by Nancy N. Rue
I darted my gaze to Donovan, who was looking at his sundae like it was disgusting even though he was practically inhaling it. What did she see in him anyway? The point was, he wasn’t my friend.
Chelsea looked up at him too, and I could see a wrestling match start in her brain. Make Donovan go away, or not hear about my weirdness. I was betting she’d give up the weirdness for now.
“Okay,” she said, “be that way–but I will get it out of you.” She stood up and handed her cone to Donovan, who looked like she’d asked him to hold her Chihuahua. Then she leaned over and whispered in Marcus’s ear while his face turned scarlet. It was like she was filling him up with red dye number 3.
“I’m calling you later,” she said to me. She let her ponytail loose and did a toss toward the door. Donovan followed her without a glance at Marcus and me.
“I’m supposed to make you tell me,” Marcus said.
I laughed, spewing mint chocolate chip across the front of his shirt and blocking out an entire crab claw.
“She thinks you can make me do something?” I said, tossing him a wad of napkins. “Has she actually met me?”
Marcus turned redder and looked at my ice-cream cone, which I handed him because I’d lost my appetite for mint chocolate chip. If I did tell anybody the embarrassing details of my secret life it would have been Marcus. He’d never breathe a word of it to anyone, and he’d never use it on me later during a fight because we never fought. I actually wanted to tell him about this father thing right that very minute–except that there was a problem.
I watched him lick at the scoop of green ice cream and felt my own face turn red. Way back in fourth grade when I was going through a Phase of my own–a Bald-Face Lying Phase– I’d told Marcus and Chelsea and whoever else would listen this long tale about how my father died. I made up a story of him being a Navy SEAL and being blown up while he was rescuing an African princess and my mother having the only piece of his body that they found–and that it was preserved in a safety-deposit box at the bank. It was my finest hour as a Big Fat Liar.
Maybe nobody would remember it now. Oh, no, wait–back in May in history class the subject of Navy SEALs came up, and Chelsea raised her hand and said my father was one, and the whole class turned around and gaped at me. Except Marcus, who had smiled like I’d just given him one more reason to adore me.
“Do you trust me?” I said.
Marcus stopped licking and blinked at me. “Yeah. What’s not to trust?”
You don’t even know, I wanted to say to him. But instead I said, “I have to stay away from my house all day today, and I can’t tell you why, but I need you to help me.”
“Will I end up in jail if I do?” he said. “I can’t go to jail– my dad’ll kill me.”
“No! It’s not like I robbed a bank or something–I just need to get away for today.”
“What if your mom sends the police looking for you?”
“You watch too many cop shows, Marcus.” I sighed. “Okay, I’ll leave my mom a note. What time is it?”
He glanced at his watch. “Eleven thirty.”
The hamster wheel kicked into gear, but it didn’t take me anywhere. Typically, the more stressed-out I got, the harder it was to think.
“Let’s just go to my house,” I said. “I’ll figure it out on the way.”
Which I didn’t. Marcus did. He pulled the Jeep–that’s what he drove, a red Jeep–onto the street that ran along the side of our house, which was on a corner. It gave me a straight shot to the back door.
“You’re a genius,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
It wasn’t until I slipped out of the Jeep that I realized I’d left the silver sandals at the Creamery. We could stop and get them after I grabbed a change of clothes from my room, which was the real reason I was here. It was pointless for me to even try to write a note to my mom–she probably wouldn’t even get out of bed when Lee or Louey or whatever his name was rang the doorbell. I would be back before she even knew I went four-wheeling with Marcus instead of connecting with the father-who-wasn’t-really-a-father.
None of that ever happened. When I rushed into the kitchen, a redheaded guy stood up from the table and said, “You must be Jessie.”
I just stared at him like I was looking into a mirror.
CHAPTER THREE
He wasn’t totally a mirror image of me, but if I had been a boy I would have looked like his identical twin.
He had the Raggedy Ann–well, Andy–red hair, cut short, and my same blue eyes that looked even closer together than they were because of the long-as-mine nose. He wasn’t very tall–his skin was pale for somebody who lived in Florida–and in addition to looking like me, he looked absolutely nothing like a Navy SEAL. Any hope of telling my friends the government had mistaken that small body part in the safety-deposit box for his when it belonged to someone else faded almost before I could think it up.
About fifteen hundred questions crowded onto the hamster wheel, including, Why are you early? and Where did you get that shirt? and Why didn’t you marry my mother? and How did you get in here?
I didn’t actually have to ask that last one because I finally noticed that my mother was sitting at the kitchen table, bare feet propped up on the chair, knees under her chin, hair half in and half out of the bun thing. She’d managed to pull on a Brooke Line Shoes sweatshirt over her pajamas, but other than that she was exactly like she was in bed less than an hour before.
Well, not exactly.
“Jessie, this is Lou,” she said.
Her voice was high and tight, as if she was forcing the last of it out of a toothpaste tube. She never got mad when she was in an In-Bed Phase, but she was obviously making an exception for Lou.
“It’s nice to meet you, Jessie,” he said.
His voice was so low I barely heard it. And when I looked at him, I could see him swallowing like he was trying to down a Ping-Pong ball. Something had gone on between the two of them before I walked in the door. Perfect.
“I’m sorry–I interrupted you guys,” I said. “I’ll just go–”
“Get some shoes on,” my mother finished for me. “Lou is taking you to The Cheesecake Factory.”
Yeah, if she didn’t remember that I’d gone out wearing her designer shoes and came back without them, she was definitely still thinking about whatever it was they had been “discussing.”
“You hungry?” Lou said to me as if we went out and grabbed a bite to eat together on a regular basis.
“I’ll go get shoes,” I said, and fled to my room where I gritted my teeth at those stupid security bars. If it weren’t for them, I’d be out my window and–
I froze, head halfway into my closet. Marcus. He was probably still sitting out there waiting for me.
I dove for the window seat, just as my door opened and my mother slipped in and dangled inside the doorway like a skeleton.
“Just grab some flip-flops,” she said. “He’s ready to go.”
“Who?” I said.
“Jessie, don’t play that game with me.”
Mom gave a weary sigh. I could never figure out how she could still seem so exhausted when she’d been sleeping 24/7 for days. Even now, after a week in bed, it looked like she had that black stuff football players put on under her eyes.
“Just go and get it over with,” she said. “I owe him that much.”
“I don’t owe him anything!” I said.
She just shook her head. She wanted him out of there, and I had to be the one to take him. Period.
And Lou obviously wanted to get out of there as much as she wanted him to go. He was standing at the front door jangling his car keys when my mother escorted me to the living room, me wearing neon orange flip-flops she wouldn’t have let me be caught dead in on a normal day. This day didn’t qualify. I’d already left behind my shoes, my best guy friend, and my usual ability to weasel out of a situation. Even thinking, “What would Lucy and Ethel do?” didn’t help.
“
What’s good here?” Lou said to me from behind the menu.
I couldn’t remember. I read the paragraph-long descriptions of every dish, but I couldn’t remember any of the words the minute I moved on to the next one. The more stressed I was, the less success I had with reading–which was why I was lousy at taking tests, writing book reports, and today, ordering from a menu with my I-thought-you-were-dead father sitting across the table from me.
“I’ll have the special,” I told the server, although I couldn’t remember what he’d told us it was.
“I’ll have the same,” Lou said. He smiled at me when the waiter was gone. “So you like eggs Benedict too.”
I had no idea what that was, but I just nodded and groped for a way to get through this. How did I get through anything difficult–trips to the discipline office, after-school detention, teacher-mandated tutoring sessions with geeky seniors? Of course…
I wrinkled my nose at Lou and laughed. “I don’t even know what eggs Benedict is,” I said. “I just got it because it sounded funky.”
He sat back, one hand flat on the table, and gazed at me. “So where do we start, Jessie?” he said.
“I’ll start,” I said, and picked up a spoon to give myself something to fiddle with while I talked. “I’m fifteen. I won’t be sixteen for ten months, which means I’ll be like the last one of my friends to get a driver’s license–my friend Marcus already has his, and a car–” I paused a second to consider whether Marcus was still sitting at the curb waiting for me, then plunged back in. “I just finished my freshman year; my favorite subject is art– and lunch. No, I don’t have a boyfriend–adults always want to know that, like it’s any of their business. No offense, but I mean, do I ask grown-ups, perfect strangers, if they’re seeing anybody? What’s up with that?”
“I have no idea,” Lou said.
He wasn’t laughing yet, but his eyes were sparkling and he didn’t have the ADHD diagnosis on his lips. This could be working.
“I’ve lived in Mountain Brook since I was six,” I babbled on, “and my mom’s designer shoes made it big, so we could move out of my grandfather’s garage apartment in Birmingham, which I don’t remember that much anyway, and besides he doesn’t live there anymore because after my grandmother died he married some younger chick, and they sold the house and moved to Fort Myers or some other old people town, although I don’t know why she would want to live there except maybe she’s not that young–just younger than him, but, then, who isn’t?”
“I knew your grandfather,” Lou said.
“Oh,” I said to the bowl of the spoon. “Did he run you off with a shotgun? Is that why you didn’t marry my mother?”
It was a Blurt, but maybe somewhere in the wrinkles of my brain I’d kind of planned it. Maybe being “socially immature” had its benefits. I watched to see what Lou would do with it. He rearranged the silverware at his place and then sat back, both hands flat on the table this time, and nodded at me.
“I guess we should get it out there, huh?” he said.
“Whatever,” I said. “It’s probably none of my business. My mother obviously doesn’t think so–”
“Of course it’s your business.”
Nobody had looked at me like that since my English teacher said, “Of course you’re getting an F. You didn’t turn in a term paper!”
“Look–I would have married your mother if I’d known she was pregnant.”
“You didn’t notice her getting fat?”
“She broke up with me before she was even showing.”
“So what about later?” I said, as long as we were on the subject and he didn’t look ready to pitch a fork at me.
“‘Later’ was long after I was married to someone else,” he said. “I offered to help, but she said you two were all set, thank you very much.”
Just as I caught an I-have-tasted-something-disgusting curl on his lip, he rubbed his palm in the air like he was erasing everything he’d just said.
“I should have insisted on being part of your life then, Jessie, and I’m sorry,” he said. “But I’m older and wiser now, and I’m here–for whatever you need me for.”
Can you get them to pass me to tenth grade English without going to summer school? I wanted to say. And then I didn’t want to say it, because I didn’t want him to know I was the worst student in the history of high school because I had a “disorder.” People found that out–certain people–and they–well, whatever. The point was, he wasn’t going to be around that long. He did, after all, have a wife.
“Does she know about me?” I said.
“Who?”
“Your wife.”
“I’m divorced.”
I exchanged the spoon for a saltshaker and examined the bottom, of course, spilling salt on the tablecloth. “Was it because she found out about me?”
Lou shook his head. “We had other issues. Back to you now.”
Fortunately the food came then, and I stopped and stared at the eggs Benedict, which had some kind of gross-looking sauce drizzled over them. When I looked up, Lou was watching me.
“I’ll go ahead and bless it,” he said.
He closed his eyes and propped his chin on folded hands and had “Father, thank you–” out before I realized that he meant he was going to pray. Not that I had never seen somebody pray before. Up until sixth grade when the Richardsons who’d lived across the street moved away, I’d gone to church almost every Sunday. I went with whoever on our cul-de-sac was going, so for a while I rocked with the Pentecostal Holiness people and then I watched people get baptized in the pool at the Baptist Church and after that I got into chancel drama with those people who didn’t call themselves anything except Christian.
Even when the Richardsons left I still prayed to God the way they taught us in Methodist Vacation Bible School. Or was it Presbyterian? They said just talk to him so I did, and even though my mind went all over the place–big surprise– and I didn’t know what I was doing, it felt like Somebody was there and it kept me from feeling like I was going crazy.
Until hormones kicked in, and then nothing kept me from going off the wall. And besides, I figured out that God wasn’t answering when I said, “Please help me pass this test” and “Please let me throw up so I don’t have to go to school tomorrow” and “Please make my mom stop having Phases.” So I gave up praying. I missed it at first, but I hadn’t thought about God in a while.
But here was Father Lou, talking about blessing the hands that prepared our disgusting-looking eggs Benedict. I glanced around to see if anybody was staring at us and got my hands folded and my eyes closed before he said the amen. Why I cared whether he thought I was praying or not, I wasn’t sure. I just did it.
I had no idea what time it was when Lou pulled his pickup truck into our driveway, but I was sure it had to be, like, the next day. I was wiped out from talking so much, which I had to do to keep him from asking me questions I didn’t want to answer or couldn’t answer or wouldn’t answer if he’d pulled a gun on me. I wondered if it had occurred to my mother that this guy could have developed into some kind of psycho over the years–although he seriously didn’t look or act like one. Not that I had known any psychos.
Anyway, I was so ready to jump out of that truck, say, “Good-bye, it’s been nice,” and forget this whole thing ever happened. I even had my hand on the door handle–but he turned off the motor and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and said to the windshield, “Is everything okay here for you with your mother?”
“She won’t let me get a learner’s permit, and I have to do the laundry,” I said, “but other than that, it’s all right.”
“That’s not exactly what I mean.”
He looked straight at me, the way Chelsea’s father looked at her, and I got the definite feeling that he had done this kind of thing before. Or maybe men just got the dad thing when they reached a certain age.
Although I knew what he meant, I shrugged and opened his glove compartment and examined t
he contents. He reached over and closed it without a word and left his hand on the dashboard. I snapped the seat belt against my chest and said a loud “Ow,” but he completely ignored it.
“It’s pretty clear your mom is depressed,” he said. “I just wondered how that affects you.”
“She’s freaked out because you showed up,” I said, which was part of the truth.
“And are you okay with her ‘freaking out’?”
“Oh, yeah, I have a lot of fun with that.”
“Who’s there for you when she can’t cope?”
“Look, I’m fine,” I said. “I’ve been fine for fifteen years, so I really don’t need you to come in and fix my life.”
That was more than a Blurt. I was bordering on a meltdown. I jerked the door handle and tried to get out of the truck without unfastening the seat belt, and when I fumbled at the stupid thing, Lou put his hand on my arm and I shoved it away.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m sorry–I shouldn’t have pushed you. We don’t have to have this conversation now.”
“We’re not having it ever,” I said. “I’m going in.”
He let me get out, but he met me at the front door where I was hating myself because I hadn’t brought my key and I was pretty sure I’d lost the one that used to be under a rock in the flowerbed.
“Are you locked out?” he said.
“I can get in. You can go,” I said.
He didn’t say anything. He just reached up and rang the doorbell.
I folded my arms and jiggled my knees back and forth. He probably thought I had to go to the bathroom. I reminded myself that I didn’t care what he thought, but that got lost on the hamster wheel, which would have thrown even the toughest rodent off by now.
“I’m planning to stay in town for a few days,” he said. “We could go to the lake–”
“I’m pretty busy,” I said, and rang the doorbell again myself. And pounded on the door with my fist. And then yelled, “Mom! Let me in!”
“You think she’s in the shower or something?” Lou said.