by Maggie Bloom
“Okay,” I say. I lumber down the steps and head for the fence, which is tied shut with a length of frayed rope. Over my shoulder, I shout, “Thanks, Mr. Cantwell!” There is no reply other than the truck’s engine ticking ominously as it creeps away.
Tom’s backyard is nothing like the one Orv, Denise, and I share, prompting me to consider trailer park ownership a worthy occupation. Gramp used to refer to our dusty little plot of land as “Postage Stamp, USA.” Tom’s place, on the other hand, boasts a rolling green expanse the size of a football field, complete with a giant trampoline, an above-ground pool, and a tidy little chicken house.
I slip inside the fence and meander. The chicken coop reminds me of an elaborate dollhouse an obscenely rich parent might lavish upon his or her spoiled offspring. “Knock, knock,” I say as I tug its wood-framed, wire-mesh door ajar.
Tom jumps, clattering the rake he’s holding against a giant metal birdfeeder. “Geez,” he says, “way to sneak up on a person.”
I giggle. “Sorry.” I step just over the threshold (there’s not enough room in the coop for someone of my ampleness) and strain to hear over the hiccupping squawks of ten or twelve hens pecking around. “What’d you forget about me?”
He tucks the rake into a corner and ushers me outside. “Nah. I got a late start this morning,” he says with a ghost of an eye roll. “It’s Wilma’s birthday.”
“Oh.” From what I know of Tom’s stepmother, Wilma, she’s sort of like the Julia Roberts character in Pretty Woman: a hooker with a heart of gold. (Not literally, of course. Wilma works part-time as a bartender at The Plough Horse and, in her off time, sunbathes and churns out macramé knickknacks.)
Tom hikes up the back steps, pauses at the screen door and says, “Want a drink?”
I shrug. “Sure.” I trudge along behind him, into the double-wide’s bright, wallpapered kitchen. He scuffs a stool away from a faux wooden island and motions for me to sit, then pours two ice-filled tumblers of lemonade. We gulp in eager bursts, awkward and silent, not sure what to make of each other after so many years of being “just friends.”
“We should get to work,” I say once the glasses are emptied and sweaty, water rings pooling in their wakes. If we don’t start the training session pronto, there’s a distinct possibility I’ll end up letting Tom Cantwell screw me.
He gives me a sweet, doe-eyed smile, clangs the glasses together on his way to the sink. When he passes the refrigerator, his gaze hangs for a moment on the five-by-seven Glamour Shot of his late mother that’s slapped to the freezer with a bunch of random magnets. I can’t help noticing that the woman has (or had) the same number of chins I do. Tom catches me looking, nods toward the living room and says, “Let’s go.”
* * *
Tom’s father lets him drive that dilapidated work truck around the trailer park, since, technically, Ocean Gates is private property. “I clocked a few routes,” he tells me as we spin our bikes out of the gravel driveway. He waves an arm toward the sun, which glows orange in the mellow autumn sky. “If we do Pebble, White Sands, and Boardwalk, it’s a mile almost exactly. We could do it three or four times and build up our endurance.”
“You got any routes mapped for speed?” I ask, figuring I’ve already worked the endurance angle on the ride over and will be tasked with repeating the performance upon my return home.
Tom nods, pops a wheelie and bounces back to earth. “Sea Spray,” he says. “It’s a straight shot. Not a lot of houses back there, either.”
I cruise up beside him, encourage my stringy hair to flutter in the breeze like a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model’s. “What’re you waitin’ for?” I ask, trying to sound flirty and carefree, like a normal fifteen-year-old. Like a girl who prays to Jesus for a shot at her first real boyfriend. Like a girl who hasn’t spread her chapped thighs for every backward ape to grunt her way.
Tom goes into race mode, whizzes out in front of me like a bottle rocket toward the heavens. I pump harder, faster, give him the best run I can. But it’s no use: A girlie tubbo without so much as a fiber of muscle in her being has no chance against a gangly nerd-boy on a testosterone-stoked mission.
I fall back, try to settle my ragged breaths, clear the perspiration from my brow with the back of my hand. Tom senses my surrender, peers over his shoulder and shouts, “Come on, Cotton!”
Ahead of Tom, a cream-colored compact car with a navy-blue passenger door reverses out of a driveway. I grip the handlebars of the Schwinn and squeeze its brakes into action. But Tom is the one in danger. Before I can blurt a warning, he smacks into the car’s rear quarter-panel, skids over its trunk, and lands on the pavement with a thud. The BMX boomerangs into my path.
I drop the Schwinn to the ground and chug around the car, which has halted in the middle of the road. When I reach Tom’s side, he’s already struggling to his knees. “Are you okay?” I squeak. I suck in a breath, offer him my arm as a crutch. With a string of groans, he makes a creaky ascent to his feet.
In my peripheral vision, I notice the tiny, narrow frame of a person coming our way. “Oh, dear,” a woman’s shaky, wet voice says.
I move my eyes from Tom’s ripped jeans to the woman’s pruned, perplexed face. “Don’t you look where you’re going?!” I cry. “You almost killed him!” (Well, maybe not, but it felt good to say.)
Tom runs a palm over his chest, as if he’s verifying his heartbeat. “I’m all right,” he murmurs, his words weak and slow.
In a dreamy tone, the woman says, “Do we need an ambulance?”
“Where’s my bike?” asks Tom.
“Can you walk?” I say. He takes a few cautious steps. “What about your lungs?” I continue. “Are you breathing okay?”
He puffs his lungs full of air, winces a little. “I don’t know,” he admits with a stunted shrug.
“Should I call an ambulance?” the woman repeats.
A young dude on a Harley roars up, stops and squints at us. “Y’all set?” He stares down the BMX, which I now realize has a blown tire.
Tom hobbles in the direction of the bikes, and I follow. “Fine, I guess,” I answer for him.
“You sure?” the guy says.
Again, the woman: “I’ll get the phone.”
“Forget it,” I snap. “His parents own the place. They know where you live.”
chapter 4
AVOCADO GREEN. That’s the color of the phone thrumming its throaty ring against our sunny yellow kitchen wall. It’s a sound that reminds me of Buttercup’s measured purring: comforting in its predictability. It also makes Orv, Denise, and me special, since we’re probably the only folks left in America without cellular phones.
“Hello?” I say, the word coming out in a gasp.
“Roberta?” It’s Marie. She doesn’t recognize my voice.
I consider pretending to be Denise. “Speaking.”
“Oh, good,” she says, all syrupy. “I’m glad I caught you.” I don’t respond. “Your father and I would like you to come over for dinner.”
The phone cord, which was once twelve feet of tight coils, is now slack, undone, as limp as a morning glory in the midday sun. I trail it along behind me as I scuff into the living room, a library copy of Into Thin Air tucked under my arm. “What for?”
“To eat,” she says. (I wish she was being sarcastic, but I don’t think she knows how.) “And to talk.”
I plop down on the scratchy plaid couch. “About?”
“Pardon me?”
“About?” I repeat louder.
She hesitates. “Well, about…” I imagine her blinking her wide chocolate eyes, trying to come up with a phrasing that doesn’t put us at odds. “Don’t you want to be part of this?”
By “this” I assume she means the baby, Roy. “It’s not really my business,” I say diplomatically. The response that pops into my mind is much meaner.
She clucks with incredulity. “But…of course it’s your business,” she says, as if she’s talking herself into the idea. “We’re a family.”
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The woman can’t possibly be buying what she’s selling. Donating an egg and hanging around just long enough to make sure the little critter you’ve spawned doesn’t gnaw its own leg off hardly makes one a parent. “I like it here,” I say, pinching a few strands of shag carpeting between my toes.
Marie’s voice shoots up a couple of octaves. “It’s settled then,” she says. “You’ll stay in Industry during the week and Hollyhock on the weekends.”
I snort. “I don’t think so. Harvey needs me to—”
“Don’t get fresh, Roberta Josephine,” my mother interrupts. “If we have to, your father and I can—”
“What? What can you and Duncan do?”
A long pause thickens the air. When Marie’s voice comes back, it’s a whisper. “We’ve missed you, Bobbi,” she says. “Won’t you come share a meal with your father and me?”
The part of me that loves my parents tussles with the part of me that’s been stung by them. “Okay,” I force myself to say. Because even though I may regret granting it to them, my heart tells me that Duncan and Marie deserve one last chance.
* * *
As I sit cross-legged on the bristly grass at the edge of our driveway, tracing abstract shapes in a gully of dirt with a birch twig and waiting on Duncan and Marie to fetch me, mangy old Buttercup’s adorable face peeks out from under the Royale.
I’m no expert on cats, but I think Buttercup’s what you’d call an orange tabby; he’s got a faint stripe pattern to his creamsicle-colored fur that reminds me of a tiger’s (and makes me figure I should’ve christened him something more rugged, like Rocky). What I don’t like about Buttercup are his eyes, which resemble milky, yellowish-green pools of baby puke.
I hold the twig in the air, and Buttercup rubs his neck, his cheek, the tip of his nose along its pocked-bark exterior, scratching a series of previously dormant itches. “They’re late,” I tell him about my parents, who should’ve been here fifteen minutes ago.
He nudges my fingers in an understanding way. Absently I reciprocate, stroke his saggy belly, tickle him until he whips away, agitated from the over-petting. “Get back here,” I say at his tail, which slices through the heavy, storm-charged air. “Buttercup!”
At the sound of his name, he cocks his head, goes into a prissy pout, his pink nose upturned, shoulders ramrod straight, not to be bothered with the likes of me. Nothing hurts me more than Buttercup getting in one of his moods, punishing me by disappearing for days on end. Luckily I’ve perturbed him to such an extreme only twice in our seven-year friendship.
I pucker my lips, squeak out a high-pitched kissing sound that coaxes him back to my side. Before I can make nice with him again, though, an unfamiliar brown minivan sputters to a stop at the curb out front (or where a curb ought to be, since our sick, patchy lawn bleeds right into the crumbling street). My mother’s shadowy form twists around in the passenger seat, and the van’s back door slides open from the inside.
I give Buttercup a goodbye scratch under his chin, and then, with a grumble and a huff, haul myself off the grass. When I clamber into the back of the van, Duncan and Marie go mum. “What?” I say.
Duncan responds, “Hmm?”
Two of the three seatbelts have been mysteriously removed from the backseat. The final one is twisted in knots, its buckle stuck in a way that won’t allow it to stretch across my abdomen. “Nice deathtrap you’ve got here,” I mutter.
“Good to see you, Roberta,” my mother says.
I fiddle with the seatbelt until we hit the highway, at which point I resign myself to living dangerously. By the time I get this nasty, gnarled mess straight, we’ll be sitting down to a meal in Duncan and Marie’s barn in Hollyhock. “What took you so long?” I complain.
“Our appointment at the ob-gyn ran late,” Marie says breezily.
My parents, a pair of trauma surgeons accustomed to living in the third world, are so concerned about this pregnancy—and my soon-to-be brother, Roy—that they’ve enlisted obstetric help? “That’s weird.”
“How so?” Duncan asks. “Medical professionals are frequently behind schedule.”
I tug a Milky Way from my pants and munch it down in two bites. Tomorrow, I swear, I’m gonna quit these things. “That’s not what I meant,” I say. “It’s weird that you guys went to a doctor, because…well, you’re doctors.” This is the most intimate thing I’ve said to my parents in my whole memory. And I regret it.
Marie taps her belly. “We’re not taking any chances this go ‘round.”
My father says, “Certainly not.”
I toss the candy wrapper onto the pristine-yet-shabby floor. “Are we almost there?” I ask. The van is starting to feel like an overgrown cage.
Duncan sucks his teeth. “Nine minutes, give or take,” he tells me.
That’s better than ten, I guess. “What’s for dinner?” I try asking. Because, truth be told, I’m rather hungry.
My mother laughs. Not a friendly guffaw or a healthy, isn’t she precious? chuckle. More of a derisive snicker, the kind of laughing-at people try to disguise as laughing-with. “One track mind, huh, Roberta?”
I extend my leg, rap my toes against the back of her seat. “It’s just Bobbi,” I say. “Or Bobbi-Jo. I haven’t gone by Roberta in years.”
“I don’t care for either of those,” my father says, in a tone that comes off sounding like a period at the end of a sentence. “But it’s your name, so it’s up to you.”
Score one for the good guys. “Bobbi, then,” I say. Case closed.
Silence envelops the van for a good five minutes before Duncan powers on the radio, which plinks out a perky, instrumental tune. I inhale another Milky Way and think of Tom, who has been incommunicado since that old broad clipped him, laying him up with a hairline fracture of the right tibia. Come to think of it, Buttercup’s got a bit of a hitch in his step lately too. Perhaps I should bump him up on my worry list.
At last, Duncan pilots the van down a rutted dirt drive and jostles it to a stop kitty-corner to an ancient rust-and-earth-colored barn. But before we can make a dash for the entrance—a modern steel door cut haphazardly into the side of the barn and currently ajar—the sky opens up, dropping a steady ding of pea-sized hailstones on the van’s tinny roof and hood.
Duncan and Marie don’t seem to notice the turn of bad weather. Or to care. They slip leisurely out of the van, and, with little choice in the matter, I traipse along behind them.
“I didn’t hear anything about hail,” I comment once we’ve made it safely inside.
I don’t know what I was expecting my parents’ barn to look like, but this definitely wasn’t it. I guess maybe I’d had two opposing visions dancing around in my mind: feral jungle hut or proper English tearoom (which goes to show how painfully limited my knowledge of Duncan and Marie really is). Because, as I look around, the scene that most readily comes to mind is an upscale city loft: sophisticated urban chic.
Duncan drops his keys into a silver bowl that sits atop an island of what looks like glossy, reclaimed lumber, stained a deep, reddish mahogany. “What do you think?” he asks as I overtly stare.
“Not bad,” I say with an impressed nod. The place is one big, open room with a rolling ladder (the kind libraries use for reaching overhead stacks) leading to an actual loft space, which I can’t see much of from the ground level. “Where’s my room?” I wonder.
Marie chuckles, rubs gentle circles around the underside of her belly, the voluminous caftan she wears swishing and swaying across the creaky wooden floor. “The upstairs is partitioned,” she tells me. “A room for your father and me, and a spot for you and the baby.”
“Oh.”
Duncan peers into the fridge, his back hunched as he rearranges glass bottles of farm-sourced milk and freshly churned butter in tidy, wax-paper packets. If it weren’t for the Food Network, I’d be uneasy about the way Duncan and Marie live, their habits odd in comparison to the head-above-water ways to which Orv, Denise, and I are accust
omed. Instead, I find my parents exotic.
My mother motions at a bamboo stool with a crescent moon-shaped seat that reminds me of the grin Gramp would suppress—quivery and notched at the edges—whenever I said something inappropriate but funny.
I take Marie’s cue and sit (a little too forcefully, I guess), splitting the seat with a drawn out craaack! The sound ping-pongs off the walls and hangs in the air like the ring of a church bell. I cover my mouth and mumble, “Sorry.”
Duncan sets a cluster of grapes directly on the island and Marie begins nibbling them. “You know, Bobbi,” she says, the tone of a lecture creeping into her voice, “it wouldn’t hurt you to pursue a…healthier lifestyle.” She eyes the stool, which is now threatening to buckle under my weight; if a few more fibers give way, I’m a goner.
Duncan follows the grapes with a big wooden bowlful of salad and a plate of cucumbers and hummus. “The way you eat over there,” he says, referring to Orv, Denise, and me, “it’s no wonder…”
He shuts the refrigerator and I blink, realizing that these bunny offerings are what we’re meant to have for dinner. “Are you guys vegetarians?” I say.
Duncan doles out the salad on colorful square plates like the ones I’ve spied in the Pottery Barn catalogs Denise leaves sprinkled about the house. (She peruses the advertisements for inspiration and then decorates on the cheap.) My plate is orange; Duncan’s is robin’s-egg blue; Marie gets the purple. I pick at the edge of a lettuce leaf as Marie says, “There are whole continents ravaged by hunger. The production of meat consumes too many resources.”
“So you’re vegetarians?” I repeat.
“It’s healthful and environmentally responsible,” Duncan tells me, finally claiming a stool of his own. “And it’s the only way we can feed all seven-billion people on the planet. Flesh isn’t a viable option.”
I eat around a soggy mushroom and change the subject. “How long are you guys staying?” I ask. “I mean, when are you going back?”