The Life of Glass

by Jillian Cantor

  “For me?”

  “Come on. I’m going to take you girls on a drive.”

  We all hopped into Aunt Julie’s rental car, Ashley up front and me in the back, because that’s the way it always was. She was older, so she got to ride shotgun when there were three of us going anywhere. Aunt Julie rolled the window down and smoked, her hand hanging carelessly out of the car with the cigarette attached. She looked nothing like a professor; my image of her had always been all wrong, and Ryan’s nickname didn’t suit her at all.

  Neither Ashley nor I asked where we were going, which was kind of strange, but since that night at the restaurant we both decided that we liked our aunt, that she was someone we could trust.

  We drove for about ten minutes, then turned down a residential street of older, almost historic-looking houses. The houses had trees so large in the front yards that they created a pool of shade in the sunny street, and the houses had almost a more East Coast Victorian look to them than the ones in our neighborhood.

  Aunt Julie pulled up in front of a house and stopped. “Okay,” she said. “We’re here.”

  “Where?” Ashley asked, and I nodded, though neither one of them was looking at me.

  “You’ve never been here before, girls?” We shook our heads. “This is where your mother and I grew up.”

  The house looked pleasant enough, though small and a bit overgrown with shrubs in the front. I tried to imagine my mother and Aunt Julie as kids, running around out front here, but the image didn’t come easily.

  There was something about seeing a place out of my mother’s past that astounded me, that made me feel sad for her and annoyed with her all at once. Because I wished she’d shown us herself, before. “I lived here until I went to college,” Aunt Julie said. “And the first year when I was away, my mother died, and I never came back.” She paused, as if remembering something about the house that struck her as sort of odd. “Your mother was pregnant with you, Ashley, and at the end our mother was very sick. That’s why I went so far away to go to college. To get away from her. I’m not good at taking care of people.” She paused. “But your mother, she’d come over here three, four times a day with groceries and stories and cleaning supplies.” She let her voice trail off, as if the memory were so clear to her she could almost taste it in a way.

  “Why are you telling us all this?” Ashley finally said.

  “Because,” she said. “It’s good to know what kind of person your mother is.”

  It did not seem right that you could be both a beautiful person and a good person. In my head, they’d always been separate. My mother was clearly beautiful, as was Ashley. But my dad and me, we were the good ones.

  I tried to picture my mother, pregnant and swollen and waddling around in the fiery desert summer with bags of groceries for her sick mother. It was a strange image, because I’d never really thought about her that way before, which seemed sort of dumb because she never complained about taking care of my father or helping Grandma Harry.

  I went into Ashley’s room after Aunt Julie and my mother had both gone to bed. She was lying on her bed, reading a book on beauty pageants my mother had bought her. I plopped down on the bed next to her. Neither of us said anything for a few minutes, and then Ashley finally said, “We could learn to ride horses.”

  I made a face, but deep down I knew she was right. “I will if you will,” I finally said.

  “We just won’t tell anyone at school.”

  I nodded, wondering if Mr. September would care if my sister hung out with a cowboy and started smelling like horse poop. “And we’ll just go one time. Just one lesson.”

  “One lesson,” she repeated. “That’s all.”

  Chapter 13

  The day school started up again, Aunt Julie, true to her word, stuffed her three suitcases into her rental car and drove herself to the airport.

  “Oh I wish you would stay longer, Jules.” My mother held on to her tightly, and they rocked each other back and forth, in the driveway, almost in a dance. “You’ll come back again, won’t you?”

  “Of course,” she said, but it was hard to tell if she really would or not.

  I, for one, was going to miss her, and I guessed Ashley might too. It was nice to have her around the house and to have her to talk to. She wrote her phone number down on a scrap of paper and handed it to me before she left. “If you ever want to talk,” she said, “I’m only a phone call away.” She also promised to email us, but I didn’t think it would be the same.

  So I was feeling a little sad as I rode my bike to school, alone. Ryan wasn’t waiting for me, and I figured he’d gone ahead and met Courtney, and of course Ashley had to pick up Mr. September.

  I got to school a little early, and as I was chaining up my bike, I heard someone calling my name. I didn’t recognize the voice at first, so I was surprised when I looked up and saw Max Healy standing right there, right in front of me. “Hey,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant, but my heart was pounding hard in my chest.

  “How was your break?”

  “It was okay.” I shrugged, trying to act cool, and I willed myself to think of something funny or smart to say. But nothing came to me. Finally, I said, “How was your break?”

  “Not bad.” He smiled. “Hey, a bunch of us are going to Jackson’s after school, if you want to come.” Jackson’s was this restaurant right down the road from Desert Crest High where they served pizza and ice cream and a lot of the popular kids went to hang out. I’d only been there one time, when I was much younger, with my parents, after Ashley was in a play and we’d gone over afterward to get some ice cream.

  “Seriously?” I said, which was an incredibly stupid thing to say, but it was what popped out. I was immediately cynical. Why would Max be inviting me?

  He smiled and started walking up the steps to the school, and after the first few his walk turned into a run. When he got to the top he turned back and waved.

  I was in such a daze that I didn’t notice that Ryan and Courtney had arrived until they were standing right in front of me. “Were you talking to Max?” Courtney asked, her voice thick with disbelief.

  “Yeah.” I nodded.

  “You’re friends with him now?” Ryan said.

  “Well, why not?” I snapped. “Why do you care?”

  “I don’t know,” Ryan said. “Guys like him are jerks.”

  “Guys like him? What does that mean, anyway?” I picked up my school bag and started up the steps, breaking into a run halfway up, just the way Max had.

  All day I debated whether or not I was really going to go to Jackson’s after school. Maybe Max had been kidding. Maybe it was all some big practical joke, and when I showed up, everyone would start laughing and pointing and saying, Oh my God, look, it’s the imp. Or maybe not. Maybe he actually liked me.

  I thought about it all through biology, as we picked our partners for the pig and I got stuck with Jeffrey. “Don’t worry, Meliss,” Courtney said as she clung to Ryan’s arm. “Nothing’s going to change. We’ll all still work at the same lab table.” Jeffrey rolled his eyes at me, but I pretended not to notice.

  I even thought about it in English, tuning out Mrs. Connor as she talked about how we would spend the second half of the year entirely on poetry. Ugh.

  When the bell rang, I jumped out of my seat, even though Mrs. Connor was in the middle of a sentence and most of the other people in the class stayed seated and let her finish.

  As I walked outside, I saw Ashley and the Nose standing on the front steps, talking to Austin and some of his friends. Ashley looked right at me as I walked by, then quickly looked away. “Ashley,” I whispered, trying to get her to look at me with some recognition. “Ashley.” Nothing. “Ashley McAllister.” I said it loud enough so the group of them stopped talking. They turned and looked at me; the Nose giggled.

  Ashley pushed her way through the bunch of them. “What?” she said through gritted teeth.

  I pulled her away from her crowd a little
bit so they weren’t all listening to me. “Max invited me to come to Jackson’s after school. Should I go? I don’t know what to do.” I was looking for some sisterly advice, though why I expected her to give me some, I couldn’t exactly say.

  “Max. Max Healy?” The surprise in her voice was enough to make me smile. I nodded. Then she recovered. “Well, he was probably just trying to be nice. He probably felt bad for you or something. You totally look like a homeless girl in that outfit.” She was referring to the old worn-in jeans and the college sweatshirt that used to belong to my dad. “You know he likes Lexie, and she likes him.”

  No, I didn’t know that Lexie, “the Nose,” had a thing for Max. But then, who didn’t? And I certainly hadn’t known that he liked her. “So?” I finally said.

  “So do whatever you want,” she said. “But just don’t get all crazy in love with him or anything.”

  Austin walked over and put a hand on Ashley’s shoulder. “You ready?” He kissed the back of her neck in a way that made her giggle and gave me the creeps. And I decided that I wasn’t going to go. But then I turned toward the bike rack and saw Ryan and Courtney, leaning against the wall, their lips locked in a passionate kiss. I was going.

  I decided to walk so I wouldn’t have to extricate my bike from the lovebirds, and besides, Jackson’s wasn’t far. Other people walked there in groups, with friends and boyfriends, but I went alone, just me, and I hoped Max would even remember that he’d invited me.

  The front wall of Jackson’s was a huge glass window, and I stood there on the outside, looking through it, watching. Max was sitting at a table with a bunch of other guys I’d seen around school but didn’t really know that well. They were laughing, having a good time.

  I heard Ashley’s giggle, and I looked up and saw her and Austin and the Nose run through the door. “Hey, Max,” I heard the Nose say.

  I didn’t wait around to see what happened next. I walked back toward school to get my bike and ride home.

  My Parents: Part II

  After Tom had his appendix out, he didn’t see Cynthia again for six months. In fact, he probably would’ve never seen her again. He’d lost the napkin with her number on it that Harriet had given him, and then he’d gone back to school, started dating a sorority girl (maybe Sally Bedford?) and forgotten all about her.

  Harriet did not forget. She kept the idea of Cynthia tucked quietly in the back of her head. One day, when Harriet was in town visiting her son, she happened to pick up a copy of the local newspaper at breakfast, and there, as if in answer to her prayers, was a picture of Cynthia Howard sitting on top of a horse wearing a tiara. “Oh my good Lord,” Harriet muttered to herself. “Would you look at that?”

  Harriet took it as a sign. She took out the phone book, called all fourteen local listings for “Howard” until Cynthia herself answered the phone, on Harriet’s very last try. After reintroducing herself, Harriet said, “Well, congratulations on your crown, dear.”

  “Oh.” Cynthia was embarrassed. She knew it was a start but not the big time. Not Miss Arizona or Miss America.

  “Let me buy you lunch,” Harriet told her. “You were so kind to me at the hospital.”

  “Oh no. You don’t have to,” Cynthia said. “It’s really not necessary.”

  “Please,” Harriet said. “I want to.”

  Cynthia agreed.

  The next day, she went to the restaurant. She looked around the room for Harriet’s poofy blond curls, and as she was looking she caught Tom’s eye. He was sitting at a table by the window, all alone.

  She waved and walked toward him. “Hi there,” he said.

  “I was supposed to be meeting your mother.”

  He laughed. “So was I.”

  Harriet was tucked away in her little white car, already halfway back to Scottsdale.

  Chapter 14

  Now that Aunt Julie was gone and Ryan and Courtney were back to ignoring me again, I started to think about how else I was going to search for Sally. Ryan hadn’t mentioned anything to me about it since the day we’d gone on our long bike ride, and it seemed like his offer to help hadn’t been a real offer at all.

  After school I’d lie on my bed and read through my father’s journal, looking for anything, for a hint of the person he might’ve or could’ve been. I learned that clinophobia is the fear of going to bed, something I certainly didn’t have as I seemed to be spending an extraordinary amount of time in mine lately. And I also learned that your ribs move five million times a year, every time you breathe in and out. This one kind of creeped me out, and I became superaware of my own breathing, so much that I started to feel this pain, this tightness pulling on my chest every time I inhaled and exhaled. I wondered if that’s what it felt like to Ryan every time he had an asthma attack.

  But there was nothing else I could find in his journal, save that one little scrap of paper with Sally Bedford’s name on it. So I figured that meant that a) she wasn’t really that important at all, despite what Grandma Harry said, or b) whatever it was about her that made her so important must’ve happened after my dad got sick and he pretty much stopped recording things in the journal.

  I had no idea if she lived close still or if she’d moved, or if she was even still alive. It happened, all the time, every day. People got sick. People died. People crashed their cars and shattered themselves and broke. People did not have the life of glass.

  But then, one afternoon, I flipped through my own journal, through my parents’ love story, and the part about my grandma Harry finding my mother by looking in the phone book caught my eye. It occurred to me that maybe I could just look Sally up that way, in the online white pages. As easy as that. Why hadn’t I thought about it before?

  I went to my computer and I felt my heart pounding furiously as I typed her name in. Three seconds later, one entry came up, only one Sally Bedford in our town. But there was no information with it. It simply said unlisted, a word that brought tears to my eyes.

  Just before Valentine’s Day, Ashley and I had our first horse-riding lesson with Kevin. My mother had been so excited when Ashley told her we wanted to do it that she’d jumped up and down and clapped her hands together. “We’re only doing one lesson,” I said.

  “Oh, girls, you don’t know how important it is for me that you get to know Kevin.”

  Ashley shot me a look. We hadn’t realized it was that important to her. When she put it like that, it sounded like she was ready to marry the guy or something. So it was an understatement to say I was not excited on the drive over to his ranch.

  Ashley didn’t seem thrilled about it either. She wasn’t being mean to me, but she wasn’t saying much of anything. She didn’t even complain about missing out on a Saturday afternoon with Mr. September. When we were almost there, she started to say something. Then changed her mind and stopped.

  “What?” I said, glad that she was going to start a conversation because the silence hurt my head, made me feel heavy and dull and guilty and annoyed all at once.

  “You know that Dad hated horses.”

  I shook my head. No. I hadn’t known that. And it seemed so unfair that Ashley knew so much more about our father than I did, that just those two extra years made her old enough to remember little important things that I would never be able to get back now.

  “Yeah, one time he took me to the rodeo parade.”

  “Where was I?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I think you were sick or something and Mom stayed home with you.” I had absolutely no recollection of any of this, but I knew for sure I’d never been to the rodeo parade. My dad had always made fun of the fact that we lived in a city that gave us two days off school for Rodeo in February and had some giant parade to celebrate it. “We were just standing there watching the parade, and there were all these floats and people on horses wearing cowboy hats. And then this little kid’s horse got spooked, and the horse shot up in the air and threw him. It was so freaky. I mean this kid was just flying through the ai
r until he hit the pavement.”

  I shuddered. “What happened to him?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t remember. I just remember Dad cursing and talking about how horses are such dangerous animals.”

  “Well, now I really want to go get on a horse.” I didn’t think Ashley had been trying to scare me half to death, but she’d gone and done it anyway. I hadn’t thought about the fact that these lessons with Kevin were going to be dangerous—annoying, yes, but I hadn’t been thinking that the horse could throw me or trample me or kill me.

  “I’m sure Kevin knows what he’s doing,” she said, but she didn’t sound entirely convinced herself.

  Kevin’s ranch was large and sprawling, with dusty fenced-in enclosures and an L-shaped brick house that sat at the end of a long driveway. DUSTY MEADOWS, the sign by the driveway read. “Lame.” Ashley shook her head when she read it. For once, we were both in agreement.

  I wondered—if my mother and Kevin ever did get married—if we would have to move here. Though it was only fifteen minutes away from our neighborhood, it felt like it was in nowheresville, the middle of the desert, all dirt and cactus and sagebrush, and horses that roamed behind a wooden fence looking sort of annoyed.

  I thought about the fact that Aunt Julie had left this city for college and never returned, and I knew immediately that if this was the place I had to come home to, I would not be coming back either. This would never be my home.

  Kevin was waiting for us, standing on his front porch in some weird cowboy-ish attire, complete with black leather boots and a black cowboy hat. “God,” Ashley muttered. “He looks like a bad country singer or something.”

  She was right, he did. With the whole cowboy getup he didn’t even look handsome or young or tan, not even like someone who could be worthy of our mother.

  Ashley stopped the car, and he waved and walked toward us, but neither of us made the first move to get out. “It’s just one lesson,” Ashley finally said, and unhooked her seat belt.