Parked

by Danielle Svetcov

  I hug my backpack tighter. “Oh—” Mom starts. I hate how surprised she sounds.

  “And you’ve likely noticed the brown. And the bow ties.”

  Beige, not brown!

  “I, uh, yes,” she says.

  “We see this all the time with kids. Just a phase, a dip between peaks,” Dean Cappo rushes on. “Cal’s got so much going . . . He’s, well, he’s a wonderful artist.” Mom must be silently nodding. Must be. She’s offered to hang my work in the restaurant. “If it weren’t technically graffiti, I might even like his”—the dean clears his throat—“alterations to the school.”

  A chair scrapes, like someone’s standing. “If I could give you one piece of advice, Lizzie: Get him out of the house, new scenery, a chance to see himself from a different, better angle.”

  Dean Cappo sounds wise, with his deep voice and personalized “Lizzie,” but he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Don’t be fooled, Mom! Our house is great. The scenery is great.

  “This all would’ve gone much differently if he’d spoken to us first,” the dean continues. “We don’t want the other students getting ideas. The janitorial staff has already begun scrubbing, but we may have to invest in special supplies to complete the job. It’s our policy to bill the student’s family . . .”

  I rise so fast, my chair tips over. Scrubbing?

  “You can’t!” I’ve flung open the door. “It’s not graffiti!”

  Dean Cappo is standing with his nostrils squeezed together like he’d rather not breathe this in. Mom jerks around in her chair, a fluff of blond hair catching in her eyelashes, making her blink rapidly.

  “Cal,” she says, sizing me up in a way she’s never done before.

  “He can’t,” I plead, all of me turned toward Mom. I swipe my bangs off my forehead, but they swing back over my eyes. She should be on my side, but she’s shaking her head. She’s turned down her mouth, like a crescent moon that’s slipped its axis.

  This can’t be. This is the opposite of what was supposed to happen. Mom should be . . . We should all be gathered in the courtyard right now, admiring the . . . “I’m not the problem,” I say. “The problem is—” I can’t find the right words. I don’t want to find the right words. This is why I draw.

  “We will call you in when we’re ready, Cal,” Dean Cappo says, eyebrows up like arrowheads.

  If it were yesterday, the paint on the courtyard would still be drying, and Mom and I would end the night with the classifieds from the free newspaper that gets thrown in our driveway. She’d whisper them in my ear while I’m half asleep, head on pillow: “For sale: partially eaten duck, ten days old. Twenty-four dollars or best offer.” We’d laugh so hard, we’d cry. I’d fall asleep smiling.

  JUNE 5

  Jeanne Ann

  It’s dumping snow when we reach the Beartooth Pass in Wyoming, with winds so strong, the van is rocking side to side like it’s in an automatic car wash.

  Mom’s got the windshield wipers flailing, but we still can’t see the road in front of us. I’m wishing I’d said a proper goodbye to my bike. And Lake Michigan. And that I’d written a real letter to the librarians. And to the other volunteers. No one was there but the cleaning crew when we swung through on our way out of town. Now I may never have the chance.

  A blizzard in June? This is bad. We don’t have four-wheel drive or chains. I lean closer to Mom. Turtling at five miles per hour, one hand on the steering wheel, the other on my knee, she looks at peace, like this is exactly how she imagined our trip to San Francisco would go. Like this is the perfect start to our new life. If we get stuck here, she’s probably strong enough to lug me twenty miles on her back through the snow. But still . . .

  “What are you looking in the side-view for? Keep reading. Does she get the guy? Will there be kissing? Don’t stop for the snow.” Mom picks up her hand from my knee and snaps her fingers at the book in my lap. Then she tugs gently on one of my curls. I’ve been reading to her since we peeled out of Chicago.

  “Maybe we should pull over?” I say, but even as the words are coming out, the snow begins to thin, first to a spray, and then a dust, and then—gone—just blue, lunchtime sky with thin wisps of cloud. I can see the road again and the giant trees ushering us along like very tall butlers.

  “Well, that was fun,” Mom says. She rolls down her window, wipes off her side-view mirror, and wags a finger at the sky. The gesture translates roughly to: We’re not turnin’ back, no matter what you throw at us.

  PARKED

  JUNE 8

  Cal

  Forty-four pencils. Sixteen sketchbooks. That’s all that’s left. Paints, pens, brushes: confiscated, an hour ago. My desk looks like an abandoned lot. It’s taken Mom six days, but she’s had it. She’s moved from talk to “consequences.” I crank open my window and slide to the floor. A warm breeze slips in.

  In San Francisco, a warm night is rare. Freaky rare. The air over the bay turns fuzzy green, and everything it covers looks older, even the Golden Gate Bridge, which hovers like the last remains of an ancient fortress tonight.

  On warm nights, everyone goes outside. Happy noises drift up from the street—laughing and wind chimes and hoots. In the playing fields across the street, I can see a pickup soccer game, and, closer to the water, a bunch of tourists photographing an ice-cream cart from all angles like it’s the Mars Rover. Even the van-dwellers next to the fields are out in lawn chairs, wiggling their toes.

  There’s a new van down there. Orange. Illinois plates. Flat tire. Parked across the street at the very front of the line. I should log it in my sketchbook, but I don’t have the energy.

  “Good luck,” I say to the new arrival, fogging up my window. I mean it, but it doesn’t sound like I do. If they know anything about this block, they’ll leave tomorrow.

  I usually like warm nights. Not this one.

  “It wasn’t your wall to paint,” Mom declares daily—in the hallway, by the front door, outside the kitchen, beside my desk. “You’ve always been so responsible, Cal.” Which is all a wind-up to: “There’s no good excuse. You will pay for the removal. You will apologize to the janitors, and the principal, and the students.”

  “I can’t,” I say. I’m not sorry.

  “Cal!”

  This morning she covered her face with her hands and groaned. When that didn’t help, she reached up and covered my face, until, unhappy and overstretched—I am a foot taller than she is—she covered her own face again.

  “You’ve never talked back to me,” she gasped.

  “I’m not talking back.” I really wasn’t.

  But the more she insists I’m wrong, the less I want to explain anything.

  It’s like that time one of her cooks choked on a carrot while testing a recipe and had to be saved by a customer who knew the Heimlich because no one on staff did. The whole thing freaked Mom out so bad, she ordered all her cooks and servers to enroll in advanced CPR, including lifeguard training, and for six months all carrots at the restaurant were served pureed.

  “This is my fault,” she added this morning. “I didn’t give you a normal childhood. You were always at the restaurant, never any trouble. I thought I was paying attention, but clearly . . .” She looked like she was remembering something happy and sad.

  “I love the restaurant. You’re a great mom,” I said. She really is. “I’m fine. Really. Can we—”

  “All your friends?” she interrupted. “Eliot, Miles, Saul . . . ?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t want to talk about that. It hurt. “That’s something else,” I said.

  “I don’t think it is something else,” she said.

  “It is.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “It is.”

  That’s the loop. She repeats what Dean Cappo said about “new scenery.” She says she’s going to throw the “kitchen sink” at this pr
oblem, that the art supplies are only the start. Her face is always a mix of serious and pumped.

  I wonder if it’ll ever end. I wonder if it’s our new normal.

  Mom says she’ll return my supplies after I’ve had time to think about “what I did.”

  She doesn’t get it. I look outside to where the orange van is parked at the front of the line. It’s what I didn’t do that I can’t forget.

  JUNE 11

  Jeanne Ann

  We wake to a stampede. I look out the van’s back window. Hundreds of people are staggering toward us. They’re all naked except for short-shorts and tank tops, and they’ve each got a number pinned to their chests.

  “It’s a triathlon,” Mom says. She’s shimmied over to the back window while still in her sleeping bag and is kneeling beside me. She can’t stand up in the van without hitting her head. “They’ll run a bunch of miles, bike a bunch, swim a bunch.” She points to a giant banner over the street that says so.

  “Why would they do that when they could be sleeping?” Or eating. We haven’t had a proper meal, on plates, with forks, since we got here three days ago.

  A runner throws a half-empty water bottle without looking and hits the side of the van. Then another squats and . . . Mom closes the curtains on my nose. This is worse than living next to an expressway in Chicago.

  “How long are we going to park here?” I ask. We have other places we could be besides this van, this intersection. Mom’s not even bothering to feed money to the meter. How long before someone notices?

  We’re at the front of a line of vans that look a lot like ours—drained of blood. I thought they were abandoned, but last night I caught sight of an arm popped out of a window two vans back; it dumped something wet and steamy onto the sidewalk. Not a good sign.

  Mom shrugs, smiling. A fog horn groans, a sound that exactly matches how I feel. I can see her making calculations in her head: This is my first vacation in years; let’s be low-budget tourists a little longer; we’ve got the rest of our lives to live indoors, pay bills; and don’t forget the flat tire. She’s not minding this at all.

  She slips the ragged blue-turned-gray paper from her jeans now, taps it against her forehead, and slides it right back into her pocket. “We won’t be here long, kid. There won’t be triathlons every day. We’ve got a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, like we always talked about.” She holds out a box of cereal I polished off in Utah, shakes it, frowns, says she’ll get to the store again today.

  We? I never talked about this view. She talked about this view.

  The only view I need is of ham and eggs.

  JUNE 11

  Cal

  I find Mom’s lost purse on the side of the bathtub and something I probably wasn’t supposed to find poking out of it.

  Cal Adjustments:

  School (new scenery)

  Job (new scenery)

  Art supplies (redirect attention)

  Color back in clothes (new scenery)

  Friends/social life/sports (new scenery)

  I probably shouldn’t have looked.

  Mom only makes lists for “the big stuff”—a waitstaff mutiny or a health inspector visit. I’m just as important as the restaurant, but my problems have always been small. I’ve been—I am easy. Like those dogs that fit in a purse and don’t make trouble. She’s never needed a list for me.

  I don’t know if this means I’ve changed or she has.

  “Cal! Did you find it?!” Mom calls from the bottom of the stairs. “It’s not down here!”

  I can hear her clogs clomping across the wood floors. Mom refuses to get ready for work until she’s already five minutes late, and then it takes her five minutes to find her purse, so she is at best fifteen minutes late and always blames something or someone besides herself, even if she was napping on the couch right before. Until recently, this was one of her few flaws.

  She’s mumbling now: “I’m going to be late” and “The new dishwashing guy is coming. He’ll use too much soap and the plates will streak and someone will complain about a chemical taste. Cal!”

  Usually, I’m happiest at this time of day, right after we’ve shared an early-bird dinner and right before a shift. The sounds, her racing back and forth across the house like a miniature pony, feel exciting, like a drumroll before a show.

  Tonight I wander to my room and stand at the window, nose against the glass. I share a moment with the orange van across the street and its flat tire. In for it, both of us.

  I sink into my beanbag chair and turn to look up at the heroes on my walls, portraits recently completed. Eleanor Roosevelt, Clark Kent, Gandhi, Harriet Tubman. I was going to sketch Mom next.

  She pops her head in. “I’m leaving.”

  “Okay.”

  “I found my purse.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  As owner, Mom works a bunch of shifts at Greenery, and this is the one I usually join her for. I want to go, but not if it’s like this. She must feel the same, because she doesn’t invite me along. We just stare at each other, looking for proof that the other person is a fake, a robot with a malfunctioning chip.

  All I can think to do once she’s gone is roll the garbage cans to the bottom of the driveway. Tomorrow is garbage pickup, and I am a good son who always takes out the garbage.

  A dirt clod wonks me on the forehead as I’m turning back up the driveway.

  Mom?

  Through a shower of dirt falling past my eyes, I can just make out our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Paglio, kneeling by the hedge between our yards, surrounded by flower pots. She wears gardening gloves and a matching blue hat. She has flowers in one hand and in the other a chunk of something brown.

  “Close your eyes!” she cries. “Oh, dear.” I can hear her scrambling to get up and shuffle over. “I’m so sorry.”

  “You threw dirt at me?”

  “Don’t speak. It’ll get in your mouth.”

  She has to go to the bottom of her driveway and then up mine to reach me. Her gloved fingers move with a slight tremor as they dust the dirt from my hair, brushing gently at my eyelashes and eyebrows. I feel like a fossil at an excavation.

  “You got caught in the crosshairs of my temper tantrum,” she says. I spit out some soil. I hear her groan, then a bubble of something—laughter?

  “Can I open my eyes?”

  “No. Keep them shut, Cal.”

  She’s stopped brushing, and I think she’s just staring at me. I peek out of my right eye. The view is blurry at first, then clears with some blinking. Mrs. Paglio’s got her hands bunched up by her throat. Her gloves are still on, and she’s not facing me like I expect. She’s facing the bay. Mom says Mrs. Paglio looks like two cabbages stacked on top of each other. I’d agree if cabbages were a little squishier. Her hair is a white wedge—sharp and blunt like a modern sculpture. I think she’s close to seventy. “A person can’t just flip a switch and change,” she says.

  “What?”

  She startles, rocking back on her heels. “Oh, that wasn’t for you.” She pats my head almost like she needs it for balance. “Let’s go talk to your mother. I should apologize.” She laces her arm through mine and tugs in the direction of my house.

  “Mom’s at work.”

  Mrs. Paglio changes course without pausing. We enter her house through a side door. I’ve never been inside. We’re wave-over-the-hedge kinda neighbors.

  The outside door has dropped us into a mudroom. We are greeted by bags of garden soil everywhere and pots of flowers. “Yellow carnations,” Mrs. Paglio says. She doesn’t move for several seconds, just stares at the flowers at her feet, then shifts and startles again when she sees me. “Cal!” She reaches up to squeeze my arm and shakes her head. “There you are.” A clump of dirt falls out of my hair onto a throw rug.

  The house smells like peaches and vinegar. A large
portrait hangs in the hallway outside the mudroom—a man with a moustache sits at his desk, wearing a suit and studying paperwork; behind him a woman who looks a lot like Mrs. Paglio holds out a teacup. Mom and I don’t see Mr. Paglio much—Mom says he’s a “workaholic”; I think this painting is a portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Paglio when they were younger.

  “You give someone yellow carnations when you want to tell them your love is waning. Did you know that?” Mrs. Paglio is leaned over, rubbing the petals of one of her flowers.

  “No.” I try to step backward without her noticing.

  “Yes, all the carnations have meaning. Most flowers. Don’t ever accept a begonia bouquet.” She shakes a warning finger, then disappears around a corner and returns a moment later with a box of Popsicles. Only now do I read her green smock: GARDENERD.

  She hands me a Popsicle. Grape-flavored. “They’re my husband’s. Go ahead. You can eat it in the house.” She watches me like the Popsicle is medicine and I’ve got to finish it in front of her, then looks down at the box in her hands and shoves it toward me. “Take them all. He doesn’t deserve them. He doesn’t believe in comforts anymore. Who knows what he believes in.” She crosses her arms, angry suddenly. Maybe this was her mood when she threw the dirt.

  I am tempted to tell her that hers is not the only family having trouble on the block, but she stops me with a little gasp as we pass through the front door. Her driveway is covered in clumps of dirt. The clod that hit me was one of many. “I’ll have nothing left if I keep this up,” she says. She’s looking right past me, toward the water, like I’m not even there. “I was trying to beautify my little corner of the world.” She sighs. “I just despise change.”

  I try to see what she’s seeing—a soccer game tearing up the playing field’s grass?—but the only change I can make out is the orange van with the flat tire and the Illinois plates across the street. And I don’t know Mrs. Paglio well enough to say “I’m worried about them too.”