by Deb Caletti
“Sit down, for God’s sake,” Trina says to me.
“Hey, fifty bucks. Another big tip,” I say.
Jane hands me a piece of Harold’s pie on a plate. “Ha, not on your life,” she says. “Eat. Indigo, my God. I don’t know how to process this.”
“Me either,” I say.
“Finish all of that,” Trina says. “If you faint again, I’m going to faint. I can’t handle anything medical.”
“Those emergency room shows…,” Nick says.
“The worst,” Trina says.
“She’s fine,” Joe says. He seems pleased at being the expert. He even hitches his belt up. He crosses his arms and gives a small nod.
“Two and a half million dollars? It’s a dream come true,” Trina says. “God, I wish I’d waited on him.”
For the rest of my shift, Jane insists I either go home or take it easy. Everyone is treating me as if I’m fragile and new. Nick asks when I’ll be quitting Carrera’s. Trina asks if my family will be moving. Funny says I won’t have to work for the rest of my life. Leroy tells them to back off, for God’s sake.
I know I’m not saying good-bye when I leave that day. But it feels like a kind of good-bye. I feel that empty place of something left behind.
Leroy calls my name as I head toward Trevor’s Mustang.
“Indigo!” he shouts.
“Leroy!” I shout back.
“This is a good thing,” he says. “Got it? A universe.”
7
It takes me a minute to realize what’s different. It’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m sitting on the seat with pony interior and Trevor has kissed me and he gently pushes the lever into drive and we’re passing Chuck’s BBQ and the bookstore and the Front Street Market and I watch some man crossing the street carrying his dog, and I’m wondering about that when it hits me.
“The car’s quiet,” I say. “No, it’s purring.”
Trevor cracks up, slaps the steering wheel with his palm. “Finally. I was wondering when you were going to say something.”
“When did you fix it? I thought you worked today.”
“Baby, did you see that guy carrying his dog? What’s up with a guy carrying his dog on a walk?”
But I don’t care about that anymore. “Focus,” I say. “The car?”
“I had it fixed. Doesn’t Bob sound happy? I never heard Bob sound so happy.” Trevor peers at me from under his shaggy bangs.
“What do you mean you had it fixed?” Trevor always fixes Bob himself.
We stop at the red light by the library. I see Erik Dobbs from my school coming out of the 76 station, holding a bottle of Coke and, what is that? A yellow bag of Funyuns? Who eats Funyuns, for God’s sake? But Trevor’s right. The Mustang is purring, and when the light turns green, it pulls out with a confidence Bob’s never shown before. I’m not sure I like Bob like this.
“Trevor!” I say.
He’s apparently engrossed in the sound too, because he tosses his head as if shaking himself into reality. “He just sounds sooo good.” He grins. “I’m loving this! I bring it to the Mustang place, right? Downtown Seattle. Let them replace the muffler, a few other things…”
“Trevor, God, how much did that cost?” I feel a little panic-flutter. Butterfly wings of anxiety. I have a feeling I know where this is going.
“I took it out of my savings. Baby, you should see your face,” Trevor says, and chuckles. “Relax. Have you forgotten that we’re rich?”
He stops at the next light just turning yellow, by the True Value where Nick works. There’s a stuffed collie outside. He used to belong to the owner, Terry, and I guess, technically, he still does. The dog wears a True Value baseball cap, and he gets dragged out every morning and dragged back in at night. The light turns red, and Trevor grabs my shoulders, kisses me long and hard. He’s forgotten I’m not into public displays of affection; still, his tongue lulls and makes a right turn, then left, and it’s the kind of kiss that would make me usually forget what century I lived in or what planet I was on. The light must have turned green, because the car behind us honks and Trevor separates from me, my lips cool with the sudden air.
“We’re rich!” he says again.
Usually that kiss would have acted like some tingling, hypnotic spell, but this time, I feel something else. A small, internal stepping back. A slight shove to his chest with my palm that I see only in my mind. Just, this little echo of away.
Mom sits at the desk that’s against one wall in the living room, tapping on our computer. It’s heavy and prehistoric, bulky and as large as old televisions, and it is the yellow-tan color of a corn tortilla. Occasionally you’ll hear it groan and creak and grind when it’s just sitting there, like it’s trying to remember something painful from the past. You kind of feel bad for it, like it should be on an IV and allowed to just rest. It’s a terminal terminal, ha-ha.
Mom’s got a pencil behind one ear. She’s looking all over for something, lifting papers and scanning the floor, and my bet is, it’s that pencil she’s missing. Trevor’s out front showing Severin under the hood of the car, and I hear Bex in the kitchen. By the warm, thick smell in our house, I’m guessing she’s making brownies.
I snitch the pencil from Mom’s ear. “Looking for this?” I ask.
“Aah. I knew it was here somewhere.”
“What are you doing?” I ask. Actually, I snoop at the computer screen, which usually pisses her off. This time, though, she leans to one side to show me. It’s an Alaska Airlines website, a grid of travel dates and times and prices.
“Well, you said you thought he went to Maui, right? That was your guess?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“Well, Dad did some asking around. Okay, really? He did more than ask around. He says he called everyone he knew and they called everyone they knew and it was practically an all-out man hunt.”
“Oh my God, you’re kidding,” I say. I can’t believe this. I picture poor Richard Howards, gone to Maui to escape his life, to get a little rest and relaxation, descended on by helicopter tour guys and parasailers and surfers. I feel horrible.
“No, no,” Mom says. “It’s okay. It’s good. No one talked to him. But they did find him, Indigo. You were right. He went to Maui.”
“That was easy,” I say. I feel a swoop of disappointment. “I think we should be grateful he apparently lacks imagination. Or just wanted to get the hell out, fast.”
“He’s been there five days. The first few nights he stayed at the Four Seasons, but then he rented a house.”
“What, does Dad have a spy ring?”
“You know your dad. People love him. He probably knows everyone on the island.”
I sigh. I’m getting a headache. Mom’s eyes have those coffee-ring moons underneath, and her hair is in the same ponytail from this morning.
“So, you’re going to fly out there?” I ask.
“No, I thought you’d fly out there.” She taps the screen with her pencil. “Next week? Thursday? Stay the weekend with your dad?”
“And what do I do when I get there? ‘Hey, hi, remember me? Am I blocking your sun? I’m the waitress you gave two and a half million dollars to. Where’d you get that piña colada, it looks delicious’?”
“I don’t know,” Mom says. “Your dad will help you.”
My mother is under the permanent delusion that my dad can fix things she can’t. Anytime something breaks, she sighs and makes some comment along the lines of If your father hadn’t run off to Hawaii… She’ll stand and look at the dripping sink or the broken shower head or the leaking dishwasher and imagine my father as this home repair hero, when the truth is, he sucked at home repair. He would stand there scratching his head and knocking on pipes with his knuckles like they might knock back an answer in secret code. I watched him hang a picture once, and it took him five tries and he hammered the nail in with the bottom of a nearby vase. You could see the Holes of Failure surrounding the upper edge of the picture frame. He’s really not great
at any other crisis either. He supposedly got lost on the way to the emergency room when Mom was having Bex, and they kept turning around in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven until the cashier stood at the door with folded arms, probably thinking they were casing the joint for a robbery. I could just picture Mom giving birth right there in a parking space littered with a Slurpee lid and cigarette butts and one of those white, ruffly paper trays they put hot dogs in. You could be having a heart attack and Dad would be looking for his car keys under the couch cushions. Yet somehow in Mom’s mind, if Dad were still with us, we’d never have car problems or a brown lawn or printer jams. To her, he had some ability to make things right and keep things running in a way she’d never be able to.
“Severin can come with me,” I say.
“Indigo, no. Sweetie. Even you—this is going on my credit card. I don’t have the money for this ticket. I didn’t want to say, but Mrs. Olson was over a week or so ago…” She rubs one eye with her palm.
I know what this means. Mrs. Olson is our landlady. Mrs. Olson looks sweet as a box of See’s candy. She wears thin sweaters and has brown spots on the back of her hands and a little gold cross necklace around her woggly chicken neck. If you got to talking to her, though, she would tell you about her ring, with a stone to represent each child, that Mr. Olson gave her on their thirtieth wedding anniversary, and then she’d tell you how the liberals are messing up the country, giving money away like it grows on trees, and how the last great Democrat was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but those days are long gone, and even he would never allow men to marry other men when that was just against nature. Just against nature, and those people ought to be hung. She actually said “hung,” which made you realize that in another life she’d be the sort to bring her knitting to the public executions. According to my mother, Mrs. Olson is one of those people who have a fat checkbook but a thin heart. After Mrs. Olson would come over to raise our rent, my mother would go into her room and shut the door for a long time, and the bottle of aspirin would be on the bathroom counter, the fluff of cotton left out and the lid off. Mrs. Olson never had any funds (as she called them) to fix anything. Instead, she’d dock a couple of dollars from the rent for a month and then turn around and raise it permanently, which, according to my mom, was the same thing insurance companies do whenever you use the insurance you paid for.
“Can’t we subtract airline tickets from the money?” I say. “It seems only fair.”
“That’d be nice, but is this someone who’s working with a full deck, here?” She sighs. “If it’s not one thing, it’s another. Who would have thought too much money would be a problem. I’m agreeing to this flight, okay?” She lifts her eyebrows, poises her finger dramatically over the enter key. I nod. “Done,” she says. “Done. I did it. You’re going.” Mom scrolls down the screen and back up again, presses a button and then stares at the printer, which just sits there politely.
“Wait—I’m going to have to be alone with Dad,” I say. “I’ve hardly ever been alone with Dad for an extended period of time.” I feel a wash of nerves, that edgy discomfort you get when you’re in an elevator with strangers. “What if we don’t have anything to talk about?”
“It’s not like you don’t ever talk to him,” Mom says. But she’s not really listening. She’s opening up the lid of the printer and peering inside, the same way she does when the car starts making weird noises. She pokes her finger around in there.
“Talking to him for five minutes on the phone every few weeks is different from finding things to say for a few days.” How is school? will take up all of about a minute and a half. How is your brother and Bex, another three minutes. What if we complete our conversational repertoire before we even get out of the airport parking lot?
“You used to live with him, remember,” Mom says. Barely remember. It doesn’t even seem real anymore, our time as a family altogether. Dad left when I was eleven, when he decided his life was becoming a frightening suburban cliché. Mom told us this one night when she’d had a second beer and let both her tongue and the image of him loosen. I like my dad, don’t get me wrong—the five-minute bits of conversation every now and then and the few times we’ve all visited him have been great. He’s a likeable guy. But we haven’t really gotten to know each other, him and me. Time and place have been barriers to that, but so has the intermittent sense that I have something to forgive him for—the fact that he left people who loved him for something better than that, I guess—and that delicate sense is the architectural frame our relationship is built on.
“You’ll have Jennifer,” Mom says. “Jennifer never stops talking.” Mom slams the printer door shut, same as she would the hood of the car when there’s nothing wrong, far as she can tell. Jennifer is my mom’s stepwife, but we don’t call her our stepmother. She’s ten years older than I am, so “mother” is just not the word that comes to mind. Mom’s right, though. All I’d have to do is bring a stack of quarters and keep pumping them in and Jennifer would keep on going.
“God,” I say.
“He’s your father,” Mom says, as if somehow this is my fault. As if I was the one who chose him, not her. She tries the printer button again, and the machine cranks to life. “Ha!” she says. When it’s done, she snitches the page from the tray, turns off the computer without shutting it down properly. It exhales in exhaustion.
We hear Bex making the “ooh eee ooh ahh” noises of someone taking something hot from the oven. Mom yells at her to use a pot holder, for God’s sake (knowing Bex, she used the hem of her shirt). “For God’s sake!” I hear Chico screech. This is just another example of sibling unfairness. I didn’t get to use the oven until I was, maybe, fifteen, and even then Mom hovered over me like I was holding a torch and a can of gasoline. Under normal circumstances, I would have complained about this injustice (shouldn’t we all have to suffer equally?), but this involves food, chocolate food. In a few minutes Bex appears with a plate of brownies.
“This is an obvious display of butt-kissing now that you’re rich,” she says. At least she’s honest about it. “All I ask in exchange is that you remember the people without homes in Malaysia.”
“She has to give it back, Bex,” Mom says.
“But we want brownies anyway,” I say.
“Do we ever,” Mom says.
“Fine,” Bex says. She holds out the plate and some napkins. The brownies were cut when they were too warm, so they fall apart a little when you lift them. Two bites and I’m feeling better already. There’s something about consumption—chocolate-to-mouth, receipt-in-bottom-of-shopping-bag—that fills empty places. We need our empty places filled, and what are the speedy, available options? Material things, God, love, nachos with everything. Consuming something, anything, smoothes out the gnawing of need and stitches the gaping of angst, and if only a brownie is available, a brownie will do.
There are places where time seems to slow down in some alien-planet way, where everything is on football-game time, a minute equaling fifteen minutes. Any math class is one of those places, as is the Department of Motor Vehicles, and the waiting rooms of doctor’s offices. And airports. Time oozes in airports, some primordial flow from before there were clocks, when thousands of years was a relatively short period of time measured against eons. That’s airport time. I’ve been waiting to board for twenty minutes, which in regular-life time feels like four or five days have passed. My good-byes to everyone and Trevor’s farewell kiss are already hazy and long-ago soft.
I go to the bathroom just for something to do. I’ve already gone to the gift shop full of overpriced candy bars and trashy novels and Seattle key chains and playing cards and those scenic spoons that you thought had disappeared long ago. Things almost impossible to imagine that people desire. I find the bathroom sign with the chick in the triangle skirt, and the rolling suitcase Mom made me bring follows behind me like Bex used to when she was younger. I want to make it go to its room, but we’re stuck as traveling partners. Ha, it’ll probably have a mo
re interesting conversation with Dad than I will.
I do the nervous push-open-the-door-quick maneuver you do in bathrooms to be on guard against unpleasant surprises. I’ve got a real knack for out-in-public bad luck. If some cash register is going to run out of tape, that’s the line I’ll be in; if there’s some stalker salesperson in the store, I’m the one she’ll follow. And if there’s a stall without toilet paper, I’m in it.
I’ve been on an airplane twice in my life, both times to see Dad. He came to visit us, but it was awkward—he stayed at the Ramada Inn near the airport and we stayed with him, Bex and me in one bed and he and Severin in the other, the sound of airplanes taking off and landing and the tiny bottles of shampoo reminding us all that it was temporary. The only lively part was Bex jumping around in her bathing suit and asking if it was time to swim yet, and Severin eating crackers out of the minibar before he realized you had to pay for them, at five dollars for maybe six Wheat Thins. The last time I was in the airport was a few years ago, and since then the airport has acquired these creepy, revolving plastic seats on the toilets. Me and my little following rolling friend cannot believe our eyes. There’s this thin skin of plastic on the seat that eeks around after you flush. I try it a few times just to watch it work, and let me tell you, whoever sat in some boardroom with this great idea was really a sicko, or at the very least, the overachieving son of the president of the company. I have the sudden fear that this is actually the same piece of plastic going around the same circle, and wish I had a Post-it note or a piece of gum or something to stick on and see if I am right. I get out of there fast. I stand at the sink and before my suitcase has even rolled up behind me, the faucet shoots on.
“Hey, I’m not ready,” I say to it, because no one else is in there. The faucet goes off. I position my hands nicely underneath and…nothing. I wave them around. Still, nothing. I turn my back to try another sink and wham, the old one shoots on. God, I hate presumptuous, overachieving appliances. Toilets that flush before you’re ready; automatic, attacking seatbelts; refrigerators that beep when the door is open too long. Melanie has one of those. For God’s sake, it makes me feel like my inability to decide is a criminal act. To all the pushy appliances out there, back off.