I could see the theater from a block away as we approached. It had one of those old-timey half-circle movie marquees out front, all lit up and glowing. My heart pounded at the sight of it. At the box office, we paid our five dollars (finally, something I could afford!) and they directed us to the main stage theater. When we went through the double doors, my breath caught.
It was so beautiful. And so big.
The theater had been abandoned during World War II and sat vacant for decades before someone raised the money to restore it. But rather than make it look all shiny and new, they had left the ornate paintings on the walls—what remained of them—by sealing them with some kind of clear coating. The colors were a little faded and much of the paint had chipped away over the years, but you could see how glorious it must’ve been in its heyday.
The stage backdrop was a patchwork of textured panels that shimmered in the colored lights. But what really caught my eye was the grand piano at the side of the stage, all shiny and black. I wanted to go up there and stroke its surface, glissando my hands up and down the keys.
Molly reached over and flicked me under the chin. “Catching flies, Emerson.”
I snapped my mouth shut and smiled. “This place is amazing,” I said. “I don’t even care if anybody performs.”
She laughed. “The sound is great, too. You’ll see.”
There was a bar in the back, and Molly went to get us sodas while I excused myself to the bathroom. When I came out, she was getting her arm signed in Sharpie by some kid with a four-inch-high Mohawk. He looked about fifteen years old. “He’ll be famous someday,” she assured me. “And I’ll have a photograph of his autograph on my arm.” She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and took a picture of it.
“I thought you were going to say you’d never wash it,” I said, thinking of Reesa when James had touched her hand in class.
“No,” said Molly. “I’m not that pathetic.”
We stood in the back for a few minutes, searching for a good place to sit. I kept glancing toward the doors, looking for James.
“Waiting for someone?” said Molly.
I hadn’t told her I’d invited James, hoping it might seem more like a chance meeting than a date. “I did mention to someone that I’d be here,” I said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
She narrowed her eyes. “It’s not Reesa, is it?”
“No.” I couldn’t blame Molly for disliking Reesa, but I felt guilty talking behind her back, even if I wasn’t really saying anything.
“We’ll save a spot, then,” Molly said. “For your mystery date.”
We found three seats in the middle of the front section. “I like to be close enough to see their fingerings on their instruments,” Molly explained.
When they lowered the houselights, a flutter of nerves rushed to my throat. I had to remind myself, It’s not you up there, it’s not you. But I couldn’t help envisioning myself standing next to the piano. Unable to move.
“You okay?” Molly was looking at me funny.
“Yep!” I pushed the image to the back of my mind and forced a smile, shifting to get more comfortable in my seat.
The first act was a rock band made up of three women—drums, bass, and the lead singer on guitar. They called themselves the Llama Mammas. They sang an original song of their own called “Spinning Free.” The bass player twirled around and around, got tangled up in her cord. My heart raced for her. I would’ve died of embarrassment, but she just laughed and unplugged herself and stepped out of it and plugged back in.
I kept looking back to the entrance so I could wave James over when he came in. But he didn’t, and after an hour I began to lose hope. We sat through a bunch of solo performances, people singing with guitars or a cappella. One guy played a bagpipe. Someone told jokes. Molly applauded and whistled for everyone. It made me wonder if she really thought I was any good or if she was just supportive of music in general.
It was past nine o’clock and still James hadn’t shown. Then someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Ladies?”
I spun around and there was . . . Lennie.
“What are you doing here?” I snapped.
“I’m supposed to meet someone.” He stared at me for a moment, then looked around. “Not sure if she’s here, though. It’s kind of a blind date.”
Molly pointed to the empty seat next to me. “You can sit with us if you want.”
I glared at her.
“Or not . . . ,” she mumbled.
“That’s okay.” Lennie grinned crookedly. The bruise around his eye was purple and must’ve still hurt. “I can see you’re waiting for someone special.”
The next performer had taken the stage, so I turned to watch. Lennie left, went I-didn’t-know-and-I-didn’t-care where. The seat next to me remained empty for the rest of the night.
Molly noticed my disappointment. “Sorry about your . . . uh . . . friend.”
I shrugged. “The music was great,” I said, eager to change the subject. There was such a crazy variety of performers, but the organizers had presented them in a way that flowed just right. It all ended with the most amazing quartet that sang a number from Les Misérables. The audience was on its feet before they finished.
I felt both exhilarated and annihilated, wanting to sing like that but knowing I never could. Molly squeezed my arm as if sensing my mood. But she didn’t say anything, which was exactly the right thing to say.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Mom shook me awake on Saturday morning. “Time to get up. I want to leave in a half hour. I made you some oatmeal.”
I looked at the clock on my little desk. “It’s only seven. I thought you said they open at nine.”
“Yes,” said Mom. “But the lady at the food pantry told me they start lining up at eight. To get the good stuff.”
Mom had broken it all down for me the day before, how the food bank collects and sorts all the donated food, then supplies it to the pantries, which dole it out to people at risk of hunger. Mom kept calling them “the hungry.”
“We’re not hungry,” I had said.
“No, we’re not.” She’d been scrubbing at a stain on the counter that was never going to come out. “Not yet.”
I rolled over in bed and groaned. “Do you think we’ll see anybody we know?”
“We might.” Her voice had that high, tinny sound like when she’d first told me about moving here.
I swung my legs to the floor. “Might as well get this over with.”
Mom had already driven Dad and the twins over to Dad’s office so he could get some work done while they played with the shredder. He had let them shred some documents once and you’d have thought they’d died and gone to heaven. Now he saved up all his shredding so they could do it for him when he worked on weekends. He’d even purchased a shredder with a special safety device so they couldn’t shred their fingers by accident.
Mom called up to me as I was getting dressed. “Wear something, uh . . . not too flashy.”
“Dress like a poor person,” I mumbled. “Got it.”
My hoodie supply was running a little low, so I pulled on the humblest sweater and jeans I could find. Instead of the knee-high leather boots I usually wore with it, I donned my oldest, most beaten-up pair of Chucks. I didn’t brush my hair or put makeup on.
“How’s this?” I said, twirling around in the kitchen.
“I didn’t say you had to look like you’d been attacked by birds,” she said. “Go brush your hair.”
When we were finally on our way, Mom explained that the pantry was at a church. “It’s a choice pantry,” she said. “That means we get to choose what kinds of foods we want. Some of them just give you a box that they’ve preselected.”
She kept rambling on about what to expect, but I honestly didn’t want to know. I just wanted to get it over with.
We drove out of our neighborhood, passing my school and heading in the same direction James had gone the day we escaped. We passed the behea
ded deer and the wine-bottle tree. My heart started to pound. “Mom? What church is this pantry at?”
Mom fumbled in her purse and pulled out a square of paper. “Northbridge,” she said, passing the note to me. “Northbridge Methodist.”
I groaned. That was James’s church. The cemetery. “Is it okay if I stay in the car?”
“I need your help,” said Mom with a look of despair. “To carry things. I don’t think they have carts.”
We had a pile of canvas shopping bags in the backseat of the station wagon—the Volvo. My parents had sold the Mercedes but the Volvo was already paid for, so that’s the one we kept. Still, when we drove into the church parking lot, it was definitely the nicest car there.
“Oh, my,” Mom said as we circled around to the food pantry entrance. There was a line of about fifty people already waiting. This was “the hungry” she’d been talking about. Not visibly starving like on TV, when they show children with distended bellies and skeletal limbs. These people seemed tough, like hunger was the least of their problems. It was the rough ones who stood out to me first. The guy with wiry muscles and a face etched with lines, smoking a cigarette. A woman who looked like she’d beat me up if I so much as blinked in her direction. They glared at us as we drove past. Did they think we were going to take their food?
“Oh, my,” Mom said again.
“We don’t belong here,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Mom drove all the way around the church and pulled into a spot facing a car that looked perfectly respectable, except for the passenger window was cracked and held together with clear plastic tape. It had a handicapped tag hanging from the rearview mirror.
We stayed in the car and watched more people arrive and get in line. One family drove up in an RV, which I assumed was their home. I noticed quite a few handicapped tags, and a number of people with walkers or canes. They weren’t so tough. More weary. After a few more minutes, a man came out of the church and handed plastic laminated numbers to those in line, and everyone dispersed a bit, going back to their cars or sitting on a grassy embankment.
“Let’s go in now,” said Mom, though she didn’t actually make a move.
I wasn’t ready. “Not yet,” I said.
A car pulled into the spot next to ours. I turned to look at the driver. It was Chandra Mandretti. My eyes went wide, and hers narrowed. We both looked away. Oh. My. God. Chandra Mandretti went to the food pantry.
I sucked in my breath.
Mom gave me a quizzical look but was too busy working up the nerve to go inside to ask what I was gasping about. She turned off the ignition and studied her reflection in the rearview mirror. Even in her not-too-flashy clothes, she could’ve been dressed for lunch at the country club. Although I was wearing my rattiest sneakers, I had forgotten and put my leather jacket on.
We did not look needy of free food.
Mom took her earrings off and dropped them in her purse. They were the small diamond studs that Dad had given her for a birthday a few years ago. “I forgot I had these on,” she said apologetically.
“I thought you said we didn’t have to be destitute to come here.”
“We don’t. We’re being silly.” She reached into the backseat for the canvas bags we’d brought. “Come on.”
I glanced at Chandra as I got out of the car, but she had her elbow propped in the window to hide her face. Her mother had gotten out and gone to collect a number by herself. But I couldn’t do that to Mom. Not this first time.
When we got to the door, a man with a bright-orange VOLUNTEER tag handed us the number sixty-seven.
“We’re new,” said Mom, as if we were joining a social club. “I understand there’s some paperwork we need to fill out?”
He took us inside to a lady volunteer who gave Mom a form with questions about our name and address and monthly income and how many people were in our family. She also offered us some literature on SNAP benefits. “That’s what they call food stamps now,” the lady explained.
“Food stamps?” I hissed in Mom’s ear. “Seriously?”
Mom just kept this smile plastered to her face and wrote her answers in the little blocks. She added up her hours of work for the past two weeks and doubled it, calculating a monthly income, and wrote the figure down.
“What about Dad’s income?” I asked.
“Nothing to report,” she said.
“Family income, it says. You need to put Dad’s down, too.”
She tapped the pencil on the paper and leaned toward my ear. “Your father is not bringing home an income at the moment, Ivy. Everything he earns is going toward the bank debt on his business.”
“What?” I glanced back down at the dollar amount Mom had written, what she brought home from her part-time job at the newspaper. “Seriously? How are we paying for Brady’s therapy?” I asked.
“We’ll talk about that later,” she whispered.
The orange-badged volunteer reviewed our form and seemed satisfied that we were as poor as we said we were. She waited with us until a man with a microphone called out “up to number seventy!”
We shuffled into line with the other hungry. The realization that we were really and truly one of them came on much the way the sensation of hunger does, with a dull ache in the stomach. Only this one felt a bit more like a sucker punch. How did things get so bad, so fast? I wanted to bend over and lean my hands on my knees to catch my breath, but that would only make it worse. People were already staring at us.
When we got to the front of the line, Mom tried to give our number to the man, but he explained that we should hand it in at the end. There were different sections for different kinds of foods. Our volunteer lady pointed out the canned stuff, like fruit and veggies and tuna, boxes of pasta and rice, cookies, and crackers. She called them “shelf-stable products.” There was a center section for fresh fruits and vegetables, and another for bread and muffins and other baked goods. “The refrigerated items are in the back,” she said. “Meat, eggs, yogurt, milk, cheese.”
Hanging on every shelf was a sign that indicated how many of each item you were allowed to take, based on the size of your family. Mom kept reading them aloud, as if I couldn’t understand the simple system. Or maybe she didn’t want the others to think we were claiming more than our share. “We’re a family of five, so we take three boxes of cereal,” she said. A family of two was allowed to take one.
“Two pounds of ground beef.” She pulled them from the refrigerator. A smaller family could take only one.
“You don’t have to announce it,” I murmured in her ear.
We stopped to watch a little cooking demonstration going on, teaching people how to prepare a nutritious meal from groceries that were available. They were making a chicken Caesar salad.
Mom kept saying things like, “Oh, look, they have Cheerios!” and “It’s just like the market!” But it was not just like the market. People didn’t snake through the aisles single file like this at the market. They didn’t get excited about two pounds of ground beef. And the market never ran out of groceries. By ten o’clock when we finished our shopping, the shelves were almost bare. And people were still showing up.
“Should we give them some of ours?” I asked Mom as we hauled our bags to the car.
She paused and considered, resting her bags on the pavement for a moment. “No,” she said firmly, snatching them back up. “I’m sorry. I can’t worry about everyone else. I have to worry about us.”
We got in the car, and Mom put her earrings back on. Her hands were shaking, but I didn’t say anything about that. I turned and saw Chandra still sitting in the car parked next to us. She looked at me again and nodded, before turning away.
As we drove toward the exit, I saw a car I recognized. Its front bumper was held together by duct tape. Leaning against the passenger door was Rigby Jones, one of Lennie’s friends. I might’ve pretended I didn’t see him, but he raised a fist and bumped it toward me. I smiled and bumped back.
“Who
was that?” said Mom.
“Kid from school.” I twisted back around to wave good-bye. That’s when I noticed the orange badge. Rigby wasn’t using the food pantry—he was a volunteer.
“Everything is not as it seems,” I mumbled.
Once we were a few miles away from the church, Mom let out a huge sigh, as if she’d been holding her breath that whole time. “I’ll make that Mexican rice and beans with chicken that your father likes,” she said, “and the chicken Caesar. That’s a good idea. A meat loaf, or maybe a meat sauce . . .”
She was over the challenge of getting the food. Now she had to find a way to stretch it, because at our income level we were only allowed to visit the pantry once every three weeks. I wondered what poor looked like for the people who could shop there every single week.
“You were going to tell me,” I said, “how we’re paying for Brady’s therapy.”
Mom didn’t reply right away. She probably didn’t want to tell me, only said she would to shut me up earlier. “I don’t want you to worry about it.”
“Mom.” This was getting ridiculous. I was worried about it. If I’d known, I would have been looking harder for a job.
“Okay, okay.” She fidgeted at the steering wheel. “Insurance pays for some of it. And all the money we made from selling the furniture, jewelry, appliances. That’ll pay for the rest. For a while.”
“Then what?” I asked.
Mom took a deep breath. “We’ll figure something out.”
I looked out the window as we headed home, newly determined to find a job.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Later that day, I headed over to the used-book shop, but the elderly woman working there laughed when I asked if she was hiring. “Barely make enough to pay myself, dear,” she said.
So I went into the Save-a-Cent. The man working behind the customer service counter gave me a little clipboard with an application to fill out. When I handed it back to him, he said, “We’ll let you know if there’s an opening.”
“You don’t have anything?”
“There’s a waiting list,” he said. “And I’ll be honest. A lot of the applicants are older and have families.”
Between the Notes Page 16