts down the bowl she’s been drying and crosses to me. “How you have made it this far in life is beyond me, girl . . .” Her voice fades out, but she’s still muttering under her breath. I catch something about “kids today” and I tune out.

  Mikey steps in before Phyllis can take over my job. “I know,” he says. He shows me how to smear butter all over the muffin tin. “My mom taught me all about cooking. Now your muffins won’t stick,” he explains. “If you don’t do this part, everything sticks to the tin, and when you pick up a muffin, you only get the top. Shirley uses cooking spray, but it doesn’t taste as good. She and Dad got in a fight about it once.”

  “That’s a weird thing to get in a fight over,” I say.

  “Shirley and my dad get in fights over a lot of weird stuff.”

  “I need a measurer and a mixer,” Phyllis says. “Any takers?”

  I eye the mixing bowl with concern. “This is the part where the wheels tend to come off the wagon,” I tell her. I’m thinking of the time I tried to make dinner for Michael and the kitchen ended up splattered in raw eggs.

  “You didn’t know how to preheat the oven or grease a muffin tin, and this is the part where the wheels tend to come off the wagon?”

  “Well, there are a lot of wheels on a wagon,” I tell her. “More than one can come off.”

  Mikey cracks up laughing and drops the measuring cup.

  • • •

  We sing while we wait for the muffins. Mikey has cheered up a lot. I’ve heard him described as a handful, and half the reason I invited him over was morbid curiosity, to find out how much of a handful he is. But so far he’s measured ingredients and helped wash the dishes. He has, without being told, wiped down the table with a dishrag, which never would have occurred to me. He already knows the words to half of Phyllis’s songs. Sure, he’s got a colorful vocabulary. But overall, Mikey seems a lot less of a handful than me.

  We eat muffins and watch a scary movie on cable. Phyllis gasps every time a fake zombie jumps out, and I have to explain how you can tell they’re fake, not just because I don’t think zombies really exist, but also because you can see the makeup lines.

  “That’s not true!” Mik
ey says. He’s got melted chocolate chips smeared all over his face, and strawberries down the front of his shirt. “Real zombies have makeup lines just to fool you into thinking they’re fake zombies! Then when you lean in to ask, ‘Is this CoverGirl or Maybelline?’—that’s the two kinds of makeup Shirley uses to chase her zombie face away—that’s when they pounce and rip your face off and . . . and bake it into muffins!”

  “Don’t tell her that; now she’ll never eat one!” Phyllis swats him lightly. “And don’t talk about your stepmom that way!” Then she asks me, “Why don’t you try a bite? It won’t bite you back!” She’s eaten half a muffin already. Mikey’s on his third. I’ve been picking the walnuts out of mine, because I changed my mind about them.

  “The walnuts look a little grosser than I thought they would,” I explain. “I can sort of picture these being zombie muffins. The walnuts could be . . . gnarled finger bones.”

  Mikey nods seriously. “That’s true. My mom said you never know where something scary will turn up. That’s why you have to keep your eye out. Even with muffins.”

  “Bite,” Phyllis repeats. She has this look on her face that lets us know she’s listening to Mikey, even though she doesn’t answer.

  I try a bite. The muffins are warm from the oven, and the chocolate chips are melty. It’s a little like biting into . . . I can’t think of any way to say it, because I’ve never bit into anything that tasted this good.

  “So what’s the verdict?” Phyllis asks.

  “The most delicious gnarled finger bones I’ve ever tasted,” I admit.

  • • •

  By the time the zombies and their gnarled fingers have gone off the TV, I’ve eaten four muffins and I’m almost asleep. I’ve leaned so far sideways on Phyllis’s couch that Stella is using my stomach as a bed. She purrs on and off between catnaps. I don’t really care for cats, but the warmth is nice.

  Mikey is passed out on the rug with an arm looped over Chip, like he’s a teddy bear. We let the animals in a while ago because the road outside will be clogged with cars again once the prayer vigil is over. It’s not a funeral. Those will be later, and private. It’s just a gathering, a chance for people to be together and to say good-bye. I’ve been to them before. They’re better than funerals—there are still flowers, but no shiny boxes—but still, I’m grateful to be here instead.

  Phyllis gets up and takes our leftover muffins to the kitchen. I hear her moving around in there, creaking the linoleum and closing the refrigerator. She comes back with her last cup of coffee and sits. I think she thinks I’m asleep, because she doesn’t speak. She pats my knee.

  She changes the channel to the news, which she always has to watch before bed in case anybody she knows is on it. Phyllis is a worrier. I figure it’s all the coffee.

  I let my eyes close. The TV newsman is talking about a car accident in Rathbone. Then there’s a drug bust in Jane. Then he says Caboose. I open my eyes again.

  There it is, on TV. The vigil. The flowers. The newsman’s voice is sugar-sweet sad. He talks about the two miners from Caboose. He says the other one lived over in Bent Tree. He was only nineteen. He was a Red Hat in training. He was only six years older than me.

  The newsman talks about the lives of the miners, and that’s what he calls them the whole time: miners. As though that were the main thing about them.

  Five years ago, I stood at Ben’s service. I remember them calling Ben a miner. I remember them saying it over and over: God bless these lost miners. Jesus is waiting to welcome them to Heaven. I remember thinking how Ben was a dad and a husband and a cardplayer and he liked to eat pizza toppings but not the crust and he liked to watch the second ten minutes of the news but not the first, because he didn’t want us kids to see the worst parts. I remember wondering why they had to pick that one thing, the mining, to talk about at his funeral. Sure, he ran a machine that dug coal out of the ground. He climbed deep into tunnels with low ceilings, and he made more money for his company than anybody, some days. But then he came home. He called me his “Sasha Love” and said I was his bright spot. He looked tired all the time. He read two books before bed, one to me and one to himself. He was made out of other stuff besides the coal mine.

  I can’t watch the news anymore. I cuddle Stella to my face and try to sleep. Only now that Ben’s in my head, I can’t shake him back loose again. I’m halfway in between asleep and awake, aware of the pattern of the fabric of Phyllis’s sofa pressing into my cheek, but also feeling Ben’s hands there, the way he used to pat my face, leaving streaks of filth from work. Ben was more affectionate than a lot of dads in Caboose, and even more so after Judy left. He made it a habit to squeeze and hug and pat and lift and spin. Since his death, nobody has ever hugged me so tight. Michael mostly kept his arms at his sides, or loosely draped across the back of the sofa, or fixed to the ladder of the fire truck.

  I’m not done missing Ben, and now I’ve started up with missing Michael, too. I’m missing him elbowing me and calling me “Beanpole” and “Lightbulb.” I’m missing him pressing and pressing for me to go off to college, to go someplace else. I’m missing those few hugs I did get from him, how carefully he held me and how safe he made me feel. I squeeze Stella tighter, breathe against her warm fur. I wish Phyllis would pat my knee again. I think about Hubert, the closest relative I’ve got anymore. I wonder if he’s the hugging type and maybe he just doesn’t know me well enough yet to hug. Or maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m not the kind of person who looks like you can hug her.

  • • •

  Hubert comes in late to retrieve Mikey. The two of them, one sad and one sleepy, make their way out of Phyllis’s house. I stretch and head up to my room. Now that I’ve napped, I feel wide awake, not ready to climb into bed yet. I look around.

  It surprises me to realize that the room doesn’t look like I live here. Most of my treasures still live in the suitcase under the bed, ready to run if I get half a chance.

  Today, I learned how to cook something. And today, I fell asleep safe, knowing Phyllis was there to watch out for me.

  I pull out the suitcase and undo the clasps. The GUI-tar money is stashed away on one side, along with my small wad of escape money. I know it isn’t near enough for college, but I’ve only been saving for a couple of years. It would have been enough to help me with a train ticket or a plane ride. Now it’s going to help me replace Phyllis’s GUI-tar.

  I take the old picture of me and Michael out of the suitcase and hold it close for a minute. It’s ruined from the day I tried to run away in the rain. You can’t even tell who’s in it, but I know. I place it on the top of the dresser, which has stayed empty the whole time I’ve been here. Beside it, I place a handful of rocks—one glittery rock Judy gave me that she called fool’s gold, one piece of hard black coal from Ben’s mine, and one smooth river rock that Michael called a worry stone. Beside the rocks, I place a small stack of photos, facedown. I like having them close, but I’m not ready to look at them yet.

  Now the only thing left in the suitcase is my notebook. In its pages, I’ve kept track of ideas for how to escape Caboose. They all involve Michael. I’ve written down firefighter jobs in other cities that I found online. I’ve written down a list of colleges with family housing, so he can take me with him. I’ve researched scholarships and grants and student loans for him.

  I was going to tell him all about it. Soon. As soon as I had it all figured out.

  Now that Michael is gone, I don’t know what to do with the notebook. I’m too young to get any of the jobs that he could have gotten. I’m too young for college. I can’t take out any loans. It’s going to be a while now before I manage to find a way to escape Caboose.

  But I have to do it. Even more so now that Michael’s gone, I can feel how this town might drain me away. I’m tired and sad like all the grown-ups here. I don’t want to get stuck like Michael did, like he always feared I would.

&n
bsp; I hold the notebook for a long time. It’s one thing to decide to stay with Phyllis for a while. It’s another to trust her with my notebook. It goes back in the suitcase, and I clasp the lid closed.

  10

  Nine and nineteen, we walked uptown one bright morning, with heavy sun streaming down like a tall glass of something sweet. My legs weren’t as long as Michael’s and I got tired before he did, but it took me blocks to be willing to admit it. By the time I did, I was so tired that I didn’t warn Michael before plopping onto the porch of one of the abandoned buildings by the side of the road. There were handfuls of them all along Route 10 for as long as I could remember. I thought I could remember this building being a feed and hardware store once. I remembered a bin labeled “Penny Candy,” only the sweets cost a dollar. It was tough to tell what the worn-down lettering on the glass used to say.

  We sat the longest time without talking. That was how it was with me and Michael. We didn’t always have to talk. He was tired, too. He’d worked all day at his firefighter gig and late into the night over at the Save-Great. He smelled like smoke and spoiled milk. He hadn’t talked about the Navy in a long time.

  “Listen here,” he said. “I know you think I’ve been on you too hard about that spelling test.”

  I shifted on the porch boards, embarrassed. I didn’t like him being disappointed in me. It wasn’t that I hadn’t studied, exactly. I had. At least, I looked over the words once, on the bus ride to school.

  “It was just a Friday test. It hardly counts.”

  “Everything counts.” He leveled this stern look at me that made me think of our mother. “Everything you learn now is going to help you get where you want to go in life.”