The Great Jeff

by Tony Abbott

  Now and then it seemed like Mr. M wanted to talk to me—did he know, too?—but I ducked out before he could. Ducking out on teachers, hard to do, but I did it.

  Later I saw Hannah out of class. Well, she saw me. It was one of the days I didn’t eat. I was passing quickly through the cafeteria to get to the courtyard where I hung out on the bench behind the tree.

  “Jeff!” she said.

  I looked over. She smiled like she did at the public library that time. I went over, wondering how I smelled. I didn’t sit down. She was eating off a tray in front of her. Another tray was at the empty seat next to her.

  “Sit,” she said. “Carly went home and left me her lunch. I’d already bought mine. I don’t know what to do with it. Sit?”

  I looked at the tray. Food untouched. “Who’s Carly?”

  “Carly. Short. Cornrows?” She wiggled her fingers over her ears.

  I looked around. “Her whole lunch?”

  “If you don’t want it, I hear they give the uneaten food to the sixth graders.”

  “You funny,” I said, and pulled the tray across the table to me and sat.

  She smiled. “So what do you think of our little friends Pobby and Dingan?”

  I tried not to eat the grilled cheese too fast. “I’m siding with the brother that they aren’t real. Maybe. But the book is named after them, so I don’t know.”

  She chuckled. “It’s another voice book.”

  “He loves them,” I said.

  She cracked through a stalk of celery. “I think I like it. It’s strange, but.” Which was Australian talk, to put words at the end of the sentence that belonged at the beginning. “I think it gets sad, though, so don’t tell me if you read ahead.”

  “I… won’t.…”

  The sealed cup of pudding, the unopened chocolate milk, the cut carrots and celery.

  “I don’t want to read it fast. Not that anybody can. Trying to figure out the lingo.”

  I didn’t get it. There were choices in the cafeteria line. The food on my tray was exactly the same as the food on her tray. My face suddenly got hot and then my whole body did and I caught a whiff of myself. I pushed the chair out and looked around.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I know…” I stood up. “I know I’m not the sharpest tool, but did you… did you buy me lunch?”

  Her eyes, wide and brown and looking straight into my face. “What?”

  “Don’t give me that. This isn’t Carly’s lunch.… There is no Carly.… This is…” I stepped back into someone’s chair.

  “Carly Emory,” she said. “She got sick.…”

  I went away fast. Somewhere. I forget where. My body took me and I wasn’t in control. Black knives spun in my eyes. Twice I turned the other way when I saw her in the hall. I think it was twice. I took the long way through the building. The day ended that way. The counselor didn’t call, or maybe she tried the old home number. I was glad the weekend came. Mom couldn’t wait to leave the shelter for the day each day, telling me she needed to do this and that. She dodged the social worker when she could. I stayed, spent time with Jano and Tad, told them about Pobby and Dingan. Mostly I holed up in the room and wondered how invisible friends can disappear.

  On Monday, I was still burning inside and hid in the bathroom when I spotted Mrs. Ward in the hall. A teacher found me; I pretended to be sick. Like pretend Carly.

  I skipped Tuesday. The next day I saw Hannah in the hall again, as if she lived there, hunting me. It was late afternoon. She was coming toward me, but even though my underwear was clean I could still smell pee on me and couldn’t talk to her and felt I was going to throw up, so I ducked into another lavatory. She had shamed me. I hated her for what she had done. She knew about me.

  My face in the mirror shocked me. Way worse than the night I slept in our car. Sunken cheeks. Weird white lips. Greasy hair. Why hadn’t Mom told me I looked like this? My ears were hot and red, my skin too tight for my skull. I was staring in the mirror at my face and neither of us was me. I hung on to the edge of the sink with both hands, bony and bloodless as my face, trying to breathe. From now on, I wouldn’t do anything other than move from here to there. I didn’t need the attention. I needed the opposite of attention now. I lived in a shelter.

  The bell rang, and I was outside before it stopped. Hannah was still in the hall. I pushed by her—“Jeff. Jeff!”—and kept my eyes down. I wanted to disappear.

  To be not anywhere.

  But Mom was waiting in the lot, crying with good news.

  CHAPTER 34

  ROLLER COASTER

  “I got the job!” She hugged me from behind the wheel even before I was all the way in. “I told you! I told you!”

  I tried to harden myself into stone.

  “Did you hear me? I got the job.”

  “You… got the job?”

  “I got the job!” She laughed through her tears as she pulled jerkily around the circle and away. “Their first choice was wrong. She looked good on paper, but I didn’t like her. She was snotty when I asked her where she’d worked. They found out and good riddance!” She whooped. “I start on Monday. I won’t get my first paycheck for two weeks, but I think we’ll have just enough until then.”

  “Enough for what? A bigger room at the shelter?”

  “We’re never going back there, Jeff. Spend Thanksgiving in a shelter? No way. A hotel. A better one. A really nice one! We can swing it, Jeff. Your father finally sent a check. More money this time.”

  “He did? How much?”

  “Enough, Jeffie. I’m going to keep this job, I know I am.”

  She was always doing this, putting on a face to make me feel better. I didn’t have the strength anymore to call her out on it, so I went along, pretending to be the old Jeff.

  “Will the hotel have a heated pool this time?”

  “Two pools!” she said. “And both of them will be in our room! I’ll make sure of it!”

  We drove to the mission, where we collected our stuff and signed out way more quickly than we checked in. The nice lady stood in the little sergeant’s room, smiling at us, at me, happy that things were looking up for us. I could tell she wanted to say more, and would have if it was just me, but my mother was all jerky movements, trying to distract everyone.

  The lady did manage to say, “Good for you both. And you, Jeff. Good luck.”

  “Thank you,” I said, ashamed I hadn’t bothered to learn her name.

  I searched for Jano and found him and Tad in the little library, reading to each other, only Tad was just pretending and making up words. When I told them I was going, leaving the shelter, Tad’s little face broke apart.

  I’d pretty much only seen him laugh since we got there, but now he had noticed his big brother’s shoulders drop, and I guess he knew what that meant. Jano brought himself back enough to make a half smile and tickle his brother’s armpits.

  “Good,” Jano said to me. “Cool. See you around.”

  “Probably not,” my mother said from the doorway.

  Which was so rude, I knew that somewhere, sometime, she must have had a drink, or was itching to get one, and I wondered what world she thought she was living in and why she wanted me to be there, too. I shook Jano’s hand, then I shook Tad’s little hand.

  “Happy Thanksgiving, guys,” I said.

  “You too,” said Jano, and Tad’s chin started to quiver again.

  Driving away, Mom kept on saying that we weren’t like them, we weren’t their kind, that it was obvious we were different from all the people there, until I told her to stop.

  “We are like them,” I said. “And they’re like everybody else. Good people who don’t have good luck. I liked that lady. She was so kind. She was nice, always nice.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “Well, our luck is changing, except it’s not luck, is it? I got the job. That’s skill.” Which meant I have no idea what.

  When we got to the second hotel, it actually was better than the first. It
cost more and the room was bigger. I felt a little scared when I saw the gleaming bathroom. Really, this is our room? After the shelter, we get to live here? Spend Thanksgiving in a real suite. Two rooms, two firm beds. Music playing from a speaker. An enormous flat-screen TV. Is this right? Is this even real?

  Mom thought we’d just left a prison, but maybe she was wrong, because dinner that night felt like a prisoner’s last meal.

  You eat great, but only once.

  Mom and me, we were lucky. We ate great for five whole days.

  CHAPTER 35

  MOMMY, OH, MOMMY

  It was the afternoon of our sixth day at the new hotel. Mom couldn’t pick me up after school, so I took the bus to my old stop, hopped a city bus down Madison Avenue, then walked the rest of the way to the hotel. It had been dark and cold all day. It was nearly suppertime and just starting to rain when I walked into the lot.

  Before I got to the room, I saw someone hunched in a ball against the ground floor wall like some kind of dead spider. Hearing my footsteps, she moved suddenly.

  “Mom?”

  She looked up. “Jeff!”

  “Mom, what are you doing out here—”

  “The social worker’s been here!” she said. “Sniffing around. I slipped her… slipped away from her and her stupid clipboard!”

  “Who? Katie?”

  Mom smelled as if she’d fallen into a vat of wine. She sounded like it, too. “Why is she following us? Getting all nosy?”

  “She’s probably checking on how we’re doing. You’re wet. Let’s go inside.”

  “How we’re doing? How I’m screwing up is what she’s after. How does she even know where we are?”

  “Mom, come on. Let’s go in.”

  “We’re in Bridgeport here stealing against the town and they fire and jail people our town knows stealing…” She snagged my hand with hers; her fingers were wet. I couldn’t figure out where her sentences started and where they were going.

  “What do you mean, Mom?” I helped her to her feet. “Who stole what—”

  “Us! This!” She slapped my backpack. “School!”

  “What about school? You’re not making any sense.”

  She stood up straight, or tried to, then glanced behind her as if she expected someone. “Because you didn’t want the free ride to school. It’s like lying. Oh, and your counselor called me today. You should have heard the line I gave her!” As if that meant anything.

  “It’s late, Mom. Let’s get to the room—”

  “Shut up and listen. If that social worker found me… like this… you’ll go straight into DCF!”

  “What’s DCF?”

  “Department of Children’s Families. Foster care—ever heard of that?”

  “They wouldn’t do that. Why would they? We would have heard about it.” I moved her slowly to the stairway. The elevator was too far away. “Up here…”

  “You don’t know that! So you need to keep your mouth shut about me. I heard you talking to that kid. He’s mad you left. He’ll tell. They tell to get ahead.”

  “That’s… Mom, that’s crazy. Jano won’t tell anybody.”

  “His pip-squeak of a brother, then.”

  “Mom, stop.”

  What came to me as I was saying this was what my dad had said. I was thirteen and I shouldn’t be talking this way. Like an adult trying to dodge the law or whatever. Then, on the heels of that thought came another. That’s what I had become, isn’t it? I was the man of my two-person family. I wasn’t a kid anymore.

  “It’s that bum. Andrade. He told the social worker.”

  “Whoa, Mom, you’re talking nutty.”

  “I told them about him! All those questions! The bum! Help me up, help me.”

  “He’s not a bum, Mom,” I said. And he wasn’t. He was a guy who rented houses and wanted people to pay their rent. We’re the bums. Kid, man, bum.

  “Okay, Mom. Just… let’s get to the room.”

  She left it at that for a few steps, then said, “I’m not having you change schools every other semester. I had to do that when I was a kid when Daddy moved, and I hated it. I don’t want you to hate school like I did.”

  Too late, I wanted to say. I kept my mouth shut.

  Then the dumbest thing happened. We were one step from reaching the landing when she dug into her pocket. She pulled out one of those personal wine bottles they sell to make it easy to sneak a drink.

  “Mom, what the heck—”

  “I’m done with this, Jeffie. Done! Let them see that!” And she lobbed it at a trash bin a few yards away. The bottle made it perfectly into the bin, with no sound all.

  The bottle made it, Mom didn’t.

  Her foot was halfway between steps when she slipped. I tried to grab her arm, but her left leg buckled under her right one, her shoe slid off, and she fell two steps, then there was a snap. She screamed an ugly scream that didn’t bring anyone running because she screamed it into my shoulder. She hung with all her weight on me, crying that something had broken, her ankle or her foot.

  I lifted her, my hands under her armpits. She wasn’t big, but she was a deadweight. We dragged ourselves up to the landing, nearly falling twice, and over to our door.

  Tugging my keycard from my rear pocket, I swiped it into the lock. A light greened, the door clicked, we pushed into the room. I slid her off me onto the bed.

  “I should… I should never have let you see me take a drink,” she groaned into the pillow. “Years ago. Never should have.”

  “Lift your head.” She didn’t, so I squeezed a pillow halfway under it.

  “I never used to. When you were small I’d wait until you were in bed. Then I did it once, and you didn’t notice and I kept doing it more and more.”

  “I noticed. And you can stop drinking anytime, you know.”

  “So why haven’t I? What if I can’t—”

  “I’m getting some ice.”

  I left the room with the plastic bucket they put in the rooms to help you drink, and stumbled down the hall to the noisy ice maker, my blood freezing in my veins. The sound of cubes falling into the bucket was like bricks dropping on my head. When I got back, she was breathing funny. Big rapid gulps.

  “Mom, are you choking?” Her ankle was already puffy and blue. Her eyes closed suddenly, and she breathed out a long, rattling breath.

  “Holy crap! I’m calling an ambulance. Mom. Mom!” I patted her cheek, softly at first, then harder until she opened her eyes and started sobbing.

  “Don’t call—”

  “I’m calling. Where is your phone?” I clawed into her bag, grabbed her phone, and typed in 911.

  “No! They’ll take you away! I’m drunk.”

  “I don’t care!”

  But when the call connected and they demanded who I was, I gave them only basic information. I was afraid to tell them much more. “A lady broke her ankle and needs an ambulance. I… no, I don’t know her name. She’s in… room 2031…” And the rest. “Just hurry!” I said, and hung up.

  “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “And watch you die on the bed?”

  “Jeffie!” she said. “Here. Here!” She shoved her change purse at my hands, then slipped back to the headboard, banging her head.

  “You need to get out of here. They’ll take you away from me! Get out of here!”

  There was a distant siren. I stuffed more pillows behind her head, under her foot. I thought of my grandfather. A car door slammed. She swung a limp hand at me.

  “Mom, please—”

  But I got it. I thought I did. The medics would bring her to the hospital. They’d read her blood alcohol level. Unfit mother. I’d be in the foster system before I woke up. But what was I supposed to do now, right now? Hide from the police? You can’t do that.

  “Go!” she pleaded. “Leave the phone they track those things get out. Get out!”

  I covered her with blankets, snatched two bottles of booze off the dresser, and went.

&nb
sp; I hurried down the corridor and onto the landing, surprised to find my backpack still on my back. It wasn’t even six, but black and cold. No moon. No stars.

  I dumped the bottles in a trash container and ran off into the shadows.

  CHAPTER 36

  RUNNING ON EMPTY

  I stopped running when an ambulance swung in through the puddles, whooping one last time. From the far side of the lot I saw its doors fly open and a woman jump to the ground. She and a guy hurried up the stairs while the driver unloaded a gurney. Guests came out of their rooms to see.

  A heavy black SUV rolled in, its lights flashing. Cops. I knew they were there to help my mom. Cops do other stuff besides arrest people, but they scared me. Mom scared me. How long could they not know that I was missing?

  It was insane to run away.

  A few slow minutes ticked by before they brought her down slantwise on the gurney, not caring about me, only her. The sirens started up a minute or two after that. I guessed they’d bring her to Bridgeport Hospital, which was the closest. My blood rushed in my ears. I started walking backward until the shadows swallowed me completely. Everything was dreamy, blurred, muffled. Where to go, where to hide. A place to be, a quiet place, to sort it out.

  I made my way to the corner, then headed left for three blocks to where I knew there was an uptown bus stop. It was raining heavily now. I tugged my hoodie tight.

  There was a lady there. A man and a little girl. They said things.

  “Where’s your mother and father?” the woman said, not nosy, just matter-of-fact.

  “I’m… I’m meeting my mother,” I said.

  She stepped away, her eyes still fixed on my face. “Good luck, son.”

  A roar and a squeal. The bus doors shushed open. I climbed up after the lady, scraped Mom’s change purse for enough coins, and took a seat. The bus drove into traffic slowly, like it was dragging a block of concrete.

  Rain clawed the windows. My ghost reflection. Shiny streets. Everything buzzed like chain saws in my ears. The route wasn’t direct, but near enough. Nobody asked me what was up. I guess I had that kind of face. Skin pulled tight on the bone. Maybe I looked older than thirteen. No one wanted to know.