When we get back to Grandma’s, I go to her bed and try to tell her that I found a dollar. The words stick like they have been, so I hold it out to her but she doesn’t understand me. She says, “Timothy, what’s this about?” He shrugs and rolls his truck back and forth on his leg. His mom is due any minute to drive down the Calle and take him home. All his attention is on the curve in the road where the next car will appear and I know how that feels, I know that curve well myself, how the mailboxes at that corner will take just the right shape of the car you want, the arms you want behind its wheel, and make you think your waiting is over when it isn’t. Timmy’s busy. He’s not going to speak for me and Grandma knows it. She says, “I’m sorry Rory D., I can’t figure this one out.”
I look at the hanging baskets over her shoulder, the baskets that hang over her bed. The bottom basket is full of skeins of yarn, crochet hooks, balls of yarn rolled from skein scraps, a word-find puzzle book, the middle basket has onions. I crumple the bill in my hand until it’s warm and moist, like a tissue held too long. Grandma picks up the ball of yarn and the hook she laid down when we came in, and I never even guess that she is tricking me, teasing me into reopening my mouth that I’ve held too quiet for too long. Grandma’s been waiting for the right moment, for something worthwhile that I needed to say and couldn’t get help with, and I squeeze the dollar tight and say—and I do say, because I can even hear me saying it—“For your money basket, Grandma.”
Grandma smiles and opens my fist. I watch as she uncrumples the bill, straightens it smooth, and puts it high up in the top basket next to the decks of cards. The baskets disappear behind her shirt, green and white, soft over bony shoulder, as she leans down, holds me close, and says, “I sure missed hearing that voice, R.D. Don’t let it get away again.”
the city of words
That night, when Mama’s car is the one coming around the curve, and she comes in to get me, Grandma asks if she has time for a quick game of Yahtzee. It’s a surprise because Grandma hates playing Yahtzee with Mama, says that Mama is the devil’s own daughter when it comes to rolling dice. If they sit down to play anything, it’s cards only, because Grandma says she loses enough on the Strip, she should have at least half a chance at home, and it’s cards that listen to her best, whisper in her ear about what else is happening in the pack and where the aces are hid.
Mama kisses me on the head but her eyes are already on the game. “I always have time to win,” she says. Grandma pulls the old giant clipboard out from the side of the couch that they use for cards and dice, and then, except for the sound of the dice rattling in the cups, of them falling on the board, there’s no noise. They really get into it and I really get bored, and find my place in The Phantom Tollbooth where Milo and Tock are being arrested by short Officer Shrift.
“How’d they treat you today, Jo?” Grandma asks. By “they” she means the customers at the Truck Stop and by “treat” she means, did anyone try to grab Mama’s ass or leave her high and dry tip-wise.
“No highlights, no lowlights, Ma.” Mama shakes her cup when she talks but only rolls the dice out when she pauses. On other nights she tells stories about customers but this isn’t like other nights, this is all part of the game, the old one I’ve been watching and learning since before I can remember. Small talk is how you get into the other guy’s head and how he gets into yours and Grandma’s an expert at it. Mama ignores her, concentrates on the numbers she needs, mouthing them before each roll. “How’d they treat you around here?” she asks.
“Fair to middling.” I can feel Grandma nodding at me even though I’m not looking at them and even though I’m obviously very interested in Milo’s adventure and praying there’s a tollbooth waiting in my room when I get home. “That one found a dollar on her way to the playground.”
Mama’s shaking her cup again, hard, like she always does, like she thinks that’s how the luck gets in the dice, but when Grandma says this, she stops, even before she rolls them out. Grandma pauses too and I can see the numbers adding up on that other score sheet, the game that’s played inside of every game, and I can tell Grandma’s winning all of a sudden, whether she rolled any Yahtzees or not, because when she adds, “Told me so herself,” Mama puts down her cup with the dice still inside.
The room is quiet until Mama says, “Well aren’t you having good luck tonight,” but her voice doesn’t have that gambler’s edge I’m used to hearing. There’s a smile in it, and relief, and when she picks up her cup again, she rolls out her dice without another shake, says, “Would you look at that, just what I needed.”
On the way home, Mama asks me if I want to talk about anything, like she’s been asking me every night, and I don’t think I do but then I decide to tell her.
“Viv moved away.”
And Mama does something she’s never done before. She reaches over and takes my hand and she holds it all the way to our driveway. Her hand is bigger than I think and stronger than it looks but her voice is gentle when she says, “It’s hard to let go of a friend, R.D., even when it’s for the best. I bet you’ll see her again.”
scantron
Mama is working some day shifts, and on those mornings not connected to the night before by headache and regret, she leans in my door and says, “Good morning, Sunshine.” I’m surprised to hear that word, and even more to feel it. My room is full of the bright morning light that never made its way under the top bunk of Carol’s bed, the morning light that rises on the wrong side of Grandma’s trailer, and right outside my window I hear Mama as she dumps her coffee grounds and eggshells into the garden, rakes them in, blends them with the dirt and grounds and shells from mornings past.
Mama on days means no more nights away from home, and Mama on days means she can come to all the parent-teacher conferences they want, and do they ever. Bar graphs bleed to the tops of the pages held in Mr. Lombroso’s hands, and our gladiolas grow tall in the small run of garden that is on the sunshine side, the morning side, of our trailer. Mama exclaims at the heights of my scores and her flowers, and asks her most honest question, “What does it mean?”
I sit at my desk and feel my cheeks, stinging and hot, while Mr. Lombroso explains the test scores again. Percentages and peculiarities, these words are about me and they buddy up and crawl across my desk. I touch the tip of my Number Two pencil to their bellies and watch them snap shut like roly-polies do. They are the same gray as roly-polies, like Ticonderoga lead, and I color them in, to hide them, cover them completely so no one will see. I do it without going outside the lines and then I wait for Mama’s next question.
There’s no explaining the test scores and nothing to do about it. As far as Mama’s concerned, my IQ grows right out of the coffee grounds and eggshells tossed into the dirt on the side of our trailer. She’s not sure if it’s due to her tending, her carelessness, or some joke between God and the school board, but she does her part to keep it going by sending me to my teachers, the principal, and his secretary, with gladiolas wrapped in wet paper towel and tinfoil.
broke
I see my brothers’ shadows in the slumped shoulders on barstools, in the muscles of Marc’s back as he rides his bike down his driveway and onto the Calle. And what all these boys have in common is that they’re gone, moving away, walking away, drinking themselves away. They’re not sticking around. The brothers came to visit once, making the trip through the Sierras together to celebrate Bob’s twenty-first birthday. Mama was so excited she wore curlers to bed the night before and traded shifts with Pigeon only so she and Grandma could take them all to the Truck Stop anyway, to show them off, and then she got so drunk they had to carry her home.
They weren’t in much better shape than she was, and as they tucked her in on the couch I listened to their voices from my bed, where I pretended to be asleep, when the hall light came on and one of their heads popped into the doorway, checking on me. He stood a second and then came to the edge of the bed. “Hey, Sister.” I kept my eyes shut but I could tell
it was Ronnie because he was the only one who called me that. It was hard to pretend to be asleep with him so close, so I gave up.
“Hey.”
“Mom’s sleeping on the couch tonight.” I didn’t figure he’d want to know that this was not a news flash, so I didn’t say anything, and he went on, “I just don’t want you to worry if she’s still there in the morning.”
He sounded so tired from driving not just to the Calle that day but all his truck-driving life, so I said, “I heard.”
“All right then,” he said, and Bob’s voice came down the hall, asking if he wanted a beer. “Goodnight, Sister.”
Bob asked if I was awake. “Nope, sleeping like a baby,” Ronnie answered, and in between beers cracking open, quiet at first, I heard tales that grew louder of how big I’d gotten, how small I used to be, about Santa Cruz and me riding in a kid’s seat on the back of Winston’s bike long enough for both of us to tumble to the ground and about the time that Ronnie was swinging at golf balls they’d taken from the De Laveaga Golf Course and he’d hit me smack in the eye with one. “My ass was more bruised than Ror’s eye when Mom got done with me.” I didn’t remember any of this and was starting to feel glad, figuring that older brothers are dangerous creatures to have around and I was lucky to be alive. And that part is true. Turns out I was lucky to have been born at all and brothers aren’t the only ones who can be dangerous. As the talk turned to Starvation Ridge and the cabin where my brothers first lived, I heard secondhand from Winston how Mama broke down one night, when he was just fourteen, and told him about her episode.
“Episode, that’s what she called it,” Winston said, and with that one word his voice turns from the good times of bar talk to a man’s voice, the voice of the biggest brother with a story to tell. I listened as he retold it, listened like Gene and Ronnie and Bob did too, all of us hearing it for the first time, together and alone, and Mama sleeping through it all, her deaf ear turned to the room. The story swirled like smoke through the house and as I fell asleep I could see the pictures it made, what my brothers might’ve become if Winston hadn’t decided to move them. If they’d stayed with Mama, settled on the Calle, they’d be just four more boys who didn’t know what to do with their hands, but they made it out, and now they’ve got families and food on the table and their teeth are still in their mouths.
a gambling establishment
From the inside of the shop-room door, a sign reminds, SAFETY GOGGLES. Woodshop is life’s anteroom for Calle boys, whose next stop will be either the pen or vocational school, the boob tube or Jiffy Lube, where boys like my brothers, but with faces still soft with peach fuzz, will ache their backs for seven bucks an hour and no dental under cars owned by strangers who will sit and read their newspapers in the waiting room, turn their pages, check their watches, and get up to wash the newsprint down the drain. Boys, like Marc, who will never in their lives sit down to table without black under their nails, no matter how red their skin from scrubbing. These boys, who will grow up to work their bones down to nothing for free coffee but no union, are entreated to STAY FOCUSED when working in the shop, and they do. But for all their focus around the lathe and jigsaw, for all their concentration and success with both tongue and groove, they will still go from this class straight back to the working class, will whittle their lives away and wake at night to the memory of the shop teacher’s severed finger, how it dirtied the ice that cradled it as he was rushed to the hospital, and how he held on to the bucket himself with his remaining good hand, his finger pointing a warning from its bed of ice now bled pink as morning sky, PAY ATTENTION.
hozomeen mountain
When Mama was fifteen, she started babysitting after school for a lady named Clovie who lived up on Highway 9. Clovie was twenty-two, already with six kids, but this wasn’t too much for Mama because if she stayed home after school she would have to take care of her sisters anyway and no pay. At Clovie’s, Mama did almost the same work, for money, and most important, got to spend her evenings in a cabin built back from Highway 9 on a westward-facing hilltop of the Santa Cruz Mountains. She would rush up the highway after school, hitchhiking rides from families still sandy from the beach, to get to the cabin in time to see Clovie off to work, to get the kids sitting down to dinner before the sun began to set so she could sit too and watch it sink into the trees that climbed up the hill she never stopped calling Starvation Ridge.
Before long, Clovie’s man Gene started coming home early, before Clovie even, and pretty soon Gene was insisting on giving pretty Mama rides home in his rusting Ford truck, rides that curved real slow down the dark side of the mountain and made Mama forget that she was a broken-toothed girl with baby food on her dress, rides that finally ended up in her getting pregnant with my oldest brother, Winston. Sometime after that, Grandma made their wedding happen. (Shotgun-style, I’d always heard, and cliché as it is, I do enjoy the image of Grandma with a shotgun up against one bony shoulder, promising real business with both barrels, a half-smoked Camel hanging out of one side of her mouth, her voice like gravel in a trailer-park playground. Another Calle stereotype born from the real: sometimes you need the threat of buckshot to get a man’s feet pointed in the right direction long enough for his head to follow.)
Mama moved up to live in the cabin with Gene at the summit of Highway 9 as fast as Clovie and her brood moved down, with all the cursing that accompanies such changes in circumstance. Winston’s little brothers followed hot on his heels, but aside from the moments Gene spent creating his sons, Mama was left with the television for her company and comfort.
By the time Mama was nineteen, she had four children of her own to watch on the mountaintop and it was then that Gene started doing just what he’d done before. His truck crawled up the hill later and later each night, and sometimes when he came home he didn’t smell like the ocean at all. This was when Mama, schooled as she was on the melodrama of soap operas, decided nap time had come to the top of the hill.
My brothers were told to lie down and while they were getting quiet, the windows were latched, and the screen door and front door too. And then the stove. And then the gas, turned as easily as the TV’s knob during a commercial she couldn’t stand. The only thing Mama didn’t shut up tight was the oven door, she left that open while she went to the living room to lay herself down.
Nap time had barely begun when my good brothers’ bad father pulled his pickup into the driveway, on time for once, with a bucket of fresh fish in the back. Gene lugged the fish onto the porch, but when he found that the screen door wouldn’t budge and there was no answer from inside and a strange smell in the air, he pulled the screen door right off the frame, then kicked the door right off its hinges and went right inside. He turned off the oven, opened the windows, and was cleaning the fish before my brothers knew what happened. And that’s the only good thing I can say about Gene Hendrix, Sr. He saved my mama’s life. But he only saved it once.
a sock to grow a block
I’ve just blown out the candles on my tenth birthday cake and I’m cutting the first lucky slice when Grandma says the place looks like a baby shower and we must be expecting twins. The streamers are leftovers from the Truck Stop’s Easter picnic that Mama brought home and strung up, standing on the chair herself and not letting me help. I recognize the baby blue and pink pastels, but when Mama says, “Don’t even joke,” I get the feeling the party’s over.
“Ice cream,” I say, which is what I want to do when I see Mama’s jaw setting like that, scream, and I head for the kitchen. Mint chocolate chip is my favorite, and I’m coming back with a new half gallon of it when I hear Mama’s voice, my name in it, tight, like she’s trying not to cry. I stop, hide myself in the tall grass of the hallway like an Easter egg in our pastel house, and listen.
“She’s going to be fine, Jo,” Grandma says. “She’s going to be a beautiful woman.”
“That’s the problem.”
“You know it’s not. If beauty was the problem, all the Ugly Ste
psisters would grow up to be Old Maids. You know what the problem is.”
I hold my breath because I don’t know about Mama, but I for sure do not know what the problem is, and I’m more than ready to hear it. I can’t believe any of us actually knows what the problem is and that Grandma might actually spill it right now, right where my Easter egg ears can hear.
“The problem is not treating yourself like you deserve and it’s your problem, Jo, not R.D.’s. You take every wrong thing on this earth straight to your heart, like it’s a sentence on you, everything’s your fault.” Grandma laughs a little. “Tried to top yourself off over the first man who stepped out on you. Oh darlin’.”
“I was a kid, Ma,” Mama says.
“Like you’re so grown now, Johanna Ruth,” and now Grandma really does laugh. “I wouldn’t be your age again for anything in the world.”
“I’m just afraid that she’s going to grow up like me no matter how I try to get out of her way.”
“That’s the opposite of what she needs. Why don’t you chew on that one? Be in her way.” My fingers are sticking to the ice-cream box that is glittering with frost from the freezer and I’m about to go in when Grandma adds, “And stop blaming yourself. It wasn’t your fault. Or if it was yours, then it was mine, the whole Calle’s.”
Everything’s quiet and I wonder what kind of quiet it is. If it’s old hatred for the Hardware Man. If it’s the old fight about the day Grandma couldn’t stop having one more pull on that shiny handle on the Strip and finally won a jackpot for Grandpa Gun when he found me waiting at the school gate alone, regardless of whether our story that day, his and mine, was anything like what Mama remembered of her own. If Mama’s ever let that go, I can’t tell.
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