Pearl

by Jo Knowles

  “We are just friends!” I scream. “Why won’t you believe me? God, Mom. This is pretty ironic coming from you. For someone who hated how Gus treated you, you sure are good at treating me the same way!”

  My mom glares at me. I wait for her to yell back, but instead I see the realization of what I just said take hold. She sags into Claire’s arms and starts to cry.

  “Oh, God,” she sobs. “You’re right.”

  I step away from her and bump into Henry, who I didn’t realize was standing right behind me. He puts his hand on my shoulder.

  “She isn’t right, Lexie. Jesus,” Claire says. “Your mother is nothing like that man!” She yells at me. She actually looks like she might cry, too.

  But my mom moves away from her. “I’m sorry, Beany. I—I saw the two of you and panicked. I just don’t want you to make the same mistake I did.”

  Henry’s hand on my shoulder tightens as her words sink in. I will myself not to let her or Claire see me cry.

  “No, we have enough mistakes in this house, don’t we?” I say.

  My mom looks horrified. “Oh, Bean, that’s not what I meant!”

  “But it’s true! You said I saved you, but I’m still just a mistake in the end. That’s what I’ll always be to you. Your big mistake!”

  “No, Bean. Not you.”

  “Never mind.” I have to get away from her.

  “You better take Sally home, Hen,” I say quietly. He nods but doesn’t take his hand off me so I reach up and move it for him. Before I let go, I look him in the eye and nod to let him know I’m okay. He nods back. I walk past my mom and Claire and go to my room, making a point to shut my door as quietly as I can, as if I don’t exist.

  chapter fourteen

  I wake up to my mom’s and Claire’s voices. They’re arguing. I can’t understand why Claire’s staying over again. It’s starting to feel weird. Everything feels weird.

  I look down at my hand and remember Henry’s in it. The warmth, and how our hands were stuck together when we woke up. Like they were melting together. I call him without checking what time it is.

  “Hello?” His voice is groggy.

  “It’s me.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Early. What are you doing?”

  “Trying to sleep?”

  “Oh. Right. Sorry.”

  “Are you okay? Did your mom calm down?”

  “She and Claire are arguing now.”

  “Oh. Um. You didn’t answer me.”

  “What?”

  “I asked if you were okay.”

  I look at my hand again.

  “Yes. I’m okay,” I say. “Can you come over?”

  “Now? It’s like eight o’clock. Go back to sleep, Bean. I’m not coming over. If you’re okay, that is. You sound okay.”

  I sigh.

  “I am. I think my mom must be going back to work today. Maybe that’s why she’s up.”

  “No, she’s taking my mom shopping.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. That’s what Sally told me on the way home last night. Your mom decided to take the whole week off, and they’re all going to the mall to celebrate.”

  “Well, Claire and my mom are still fighting, so I don’t know if that’s the plan.”

  “What are they fighting about?”

  “I don’t know.” I bite the inside of my lip. “Do you think it’s weird that Claire never goes home?”

  “I guess so. Can I go back to sleep now?”

  “Fine. I’ll call you later.” I hang up, feeling irritated with him. I don’t know what I expected. Just … more.

  I get out of bed and look out my window. I can see the river from here through the few trees that line the embankment. If Gus was alive, this would be the time of day he’d be out there. When the streets are still quiet.

  I make my way to the shower and even though I’m hot, I turn the water almost as hot as it can go. I close my eyes and listen to the steady stream of water spray out of the faucet. There’s an extra bottle of shampoo on the tray inside. And a new loofah sponge. And a third razor.

  Claire appears to be here to stay.

  Perfect.

  When I finish I open the shower curtain. Water from the steam drips down the mirror, leaving a single streak. I feel sweaty before I even step out.

  Back in my room, as I finish getting dressed, I hear the front door slam, then nothing. I wait, but the house is silent. I go downstairs to see if there’s any leftover coffee. When I step into the kitchen, Claire is sitting quietly at the table. The coffeepot is empty. She looks up at me from the newspaper she’s reading and raises her eyebrows.

  “Where’s my mom?” I ask.

  “She went to get more coffee.”

  Her face is a little blotchy, as if she’s been crying.

  “I’m going to Henry’s,” I tell her.

  She flattens her paper. “Do you think your mom would like that?”

  I pause and turn back. “Do you think I care?” I snap.

  She takes a sip of her coffee, just to rub it in, I’m sure.

  “You should cut your mom some slack,” she says.

  “Why?”

  “Because you don’t know anything.”

  “Yeah, well, she’s pretty clueless, too.”

  Claire shakes her head and rolls her eyes. “Someday you’ll regret being so mean to her.”

  “Me? Mean to her? Are you serious?”

  “You make assumptions, Bean. Be careful with that.”

  “Oh, and the two of you didn’t make assumptions about me last night?”

  “You were sleeping on your dead grandfather’s bed with a boy. In the dark.”

  “He’s my best friend! Whatever. I don’t need to explain myself to you.”

  It feels strange to talk back to someone besides my mom. At the moment though, it feels good.

  “Besides,” I add, since I’m on a roll, “weren’t you just fighting with her, too? Why is it okay for you to fight with her and not me?”

  “We weren’t fighting, we were arguing.”

  “Big difference,” I say sarcastically.

  “There is,” she says. But judging from the cry splotches on her face, it’s just as painful.

  “Whatever,” I say again. I leave her in the kitchen and head outside, but coming up the walk is Sally, all dressed up.

  “Hi, Miss Bean,” she says as she waddles up the walk to me. Her new blond hair is done up in a twist and she has so much makeup on she looks like a circus act. All she needs is a beard. God. What the hell is happening?

  “Are the ladies up yet?” she asks. “We have a big day planned.”

  The ladies? I picture Claire with her spiky black hair. Hardly.

  “Claire’s in the kitchen,” I say quietly. I’m still standing on the porch. Sally labors her way up the steps. I expect her to give me a hug or ask me how I’m doing, but she just smiles at me in her innocent way, like everything is perfectly normal and pleasant and she didn’t overhear a word of what happened last night.

  “We’ve got a shopping day planned. Did you know?” She is beaming.

  Run, I want to tell her. They don’t deserve you. I can see myself reaching for her hand and dragging her back home with me to Henry, but as I look at her hopeful face, I realize I probably wouldn’t be able to move her one inch away from here.

  As Sally continues to beam at me, my mom pulls into the driveway with a box of doughnuts from the MiniMart. She doesn’t acknowledge me.

  “Hi, honey!” Sally calls to her like she used to call to me when I visited. I feel a twinge. I want the old Sally back. The old Sally who belonged to me and Henry. Who sat on her big comfy sofa and patted the space next to her just for me.

  When my mom steps onto the porch, she reaches over and gives Sally a kiss on the cheek. She has never kissed me on the cheek. Or anywhere else as far as I can remember.

  “Join us for breakfast, Beany?” she asks nonchalantly. She doesn’t meet my gaze, but
I can tell this is her way of making a peace offering.

  “No thanks,” I say. I don’t tell her where I’m headed and she doesn’t ask.

  “All right. We’ll leave some for you in case you change your mind.” She turns away and leads Sally inside.

  The air is already steamy hot when I climb down the steps and head for Henry’s house. I walk quickly, even though it’s daytime and relatively safe. Gus says the city grew up around this neighborhood, then into it. But to me it feels like our quiet street is a small bubble trapped inside a bigger bubble. It seems like we are all trapped, one way or another.

  chapter fifteen

  “You’re up,” I tell Henry when I find him watching TV from his spot on the couch. He’s wearing a white T-shirt and plaid pajama bottoms.

  “Thanks for pointing that out.” He doesn’t look up at me.

  “Sorry,” I say. “Why are you watching Good Morning America? Sally isn’t here.”

  “Something isn’t right,” he says, still staring at the TV.

  “Yeah. You’re watching Good Morning America,” I tell him.

  He’s eating dry Cheerios from a plastic bowl. Henry wants to lose weight so desperately. He wants Sally to, too. But so far he hasn’t had much luck in that department. I think, every time Henry looks at Sally, he fears what could happen to him.

  “Want to go for a boat ride?” I ask. “No fishing, though. Just meandering.”

  Henry responds by pinching two Cheerios between his fingers and slowly putting them in his mouth. He still hasn’t looked at me.

  “What is wrong with everyone today?”

  He chews.

  “Never mind.” I leave him on the couch and start walking back toward my house. Maybe earlier was a dream, and when I go back, my mom will be sitting at the kitchen table—alone—with a cup of coffee and a frozen Snickers bar hidden under the morning paper.

  No Sally.

  No Claire.

  I walk slowly, just in case. The neighborhood is quiet as usual, though someone at the end of the road is sweeping the sidewalk in front of his house and kicking up a small dust cloud that floats across the street like a ghost. That would please Gus, to see someone still caring about keeping things tidy. The swishing echoes up the street.

  I’m halfway home when I hear shuffling feet and a familiar wheezing behind me.

  I don’t turn around, but it is the best sound I’ve heard in a long time.

  “You need to get over the fish thing,” Henry says, already flapping his shirt away from his body.

  I grin at him.

  “I’m just saying.”

  “You need to get over the not acknowledging me when I come over thing.”

  “Sorry. I was just … confused.”

  We stop walking and face each other. I squeeze my hand into a fist, remembering what his fingers felt like laced with mine. The heat of the pavement reaches up through my flip-flops.

  “Everything’s fine,” I say.

  He nods. “Okay.”

  We start walking again, this time side by side.

  When we get back to my house, we’re both sweating. My mom’s car is gone.

  “It’s too hot to go out on the boat.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know, what do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know, let’s just go in.”

  “Hey,” I say before we make our way up the steps.

  Henry lowers his face and squints at me. His cheeks are getting pink. “What?”

  “Thanks for coming after me.”

  He smiles. “Thanks for asking.”

  There’s a note taped to the front door.

  M. Like it’s too much work to write out Mom.

  One time Gus told me that when I was learning to talk my mom tried to teach me to call her Lexie, not Mom. Maybe she thought if I called her Lexie, people would think she was my big sister and not my mom. She’d pat her chest and say, “Lexie?” But I’d point and say, “Ma-ma.” I swear Gus thought this was so funny. But now, looking back, I just think it’s really sad. Because even then, my mom didn’t really want to be my mom. She just didn’t know how.

  I hold the note in my hands. “I don’t get it. She knew I knew they were going shopping. Why the note?”

  Henry shrugs. “Maybe she’s trying to show you she isn’t mad at you anymore. That she’s talking to you again.”

  I think about her doughnut offer this morning. “She didn’t have a reason to be mad at me in the first place. If anyone should be mad, it’s me.”

  He shrugs. “It’s just a note.”

  The sun is starting to bake the outdoors so we decide to sit in the living room and watch TV. There’s nothing on but old Star Trek episodes. We turn down the volume and make up the dialogue, something we do on our most desperate Saturdays. Sally isn’t crazy about it, but it still makes her laugh. It feels odd doing it at my house, though. Without Sally.

  When we get hungry for lunch, I check to see if “the ladies” really did leave us any doughnuts, but all I find is a tiny bit of cold coffee left in the pot and an empty doughnut box on the counter with a few sprinkles and some jelly smudges left on the wax paper inside. I make us some lemonade from a mix and we eat an entire bag of low-fat, gourmet potato chips instead.

  “I feel ill,” Henry says. He turns the bag over and studies the ingredients. “No trans fats!” he says.

  “Yay.”

  We put our glasses in the kitchen sink and wash the chip grease off our hands.

  “I bet Claire bought those chips,” I say. “We’ve never had them before.”

  “Think she’ll be mad at us for eating them all?”

  “She’s been basically living here for a week. I think the least she can do is donate a bag of chips.”

  “True. So, now what?”

  “Come on,” I say. “Let’s go to the roof.”

  “The roof?”

  “Yeah. You’ll see.”

  Upstairs in the bathroom, I have to struggle to get the screen open. There’s a dead spider on the sill. I reach through the frame and pull myself up and out. The surface of the shingles digs into my bare knees when I turn back to help pull Henry through.

  I crawl to the place where I sat next to my mom, right under a leafy branch. I lean back against the slanted roof. Henry leans back next to me. We look up at the bright green leaves. The sunlight sparkles through them like holes in lace. It feels good to have Henry breathing quietly at my side. Just being here. I don’t want to think about my mom and Claire dragging Sally around to all the mall stores. I don’t want to worry about whether they will know to take her in the plus-size stores. Or if they will force her to sit at the makeup counter and have a facial with them. The whole situation makes me feel uneasy. Like Sally is their new project and not their new friend.

  “What are you thinking about?” Henry asks.

  I’m sure he won’t want to know, so I just sigh. “Nothing,” I say.

  “Yeah, me too. I like it up here. It’s peaceful.”

  I turn my head so I can watch him look up at the green lace above us. At the same time, he turns to face me, too. When our eyes meet, I feel butterflies in the pit of my stomach. I don’t dare move. I don’t dare think about what they mean.

  When we were eight, Henry kissed me while we were playing with his Star Wars figures. We were making C-3PO and R2-D2 argue about rescuing Anakin when he paused and kissed me right on the lips. I yelled “Hey!” and pushed him away. His face turned red and sweaty, and he pretended it didn’t happen.

  I know it’s crazy, but suddenly I want him to try again. I want him to take my hand in his warm, soft one.

  “Henry,” I start. But I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to ask for.

  We look at each other for a split second longer, then he turns to face the leaves.

  I will my heart to slow down and concentrate on the warm shingles against my back. I listen to the traffic going
up and down the street, the birds arguing over their spaces, the squirrels chattering about a found nut. This was supposed to be my escape place. Not my “bring your best friend and want him to kiss you” place. And since he’s not making attempts to move any closer, maybe it isn’t.

  I imagine my mom up here in this exact same spot when she was my age, wanting to run away. I imagine her standing at the window after she got pregnant, and not coming back out, trapped inside the house. And then I imagine her here the other night. Sitting in the fading light. Alone. And I’m glad I brought Henry here after all, because I never want to look like that.

  Henry’s eyes are closed but he’s tapping his fingers at his side.

  “Do you ever wonder why our moms never tried to find someone new?” I ask.

  “Sometimes,” he said. “I mean, when I was really little I used to wonder if I’d get a new dad. I didn’t really want one—” He pauses, as if he’s realized something. Then he sits up and looks at me with his worried face.

  “I think I told her that. I think I told her that I didn’t want another dad.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with saying that. You were a kid.”

  But he doesn’t seem sure. “Do you think she’s been alone all this time because of me?”

  What I think is that it would probably take more than just wanting a man in her life for Sally to get one. Which is horrible of me. So I think hard for a better answer. I think of Sally in that small house all those years, never leaving. Never really living, except through her soaps. Alone, just like my mom.

  “It’s not your fault, Hen,” I finally say. “I think maybe Sally was just afraid. Maybe she was afraid of getting hurt again, you know? I mean, maybe it was just safer to live through the soaps, where everything eventually turns out okay, more or less.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I guess so. Do you think that’s why your mom never dated, too? Why she never left home? Because she was afraid?”

  I remember all the times my mom came home late at night after work and how I never really knew who she was with. She always told Gus she’d been out with friends from Lou’s. But the only time she ever mentioned anything about dating was to say she was too tired to date. And who had time. But maybe that was just an excuse. Maybe she was too scared, just like Sally.