“A function of his immaturity.”
“He likes Annie. And she likes him.” It’s quiet a minute, then, “You do realize, dear, that as long as Annie was lying about . . . everything she felt, you had no problem with her. It was when she started telling us who she really is that you came completely off the tracks.”
“That’s nonsense.”
“You know, back in high school, this is the one thing my parents warned me about.”
“Don’t even start with your parents,” Pop says. “Your father has always loved me like a son.”
“My father likes you because he would do anything to make his daughter happy. You know what he said to me right after we told them we were getting married? He said, ‘He’s a good kid, Jane, but he has to have things his way. I hope you’re ready for that.’ And you know what? I thought I was. But you know what else? Over the years it’s just made me sneaky.”
I feel the air go tense. “Careful . . .” Then, “Have you had other relationships?”
“My god you are thick. No, I have not had other relationships. I’ve barely had this one, and if no other good comes from all of this, I am finished being careful.”
I hear Pop’s chair scoot, then, very low, in a total change of tone, “Jane, if I’m willing to work on all the other things that have come up, are you willing to give up Annie’s placement here?”
“All the other issues?” Momma says.
I wish I could see their faces; Momma sounds interested, maybe even intrigued. My heart almost chokes me. I’m already out of Marvin’s bedroom when Momma answers, because I do not want to hear it.
“You lose stuff from the day you’re born,” Walter says, “starting with a nice, warm safe place to be. You got to learn to lose it with grace, otherwise you leave no room for what’s next. Learnin’ that was the only way I come to manage everything the war took.”
“How did you do it, Walter; or better how do I do it? She was . . . Momma said I didn’t have to worry, and then, you should have heard her voice. I don’t mind moving, but I couldn’t stand her backing out on me. And it would mean no placement for Frankie . . . I couldn’t stand to hear her tell Pop yes.”
He shakes his head. “You hear Momma’s voice through a heat grate and decide everything she’s said to you up to now is a lie? That make sense? You’re geared to believe folks are lying to you because of how you grew up. C’mon, girl, Jane Howard loves you, and you love her.” He taps his temple. “Think!”
We’re in our favorite corner at Revel, which is nearly empty in the early afternoon. “Some people pay a hundred fifty dollars for therapy, Walter. It only costs me a cup of coffee.”
He laughs. “I was thinking of having a scone.”
“You’re covered, but we might have to extend the session.”
“Slow day,” he says. “I don’t have another client until”—he looks at the wall clock—“well, hell, till you call again.”
“You’re probably right about Momma, but it’s the anticipation,” I say. “It’s not knowing for sure.”
“Hate that,” he says. “You know what I do about not knowing?”
“What?”
“I know—make the next thing happen,” he says. “Why let somebody else decide your fate? Weigh in on your own. Let’s say your cockamamie fear about Jane is real, which it is not. Tell the Howards to crap or get off the commode. Whaddaya got to lose? Hell, you’re almost eighteen. In some cultures you’d be a sex slave by now.”
He means I’d have a job.
“If anticipation is the enemy,” he says, “kill it. Going up the losers bracket is the same in life as at Hoopfest. Lose one, kick ’er in gear. Basically we’re talking about an education, right? The Howards were good for tuition?”
“Yeah, I mean they still might. And there’s Marvin. I’d lose him, too.”
“Tuition. Marvin. What the hell,” he says. “They can’t keep you from Marvin any more than they could keep you from your bios. And hell, do a couple years at community college—walk on if you can’t get a scholarship—play hard, and get something at a four-year place.”
“I don’t know if I’m that good.”
“Only one way to find out. If you don’t stack up with the big girls, go to a school with a crappy team. Plenty of those.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“Darlin’,” he says, draining his coffee cup, “I can come up with solutions all day long and you can come up with reasons. Either you take control or all you’ve got left is reasons.”
“Okay,” I say. “Okay.”
“Gonna sit here a while an’ read,” he says, hoisting his tattered book bag. “We still making that Yakima run?”
“Soon as I get the word from Sheila. Keep your calendar open.”
I answer, “Come in,” to the knock on my bedroom door.
“Hey, Annie,” Momma says.
“Hey.”
“Listen,” she says, “we need to talk.”
“Can I go first?”
“Of course.”
“I think I should find another place to live.”
“What?”
“It would make it a lot easier for you guys to figure things out.”
She stands wide-eyed.
“I heard you talking. I know I’m, like, what Marvin calls the bargaining chip or something.”
Momma rolls her eyes, takes a deep breath, and sits on the side of the bed. “No offense, but you’d be the lamest bargaining chip ever invented. You’re not going anywhere. Or if you are, you’re going with Marvin and me.”
“I thought . . .”
“Annie, Jack’s going to have to learn lessons he should have learned a long time ago. That, or I’ll learn the one I need: that letting a man have his way all the time is the best way to turn him into an asshole. Look, Jack can be a nice guy, when he wants to be. He’s funny, he makes a good living; compared to a lot of people, he might even be a passable parent. But I’ve let him tell me what’s best for Marvin and you, and what’s best for me, when I knew it was all best for him. I’ve always cajoled and danced and eventually gotten my way, but it’s wearing me out.”
“Yeah,” I say, “but if I weren’t here, you could just worry about your own family. Your relationship.”
“You are my family. As snotty and bitchy as you can be, and you can be, you’re ours, or mine. This isn’t the first disagreement we’ve had about you.”
“But still . . .”
“Enough. If I were to follow Jack’s ‘direction,’ or if you were to leave because of all this uproar, I’d resent him for the rest of my life, or until I poisoned his soup.” She stands. “Let us handle the big people’s problems and you just get yourself through the rest of this year and figure out what’s next. And you go see your family whenever you damn well please.” She starts to walk out. “Just don’t bring them here, except for Frankie, of course.”
“But if Pop stays and I stay, he’ll never talk to me.”
“You can always hope,” she says with a smile, and she’s out the door.
Chapter
Seventeen
“This bitch better not start raggin’ on me,” Nancy says from the backseat as we turn off Interstate 90 at Ellensburg.
“Don’t do that,” Walter says. “You keep that in your head and anything she says will sound like ragging on you.”
“Well, she just better not.”
Having been in the system since I was a fetus, I’m pretty used to how therapy works. “It’ll probably be like with that woman we used to see at the mental health center,” I say. “The second one, Mary Ellen something. It’s just a way to get everything out in the open.”
“I don’t want ever’thing out in the open. People been stickin’ their nose in my life all of it. That’s what happens when ever’thing is out in the open.”
If I had the choice between being this therapist or Momma and Pop’s, I’d choose suicide.
Walter says, “Nancy, you’ve told me how many time
s you wished you could do it all over. Nobody gets a chance to do any damn thing over, but once in a while we do get to make repairs.”
“I don’ know. This was just a bad idea.”
I say, “You’re just scared. Do you know how I used to hate it when you were coming into therapy with me? I was always afraid you were going to rat me out. Look, you’ll be there an hour. You can take anything for an hour. Can’t be worse than the dentist. Then we go out on the town, stay in a nice place.”
“Damn straight,” Walter says. “’About time we classed this relationship up.”
Leah’s eyes are glued to the highway. This girl deserves a medal; she has no stake in any of this but agreed to drive so I didn’t have to borrow Momma’s car and get Pop all up in her face.
About ten miles outside Yakima, Leah takes a left into Re-Start’s long driveway, then coasts into a small side parking lot.
“Y’all wait in the car,” Walter says. “Or take a drive if you want. I’ll be in the waiting room; I’ll holler when they’re done.” He lifts his cell.
Walter and Nancy disappear through the front entrance and Leah drives around the circular drive. As she guns it, I see Walter waving in the rearview mirror. “Stop, Leah. We gotta go back.”
“Gone,” Walter says when we circle back.
“Where?” I ask.
Nancy stands on the concrete porch, stunned.
“Don’t know,” Walter says. “The woman in charge says some guy drove up and leaned on the horn. They called nine-one-one but Sheila ran out and jumped in. Left all her stuff.” He takes Nancy by the arm and leads her to the backseat.
“Bitch,” Nancy says. “Come all the way down here, ready to let ’er tear me up in front of one more damn counselor an’ jus’ like always. She runs.”
When Leah pulls in front of Nancy’s place that evening, we’re spent. The leisure aspect of this trip crashed in unanimous agreement. Nearly four hours in the car, I’ll bet we didn’t say five words. Nancy sat in the backseat pissed and sad and dumb as she’s ever been. Walter was smart enough to sleep. Leah drove and I stared out the window.
Walter gets out to open the door for Nancy, but she just bangs it open with her shoulder and stomps up her walk. He watches her go, looks for a second like he might follow, then gets back in the car. “Best drop me at my place,” he says. “Let her cool down. There’s no getting through that.”
Momma and Pop were expecting me to stay in Yakima for the night, so Leah and I go to her house because everyone’s out; she calls Tim and the three of us order pizza and watch a movie.
Maddy says, “This is a better story than most of the ones we read. What happens with Frankie?”
I have given the book club the Reader’s Digest version of “The Ballad of Frankie Boots,” with Leah filling in with an outsider’s perspective, to great interest.
“He’s with Wiz for now,” I say, “but the plan is for Sheila to pull it together. More a hope than a plan, really.”
Mark says, “It doesn’t sound like your sister is coming to her senses anytime soon.”
“I don’t know that she has senses to come to,” I say. “I should have remembered, just because Frankie aches for his mother doesn’t mean she aches for him.”
Leah says, “But remember, she came back after she disappeared and she also went to rehab; she had to have some connection to him. It was a dumb-ass plan to run, especially with all that gas I wasted. . . .”
I say, “Maybe she hates CPS more than she loves Frankie and came back just to show them. Anyway, I don’t know where it goes from here.”
Seth’s hand goes up. “I do believe we have come to the place where real life and literature separate.”
I say, “Tell us, Seth.”
“Editing,” Seth says. “In literature, when circumstances don’t play out well, the author rewrites. All the how-to writing books say it.”
“And in real life . . .” Leah says, ushering Seth along.
“No rewrites. What’s done is done.”
“You guys know why I became a librarian?” Sharon asks.
Maddy says, “To increase the hot factor of all librarians throughout history?”
“There is that,” Sharon says, “but . . .”
I remember. “The Color Purple.”
“Beyond that,” Sharon says.
“To hide your rack among the stacks?” Leah slaps her hand over her own mouth. “That just came out! It was like . . . bad rap!”
“That’s what I get for asking a rhetorical question, right, Seth?” Sharon says, tapping her forehead. “I wanted to find the bridge between stories and life. As long as I can remember, every important literary character reminded me of someone, and almost all the ones I loved reminded me a little bit of me. Of course many of those I hated also reminded me of me. Seth is right; stories are . . . cleaner, because of rewrites. We don’t get the rewrites, but we also don’t have to bring our stories to conclusion in three hundred and fifty pages, so no rewrites, but do-overs, maybe.”
Oliver says, “I like that.”
“Something else has become clear to me,” Sharon says, “listening to all your stories, and particularly this mess of Annie’s. I think we’ve missed the boat, focusing on heroes and/or heroic acts; you know, finding them in fiction and then in life.”
Leah says. “So what should we have been talking about?”
“Narrators,” Sharon says. “The tellers of the tale. It isn’t a question of whether or not you’re the hero of your life, it’s whether or not you’re the narrator; whether you tell your own tale or let someone tell it for you. The characters I love stand up for themselves, understand that they run their own show.”
I’ve heard this before in one form or another, from Leah and from Walter.
The conversation continues, but the rest is word salad to me because my mind slides down the road of “standing up for themselves. . . .” I see it again so clearly; I get so mad at Pop because he wants to tell my story. When he tries, I get devious and elusive; I lie, and live a story that’s not his, but it’s not mine, either. I felt such relief that evening in the den when I just gave up—refused to let him own me. So, easy enough: from here on out, tell the truth and let what happens, happen. The truth has a way of catching up to you, as they say, which sounds right, but I also need to catch up to it. But I’m on the other side of this, too. I want to control Nancy. I’ve done everything to make her feel guilty about not taking care of me in the first place and about not keeping contact. I want to control Sheila, because I want to control what happens to Frankie. Maybe Sharon is right. Maybe those aren’t my stories.
Chapter
Eighteen
It’s crazy how things work, or maybe how they don’t. As much time as we’ve spent in book club talking about books we’ve read and the “lessons” that come out of them and as much time as I’ve spent with Walter, who’s like some kind of guru, I don’t know any more about how life works than I did when I was five. I remember talking with Mark about God one night after book club last year, walking away thinking I hope he’s right. I hoped some great big entity is watching, some entity who wants things to turn out right . . . and who has the power to make that happen. But at the same time I was afraid to want it, because of how much it hurts to not get it. When I was five, I was back with Nancy and Sheila for a fairly extended period, one that ran through the Christmas holidays. Nancy was using again, just hadn’t been caught, and Rance was in and out for some reason that probably had to do with dealing. Sheila had taken over what parenting duties there were, even though she was barely a year and a half older than me, and we’d been downtown looking in store windows. She kept asking me what I wanted for Christmas and I picked some things out. She told me I had to ask Santa Claus real nice and if I’d been good, I’d get them. Christmas was only a week or so away, and I remember thinking I hadn’t been all that good or I wouldn’t keep having to go away, but if I could do everything right for a week, Santa might come with the
goods.
And I was so good. I didn’t cry or call names, and was seriously obedient . . . helped Nancy steal groceries and hid money under my bed that she’d snuck out of Rance’s billfold. When I woke up on Christmas morning I didn’t get anything I wanted; in fact, I didn’t get anything. First day back at kindergarten our teacher asked about our vacations, and it seemed like every kid got at least one thing they asked for. I couldn’t believe I was the worst kid in the class, but the jury was in. I can’t tell you how glad I was to find out later that there wasn’t a Santa Claus.
So as much as I wanted to believe in the God Mark talked about, I was just too afraid to wake up and find out I haven’t been good enough.
Things do get on a roll and a hand may be guiding them, but not necessarily a good one.
A few days after Sheila disappeared from drug treatment, Frankie disappeared again . . . right from Wiz’s place. Wiz was in town at the library and his wife had put Frankie to bed. When Wiz got home and stuck his head in Frankie’s room, the bed was empty. They didn’t think much of it; Frankie is famous for wandering in the night, but they scoured the house and Frankie was gone. Wiz called 911, then alerted everyone who even knew Frankie’s name. Pop and Momma forgot their differences and jumped in the car and I texted Leah, who was out with Tim, and they were at my place in minutes.
I jump in the backseat and Leah says, “Yvonne’s.”
I say, “What?”
“It’s gotta be your sister. Frankie wasn’t in the park this time; he was home in bed. That’s not a stranger.”
“Yvonne’s,” I say, and Leah barks the directions at Tim.
“Yvonne, when was the last time you saw Sheila?”
“Couple of days ago, I guess.” Yvonne is cross-legged on her couch, smoking a joint—candles lit all over the place, low music floating in from another room. No wonder she wasn’t startled when Leah and I found the door unlocked and stormed in.