All the Roads That Lead From Home

by Anne Leigh Parrish

  He dropped off and she was left to take one deep breath after another until she finally gave in to sleep.

  ***

  In the rain she made her way down the block. The street was brown with dirt. Her skin was brown, too, and always had been. The big secret. Her father not her father. Her mother a woman who loved brown men so much she got knocked up by one, then left her husband for another.

  The driver of a car honked because she was walking in the street. “Fuck you!” she yelled.

  She loved him anyway. The drunk who took her into bars.

  The rain bent her face down, and when it lifted up there was Yolanda coming around the corner with a wastebasket she must have emptied into the dumpster. Yolanda said, “I remember you.” She had cornrows for hair, violet half moons for fingernails.

  “You looking for a piano?” said Angie.

  “Not me, the Father.”

  Angie didn’t like the sharp stare she was being given.

  “All right, then. Don’t be standing around in the wet,” Yolanda said.

  She followed Angie inside and set the wastebasket on the floor. She went down a hall and knocked on one of the doors, then leaned her head inside. She closed the door and called back to Angie, “He be right out.”

  Yolanda went down another hall while Angie waited. The quiet was broken by the quick tapping of a radiator that slowed, stopped, and resumed like a sick heart not ready to quit.

  He came out the door Yolanda had opened a moment before, a short, round man wearing black pants, a priest’s collar, and a ratty gray sweater.

  “I’m Father Mulvaney,” he said and extended his hand. Angie didn’t take it. “I understand you have a piano.”

  “I can let you have it for fifteen hundred,” she said.

  He nodded, rubbed his hands together, and stared into space just beyond her shoulder, as if he’d forgotten what he was going to say.

  “Hm. Now, what kind of instrument is it?” he asked.

  “Old and banged up.”

  “An upright?”

  “Uh, huh.”

  “Out of tune, I suppose?”

  “Probably.”

  “Why are you getting rid of it?”

  “What do you think?” Angie had put a few paces between her and the Father by then. He took her in with one long hard look.

  “I think you could use a hot cup of tea and a sandwich. I’m just about to have one, myself.”

  Angie hadn’t eaten breakfast that morning because she’d forgotten to get to the store the evening before. Sometimes she ate at work, if her boss left early. Last night he didn’t, and she’d had two bags of M&M’s for dinner.

  “Nothing fancy. Just ham and cheese,” he said.

  His office was small and full of books and papers. The radiator’s paint peeled gray flakes that showed a darker gray underneath. She sat in the chair opposite his, separated by an old wooden desk. On a smaller table were a plate with several sandwiches, a teapot, and a number of cups, most of them chipped. Angie looked at the amount of food, wondering.

  “Yolanda always finds a guest or two for me at the last minute. Saves the kitchen trouble by just having something made in advance,” said the Father.

  “You must feed a lot of people,” she said.

  “The mission down the street had to close its doors, and the economy hasn’t picked up as much as we’d hoped.”

  Angie finished her sandwich quickly and the Father offered her another. She took it, but refused any tea.

  She looked through the window into the courtyard where a man swept bits of paper into a dust pan. His arms reached beyond the too short sleeves of his shirt.

  “What is it?” the Father asked.

  “Why is that guy working in the rain?”

  The Father looked through the window, too. “Francis? Well, I expect he needed to get some fresh air. He’s not overly fond of being indoors.”

  Angie watched the man some more and wondered what it was like not to mind getting wet. When she turned away, she found the Father leaning on his elbows, watching her.

  “You pay cash, I’ll drop the price a little,” she said.

  His smile showed tiny uneven teeth. Above them his eyes were warm. “I’m afraid I can only offer something very nominal.”

  “Like, how much?”

  “Can’t really say, until I have a look at it.”

  “Sure. You come by any evening. First-floor apartment, end of the block going that way,” she said, tossing her head over her right shoulder.

  Three days later Angie came home to find two bags of groceries by her door with a note: Sorry to have missed you. I’ll come again. Father Mulvaney. She took the bags inside and went through them. One had milk, eggs, butter, bread, frozen pizza, soup cans, spaghetti, even some coffee. In the other were flour, sugar, salt, a bunch of pretty fresh bananas, three oranges, and a can of peaches in heavy syrup.

  “Who the fuck wants that shit?” said Kevin. “Why doesn’t he just cough up for the piano?”

  “He will.”

  “He better.”

  That night Kevin was going to rip off Ramon. He’d say to meet him at the bar where Angie worked, and then she’d keep him there with a free drink or two. Angie’s boss didn’t let her give away drinks. She’d have to put her own money in the till. Kevin didn’t think about that. He only had a twenty on him.

  “I can make change,” she said.

  “Forget it, will you?”

  Ramon didn’t come into the bar at all. Angie called her apartment once, twice. At two a.m. when her shift ended she went home. Marta hadn’t been let out. Angie cleaned the dog shit off the floor, walked her around the block, breathed in icy air.

  Angie’s stomach was tight with hunger. Marta danced when the bowl of dog food descended from Angie’s hand.

  The phone rang when she was fast asleep.

  “Babe, listen, I messed up.” He sounded funny. He was crying, she realized.

  “What happened, Kev? Where are you?”

  “Ramon was there. He tried to get tough.” It would have taken a lot more than a slap in the face to put Ramon down. Kevin would have had to finish it.

  “Kev, what—”

  “I can’t believe it. I don’t know what the hell happened.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Never mind.” He was quiet for a long time.

  “Kevin,” she said.

  “I have to go. Oh, and look in the piano. It’s yours.” The line went dead.

  She got to her feet and padded along the floor. The living room was given over to moonlight from the curtainless window.

  The piano lid took some lifting. The envelope inside contained one thousand dollars and the note, You don’t know anything.

  The night was clear, and the violet sky thrown with stars. Take one down, her father used to say. That’s what they’re there for. Just reach up and take one.

  ***

  The morning light seeped over the window ledge, then flowed like clean water into the room. Marta lay warm beside her. Kevin could be anywhere by then, though if Angie guessed right he was at his father’s in Indiana, the place he hated so much he described it with a fist to his head—the blue twinkling pool, the big white barn in the middle of fifteen rolling acres, the yellow forsythia hedge. His father would take him in, because money took care of its own. And he’d never get caught, because Ramon was just some drug dealer from Tijuana who’d had nightmares about the truck he crossed the border in, the sealed-up heat of it, the days without water.

  Angie opened the kitchen door and let Marta into the little yard to pee. Marta squatted, then ran her nose through the dead winter yard until Angie called her back inside.

  After she had dressed and sipped a reheated cup of yesterday’s coffee, Angie took Kevin’s expensive wool sweaters, heavy flannel shirts, and three pairs of good leather boots and put them in a green garbage bag. She put his books on the sidewalk in front of the house with a note, written on an old grocery sa
ck, Free. His toothbrush she threw away. The toothpaste he’d used was hers. She wasn’t surprised by the wetness of her eyes, or the tightness in her throat. Ramon had made her feel more at home than Kevin ever had.

  Her neighbor, Joey, was sound asleep on a thrown-out sofa two doors down. He wasn’t homeless, but seemed to have trouble staying in his apartment at night. Angie nudged him with her foot and he opened his gummy red eyes.

  “You want to make twenty bucks?” she asked.

  He sat up, spat on the sidewalk, and scratched his head. His fingernails were filthy. “For what?”

  “Helping me roll a piano down the block.”

  “You nuts?”

  “You want the money, or not?”

  Joey was several inches shorter than Angie, but strong. He had no trouble keeping the piano under control as it rolled back down the ramp. She took the other end and kept it from veering off.

  The day was overcast, the air calm. They pushed past parked cars, one with someone asleep in the back seat, another with a broken out windshield, and another up on blocks.

  Every few minutes Joey stopped to clear his throat. When they reached the church Angie gave him his twenty.

  “How come we brought it here?” he asked.

  “That’s my business. Now go on.”

  The front door of the church was locked, and a side door, which gave on the alley between the church and the grocery store next to it, was locked, too. There was a light on the second floor, and Angie threw a pebble at the window there, then another. The window lifted, and Father Mulvaney’s head appeared in the open space.

  “Who’s making that racket?” he called down.

  “It’s here.”

  “What is?”

  Angie pointed to the piano, which was being closely examined by an old man pushing an empty shopping cart.

  “So it is,” said the Father.

  “It’s yours. Free.”

  “That’s most generous of you.” The Father’s face took on a look of worry as he watched her from above.

  “Better get it inside before the weather changes,” she said.

  “Miss—” But Angie had gone around the corner by then, back to her apartment. She needed to give Marta another walk after breakfast, get the bag of Kevin’s stuff to the thrift shop and take whatever they’d give her in return, then gather up her own things.

  Then she’d find a pay phone. The call she gave the police would bring him in. He’d know it was her and one day, if he stopped hating her guts, he might realize that being taken wasn’t the same as being bought.

  Pinny and the Fat Girl

  She was a sullen child, a little slow to catch on, and thus easy to make fun of—Pinny said two and two is five! And that Miami’s the capital of Maine—the nickname a clever blend of “pinhead” and her real name, Penny. She was tall for her age with light hair some called ash or “dirty” blonde, gray eyes that were green in brighter light, and a clumsy gait because her feet turned in, giving her at times another name—“Pinny pigeon-toes.”

  She was also an only child. Her mother stayed home and her father sold cars with a flair that should have put him on the stage. Loud suits, loud voice, dropping down to a whisper carefully breathed in the neat pink ear of a lovely young woman needing a car for her new job, or for her life as a new mother, or because she’d finally escaped her wretched marriage and was all on her own.

  The flirtation took its toll. Pinny’s mother—a snob who always said she’d married down—accused and swore, and then one day announced that she’d had enough, she was not put on this earth to tolerate the disgusting appetites of a fat, balding husband or the glum stupidity of her only child, and off she went, suitcase in hand, leaving Pinny and her father still at the dinner table, their meatloaf greasy and cold.

  After that, meals were from a can, or Chinese food containers, or pizza boxes, or when necessary, the drugstore where Pinny bought candy with the change her father left on his dresser after having made his own dinner out on pretzels and beer.

  Some talked of calling Child Protective Services. One teacher did, and a sallow woman with dark circles below her eyes came to the house unannounced to find Pinny doing laundry and sweeping floors, the father paying bills at the kitchen table, and determined that the pair had formed a good, viable team in the mother’s absence.

  Pinny didn’t mind housework. She didn’t mind cooking a fried egg sandwich now and then. She didn’t mind her mother being gone, because her mother was often harsh and critical—No, no, stupid, a minotaur and a centaur are two different things!—and could really sink a cold finger into Pinny’s heart. She didn’t mind the way her father’s breath smelled when he’d been at the bar, or the jagged sobs he let out some evenings when the twilight was particularly tender and soft.

  In fact, just about the only thing she minded was how people treated the fat girl.

  The fat girl had transferred from another high school in the middle of the year and often arrived after the last bell. Some said it was because she stayed too long at the breakfast table, and the bus was long gone by the time she waddled out to find it. The truth was that she had a little brother to dress and feed, and a barn to muck out, with her big rubber boots still on to prove it. She smelled funny, like earth and sweat and something sweet—like hand soap she would later say, a cheap scent of honey and lemon.

  One thing was sure—the fat girl knew how to make an entrance. She took her time crossing the classroom to her seat by the window, looking at the faces turned her way as if they were all her loving fans.

  The fat girl’s name was Eunice, and hearing it called out by the homeroom teacher made the other students roar. A person couldn’t help the name she was given—like Penny, for Penelope and her mother’s passion for all things ancient Greek—any more than she could help smelling weird or being fat. Pinny was soon a quick defender of the fat girl—Oh, yeah? Well, you’re ugly, how about that?—sometimes with a raised fist though she had never actually hit anyone.

  “You don’t need to stick up for me,” the fat girl told Pinny one day. “Not that I don’t appreciate it, but I got some ideas of my own on how to fix these losers.”

  Not long after that a boy opening his locker was met with a rotten egg smeared on photographs of racing cars taped lovingly to the inside of the door. This boy had been a principal teaser of the fat girl only days before, taunting her in the lunchroom as she ate her two bologna sandwiches, one cheese sandwich, and several cookies, calling her Blimpo and Miss Piggy. A pretty girl who’d told the fat girl she smelled like a used Kotex found exactly that in her locker the following morning.

  After school, the fat girl took a bus that drove sixteen winding miles through the farmland of upstate New York to deposit her at an intersection of two country roads. She walked along the one that bore east until its cracked pavement turned to gravel and then to dirt, to arrive at her house, a two-story wooden structure that must have been very beautiful about seventy-five years ago. The porch wrapped around three sides, the peak had a lightning rod with a ball of purple glass on top, and the windows were framed with shutters. The paint had long since worn away, and the bare wood stood against the revolving seasons like a tired, old face. She lived there with both of her parents and the baby brother, just a year and a half old. The father had a herd of dairy cows whose milk brought in some income, otherwise he worked for Tompkins County repairing roads. The mother sometimes waited tables at a bar six miles away and was rumored to have a boyfriend over in Slaterville Springs, an ex-con named Lyal who sometimes sold a hot stereo or a shotgun from the back of his mobile home.

  One Friday afternoon, Pinny rode the bus home with the fat girl. Their walk to the house was colored with the green light of newly leafing trees.

  “It’s nice out here,” Pinny told the fat girl.

  “It bites. I’d rather live where you do.”

  Pinny lived in “the flats,” or downtown Dunston, near a creek that ran noisily in summer and froze over in t
he winter.

  “No, you wouldn’t. The college kids hit the bars, then wander around singing and shouting like a bunch of retards. It’s a pain,” said Pinny.

  The fat girl breathed loudly as she walked, her thick arms swung wide with the effort of moving her forward, and her backpack thumped and rustled with the rhythm of her stride.

  The fat girl’s mother was sitting on the porch with a pan and a plastic bag of green beans. With a small knife she removed the end of each bean, threw it into the yard, snapped the bean in two, and dropped the pieces in the pan at her feet. She had the same yellow hair the fat girl had, but not as bright and shiny.

  She looked at Pinny.

  “Who’s this?” she asked.

  “A friend from school,” said the fat girl.

  “Hello, friend from school.”

  Pinny watched the fat girl’s mother work her beans.

  “Go on in and get something to eat if you want. There’s lemonade and Ding Dongs,” the fat girl’s mother said.

  The house smelled of fried fish and sour milk. A television set was on in another room playing what sounded like a game show. The fat girl dropped her backpack on the kitchen floor, helped herself to the contents of the white cardboard box on the counter, then went to the refrigerator and drank lemonade right from the pitcher. Pinny put her backpack in the corner by the door they’d come in through. In another corner was a playpen, and in the playpen the fat girl’s little brother was moving a red plastic train back and forth on bright green wheels. His yellow hair was cut so short it was a light fuzz on his head. There was a pink Band-Aid stuck to his scalp that was black and sticky-looking along its edge.

  He looked up and wailed.

  “Stick it, Zach,” the fat girl said. Zach kept up his wail. The mother called, “See to him, Eunice, will you?”

  The fat girl lifted Zach from the pen. He turned to Pinny and watched her with huge blue eyes.