I found more clothes and picked out underwear and a pair of white shorts and a dress with flamingos on it and white shoes that were like fancy grown-up pointy pumps and spotty purple pajamas that said NIGHT NIGHT on the pocket. I found a small flashlight for emergencies and added it to the pile. In the toy section I found a box of colored pencils and a blank notepad for drawing and a pink comb for Clemesta’s hair, and a new toothbrush for me with a glitter handle and a hairbrush for keeping my hair IMPECCABLE, and a box of chalk sticks for writing on the ground because I always wanted to try those out.
I did not want to be a SPOILED BRAT like Lina in my class who gets whatever she wants from her Mom and also $200 every week for her allowance. Maybe it’s only $200 every month, but she is still a brat and a show-off and once I made her cry when I said her new sneakers were stupid. It was only because inside my heart I was feeling jealous. I never get brand-new sneakers, only hand-me-downs from our neighbor Caleigh who is eight and growing out of all her clothes. Her mom bundles everything up and gives it to Mom. She hands it to me and says, “See? Now you have everything you need,” and then the next day she comes home with bags full of new clothes for herself, even though her closet is already FULL UP with sparkling beautiful dresses hanging in plastic to keep them fresh. Those are the clothes she wore in Florida when she went to parties all the time but now Dad and her don’t go anywhere fancy, so the dresses just stay in the closet. She brings them out on CAN’T GET OUT OF BED DAYS because she likes to put one on to cry in.
Actually Mom shops a lot for new clothes but most of the time she returns them after she’s unpacked them and tried them on and snapped a photo in them and pretended they are hers. Some stores won’t take the clothes back and then she has to hide them from Dad so he won’t get mad at her for being so IRRESPONSIBLE and DELUSIONAL. Those are bad words too, and her clothes are another secret I have to keep in the secret-secret box.
Anyway, I was very responsible and I stopped putting things in the basket. I went to find Dad, who was waiting for me at the start of the checkout line.
“I’m all done,” I said.
He had grabbed stuff for himself, like a stick of deodorant and a pack of navy blue boxer shorts and a plaid shirt.
“You could have packed those at home,” I said. “Then we wouldn’t have to buy all new stuff.”
Dad rubbed his face with his hand like he wanted to wipe away invisible dirt.
“I could have packed for both of us,” I said. “I’m good at making lists and then I could have ticked it off and that would have been very EFFICIENT.”
The checkout lady said hello and I saw that she was missing two of her front teeth.
Dad loaded everything onto the counter. It was a huge pile.
“We’re on an adventure,” I said, in case she was wondering why we needed so much new stuff or thinking we were spoiled brats instead of regular nice people.
Dad grabbed a six-pack of water, a box of mints, and a pack of headache tablets. He paid for everything with bills he pulled from his jeans. The checkout lady yawned and I saw that she had some of her back teeth missing from her mouth too. I bet Gerry Germ ate all of them. He can be a real greedy guts sometimes. Probably Gerry Germ is also obese.
At the car, Dad set the bags in the trunk.
“Now what do we do?” I said.
“Now we drive,” Dad said.
“Oh. For how long?”
“A while.”
“Do we have far to go?”
“Kinda.”
“That’s good. I like being away from home. And from Mom.”
Dad didn’t say anything. He shut the trunk and got behind the wheel.
We went LEFT RIGHT LEFT out of the parking lot and then we were back on Mr. Interstate 81, heading south.
I laid my head back to watch out the window. I read a sign that said MARYLAND WELCOMES YOU and then another one that said WELCOME TO WEST VIRGINIA and that was two more states ticked off our list. It was a sunny and blue-sky beautiful day, and there were trees all the way along, nothing but trees. And not just a few browny-turning-a-little-green trees like the ones on our street at home, but extra-green trees and purple blossom trees and orangey-fiery trees all showing off their spring colors. I opened the window because fresh air is good for you and I wanted to suck it all up into my lungs.
“I’m glad we aren’t home today,” I said. “It’s so stinky there.”
That’s only half-true. Our house is very lovely actually. It has lots of different rooms and a basement and a yard and a bunch of hiding places and my bedroom, which has all my stuff inside, like my craft projects and my closet full of clothes and my dream catcher on the window and my Legos for building and my doll’s house on the floor, and a pretend microphone for playing AMERICA’S GOT TALENT which is Mom’s favorite game since she likes singing and winning talent shows. She likes to be the BEST and she even has a whole list of sentences printed out on a page and stuck to the mirror in her closet which she says out loud every day to make her life perfect. Like “I am beautiful and talented” and “I have money, power, and joy in abundance” and “I am a successful actress.” Probably it’s stuck up but maybe it’s helping. Like the other things she says aloud to practice sounding fancy and to make sure her Queens accent STAYS AWAY. Otherwise it might ruin her chances for parts.
Our house is actually the exact same house that Mom grew up in when she was a little girl like me. She spent her whole life there until she graduated from high school and moved to Hollywood to be a star and then moved to Florida to be a wife. After Dad’s mortgage company went BANG and she got me in her belly, she and Dad moved back to Queens to live with Pop, who is Mom’s dad. Pop’s friend Tommy Marsden found Dad the job at VALUE MOTORS which was only meant to be until he got BACK ON HIS FEET but now it’s his forever job.
Mom says she didn’t want to move back to where she started because she always said OVER MY DEAD BODY would she live in Queens again. She liked living in their fancy beautiful house in Florida with a pool and a cleaning lady and a whole closet full of beautiful clothes. She liked their Florida friends and their Florida parties and she liked taking trips to Italy in the summer and trips to Aspen in the winter, and most of all she liked Dad because he was very successful and happy and rich, and she says that’s what he was always destined to be because he worked so hard and ROSE FROM NOTHING and that’s what being a real winner is all about.
Sometimes Mom gets so mad about living in her old house again that she throws things against the wall or slams doors or just bursts into pools of tears for no reason.
“It’s a nice house,” I say, but she just sobs.
Some days after she picks me up from school, we walk down to Socrates Park, which is on the water. Mom stands at the edge looking across at Manhattan on the other side and her eyes get misty.
“I’m always in the wrong place, Dolly. My whole life I’ve been stuck here and there’s no way out.”
I don’t know what to say to that.
I feel very heavy when I think about everything going wrong, like a bad magic spell that makes a curse on your whole life. Mom hated living with Pop and said he was a mean old bastard. Probably because he was mad at her. He wanted her to be full of brains and a doctor or a lawyer, but instead she was just beautiful. He always looked at her and shook his head and said something in a sad voice in his strange Bulgarian language. Everything sounds sad in Bulgarian, but he was extra upset with her for disappointing him.
I didn’t mind living with Pop. He never did much except sit in front of the TV all day and drink beer and make bad smells, but if you stayed out of his way it wasn’t so bad. The only times he made me really mad was when he said he hoped I didn’t get Mom’s birdbrains and also when he said STOP TALKING TO THAT STUPID HORSE, CHILD. After that, Clemesta put a curse on him and soon after he went to the old people’s home with the disease that eats your brain and six months after that he died and now he is in the ground at the cemetery next to Mom’s m
om, who was Grandma, who died before I was even born.
We visit them sometimes and bring white peonies for Grandma because she loved those the best when she was alive. We don’t bring anything for Pop because probably you can’t bring dead people beer.
Outside the window I could see ONE MILLION American flags. They were everywhere, stuck in the ground and flying from poles and painted onto buildings to remind people which country they were in. Clemesta and I made up a counting game to pass the time. You had to yell FLAG! when you spotted a flag and you got extra points if it was a particularly giant one or if it was two flags next to each other. We counted thirty-two flags and that was just in one hour of the clock. Dad wasn’t playing along even though I explained the rules VERY CLEARLY.
We passed a long stretch of trees and I could see apples hanging from the branches.
“Red apples are my second-best kind of apple,” I said. “My first-best is green because they make your mouth go juicy from the sour. Green apples are called Granny Smiths because she’s the lady who grows them. Look,” I said, “like this. Look at my face. It goes juicy if I just think about green apples.”
Dad looked at me and then back at the road. He was VERY FOCUSED so he couldn’t tell me about his best apples.
We passed by a row of houses, and some of them were fancy like from a TV show where a big family lives inside one house and laughs a lot, but others looked like they were falling apart with broken front steps and smashed windows. None of the houses looked like the ones back home.
I waved to some of the horses and cows but Clemesta HATES other horses so she would only greet the cows and the dogs. She says that other horses don’t believe she is a magical horse queen. They think she’s just making up silly stories and they tease her and that’s why she hates them and won’t even say hello.
“Dad!” I said. “I’m so bored I might crack.” I was using my whining voice even though nobody likes a whiner. I couldn’t even help it. “My legs need stretching. My neck is stiff from staring out the window the whole time.” I kicked my legs to shake them out. They had needles and pins stuck in them.
“Actually my bones are stretching again. That means a growing spurt. I bet I’m going to be really tall like Mom.” I closed my eyes to make that into a wish. Tall and beautiful, I said in my WISHING VOICE. That’s the voice that stays in your head so you can hear it but no one else can, because if you say a wish out loud it gets JINXED and then it won’t come true. Tall and beautiful, tall and beautiful, I said. That would make Mom happy and then she wouldn’t have to do the other stuff.
I stared at Dad’s head, which wasn’t moving. I sighed and folded my arms and sighed again. “You said this was supposed to be fun.”
Dad rubbed his eyes and checked the time.
“Sorry, Doll,” he said. “You’re right. We should have some fun.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll pull over soon as I can. We’ll find somewhere.”
“Somewhere fun.”
“Yeah.”
Clemesta and I went back to flag counting to pass the time.
Flags are PATRIOTIC and that means everyone loves America a whole lot, like Pop who always said AMERICA IS THE GREATEST NATION IN THE WORLD. He and Grandma came to America because where they were from was full of bad guys who kicked Pop’s Dad out of his big house and took away all his money and stole his job and left him with NOTHING, not even the watch on his wrist. When Pop was twenty-five years old, he met Grandma at the movies and said, “I love you, let’s go to America,” and they saved up all the money they could find until they had just enough to leave.
In America, Pop worked in a bakery even though he was actually a very brilliant engineer. He learned English and he drank a bottle of Coca-Cola each morning with his breakfast. Every day he kissed the ground because he was so happy not to live in Bulgaria anymore. Probably he ended up with mouse droppings in his mouth but he didn’t care.
Dad kept looking out his window but we weren’t passing by anything except flags and churches, flags and churches. Clemesta and I made a new game out of reading all the church names very quickly as we zoomed by.
ACTORS FOR CHRIST.
CHURCH OF GOD: SERPENT-HANDLING.
HIS FAMILY SAVIOR GOSPEL.
If you didn’t get all the words you couldn’t get any points.
I was winning but Clemesta wasn’t mad because she isn’t ever a SORE LOSER.
Dad pulled up at a gas station. It was called LIBERTY and there was a flag hanging out front. The roof was painted to look like the flag too.
“That’s two points,” I told Clemesta. “But I’ll share them with you so it’s one each.”
“Dolly, your heart is an ocean of kindness,” she said.
“Yes, it’s for Kindness Week,” I said.
The parking lot was big and empty. Part of it was for trucks but there weren’t any around. On the other side, there was a diner but it didn’t look like anyone was inside.
“Why are we stopping here?” I asked.
Dad popped the trunk and scratched through our Walmart bags. “Well, there’s nothing around here for miles, so—”
He pulled out my brand-new chalk sticks and held up the box. “We’ll make our own fun, for now.”
I followed him with my eyes and then also my feet. He walked across the parking lot and then bent to the ground and started drawing with the chalk.
“You’re making hopscotch!” I said. “I love hopscotch.”
“So, go ahead,” Dad said. “Let’s see you.”
I hop hopped wobbled hopped and Dad watched and then I went back the other way and he took out his phone to read something.
“Why are you checking the news the whole time?”
“I don’t know. In case anything happened.”
“Like what?”
Dad shrugged.
“Probably something bad,” I said. I hopped twice more with wobbles and once without and then I stopped. “It’s your turn.”
I watched Dad jump and he almost fell over and then he made himself straight again with his hands. “You’re better than me,” I said. “But I’m faster. Let’s make another game. Like an obstacle course. You have to, um. Make symbols. And each one is different and I have to do the right move. Like a circle is a jumping jack and a star is a twirl. No, probably that should be the other way around.”
Dad bent down and made some marks with the chalk. He wiped his hands against his jeans and squinted against the sun. He was sweating through his shirt at the armpits and over his back. I bent down and drew a heart with the pink chalk. That was for a pirouette, because I love ballet so much. I wiped my forehead which was also feeling sticky and then I made up moves for all the rest of the drawings. I did a frog jump onto an X. The gravel nipped at my hand when I landed and the game ended.
“Now let’s race,” I said. “Draw a start line and a finish line and then we say READY SET GO and race. Probably I’ll be faster than you.”
Dad drew the lines and I retied my laces. When I stood up my head was spinning.
We did three races and I won two and Dad lifted me up in his arms and danced me around and said I was a champion. I put my hands on his head and covered his eyeballs.
“I wish we could have fun days like this every day,” I said. Dad set me down very gently on the ground.
“Me too, Doll. Me too.”
“Why can’t we, then?” Dad rubbed his face on his sleeve to mop up the sweat. “I don’t know. Too much work. Too much…” He shook his head. “Sometimes dads aren’t too smart.”
“You are smart!” I said. “The smartest. Like me.”
Dad laughed. “Wanna grab an ice cream?” he said.
“For lunch?” I snickered behind my hands because Mom would be so mad at us for all this MISCHIEF.
Dad collected up all the chalk pieces and slipped them back in the box. I picked up Clemesta, who had been waiting on the curb.
Inside the store, there was a man wearing sho
rts and he had one real leg and one robot leg made from metal. He was paying for beer at the counter.
“Don’t stare,” Dad whispered.
“What happened to him?”
“He must have gotten hurt.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think his leg was eaten by a shark. They like leg meat.”
I picked an Oreo ice cream out of the freezer and Dad chose a popsicle. By the time we got to the counter, the one-leg man was gone. The lady behind the counter gave Dad back his change and said, “Have a nice day.”
“Thank you,” I told her, but Dad didn’t say anything.
I leaned in close as we walked back to the car. “You didn’t say thank you. You keep forgetting to say it.”
Dad frowned, and then nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “I keep forgetting.”
“Why do you keep forgetting?”
“I have a lot on my mind, I guess.”
“Me too,” I said. “My mind is full of stuff, like questions and information FACTS and the times tables and spelling for the hard words and a bunch of other stuff too.”
“But you always remember your manners.”
“Yeah, my brain is advanced, probably that’s why.”
Dad shook his head and smiled at me and his eyes were full of MILLIONS OF LOVE-HEARTS just for me. My ice cream was running and I tried to lick it all up.
Dad and I sat on a patch of spiky grass near the Jeep.
“What happens to that checkout lady when the Walmart closes?” I said.
Dad shrugged. “She loses her job, I guess.”
“Like when you lost yours.”
“Right.”
“But you found another one. So she will too.”
“Maybe,” Dad said. “I hope so.” He looked at the tires of the Jeep.
It wasn’t Dad’s fault that he lost his job and his whole entire company. It was the fault of the big crash that made everything fall apart. MILLIONS of people lost their jobs and their savings and their houses, and everyone was sad for ten years. Mom says that’s called HARD LUCK but she says you have to make your own luck in life and that’s why she goes to every single casting because you never know and this country is built on lucky breaks. I hope Dad gets another one soon. Then he’ll cheer up and he won’t just come home from work and turn on the TV and be too tired to play with me.
All the Lost Things Page 6