by Lisa Wingate
My mind hopscotched forward, and I wanted to go home right away and tell Cody about the baby and have him be as excited as I was.
Cody looked up from the tire and saw me with the baby and frowned. I heard that squelching sound they use in the movies when somebody’s daydream rewinds like an old reel-to-reel tape. He stood up from the car, and the teenage girl in the short skirt stood up with him.
“I need to go grab a few tools to bend that fender out,” Cody said. “That’s what’s rubbing your tire. If you leave it that way, it’ll ruin the spare, too. The tire shop might be able to fix that, or else put a used one on the rim for you.”
The girl shaded her eyes so she could look at him. She was almost as tall as Cody was, but for a guy, Cody wasn’t tall. Just five-nine. “Oh . . . okay. How much does that cost?”
I heard that rewind sound in my head again. How much does that cost? Probably not near as much as that way-cute outfit she had on.
“Not too much—ten, twenty bucks, depending,” Cody answered. “I go by a shop on my way to work. I could drop it off for you tomorrow.” No way Cody would of been bending over backward to drop off a tire for someone who didn’t look like Hannah Montana. I felt a little pinch of jealousy.
“Oh, that would be so great,” she breathed, not seeming flirty, really, just like she was used to people doing favors for her. Cody jogged off toward our house. Some snarky part of me said, All right, now he’s being too nice to the cute girl.
I peeked around the grandmother and introduced myself, so Hannah would know Cody was attached. “I’m Shasta. I live across the street.”
Her eyes flashed wide when she saw that I had the baby. “Tam.” She moved closer and shook my hand, then reached for the baby, but the baby hung on to me and started whining.
The grandmother chuckled, then leaned close to the girl and whispered, “She looks like the nanny—the little Spanish one. Jewel thinks she’s found Esmeralda.”
The girl, Tam, turned white, then pink. “Aunt Lute,” she gasped between her teeth, then glanced at me and mumbled, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” I told her. “I love babies; babies love me. These are my guys, Benjamin and Tyler.”
Tam bent down and said hi to Benji and Ty, and they were star-struck. This girl was the closest thing to Paris Hilton they’d ever seen. “I guess you’ve met Mark, and Daniel, and Jewel. And Aunt Lute.”
“A little,” I answered. “We were glad to see some kids across the street. The boys’d love to get together and play sometime.”
Tam shifted from one foot to the other, her gaze flicking toward the house. “I’ll have to ask my stepmom. . . .” I had a feeling that was an excuse to brush me off. The conversation ran out then. Cody came back, and Hannah wandered to the car to watch him finish changing the tire. I stood playing with the baby girl and letting the boys get acquainted until Cody was finished. The boys helped him gather his tools, and he handed them off to Benji and Ty, then picked up the flat tire to carry it across the street.
“Look what I’ve got,” I said, and turned the baby girl around so Cody could see her. “One of the little pink kind. How cute is she?”
He gave me a narrow glance on his way past. “Don’t get any ideas.” He didn’t even look at the baby, just headed back across the street with Benji and Ty behind him.
The girl in the fashion-model skirt gave me a curious look, and I felt myself blushing. “Guess I should give her back now,” I said, feeling like an idiot. My husband could be nice enough to her, and all he could say to me was, Don’t get any ideas. “So . . . ummm . . . let me know if y’all ever want to get the boys together to play.”
She gave me an uncomfortable look, and I could tell she wasn’t gonna be calling anytime soon for any playdates.
Of course she wouldn’t.
I looked too much like the little Spanish nanny.
Chapter 16
Tam Lambert
The morning after the flat tire, Fawn came by to, as she put it, “get Barb out of the house for a while.” After days cooped up together, while Barbie ranted with Fawn on the phone or mellowed herself with Xanax and wandered off to the bedroom to sleep, I didn’t even complain about Barbie leaving me stuck with the kids and Aunt Lute. Barbie hadn’t been taking care of them, anyway, other than to occasionally bring one or two into the bedroom with her and curl up in a fetal position for a group nap.
Suddenly, I couldn’t imagine what I’d thought was so bad about our old life—why I’d found reasons to complain about the chaos in the luxurious home with the nanny and the endless supply of toys. Life here felt like a reprimand from God—a slap in the face meant to show me how ungrateful I’d been. Life could be so much worse. It was worse. The house was so small, we were stacked on top of one another. The television wouldn’t work because there was no cable, the kids were bouncing off walls and boxes, and furnishings sat piled like toys created on the wrong scale for a dollhouse. Aunt Lute paced the house day and night, disturbed by the fact that her scrapbooks, painting supplies, and stashes of hoarded treasures were piled in boxes on the porch.
After Barbie took off with Fawn, Aunt Lute decided to unpack some of her materials. She left an easel and palette in the living room, and the sibs promptly knocked it down. Paint splattered everywhere, and Jewel picked that moment to figure out that she could do the seal-flop across the room. While I was in the kitchen cooking hot dogs, and Aunt Lute was on the front porch unpacking more supplies, the living room became a finger-paint masterpiece of handprints and footprints and baby slug trails.
When I saw what they’d done, I sank down in the doorway and cried. Every part of me wanted to run away, but there wasn’t anywhere to go. We had one vehicle, currently with no spare tire, and a limited supply of pawnshop cash. The proceeds from Barbie’s ring had been enough to catch up on the car payments, and we had money left to live on for a few months, but there wasn’t anything extra to spend on luxuries like cable TV and trips to McDonald’s. If the sibs were left to their own devices for a millisecond, they wreaked havoc either by accident or on purpose as a form of passive-aggressive protest over their lost toys, lost house, lost dad. Lost everything. They had no way of understanding what was happening, and as far as they could reason, their only recourse was to act out until life went back to normal.
Aunt Lute came in the front door and discovered the paint, and me crying about it. “Ssshhh,” she whispered. “I think I’ve seen a pride of lions nearby.” Motioning to the boys, she tiptoed across the room, leading them out the back door in a colorful, yet from my perspective blurry, parade of paint-spattered clothing, hair, and limbs.
Pushing the moisture from my eyes, I rescued Jewel from the floor, read the label on a tube of paint to make sure it was nontoxic, then bathed Jewel in our one tiny bathtub and dressed her again. Through the window, I could see Aunt Lute stripping the boys to their underwear and hosing them down to get the paint off. In the context of the past week, it hardly even seemed like a strange thing to do.
The boys reentered the house half-naked, wet, and shivering, little streams of water dripping from their underpants and running down their legs. I heard Aunt Lute mopping the floor in the living room while I fished for clothes from the laundry pile and gave them to the twins, then dug out a top and shorts for Landon.
Something caught my eye outside as I was pulling his T-shirt over his head. The mom from across the street, Shasta, was heading down the sidewalk with her sons. They were laughing and pointing at birds in the trees, strolling like subjects from a greeting-card photo. Her long, dark hair swung across her hips as she stopped to show the boys a squirrel running on an electric line overhead.
Yanking Landon’s T-shirt into place, I picked him up, grabbed Jewel, and ran to the overstuffed bedroom at the end of the hall, where the three boys were sharing two single beds, because that was all that would fit. Daniel and Mark were sitting on a bed, their faces long and somber, as if even they realized they’d pushed thing
s past the breaking point. Perhaps they were afraid Aunt Lute would take them outside and douse them with the garden hose again, because they shrank into the corner as I came in the door. They were wrapped in the covers, shivering still, their arms covered with goose bumps.
“Come on,” I said. “You two follow right behind me, and I mean right behind me. If anybody steps anywhere I didn’t step first, there’s going to be serious trouble, understand? I mean it. I’m sick of you guys not doing anything I tell you. I swear, if you two don’t cut it out, I’m going to walk out the door and not come back.” Threats probably weren’t the most mature way to deal with kids, but at the moment, I meant it. I was teetering on the edge of a place I didn’t want to go, struggling to abide by the still, small voice of conscience warning me that if I left, something terrible would happen.
The boys cooperated as if they walked in single-file lines every day of the week. Usually, getting the sibs from one place to another was like herding ferrets, but today, they obediently took long steps behind me, so that their feet landed in my tracks. “We’re going over to the park,” I told Aunt Lute, as we tiptoed through the living room, avoiding smears of paint.
Aunt Lute was down on her knees scrubbing daubs off the floor. “It’s only a small mess,” she said without looking up. “Just a bit of paint. Red and blue and brown, like the birds of spring.” Sitting back on her heels, she studied the spatters and handprints dotting the white walls. “Acrylic washes so easily. God must paint in oils. His birds never fade in the rain. Have you noticed?”
As usual, it was impossible to tell whether Aunt Lute was talking to me or just talking.
“I’m taking the kids over to the park,” I repeated. “If I don’t get out of here for a while, I’m just going to . . . lose it, okay?”
“What if you can’t find it again?” Aunt Lute leaned over to pull something from between the cushions on the sofa. “Oh, look, another one of these.” She drew out a string with a tiny wooden animal on it. “A little brown bear.”
“’S mine,” Daniel offered, and stretched out his hand, opening and closing his fingers. “I finded it.”
Aunt Lute leaned over and swung the bear toward Daniel’s hand, once, twice, three times until his fingers closed over it.
I hurried the sibs out the door, then headed across the yard carrying Jewel, with the boys following neatly behind me. Shasta had already made it to the bridge with her kids. The three of them were leaning over the railing, looking at the creek below. She glanced over her shoulder and waved as we reached the street.
Landon broke rank and dashed ahead to join the neighbor boys. Mark and Daniel moved more timidly, and Shasta stepped aside, pointing out the minnows in the shallow water below. “See them swimming down there? Benji and Ty brought some bread to give the fish a little snack. Share your bread, guys. Give everybody a little bit.”
I watched the sibs politely take small pieces of bread from the neighbor boys. Jewel stretched in my arms, wanting some, too. “Are you headed to the park?” I asked. “We have got to get out of that house for a while, before somebody, probably me, goes nuts. The kids just smeared paint all over the living room, and my stepmother’s, like, AWOL again, and . . .” The next thing I knew, I was blathering on. By the time I finished, Shasta probably thought I was a complete lunatic. “I’m sorry. I just . . . it’s just . . . been a really bad . . . few days, and . . .” Emotion gathered in my throat, and for a horrifying moment, I was close to dissolving into tears. I swallowed hard, trying to gather myself together. “I just . . . I saw you and I thought maybe . . . you were headed down to the park.”
Shasta’s forehead lowered. Clearly, she was wondering why the sudden change of heart. When she’d asked about playdates before, I’d intentionally put her off, knowing Barbie would never agree to it.
“Oh, well, we’re not . . .” She stopped, her gaze flicking toward the park. She had beautiful eyes, dark like those of the foreign girl who sat next to me in English class last year. I never bothered to speak to the girl, to ask what country she was from, or what her name was. I just snorted impatiently at her thickly accented English, wrinkled my nose at her strange, spicy scent, and thought she was actually very pretty, but she’d be so much prettier without that hijab wrapped over her head and fastened under her chin.
Now those casual thoughts from high school seemed pointless, immature, and idiotic. Who was I to judge anybody?
Yet I couldn’t help thinking that Shasta looked even younger today, with her hair loose around her face. Not much older than me—way too young to have a five-year-old. Without consciously thinking about it, I categorized her with a long list of tags—Minority, low socioeconomic, possible high school dropout, teen bride, teen mom, hick, not my type of person, nothing like me . . .
The list pricked my conscience, as much for how easily it came as for its content. Tagging people, judging them according to my mental catalog, was as natural as breathing—an unconscious by-product of having grown up in a neighborhood, a school, a community that had high standards.
Barbie wasn’t the only reason I’d put Shasta off about playdates. The truth was that even though she was friendly and beautiful, and her husband had saved us from the flat tire, and she had it together with her kids much more than Barbie did, this girl wasn’t up to my standards.
The look on her face said she could tell that. She was reading me like a book, and she’d slapped a few labels on me, too. Snob, brat, spoiled little rich girl . . .
The funny thing was that none of those labels fit anymore. I didn’t know who or what I was, but the spoiled, self-possessed girl who’d trotted the high school halls like she owned the world had been given a wake-up call in the most painful way.
Shasta tossed her hair over her shoulder, motioning down the street, seeming uncomfortable. “Well . . . ummm . . . actually, we were headed someplace else.”
“Oh,” I muttered, turning my attention to the boys, because the situation was suddenly awkward, and tears were building in my throat again. I felt lonely, and lost, and I needed someone to talk to. “Well, that’s all right. I mean, maybe another time.” Stepping back to peer around the overhanging trees, I considered taking the kids to the park by myself. The idea sent an uncomfortable sensation sliding over my shoulders, causing a tiny shudder. Just down the street, homeless people stood in a soup line outside the white church. What if they got the urge to come sleep it off in the park after lunch?
On the other hand, the idea of going back to the blue house was almost unbearable.
From the corner of my eye, I could see Shasta watching me, trying to decide what to say next. “Well . . . ummm . . . actually, we were headed to the church on the corner. The little white one?”
I blinked hard, broadcasting shock before I could consider how she’d take it. No doubt my face said, The place with the soup line?
Along the bridge railing, the boys were laughing and talking as if they’d known one another forever. For them, there was no socioeconomic gap.
Shasta crossed her arms uncomfortably, digging the toe of her tennis shoe into the dirt at the curb. “You’re welcome to come with us,” she offered halfheartedly. “They told me they have a story time and games for kids there every day after lunch.” She rushed the words out, seeming as nervous as I was. “And they were looking for volunteers to sign up as tutors for a reading class they’re starting three nights a week. I figured maybe I’d do that. Cody’s gonna be doing a little extra night work, which leaves me stuck with no car all day and all evening, and, well, I just need to get out and do something, you know?” Her eyes met mine, and I nodded.
“I can so relate,” I admitted. Labels or no labels, there wasn’t an inch of space between us right now.
Shasta’s face opened, and she grinned, her expression precocious as she leaned a little closer to me. “And, for this literacy thing at night, I hear they have free child care.” She cast a glance at the boys, and I understood everything that was being said with
out being said. “Come down there with us,” she pressed, touching my arm. “You know, check it out and stuff. The kids would have fun playing the games.”
I thought about the soup line winding from the old church like a slowly moving snake, and air hitched in my chest. Not so long ago, our church youth pastor had made plans for us to do a poverty simulation with some church that met under an overpass and served homeless people. We were supposed to give up everything that belonged to us and live for twenty-four hours the way those people did—sleeping at the mission, eating in a soup line. I signed up to go along, because I didn’t want to look bad compared to everyone else, but the truth was that I didn’t want to participate. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like, stuck in that part of town, surrounded by derelicts, by society’s castoffs, and I really wasn’t interested in finding out. It seemed to me that, if we wanted to do some good, we could have a car wash or a garage sale to raise money for homeless people.
I told Dad about the trip, and he couldn’t see any point in “exposing yourself to those realities.” He sent me back to the youth pastor with a donation and a warning—while my father appreciated the youth pastor’s zeal, he needed to be more judicious about his methods. We were just kids, after all, and some things you didn’t have to experience in order to understand them.
“You know, I’d really better go back and check on Aunt Lute,” I said, giving our house a concerned look so Shasta wouldn’t think I was making excuses.
She frowned toward our driveway. “She could come with us.”
“Aunt Lute’s busy cleaning.”
“I wan-go wit boys,” Landon interjected, suddenly tuning in to the conversation. Jewel bounced in my arms, as if she understood, too.