Motorcycles, Sushi & One Strange Book

by Nancy N. Rue

  I stood up and shook my feet so the pant legs of my shorts would straighten out. “Sorry,” I said. “I think you have the wrong number.”

  “You’re not Jessica–Jessie Hatcher? Brooke Hatcher’s daughter?”

  “Yeah,” I said–and only then remembered that you’re not supposed to give out personal information to strangers over the phone. Or was that the Internet?

  “Then I have the right number,” he said.

  It occurred to me that he sounded kind of nervous. Weren’t psychos usually pretty jittery? In movies they always showed them sweating and pacing when they were holding people hostage in a bank vault.

  “You didn’t get a letter from me, Jessie?” he said.

  “You sent me a letter?” Did that mean he had my address too? Now I was starting to sweat and pace.

  “A couple of weeks ago. From St. Augustine.”

  “Where’s St. Augustine?” I said.

  “St. Augustine, Florida.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That St. Augustine.”

  I could feel the perspiration running down between my shoulder blades, but I couldn’t seem to get it together to go back into the air-conditioned house. I just stood there in the middle of the frying porch and saw the letter Mom had confiscated from my room wiggling in my memory the way the hot pavement ahead does when you’re going down the road.

  “Maybe we should start over,” the man who claimed to be my father said. “If you didn’t get the letter, I could see how this would catch you off guard.”

  “Ya think?” I said. “I got a letter but I didn’t open it.”

  “That would make sense then.”

  Uh, no, none of this made sense.

  “I’m Lou Kennesaw. Apparently your mom has never talked to you about me.”

  I added the psycho-pacing to the psycho-sweating. “No,” I said. “I mean, yes, she told me about Lou Kennesaw, but you died before you could marry her. You’re dead.”

  There was a silence so long I thought he’d hung up–which was fine with me because I was ready to unzip my skin and jump out of it. I even had my finger on the End button when he said– in a voice like that spider web I was toeing earlier as if I didn’t have a problem in the world–“Jessie, I’m so sorry you were told that, but I am very much alive and I thought it was time I met you. If I’d known you thought I was dead, I never would have called you like this.”

  “Okay, so let’s pretend you never did,” I said.

  I didn’t mean to say it, but like most things I haven’t meant to say in my life, it just came out. I called that a Blurt.

  “I don’t think we can do that,” he said.

  “Maybe you can’t, but me, I’m great at pretending. Lou who? A wrong number, you say?”

  “I know this is a lot to take in, so I’m going to let you soak it up a little–but I would like to see you.”

  He was actually sounding fatherly. Not that I’d had much experience with having a father. Okay, I’d had exactly none. Except my grandfather, who I hadn’t seen much since he married that woman Mom didn’t like, which was before I even started wearing a bra so he didn’t count. But I’d heard Chelsea’s dad say stuff like, “I would like for you to clean your room,” in a way that sounded like she’d better do it or she was going to be placed under house arrest. This Lou person had that sound down. I always wondered why Chelsea went right up and cleaned her room instead of telling the man how stupid it was to tidy up a space you were only going to trash again an hour later. Until now.

  But this dude was not my parent. I only had one parent, and even she–

  Might come in handy at that moment.

  “I’d have to ask my mom,” I said.

  “Well, of course. I didn’t mean I was going to come by in the next ten minutes.”

  “Don’t come by,” I said. “Call. No, I’ll call you. After I ask her. Which could be tomorrow, maybe Monday, depending on–”

  I chomped down on my lip. When it came to certain subjects I did have some control over my mouth. But it never lasted long, and once again I had my finger on the button that could end this call so I could go back to arguing with Chelsea about Marcus and wondering how I was going to wash clothes without laundry detergent.

  “I tell you what let’s do,” the Lou-person said. “You talk to your mom, and I’ll call you later tonight. If you want me to talk to her, we can do that too.”

  “No,” I said. “I’ll do it. You can’t do it.”

  “I’ll call tonight,” he said. And before I could beat him to it, he hung up. That ticked me off more than anything. Well, almost anything.

  I went inside and pitched the phone onto a pile of laundry and charged down the hall to the guest room. I was about to break the one and only rule I had never broken before. I was going to wake up my mother.

  CHAPTER TWO

  If I had known that all it took to shake my mother out of one of her In-Bed Phases was to tell her my presumed-dead father called, I might have used that one a long time ago. If I could even have thought up such a weird story. I’d come up with some pretty big ones in my time, but even I couldn’t have manufactured that one.

  Mom sat up on the guest room bed, blinking at me with her eyes that lost all color when she was in a black hole. Even though she’d asked me to repeat myself four times, and I’d told her the very same thing four times, she was still shaking her head and staring like I was speaking Latin. Her face was going paler, which I hadn’t even thought was possible. Mine, on the other hand, was, I knew, about the shade of a plum.

  “So could it be for real?” I said–okay, yelled. “This guy might be my dead father?”

  “What did he say?”

  “Mom! I already told you what he said!”

  She put both hands up and closed her eyes and licked her lips, while I thrashed around the room, picking up throw pillows and spiking them to the floor.

  “Could you get me some water?” she said.

  “What? Mom–”

  “Jessie, just get me a bottle of water and let me get my head wrapped around this–”

  “Did you read the letter?”

  “What letter?”

  “The one that you took from my room?”

  She opened her eyes and gave me the look that apparently matched wrapping your head around something. It was a concept I never understood and I sure wasn’t getting it now.

  “That was from him?” she said.

  “I don’t know!”

  “Jessie–just–sit down.”

  I did, and then got right back up and picked up the pillows I’d thrown so I could throw them again.

  “You said he was dead,” I said. “Was that a lie?”

  Her face crumpled, which meant she was about to cry. Once that started, there would be no getting anything out of her.

  “So was it?” I said.

  “I did what I thought was right,” she said. Every word dragged itself out like it didn’t want to be there. “If he wasn’t going to be part of your life, then it seemed like it was better for you not to know he even existed.”

  “He didn’t want to be part of my life?” I said. “He didn’t know me!”

  “Please, Jessie, I just need some water, and I’ll tell you everything. ” Her voice broke off, and here came the sobs.

  I all but put my fingers in my ears. “I don’t want to know everything,” I said. I stood at the end of the bed, where I had once again run out of pillows. “I just want to know if I have to see him.”

  Mom fell back onto her own mound of pillows and covered her face with her hands. The crying was raspy, but it didn’t make any tears. I always figured she’d cried so much she’d used up her life’s supply.

  “I guess I messed this up just like I’ve messed up everything else,” she said. “I don’t know what to do, Jessie. I guess you ought to meet him.”

  “I don’t want to meet him! What am I supposed to say to him?”

  “I’ll talk to him,” she said. “Just let me ge
t a handle on this. I need a few minutes.”

  She was already headed into that curled-up thing, like Chelsea’s Chihuahua whenever anybody but Chelsea looked at him.

  “Okay, I’m giving the phone to you when he calls,” I said.

  “When’s he going to call?” she said.

  “Tonight–tomorrow–I forget what he said.”

  I was so flipped out, I was actually about to forget my own name. What was my name, anyway? Was it still Hatcher–or was it now Ken-Doll or whatever it was he said his last name was? The hamster wheel in my head was turning faster than ever. And my mother was shivering under the covers and waving for me to close the door behind me.

  Out in the hall I could hear water running in a way it shouldn’t have been running, which probably meant the washing machine was overflowing or something. I didn’t care. For once I could only think of one thing: I was going to meet my father.

  Only not like Chelsea’s dad was her father and Marcus’s was his. This man had only given me his genes. He didn’t make me clean my room or take me on vacations or tell me I couldn’t bring the Chihuahua to the dinner table.

  I froze with my hand on my bedroom doorknob. Did he think he was going to do that now? Come in and start telling me what to do?

  Nah. I pushed into my room and flopped on the bed and did a shoulder stand so my toes touched the tassel that hung from the chain on my ceiling fan. Mom just said I had to meet him. He wasn’t moving in. Besides, after ten minutes with me he’d probably deny he ever even knew my mother, much less–well, you know.

  I dropped my feet to the mattress. Yeah, ten minutes was usually about all it took for adults to decide there was something “off” about me. They either fidgeted in their seats like I was making them nervous, or they nodded like they had made the same diagnosis made by teachers and counselors and that doctor my mother took me to when I was in seventh grade. I could read, “This is a classic case of ADHD” in their eyes. Which was about the only thing I could read–though most people didn’t pick up on that even when I was in their class for a whole semester. I was pretty good at covering that part up.

  I rolled over onto my stomach and crawled to the window seat at the head of my bed and looked out between the fancy black “security bars.” My mother had called them that when she had them installed all over the house. I knew it was basically a way to make sure I didn’t sneak out, which I’d never done after that one time in seventh grade. That had led to my visit to the doctor, who had said I had “poor impulse control associated with–” well, I forgot the rest. I watched a squirrel skitter up the magnolia tree in the side yard and totally identified with him. I always figured I’d have been a very successful squirrel. I wondered if my father liked small rodents.

  Of course, it didn’t matter whether he liked me or not. He wasn’t going to be around that long. But I didn’t want him to know I had a “disorder.” If we just, like, sat in the living room and had a Coke, I could probably fool him like I did my friends and the adults who only saw me for a few minutes at a time. The UPS guy, for example, seemed to think I was pretty cool. Maybe this Lou person would just stay long enough to feel like he’d done some kind of duty by me and leave, and we could go back to normal.

  Normal.

  I squirmed off the seat and went to see how Lucy and Ethel were doing.

  “Let me see what you decided to wear,” my mother said.

  I jumped halfway out of my skin. I hadn’t even noticed that she’d moved from the guest room back into her own bed when I came in to forage for a pair of shoes from her closet. She’d gotten so thin she barely made a bump under the covers.

  “Turn on the light,” she said.

  Actually, I could have opened the shades and it would have lit up the whole room, but she probably didn’t know that Saturday night had turned into Sunday morning. Ever since Lou, father ghost from the past, had called the night before and she’d talked to him for thirty minutes with me stationed outside the guest room with my ear pressed to the door, she’d gone even further into her cave. When I’d asked her what he said, she mumbled something about him coming for me at noon to take me to lunch.

  So while she was sleeping, I was tearing my closet apart trying to put together an outfit that didn’t scream “I’m hyperactive!” but that didn’t look too goody-goody like I was trying to impress him, or that wasn’t too skimpy so he’d think he had to call social services. It took most of the night to make a decision, partly because I had a hard time making choices about anything and partly because I needed something to do since I couldn’t sleep anyway. I could never fall asleep until like midnight on an average night as it was–and that was definitely not an average night.

  “That’s cute,” Mom said about my lime green miniskirt and silver tank and arm full of bracelets. “Wear the silver sandals with the kitten heels. The Summer Brooke Line. SB-100.”

  “Okay,” I said, and proceeded to open every box until I found the ones she was talking about. They were part of the line of shoes she’d designed before she had the In-Bed Phase before this one. They’d sold well enough to keep her accountant from coming over to say she had to get back to work.

  I slipped the shoes on and modeled them for Mom as she squinted in the light from the lamp.

  “You need a necklace,” she said, and then shook her head. “No, you’ll just fiddle with it and drive the man nuts. I don’t think the bracelets are a good idea either, come to think of it.”

  I closed the closet and headed for the door.

  “Jessie, wait,” she said.

  I decided to give her fifteen seconds. I wasn’t done being mad at her over this whole thing–and if she was going to add her digs about my “condition” on top of it, I was so out of there.

  “He’s a nice man. You don’t need to be afraid of him or anything.”

  “Nice?” I said. “As in leave-the-girlfriend-who’shaving-your-baby kind of nice?”

  “Jessie, that is so immature–”

  Of course it was. I had the emotional skills of an eight-year-old. According to her.

  “Look, I don’t have the energy to argue with you about this,” she said.

  Good. That meant she wouldn’t have the energy to yell at me when I slammed the door and stomped off down the hall, which I did, kitten heels and all. The grandfather clock in the foyer donged eleven times while I stood there counting.

  I grabbed the phone and called Chelsea as I looked for my purse. By the time I told her where to meet me I still couldn’t find it, so I just took off out the front door without it and started down the sidewalk toward Cahaba Road. Two steps out I realized I’d forgotten my sunglasses, but I wasn’t going back to look for them. I probably wouldn’t be able to find them anyway, so I just squinted into the glare.

  I was mad enough to make it almost to Mountain Brook Village before I noticed that my feet were killing me. I took off my mother’s designer shoes and held one in each hand while I marched the rest of the way to the Mountain Brook Creamery barefoot. The Fake Father could come to my house and have it out with the Messed-Up Mother while I was getting what I needed, which was ice cream and Chelsea.

  She was already there when I arrived, standing at the counter with Donovan, who was looking down at her like, “Go ahead, try to make me smile.” I hoped he wouldn’t. He really did have funky teeth. Besides, what was he doing there? I’d made it clear on the phone that I had to talk to Chelsea in private.

  Bent on getting rid of him, I started toward her. Somebody behind me said, “Fine. Don’t say hi.”

  I whirled around into a T-shirt with a giant crab on it.

  “Marcus!” I squealed, like a pig caught in a doggy door.

  He picked me up, because he was six-foot-two and weighed, like, a lot. He swung me around while I held onto his neck, still clutching the silver sandals. After a mom holding two doublescoop cones for her kids glared at us, he dropped me into a chair at a table by the window.

  “I am SO glad you’re back,”
I said. “I thought I was gonna bore myself to death.”

  He smiled his big, sloppy smile and didn’t say anything because usually I didn’t give him a chance to anyway, which always seemed to be fine with him, because when most girls talked to him they expected him to actually contribute something to the conversation, and he wasn’t that good at it. Not until you got to know him. Which I did. Which gave me an idea.

  “I want to hear all about your trip,” I said.

  “It was good.” His wide-as-a-plate face was pink under the dark stubble that dotted it like flecks of pepper, and his dark eyes that matched his hair were dancing all over my face. Unlike my mother, he did not seem to think I had the emotional maturity of an eight-year-old.

  “I want to hear more than that,” I said. “So can we go four-wheeling or something? You know–now?”

  “No way, Jessie.” Chelsea scraped another metal chair up to the table and stuck a scoop of mint chocolate chip on a sugar cone into my hand.

  Donovan looked like he was about to slip into a coma as he leaned on the windowsill and dug into a sundae.

  “You guys could come too,” I said.

  “Not before you tell me what’s going on.” Chelsea looked at Marcus. “She’s avoiding something. You know she is.”

  Marcus shrugged. Chelsea glowered at him. She had her hair pulled up in a ponytail, which meant we were going to cut right to the chase. Otherwise, she would have it down where she could toss it at Donovan. Having ultrashort hair, I never mastered that technique.

  “Come on, Jess, dish,” she said.

  “I had a fight with my mother, and I need to get out of the house,” I said.

  Chelsea shook the ponytail. “If you had a fight with your mother you wouldn’t be out of the house. She’d have you on lockdown so fast.”

  That was true. Mom and I usually only fought when she was in a No-Bed Phase, and she always won.

  “It’s just weird right now,” I said. “I need to go get wild– you know, get it out of my system.”

  “You never get wild out of your system. What’s up with this–you’ve got something weird going on and you can’t even tell your best friends?”