The People We Keep

by Allison Larkin

  Somehow, I am sure he’ll be a traveling baby, happy in his car seat, letting the sound of the road lull him to sleep. Once we reach the mainland, Max gets quiet in my belly while I drive, so maybe he’s already in love with the road. I’m happy to have him with me. To feel like I’m not completely alone. I don’t like the middle of Florida—cows and farmland and I feel like alligators and giant snakes must be lurking in every body of water. I drive straight through to the Georgia border. I don’t drink anything so I won’t have to stop to pee.

  Once, when I was in Boston, my friend Slim called the bar where I was playing to say he was recording a single for some country singer and my exact voice was what he needed to fill out the sound. I drove all the way from Boston to Nashville after my gig. Right on through. I couldn’t see straight by the time I got there, but Slim pumped me full of coffee and tuned my guitar and I was fine. The song didn’t really take off, but every once in a while, if I leave a country station on long enough, I’ll hear it on the radio and I can pick out my voice singing oohs and awahoos through the static. That road trip was killer. This one is worse—I don’t even want to get where I’m going—but I make it over a thousand miles with only four stops and a quick nap, pregnancy bladder and back pain and everything.

  Fifth stop is when I call Margo just after I cross the Pennsylvania border to tell her I’m four or five hours away.

  “Oh, girlie,” she says. “He’s already gone.”

  And here I am, some dirty, stinky, hungry, pregnant girl, crying into a truck stop pay phone like a damn country song.

  “I drove too slow,” I whisper, two dimes later when I can finally talk again.

  “You know that old saying about procrastination on your part doesn’t equal an emergency on mine?” Margo says. “Your father made this an emergency, not you. He had three years to make things better. He had three years to come looking for you.”

  She listens to me sob on the phone and there’s something about knowing she’s listening that makes my tears seem less futile. She’s my witness. She always has been.

  She asks me to come for the funeral.

  “I can’t do it,” I tell her. “I can’t come back. I don’t want to see Irene and the boy and I don’t want to see that baby. I don’t want to. He’s already dead. It’s not like he cares if I’m there.”

  “Funerals are for the living,” she says. “To hold up the people who get left behind.”

  “I don’t want to hold Irene up. She wouldn’t want me to.”

  “I could hold you up,” Margo says.

  I feel like I need her.

  — Chapter 62 —

  I haven’t thrown up since about five months in. But when I get off I-90 and I’m on back roads and everything is familiar, I feel it building. Starts low and gets bigger. I sweat. No matter how hard I grip the steering wheel, I can’t stop shaking, and finally, I have to pull off the road and puke in a drainage ditch. I don’t even feel better after. Just spent and sour. I swish my mouth out with some flat warm Sprite left in the bottom of a bottle that’s been in my car for who knows how long. It’s all I have left.

  * * *

  Margo’s Diner looks the same, only smaller than I remembered it. Everything about Little River seems smaller than it used to be.

  Margo must have been watching out the window, because the second my car pulls into a spot up front, she runs out the door, waving her hands like I might miss her. She looks smaller too. Her hair is washed out and less bubbly than it used to be. Her face is pale and bony. The breakup with Gary was messy. She’s still wearing one of her itty-bitty skirts, but even her killer gams look like they need a bit more oomph.

  She tries to open my car door before I’ve even unlocked it. I think about driving away. I’m scared about what she’ll say. What she’ll think of me. But her face in my window and her big, bright smile make me remember that she’s never ever said anything mean to me on purpose. No reason she’d start now.

  “Girlie,” she says when I open the door, “you are a sight for— Oh my god!” She sees my belly and looks like you could just about knock her over with a chicken feather.

  My legs wobble when I stand up. “This is Max,” I say, resting my hand on top of my bump.

  She’s quiet for a sec, staring at me in the glow of the diner lights. I hold my breath.

  She reaches out to touch my face like maybe I’m a hallucination. “Now, I know you don’t tell me everything, but how did you go all this time”—she arcs her hand outward from her own belly—“without saying a word about it?”

  “I guess I didn’t want to worry you,” I say.

  “Didn’t want to worry me? My well of worry for you goes all the way to the core of the Earth, girlie.”

  She laughs, but I see how I’ve been a weight she’s carried and I think she sees that I understand that now.

  She kisses my forehead.

  “If I didn’t love you and this baby so much, I’d strangle you.” She pats my belly and says, “You just wait until Grandma Margo tells you all her stories about your mom.” Then she looks at me, eyes full of tears, like she’s hoping I won’t object to Max having her for a grandma.

  I hug her the best I can with my belly in between us.

  * * *

  The diner is empty. It’s just before closing time. Margo feeds me a burger and fries and a milkshake for calcium and a big plate of spinach because she says I need extra iron. She drowns the spinach in butter because she knows it’s the only way I’ll get it down. We sit in a booth, since I’m way too huge to try and balance on a stool at the counter like we used to.

  She stares at my belly a lot. I wonder if she’s trying to picture Max, all curled up and napping in there. Maybe sucking his thumb. Babies do that sometimes, before they’re even born. I try to picture him all the time. I wonder if he’ll be familiar when I get to meet him.

  Margo doesn’t ask about his father, about where I’m planning to live with him, or even when he’s due. Over the years, she’s gotten used to the idea that I’ll only tell her what I want her to know. But I wish she’d ask, because it’s hard to just say things sometimes. I wish I could talk to her about Robert and ask if she thinks I did the right thing, but I don’t know how to start. I only tell her about Ethan, that I stayed at his house for a while and we dressed like Fred and Ginger, and he made a painting that looked like lines and curves but it was really me.

  “I’m glad you have solid friends in the world,” she says, because she doesn’t know about how I always end up leaving them all.

  We see Mrs. Spencer walking slow past the diner like it’s normal for her to take a late-night stroll through town. She stares at us through the window, but when Margo waves, she looks away like she didn’t see us at all. I wonder how much she talks to Matty. If she knows I saw him about nine months ago and she’s worried Max is somehow his. I wonder who saw me and called her, if the whole town already knows I’m here and pregnant. Probably it took ten minutes for everyone to find out.

  “That woman,” Margo says, “thinks she’s pretty high and mighty these days. Her big star of a son bought her a Cadillac, which she believes gives her perpetual right of way.” She rolls her eyes. “Like Cathy Spencer needed an excuse to be a bigger bitch.”

  It’s funny to think of Mrs. Spencer as a bitch. I always just thought of her as a grown-up.

  “I saw him,” I tell Margo, “Matty. This spring. I think they did his teeth.”

  “Like they aren’t real?”

  “Exactly. They don’t look like they used to.”

  “Amazing.” Margo shakes her head. “What will they think of next? They nip things that don’t need tucking. Give fake teeth to someone with perfectly decent ones. That boy had fine teeth to begin with. He never had any problems chewing.”

  I yawn. I can’t help myself.

  “Well,” Margo says. “What’s say we close up here and turn in for the night. You must be exhausted.”

  I think of the motorhome, the way it u
sed to smell like mildew and rust. I think about driving down the dirt road to get there. I worry I’ll end up puking on the side of the road again. “I don’t think I can do it, Margo. Go to the motorhome. I don’t think—”

  “Don’t be silly. I have my couch all pulled out and made up for me to sleep on so you can have my bed.”

  “You do?”

  “Of course,” she says. “Your father can’t very well yell at me for overstepping my bounds now, can he?” She claps her hand over her mouth. Her face goes pale. “I’m sorry. I just—I always felt bad taking you back to that motorhome. I didn’t mean to…”

  I’m ready to cry, to know that Margo might have actually wanted me. To know that she really would have taken me home with her if she could. But I think if I cry she will and if she cries I’ll cry harder and between us, we might have too many tears to ever stop. So instead, I say, “I can sleep on the couch. Really, it’s okay,” because I can’t let any of it sink in. I could drown, so easily, I could drown.

  “April,” she says, grabbing my arm and shaking it, “use that delicate condition to your advantage. Take the bed.”

  * * *

  Margo’s apartment looks pretty much the same as it always has, except she has a cat now. “I’m one of those ladies,” she tells me when a dark blur darts across the living room as we kick our shoes off. “That’s Stuart.” She points to the chair he’s taken refuge under. Yellow eyes stare back at us.

  Later, when we’re gabbing in her kitchen over a piece of chocolate cake I just know will give me indigestion, Stuart emerges and rubs his skinny little body against my leg. I can feel his ribs ripple along my calf. He’s inky black except for a white muzzle and three out of four white feet. He has too many toes on each paw and a cauliflower ear. He’s not pretty.

  “I didn’t take you for a cat person.”

  “I’m not,” she says, reaching down and swishing her fingers together. He runs to her and rubs his face into the side of her hand. “I’m getting lonely in my old age, I guess.” She smiles this sad, tired smile.

  And something about all of it just makes me fall apart—Margo being so lonely that she has to get an ugly little cat, and my father dying, and the fact that all I can picture is some bones on a hospital bed in the shape of him, hooked up to machines like the ones that flashed and beeped while Matty was in a coma on All My Days. Something about the whole thing makes me so sad that I can’t even stand it. “What kind of a person am I that I wasn’t even here?” I say. “I should have driven faster.”

  “Sweetie,” Margo says, handing me a napkin, “you know I’ve done my best to never say a bad thing about your father. You search back and think on what I’ve said and you’ll be hard-pressed to find many ill-meaning words.” She sighs. “I did that for you and I thought I was doing the best I could. But not now when you’re beating yourself up. He made this choice. He chose not to get treatment and push everyone away. He made the choice to not go after you when you left.”

  “Gary told him not to,” I say. “I begged you, so you got Gary to tell him to let me go. It was me. He was just doing what I wanted.”

  Margo takes a deep breath and presses her lips together, like she’s holding back her words until they get in line. “When Gary went to talk to him that time, it wasn’t so he’d give you the car. It was to make him come get you. Gary told him that no man lets a little girl go out on her own like that. No man lets his responsibilities pass him by. That’s what really happened.”

  I feel the same drop in my stomach and flush in my veins that I get when I’m driving away and realize I’ve left something behind. Margo pulls another napkin from the holder on the table and gives it to me. Mine is soaked already.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I thought I was protecting you. I tricked myself into thinking you wouldn’t notice what a bad father he was if I didn’t point it out too much. I thought it was better for you to think he was letting you go because he thought it was best than for you to know that he wasn’t even thinking. Don’t you go feeling responsible for his failings. They aren’t yours, April.”

  “When both parents crap out on you—I’m the common denominator, you know.”

  Margo grabs my hand and squeezes. “You’re the gift that came from two broken people. They were weak, and hurt, and cowardly, and somehow managed to make this miracle girl who is so full of piss and vinegar that she survived it all. Maybe you need to mourn who they weren’t. Maybe that’s what you’re here for now.”

  “You’re too good to me, Margo,” I say, wiping my face with the napkin.

  “I don’t think I’ve been good enough,” she says, and I realize she’s crying too.

  — Chapter 63 —

  Margo is gone before I wake up. She told me last night she was headed out early to make egg casseroles and crumb cake for anyone who stops by the diner after the funeral. Said she didn’t want “that poor Irene” to feel like she had to feed people on top of everything else.

  I call to her anyway, wishing for an answer, hearing only the rattle of the heater. I have a crying hangover. Puffy face. My nose feels like it’s filled with cement. It’s strange to be in Margo’s apartment alone. When I walk into the living room her cat jumps off the coffee table to hide under the couch.

  In the kitchen there’s a note, a strawberry Danish, and a glass of orange juice on the counter. The kitchen smells like coffee, but she didn’t leave me any. I’m sure it was on purpose. There’s a navy blue maternity dress hanging over the back of one of the kitchen chairs. The note says: Thought you might need this. Love, M. I wonder if it was one of Irene’s maternity dresses. It has a drop waist, a pleated skirt, and a square flappy collar with white trim like a sailor’s uniform. You know, because of all the pregnant ladies in the Navy.

  I think about cutting the collar off and trying to make it something else, the way Carly would, but my father never cared what I looked like when he was alive I don’t think it’ll start to matter now. My long skirt with the stretchy waist is good enough.

  On the back of the note she’s written the calling hours and the funeral time. There’s a viewing this morning. Like I’m supposed to go down to the church and have people stare at me while I look at his dead body so they can spend the next three years talking about how I didn’t react the right way. So they can pretend they know more about me than they really do.

  I take the note with me so I'll remember what time the service is. I know enough to know it won’t feel good to see the motorhome, but I can’t stop myself.

  — Chapter 64 —

  Mrs. Varnick’s place is abandoned now. Margo says they had to put her in a home last year. Her son wanted her to live with them, but after years of Mrs. Varnick calling her daughter-in-law “the fat cow,” she was what Margo called “persona not gratas.”

  Weeds grow up fast. There are sumac saplings where Mrs. Varnick used to park her car. Virginia creeper curling into a broken window.

  And then, at the end of the road, there’s the motorhome. It’s not a clubhouse. It’s a closet. A tomb. It’s where he left me so he could forget I existed, the way Margo sends her fake Christmas tree to storage after New Year’s.

  The white metal sides have rusty stains at every bolt, and one of the windows is broken. I feel like I should go in and search for some kind of understanding. Or maybe to clean everything, because whatever mess is in there shouldn’t be all that’s left of someone. But I can’t make my feet take me to the door. I don’t want to see what he left behind. I don’t want to remember what it felt like to live there. The whole motorhome leans like it might tip over, and I’m not exactly light on my feet.

  The thing of it is, the motorhome doesn’t look much worse than it did when I lived in it. It hasn’t changed enough. I feel like if I look hard, I could still find splinters from my guitar in the dirt. I can almost feel the sting of my father’s hand on my cheek.

  I walk out to the flooded house foundation. It’s so overgrown that I have to step around roots an
d bushwhack my way through. Something thorny scratches me and leaves a thin line of blood across the back of my hand. I sit on the edge of the foundation and rest my feet on the first step of what would have been the stairs to our basement. The water comes up to the step below, a film of leaves across the surface. It smells like rot.

  It’s November again. Everything is dead or sleeping. I feel like it’s always November here. There’s never enough warmth or light or any of the things a person really needs. I poke at the leaves with a stick and think about who my parents weren’t until the cold seeps in through my skirt and I start to worry it might not be good for Max. My jacket won’t close over my belly anymore. I wonder if he can get cold in there.

  — Chapter 65 —

  I get to the church early. It’s this stone building with stained-glass windows and steps that look like they were designed just for wedding pictures. It’s probably the fanciest building in Little River. I’ve never been inside the chapel, just the basement for rummage sales. It’s weird to think about my dad walking through that arched doorway with Irene on Sundays. He didn’t even believe in God until she made him. And it’s not the kind of church that’s like, Jesus was nice so you should be too and feeds homeless people and all that stuff. It’s more like Here’s a bunch of ways you can judge people and feel better about yourself for it—the kind of church that would tell Ethan he was going to hell.

  I sit in my car. I’m waiting to sneak in right before the service starts, so I can sit at the back without having to deal with all the people walking past me. But while I’m sitting there watching everyone go in, I start getting mad. The whole town shows up: Mrs. Hunter, Ida Winton, Molly Walker, Gary and his whore of a girlfriend, the Spencers. None of these people even liked my father. And all of them knew about me. They knew where I lived. They knew that he left me. They left me too. Instead of thinking that maybe a kid who lives in a motorhome in the woods might want to come over for cookies and milk after school, they told their kids not to play with me. They looked at me like I should be ashamed for existing, because my parents were divorced and my shoes were ratty and my hair was stringy and I always had dirt under my fingernails. I was something they could catch if they got too close, like my shame would rub off on them. They were happy to forget me, same as my dad. And now they’re all here in their Sunday best like they’re going to get God points for showing up to mourn a man who wasn’t even worth it.