The Secret Life of Sam

by Kim Ventrella

  “Do I look like a chauffeur?” Aunt Jo said, but she laughed and pumped the gas anyway, bumping away toward home. Her home, at least, but it would never be Sam’s, not really.

  “You can take me to my house, Miss J,” Edie said over the twangy bluegrass music blaring from the radio. Pa would have approved. “Mom’s sister called and said she’s coming home early, and I’ve got dishes and laundry and stuff.”

  “We’ll see.” Aunt Jo’s reflection in the rearview mirror turned grim. “And you can bet I’m gonna have a talk with your mama when she gets back.”

  Edie gave Sam a worried look. As they approached Edie’s house, which was just down the street from Aunt Jo’s, Sam saw lights on inside and a beat-up hatchback with about a hundred bumper stickers parked crooked in the driveway.

  “See, I told you she’d be home.” Edie jumped out. When Aunt Jo started to follow, she blocked her door. “Maybe you can just give her a day to settle in and then talk to her. She’s trying her best.”

  “She needs to try harder. She should be taking care of you, not the other way around.” Sam couldn’t understand why Aunt Jo sounded so angry, but then her tone softened. “You call me if you need anything. Anything, you hear?”

  “Yes, Miss J.”

  Edie lingered on the curb a few seconds longer.

  “See you later?” Sam said, because as usual he couldn’t think of anything really good to say.

  “Definitely. Oh, if it’s okay, Sam and I are going to work on our project this weekend.”

  “Sure thing, just call me and I’ll pick you up. How’d it go today by the way? Ready to launch into space yet?”

  Edie looked at Sam and then back at Aunt Jo. “Not just yet, but it went great. We’re almost done designing the wings.”

  “Right on. Nice to see you two working as a team. I can’t wait to see it when it’s finished.”

  “Bye.” Edie offered a weak wave. When Aunt Jo wasn’t looking, she winked at Sam, which made his cheeks heat up and his insides squirm.

  Aunt Jo didn’t drive away until Edie had gone inside, and even then she was muttering.

  “Is she . . . ?” Sam started, and then realized he didn’t know the right way to finish. “I mean, Edie’s mom, is she—?”

  “An addict? Like me?” Aunt Jo shot him a look in the rearview mirror. “You bet your socks she is. The longest she ever had was two months clean, and that was over a year ago. Thought she might make it this time, but you know how it is with addicts.”

  Sam didn’t know how it was. He still thought of addicts as the people you saw huddled on street corners, not his friend’s mom. Not Aunt Jo. She reached over and turned the music all the way down. “It’s like having a disease. Just when you think you’ve kicked it, it rears its ugly head again. It was like that for me, too, when I first got back.”

  “Got back from where?”

  “Afghanistan. I’d lost my leg and my career. They wanted to park me behind a desk, but I’ve never been any good at sitting around. I got angry. I lost myself.”

  Silence settled over the car as Aunt Jo pulled up the driveway in front of the big yellow house. The huge maples on either side cast the car in shadow.

  “Is that why you couldn’t call or write? Because you lost yourself?”

  She turned back to face him, her expression not angry or sad, just quiet, resigned. After a pause, she spoke. “You know, even though I was taller and tougher than your pa, I always looked up to him. I don’t know, maybe it’s bound to be that way with older brothers. Everything I did—flight school, my service—it was for me, sure, but it was also for him. Pops never understood why I wanted to go into something he considered ‘man’s work,’ but your pa didn’t bat an eye. He always stood up for me when Pops took one of his stands on old-fashioned values. I guess that’s why your pa’s opinion mattered most. I always wanted to make him proud.”

  Aunt Jo paused and all Sam could hear was the sound of her breathing. “At first, I thought I could keep it from him, pretend like nothing was wrong. I don’t think I believed there was anything wrong myself. All I was doing was taking medication the doctor had prescribed, and I needed it for the pain, and I mean really needed it. You try losing half a leg and not taking any pills. The problem was that, even after the worst of the physical pain went away, I couldn’t stop.”

  Her hands gripped and released the steering wheel, worn hands with wrinkled knuckles, just like Pa’s. “I drove down for your ninth birthday. I bet you didn’t know that.” She turned around to face the back but didn’t meet Sam’s eyes. “I thought I was fine, normal, but on the way there, I drove off the road. Just like that. One second I was moving along the curves, same as always, the next I was off in a ditch, wheels spinning, my whole world turned upside down.”

  Sam heard the words but it took them a while to register. “You had an accident?” Images of Pa’s Sunbird flashed through his head, but he forced them back down again.

  “Nearly died. Somehow, my phone didn’t break, and I called your pa before I even called 911. He was the one who pulled me out.” She rested her forehead on her hands for a moment and closed her eyes. “He didn’t know about the pills until we got to the hospital.”

  “No. He would have told me. He said you couldn’t make it because you had some army reunion.” And it was too weird. Two accidents in one family. Three, if you counted what had happened to One-Eye.

  “That’s because I asked him to.”

  “You’re lying. He would have told me if you’d had an accident. No way he wouldn’t.”

  She didn’t say anything for a long while. It got so hot inside the car that Sam cracked the door to let in some air. “Do you know why I drove down that day?”

  “It was my birthday. You always come down. You always came down.”

  “And what did we always do on your birthday?”

  “I don’t know, birthday stuff. We had cake and you drove me to the aviation museum and . . . oh.”

  “Yeah, oh. If things had been different, just a little, then you might have been with me in that car when I crashed.”

  “But I wasn’t.” Suddenly, the air was closing in around him.

  “But you could have been.”

  The clouds shifted and a slant of sunlight flooded the car. Sweat dripped down Sam’s back, but he ignored it.

  “Come on,” Aunt Jo said. “Let’s go inside.”

  “No, wait.” He pushed past the images of twisted metal still swirling in his head and tried hard to focus. “What did you mean earlier when you said that Pa asked you to stay away?”

  Aunt Jo turned to the back seat and this time she did meet his eyes. “I was mad about it at first, but I don’t blame your pa. He was only trying to protect you.”

  “Oh.” Protect him? By sending Aunt Jo away for four years? He couldn’t stand the idea of Pa ignoring his own sister, all because of one tiny mistake. All because of him. With everything that was happening, and with all he’d learned about Ma, he was beginning to wonder if he’d ever known Pa at all.

  She opened the door and a wave of hot air flooded the car.

  “You could have told me.” Sam’s words hung in the space between them. “You could have called.”

  Aunt Jo sighed but didn’t answer right away. “Recovery is tough, and I wasn’t always doing as well as I am now. I wanted to protect you too, like your pa, but maybe . . . I don’t know, maybe I was really protecting myself.”

  Sam didn’t know what to say to that. After a while, Aunt Jo shut her door and popped the trunk. “Hey, I thought we’d make something special for dinner,” she said, trying to sound cheery. “Picked up the ingredients today at work.” Aunt Jo worked part-time at the grocery store and part-time fixing cars out of her garage.

  Sam got out and stretched his legs. He hadn’t noticed it before, but they did feel a little stiff and bruised from where he’d been dragged down the tunnel.

  “Here, you take these two.” She hoisted two heavy paper sacks into his
arms. “Got everything we need for your pa’s special turkey-and-bacon lasagna. What do you say, think you can help me make it?”

  Sam shrugged. He wasn’t mad at Aunt Jo like he’d been when he first arrived, but that didn’t mean he was ready to be best friends either.

  “Well, I sure hope you can help me eat it, because I’m trying to lose weight, Bucko, not chow down on an entire lasagna by myself.”

  Inside, Aunt Jo cranked up some Clifton Chenier and His Red Hot Louisiana Band. That was Pa’s favorite CD of all time, and Sam wondered where she’d gotten it. Then he wondered if maybe it wasn’t her CD at all, but Pa’s.

  “How about you slice up these onions?”

  Sam didn’t know how he felt about Aunt Jo maybe stealing Pa’s CD, but he started chopping. It was nice listening to the familiar, bluesy tunes. He didn’t even mind the onions burning his eyes or the way Aunt Jo chopped the bacon into chunks instead of slices like Pa always did. Once the bacon and onions started frying and the turkey started sizzling, Aunt Jo’s ugly old house even smelled a little bit like home.

  While they waited for the turkey to finish, Sam sat down at the kitchen table. Aunt Jo brought him a tall glass of sweet tea, which wasn’t Orange Crush, but was still pretty good.

  “You know, I talked to your pa the day of the accident. Before it happened, I mean.” Aunt Jo released a huge sigh as she sat down. She had bacon grease on her shirt and a piece of onion skin stuck to her sleeve.

  “On my birthday?”

  “No, not my accident, your pa’s.” She fumbled with the chip hanging from her neck, digging her fingernails into the grooves. “That bothered me a lot at first, me surviving an accident and your pa . . . well, if one of us deserved to die, it sure as heck wasn’t him.”

  Sam swallowed, letting the words sink in. “What’d he say? Was he . . . ?”

  “He talked about you—what else?” Aunt Jo smiled, sitting up straight again and returning to her usual, no-nonsense self.

  Sam wished he could do the same. Instead, something hard settled into the back of his throat.

  “Said how you’d caught a catfish as thick as a mailbox, and how you’d probably make it into Bobby Joe’s Catch of the Week a second time, which was a record for someone your age. He said how you were doing well in school, and how you’d nearly won the hundred meters in track and how he wanted me to come down again to visit.” She paused, picking the onion peel from her sleeve. “That was the real reason he called. He . . .”

  Sam waited. Aunt Jo got that look on her face like her cheeks hurt and maybe her eyes too, on the inside not the outside, and Sam knew just how she felt because his face didn’t feel all that great either. An ache sprouted behind his eyes and filled up his throat, and suddenly he couldn’t listen to Clifton Chenier or smell Pa’s lasagna or look at Aunt Jo’s face for one more single second. True, he would get Pa back soon enough, but what if? What if he didn’t?

  “I need to go upstairs.” He stood and then he waited for a second, thinking maybe he would change his mind, but he didn’t, and so he went upstairs and Aunt Jo didn’t stop him.

  Safe in his room, he closed the door and buried his face in his cat-hair pillow. He tried not to think about what would happen if he failed. If the doorway closed and Pa got stuck over there, and he got stuck over here, and he had nothing left of Pa but a stolen CD, a bunch of old stories, and a dish full of not-quite-Pa’s lasagna.

  11

  LATER THAT EVENING, SAM WOKE up to a gentle knocking and the sound of retreating footsteps. He could tell before he even opened the door that Aunt Jo was holding another one of her meetings. Friendly voices filtered up the stairs, along with the patter of clinking silverware. Sam wondered if Edie was in the kitchen again serving cake.

  Part of him wanted to go down and check, but then he found the cardboard file box sitting outside his door. On top was a plate wrapped in tin foil and a note:

  Hope the lasagna turned out all right :)

  P.S. These are some of your pa’s things. I thought you should have them.

  Sam pulled the box into his room and sat down on the floor to examine it. On the side, Pa had scribbled in black Sharpie: Jack’s stuff—don’t touch! Sam remembered that box from their garage back home, but he’d never looked inside. Jack. That’s what Ma had called him. Sam knew it was Pa’s name, but it was still weird seeing it in writing.

  Careful not to tip over the lasagna, Sam lifted both the lid and the plate onto the floor and set them aside. The smell of dusty papers filled his nostrils, settling all around his head like a cloud. He pulled stacks of pictures from crumbling manila envelopes and spread them across the floor. There was Pa when he was still called Jack, wearing those same dirty overalls, all curled up in a ball while One-Eye, the real One-Eye, tried to lick his face. There was Aunt Jo, looking huge and awkward, standing next to a bike that was a few sizes too small. Pa was there too, sitting in the grass with One-Eye cradled in his lap like a baby.

  “That cat sure loved your pa.” Aunt Jo peeked into the room, and the low hum of voices drifted in from down below. “I think your pa was the only thing he ever did love. Never cared much for me or Pops, and I can’t blame him. He was a hard cat to warm up to, but not for Jack.”

  Sam sifted through more of the photos. One-Eye was in most all of them. “Is it true Pa rescued him after he got hit by a car?”

  “Sure is. I guess we Wests have a thing about cars.” She shook her head, dropping her gaze. “But I bet your pa told you all about One-Eye. Knowing how much he loves his stories.”

  “I guess.” Sam thought back, thinking how strange it was that, of all of Pa’s stories, he’d chosen to leave this one out. If he’d really loved that ugly cat so much, how come he’d never mentioned him? And what about Mama? whispered the nagging voice that kept popping up in his head. “How’d he die?”

  Aunt Jo knelt down, every bone in her legs creaking and crunching. “That was the part your pa never could get over. He went to sleep one night, snuggled into a furry ball on your pa’s pillow, same as always. Only, the next morning, when Jack went to wake him up, he was already gone. Just like that. After all he’d been through, surviving the accident, scrabbling with raccoons and wild dogs. After all that, your pa couldn’t understand why he went to sleep one night and never woke up again.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nobody knows. Sometimes, life isn’t fair. One minute you’re here and everything’s fine, the next minute . . .” Aunt Jo tugged on the poker chip around her neck. It was green, and now, up close, he saw that it said one year. “After that, your pa wouldn’t talk about One-Eye anymore. He put all his pictures away, except the one by his bed, and if anybody asked, he’d say he’d never had a cat.”

  Sam’s breath had grown heavy in his chest, but he thought he understood. It was the same way he could barely stand to hear stories about Pa. Maybe Pa had wanted to tell him about One-Eye and Mama, only he couldn’t find the strength.

  Sam wasn’t sure how he felt about that, Pa only trusting him with part of the truth.

  After a bit, Aunt Jo stood up with a groan. She rubbed down her left leg and Sam found himself wondering for the first time what it had been like. Losing a part of herself that she’d thought would always be there. Waking up one day expecting to find it, for life to be normal, and then remembering all over again that it was gone.

  “You’d better eat up,” Aunt Jo said, “before your food gets cold.” Sam had already forgotten about the lasagna, but now that she mentioned it he could smell the aroma of warm bacon and turkey rising up over all that dust. “Come downstairs if you want. We’ve got pies tonight. Oh, and I almost forgot.” She reached into the pocket of her cargo pants and pulled out a cold Orange Crush. “I had Earl pick up a few cases from the city. They don’t sell them at the Shop ’n’ Save.”

  “Thanks.” Sam took the can. He had the sudden urge to cry again.

  “I should get back. Meeting’s about to start. Thank you for . . .” She
trailed off. When she found Sam’s eyes, she looked like the old Aunt Jo again, like some of her ugly layers had been peeled away and she was more like the person he remembered. “I just . . . I’m glad you’re here.”

  She shut the door and left him holding his can of Orange Crush, the little beads of condensation dripping down his fingertips.

  Sam sorted through the photos a while longer. Most of them were from Oklahoma. He could tell by the dried-out grass and open fields, but a few were from the tiny white house in Louisiana. He knew that Pa had moved there after he left home, but he’d never really thought about how strange that was. Pa moving there when he was a kid, and now Sam moving here. Did that mean that Pa had thought of this place as home, at least back then? Had he been missing the dusty gravel roads and the dead fields and the wind that sucked all the liquid from your eyes the minute you stepped out of the car?

  Sam found a stack of notebooks hiding under all the pictures. He flipped through a few, surprised to find them filled with Pa’s messy writing. Entire notebooks full, some recent, others dating all the way back to when Pa was a boy.

  His palms tingled as he turned to a random page, the sound of Pa’s voice filling his head.

  June 12, 1988

  I should’ve known it was a bad idea to go out gator hunting with Pops and the Earle brothers. This whole trip was doomed from the start, but you know Pops. Head as hard as a boulder and twice as thick. And he wouldn’t even let Jojo come with us, which was the biggest blue-jay move of all. She’s the one who once shot a coyote from three hundred feet away when it was trying to eat Miss Carla May’s dog, and who cares if she’s a girl? She’s the one who likes hunting and tracking, whereas me, I’m what Pops would call a bona fide wuss, and proud of it.

  Now I’m stuck out in Nowheresville, Louisiana, just me and three jerks with guns, trying not to get sucked dry by the world’s biggest mosquitoes. Hand to God, I saw one as big as my fist, and don’t get me started on the roaches. Good news is, we’re heading home in the morning. Bad news is, Pops ain’t speaking to me anymore after what went down with the Colonel.