I hate the way she says “a talk.” Like it’s a cookie or a pet or a new pair of shoes, something more than words falling out of our mouths.
I sit at the table and pull my feet up on the seat, flip-flops and all. In Irene’s apartment, you have to take your shoes off before you get past the welcome mat.
“You and me,” Irene says, “we haven’t exactly gotten off to the best start.”
I picture the words coming out of her mouth like hard pieces of plastic. Like those magnets kids have sometimes so they can spell words on the fridge. Cat. Mom. Dog. Dad. I picture Irene’s words collected in a basket that she hands to me. There’s our talk, right there. All jumbled up until it makes no sense.
She pokes around, peeks in cupboards until she finds the teapot. I watch her when her back is turned. Her waist is really tiny, but her black dress pants sag at the butt and don’t do her any favors. She’d look better in a skirt.
When she glances back at me, I stare at my feet. Margo painted my toenails over the summer and there’s a sliver of pink left at the tips.
“Do you think you could say something?” Irene asks. “I mean, this is hard, April.” Her eyeliner is melty, pooled in the corners of her eyes. She doesn’t usually wear this much makeup. Her sweater looks new. I wonder if she came from something, or if she got all dressed up just to see me. “I’m talking to you and you’re acting like I’m not even here.”
I want to say Wishful thinking, but her hands are shaking and it’s making me nervous. I’m not sure what her angle is—why she hasn’t asked about the ring yet. “Use the water in the jug.” I say, holding my leg up just above the bench, using my toes to make my flip-flop flop against my foot. “The stuff from the tap looks like piss.”
“Okay.” She lifts the lid off the teapot, looks in the hole, and sniffs. She pours a tiny bit of water from the jug into the pot, swishes it around, and dumps it in the sink. Satisfied, she fills the pot and plays with the burner until she gets it to light. I don’t tell her there’s no tea. I’ll save that for after the whistle blows.
She looks at me, but when I make eye contact, she pulls a strand of hair in front of her eyes to check for split ends. When I look away, I can feel her watching me again.
“Your dad didn’t mean it,” she says, sitting across from me, pointing to the pile of splinters that used to be my guitar.
I collected all the pieces after he left. Every bit I could find. I mean, it’s not like I could glue them back into a guitar and have it work. I know that. I know. I just didn’t have the heart to throw them away.
“He doesn’t mean a lot of things, but that doesn’t put anything back together,” I blurt out before I remember that I’m trying not to talk to her.
Irene doesn’t say anything. She just stares at me like she’s measuring up everything about me to see if it’s good enough to even get close to her perfect self and her perfect son and her perfect church-going life. I was bored before, so I braided my hair into like eight or nine braids and I probably look like an idiot. Plus, I’m wearing my dad’s old plaid flannel, cinched at the waist with one of his cracked leather belts, and a pair of leopard-spotted leggings Margo gave me after she shrunk them in the wash. I wish I could excuse myself and change into something that doesn’t make me feel like a freak show, but I don’t want Irene to get it wrong and think I even care what she thinks.
I remember Irene from before she had anything to do with my dad. She was in high school when I was in elementary. She had the lead in West Side Story and danced on the stage in these red ballet slippers and after I saw it I used to twirl around and pretend I was her. Colored my sneakers with red magic marker and everything. She was beautiful and her parents were so proud they brought roses in that shiny plastic wrapping and her father ran up to the stage to give them to her when she took her bow. I don’t think it was too long after they found out she was pregnant with the boy and kicked her out of the house.
“Why are you driving Mrs. Ivory’s car?” I ask, pulling the rubber bands from my hair like I’m just fidgeting.
“Your dad bought it for me.” She looks kind of young when she says it, like a kid who just got a pony. It doesn’t occur to her that I can’t get my dad to buy me groceries voluntarily.
“You could sail to France in that thing,” I say, picking at the cracked inlay on my guitar neck.
“I know, right?” she says, giggling like we are girlfriends. “It’s three times the size of the Datsun.” She smooths hair behind her ear. “Duncan Ivory doesn’t want his mom driving anymore. He sold it to us cheap because I promised to take Mrs. Ivory to her appointments.”
The teapot whistles. Irene gets up, turns off the heat, takes the pot from the burner. “I had to drop her off at Mrs. Varnick’s, so I decided I’d come see you.”
“Lucky me,” I say.
I know she heard me, but she pretends she didn’t. She opens the cabinet where we keep plates, closes it, opens the next one and takes out two mugs. They’re also Margo hand-me-downs, chipped and cracked from too much use at the diner. Irene rinses them with the jug water, touches the chips with her finger like it might repair them. She starts fishing around in drawers. I’m pretty sure this isn’t about the ring. I don’t think she could keep a poker face this long.
“Oh! You know, I think we’re out of tea,” I say like the thought just occurred to me. I try not to smile, but I feel my mouth going there anyway.
I watch her shoulders creep to her neck. She slams the drawer closed. “Damnit, April! I’m trying. I am trying here.” She sits across from me in the booth and drops her head in her hands. “I don’t know what I did to you,” she whispers, poking at the splinters of my guitar like she’s playing pick-up sticks. Move one sliver without the others collapsing. “I love your father. How does that hurt you? I don’t get it.”
“Because you’re an idiot,” I say.
“Not fair, April.” Her voice breaks. I can see tears well up. “Not fair!”
“Is it fair that you took him? That you take all of it? I get crap and you get a new car? What’s fair about that, Irene?” I get up and walk out, slamming the door behind me. I pace in the driveway, walk around the car and kick the tires, feeling the sting in my toes.
Irene comes out. She’s standing on the steps, just like my dad when he smashed my guitar, but she’s crying, mascara running down her cheeks like dirty slug trails. “I just wanted us to get along. I thought—I just thought since I’m pregnant with your little brother or sister you might decide you give a shit. You might try to be my family too.”
The jumper cables hit my heart again. “Yeah, that’s what my dad needs. Another kid.” I stand between her and the car so she can’t get away yet. “Fucking brilliant! Especially since he does such a good job taking care of the one he already has. Smart, Irene. Good one.”
“April,” she says softly, and I think she’s going to say something else, but she crumbles, shoulders shaking. I can see her tears fall to the ground, raining on the coffee. A part of me wants to tell her that she was so beautiful I wanted to be her. A part of me wants to say Yes, I’ll be your family, because I don’t have one either. But I can’t. I don’t work that way.
“He’s with you because you look like her,” I say, picturing myself smacking her basket of plastic letters, scattering our talk everywhere. “My mom. You look like her.” I walk off into the woods and wait by the flooded house foundation, kicking at the thin film of ice with the edge of my flip-flops until I hear her drive off in Mrs. Ivory’s car.
* * *
After Irene leaves, I go back to the motorhome and dig around under the mattress until I find the ring. The box doesn’t look so new. It’s not just that it’s covered with pocket lint. I didn’t notice before, but if you look close, some of the velvet is rubbed off the top. I open it, take the ring out, and slide it on my finger, stacked on top of the promise ring Matty gave me. It’s a little loose, but it almost fits.
The diamond is big like a tooth, and
glows like there’s a light inside of it. Round, but not quite perfect, with a tiny black dot in the center where the bottom is cut off, where it doesn’t come to a point. It’s a miner’s cut. The words are just there in my brain. I know it’s a miner’s cut and then I realize that I know this ring. I remember twisting it around on her finger while she held me in her lap. I remember this ring and her hair falling, so long over her shoulders, I had to brush it out of my face. Her hair had sun streaks of gold and copper and the ring was platinum. Everything sparkled. I take it off my finger and read the tiny letters of the inscription.
When my father was twenty or so, he played guitar at a coffeehouse in Syracuse if he was between carpentry jobs. He’d play for a free meal and whatever people would put in his tip jar. “You can’t be proud when people will feed you,” he’d say. They both told me the story when they were together. They each had their own part, like it was a play, but he’d never tell any of it after she left, so I don’t remember everything. I wish I did.
The people at the coffeehouse liked him and he always got a good crowd. He didn’t write much, so it was mostly covers, but he played the covers other people didn’t. James Taylor was huge, but he never played Fire and Rain. He’d do the obscure stuff, so people thought he wrote the songs himself because they’d never heard them—Ella, Nat, Fats Waller. Maybe some Dylan B-sides.
He’d been playing all night when my mom walked in with a group of friends. They were talking and laughing and he couldn’t stop watching her from the makeshift stage. She wore a short red dress with tall brown boots and when she smiled it was big and the room got brighter and he felt like the world was a better place.
She would chime in, back when they were happy; she would say that she walked in with a group of friends to get coffee. After that they were supposed to meet some boys somebody knew. They were talking, not paying attention to the music, but then my mother heard my father singing Autumn Leaves. She’d never heard the song before.
“He sang my name,” she’d say, and wink at him. “So, I started watching to figure out if I knew him. I didn’t, but by the end of the song I decided I wanted to.” She would sing the whole song when she told the story—the tale of a left behind lover who remembers his love when the leaves change color and fall from the trees. Her voice was thin, but pretty.
So that’s how they met, because of some stupid song. But he lived in Little River and she lived in Syracuse and her parents expected her to marry a doctor or a lawyer or an astronaut. “What did I want with a husband who was always jumping around on the moon?” she’d say.
He didn’t have a lot of money, so one night when he missed her so much he couldn’t stand it anymore, he drove up to Buffalo to ask his grandfather for his grandmother’s ring. He had it engraved with a line from their song the very next day and drove all the way to Syracuse in the middle of a snowstorm to ask her to marry him, right in front of her father. And when she said yes, but her father said absolutely not, she said that Jesus was a carpenter and that was good enough for her. So they had a little wedding that no one on her side came to and Autumn Leaves was their first dance.
Part of the problem with wedding songs is that people don’t listen to the words enough. With my parents, it was like the song decided it. They never had a fighting chance.
I roll the ring around in my hands. If I turn it the right way, all I can read of the lyrics is When Autumn leaves.
— Chapter 5 —
“We should just go,” I say to Matty. We’re hanging out in his uncle’s deer blind since I’m not allowed at his house anymore and I try to avoid him ever spending time at the motorhome.
“Go where?” he says, blowing into his hands. The blind was a better place to hang in the summer.
“Does it matter?” I jump around to stay warm. “Anywhere. Not here.”
“What’s so bad about here?” He pulls a sloppy hand-rolled cigarette from behind his ear and lights it, coughing. This smoking thing is new. He picked it up from Mark Conrad and now he thinks he’s a badass. I don’t smoke, but his parents will blame me when they find out. They blame me for everything. His mother stopped liking me after mine left. As if me and my dad had a disease her family could catch.
“What’s so great about here?” I say. “We’re dying on the vine, Matty. There’s a whole world out there.”
“What’s got into you, Ape?” He makes a fish mouth when he exhales. Mark Conrad can blow smoke rings, but Matty’s come out like sad little clouds.
I fan the smoke from my face. “Don’t call me Ape.”
“It’s just getting good, you know? I’m almost done with school. We’re almost there.”
“I won’t be done with school.”
“It’s not like it matters. You’ll get a new guitar. You can play at Gary’s until we get married.” He picks a piece of tobacco off his tongue and looks at it. “Not like I want my wife playing in a bar, right?” He starts to laugh, but it turns into a cough. “After that, you can stay with the kids and I’ll bring home the venison.”
The deer hunting obsession is getting way worse. I’m guessing Mark Conrad does that too.
“What if I still want to play at Gary’s when we’re married?” I say, twisting my promise ring around my finger with my thumb.
“Ape—” I give him a look and he quickly adds “—rul. That’s not what married girls do.”
“So what, am I supposed to join bible study and make potluck in my crockpot?”
“Potluck isn’t something you make,” he says, shaking his head like he’s old and wise and I’m so foolish. “You make jello or stew.” He stubs his cigarette out on the bench and slides to the floor. “Come here.” He spreads his legs out. I sit between them and he wraps his arms around me. “It’s gonna be good.” Cold seeps through my jeans. Matty kisses my ear. Whispers like he’s trying to get a baby to stop crying, “You’ll love it. I promise.”
I want that to be true. It would be so much easier. But I’ll never belong the way Matty does. I only fit with him because we’ve been this way forever, from when our moms used to drink tea at his house every day. He doesn’t see me how everyone else does. He doesn’t notice that none of his friends ever talk to me. And because he’s Matty, because everyone wants him to like them, they don’t say what they really think. They just pretend I’m not there. It’s not something a few years and some jello will change.
Matty laces his fingers through mine. My hands have been in my pockets; his feel like ice. “Trust me, Ape. We’re good here.”
* * *
When I get home, my dad is parked in front of the motorhome, sitting on the hood of his truck. I see him from the end of the driveway before he sees me, smoke and hot breath swirling. My head says turn tail and run, like a warning light flashing over and over again, but the walk back from the deer blind was long and it’s like twenty out. My feet hurt because my boots are too small, and I just don’t have the energy to play these damn games with him anymore. So I tell myself I’m only shaking from the cold. I hold my head high and try to walk past like he doesn’t exist. He jumps down and grabs my arm.
“What’d you say to Irene?” His fingers dig into my armpit, even through Margo’s old down jacket.
I look him right in the eyes and give him my blank face, like I’m dead. I’m a corpse. Corpses can’t talk.
He pulls my arm up. I can barely keep my feet on the ground, “What did you do to her?”
My hand is pulsing. I give him a big, sick smile. “I told her you’re Father of the Year,” I say. “That’s one lucky kid you got on the way. Congratulations.” My nose smarts and I know the tears are coming. I fight them. Close my eyes and imagine I’m running, feet pounding on pine needles in time with my heart, air stinging my lungs until I can barely breathe.
He pushes me away. “You show her respect,” he says.
“Like you do?” I open my eyes and back out of his swinging range. “Telling her you still have a job? Getting her knocked up when you’re br
oke? Blowing money you don’t have on a car?” I shake my head and smile, trying so hard not to cry. “You’re a shining example, Dad. I’m sure your new kid will look up to you.”
“Maybe this one won’t be such a little shit.” He throws his cigarette down, stomps it out, and opens the door to his truck.
“What? Going already?” I laugh and it sounds like it’s coming from another person. Something’s come unlatched. I can’t stop. “Why don’t you come in for some tea, Dad? We’ll have a talk.”
“Irene’s boy’s got a band recital,” he says, staring me down. “I want to be there.”
“I told her she looks like Mom,” I say, getting closer. “But Mom was prettier. And she had the good sense to leave you.”
I see his hand coming like it’s slow. Tobacco stains on the tips of his fingers and every line in his palm. All I can see is that hand—it eclipses the sun—but I can’t make myself move out of the way. I’m a corpse again. Corpses can’t move.
— Chapter 6 —
I pack everything. I don’t know where I’m going and I don’t know how I’m getting there, but anything that could be useful gets thrown in a garbage bag—three cans of baked beans, two and a half boxes of Pop-Tarts, the last Coke, toothpaste, flashlights, fuel cans for a camping cookstove that came with the motorhome and doesn’t even work. I need supplies. Reinforcements. Survival tools. I wish the damn motorhome had a freaking motor and I could just drive it away.
When one bag is full, I tie the end on itself and throw it up front. Before I even get to the bedroom, I can barely see out the windshield. I didn’t know we had this much stuff.
The world is ending, or at least I’m done with it. I keep thinking I need a plan, but so far, this is it: shove everything in bags.
The People We Keep Page 5