by Sarah Dooley
Mrs. Madison doesn’t come in to chat at bedtime on Sundays. She seems to realize I want my space.
The rest of the week, she tries to be friendly. Offers me something to drink or brings me chocolate chip cookies or something grandmotherly like that. It doesn’t fit with how she looks, pointed shoes and dyed-blond hair. She doesn’t seem the chocolate chip type.
Usually when she tries to make friends with me like that, I pout and hide and refuse to speak to her, and eventually she goes away.
Then I start feeling bad. Remembering how when I was six and broke my pinkie, she brought me a teddy bear at the doctor’s office. Reminding myself of the picture of me she keeps on her nightstand, taken when I was seven or so, when Mama Lacy was better for a while. That happens sometimes, with cancer. You get better, and you stay better for a while—even for years—and then all of a sudden, you’re not better anymore. In that middle part, when Mama Lacy was feeling good and liked to visit, I used to go with her to see Mrs. Madison a lot—back when I was still little enough to call her Grandma—and we’d eat the fancy butter cookies that were supposed to be dipped in tea, except I didn’t like tea back then, so I crunched through them one painful bite at a time to be nice to my grandma. I think about how she remembered that, remembered it enough to buy me chocolate chip cookies this time around.
So then, feeling bad, I’ll go to find her, and by then she’s upset and she won’t say more than a couple of words to me. I feel like if things were normal, if Mama Lacy were still alive and I was only staying at Mrs. Madison’s as a visitor, we could be friends. She’s a strange, formal old lady and she panics at the smallest things, like when the refrigerator makes a noise and she thinks it’s going to catch on fire, or when the FedEx lady knocks on the door and she thinks it’s the IRS come to take her house because “they can just do that, you know.” She’s suspicious of everybody and afraid of almost everything. I feel like I’m a lot of things to Mrs. Madison—a distraction when she’s trying to read a romance novel, a bother when I knock things over in the kitchen, and a nuisance when she’s sipping wine with her friends from the gardening club, which hasn’t gardened in years. But I also think that sometimes, just once in a while, when she’s nervous at night and she doesn’t like to be alone, she’s glad I’m there.
To be honest, I feel the same way. Mrs. Madison bothers me because she’s not Mama Shannon . . . or Mama Lacy. But she tries really hard to do nice things for me, and most of the time, I’m glad I have her.
It’s still sixteen miles to Wytheville and I’m preoccupied with trying to shield me and Haberdashery with my robe to save us from the secondhand smoke coming from my two fellow travelers, when Adam pulls the truck into the mostly empty parking lot of a grocery store.
“What are we doing?” I ask.
“Refueling,” Adam says, which doesn’t make any sense because there aren’t any gas pumps. The only thing in the parking lot besides us is a pink convertible. The sign on the door says CLOSED, but the lights are still on.
“What grocery store pays well enough you can drive a pink convertible to work?” Zany wonders. She worked all last summer at Face Facts Beauty Supply, selling cosmetics to help get by when Mama Shannon’s grocery store job wasn’t enough to pay for Mama Lacy’s medical costs, plus groceries and rent. She’s been mumbling ever since about salaries, about how nobody can be expected to earn a living at these wages. She sounds more like Mama Shannon every day.
Adam’s not paying attention. Instead he’s pulled up sort of near the pink convertible. Near enough to the pink convertible that I realize his plan almost as soon as he’s out of the truck.
“Zany, is he—is he stealing from that person?”
She glances out. Watches Adam as he sticks his arm through the half-rolled-down window and starts trying to hit the lock. Two tries. Three. The door opens.
She says a word she’s not supposed to say in front of me.
“Quick, drive away before he steals! If we’re here when he does it, we’ll be accomplices! They send you to jail for that!” I’m still certain this trip is going to end with us in jail.
Zany’s staring at me now, forgetting to keep an eye on our car-burgling companion. “And if we steal his truck, we’re criminals instead of accomplices. You know they send you to jail for that, too.”
Oh. Right. “I forgot we’re not in Mama Shannon’s car.”
“Yeah, because a blue Subaru Forester and a canary-yellow Ford Ranger with a black passenger door are easy to mix up.”
“Shut up.” I wish I had another inch of elbow room for every time my sister and I have said shut up to each other on a car trip. We’ve done pretty well this time, but I can’t help but say it now.
We turn back to Adam, who is sitting slyly in the pink car, going through things. I want to get out and tell him to stop, but I feel tongue-tied, which is what happens when I have something really important to say. Slowly, I ease the passenger door open and step out of the truck. Zany’s on my heels, dangling Adam’s car keys. She pushes me behind her and moves ahead of me. Relief, and a little disappointment to have chickened out, washes through me. Zany’s going to take care of this, so I don’t have to.
I climb back into the truck, where it isn’t quite as cold. In the store, I can see a black ponytail bobbing up and down the aisles. She doesn’t look like the type to leave money in her car, but then, Zany and me probably don’t, either, and we made the same mistake.
Zany is dragging Adam back to the truck by his elbow. I let her in and wait for the motor to roar to life, but though we’re all inside, nothing happens except that Adam feels around the steering wheel, the dashboard, and the seat for a minute. Then he says, “Where the hell are my keys?”
“In my pocket,” Zany announces, “and they’ll stay there until you put back what you took.”
Adam stares straight ahead for a minute. His jaw is set, stubborn, and his eyes look tired.
“Look, lady—” he begins.
I can’t help but giggle. I’ve never heard anybody call my sister “lady” before.
Zany nudges me silent and holds her ground with Adam, whose face is going darker with each word.
“My dad’s sick,” he says. “We don’t have no gas money. We’re going to run empty by the next exit. What do you want from me?”
“I want you to go put that money in that car before I call the police.”
“You ain’t got a phone.” Because he sure isn’t going to give us his.
“Bet that store does.” She holds up the keys. “You want these, you’ll go put that money back where you got it. Now.”
He doesn’t move. “We’re not getting far without money.”
“What happened to our gas money?” Zany asks. “You know, that you stole out of our car when you stole—”
He waves her off. “I know what I stole. Okay? And I’m not taking y’all’s money. You’re going to need it to get where you’re going.”
The mention of our gas money makes me remember that I have money with me, too. I’m scared to say anything, and my voice comes out in a squeak. “I got money.”
Zany turns slowly from Adam to me. “What are you talking about?”
“I . . . got money,” I repeat. I reach into my purple sock and take out a soggy twenty.
Zany stares and stares. “You’ve got twenty bucks and you didn’t say anything?”
“It’s not mine. It’s Mrs. Madison’s. She makes me keep it in my sock in case of emergencies.”
“She makes you keep twenty dollars in your sock? Even at bedtime?”
I can hear my voice getting louder. “She’s afraid I’ll get lost or kidnapped or separated from her and I’ll need money for a taxi or a phone or food or something. Or if the river floods and we have to run away really quick. Or if robbers break in and everything we owned was stolen. She says at least this way we’ll have forty
bucks to get us started again.”
“Forty? You mean Mrs. Madison keeps twenty bucks in her sock, too?”
“No, she keeps hers . . .” I blush. “Somewhere else.” I cross my arms over my chest. I’m not about to say bra in front of Adam.
Adam lets out a breath and it sounds so weird that for a minute, I think he’s crying. Then I realize he’s actually laughing. Zany notices at the same time and we both turn on him.
“And what’s so funny?”
“You two are just . . . you’re just like a sitcom. You should have a laugh track.”
“Shut up. Are you going to put the money back? Since it sounds like we have enough already?” She looks sideways at me.
He shakes his head. “Fine. But if I get caught putting the money back, it’s on y’all. It’s always when the thief goes back that he gets caught.” Zany looks pointedly at me when he says this, like having Adam say it makes it true.
While he’s gone, she keeps looking at me, but the look changes from “so there” to something more serious.
“It’s a different world over there at Mrs. Madison’s, isn’t it?”
I shrug. Something about her stare makes me uncomfortable. It annoys me how she can stay so calm sometimes, even when she’s mad, if there’s a point to make. “I don’t know. Why?”
“You had twenty bucks in your sock and you forgot about it till now?”
“I didn’t forget. It just wasn’t an emergency.”
She stares at me. Keeps staring till I squirm. She’s about to speak, but then Adam gets in the truck and Zany doesn’t say anything else, which isn’t like her.
All the way back onto the interstate, I chew the inside of my cheek. I know money’s tight with Mama Shannon and Zany. But I’ve been with Mrs. Madison for six months, and Mrs. Madison can blow twenty bucks on potpourri at the Family Dollar. So I wasn’t thinking about twenty dollars being a lot of money. I wasn’t thinking about it being money at all. It was just another of Mrs. Madison’s goofy habits.
Now that I see the hurt expression on Zany’s face, I’m trying to add up how many hours she would have to work at Face Facts to earn twenty dollars. I’m trying to count how many boxes of butter noodles twenty dollars could buy. I’m thinking about the chicken I had for dinner last night and my nightly mug of hot chocolate before bed, and I’m feeling sick. How could I forget twenty dollars was a lot? Guilt chews at me. If I could have a coffee conversation with Mama Shannon tomorrow, that would be the first question I asked her. But I can’t. I think maybe those days are gone for good, and the thought makes my voice clog up with sadness.
“I didn’t forget,” I say thickly.
“Okay,” Zany says.
“I didn’t.”
“Okay.”
We don’t talk anymore for a while.
chapter
11
I doze off and wake up feeling like hours have passed, but the dash clock says it was only fifteen minutes. For a second, I’m not sure where I am, or why the dash clock is in the wrong place, or what the warm thing is that’s asleep on my knees.
“You missed the exit!”
Oh. Zany. Adam. Truck. Haberdashery. Right.
“That was Wytheville!” Zany slaps at Adam in a way that startles me. It’s a playful slap, not exactly like she’d play with me, but not angry. “That was our turn. What were you looking at?”
As I clear the cobwebs from my brain, I can guess what he was looking at instead of the road. He glances at Zany and then away, and though I wouldn’t expect to see a street thief blush, there it is in front of me.
Flashing arrows announce a steep curve in the road and we swing around it too fast. I grab at Haberdashery to keep him from falling onto his injured leg. He wags his nubby tail and licks my hand once in thanks, which is the friendliest Haberdashery has ever been with me.
“Get off here,” Zany says, pointing at the next exit. “It says Wytheville, too. We can still get where we’re going.”
Adam does as he’s told. I hope the truck drivers are paying attention, because he doesn’t signal this time before darting toward the off-ramp.
The first thing we see is a gas station, which is good because I need to pee really bad.
“Stop,” I beg. I don’t have to say why. Zany guesses.
“Again?” she wails. “We were just at a gas station twenty minutes ago! Why didn’t you go then?”
“I didn’t have to go then!”
“Fella! Your bladder’s the size of a pen cap! This trip’s going to take forever!”
“If Adam wants his truck to stay dry—” I warn.
“It’s an old truck,” Adam says, but he pulls into the gas station anyway and I shove the door open as soon as we’ve stopped.
“Two seconds,” I shout over my shoulder.
“One . . . ,” Zany hollers after me. As the door swings shut, I hear, “Two!”
I have to go into the gas station to get the bathroom key, and I’m terrified they’re going to recognize me from my description on the radio. I keep my head down, chin pressed almost to my chest, as I mumble about needing the key. The cashier’s wearing a blue polo shirt with coffee stains on it, but I don’t know what her face looks like, because she never looks up. I’m convinced I can hear my heart pounding as I scurry away, key in hand.
The light in the restroom is flickery, and there are things like phone numbers and crude words on the walls. In the cracked mirror, I study how different I already look from the way I looked when I last saw my reflection, back at the rest area where we first crossed paths with Adam. That mirror was clean and whole, and I was clean, too, though I haven’t felt whole in a while. I’ve got blood on my pink robe from the poodle’s injured leg, and I’m all rumpled and wrinkled, and even though I can’t see it on me, I know I smell like dog pee and cigarette smoke.
I wonder what Mama Lacy would think if she could see me. Mama Lacy, who carried Wet-Naps and hand sanitizer in her purse. Mama Lacy’s purse was like a magic trick, twice as big on the inside as it looked on the outside. Inside, she kept one of each of everything you could possibly need. Now it, like her, is gone forever, emptied and given away—or thrown away—a piece at a time by Mrs. Madison. No more Wet-Naps and hand sanitizer. No more Tic Tacs and Trident gum, no more safety pins, spare buttons, and the menus to every fast-food place we might ever need to order from. I gaze at the sad girl in the mirror for a minute longer, but even her hair doesn’t look familiar, tangled as it is. I think Mama Lacy might not even recognize me if she happens to peek down from heaven.
Three steps out of the station, I stop next to the gas pumps. My bare left foot feels slimy from the concrete, and I’m freezing. The truck is still running, puffing out blue exhaust. In the front seat, Adam is kissing my sister.
I can feel my heart beat now all the way in my stomach. My face crinkles up and I have to work at smoothing it. Only when I can draw a breath without letting it out in a screech do I climb back into the cab of the truck. I slump against the window, forehead flat on the cold glass.
“Ready?” Zany asks cheerfully. She doesn’t seem to know that I saw them kissing. She also doesn’t seem concerned about whether I’m ready or not. Adam pulls onto the road while I’m still fighting with Haberdashery to get an inch of freedom to fasten my seat belt, and we wind our way in the direction that Zany thinks might be toward Wytheville.
“That sign said go right,” I say when Adam stays on the main road instead of turning where the sign told him.
“That sign doesn’t know what it’s talking about,” Adam answers.
“But—but that sign said go right.” My voice goes a little higher. I’m starting to feel sort of scared, like maybe I really am being kidnapped or something. All those scary movies about kids being kidnapped, which I’m now furious at Zany for letting me watch, start with the kid accepting a ride from a strang
er. And then the stranger doesn’t go where he’s supposed to, he drives off on some little two-lane road, and the whole thing ends in a scary cabin with a humongous ransom demand.
“Adam, I swear, that was where we were supposed to go,” Zany says, and I detect a hint of uneasiness in her voice, too. I scoot closer to her again.
Adam shakes his head and keeps driving. Just when I’m trying to figure out how to be sneaky about opening my window so I can scream, Adam says in this little-boy voice, “I’m not ready yet.”
Oh, shoot. That.
“I’m not—I mean, I know this is it, and I don’t know—I haven’t figured out what to—” He’s stuttering worse than Zany when she’s had four Mountain Dews. A few tenths of a mile slip by.
“What to say,” Zany prompts.
“Yeah.”
“Christ, I still haven’t figured out what to say.” Where Adam’s voice got younger, Zany’s sounds older. Old as Mrs. Madison.
I remember wondering what to say, too. Remember what it felt like, walking down the cold hospital hallway, knowing to my bones it was the final visit, even though I was only eleven and nobody would tell me anything for sure. I remember taking so long in the hallway that by the time I was ready to enter the room, it was too late. It was over too quick, and nothing felt final.
Zany must be thinking of the same awful day, because she’s got her hand on Adam’s shoulder and she doesn’t even care if I see.
“This feeling’s not going to go away,” she says, rubbing the brass container with her other hand. “But take all the time you need.”