The Great Jeff

by Tony Abbott

  “The most realistic so far.” He’d hand one to me, then wait for my reaction.

  He must have been in his room that day he called me, crying that my stupid uncle hadn’t come roaring into town with his real Cobra, which he insisted I had promised we would ride in. I barely knew what he was talking about because my uncle never follows through on anything and that was also the day Mom dented a parked car because she’d had wine at brunch.

  “It wasn’t that much,” she’d said.

  “What, the wine or the dent?”

  “Neither!”

  Then she freaked out because she was sure somebody would report her. Two seconds later Tom called and screamed at me: “Where’s the car? Where’s the car?”

  That was another great day in my life.

  I hadn’t thought about the blue house, about coming here, about each street I’d need to take to get here, for months.

  So why now?

  Maybe that was exactly why I was here. I hadn’t thought. The way here was too natural. No matter what I thought of him now, it must have felt right to arrive here. The lefts and rights, the corners, the streets to cross. And it had been right for years, coming to his house, being inside it, just being. It was something I did so many times before it all burned to the ground.

  A sudden wing of brown leaves flew out of the hedge, blew apart, and sprayed across the lawn. Another. Someone was raking leaves from the side yard into the front. The leaves were mostly down from the trees by now, so it was time. I moved behind a thicker tree to not be seen.

  Mr. Bender, hatless in the cold, his jacket unzipped, pawed his rake at the ground, clawing leaves out of the border and across the tops of his shoes. He dug like that for a minute or two, then stopped and looked behind at what he’d collected. His shoulders slumped. There was a ton more to do. He looked the same as last fall, the last time I could remember seeing him.

  What I hated was how Tom had turned on me just as things got weird with Mom. She had been slowly losing what I now knew was her part-time job at the hospital. She drank a lot of wine, sometimes while Tom was at my house.

  And of course there was Jessica Feeney.

  Everyone, Tom mostly, wanted me to be all friends with her and thought I was mean for not holding one of her burned hands, not being able to make myself hold it, and for saying what I said. I don’t even remember what I said, but whatever it was, it was the end for him. Mom was right. Tom Bender abandoned me. Never mind. Never mind, except that he tossed me away while he was walking somewhere, like I was a weight that tires you to carry.

  Mr. Bender was making a real mess, rattling and tearing at those leaves like a mouse in a trap. Cursing at the air, at nature, at himself. I watched him open a tall leaf bag, fold the rim over to keep the sides up, then press his rake into the pile of leaves, squeeze it with his other hand like a set of clamps, and try to empty the whole thing just as the bag folded away from him.

  Clumps of leaves fell to the ground. He kicked the bag. He was funny. He’d always been funny. Quiet and funny. I liked him. I wonder if he ever asked Tom why I didn’t come over anymore. Maybe he didn’t. Should I like him anyway?

  My heart flipped when he suddenly glanced over and half raised his hand, but he hadn’t seen me, wasn’t waving, just sneezing. I was standing so still I was invisible. He propped up the bag again, regathered the leaves, and got it this time.

  Score one for Mr. Bender.

  He was doing better than me.

  In the shadow of the trees, I cut unnoticed to the end of the street and turned toward the library.

  CHAPTER 22

  OUR SHAME

  It was after four by the time I got to the town center. Our car was still in the medical building parking lot, so I peeked in at the office. Mom bounded up from the bench when she saw me. “I’m still waiting,” she whispered, then made a face at me. “You look awful. Did you walk from school?”

  “From home… the house. I need a book at the library.”

  She shook her head while tugging out the shoulders of my shirt. “Did you run? You sort of smell, honey. BO.”

  “Sorreee. The hot water didn’t come on, you know.”

  “I’ve been keeping the furnace down. I should have told you.”

  “By the way, there was a truck driving away from the house when I got off the bus.”

  “No!”

  “I didn’t go in until it left.”

  “Stinking rat,” she hissed, and pushed my hair behind my ears. “He said no one would be there after school hours.”

  “They almost weren’t.” I pinched a spec of lint off her sleeve. “This top again?”

  So many things were going into cartons or in bags that Mom was rotating the same two or three outfits. She knew what she looked like but couldn’t do anything about it.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “Look at us. Fixing each other up.”

  It hit me then how every sentence we said, every word, had our shame behind it. How all the words, by themselves, told the truth of what was going on. Most people weren’t listening closely enough, but I knew Mom heard as well as I did. Nothing was regular about this little scene. I had walked too far and sweated through my days-old shirt. Mom’s clothes were wrinkled and she was afraid. It was all because we were losing our house. I felt like throwing up.

  A door clicked open and a lady waved from inside. My mother nodded to her.

  “Go get ’em,” I whispered.

  She smiled at me and followed the waving lady.

  I trotted across to the library. There was an empty table in the adult stacks, and I put my pack down. The air was full of those smells you always smell in a public library: the weird sweetness of old paper, brittle cellophane, something like rancid baloney, dust, copy-machine toner, farts—or maybe the baloney smelled like farts—dusty carpets. Every odor was exaggerated and mixed together because libraries never open windows and are always overheated in cold weather.

  A single thousand-year-old copy of Mango was all that was on the shelf, and it was only there because it was misshelved and you could barely read the worn spine. I flipped through the yellow pages. Nearly every one was underlined and highlighted. Holding it was like wearing someone else’s swim trunks.

  But I turned the pages anyway, looking for parts to catch my eye. My tongue, like always, formed the words as I read them. I guess that’s why I’m a slow reader. It tires you out, your mouth moving while you read, and it looks stupid, so I turned my chair away from the other tables. Then I saw a chapter called “Bums in the Attic.”

  Passing bums will ask, Can I come in? I’ll offer them the attic, ask them to stay…

  My head buzzed. Even though Hannah hadn’t read this in class, I heard her voice saying the words, and I felt sick and angry. I wanted to throw the book at the wall.

  Maybe I was mad about the truck in the driveway or that they made my mom wait so long for the interview or the waving lady’s face. Or maybe it was seeing Tom Bender’s house. Or maybe I was mad because there was no way I could be somebody other than the dummy my parents made me.

  I walked between the stacks, trying not to think at all, then because I might need to read it again, I reshelved the book exactly where it didn’t belong. People usually look for things at eye level, did you ever notice that? Like Mr. Bender looking across the street and not seeing me. If you’re not where they expect you, they might not see you. I buried the book on a bottom shelf.

  A man laughed. I turned. Decorations were half-up, half-down. Pumpkin lights dangling to the floor, Pilgrim cutouts and paper turkeys waiting in the wings. I couldn’t tell what was going up, what coming down. Had Halloween already come and gone? It was still on its way, wasn’t it? When? What day was this?

  A yellow aluminum ladder stood at one end of the reference desk, with a couple of open-flapped cartons on the floor next to it. A high school kid was up the ladder, reaching behind the INFORMATION sign over the desk to string up a coil of gold twinkly lights, while another int
ern fed the lights to him yard by yard. The librarians were joking with the interns, while the only man on the actual staff under age eighty held the ladder steady, a single foot planted on the bottom rung, showing off. All this was fine. Great. Stupid. Life doing what it’s supposed to.

  I was worming my way back to collect my stuff when I saw a copy of Mango on a study table with a binder and a water bottle. It wasn’t the version Mr. M had given us in class, but older, with a hard cover. No one was sitting there, so I leaned against the table edge, picked it up, and looked inside. No underlining, no notes, but stars and dashes penciled up and down the margins.

  “Hey.”

  I remembered that little girl on the “private court” in New Hampshire. I turned, ready. Hannah stood a few feet away, taller than me. Brown eyes, hair rusty brown and unbraided and wild, different from how she had it in class.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I was just…”

  “Don’t you love that book?”

  I thought about that. “Probably not as much as you, but yeah. I haven’t finished it, though. I lost my copy.”

  “They must have one here.”

  “All out, I checked.”

  Except why did I lie about that? She already had her own, so she wouldn’t go hunting for the one I’d hidden. I don’t know.

  “Do you come here?” she asked. “I study here a lot. It’s quiet and, well…” She waved her hand at the stacks as if to say, Books!

  I shook my head. “Sometimes. Plus, my mother works across the street. Office manager.” Why couldn’t I tell her the truth? Why was everything a lie? Because it was easier? Distract them. Make them look away. Fade off.

  I smelled myself and stepped back.

  She sat down. “You should finish it. Really. The best part is the end. I first read it in sixth grade. This is my mom’s book. Well, not in sixth grade. During the summer. This time was so much better. I saw so much more. I want to be her.”

  She was talking so fast.

  “You want to be your mom?” I asked.

  “No. She died when I was born. Well, just after.”

  “Oh, sorry. That’s tough.”

  “Sometimes. But I mean I want to be her, Esperanza. But not her either. I want to be the author, who actually did get away and wrote all about it.”

  “So you think the book is true? It really happened?”

  “True? Well, it’s fiction… but it’s sort of the author’s story. I think so.”

  “Sort of. A metaphor, you said. But I get it.” I didn’t, but she was looking at me for more, so I added, “You sounded like a teacher in class. You could teach Mr. Maroni.”

  She laughed. It was the first time I’d heard her laugh and it sounded like bells. Dumb, but that’s what it sounded like in the quiet library. Then she handed me the book, open at the end, shut her eyes, and quoted the whole last chapter from memory, from I like to tell stories to For the ones who cannot out. Of course she got it perfect, every sentence, every word. But it wasn’t even that. It was as if she was a singer and had just sung a song. Or recited a poem or a gospel, quietly and only to me. Secretly.

  Then there was a moment.

  When she stopped speaking but her eyes were still closed, her face went smooth from her forehead to her eyelids to her cheeks to her lips and chin. In that split second, I felt like leaning in and putting my cheek against her cheek, because I knew it would be warm. I don’t know. I really did think that, but it was so wrong. Totally off base. But I thought it, so shoot me. Then it was past and she popped her eyes open.

  “How did I do?”

  “Yeah. You got it right. I have to find a copy.”

  “Well, you can’t have mine,” she said, collecting her stuff together in a big bag. “It’s got all my mom’s junk in it, her dashes. All my junk, too. I’m the stars. You gotta make your own junk.” She laughed like bells again, then whisper-shouted, “Make your own junk!” But nobody looked.

  She took a long breath, pulled her forest of hair back, let it go, and said, “I have to get moving, so I guess, you know, see ya.”

  I stepped back again. “Yeah. See you.”

  CHAPTER 23

  HOPES

  When ten minutes later I crossed the street to the office where Mom was, I was still thinking about Hannah. What’s going on here? Her face, her voice, still working on me. I could have kept them inside for a long while, but I didn’t have time, I didn’t have space. Mom was done with her interview and standing there, smiling stiffly.

  Before I said a word, she pulled me through the lobby to the parking lot.

  “How did it go?” I asked when she beeped open the car.

  “We’ll know in a week or ten days.”

  “Ten days? We have to leave a week from Saturday.”

  We drove out the lot toward home.

  “You never mind about that. I have hopes. I think they liked me. Everything they want this person to do is everything I can do. I’ve done it all. And more. I feel good about it, Jeff. Really good.”

  I hoped she was telling the truth. A new job might get Mr. Andrade and the marshal to back down. Then the usual thought crept in. That Mom had gotten it wrong, that they make everybody feel good after an interview and were just lying to her, humoring her until they hired someone else.

  “Did they ask about getting fired from the clinic and the other job the clinic offered you?”

  “A little. I got past it.” She slowed for a stoplight but it turned green.

  “Did the lady have a file or anything?” I said.

  “A file?”

  “You know. A report card. Like they had at the unemployment place.”

  “No. She might check, but I really didn’t burn any bridges when I left those places. I was mad, but anybody would have been. I didn’t make a scene.”

  I wondered if that was true. “Well, good. Perfect. Does that mean, if you get this job, that we can stay in our house?”

  She half nodded. “The notice the sheriff gave me…”

  “Marshal,” I said, as we turned the corner onto our street.

  “…I’ll get a lawyer to get me an extension. If I can find one who won’t chisel me. Anyway, I really feel good about the way this interview—”

  She gulped back what she was going to say. A small pickup and a van were parked at the house, the truck in our driveway, the van out front. The pickup must have been Mr. Andrade’s.

  “What the—” She pulled up short at the curb. “He’s at it again!” She tore out of the car, leaving her door open, and started yelling at Mr. Andrade between her teeth.

  “You said this wouldn’t happen. You promised! What are you doing here? My house is my house until it isn’t! You said. You said—”

  “No, no, just painters. I am sorry, miss. Just seeing what needs to be done. I had to double-check how much paint. It’s chilly in there. You should turn the heat up. You have a lot to do inside, yes?”

  “You never mind what’s inside!” she snapped. “I’ll take care of it. Don’t you worry.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “Mom? The lawyer, tell him—”

  She elbowed me to keep quiet.

  “So, okay, okay,” Mr. Andrade said, and got into his truck, while the other man, in painting overalls, came over. He slipped two fingers into a pocket and tweezered out a card. He held it to Mom.

  “In case your new place needs any—”

  The look she gave him. As if he were handing her a poop.

  I took the business card. “Thanks.”

  He shrugged at me like, What’s with her? and got into his van and left.

  CHAPTER 24

  GETTING COLDER

  It was because I forgot to think.

  It was because I believed my mother when she said she was taking care of us. It was because after Mom celebrated with her old nurse buddies last night about the interview—the interview!—she did her usual thing and fell asleep on the couch like all the other times.

  We woke late on Sunday to
pounding on the front door. I think I screamed. My first, crazy thought was that Hannah was mad because I stole what she said for our essay test last week. But no. From my window I saw Mr. Andrade. He was dressed in church clothes, his face red, looking in and pounding for a long minute, then jumping back down the steps to the marshal, whose car blocked our driveway.

  We got to the door and opened it just as a moving van was rolling slowly to the curb. The sky was dark, gray with clouds.

  “Oh, my lord!” my mother screamed. “No—”

  “The oil com-company!” Mr. Andrade sputtered. “The oil company called me. Emergency. You didn’t pay last two months. They didn’t deliver. My furnace!”

  “What?” Mom squeaked. “The liars! What?”

  The cold water, the chilly mornings and nights. It was because I didn’t think.

  “Sludge in the pipes,” Mr. Andrade went on. “The furnace sucks in all the dirty sludge if the tank is empty. They have to—probably have to drain the lines. New filters. My furnace!”

  Mom just stood there shaking.

  “You’re leaving today,” the marshal called out.

  “We still have more time!” I said. “You said two weeks. It’s not—”

  “Time’s up now,” the marshal said, pushing himself away from his car, a different one from the car he had a week ago. “This house is unsafe. No heat, no hot water, no sir. We need to get you out. You have damaged the furnace, maybe thousands in costs, and it’s not safe to live here. So… time’s up.” He worked his way up the walk side by side with the landlord, whose face was purple. “Tell us, ma’am. How can we help?”