by Lisa Wingate
His round cheeks squeezed his eyes into slits as he smiled. “Well, glad to have you.” He stuck his hand out to shake mine. “Pastor Al. Stop by and see us anytime. We’ve got lunch provided by the Summer Kitchen Monday through Friday, and after lunch, there’s story time and recreation for the kiddos. We’ll have an adult reading class starting in the evenings soon, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.”
Geez, did I look like I was hungry and illiterate? “Yeah, okay. Thanks.” When you’re young, and not white, and you’ve got a couple kids already, people assume you’re, like, a welfare case.
“We’re always looking for volunteers.”
Volunteers . . . All of a sudden I felt much better. Volunteer? Me? “I’ll think about that.”
“Wonderful!” Rocking back on his heels, he clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Always happy to get some new fish in the net.” Grinning, he held up his necktie, which was printed with fishing rods and bobbers. “Sorry. Old fisherman’s joke, from an old fisherman. But it doubles as a pastor joke—two for one. We’ve got nursery for the kiddos during the reading classes, too. Free child care.”
“Those are the magic words,” I answered, and he chuckled.
“Always good to see new families moving into the neighborhood. Wasn’t so long ago it looked like this old church might die off for lack of interest. Neighborhood gets ragged, you know, and places go downhill, congregation gets old and tired, and the church turns quiet and sleepy.” With a loving glance over his shoulder, he took in the building like he was a painter looking at his masterwork. “Nobody falling asleep around here these days, I’ll tell you. With the Summer Kitchen open now, and the evening reading, GED, and English-l anguage classes, we’re a happening joint. No reason for anybody to sit around the house and be lonely in this neighborhood these days.”
I had the weird feeling he’d read my mind. With Cody gone so much, and all the little problems with the house, and being pregnant, I felt like I needed somebody to talk to. I couldn’t even call Mama, because talking to her or my brother or anyone back home would just remind me that I was keeping some big secrets, and I was doing that because I didn’t want anybody telling me I’d gone and done something stupid again. I needed a friend here, but it probably wouldn’t do any good to talk to the preacher, because preachers are like mothers—they think it’s their duty to tell you the things you don’t want to hear.
“Well, I’ll sure give it some thought,” I said finally.
“Door’s always open.” A siren blared up the road, and Pastor Al turned an ear to it. “Hope they’ve apprehended your maniac driver. Done too many car wreck funerals in my day, that’s for sure.”
“I hope they did, too.”
“You come volunteer with us.” He grabbed the handle and opened the car door for me. “Anyone who’d jump on a wild driver knows how to take control of a situation. You’ve got tutor written all over you. I can tell it.”
“Thanks,” I said, then got in my car and headed off toward the boys’ new elementary school, thinking, I’ve got tutor written all over me? It felt good to hear that. Back home, all I ever heard was what a bunch of wasted potential I was.
I could teach somebody to read. I really could. In high school, I was smart. During my study hall period, the principal used to send me down to the elementary school to help kids with their homework. In southeastern Oklahoma, some kids grew up so far back in the sticks, you needed a four-wheeler or a mule to get to their houses. Those houses were more likely to have a meth lab in the kitchen or a marijuana patch out back than they were to have books around. I loved when those kids finally realized that reading a story was something awesome. You’re good with these kids, the principal used to tell me. They need to see that it’s okay for a young woman to be smart. That there’s more to life than having babies young and going to work for the pulpwood companies. . . .
The high school principal talking in my head was hard to take. I’d ended up doing everything he told me not to do. The whole laundry list. All of a sudden, my happy feeling came sinking down like a balloon deflating. It settled over my shoulders and started to weigh on me, getting heavier by the minute. I didn’t even want to go sign the boys up for school. I wanted to go home, and flop down on the sofa, and sleep off the blues the way my daddy used to sleep off a hangover, back before he moved off and left us.
The truth was that no matter how hard I tried, I never got it right. Everything I did was stupid and wrong, and here in Dallas, things were worse than ever. I didn’t have any friends, and neither did the boys. I missed my family, and I missed home. I’d thought getting a house would make everything better, but it wasn’t better.
When this baby comes, you’ll be all alone with it. There won’t be anyone to help you. The idea went through my mind like a sudden thunderbolt, and then the rain started falling. The next thing I knew, I was turning the car around and heading back home.
“Where goin’, Mommy?” Ty asked, and I couldn’t even answer. The lump in my throat was about to burst. I wanted to hit the highway, start driving toward Oklahoma, and not stop until I got there.
“Mommy?” Benji whispered, stretching as far as he could in his seat belt. “Are you cryin’?”
I swallowed hard, sniffed, and shook my head. Above the church parking lot, the marquee read,THE SUMMER KITCHEN
LUNCH, STORY TIME, GAMES 11:30
EVENING ADULT READING AND GED CLASSES,
ENROLLMENT OPEN
TUTORS WANTED
Tutors wanted. I read it twice.
In the churchyard, a group of kids was sitting under a tree, listening to a woman talk. Her hands flapped wildly, making her long red muumuu swirl around her high-top tennis shoes. She twirled in a circle, and then ran around the tree, like someone was chasing her. When she reached the sidewalk, she froze, and the children froze with her. The only movement came from her long, gray-black dreadlocks, swirling like the snakes in Medusa’s hair. Watching her, I almost missed a perfectly good gap in traffic. Something about that woman was weirdly interesting. . . .
In the backseat, the boys were as fascinated as I was.
“Is a lady!” Ty cheered, weirdly excited. “What her do?”
“They have story time over there after lunch,” I answered, then stopped watching the storyteller and gunned it across to Red Bird. “She’s reading the kids a book, I think.”
Twisting in his seat, Benji strained to watch through the back window.
“Is a wed-dwess lady!” Ty observed.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess she is a red-dress lady.” Why the boys had this strange new thing about naming people by their clothes, I had no idea, but story time did look interesting, and at least the red-dress lady, unlike the green-pants lady, was a real person. Maybe if the boys had someone real to talk about, they’d quit making up imaginary people.
Whenever I finally finished getting the house in shape, maybe I’d bring the boys back here, after all. It couldn’t hurt. The church was close enough for us to walk. We needed something to do on days Cody had the car. Maybe we’d even take a little break and try it tomorrow, or the next day. Just for lunch. Just for a little while.
No reason for anybody to sit around the house and be lonely in this neighborhood these days.
I was lonely here.
When I pulled into our driveway, the old lady next door was out by her mailbox. Speaking of lonely people. Even though there wasn’t twenty feet between our houses, I’d only caught sight of her a couple times, when she was peeking out her window at us, or coming and going in her car. I’d knocked on her door once, thinking I’d try to be friendly. She hadn’t answered, even though the TV was on, and I knew she was in there. Today, she was watching me with her arms folded, frowning. Definitely not any friendlier than usual.
“Who’s that?” she asked, jerking her chin toward the moving van across the street as I got out of the car.
“New neighbors, I think.” I took few steps closer, thinking, Maybe sh
e’s actually nicer than she seems. . . .
“Mmm,” she muttered, squinting at the blue house. Her lips fused together, pleating in a single frown line.
“They had kind of a commotion over there earlier.” Usually I could talk to a tree, but this lady was hard to like.
“I saw,” she said. Nothing else, just, I saw.
I thought about getting the boys out of the car. There was always the chance that she liked kids.
She turned back toward her house, then stopped and looked across the street again. “Two of you in one week.”
“What?”
“Two in one week,” she grumbled, shaking her head.
I felt my cheeks go hot, and I wasn’t even sure why. “Two of what?”
“Householders.” She snorted, and walked off without saying another word.
Chapter 13
Tam Lambert
Barbie sped down the block, turned left instead of right, and drove three blocks in the wrong direction before whipping around the corner, catching the curb, and bouncing the rear end of the car onto one tire momentarily. After missing the highway ramp, she hung a U-turn so fast she cut off a guy in a rusty pickup truck, and he honked and gave her the finger. Changing lanes, she nearly clipped someone else.
“Mommy, no!” Mark screamed. He had destroyed enough toy cars to know what happened when two vehicles ran into each other. Aside from that, Barbie let the kids watch the news, and cop shows, and old episodes of CHiPs, so they knew all about police chases and the mangled results of driving disasters. Car Chase and Car Wreck were two of their favorite make believe games.
“Be quiet!” Barbie snapped, her voice vibrating through the car in an ear-piercing shriek. “Shut up! Just shut up!” Her fingers kneaded the wheel as she darted in and out of traffic.
Mark sniffled and let out the kind of long whine that usually preceded a tantrum.
“Don’t you start crying,” Barbie hissed through clenched teeth.
Mark responded with a loud wail, then grabbed a Happy Meal toy from the seat and threw it toward the front. It hit Barbie’s arm, bounced off, and landed on the floor.
“That’s it!” Growling in her throat like an animal about to bite, Barbie leaned over and fished for the projectile. “You want to see what that feels like? Do you?” The Escalade swerved across the center line into oncoming traffic before Barbie grabbed the Happy Meal toy and steered the vehicle into the correct lane as an oncoming garbage truck laid on the horn.
“Barbara, stop it!” I tried to reach for the wheel.
“Look ahead!” Aunt Lute cried as all three of the boys descended into tears and Jewel let out a wail in the backseat.
Lowering the window, Barbie pitched the toy out. “You want to see how it feels?” Her voice was ragged, between a desperate scream and a sob. “You want to see how it feels?” Opening the console, she grabbed one of the kids’ DVDs and threw it out the window. “It’s like this!” She pitched another. “And this, and this!”
“Pull over!” I screamed, reaching for the steering wheel again. “Pull over, now!”
Barbie whipped into a McDonald’s parking lot, then hit the brakes and threw the car into park all at once. The vehicle was still vibrating when she dropped the last DVD, buried her face in her hands, and began to sob.
My heart pounded in my throat as I leaned over, turned off the ignition, and tucked the keys into my pocket. Barbie would be getting those back over my dead body. I collapsed in my seat, my throat burning and too dry to form words.
A police cruiser pulled into the parking lot and stopped behind our vehicle.
“Barbie.” I forced her name past the pulsating lump in my throat. “There’s a police car outside.” Thank God, part of me said. Thank God somebody’s here. Then a myriad of terrible possibilities ran through my mind. If Barbie ended up in jail, what in the world would happen to the sibs?
The officer tapped on the window, but Barbie ignored it. I hit the button to lower the glass.
“Everything all right here?” The officer leaned closer to the window, taking in the whimpering kids, the sobbing driver, Aunt Lute, and then me.
“We’ve been lost,” Aunt Lute piped up, unbuckling her belt and leaning over the second seat. “Terribly so. It upset the children.”
Squinting at Barbie, the officer pursed his lips skeptically. “I had a complaint called in about reckless driving. The vehicle matched this description. You know anything about that?”
Barbie shook her head, wiped her eyes, and patted her cheeks. “I’m fine. I’m fine. I just . . .” Closing her eyes momentarily, she took a page out of Aunt Lute’s book. “. . . got lost. I don’t know this neighborhood.”
Backing away from the door, the officer asked Barbie to step out of the car.
“I’m all right now,” she insisted, and he requested that she step out of the car anyway.
“I haven’t done anything!” Her voice quavered with a haughty combination of anger and tears.
The officer braced his hands on his gun belt. “Ma’am, if you’re refusing to comply, I’ll have to remove you from the vehicle forcibly.”
Barbie unlocked the door and lifted the handle, and the officer took another step backward, as if even he were reluctant to get involved with whatever was going on in our vehicle.
Barbie stepped out, and the conversation took on the usual Barbie drama. Within minutes, she was in an epic meltdown like nothing I’d ever seen in my life. She paced the parking lot, babbling incomprehensibly about the Baby Bundles wreck, my father, the eviction from our old house, and the blistering descent of the past week, while the cop followed behind her, trying to calm her down and keep her still. Staggering over a storm grate, she twisted her ankle, then yanked her foot free, pulled off her stilettos, and threw them at the car, screaming, “Homeless people! He thinks we’re going to live in a house with homeless people lined up. Just lined up!” She raked her fingers over her hair, creating so much static that the top of her head looked like an upside-down haystack. “But we’ve got bars! We’ve got bars. That’ll keep them out. Bars on the house, and he thinks I’d live in a place like that! I’m not an idiot. I have . . . I have friends. I have . . .”
Tipping his hat back, the officer scratched his receding hairline and gave the Escalade a look that said he wished we’d landed on some planet other than his.
Inside McDonald’s, a growing audience stood plastered against the glass, watching Barbie’s performance, and in the backseat of our car, the sibs had just realized we’d, quite conveniently, stopped at a McDonald’s with a playscape out front. They wanted to go inside and enjoy the facilities.
The officer tapped the passenger-side window, and I rolled it down. “Is there someone I can call for you?” he asked, monitoring Barbie’s rant from the corner of his eye.
“Someone?” I repeated, thinking, No, there’s no one. Not a soul in the world.
“A friend, a relative, a clergy member?” he suggested, clearly hoping to turn us over to a higher authority, or any authority, actually.
“No, sir.” Both of us watched as Barbie kicked the car tire with her bare foot, then roared in pain. “We’re all right, I promise,” I said, trying to mollify the situation before we ended up in state custody. “She’s always like this. Well . . . not quite like this, but it’s been a bad day. She’ll calm down once we’re home.”
He slowly folded his ticket pad with what would have been our ticket still in it. “Are you a licensed driver?”
“Yes, sir. I’m sevent . . . eighteen.” I realized my birthday had passed without my even noticing. The luau and the new car I’d been expecting seemed light-years away now.
Tucking his pen in his pocket, the officer gave Barbie a worried look, then turned back to me. “All right. I want all of you to go inside, cool off, and calm down for a while. Then I want you to drive. If I see her behind the wheel again, I’m taking her straight downtown.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is she on any
medications?”
“No, sir.” That was probably a lie. In the past week, Barbie had made short work of a bottle of Xanax, as well as a smattering of herbal stuff provided to her by her only remaining friend, Fawn. “This is just her. She’s high-maintenance. You should see her when she breaks a nail.”
Shaking his head, he pulled his hat into place and backed off. The police procedure manual probably didn’t have a recommendation on what kind of social services to call for a hysterical, stiletto-throwing woman having a really bad day in the McDonald’s parking lot.
“All right.” He pointed a stern finger at me. “Take a little break until everyone’s got it together; then head on home. Safely.”
“Yes, sir.”
His police radio beckoned, and he took advantage of the opportunity to hurry off and engage a problem that could be solved.
I climbed out, retrieved Barbie’s shoes, shoved them into her stomach so hard she coughed out a breath, and said, “Here. Good job, Barbara. You just about managed to get us taken to jail.” I pictured Barbie under incarceration and the sibs and me stuck in some kind of emergency shelter, and a shiver went down my spine. There were worse places than the blue house with the burglar bars. Much worse.
Barbie stood on the sidewalk with her shoes dangling loosely in her hands as I unloaded the sibs and herded them, along with Aunt Lute, toward the restaurant. “For heaven’s sake, Barbie, get a grip!” I growled out, waving at the officer as he circled the parking lot and drove off.
Inside McDonald’s, the sibs and Aunt Lute headed for the play yard, trailed by the curious stares of restaurant patrons. Stifling a sob, Barbie dashed toward the restroom, a hand over her face. I didn’t try to stop her. Locking herself in the bathroom was one of Barbie’s favorite tricks. It drove my father nuts. Undoubtedly, we were going to be in McDonald’s for a while—however long it took Barbie to get her head together and realize that the blue house around the corner was the only place we had to go.
At least the sibs were happy in the meantime. Within moments of our arrival, Aunt Lute had them convinced the playscape was a castle, and they’d forgotten all about the mama drama. Meanwhile, Barbie’s emotional surrender to reality slowly progressed, first in the bathroom and then in the play area. While Jewel dozed in her carrier, Barbie stared out the window, her eyes tracking the passing cars, flicking from one to the next as if she were waiting for a solution to drive by. Every so often, she fished her cell phone from her purse, thumbed through her contacts, dialed up a number, then either waited while no one answered or, occasionally, had short conversations with ex-friends whose discomfort echoed through the phone. Everyone Barbie knew was suddenly on the way out of town, had company in the guest room, or felt it was better not to get involved. Even Fawn was “putting new carpet” in her apartment, but she did promise to come take Barbie “out for a mocha later in the week and talk about everything .” Listening in from the next table, I almost felt sorry for Barbie. She was finding out that nobody cared.