“My dad and Bobby were at Camp Dawson together.” She turned her face to look at me. “I think he helped my mom out once when her car broke down on Interstate Sixty-eight.”
We sat there for a while, but eventually I found the nerve to ask her if she’d heard from her dad since he left.
“Just an e-mail,” she said as she ashed her cigarette on the wood-slatted floor of the porch.
“How’d he sound?” I wanted her to tell me that he sounded good. I wanted her to say he made some jokes and wrote about how the war wasn’t really that bad after all. I wanted her to say the e-mails were light and cool and easy, just like I remembered her dad being.
“Hot,” she said instead. Emmy took a long, hard drag from her smoke. “He sounded hot and thirsty. I guess there’s a lot of sand.”
Her dad was a thick-necked man I’d met a handful of times when I’d gone to her house to avoid Stella after she found out about the baby. He was a sunburned, T-shirt-wearing kind of man who smelled like wood chips and drank Budweiser after he got home from work at the landscaping company. He liked to watch Dirty Jobs and This Old House and another show about fishermen in Alaska risking their lives to catch crab in the Bering Sea. He also liked to tell knock-knock jokes that weren’t very good. I remember him saying once that Emmy’s mom’s homemade spaghetti sauce was the best he had ever eaten.
“Ever,” he said, and then he winked at me over his bottle of beer as he raised it to his lips.
“I don’t think he’ll be able to get to a computer very often,” Emmy said, and she tossed the cigarette over the railing. “Dylan wants to write a poem about it for the spring issue of the lit mag.” The butt hit the ground and sizzled on the damp grass. “He wants to title it ‘Sandstorms.’”
My stomach got all fluttery then, and I wondered if the baby could hear me and Emmy talking about the things that were closing in around us.
“What if he never comes back, Lemon?” Emmy asked. “What if he’s gone? I can’t stay here for the rest of my life and take care of my mom and my sister.”
And she was right, she couldn’t get stuck in Morgantown, stagnant and sad forever, just like I couldn’t get stuck inside Stella’s world, running and restless, endlessly unhinged.
“I’m going to take you somewhere amazing,” I told her, and I took her hand and lowered our entwined fingers to my knee. “We’re going to take a trip over Christmas break, and when we get back you’ll be happy again,” I promised. “And I bet your dad will be home safe and sound soon, Emmy,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure he was ever coming back, wasn’t sure safe and sound was really ever possible.
My first official prenatal appointment was scheduled for that Monday, and Stella took off from work early and picked me up from school so we could go to the hospital for the exam.
“If you go, I go,” Stella said, which I was glad for. I always got nervous around doctors. I think it was the white coats: The clean, stiff fabric made me feel like they were hiding something. The white coats and the smell of all that sanitation.
Dr. Stines asked a ton of questions about my medical history and decided to do an ultrasound to check for the heartbeat of the baby and to figure out exactly when my due date was. I lay on a table, eyes closed while the technician did the test, and all the while Stella stood next to the bed waiting for good news or bad, we weren’t sure yet.
The tech tilted the monitor toward us. “Look.”
And then the image showed up on the screen, and nothing mattered after that because I finally saw the thing I’d been so worried about, this tiny lump of shadow flickering on the monitor. The technician was talking about the fetal heart rate and the amniotic fluid volume, but all I could think of was this child I’d made in a tattoo parlor with a guy I’d probably never see again. This child who would be with me forever.
I thought of Johnny Drinko, of how he’d probably never thought of me again after that day at the shop and how his life was probably no different now than it was before. And then I thought of my own dad, a man I’d never met, living somewhere far away in California, not thinking of me or Stella or the little heartbeat thumping in my stomach.
But mostly I thought of my mother doing the same thing over seventeen years earlier all the way in San Francisco. I reached over and took her hand, and in the dark like that it was easy to imagine her just like me, laid out on a table watching the screen as her entire life changed, as she realized, just like I did, that nothing would ever be the same again. For her it was the moment that the vision of her life and what she thought she would become transformed into an unrecognizable image.
I cocked my head a little and looked her up and down in her tight blue jeans, her low-cut shirt and high-heeled boots. I remembered our shitty house with the stained carpet and the worn-out couch waiting for us on the other side of town, and I realized I’d spent most of my childhood being angry at her for making us live like that, for not having enough money for us to rent a nicer home, and for refusing to pick a place to settle down in. I looked at Stella’s face, the wrinkles and tired eyes camouflaged by the darkness of the room, and I wondered if she would go back if she could, wondered what she would change and how things would go the second time around if she had a chance to fix the choices she regretted.
And before we left I found out that I would be having a baby the first week of July. Just like that. A person unlike all the other people who had drifted in and out of my life with my mother. A person who would stay. A child who would be bound to me in the same way I was bound to Stella.
WE GOT OUT OF SCHOOL EARLY the day before Thanksgiving, so Emmy and I sat on the porch at my house, enjoying the freedom of our mothers being stuck at work. Stella was at Simon’s studio taking calls and organizing his portfolio, while Emmy’s mom served coffee at a diner near the mall. We complained about the weather turning too cold too fast and about finals just around the corner and about our mothers and the way they still treated us like children.
“I miss my dad,” Emmy said as she fingered her four-leaf-clover necklace. “Mom never paid as much attention to me and Margie before he left. It’s like she’s worried if she’s not careful, we’ll up and disappear too.”
She was smoking, and I was watching the road in front of our house where the neighborhood kids played: two brothers on dirt bikes in matching black sweatshirts, a little sister who couldn’t keep up on her red and white scooter as her brothers sped out of view. On the other side of the street a woman in slippers walked to her mailbox and yelled for her dog, a honey-colored mutt that had jetted next door to rummage through a pile of trash bags tossed on the lawn.
“I swear if she asks me one more time if Dylan and I are having sex, I’m going to say yes.” Emmy flicked her butt over the railing and pulled her hands into the sleeves of her shirt, shivering. “I can’t imagine why she keeps asking.”
“Because your best friend’s knocked up and she wants to make sure I’m not rubbing off on you,” I told her. “Hello.”
She nodded, reached into her purse, and lit another cigarette as we talked about our trip, picking the departure and return dates as if everything was planned even though neither of us had bought a ticket and neither of us had told our mothers yet. The semester started the second week of January, so if we left two days after Christmas, we’d have ten days out of town, which sounded like a lifetime as we sat on the porch.
She said, “Let’s go west,” and I said, “Obviously.”
“I hear Lake Michigan’s pretty badass,” she told me.
“In the winter? Way too cold,” I said, shaking my head. “Plus, I want to see the Mississippi River.”
“Fair enough. What about those big heads?” she asked. “I think they’re in Nevada?”
But I was pretty sure they were carved in a mountainside somewhere in South Dakota, and besides, even though I hadn’t told Emmy yet, I was hoping we’d head all the way to California.
“We should pick a day, a time that we both have to tell our
mothers by, a deadline,” she suggested, since we still hadn’t figured out how to talk Stella and her mom into letting us go.
“It doesn’t matter when I tell her,” I said. “Stella will have a shit fit. She’ll try to stop us. I want to tell her when Simon’s around,” I said, thinking he could balance out her anger with all that calmness he always had. “And I think I’ll buy the bus ticket first. If I use my own money, she won’t be able to do anything about it,” I said, because in addition to my allowance and the fives I’d been sneaking from her purse, Simon had started slipping me ten-dollar bills after he found out about the baby, and I hadn’t spent a dime of it, just in case.
Next to me, Emmy nodded. “I like the way you think, Lem.” Emmy had her own money too. She had worked that summer babysitting a couple of kids who lived in her neighborhood, and she said she wanted to use every penny of it to get the hell out of Morgantown, even if it was just for a week or so.
“It’s like they don’t understand we’re not kids anymore,” I told her. “I mean, I may not have a license, but I’ll have a baby and a diploma this time next year,” I said, and I meant it as a joke, a way to lighten the mood and verify my adult status, but once the words were out of my mouth I got a sick-to-my-stomach feeling that settled heavy in my lap.
“I want to know about the dad,” Emmy said after a while.
“My dad?” I asked, but she shook her head.
“The baby’s dad. Does he know?”
I thought of Johnny Drinko still in Virginia and how easily I let him have me in the back room of the tattoo shop that day. I’d never done it in a chair before, and I hadn’t been able to figure out where to put my legs, one foot hanging down toward the floor, searching for leverage, and the other awkwardly folded between Johnny’s knee and the armrest. He told me to bring both legs up to the seat as he reorganized my body, and I ended up squatted above his lap like I was digging in the dirt. Burying treasure, or searching for it, maybe. He put both his hands on my waist then, pulling me onto him as he tried to find a rhythm. Eventually my leg fell asleep, a bloodless limb dangling.
“He doesn’t know anything about me, really.” I sank down into my chair. “He was older. Twenty-seven, I think.” I imagined Johnny Drinko spending the rest of his life in that small town in Virginia inking big-boobed women with frizzy yellow perms and drinking beer with his buddies at dead ends in the county. “He tasted like cigarettes, and we did it in a chair where he worked. I sat on top,” I told her. I could feel Emmy looking at me, but I kept my eyes on my fingers as they traced circles around my belly button. “It didn’t feel very good,” I said finally.
“Jesus Christ, Lemon,” she said, and I tried to decide if she thought I was disgusting, if she thought I was a slut, but then she said, “He sounds like such a scumbag,” which made me feel a little better. “So you’re not going to tell him, then?”
“I wouldn’t know how to get a hold of him if I wanted to,” I lied. If I had decided to tell Johnny Drinko about the baby, it wouldn’t have been that difficult to track him down at the tattoo parlor, but it was easier to pretend the option didn’t exist. Stella had worked hard to talk me into believing my father would have made things worse for us, in the same way I was working hard to convince myself Johnny Drinko would make things worse for me, and by that time he lived in a world far too detached from mine to bridge the gap.
In the morning I found Stella in the kitchen: Pop-Tart in the toaster, coffee in the mug, black with half a packet of sugar. It was Thanksgiving Day, and I still had sleep in my eyes as I pulled on a sweatshirt. She stirred the mug and then used the spoon to check her lipstick in the reflection. November was the month of Fire Engine Red. She first discovered the color in lipstick form, and she kept a tube of it everywhere important: one in her purse, one on the bathroom counter next to the bars of hotel soap she always took when we traveled, another tube on her dresser top, the tip blunted from use.
“Fire Engine Red just sounds good, doesn’t it?” she said to me a few weeks earlier in Walgreens.
We were waiting for her birth control pills prescription, her in the makeup aisle, and me in the school-supplies aisle running my fingers over perfect five-subject notebooks and rolls of Scotch tape, boxes of paperclips, and scissors still shiny and sharp with newness.
“Get over here, Lemon,” she said. I stood by her as she took the tester, swiped the lipstick over her mouth, and looked in the little square mirror stuck next to the sale rack. “It’s good, right?” she said, and I nodded and told her she was beautiful just like I knew she wanted. Sometimes it was easier that way. “Fire Engine Red,” she read from the bottom of the tube.
The lipstick made her teeth look white. White like light-bulbs or the laces on new tennis shoes, white like the sugar she put in her coffee. “Your teeth look like snow,” I said, which I guess she liked the sound of because she reached over, pushed my hair away from my eyes, and rubbed her nose across mine, Eskimo style.
“This is the month of Fire Engine Red,” she announced, and then she took three tubes off the shelf. Afterward we went to the art supply store and found a matching paint for her canvases.
But with the sun slicing lines into the kitchen through the blinds that morning and my mom standing there in a cream-colored sweater and black miniskirt, with her hair pulled back off her face, Fire Engine Red was so bright and brilliant, it almost hurt to look at her. She squinted into the spoon again and wiped a smear from her teeth with her finger as I sat down at the table and opened my book to the dog-eared page I’d left off at the night before. I was working through a list of Tom Robbins novels and was anxious to find out what happened at the Rubber Rose Ranch to Sissy Hankshaw, the small-town heroine of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Stella dropped the mug in the sink, and on her way out of the room she stopped at the table where I sat and placed the hot Pop-Tart in front of me, its strawberry jam bleeding onto the paper towel. She bent to kiss me on the forehead, and she smelled a little like paint and a lot like hotel soap.
I thought of telling her then. I almost grabbed her hand so I could explain it was my turn to go west. I had practiced it in my head enough times that it should have been easy to start with the I-know-you’re-not-going-to-like-the-sound-of-it-but-I-promise-it’s-going-to-be-okay part and to end with the I’m-almost-eighteen-and-you-were-my-age-when-you-left-for-San-Francisco part. I wanted it over with before I lost my nerve, but it was a holiday, a bad day for picking fights, so I let the moment pass.
“I’m heading out to grab the bird and the fixings,” she said. “I expect you to be here to help when I get back,” and then, “I’m fully prepared to admit your apple pie kicks my apple pie’s ass, which makes you in charge of dessert.”
For Thanksgiving, Stella, Simon, and I invited Emmy and her mom and her older sister, Margie, over to eat turkey and drink wine and pretend we were thankful for all the things we had, when really I think we were all hoping to distract one another from the things we were missing. I was feeling pretty nauseous all the time by then, and Emmy’s family hadn’t heard from her dad in almost a month, but I guess the wine was pretty good because everyone seemed to get along okay, and everyone thought of something decent to say when we went around the table before dinner to name one thing we were glad about.
“I’m thankful my boss finally taught me how to give highlights, so I can make more money now,” Margie said as she swept her bangs away from her face.
“I’m thankful that I’m healthy,” Simon said. “And that we could all be together today. I’m thankful for the people I love,” he said, and he reached for Stella’s hand.
I thought it was sweet, him looking at her like he believed in them, but Mom shifted her eyes to the floor and pulled her fingers away, which reminded me of the bartender she told me about from Gibbie’s Pub, a man she’d met recently with her friends on a girls’ night out.
“I’m thankful for this food,” she said quickly, reaching for her glass. “And for Lemon,” she added when she
put the wine back down. “For Lemon being safe and healthy, even if she is, you know.” She shrugged one shoulder, a new habit she saved for times when we talked about the baby.
When it was my turn, I said something lame and predictable about being thankful for having a family and food to eat and a house to live in, which was fine because I was pretty grateful for those things, but when it was Emmy’s turn, she froze, silent and shell shocked and gaping into her heap of mashed potatoes like no one else was there.
“You’re up, baby girl,” her mom prompted, nodding at her.
I thought maybe it was the joint she’d smoked in the backyard before dinner, but when I kicked her under the table and she looked me in the face, I could tell she might puke or might cry, sitting there thinking about her dad in Afghanistan a million miles away, imagining him eating sand and drinking warm water on Thanksgiving day.
“Emeline,” her mother said.
“It’s okay, she doesn’t have to go,” I said, hoping we could just skip over the whole thing and start eating, but I guess she snapped out of it when she heard my voice, because she looked down at her plate and said she was thankful Stella and I had invited them over for dinner since her mom burnt the hell out of the turkey the year before.
I thought that was pretty smart.
Afterward, Margie left to meet her boyfriend at the bowling alley, and the grown-ups went to the living room with another bottle of wine, so Emmy and I headed out for a walk around the neighborhood. Emmy had knitted a beanie for Dylan that week in home ec class, and she wanted to slip it into his mailbox and leave it for him as a surprise. He lived about a mile from my neighborhood, so we planned to sneak over and drop it off that night.
“It’s good for me to exercise,” I reminded Stella when she hesitated to let us leave the house together. “It’s good for the baby,” I said, just so I could watch her squirm.
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