Waiting on Justin

by Lucy H. Delaney

  Believe it or not, I preferred the skunk breath to the booze breath. When he was drinking, I was liable to get slapped or spanked if I turned my head or closed my eyes, so I guess maybe the weed did chill him out after all. If he was yelling at Justin, it was no big thing for him to punch him. His favorites were sucker punches. I think he liked those best because they didn't leave bruises.

  We learned to take his rants just like the soldiers in the movies we would watch together as a raggedy family. If we stood there strong, stiff, and stoic, looking straight ahead, he would eventually tire out and leave us alone. We never yelled, “Sir, yes, sir!” like they did in the movies, though. That would have not fared well for us.

  I guess it's OK with your neighbors if you fight with your girlfriend and slap your kids around as long as you mostly keep it inside where they can't hear. I wonder if anyone would have called if Clayton took it outside more often. I can't blame our neighbors; they probably thought our life was as normal as theirs. We didn't bother them and they didn't bother us.

  My favorite neighbor, Justin's too, was Mrs. Diaz. Mom called her an old bag; we called her Gramma Diaz, even though she wasn't anymore our grandma than Uncle Jon was our uncle. She was as persnickety as they get. She went to church every Sunday and Wednesday, and she smelled like old flowers. I liked that smell. She displayed pictures of her family in golden, gilded, gaudy frames all the way down her million-mile-long hallway. I always seemed to find my way to the hall. I loved to stare at all the happy people behind the glass in her frames. None of her people held beer bottles or pipes in their hand; they smiled just because they were happy.

  Mrs. Diaz never asked us what happened at our house, and it never entered my mind to tell her that sometimes my parents left us alone or let people party till they puked. I did ask, once, where her bar was. Every house I had ever been in had a bar or liquor cabinet or something. She chuckled, exactly the way you would expect a chubby grandma with silver-gray hair to chuckle, patted my head, and said, “Oh honey, not everyone needs alcohol to have a good time.”

  I loved to go over to her house. One step inside and I was consumed by a cloud of warmth and love. We ate her cookies; she baked them fresh for the neighbor kids every Wednesday before church. It was a ruse: get us in, sugar us up with sweets and invite us to church. How could we say no? Our parents were only too happy to let us go since it gave them one night a week they didn't have to deal with our snotty noses.

  Gramma Diaz went to a church that was exactly four songs away. I still remember every single word to each song on the cassette tape she would play. We would go to AWANA as they called it; we called it game night. We played games, memorized Bible verses and got fake paper bucks to spend on goodies like sunglasses and erasers. Whenever I thought of heaven it always resembled the AWANA store, full of good things I wanted but could never reach.

  Like I said earlier, our neighborhood was kind of spread out, not like the new developments nowadays. We lived at the end of a long dead-end road with six houses on one side and five on the other. I could only see the Diaz house from the street, and even theirs was barely visible because it was so far back. Our bus would drop us off at the beginning of the road, where Justin, Lizzie, and I would get off, along with two other kids, Michael and Kim. We saw other kids' parents wait in cars for them at the front of their roads; my parents almost never did. Clayton worked, and Mom was usually drunk by three or had a headache—and besides, we were old enough to know where home was anyway. So we walked home from the bus unaccompanied.

  The road was long enough to keep the houses spread out. Maybe they really didn't know and couldn't hear what happened at our house. I know trees blocked one house from another, so I'm sure no one could see into our house to see the fighting and drinking just like no one could see mischievous kids prowling houses that weren't theirs. I'm not going to lie, once or twenty times we walked down my neighbors’ driveways. Once or twenty times we opened their locked doors, ate their food—just a little bit, like innocent mice—and left before anyone knew we were there.

  Our house was the last one, a half a mile or so from the beginning of the road and far away from the other houses. Clayton bought it before I was born from an old-timer he used to work for after school, right after the Army sent him packing and he went back to doing drywall. That's why he got it when he and Karina split: because he bought it and because he kept Justin, the courts thought he was better for Justin than his mom. It made me wonder what his mom was really like for anyone to consider Clayton the better parent.

  Our home—or rather, Clayton's—was down a rutted, gravel-less, brush-lined driveway of its own. Maybe that's why no one saw, heard, or said anything about what happened there. I think if I were a neighbor of that ramshackle house down the road, I could have heard the yelling. I think I would have called about it. Yeah, I would have.

  When I was a kid growing up in it, I didn't realize how bad it was. I thought it was normal. But other people must have known that wasn't normal. Maybe not Clayton and Mom—maybe they were so broken they thought it was fine—but the neighbors? All of them? They had to know, at least some of them, like Gramma Diaz and the young couple in the pea green house. They had to have heard—at least in the summer when the windows were open. I swear Clayton would yell louder in the summer because his voice didn't stick in the house the way it did when they were closed. It was like he thought he needed to be louder for us to get the point that we were good for nothing. The old man with the huge hearing aids all the way up at the front of the road—I can accept his not hearing us. But there were nine other houses that could have. I still do blame them, I guess, and I need to get over it—accept the things I cannot change, right? But I can't quite accept it yet because if I could hear their music and barbecues, they must have heard Clayton yelling at me, Justin, Lizzie, and Mom. I don't know what good it would have done to call the police; maybe they would have taken me to Aunt Aerin sooner, or maybe they wouldn't have done anything. But if I were my neighbor back then, I would have done something to save a kid like me from a life like that.

  In the summertime he played his music louder too. I could hear it from far away in the woods where we would play. But I could still hear his voice over it—not the words but the yelling—when he was mad at Mom. The music blasted outside but inside it was so loud I could barely think; their Friday friends liked it that way. They only had big parties every now and then, but they had friends over most weekends if they weren't out at the bar themselves. We would play outside with the other kids who had parents like ours. We took them to the woods where we had climbing trees and forts and freedom. That was the nice thing about their Friday friends, a lot of them had kids too. The grown-ups would be inside listening to AC/DC, Queen, and Duran Duran, while getting wasted, and we would be outside pretending to be real adults in wars and houses. We would stay outside as long as we could to avoid the noise and the noise makers, spilled beers, and nonsense.

  Like I said, my mom was lucky: she had a man. In their social circle, Clayton was actually a pretty dang good man; he came home almost every night, he kept a job that paid the bills, he even cooked us dinner most weeknights while watching reruns of The Honeymooners, which I hated. Yeah, he was a great guy. Ha! All he expected in return was a clean house (which my mom could never keep clean enough), a stocked bar (which he accused us of stealing from), and kids who kept their mouths shut. Because of Clayton's awesomeness, Mom didn't have to work like most of the women we knew. She could stay home, which was a good thing because her drinking habit would have gotten in the way of a real job. She had the shakes almost every morning when we left for school (that's if she wasn't blacked out from the night before), and she was drunk or on her way there by the time we got home, yet she still contributed financially by babysitting Lizzie.

  Lizzie's mom, Brenda, was one of my mom's drinking buddies who liked to listen to the loud music too. She wasn't lucky like my mom—she was single, and busted her butt to make ends meet. Lizzi
e's dad was a three-time loser, back before they even had three-strikes laws. He was locked up for something—murder, I think. He was a biker, I guess; Lizzie doesn't talk about him, and I know better than to ask about bad memories. She really doesn't like to talk about the past unless it's about the good times.

  So anyway, Lizzie's mom, Brenda, raised her alone but needed help. She worked as a residential house cleaner until she failed a drug test; then she took anything she could find for a while. She was a cashier at a grocery store, then a convenience store; she worked at a mill doing something, but I don't know what. She always worked on the swing shift and got welfare to cover the difference—and the child support the locked-up loser didn't pay. Later she found her true calling as a dancer, but that's Lizzie's story to tell, not mine, not really. I'll save it for when it comes in to play. All that matters for now is that Mom helped Brenda out by watching Lizzie and because of Brenda's schedule she stayed the weekends with us and almost all the weekdays too, and Brenda paid her for it. I don't know how much, but I think she and Clayton relied on the money to make our own ends meet.

  I'm pretty sure Brenda and Clayton slept together. I don't know if it was an affair or only a booty call thing they did when Mom was passed out, but I'm almost certain it happened. Clayton was the kind of guy who wouldn't let an opportunity like that go; Brenda had a reputation for sleeping around, and she was indebted to us. She gave my mom money for watching Lizzie, so she had to be paying Clayton with something too for him to put up with another sniveling brat hanging out around his house all the time. Sex is all I can figure she gave him for his kindness to her daughter. Justin and I would never talk in front of Lizzie about what kind of a woman her mom was.

  Justin got into plenty of fights over Brenda’s reputation. People talked about what Brenda did after she started dancing. The guys probably talked about it because they got dances from her themselves. Kids at school made fun of Lizzie for it too. If Justin caught her crying because of something someone said, he would find out who called her mom a name and beat him up. It worked out well for Lizzie but not so much for Justin. Whenever he got suspended for fighting, which happened all too often, Clayton would let him have it.

  “You like to fight, huh, boy?! Fight me then, and I'll show you what's up. Fight me, punk!”

  “No, Dad,” Justin would always say before Clayton would give him a famous sucker punch, sometimes knocking him to the floor.

  “You like it? You like fighting?”

  “No, sorry.”

  “You're right, you're sorry! Is it going to happen again?”

  “No.”

  “You sure about that? 'Cause this isn't the first time. When are you going to get it through your thick skull that you can't be fighting in school?”

  Justin never cried or showed weakness, but Lizzie did, her big brown doe eyes would pool with tears that spilled over onto her pink cheeks when Clayton bellowed at him. Clayton only allowed him bread and butter on the days he stayed home, telling him that's all he would get in jail if he kept it up, so we would save bits of food from our dinner and take it to him afterward. I don't know what Justin did while we were at school, but on the days he was suspended, Lizzie and I always knew he would be there to get us when the yellow doors opened.

  CHAPTER 2

  BEFORE I GET to the night I fell in love with Justin I have to tell a little more about us when we were kids. Back then it was the three of us—me, Justin, and Lizzie—for life. We would get off the bus together and walk the long dead-end road to the house.

  The two other kids on our street were brother and sister. They were spoiled losers who called us poor because our parents couldn't put us in designer clothes like theirs did. We didn't talk to them much at all. They ran in a different circle, one for the “cool kids.” We weren’t good enough for them, and I knew it. I hated Kim for her perfect hair and her mom who brought cupcakes to class on her birthday. I had tried to make friends with her in first grade, we had the same teacher, but a week later she told another classmate I got my shoes at the Goodwill, and it embarrassed me. I knew my shoes weren't new, they showed up one day and Mom said she found them for me. I thought they were nice. I had no shame about them until Kim made fun of me. After that I hid them in my closet and said they were lost. The only other shoes I had were jellies that I wore until it was too cold, as if wearing summer shoes in winter was somehow better than used tennis shoes. It worked though: I got another pair of shoes from Payless, brand new, for $9.95; Justin scored a pair too on a BOGO deal.

  “How do you lose a pair of shoes?” Mom asked me the day she finally took us. “You've gotta be some kind of an idiot to lose the shoes off of your feet. I just got those for you, Haylee. They fit you fine. You think we have the money to get you shoes every month?”

  It was easy taking it from Mom. Clayton was harder, but while he was dribbling spit in my face I squished my toes into the soft padding of my new Pro Wings and smiled on the inside. Yep, it was worth it.

  The only other time we talked to those spoiled kids was once when Justin heard them call us losers. It was the last time he wanted to hear it. Justin was smart about it, he waited until the bus was out of sight, then ran right up to unsuspecting Michael and kidney-kicked him from behind.

  “You ever call us losers again and I'll beat your face in; you got that?” he yelled in a fashion I'm sure Clayton would have been proud of. Michael tried to look tough but complied.

  Sometimes, after that, we would kick a pine cone between us, and of course we all played nice at Gramma Diaz's house on cookie Wednesday, but we weren't ever friends with them. Other than those two, the only other kids on our street belonged to a youngish couple who drove an older Volvo and a minivan, and they were too young to go to school. And so the three of us played alone together. Clayton and Mom called us the Three Musketeers, but we didn't know who they were.

  We were left to ourselves most days after school. Mom didn't care what we did as long as we left her out of it, and Clayton never got home before dark. We liked outside best because it was away from the parents, but there was more to it than that. Outside, in our secret places, we traveled the world through time, space, and history.

  Justin was amazing at building things: forts, toys, wooden guns, furniture, bunkers, and contraptions for any number of schemes. He was a creative genius, and Lizzie and I were his helpers.

  We had this perfect shack of a hide-out in the woods not too far from the house. It was hidden under years of overgrown ivy, sticker bushes, and rotting leaves, and we were certain no one else knew our secret place. The adults probably knew about it, but they never spoke of it in our presence, and neither did we. Inside the safety of those rotten plywood walls we would pretend to be cops having a shoot-out with bank robbers or hijackers, pioneers in a covered wagon, Native Americans in a teepee, travelers stuck in a sandstorm hunkered down in a Bedouin tent, or adults living in our own house (OK that was me and Lizzie, but every so often Justin would allow us to play a girlie game like that). Most of the time, we would pretend there was a war and that we were hiding from the Nazis or Japs or Charlies, shooting out Justin's windows and snipe holes. I didn't get the names but played along for fun. We could disappear for hours, and no one cared. When Mom or Clayton called us for dinner, we had to stop everything and run home as fast as we could, hoping to avoid trouble for being late.

  When I was in first grade, Justin started fourth, and our make-believe games were forever changed. His teacher, Mr. Sanchez, introduced the class to science fiction. Female teachers read Beverly Cleary during story time, but Mr. Sanchez read H.G. Wells, Heinlein, and Bradbury. Justin said during science Mr. Sanchez would talk about sci-fi inventions that people were actually creating right then. Computers, Justin told us, had been science fiction, and now almost every workplace used them. Communicators people carried with them were make-believe, but real-life inventions were making them reality. It changed him. Justin got lost in the possibilities of time and space travel and al
l things science fiction. I know now it was his escape from our pain like he was mine.

  Despite Justin’s bad grades, he always had a book checked out from the library from fourth grade on. He had always been a good reader, telling Lizzie and me stories from books all the time. After Mr. Sanchez, though, they went from The Hatchet and White Fang to sci-fi and alien thrillers. In our fort he would read them to us, and our shack turned into whatever space we needed to imagine the story into real life. Time travel and teleportation stories were his favorite. Where once we were content being police or soldiers in bunkers, we transformed almost overnight into scientists in lab coats, mad geniuses inventing true teleportation machines in secret labs. We invented a teleporter of our own and named it the BTTF24, Back to the Future 24. We pretended it was our 24th try and we finally had success. We would transport ourselves to other places: the desert, the future or past, New York City, or Mrs. Diaz's kitchen on the next Wednesday. We would run to our machine to escape danger just in the nick of time. It was really just a bunch of rusty metal scraps, wires, and buttons we glued and stuck into a three-by-three piece of peg board, but in our imaginations it was pure science. I swear I really went to the places we programmed in our fake machine. It didn't feel pretend to us; it was real, and to this day Justin is dreaming up ways to make teleportation through space or time— or both—possible.

  Though we avoided being inside as much as possible, our part of California wasn't always warm and sunny in the winter and we had a real problem enduring the cold. Our teleporter was great for imagination, but we didn't know about insulation. That's when we had to get creative.

  It was Justin who first had the idea to sneak into Mrs. Diaz's house when she wasn't home. It was winter—I remember because the slightest amount of slush covered the road and driveway. Justin said we should stick to the ruts to cover our tracks. It felt like a grand adventure to Lizzie and me, so we obeyed. We were cold, and neither the BTTF24 nor home was a welcoming thought, but the Diaz's place was; who wouldn't want to leave our sorry lives and teleport into theirs?