The Deepest Roots

by Miranda Asebedo

  “How do you know all this?” I ask.

  “I volunteered for the Cottonwood Hollow Historical Society last summer, remember?”

  I sort of remember helping her with a bake sale, but Mercy has so many extracurricular activities and volunteer work that they all sort of blend together.

  Lux makes a face. “I don’t care about the land. Let’s go back to the silver. And the gold bar.”

  “I don’t think we should be selling Emmeline Remington’s dowry chest,” Mercy says warily. “It sounds like trouble.”

  “It sounds like she wanted us to have it,” Lux shoots back, her green eyes sparking. She fixes them on me, her gaze asking me to know, to understand what this means to her. I think of what her mom said about needing Aaron as a provider. This is Lux’s way out. Her way to convince her mom to kick Aaron out.

  All I can think about is the rent money. I really, really need that rent money.

  Lux is right. Who cares about the gifts? Emmeline is offering us a way to fix everything. I close my eyes briefly, imagine Mom’s face if I came home tomorrow or the next day with a wad of cash so that we wouldn’t have to worry about Garrett and his stupid rent for a long time.

  “We don’t even know where it is,” Mercy says. “Where would we even start looking?”

  “It’s got to be somewhere out there in that fenced-off area,” Lux says. “The land that Emmeline left for Cottonwood Hollow.”

  A car drives by with its music turned up and the bass booming loud enough to shake the windows of the garage.

  “I need to get back to my bedroom,” Mercy whispers as if suddenly someone might be able to hear us. “That could have woken my parents.”

  I nod. “We’ll talk tomorrow.” Inside, I’m still buzzing, thinking that maybe we’re going to be okay. Maybe this dowry chest is going to change things for us.

  Outside the Montoyas’ house, Lux holds the bottom of the ladder while Mercy climbs, her pretty pink robe falling in soft folds around her ankles as she ascends. When she’s inside, she gives us a wave and an all-clear thumbs-up. Lux and I pull the ladder from the house and carry it to the back of the garage. We hang it gently, careful not to make any more sound than necessary.

  The walk back to Lux’s house is quiet. She’s too wrapped up in plans about that dowry chest, and I’m thinking of the rent, of Aaron, and of Mercy’s pretty pink robe and her two-story house with the window boxes as I look down at my sweat pants, the hole in the knee bigger than I remember it being.

  “Don’t forget,” Lux whispers when she’s in her room again. She slides the screen back into place.

  I nod.

  I tuck the diary under my arm and walk back home. Cottonwood Hollow is dark and calm, the entire town asleep, inhaling and exhaling in the same rhythms, gently wafting the clouds over the moon.

  When I get back to our trailer, I let myself in quietly through the front door. Then I creep back to my room and change into darker clothes. I leave the diary on top of my dresser and grab my backpack. I listen at Mom’s bedroom door and hear both Steven and Mom snoring gently. In the tiny laundry room next to her bedroom, I grab the bottle of bleach from the shelf above the washing machine and stop at the shed outside to put a funnel in my backpack.

  The walk back to Lux’s house is just as quiet as my walk home earlier. It’s only me and the cicadas. The occasional flicker of lightning bugs helps light my way when I pass through the parts of town without street lamps, the sidewalks familiar enough that I can avoid the broken spots, even in the dark. I know who’s likely to be smoking out on their porch this time of night or letting the dog out one more time before bed, and I avoid those houses, picking my way up one road, then across and over to the next, not wanting to be seen by anyone.

  Lux’s front yard is dark. The lights in the house are all off, even the television in the living room that always seems to be on, blaring syndicated dialogue and laugh tracks.

  Good.

  I hunch over and scuttle up the driveway to Aaron’s truck. It’s a late-model Ford, a three-quarter ton kitted out with four-wheel drive and leather. Lux said they practically had to mortgage the house to buy it. He’s got a personalized license plate on the back of the truck that says AARONS, and when he’s not driving it around, he’s usually waxing it in the driveway in the shade of the leaning pine.

  I tinker with the gas hatch until it pops, even without unlocking the truck and pulling the release switch. One of the perks of being a Fixer, I remind myself. A gift, not a curse. I unscrew the gas cap, creeping up slowly to peek over the truck bed and make sure no one in the house is stirring. It’s still quiet. Still dark.

  I tug the funnel and the bottle of bleach out of my backpack. Fitting the funnel into the gas tank, I unscrew the cap on the bottle of bleach and carefully tilt the bottle up to the funnel.

  Glug, glug, glug. I tip the bottle up until all the bleach is in Aaron’s gas tank.

  When it’s empty, I shake errant drops of bleach from the funnel tip, put the lid back on the bottle, and stuff everything back into my bag. I close Aaron’s gas tank, shoulder my bag, and leave the same way I came.

  Nobody messes with the girls from Cottonwood Hollow.

  Seven

  THE POUNDING ON THE FRONT door wakes me up. “Ugh,” I groan, rolling over and accidentally pushing Emmeline Remington’s diary off my bed. I’d stayed up almost all night reading it, hoping there’d be more clues about where she’d left this dowry chest that could possibly save us. It’s not something I plan on recommending to Lux and Mercy. It was tragic: the tale of a happy young woman from a well-off family who moves out west to be with some guy she met who says he has a prosperous farm in Kansas. Instead of having a happily ever after, she grows sadder and more isolated as her husband begins spending all his time with another woman. He finally leaves her when the child she’s carrying, the daughter she desperately wants, dies. And then, presumably, so does Emmeline, because the rest of the diary is blank.

  The pounding comes again, and I drag myself out of bed as Steven barks at the other end of the trailer, which means Mom is trying to do the same thing from her bedroom. We make it to the front door at the same time, Steven bumping against our thighs to see who’s arrived. There’s a jangle of keys in the lock.

  Mom and I jump. “Shit.” She mouths the word and attempts to tug the door open before Garrett Remington pushes it open.

  “There you are, girls,” Garrett says as he steps into the living room area. His ostrich-leather boots click on the linoleum. “I was starting to think you were avoiding me.”

  “No,” both Mom and I say too loudly.

  Garrett smiles, and it’s all I can do not to punch him in the face. In the daylight, Garrett looks a lot like an aging Ken doll, unlike the sinister being he’d been when we met him in the pasture after dark. He’s wearing a loose jacket with the words Cottonwood Hollow Rentals embroidered across his left breast. He’s good-looking, somewhere in his mid-forties, with a perpetual tan and that Oklahoma drawl that’s out of place because I know he went to high school in Evanston.

  “Well, I haven’t seen you with this month’s rent check. So I thought maybe I’d pop in before you girls left this morning.”

  “We’ve hit a bit of a snag, Garrett,” Mom says, smiling, as if we’re not standing here in our pajamas because he’s pushed into our house with his set of landlord’s keys.

  Garrett grins like he’s really enjoying that he’s cornered us, and it makes me feel sick inside. “I heard about you getting laid off, honey, and that’s just too bad. But you know, I’m a businessman, not a philanthropist. In Evanston, there’s places like this lovely home renting for nearly twice what I’ve been charging you.”

  “Evanston has a median income of nearly three times Cottonwood Hollow’s,” I parry.

  Mom shoots me a glare that indicates I’m not helping.

  Garrett’s tongue moves around his mouth like he’s trying to use it to pick out something from between his teeth. �
��Darling,” he spits out, “you just get cleverer every time I lay eyes on you. And prettier, too. Just like your mama.” His blue eyes flick back to Mom, and he smiles appreciatively. Probably because she’s not wearing a bra.

  “You know,” Garrett says suddenly. “It’s been awhile since I’ve done a walk-through of this place. Seen what needs work. I think I’ll do that now. Just in case I need to start bringing prospective tenants out here soon.” He surges past us, his hand purposely brushing against my ass even as I attempt to get out of his way. Mom’s eyebrows shoot up, her spine going as rigid as iron.

  “Garrett,” Mom says, “you don’t need to—”

  “Nonsense, honey,” Garrett interrupts her. “It’s part of my duties as a landlord. Now why don’t you and your little darling go find your pocketbook and get out your rent money?” He goes down the hall toward my room.

  Mom’s eyes lock on mine, and I realize that I’ve never noticed how similar they are to my own. That same coppery brown flecked with gold. Rusty, Lux had once called them. Like Cottonwood Hollow had oxidized us both. “What are we going to do?” I mouth to Mom, as if she’s going to have the answer. I looked it up at the library, and in Kansas, landlords are required to give thirty days’ notice before eviction, but that’s if you can prove that you’re a good tenant—one that’s always paid the rent on time. And he can prove that we haven’t, thanks to that one episode when I was thirteen.

  Mom shrugs helplessly. “I don’t even have a check to write him a hot one. We are screwed.”

  “We have to negotiate,” I whisper. “Or stall him somehow.” But I have no idea how we are going to do that. I think of Emmeline Remington, and how shitty her life was here. It occurs to me that things in Cottonwood Hollow haven’t changed much.

  Mom licks her lips, and takes a deep breath like she’s about to jump into Truett pond. “Okay,” she says. “I know what I have to do.”

  Garrett bursts back out of my bedroom, his hands in the voluminous pockets of his jacket. He looks at me. “See you did some painting in there, sugar tits. Should’ve talked to me about that first.” It’s like he’s making a list of all the things we’ve done wrong in case we get the guts to take him to court. As if we could even afford it.

  Mom fists her hands.

  “Let’s go check your room, shall we?” he says to Mom with a leer. “I seem to remember having some good times back there. Maybe we still can.”

  Now I want to punch him in his face. Garrett Remington is a sick bastard. Mom nods and begins to follow him down the hall, giving me a gesture that says, Get out.

  There’s a sinking ache in my stomach like I’ve swallowed a thousand ball bearings. This is her new plan, the reason for that deep breath. Mom and I have done a lot of things to get by over the years, but never this.

  “Wait!” I shout so loudly that Steven sits, head down and ears pinned back against his skull. I hold up a hand to stop them.

  Garrett turns around, and Mom gives me a look that says, What the hell are you doing?

  “We don’t have the rent money,” I tell Garrett. He comes back into the living room, that same sick smile on his face. He’s getting what he wants. He’s making us suffer. Making us beg.

  But I won’t beg.

  “We want to negotiate. My 1972 Mach 1 Mustang for five months’ rent.” I know he’ll never give me that much, but I have to start high or he’ll screw me over even worse.

  “Three,” Garrett says without missing a beat.

  “Four,” I counter.

  “Three because I have to deal with the bother of selling it.” He bares his teeth like an animal.

  “Fine. Three and we don’t see your face here again until the first of August.”

  “Where’s the title?” he asks, rolling his shoulders like this is just another day at the office.

  “I’ll get it,” I reply, my voice hoarse. I go back down the hallway and get the title out of my underwear drawer in the white dresser. I come back out into the living room, and Mom has managed to shuffle Garrett to the front door.

  “Here it is,” I say, signing over the title with a ballpoint pen I find on the kitchen table and handing it to him.

  “And the keys?” Garrett drawls.

  I grab them off the kitchen table too and hand them over. When their weight leaves my palm, it feels as if I’ve ripped off a part of me and given it to him.

  “All right, pretty girls,” Garrett says, opening the door. “I’ll see you in three months.” He goes out and slams the door behind him. We stand there still until we hear the sound of the Mach starting up and pulling away, the 351 Cleveland growling. I peek out through the curtains and see he’s left his one-ton, gas-guzzling Ram truck parked just off the dirt road to pick up later.

  Mom’s head swivels toward me. “What were you thinking?” she exclaims, throwing up her hands.

  “What was I thinking?” I shout back. “What were you thinking? Going back there with him to your bedroom? He’s a creep. What if he had wanted me to go back there?”

  “I would never let him—” Mom slings back, her face contorted with emotion.

  “And I wouldn’t let you, either.”

  “You shouldn’t have given him your car!” Mom shouts back, near tears. “You love that car!”

  “Well, we couldn’t live in it, Mom!”

  Steven barks.

  “Shut up, Steven!” we both shout.

  “You can take my car to school and your job at the shop,” Mom says quietly. The fight is gone out of her, and for the first time in my life, I think that she really looks defeated.

  “How are you going to look for work without a car?” I snap. I can’t keep the edge out of my voice. If she’d had a job, I wouldn’t have had to trade the Mach for rent. “You going to walk to Evanston?”

  Mom shrugs.

  “I’ll ride the bus, Mom. And I’ll figure out a way home from work.” I turn on my heel and stomp back to my side of the trailer.

  I’m waiting at the head of the dirt road when the bus comes. I climb on, ignoring the comments and stares from the other Cottonwood Hollow high schoolers not used to seeing me ride the bus. “Get lost,” I tell the freshman boy in the farthest seat in the back. He ducks under my arm and scurries up the aisle. I throw myself into the now-vacant seat, bunching my backpack on top of my stomach as I slouch down until I am invisible.

  Mercy and Lux get on later, clearly perplexed that I sent a random text from my mom’s phone saying I couldn’t pick them up this morning. I should have waved them back to me, explained everything that happened this morning on the ride to school. But I can’t. I can’t make myself sit up, meet their gazes, and spill the truth on the Cottonwood Hollow school bus.

  I’d barely been able to pass the empty spot in the front yard where I usually park the Mach without throwing up.

  I stay curled up in the back seat until everyone gets off at the high school. Then I pull the emergency lever and jump out the back. The alarm goes off and the bus driver swears at me, but I don’t really care.

  I skip first period. Not because I don’t like history, but because I can’t face Lux or Mercy yet. One look from them and I’ll crumble inside. Instead I go to the library, climbing up the steps to the small study table on the mezzanine. I dump my books out of my backpack and work on the questions I know Miss Strong will assign at the end of the chapter. I’m not worried about skipping, but I want to keep my brain busy and not think about the Mach or my mom or Garrett.

  I plan to duck out before my free period, when I know Mercy will look for me here, but I get absorbed in trying to finish the last question for history and don’t notice how late it is until Mercy appears at my elbow.

  “Hey,” she says. “I thought maybe you weren’t coming today.”

  “I’m here,” I say, waving my pencil as if nothing much is going on.

  “What happened this morning? You didn’t say much in that text from your mom’s phone.”

  “I couldn’t drive us.
”

  “Is there something wrong with the Mach?” she asks, frowning. She asks it in the same tone a new mother might use to ask if her baby is sick.

  I briefly contemplate lying, but there’s no way to hide the fact that the Mach is gone. “I don’t have it anymore.” The words might as well have been ripped from my vocal cords. That’s how painful it is to say them.

  “What do you mean?” she asks.

  “I sold it. Traded it, I mean. This morning.”

  “Rome, what did you trade it for?” Mercy turns her small hand over toward me, her white scar barely visible before she closes her hand down over mine.

  I’m ashamed that tears are pricking the backs of my eyes. I’m not a little girl, and it’s not something to cry over. It’s not like I lost my mom, or Steven. It’s just an object. Just a car.

  “The rent,” I squeak out, hating myself for telling her the truth, for letting out just one secret that I’d sworn to keep. But there’s no other way to explain that the Mach is gone. “I traded it for three months’ rent from Garrett.”

  “Rome,” Mercy admonishes me. “Why didn’t you tell us things were that bad?”

  I tug my hand out from underneath hers, slamming my history book shut and stuffing it into my backpack. “I have to go,” I lie. “I have to meet Miss Strong and tell her why I missed first period.”

  “Rome,” Mercy calls after me as I thunder down the stairs of the mezzanine, causing the librarian to glare.

  I hurry down the crowded halls of the massive school, head down, not really sure where I’m going. I bump shoulders with a senior boy who mutters something like “stupid Hollow slut,” but I can’t find it in me to fight back, or even really be insulted. Eventually I make it outside, and all I can think about when I see the parking lot is getting into my car and hitting the open road. But I don’t have the Mach anymore. I can’t run away.