He’s parked all the way at the end of the driveway. Truck turned to the road, backed in to ensure an easy escape. He’s always acted guilty like that, even when you can’t point to anything specific he’s done wrong.
Since it’s his gas, I drive out to the Big M in Harristown instead of shopping at the Nice N Easy in Little River. I change all the presets on his radio. Irene has him listening to Christian rock and Evangelical talk show crap. He used to like The Doors. He listened to Floyd. He used to say Bob Dylan was God.
There’s three hundred bucks in his wallet. Cash. He doesn’t trust banks. I start out thinking I’ll spend it all, but then I feel bad and rein it in to a hundred. It’s not all he has. There’s probably a stash in a hole cut in the mattress or taped under one of Irene’s dusty-pink La-Z-Boys. It could even be in the truck somewhere, so Irene won’t come across it while she’s cleaning. It’s not like he doesn’t owe me, but there won’t be any more coming in for a while. So I take four twenties and two tens and shove them in the back pocket of my jeans as I walk across the Big M parking lot. Inside, I grab a cart and hit the aisles. Family sizes and name brands on everything. No more store brand toaster cakes and dented tuna cans for me. I spend five minutes debating the merits of yellow American cheese singles versus white ones before I decide to buy both and do a taste test. I buy Pop-Tarts in five different flavors and Coke in glass bottles that look like they came from the fifties. I get three bags of cheese puffs like the ones Margo got us that time—the ones that are more crunchy than they are puffy. I buy cold medicine, ibuprofen, and tampons, and stock up on soap and toilet paper so I don’t have to steal from school. I walk around for over an hour filling up the cart, counting on my fingers and rounding up to make sure I don’t go over a hundred. I don’t want to pull out my dad’s wallet at the store. And I don’t want to have to put anything back. Not today.
In line at the checkout, this woman behind me with frosted mom hair and a big coupon wallet watches me unload my cart onto the conveyor belt. “Sweetheart, I think you missed a few food groups,” she says, like she thinks I’m dumb enough to hear it as suggestion instead of criticism.
“It’s for a party,” I say.
When the checker rings everything up and it only comes to ninety-three dollars, I pick out two Mars bars, a bag of M&M’s, and four packs of Juicy Fruit from the rack next to me. Mrs. Coupon Wallet shakes her head. “Take the change off her bill,” I say to the checker, while Coupon Wallet is busy loading her six gallons of milk onto the belt. It’s only a dollar and change, but I’m sure it’s enough to throw her off her game.
It’s two thirty now, so on my way back I swing by to see Matty. He’s walking. Halfway home. Just turned onto Woodland Road, Bills cap pulled low over his perfect face. I drive real slow next to him. He picks up speed, doesn’t look over. I wonder if he realizes it’s my dad’s truck. Maybe he thinks his evening will be made busy with a shotgun and a preacher. Maybe he doesn’t know whose truck it is and thinks I might be some kind of pervy serial killer. I keep his pace for all of Woodland, but when we turn onto Edgar, I get a good glimpse and he looks panicked and I feel bad. I roll down the window and yell, “Hey, butthead!”
He turns around. His face is blank and kind of white, but then he realizes who it is and smiles that big Matty smile that’s just about him and me.
“Why does you driving this big truck make me nervous?” he says, climbing in the passenger side when I slow down enough for him to get in. He kisses me on the lips, his head blocking my view. It doesn’t matter. I know these roads.
“I am an excellent driver,” I say.
“Okay, Rain Man.”
“Okay nothing. I know what I’m doing.”
“I’ll say.” He smacks his hand on my thigh. It stings the slightest bit. He uses the potholes as an excuse to bump his hand up higher and higher and I use them as an excuse to slide my leg toward him, so eventually, his hand is right there and he’s rubbing his finger up and down the seam of my jeans right where the legs meet and there’s that thick part, all the seams coming together, and he’s making me crazy and I want to close my eyes but I’m driving. He’s acting like he doesn’t know. Pretending like the bumps in the road just led his hand there and he has no idea what it’s doing to me. He’s humming and looking out the window, but there’s that great big smile across his face. By the time we pull into his driveway, he’s got my jeans unbuttoned.
We make out in the truck for a while even though his mom is at work, his dad is on a job out in Olean, and his little sister has Girl Scout cookies to sell or something. It’s more fun this way. His bedroom is getting old. And it’s not like anyone will see. His nearest neighbor is a quarter mile away, and there’s so many pine trees.
I still have my dad’s jacket on, but my jeans are hanging over the seat. Matty unbuttons his pants, grinning. Even when we kiss I can feel his movie star smile. His grandfather was a poster boy for the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II, and with his strong brow and noble chin, Matty looks like he could have been the one painted in the clouds holding a rocket bomb. His smile feels like sun breaking through.
“Do you have something?” I ask, determined to keep my wits about me.
“In my room.” He takes his pants off and climbs on top of me. It’s flopping around in his boxer shorts, like it’s spring loaded. We’re in our underwear, but I feel him trying to push the right things together.
“Go get it.”
“April!”
“Go.”
“Come on.” He sits up, but he’s still on me. Things are still aligned. He runs both hands through his hair.
“You come on.” We’ve been through this almost as many times as we’ve done it.
“I’m trying to,” he says, his voice so strained it’s more grunt than words.
“Matty.”
“I’m not cheating on you.” He holds his hand up, flat palmed. His pale brown eyes look golden in the afternoon light. “Scout’s honor. You won’t catch anything.”
“Pregnancy is an awful disease,” I say, trying to wriggle out from under him so we don’t have an accident. He’s trigger happy.
“Do you know how hard it is to get pregnant? Seriously. I’m being serious. My cousin Lindsey has been trying for years.”
“She’s like fifty.”
“That has nothing to do with it,” he says through his teeth.
“I think it does. There was an Oprah.”
“Would it be so bad?” It’s new, him trying different angles like this. Usually he flat-out begs and gives up easy. “We already know we’re getting married. Right? And you already dropped out of school.” He’s talking fast, like he does when he’s trying to scam his mom into a later curfew or a new skateboard. “It probably wouldn’t happen anyway, but everyone says it feels so different, like so much better. For both of us. Not just me. It’ll blow your mind, April.”
“It’ll blow your mind, April,” I say, making my voice crack like his. I laugh and I enjoy it when he looks wounded, like I broke his new Tonka truck. I put a pin in his plan. I love that I’m the only person who doesn’t cave just because he’s beautiful.
He’s a little less excited, but he still hasn’t budged. I think he believes he can pout his way to victory. “You have a choice,” I say, mimicking his mom and how she gets all calm and reserved when he tries to pull a scam. “You can either go inside and get a condom, or you can go inside and do your homework while I go home. Either way. The choice is yours, Matthew John.”
“Mark Conrad says Tonya lets him do it without a condom all the time, and she hasn’t gotten knocked up.”
“Well,” I say, “you’re not Mark Conrad, and if Mark Conrad jumped off a—”
“Mood killer.” He sighs so hard it makes my belly shake. “Pretending to be my mom is not hot.”
I snap the band of his boxer shorts. “Then you’re going to do homework?”
“I’ll be back,” he mumbles. He doesn’t make eye contact when he
pulls his pants on and gets his keys out of his backpack. He walks funny going up to the house.
When he comes back, it’s over pretty fast, so I don’t think I killed the mood all that much.
What I don’t get about sex is why the actual doing it part isn’t as great as all the stuff leading up to it. I always want to do it, but then, after, I wish we could go back to the moment right before, when it feels like I’ll go out of my mind if we don’t. It’s like an itch you have to scratch, but then it turns out the itch felt better than the scratching, and it fools me every time.
I turn the key in the ignition enough to get the radio to play without starting the engine, and rest my head in Matty’s armpit. We share one of my glass-bottled Cokes. He talks about the job he’s going to get when he graduates in spring, and how Mark Conrad says the factory is paying three bucks over minimum now. He’s calculated how much we could pay for a trailer and beer money, and if he went hunting with his Uncle Barry, we could have deer meat in our deep freeze and save a ton. I stop listening when he starts in on the awesome venison burgers his Aunt Gloria makes and how she could teach me.
Bob Dylan is playing on one of the presets. It’s Lay, Lady, Lay, and I laugh because it just seems too appropriate. Matty says, “No really, it’s like the best burger I’ve ever had, and it’s like free from nature.” When Bob gets to the part where he sings about not waiting for your life to start, just having cake and eating it now, I know what he means is pretty much the exact opposite, but I start to feel like I’m a million years older than Matty and maybe even from another planet. I start to feel like Matty is the opposite of cake.
We’re stuck in our own stale breath and it’s fogging up the windows. “I have to go,” I say, sitting up, grabbing my jeans.
Matty tries to pull me back into his armpit.
I twist away. “No, really.” I kind of shout it. “My dad doesn’t know I have the truck. I have to go.” I pull my jeans on and lean back to do the button and the zipper. My shirt rides up. There’s a wet spot on the seat.
“Oh, okay,” Matty says, giving me that broken Tonka truck look again.
I rub at the wet spot with my hand behind my back, trying to pretend like my panic is about my dad getting mad and not the life Matty is spreading out ahead of us. “My dad just—he got laid off and he’s all pissy and Irene doesn’t know…” The clock says it’s 4:23, and pretending I’m panicking about my dad starts to make me actually panic about my dad. He probably isn’t sleeping anymore.
Matty says, “See you tomorrow,” but then he tries to stretch it out by kissing me more. He moans gently, like he thinks he can work me into going at it again.
I rub my hand down his leg until I get to his knee, then I reach over and hand him his backpack. “I gotta go.”
He’s walking funny again. I stay to make sure he didn’t lock his keys in the house when he went to get the condom. As soon as he opens the door, I honk twice and drive away like my tail’s on fire, kicking up a trail of dust. Rocks hit the underside of the truck like a barrage of bullets from one of those boring war movies my dad used to watch on Sunday afternoons before Irene made him spend the day at church.
Matty left the condom on the floor mat, full and floppy like a jellyfish. I don’t notice it until I’m at the end of Woodland. This isn’t exactly a busy road. I know I won’t get caught, so I open the car door at the stop sign and drop it, praying it will get driven over and dusted up before anyone can see what it is. It leaked on the mat. I search my dad’s pockets for a tissue or a napkin, even a handkerchief, but I don’t find one. I do find a small box in his inside breast pocket—black velvet with a rounded top. The hinges creak when I pull it open. The ring inside has a diamond so big I start to wonder if my dad has any stashed money left anywhere. It’s real too. I scratch it against the window and it leaves a thin etched line. I put the ring box in the left pocket, where he keeps his wallet, as a warning, so he’ll know I know about it. I flip the mat over and wipe it on the carpet underneath. When I flip it the right way again, it looks even cleaner than it was to start.
There are three lights in town and I hit all of them red. Then I get stuck behind Mrs. Ivory, who can’t drive any faster than fifteen miles an hour and probably shouldn’t drive at all. Turns out she’s going to visit my neighbor, Mrs. Varnick, and I’m stuck behind her the whole way home. By the time I pull in the driveway, the clock says 4:57, and before I can even throw it in park, my dad is standing on the steps of the motorhome, holding my guitar by the neck like prize game.
“God damn it, April!” he screams when I get out of the car. “Where the fuck were you?”
“Shopping,” I say, and start unloading my groceries from the back of his truck into a pile on the ground. I don’t look at him. I tighten my jaw and ignore his temper tantrum with a fake smile the way my mom used to. “A growing girl’s gotta eat.”
“I told Irene I was getting out early today. At three thirty,” he says.
I smile again and keep unloading. Don’t say anything. Don’t apologize. The Coke bottles clink against each other when I set that bag down. Otherwise it’s quiet and I can feel it in the air, the way he’s about to explode, like how the teakettle gets extra still just before it boils. The metal steps of the motorhome rattle. Even though I’m not looking, I know he’s starting to shake and I’m sure he’s holding the neck of my guitar hard enough to make his knuckles turn white.
“God damn, April!” he screams, and then there’s an awful crack. Just one. Loud and sharp and it stays in my ears even after it’s done and I know I will hear it for days.
“There, I took something that’s yours. How do you feel about that, April? How do you feel about that?” he says.
I palm the ring box and drop it in the bag with the cheese puffs as I carry it over to my pile. It’s the last bag. The cheese puffs crunch when I set it down. I take his jacket off and drape it on the front seat of his truck.
“Fine,” I say, and toss him his keys.
— Chapter 4 —
I don’t have jack shit to do, so I pace the motorhome singing Should I Stay or Should I Go. The singing starts so low it’s only in my head, but once I get going I’m loud and bouncing around and the whole motorhome shakes.
Since I swiped the ring from my dad a few days ago, I’ve been expecting him to come back for it. The suspense is making me crazy. Anytime I hear a noise—Mrs. Varnick closing her car door, or a tree branch falling, or buckshot—I jump out of my skin and my heart starts up fast like someone hit it with jumper cables. We learned about fight or flight in science class. It’s like your instinct to deal with a situation. I’m not sure what my instinct would be if my dad came for the ring. It’s not even a fair trade. His ring is still in existence. My guitar is a pile of broken wood. I had to cancel my gig at Gary’s Tap Room, but I’m guessing my dad isn’t sitting around thinking that I’m the one who got wronged.
There’s a hole in the carpet on the floor, right by the sink. I kick the edges while I dance, making it a little bigger every time I pass. No extra shifts at the diner, and Matty is grounded because of the other day when one of his neighbors saw us going at it in his driveway. Plus, his parents don’t want him hanging out with a high school dropout.
“Do do do do do do trouble! Da da da da da da double!” I shout more than I sing. I just need noise. I’m doing this move where I shake my butt and then jump and spin around when I see a car through the slats in the blinds. It’s Mrs. Ivory’s big beige Mercury. Sometimes she gets confused when she’s visiting Mrs. Varnick and ends up in our driveway instead. The thing that really gets me is that Mrs. Varnick lives in a double wide. I live in a motorhome. It’s easy to tell the difference.
I go outside and knock on the car window. “Shove over,” I yell. “I’ll drive.” It’s a stone’s throw to Mrs. Varnick’s, but last time Mrs. Ivory almost hit like four trees on the way.
I peek in the window, but it’s not Mrs. Ivory. It’s Irene, sitting in the driver’s seat
with her seat belt off, clutching a plastic baggie of what looks like dirt. “I thought you were Mrs. Ivory,” I say, backing away.
Irene opens the door. “I was just giving her a ride.”
Irene has come to claim her ring. My dad must have told her he was going to propose and now she’s here and she’s pissed. I want to turn tail and run, but I don’t even have real shoes on. Irene’s not like a marathon runner or anything, but I’m sure she could catch up with a kid running in flip-flops. I start toward the motorhome to barricade myself inside. But then Irene gets out of the car and spills the baggie of dirt on the ground.
“Shit,” she says.
I’ve never heard her curse. She looks like she might cry. I hadn’t noticed it before, but Irene kind of looks like my mom. At least like the one picture I have of my mom. That’s probably what my dad sees in Irene. I think about telling her this, but I don’t want to deal with her crying in my driveway. I’m not in the mood.
“It’s okay to spill dirt in the dirt,” I say, crossing my arms over my chest. “It’s not like it can get any dirtier than dirt.” I wish I could make myself shut up, but the words keep tumbling. “I mean, it’s already dirt, right? There’s nothing—”
“It was coffee,” she says, walking up to the motorhome like the fact that I’m talking to her means she’s invited. “Your dad said you ran out.”
I walk in front of her and up the steps. I don’t slam the door in her face, but I figure if I don’t talk to her she’ll realize she’s not wanted.
“Could we make some tea?” Irene says, climbing in with her head down low, like she’s not sure the ceiling will accommodate her five-foot-two frame. “I was hoping we could sit down and have a talk.” She looks around, lingering on the dirty laundry piled on the passenger’s seat, my muddy boots on the floor, the pile of guitar pieces on the table, and I can feel her judging all of it. “Because you and me”—she eyes me like I’m dirty boots—“we’ve never really had a talk, you know?”
The People We Keep Page 4