The Dime Box

by Karen Grose

  Latoya’s mother glanced at her wrist. “I’m sure he’s on his way,” she said, reassurance warm in her voice.

  When Latoya returned, hair wet, in pajamas, she climbed onto her father’s chair, snuggling her nose in his shoulder. He smiled and wrapped his arms around her. Greta pulled her eyes away.

  “Should we call?” Latoya’s mother asked, stifling a yawn.

  Greta stared at the carpet. Even if she wanted to, she didn’t know the number.

  “I’ll get the class list.” Latoya’s mother disappeared to the front hall and, when she returned, there were lines etched across her forehead. “There’s been some sort of mix-up.”

  Greta’s cheeks burned. She pictured Ian on the couch, his face pressed into the plastic. She could almost smell the stink of the drool spilling out of his mouth.

  She gave the best-surprised look she could muster.

  The pencil stopped scratching the page and Detective Perez motioned to the chair. “I appreciate how that might have made you feel back then.”

  “He forgot me.”

  “There’s thousands, maybe millions, of parents who get caught up late at work every day. Meetings. Special projects. A call from the boss. Traffic alone is a disaster.”

  She sat, arms at her sides, nerves ragged. “He was home.”

  “Maybe he fell asleep.”

  “More like sleeping it off.”

  Another taunting silence ensued. That hadn’t been the worst of it. After she’d put on the pajamas Latoya’s mother laid out and wormed her way into the makeshift bed on the floor, the blanket wrapped around her, thick, soft and warm, all she could think of was Bunny. Like every night, the lock outside her bedroom door would be bolted tight. She prayed he wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night in the dark, alone, missing her, and wondering where she was.

  Detective Perez looked over the top of her glasses. “Let’s move on. What about mental health issues in your family? Any history?”

  Greta looked up. “What? I don’t know.”

  “If there are any—and I’m not saying there are—it’d be nothing to be ashamed of. The whole stigma thing drives me crazy.”

  “Nice word choice,” she remarked. “For your information, detective, my generation knows a lot more about mental health than yours does. Genetics. Hormones. Stress. The environment. Which, by the way, you wrecked. Back in the day, as my mom would’ve said, you hid your shit under the rug.”

  Detective Perez nodded in agreement. “It was a different era, I’ll give you that.” She folded her hands in front of her. “I’d like you to focus on your father. Did he have—”

  She smacked her palm to her forehead. “He was born like that.”

  “And your mother?” said Detective Perez.

  “What about her?”

  “Anything up with her mental health?”

  “I don’t think so.” Then she stopped. “Except maybe once. A whole year was out of whack.”

  TEN

  “Y our eyes look like scary marshmallows,” Greta told her one morning over breakfast. “They’re white and puffy and shiny inside.”

  Her mother glanced up from her coffee cup and rested her chin in her hands.

  “Are you sick?” she asked.

  “No, honey. Just tired.”

  She put her spoon down. “A little or a lot?”

  “A bit.”

  “Are you gonna be slow? Or are you cranky?” She didn’t want to miss her bus.

  “Neither,” said her mother.

  “Then what?”

  “It feels like storm clouds all around me.”

  Though Greta looked out the kitchen window, the morning sky clear and bright and blue, by the time the bus dropped her off after school, she knew something was up. Her mother wasn’t standing waiting for her at the stop. She ran down the laneway to the cabin.

  “Hello?” she called out.

  No answer.

  She pressed the front door shut. The kitchen was empty and dark, and down the hall in the living room, the TV was black, the chairs on the back patio empty.

  “Mom?” she called out again.

  A gnawing pain filled her stomach. She rushed upstairs and opened her bedroom door, covering her nose with her hands. It stunk of boiled cabbage. “I’m home,” she whispered.

  Her mother didn’t stir.

  “You forgot me,” she said louder.

  Still no response.

  She dropped her hands to her sides and leaned down close to the edge of her mother’s head. “Hey.”

  Emily squinted through the darkness. “That you, Colleen?”

  She pulled a face. Who else would it be? “Who’s Colleen?”

  “An old friend. Just forget it… I was half-asleep. Go watch TV.”

  She didn’t move an inch. “Is it the storm clouds?”

  Her mother nodded. “You see them?”

  She didn’t know what to say. She’d looked for them all day. On the way to school and outside at recess and on the way home on the bus, but she couldn’t find them.

  “Kind of,” she told her so she didn’t feel bad.

  Her mother patted her head, covered her ears with her pillow, and rolled over.

  Greta found Bunny in her room and went downstairs. Desperate to know more about storm clouds, she flipped through the channels on TV. Were they invisible? Dangerous? Would the power go out again? Were they magic?

  After school each day, whenever she found her mother in bed or on the couch, Greta searched for the clouds; she’d look on top of the covers, on the dresser beside her make-up, and underneath the mattress where the dust bunnies lived, but she never found them.

  ***

  “Depression’s complicated,” Detective Perez said.

  In no hurry, Greta took a slow, deep breath. “She was always sleeping. Stopped brushing her teeth. She had these cracked, flaky, dry lips. She didn’t eat much either.”

  The detective nodded. “Unless someone’s been there themselves, we’re still learning what to do with it.”

  Though she tried to piece together what she knew, not a lot of it came back. “I knew she was unhappy, but back then I didn’t understand why.”

  “Were there services up there to help?”

  “I told you: we didn’t do doctors.”

  “Right.” The detective cleared her throat. “That must have been tough.”

  She pulled her hands over her face and sighed. “Not really. It didn’t bother me half as much as the lying.”

  It was a late afternoon in December.

  “Greta is going through a difficult time,” she heard her mother tell Mrs. Harvey as she eavesdropped on their phone call. Happy her mother had finally come out of her bedroom, what she overheard stunned her. Maybe she’d heard wrong. She shut her eyes, straining to capture the conversation from the steps of the wooden staircase.

  “She clung to my knees when the school bus pulled up, begging to stay home.”

  She hadn’t. And it was Lie Number Two. She was flattened. Her beloved Mrs. Harvey would think she was a baby. Her prized Snack Helper job would be at risk.

  Greta pushed herself off the bottom step and stormed into the kitchen, waiting for the conversation to finish. She counted to one, two, three; silently fuming. After her mother hung up the phone, she exploded. “What’s wrong with you?” The strength of her voice echoed through the kitchen and bounced off the dingy white walls. “You know why I cried at the bus stop. You pinched me hard under my arms.”

  Her mother turned, startled, but didn’t respond, not even to defend herself.

  Greta took a step back. Who are you? Where is my real mother? She wouldn’t have forgotten what happened. What did you do with her? Her real mother would know the truth.

  She yanked up her sleeve and pointed to each one of the bruises. Purple and yellow and brown. The impostor took them all in.

  Greta waited. A. Full. Awkward. Minute.

  Her mother pursed her lips and chewed slowly on the bottom
left corner. Greta knew the look. Contrite action was needed—and fast. She told her she didn’t like it either when the kids called her Wretchen Gretchen but that, deep inside, she didn’t care. The hurt was her mother’s, not hers. She didn’t pick her own name.

  Lie Number Three came months later when Principal Parthi discovered Greta wasn’t in school. He called the house to investigate, and her mother said she’d kept her home for the day to help with the spring-cleaning, claiming four hands made for easier work than two. But it didn’t add up. Ian was home, so there were actually six hands, not four, and cleaning day was Saturday. That’s what the rules taped to the refrigerator said. She couldn’t read them yet, but she’d heard them so often she was absolutely certain it was on the list. She listened to the rest of the conversation, waiting to see what would happen.

  “Principal Parthi, I’m fully within my rights to keep my daughter home now and again to help out with the chores.”

  Pause.

  “I understand that.”

  Pause.

  “Well, I’ll have to check with my husband.”

  Longer pause. She cleared her throat.

  “Then she’ll be on the bus Monday morning.” Her mother placed the phone in the receiver.

  “Why are you still lying?” Greta asked.

  Her face turned deep red. “I’m not.”

  “And now you’re lying again.”

  “Greta, I can keep you home if I want to.” She knelt down beside her and held her arms out. “Besides,” she smiled, “when we’re both home together, we’re not lonely, are we?”

  She stepped away and put her hands on her hips. “I’m not lonely. I have Mrs. Harvey.”

  Emily winced.

  “And I have the kids at school.”

  Her mother pushed herself up from the floor. “When we’re together, we’re safe.”

  She looked at her mother. Had she gone insane? School was perfectly safe. Mr. Parthi said it was, and she’d heard him say it more than once. “If you need to be safe, you should find your own school for grown-ups,” she told her.

  Her mother’s face clouded over. Greta could see from the way she was staring off in the distance, she was thinking. Good for her. Maybe she’d go find one—but if she did, there was something she needed to know. “Whichever one you choose,” she told her, “you probably can’t lie there.”

  A sharp crack rang out through the office. Greta stared wide-eyed at the detective.

  “Sorry. Dropped my notebook.” She stretched her arm down under her desk. “I can see why you were upset. Why do you think she was doing that?”

  “Because of my father. She felt better when I was around.” She pressed a hand to her chest. “All she and I had were each other.”

  The detective ran a finger across the page. “You just told me you had friends at school.”

  “It wasn’t until right after that.”

  Detective Perez frowned. “So you weren’t telling the truth?”

  She raised her hands in the air. “I was. The timing’s just disjointed.”

  Monday morning found Greta standing at the water table when a voice to her right said, “Nice you’re back.” The voice belonged to Latoya. She wore a purple dress with thick woolen tights, and had carefully braided pigtails perched high on her head. She was small, unlike Greta’s tall. Her rich cocoa brown complexion contrasted with Greta’s porcelain skin. Latoya spun her tugboat around an imaginary route in the oversized plastic tub. “Why is the sky blue?”

  Greta pushed her limp black hair back from her face. She’d never thought about it. It just was and always had been, except when it rained. “I dunno,” she said. She was happy one of her classmates was talking to her. “How small are the people on the radio?” she asked Latoya.

  Latoya pinched her fingers together. ‘Teeny weeny tiny, like this.”

  Greta flashed a grin. “Do you know the man who comes into your room at night to make sure you’re asleep?”

  Latoya turned to face her. “What?”

  “And if you aren’t, he gets mad?”

  Latoya shook her head side-to-side. “Nope.”

  “Well, how long does someone have to stay under the blanket, like they’re dead, until the man goes away again?”

  Latoya paused. She stirred her boat around in the water. “I don’t think that’s true for Earth. But if it was true for far away, like somewhere in a monster movie, I’d guess about six minutes.”

  Greta considered Latoya’s answer and thought it sounded right. A long time, but not too long. This girl was smart. To be sure, she asked her one more question. “Do you know if, when bees eat flowers, their farts smell like flowers?”

  Latoya laughed. The space between her two front teeth showed. “Of course, silly. What else would they smell like?”

  Greta picked up her tugboat with her left hand and steered it across the surface of the water. Then she stretched out her right, inching her fingers along the cool plastic side of the tub, until she found Latoya’s.

  ELEVEN

  “I s this the same Latoya who was at your apartment last night?” Detective Perez said.

  She smiled. “The one and only.”

  The detective flipped through the pages of her notebook. When she stopped, she said, “Her last name is—”

  “Jackson.”

  Detective Perez wrote it down and underlined it twice.

  “Want to talk to her?” She reached around the back of the chair, dug through her purse and pulled out her phone. “She knows about my parents. School, too. Grade One sucked. We had this teacher, Mrs. Stanton. If Ian ever came to school, I swear they would’ve been best friends. They both loved silence.” What she didn’t tell her was that, while Ms. Stanton repeatedly smacked the little silver bell on the side of her desk to bring order to her classroom, Ian demanded that everyone at home have a clearly marked and accessible off button. Greta’s, he’d told her, was located on the side of her head. “And they both thought kids learned by repeating stuff a thousand times.”

  “Sounds familiar,” Detective Perez sighed.

  “When Latoya and me told my mom Mrs. Stanton was too strict, she promised we’d adjust, and when I told her Dad was an asshole, she promised he’d change, too.”

  “Did he?”

  “It was all lies.” She held out her phone. “Call her if you don’t believe me.”

  “Latoya? How long exactly have you known her?”

  “We’re like sisters.”

  “I didn’t ask who you were. I asked how long you’ve know her.”

  “I told you. My whole life. She’d do anything for me.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of. I’m sure you understand why that’s a problem.”

  She shrugged and put her phone in her purse as a narrow-faced woman stuck her head through the doorframe of the office.

  “Astra?”

  Detective Perez craned her neck in her direction. “Are they back?”

  “No, but I searched up the vic’s background like you asked.”

  When the woman stepped into the room, Detective Perez took the document from her hand and skimmed through it. After a short silence, she turned back to face her.

  “I’m confused. In your words,” she looked at her notebook, her tone sour, “your father was an asshole. But it says here,” she fluttered the piece of paper in her hand, “he was employed as a Deacon at a church.” She put it down and planted her palms on the desk. Her voice rose. “I don’t know a single deacon who acts like a jerk.”

  Greta’s chest trembled. “Right. And you know all of them?

  “Of course not.”

  “Follow them home and see how they treat their families.”

  Anger drained from her voice as quickly as it came as she continued, “Besides Latoya, did anyone else see what you’ve described?”

  She sucked in a deep breath. Vanilla, nuts and sweet cherry filled her nostrils and brought back every memory. The tinkling of the bell in her ears during servi
ce. People mingling on the steps afterward, bodies crushing into her all around. The relief she’d felt in the backseat of the car with its windows open, the breeze in her hair.

  Then her father’s eyes.

  “Oh yeah. There was the day he blew up at the candy store.”

  Greta’s only hope for refuge from the drudgery of her life came during the same three hours each Sunday when the Giffen family attended St. James Church in Bracebridge; every Sunday, rain, snow or shine. During the service, she felt the weight of two pairs of eyes bearing down upon her. God’s eyes looking into her soul for the sins she’d been told she’d committed, and Ian’s eyes, cold and far scarier, as he waited to call out her mistakes.

  During the week, she practiced the routines of Sunday service in her bedroom.

  Stand up. Sing. Sit down. Kneel. Pray.

  Stand up. Sing. Sit down. Kneel. Pray.

  Pray. She had no idea what praying was supposed to accomplish, but she worked hard to perfect Minister Marcello’s instructions. It was important not to embarrass Ian in public. Her bruises were reminders of what happened when she did. While the first two hours of the service were nerve-wracking and made her stomach ache, the promise of what came after spurred her on.

  “How’d you do today?” Ian asked after they spilled onto the church steps with rest of the congregation and walked to the car.

  She kept her eyes to the ground. “Good.”

  Ian unlocked the truck, sat down in the front seat, and stared at her through the rear-view mirror. Fear rose up through the pit of her stomach as she reviewed her whole performance in fast motion in her mind.

  “I got all the steps, right?”

  He didn’t respond.

  When he finally nodded, she exhaled, relief washing over her, and smiled back at him through the mirror. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his spare change, counting out one dime for each part of the routine she’d perfected. That week, she’d nailed all five. As he pulled the truck out of the parking lot, her mother said, “Don’t you think it’s a good time to start saving those dimes?”