by J. A. Wright
When I heard Mom’s car in the driveway, I went to the door to meet her. I think I told her everything about Reverend Bob before she had a chance to put her purse down.
“Are you hurt? Should I take you to the doctor? Oh god, wait until your Dad hears about this, he’ll kill him.”
“Aunt Flo will hate me. Please don’t tell Dad,” I pleaded.
When Dad got home from Seattle the next night I heard him and Mom in their room talking about what Reverend Bob did, and a few minutes later I heard Dad walk to the kitchen. I met Mom in the hall on my way to the living room and she reached over and rubbed my head. I stiffened up and pulled away. “Why’d you tell him?” I asked.
“He’s got a right to know,” she replied.
I pretended to watch TV in the living room while Dad screamed on the phone to Aunt Flo, “Who the fuck goes to Las Vegas for the weekend and comes back with a loser like Reverend Bob? He’s a child molester and you’re an idiot for marrying him!”
That was the first time I’d ever heard Dad talk to Aunt Flo that way, and something inside of me was happy about it. After Dad slammed the phone down, he came out to the living room and told me I should’ve locked the bathroom door and I had no business getting in a car with anyone. I looked over at Mom, and she shrugged her shoulders and gave me a big frown that let me know she agreed with Dad. When Mom knocked on my bedroom door later that night, I told her to go away.
“I know you’re upset, but Aunt Flo shouldn’t have married anyone so soon after Uncle Hank’s death, and especially not that pig Reverend Bob.”
I pretended I didn’t hear her and pulled the covers over my head. I waited for her to go to bed before I got up and took one of her pills from a bottle in the bathroom cabinet. I broke it into four pieces, swallowed one piece, and put the rest in my sock drawer for later.
No one mentioned Reverend Bob or Aunt Flo to me for weeks after Dad’s phone call, and then one day in August, two days after the first anniversary of Uncle Hank’s death, when Dad and I were driving home from a weekend car club exhibition and after he had drunk all five beers from the cooler in the backseat, he said, “You’re sure it was Reverend Bob?”
I didn’t answer, because I wasn’t sure what he was asking.
“The bathtub, the bra. Was it him?” Dad asked about a minute later.
“It’s the truth, Dad, I promise.”
He drove straight to Aunt Flo’s, got out of the car, and stomped past the gate and to the front door. I followed because I didn’t know what else to do. Dad didn’t knock, he just opened the door, and we both could see Reverend Bob sitting in Uncle Hank’s favorite chair watching TV. Aunt Flo was in the kitchen, but when she heard Dad yell at Reverend Bob to get up and get outside, she came right out and told Dad to leave him alone. “It’s none of your business,” she said.
Dad fired back, “Touch my fuckin’ kid and it’s my fuckin’ business.”
Dad picked Reverend Bob up out of his chair with one hand, and I watched in amazement as he put him in a headlock, dragged him out to the front gate, and threw him down on the street curb. He kicked him really hard right in the stomach and told him to “get the fuck out of Dodge.” Aunt Flo yelled at Dad to leave him alone, and I ran to the car, got into the backseat, and covered my ears. It was all over by the time the neighbors got to Aunt Flo’s gate, and I peeked through my fingers to see the taillights of Uncle Hank’s T-bird, with Reverend Bob in the driver’s seat, disappear down the road. Aunt Flo was standing by the front gate crying.
“He’s a fucking bum, Flo, and you know it,” Dad yelled as he got into the car and took off so quickly that I slid clear across the seat and hit my head on the door handle.
Even though it was a Sunday and Dad had to work the next day, he drove home the long way so he could stop at the Mic Mac Tavern. I was happy to stay in the car and wait because I’d never felt safer or more loved by my dad.
CHAPTER 10
Just after I started the seventh grade, Mom told me that Aunt Flo had kicked Reverend Bob out for good, but not before he stole a lot of the money she got from Uncle Hank’s life insurance. I remembered Uncle Hank’s hidden box and wondered if Reverend Bob had taken that too. I knew that Uncle Hank would be angry if someone stole his things and I really wanted to go over to the cottage and have a look in the shed, but I wasn’t sure if Aunt Flo would want to see me. She’d stopped calling me after Dad beat up Reverend Bob.
I spent most of the year leaving notes and cards in her mailbox. I even knocked on her front door a few times. She never answered and she didn’t respond to my notes or phone messages, either. I’d just about given up on ever seeing her again when a box arrived at my house on June 1, 1988.
Happy 13th Birthday Honey. I’m passing these on because
I know how much you like them and Hank and I talked
about giving them to you on your 13th.
—Love Aunt Flo and Uncle Hank
Inside the box I found the little gold and sapphire hoop earrings Aunt Flo used to wear all the time, the ones Uncle Hank gave her when they got married.
Mom was surprised. “She hasn’t been in touch for almost a year and now she sends you a gift like this? It’s too much,” she said.
Dad said they were too expensive. “You’re just gonna lose them like you lose everything else,” he said.
I put the earrings on anyway and left a long message on Aunt Flo’s machine about how much I loved them and how much I missed her. This time she called back and we talked for hours.
Aunt Flo got married again in February of 1989, only this time she married a man with “real money,” according to Dad. Arnold Smythe and Aunt Flo had a Valentine’s Day wedding at a fancy yacht club not far from his house in Malibu. It took an hour and a half for us to get there. That’s an hour and a half of Dad driving while swigging from a fifth of Jack Daniels and listening to his favorite Waylon Jennings cassette so loud that it was almost impossible for me to talk to Mom about why I shaved my legs even though she’d told me not to. I’d been asking her for months about shaving because I knew lots of girls who were thirteen who shaved their legs and underarms, and some who even shaved their privates. I begged Mom to let me shave and even made her have a close look at my legs one day, outside in the sunshine, but she said there wasn’t enough hair on them to shave off. She told me to rub my legs with lotion.
I tried the lotion but it didn’t do much to hide the hairs, and although I did my best to ignore it, I found myself thinking about it all the time. Sometimes at school I’d sneak off to the bathroom just to have a look at what was happening with my leg hairs. On the morning of the wedding, I found ten new little black hairs on my right shin. I thought about plucking them out, like I’d done to the ones on my left leg, but there wasn’t time, so I used Dad’s razor while I was in the bathroom. I’d watched Dad shave a few times, so I knew I was supposed to put shaving cream on my skin first, but the shaving cream can was empty so I just used water. It took forever for the bleeding to stop, and even though I put flesh-colored Band-Aids on the seven or eight places where my skin had come off, red was showing through them. Mom noticed right away. She yelled at me most of the morning. “I went to a lot of trouble and spent a lot of money on that beautiful dress you have on. Now no one is going to notice because they’ll be too distracted by your bloody shin.”
The outfit Mom bought for me was a bright yellow satin midi dress, complete with shoulder pads and puffed sleeves. She got it because she thought it matched the purple satin minidress she’d bought for herself. Dad was supposed to wear the tuxedo she rented for him but he didn’t. Instead he wore his black jeans and cowboy boots and put a brown suit jacket on, but only after Mom insisted he wear one. Aunt Flo gave Dad a dirty look when she saw him and mentioned something about his bad dress sense and bad manners. She loved my outfit, though, said it was a nice style for me. “Not many people can wear lemon yellow as well as you. And with those beautiful earrings you look like a princess.” She also like
d my red headband and lip gloss, and she didn’t mention my Band-Aids.
A few people did ask me about my leg, and I told them about a stray dog that had attacked me when I was taking the garbage out the night before. I think they believed me. Even if they didn’t, after my second glass of champagne, I didn’t care.
I was dancing by myself next to the bar when I saw Mom motion me over to the reception hall kitchen area. “You promised to help me pass out wedding cake, remember?” she said.
“Sure Mom, I’m only here to serve,” I laughed.
I winked at Mom as I picked up two plates of wedding cake and tucked little forks under the cake like she suggested. I was about to walk out to the reception hall to pass them out when I heard her say, “Don’t forget the napkins—and why are you so happy? Have you been drinking?”
“Just the glass of champagne Aunt Flo gave me for the toast,” I lied.
Mom gave me her half-grin, eyebrows-up stare, the one she always gave me when she was upset with me, but I didn’t respond. Instead, I picked up a third plate and placed it a bit higher up on my forearm and pretended I was one of the Denny’s waitresses I often admired—the ones who could carry four or five plates at one time, cradling them all the way up their arms. I was doing a pretty good job passing out cake until I slipped and dropped a piece at the feet of Aunt Flo’s maid of honor, Helen, and it got all over her silver shoes. While I was stooped over trying to pick up the cake, I heard Helen tell Aunt Flo that I was either drunk or a complete spastic and that I shouldn’t be allowed to hand out anything.
“I’m sorry, Helen, the plate just slipped out of my hand,” I said.
The next second Mom came running out from the kitchen with a dishtowel and bent down to wipe the icing from Helen’s shoes. Helen told her to stop and took over cleaning her own shoes. “You should attend to your daughter. She doesn’t look well,” Helen said.
Mom pushed me into the ladies’ room. “What’s wrong with you? No one gets drunk from one little glass of champagne. You’d better not let your dad see you in this condition,” she said.
“He’s too wasted to notice,” I replied.
“He might be, but I’m not,” she said.
She made me splash water on my face and said I needed to get something in my stomach, including a cup of coffee.
The buffet table had so many different types of food on it that I couldn’t decide what to eat, so I just stared at the chicken until Mom jerked the plate from my hand, said something about hating being a mother sometimes, and then piled as much food as she could onto it before handing it back to me and telling me to eat every last bite. I took a seat at a table occupied by a really old man who seemed to be asleep. A few seconds later, Mom walked up behind me with a cup of coffee.
“I put three sugars in it, so drink it all. I’ll check on you later, but I need to get back to your dad before he drinks the bar dry,” she said.
It took me a while to eat the potato salad, corn on the cob, prime rib, and roasted chicken, but I did. I also finished the half bottle of beer someone had left on the table. Aunt Flo came over to see if I was okay but she only stayed for a minute. “I’ve got a gorgeous new husband waiting for me and I’m gonna find out if he can dance,” she squealed.
I sat and watched Arnold and Aunt Flo swirl and twirl around the dance floor for two or three songs before I took my empty plate into the kitchen and grabbed a piece of cake for myself.
That night I discovered drinking and dancing must go together, because the more people drank, the more they danced, and some of them were really bad at it. I didn’t hit the dance floor until the band started playing my favorite song, “We Belong,” and that’s when I first met Arnold’s grandkids, Tyler and Sissy.
After watching me dance alone for a few minutes, Sissy Soul Train–danced over to me and introduced herself. “I’m Sicily, but everyone calls me Sissy. I’m Arnold’s granddaughter, and that’s my brother Tyler walking out the back door.”
I tried to catch a glimpse of Tyler, but there were too many people in the way. “I’m Randall,” I replied.
“Really? Someone named you Randall?” she asked.
“Yeah, I think it was my dad,” I replied.
“It’s a great name, much better than Sissy,” she said.
I didn’t know if it was okay for two girls to dance together, but since no one was looking at us and no one yelled out for us to stop, I pretended she was a boy and danced away. When the band started playing “Boogie Wonderland,” I showed Sissy my best version of the hustle. She got it right away, and so did a few of the other guests, and pretty soon there were about ten of us doing the coordinated steps all together.
I was having the most fun I’d had since Uncle Hank died, so I stayed and danced with Sissy until we were both exhausted and thirsty. When the band started playing a Kenny Rogers song we headed to the punch bowl to get a glass of what tasted a lot like Hawaiian punch. Sissy was the one who suggested we only fill our glasses halfway so we could top them up with the pink wine from the kitchen. She drank her glass of wine punch in a few swallows and poured another, so I did the same.
We stood next to the kitchen door waiting for the band to play a good dance song but it took so long that we had time to refill our glasses two more times with the punch and wine. We also had time to talk about our parents. I didn’t want to talk or even think about my dad, but it was hard not to, especially because he was running and jumping around the dance floor doing some type of weird jig.
As my dad followed up his jig with his version of the alligator, Sissy asked, “Hey, what’s with your dad? Is he wasted or what?”
“Yeah, but he’s wasted a lot,” I replied.
“Sorry about that. I know how it is. My dad was like that too,” she said.
“Where is he now?” I asked.
“In a prison somewhere in Texas, I think. He doesn’t stay in touch and Arnold thinks we’re better off without him.”
“How come he’s in jail?” I asked.
“He ran over a woman, and since he’d been in trouble for drunk driving a few times they sent him away,” she said.
I was surprised to hear this story. I thought kids weren’t supposed to talk about the bad things their parents did.
“Yeah, my dad did something like that once and he had to go to jail for a weekend,” I replied.
“Too bad they didn’t keep him, huh?” She laughed.
I laughed too.
Sissy told me her mother hadn’t been around for years. “She lives in Idaho in a commune, or something like a commune. Anyway, she never calls or writes, but it doesn’t matter.” With that she changed the subject abruptly and suggested we go see what her brother was up to.
Sissy didn’t seem too sad about not having a dad or a mom around. Maybe it was because she was fifteen, two years older than me, and so mature that she didn’t need parents. I thought she was interesting, cute, and the coolest girl I’d ever met. She had light brown freckles all over her nose and forehead and reddish-blond, curly hair that she wore in braids tied together in a messy way with six different-colored ribbons. She also had the greenest eyes I’d ever seen, and when she smiled you could see all her teeth and they were big, white, and perfectly straight. Not like mine, which were small and yellowish and a bit crooked, but not crooked enough to get braces, according to Dad.
I followed her outside to the parking lot, where a bunch of kids about Sissy’s age were hanging out. Sissy introduced me to everyone, including Tyler, who was leaning on the front of Arnold’s shiny black Lincoln Town Car smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer. Tyler was even better looking than Sissy, and I was feeling so strange and so good that I thought I should kiss him, but I knew that was out of the question. I didn’t want him to think I was a loser and laugh at me. Besides, I could feel Sissy tugging at my sleeve and pulling me away and I heard her whisper, “Stop making goo-goo eyes at him.”
I moved to the other side of the car with her so she could talk to a g
irl she knew, but I didn’t hear a thing they said to each other. I was too busy listening to Tyler, who was talking to a couple of guys about a car he was thinking about buying. It was hard not to interrupt and ask him questions. I wanted him to know that I knew a few things about cars, but I kept my mouth shut because he was talking about Fiats and Triumphs and I only knew about American-made cars with V8 engines because that’s all my dad and his car club friends owned.
Sissy and I were just about to go back into the reception hall when Tyler lit up a joint, took a drag, and walked right up to me. “You wanna hit?” he asked.
I wasn’t sure what to do, so I looked at Sissy, and she said, “You can stay and smoke if you want, but I’m going.”
I took a step back from Tyler. “No thanks,” I said. All the while I was thinking about the lecture Robbie had given me at Christmas about the evils of marijuana and how it leads to heroin addiction in 99 percent of all cases. Robbie’s talk was pretty scary, and although I usually didn’t listen to a word he said, I knew he’d joined a few groups at his college, including the new one called D.A.R.E., Drug Abuse Resistance Education, which was all about spreading a message that drugs are dangerous. “Pushers, druggies, and potheads are ruining this country, and something needs to be done about it,” Robbie had said.
I whispered in Sissy’s ear that I didn’t like to smoke pot. Not that I ever had—but I wasn’t about to tell her that.
“I hate that shit too. Just makes ya hungry and stupid,” she replied.
We made it back into the reception hall just in time to dance to “American Pie” and to help ourselves to a couple of half-empty beers we found by the bar. Sissy and I hiked our dresses up and did the cancan, and I thought we were looking good, but Mom didn’t seem to think so. When I boogied my way over to her table, picked up her beer, and took a swig, she grabbed my arm and the beer and told me to knock it off.