Every Other Weekend

by Zulema Renee Summerfield

  The break wasn’t all that long ago but seems far away in time. They lived in Yucaipa then, which is a rock-strewn and lonely place, and the family across the street were hunchbacks—mama hunchback, papa hunchback, two hunchback boys. The yard next door was littered with trash, and their own yard was all rocks and no grass. There was hardly any furniture in that Yucaipa house. Everyone had a bed and there was a table with chairs, but when they watched TV, they sat on the floor. Mom worked the night shift at the hospital, gone from dusk until dawn, and at night Nenny stood in bed, her face at the window, waiting for Mom to come home, and some nights—most nights—she cried. Thinking about that house now—late on a Saturday, in her sleeping bag on Dad’s floor—even all these months later, it still makes her stomach ache.

  Maybe in other houses divorce comes banging loud like drums, but not at the house in Yucaipa. It just seemed like after a while Mom and Dad didn’t talk anymore; they’d pass by each other in the house, wordlessly, the way people who don’t know each other do. Some days Mom wasn’t around at all, and Dad said she was working, but Nenny knew that probably wasn’t true.

  Once they walked down to Taco Bell for lunch, on one of those days Mom should have been at home but wasn’t. It was too hot to be walking, but Mom had the car. Dad ordered four burritos, the kind that cost only thirty-five cents, and they ate in a booth near the back. They were the only people there. Halfway home, Nenny realized she’d forgotten her doll, back on the bench in the corner booth. It was a floppy little thing, a sack of loose limbs with a plastic face, nothing like a real baby. Still, she didn’t want to be without it.

  “What do you mean you forgot? Where is it?” They were at the stoplight, cars whizzing past, Dad’s hair wild in the sweltering wind.

  “I guess back at the booth,” Nenny said weakly. She had to stare at the sidewalk, at her shoes, otherwise she’d cry.

  “Dammit, Nenny.” Dad’s face was splotched with rage. “I told you to leave it at home.” Which was true, he did, but she’d begged. “Dammit,” he said again. Dad had cursed before but never at Nenny or the boys. He started to march back, Nenny and the boys trailing behind, silent in the way when one of you is in trouble so all of you are but really no one is. Even then, young as they were, they knew it wasn’t about the heat or the walk back to Taco Bell. They knew it wasn’t about them at all.

  Space Rocks

  IT’S MONDAY and they’re walking to school, Nenny and the boys and Charles. Kat takes the bus to public high school, which pisses her off because she wants to learn how to drive. Is it strange that they go to private school? Probably. Nenny doubts Rick believes in God, and Mom prays but never goes to church. Dad takes them to church on Sundays but sporadically, maybe like once a month. Nenny wonders if school was somehow a condition of the divorce, the only demand of Dad’s: If you’re going to raise my kids in a godless house, they’ll at least go to Catholic school. It’s hard to say. What Nenny does know is that in August, when Mom and Rick told Charles he’d be joining Nenny and the boys, he flipped his lid. “What the crap! With those freaks?!” as if Nenny and the boys were another species, as if they weren’t sitting right there. Rick said, “That’s enough,” discussion over. And though it made little sense—Why would Rick pay for Charles to go to school? He hates spending money—and Rick seems hard as nails, at the end of the day he wasn’t going to let Charles call them freaks, and that felt noteworthy in some regard.

  Charles walks ahead of them now, as always. He kicks pebbles off the sidewalk and makes rude faces at passing cars. He acts like he doesn’t need any of this, like he could leave at the drop of a hat and go live with his mom if he really wanted to, have his pick of houses and lives—though everyone knows that’s not really true.

  “Let’s pretend it’s space rocks,” Tiny calls to Charles.

  “Let’s not and say we did,” Charles says, not even turning around.

  “But they was space rocks last week,” Tiny protests. Last week Tiny’d suggested they have an adventure out in space, and Charles had been game. He ran ahead and ducked behind trees, shot his space laser twig, and shouted, “Kill the alien bastards!” And though he’d clearly usurped Tiny’s game—kind of did his own thing, running around chucking rocks over fences and into the street—it didn’t matter. Tiny loved it. He talked about it for two whole days.

  “Last week’s over,” Charles says and spits in the grass. He and Kat went to their mom’s this weekend, and Tiny’s just entered kindergarten so he doesn’t get it yet: how fast things can turn, that a lot can change in two days.

  “But—”

  “Shut up about it, already,” Charles says. Tiny tucks his chin and looks like he might cry.

  Bubbles doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even glance up, just keeps his eyes on his feet. He’s the oldest after Kat, almost eleven, but even so, he’s surprisingly meek. He stays on the sidelines, allowing himself to be swallowed into the background of whatever is going on. Nenny feels a sudden spark of rage, wants to shake Bubbles angry and awake. Do something, for criminy’s sake. He’s your little brother. Defend him, you goon.

  “Give it to me,” she says. She puts her hand out for the rock because she can’t stand it anymore, Charles and Bubbles being so hopelessly cruel. Yes, Tiny is annoying as hell, but he’s just a kid. They call him Tiny for a reason.

  Still: she waits a good minute until the other two have walked away.

  “Okay, where are we again?”

  “The moon!”

  “All right. And who am I again?”

  “Manny Hernandez!”

  Nenny rolls her eyes. “Okay. And I eat them?” She doesn’t really remember the plot to Friday’s game because, Tiny-constructed, it made no sense.

  “Yeah, an’ when you eat ’em a alien comes from the rock an’ eats your brain so then you have to walk funny, like this”—he twitches his arm and drags his foot—“an’ then I shoot you to set Manny free. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she says and goes “Nom, nom” until Tiny laughs. Sometimes—she can’t help it—Nenny plays her own pretend game, though she would never tell anyone about it, not in a million years. Late at night when she can’t sleep, or in the earliest hours before the alarm, she imagines them all in a room, including Dad, sitting in a circle like musical chairs. She knows it’s foolish; she knows this fantasy makes no sense. But there it is, everything slowing for a bit and everyone just being who they really are. But it’s stupid—it’s like wishing for a pot of gold when there hasn’t even been rain.

  When they get to school, they all go their separate ways. She watches Charles throw his backpack at Dalton Mulligan, a tall kid with freckles in the other third grade. She wonders if Dalton is Charles’s friend, what it’s like to be friends with Charles. On the first day of school Yvonne Peralta pointed to Charles across the yard and said, “Is that your new brother?” Nenny didn’t answer right away. At home he talks to Nenny and the boys or does not talk to them, either hands Tiny or Bubbles a Nintendo controller and lets them play or else says “Go away.” He’s inconsistent, pushing them out or letting them in depending on his mood. And everyone knows that when someone shuts you out, you only want them more. Finally Yvonne poked Nenny’s ribs, like Hey, hello, and Nenny said, “I guess so,” which was not the most assertive of answers but was closest to the truth. You cannot claim that which does not want to be owned.

  A Weekend at Dad’s

  HAVING DIVORCED parents is like living in one of those claw machines at the pizza parlor: you’re just hanging around, minding your own business, and then every other weekend you get plucked up and flung somewhere else. Except it’s less fun than the pizza place. It’s not like Nenny ever thinks Yippee, a weekend at Dad’s.

  Every other Friday, Dad’s Pinto chugs into the parking lot at school. It smells like coffee and Old Spice cologne, and has dents in its sides and scratches on the doors because he doesn’t exactly pay close attention when he drives. There’s trash everywhere and stains on the seats, not be
cause he’s a slob but because he doesn’t remember to be tidy, and those are two different things. A slob is someone who doesn’t care; Dad is someone who forgets to care. Today he honks the horn and waves when he sees them, even gets out to open doors and clear papers and folders off the seats.

  “Get in! Get in!” he says.

  “Daddy,” Tiny starts in right away, “did you know a cheetah is the fastest aminal in the world?” He fits himself right into Dad’s good mood, but Nenny’s a little suspicious. She’s seen these moods hundreds of times and knows they don’t really last.

  “You don’t say?” Dad says, poking at the radio buttons. “Hey, is anybody hungry?”

  “I’m hungry,” Tiny says.

  “I could eat,” Bubbles says.

  “And what about my favorite daughter?” Dad says, glancing back. It’s a familiar joke—she’s his only daughter—but Nenny feels her face flush anyways.

  “To Mickey D’s?” Dad says, and Tiny cheers. Dad goes, “Whoop, got your nose!” and swipes playfully at Tiny’s face. Tiny laughs and laughs, though that’s an old joke too.

  * * *

  “You know what? I think today we’ll take it to go,” Dad says when the girl at the counter asks. “Let’s go to the park.”

  “But I want to play in the ball room,” Tiny whines.

  “Play till the food comes,” Dad says, then to Bubbles, “Go with your brother.”

  Nenny and Dad sit in a booth while they wait for their order. Nenny takes the wrapper off a straw, smooshes it into a ball. Dad taps his key on the Formica, watching people come and go, then blinks and turns to her with a smile, remembering she’s there.

  “Okay,” he says definitively, like picking up where they’d left off—which is nowhere. “What’re they teaching you guys?”

  He means in history. “We’re learning about the Egyptians,” she says.

  “The Egyptians, huh?” His eyes light up. “King Tut!” he sings, his voice lowered an octave, but Nenny just smiles tautly. She doesn’t know that song.

  “That’s Steve Martin,” he says, a bit reproachfully, but sees that she has no idea what he’s talking about. He waves it off. “Anyway. Okay. So, the Egyptians. You learning hieroglyphics?”

  “Yeah.” Somehow it’s almost harder to relax when he’s in a good mood. There’s more pressure to keep it up, keep it going. “We’re learning about mummies.” Just then the girl comes by with their bag, which truthfully is something of a relief.

  It’s a beautiful day. The trees are rainbowed with early fall leaves and there are lots of other people at the park. Everyone seems happy. “Let’s eat by the lake,” Dad says and remembers their coats and doesn’t lock the keys in the car. He sings, “King Tut!” as they walk, and when some guy throws a football and the football rolls to Dad’s feet, he picks it up and throws it back. For a brief moment it seems possible that his mood actually will last. Nenny thinks, Maybe this is him, the dad she’s been waiting for since the divorce, since before that even, attentive and silly and sweet, that maybe her real dad is back or has finally arrived.

  Which is, of course, totally foolish, because the minute they get to the lake Dad shouts, “God dammit!”

  “Daddy, what happened?” Tiny says, but then they see what the fuss is about: Dad’s stepped in a giant dog turd.

  “Dammit,” he says again.

  “It’s okay,” Bubbles says, like a parent would, grabbing a stick. “You can scrape it off.”

  “Don’t touch it!” Dad yells, which is weird because Bubbles wasn’t. “Ugh. Ugh,” he keeps saying, and they watch for a minute as Dad—McDonald’s bag in hand, glasses sliding down his nose, Banning Unified ID swinging against his chest—grumbles in disgust and drags his foot across the grass. Nenny knew his mood wouldn’t endure but had no idea it would end with dog poop. It’s almost funny, though Nenny and the boys are smart enough not to laugh.

  “Just everyone sit down,” Dad finally says, and they sit at the picnic table. He irritably hands out the food and they start to eat.

  Nenny’s burger is smeared with ketchup and she practically gags, but she knows better than to complain. Also, today’s Happy Meal toy is a puzzle, which is not a toy. After a while Tiny says, “Can I go play?” He has to ask twice before Dad nods. Dad doesn’t tell Bubbles to go with him, but Bubbles stands up anyways, laying a hand on his shoulder before he goes. “Don’t worry, Dad,” he says. “It’s just some poop.”

  Nenny looks at Dad, who doesn’t seem to notice she’s still there. He takes a dejected bite of his Big Mac, then lets it kind of flop onto the wrapper and stares at the ground while he chews. An hour ago he seemed ready for anything—peppy, funny, father of the year. Now he just looks sad, and there are wrinkles in his coat and a coffee stain on his tie she hadn’t noticed before. It doesn’t seem fair, any of it: Mom got a new house and a new family, and Dad got what? A crappy apartment with a gross pool? Like, who does Dad even talk to? Does he have any friends?

  “Daddy, there’s tadpoles in here,” Tiny calls from the lake’s edge.

  “A whole bunch,” Bubbles echoes, but Dad just says, “Let’s go,” and leaves it to Nenny to gather the trash. He stops every ten feet or so on the way to the car, grunting and swiping his shoe across the grass. Even then, despite all that, despite his efforts, the whole ride home smells distinctly like turd.

  Discord

  IT’S LATE afternoon, and Nenny and Charles and the boys are doing homework at the table while Mom cooks, when suddenly Kat comes thundering down the stairs. She’s clutching a stick of Teen Secret in her hand. “Who did this?” she demands. No one knows what she’s talking about. She starts waving the deodorant around. “I said, who did this?” All she gets are blank stares.

  “Who did what, Kat?” Mom says, but instead of answering, Kat storms back upstairs. Of course they all follow her, except Mom, who just sighs. They scramble and shove past one another up the steps, and Kat’s already in the bathroom when they arrive, fuming by the towel rack. They crowd the doorway, poking their heads in to see.

  “Someone,” she says, her voice like sliced metal, “smeared my deodorant all over the hamper and ruined it.” They look down at the hamper. Sure enough, it’s covered in a thick layer of white paste.

  “That was me,” Tiny says, as if just now clueing in to what she’s talking about. “I did that.”

  Kat looks at him, seething. “You’d better replace my deodorant!”

  “I don’t have any money!” Tiny cries.

  “You’d better find some money, today.”

  It’s the most ridiculous argument that’s ever been had, this week anyways. Charles smacks Tiny on the head, then runs downstairs, the boys close behind. “Your brother’s a creep,” Kat says to Nenny, as if this is somehow her fault. Nenny wants to say So is yours, because yesterday Bubbles fell asleep on the couch and Charles woke him up by dragging a dirty sock across his face. But she doesn’t say it, because she wants to be in Kat’s good graces, and besides, what’s the point?

  Back downstairs, Mom’s sitting with Tiny at the table. “Honey, why did you smear the hamper like that?”

  “I was tryin’ to poop and it wouldn’t come out and I got bored,” Tiny says, already coloring again, as if smearing deodorant across a hamper is the most ordinary thing in the world.

  Mom blinks a little and shakes her head. “Well, you need to apologize. Kat is very upset.”

  “You’re damn straight I’m upset,” Kat yells from the top of the stairs.

  “I know! I’ll make her a cod,” Tiny whispers, already folding a piece of paper.

  “I think that’s a great idea,” Mom says, though it’s clear she knows it won’t accomplish much.

  The card has one of his boxy people drawn on it, purple with seven-finger hands, holding what looks like a balloon. He puts it on the bathroom counter, along with a pile of coins, about thirty-five cents. When Kat comes down later, he looks at her brightly. “Did you get my cod?”

  �
�Yes, I got your stupid card,” Kat says, and Mom looks at her like Cool it, he’s only six. “Just stay the hell away from my stuff.” She stomps back upstairs.

  “Okay!” he chirps, then runs to play in the other room.

  When Rick gets home, Mom explains the whole thing. “I guess he was pooping and the deodorant was on the counter? Who knows.”

  “Does it still work?” Rick asks, emptying his lunch sack.

  “Does what still work?”

  “The hamper. Does it still hold clothes?”

  “Well, yeah, it still holds clothes.”

  “All right, then,” he says, as if not having to replace the hamper is what matters. He goes upstairs to change out of his scrubs, and Nenny can tell Mom is frustrated, because when she catches Nenny watching, she smiles tightly before turning back to the stove.

  Truthfully? Nenny has no idea why Mom loves Rick. He hardly ever laughs, and he’s usually in a sort of crappy mood—not like being grumpy but right beside grumpy, like he might step into grumpy at any time. He’s not ugly but he isn’t exactly handsome, unless you can be handsome and also be bald. In their wedding photos they look joyful enough—smiling together on some courthouse steps—but who knows. They went off and got married in Las Vegas one weekend when Kat and Charles were at their mom’s and Nenny and the boys were at Dad’s. Which Nenny wasn’t happy about either; it’s like they kept it to themselves on purpose, and it didn’t even occur to them that the kids should be invited and that Nenny should be the flower girl.

  Anyway, maybe that’s why Rick’s so grumbly all the time. This probably isn’t exactly what he bargained for. But then again, who did?

  Gramma B