After termination and the restraining order, no more supervised visits, so if I get to see Nancy or Sheila it has to be in public, where as long as one of them doesn’t strap a bomb to herself, there’s no keeping them away. Neither has thought of that yet. So at Hoopfest, the more games I play, the more chances I get to meet up. I hide these clandestine rendezvous from Pop Howard, because I live under threat of deportation. He’s invested in me as a jock so he shows for most of my Hoopfest games and all my high school games, but he’s got other business and stays only long enough to watch me play and tell me what I did wrong. He was, like, a third-string high school point guard on a state championship team, but when he tells it, “third-string” is conveniently missing. This might seem kind of mean, since the Howards have put up with my unpredictable behavior for eight years, but Pop is one of those guys who’s way more interested in what he looks like than who he is.
At any rate, when Nancy does show she plays “Where’s Waldo?” in the crowd until he’s gone. If you saw Nancy you’d recognize that as a difficult feat, but Pop is pretty self-absorbed, so he lays down his b-ball wisdom and splits.
By the time we work our way over to Hoopfest Central to see who we play next, my team has forgiven me our bogus loss and is ready to sweat it out back up through the losers bracket.
We could have won our second game with two players. There will be a few like that, but I have put the pressure on us to win them all. We towel off and Mariah and Hannah split in search of sno-cones while Leah meets up with her boyfriend to shoot over to one of the city pools to get in a few laps during noontime lap swim. She has the same passion for the pool that I have for the court. Tim Kim, the aforementioned boyfriend, thinks my losers bracket strategy is genius. Leah calls Tim her Korean breaststroker, which is interesting because he swims distance freestyle. Anyway, we all agree to meet fifteen minutes before our first afternoon game and I slip into Riverfront Park. If Nancy shows, she’ll come through there.
“Well, well, if it isn’t Cheryl Miller.” My sister Sheila, parent of the year. She’s with a woman I don’t know, and Sheila’s kid, Frankie, trails behind. Frankie’s five.
“Hey, Sheila. Cheryl Miller’s, like, fifty.”
“Yeah,” she says back. “I saw the end of your first game.”
“You run into Nancy anywhere?”
She holds up a fist. “See any blood on my knuckles?” That means no.
I extend my hand to Sheila’s friend. “I’m Annie. We’re sisters.”
“Yvonne.” If her grip were limper, her hand would fall off.
“Half sisters,” Sheila says.
I nod. “That’s as much sister as you get in our family.”
We exchange unpleasant pleasantries for a few minutes more before Sheila and Yvonne edge toward the street.
“Uh, what about Frankie?”
“Why don’t you keep him for a while? Yvonne and I got business.” I glance at Frankie, headed with his fists doubled toward a kid who’s gotta be three inches taller and fifteen pounds heavier, and rush to grab him; at least if I’ve got him he won’t show up on a milk carton.
“You gotta use your words,” I tell him.
“Fuck you,” he says.
“Different words.”
“I hate you.”
“Better.”
I take his hand and we head for one of maybe twenty-five sno-cone stands.
My sister is not even two years older than me, but it feels like we were born on different planets. While I get it that I can be tough and unforgiving in a lot of circumstances, she is raw and rugged and dismissive in almost all circumstances. I know enough about family to have a pretty good idea what that means for Frankie.
We win our two afternoon games easily. Nancy never shows but her friend, Walter, does. I don’t know the true nature of their relationship, but then I never do. He is way cooler than any of the others, even though he looks like he eats children. The guy is covered in reptilian tats, rides a hog, and carries a loaded pistol.
Walter says, “Something urgent came up.”
“Was it in a pill bottle?”
He pats me on the shoulder, apologizes, and disappears into the crowd. I’ve got to do something about my quick temper; he didn’t deserve that. Plus, I put a hurt on that second team all by myself, and just my luck, Momma and Pop Howard showed for it.
“You were rough on that girl,” Pop said as I pulled my towel out of my duffel. I was sweating like a soaker hose.
“She could have called foul.”
“Hard to call anything after a chop to the throat.”
“No Nancy, huh?” Momma said. She’s always suspected how I schedule my rendezvous.
“Don’t know what you’re talking about.” I smiled when I said it.
Pop pushed my shoulder. “Well, if what-you-don’t-know-what-she’s-talking-about happens again tomorrow, remember it’s Nancy you’re mad at, not the girls on the other team. You embarrassed me.”
I said it again: “She could have called foul.” How did it embarrass him? All he’s gotta say to explain me is, “She’s a foster kid; there’s something wrong with her.” I sat, stretched my legs flat in front of me, and bent forward, forcing my head to my knees.
“If that had been a good team, they’d have wiped up the pavement with you because you wanted to hurt someone more than you wanted to win.”
He was right, but I admit nothing to nobody.
Momma looked over at Frankie, who was being watched over during the game by Tim, who only thinks Frankie’s pretty cool because he never spends long stretches of time with him. “No Nancy, but you did run into Sheila, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Frankie with us tonight?”
“That okay?”
She looked sideways at Pop, whose eyes were rolled so far back in his head he was staring at his brain. “Yeah, honey, that’s okay.”
“Sorry.”
“I always wanted a big family.”
Pop believes the more often we take Frankie, the more we tie ourselves to Sheila, and to Nancy by default. Hard to argue.
The Howards don’t look like a Momma and Pop. They’re, like, in their early forties and in killer shape. I don’t call them Mom and Dad because that’s what Marvin calls them, and it’s only fair he gets first shot. He’s their real kid, the un-jock. I picked “Momma” because there was this really cool black kid in fourth grade who called our teacher that—until he got suspended for calling our teacher that—and “Pop” covered the bases for his status and left “Dad” open in the unlikely event that mine comes out of his pharmaceutical coma.
Bringing a beastie like Frankie home—even for one night—should be against the law, especially into a home that includes a soft soul like Marvin. Marvin’s already a little displaced by me because along with being a brainiac, he’s artsy. Momma loves Marvin and his talents unconditionally, and maybe so does Pop, but you can tell he’d have rather had a boy he could play catch with, and maybe teach to shoot small forest animals. It’s kind of a cliché that I’m the son he never had. Marvin gets even less attention when Frankie appears ’cause Frankie’s a mean motor-scooter and a poop-grouter who has to be watched. Frankie will go off at the smallest slight or frustration, and as for the poop-grouting—my term—when he gets seriously off-center, he fills any small empty space with poop—his. He pushes it into the cracks in the walls in his bedroom, where regular grout is missing in the bathroom or shower, into cracks in tables or chairs or linoleum. You don’t actually see him do it, you just find it. You smell it and you find it. There’s no other way to say this: if Frankie’s your foster kid, your house smells like shit. At first there’s just a hint. “Do you smell something?” “Does the house smell funny to you?” Pretty soon there’s nothing funny about the way your house smells. The trick is to keep him below that particular level of stress.
Chapter
Three
I’m sitting on the curb pulling on my sweats after our title game. Hann
ah and Mariah have split, Leah and Tim are off with Frankie, buying him yet another sno-cone, Pop has deconstructed my play in maddening detail, and he and Momma are on their way to the car. Across the street Nancy stands beside Walter. I’d fire a hard one-handed pass straight at her smirky face, but I don’t want to embarrass Walter any more than he should be embarrassed already. Look, if you’re blessed with my mother’s particular body design, do not wear tight shorts and body-hugging tank tops. And don’t have an unlit cigarette hanging out of your mouth while clutching a King Kong–sized Big Gulp. Nancy’s not morbidly obese, but she can be morbid.
We came back up through the losers bracket like always—beat that first team like a cheap bass drum on the way—and Nancy didn’t see one game.
She’s pointing her cinnamon bun at me, yapping ninety miles an hour into Walter’s ear, so I know she’s pushing him to come sell her excuses. Walter’s resisting because it’s gotta be a little humiliating to deliver the bilious dreck she wants him to convey, even though he knows I’ll finally give him a pass because he’s the most decent guy she’s ever been with and we both know what a pain it is to talk her out of anything. Bilious dreck—how’s that for advanced vocab? Marvin would be proud. Maybe I can find a place for it in my senior thesis.
Anyway, finally, he shrugs and saunters over.
I say, “Save it, Walter.”
He nods. “Well, talk to me a minute, so it looks like I tried. You’re going home to relative calm. I’m going . . .” He nods back toward Nancy.
I gaze into his earnest eyes. “You poor man. Why do you do it?”
“Your mom’s not so bad,” he says, “once you get used to her.”
“I’ve known Nancy seventeen years. I don’t recommend getting used to her.”
“You act tougher than you are,” he says. “Don’t think I don’t know how the two of you sneak around. If you held her in the kind of disregard you claim, you wouldn’t get so riled when she doesn’t show.”
As much as we do battle half the time, there’s great relief knowing Nancy’s finally with a guy she would never attack physically, and vice versa, and who would never steal her ill-gotten gains or live off her welfare.
Still, not that high a bar.
He says, “You’ve got to cut me some slack sometimes, like right now where I’m making it appear like I’m giving you her bullshit excuse. You could make it appear like you’re buying it. Okay?”
I hear a combination of pleading and warning.
“So if you’re gonna go over and have a conversation with her, just leave out the part where you’re pissed. That’ll make my day a whole lot easier.”
Walter’s as tough as he looks, maybe twenty or twenty-five years older than Nancy. Even though he stays over some nights, they don’t live together because he doesn’t want to mess up her “government wages” as she sarcastically calls what she gets for housing and disability and whatever else she can come up with to rob America’s hardworking taxpayers. He works on motorcycles, washes dishes at a local sports bar, and sometimes works a third job, depending on scheduling. He keeps a one-room apartment five or six blocks from her place, a safe haven to which he can retreat when Nancy and Sheila go to war during one of Sheila’s frequent visits.
I pat Walter on the back. “You do know,” I whisper, “Nancy’s not what most guys would call, like, a catch.”
He gives me a hard glare. “People can’t help how they look,” he says.
Nancy stands on the sidewalk, a smile on her face, holding the Big Gulp in one hand and a Quik Mart cinnamon roll in the other. “Actually,” I say, “to a certain extent . . .”
“You be kind. Under all that trouble, she looks a lot like you.”
“Hey, Nancy!” I call to her.
She sets the giant plastic cup on the sidewalk, carefully removes the straw, balances the half-eaten cinnamon roll on the lid, and opens her arms as I cross the street to her. “Baby! You were great!”
“I was,” I say, “but you only heard about it.”
“I got here for the last game,” she says. “You must not have seen me.”
In deference to Walter I pass on the opportunity to tell her how impossible that would have been, but reflexively roll my eyes. Muscle memory.
“I meant to be here,” she says.
I give in. “I know.”
“Can we go somewhere?” she asks. “Walter, you’d buy us a late lunch, huh?”
“Gotta get,” I say. “Momma’s making celebration burgers for me and the team and . . . well, we’ve got Frankie.”
“Where’s Sheila?”
“Wherever Sheila goes.”
“Want us to take him?” she says. “Social services doesn’t need to know.”
I shoot Walter a quick now-you-really-owe-me look. “Naw, we’ve got him.”
“Baby, I really wish . . .”
“Nancy, if you want to spend time with me, make my games.”
“There should be mandatory visitation,” she says. “Them social service bastards.”
“There was a visitation schedule. You made those less often than my games. And them social service bastards don’t have anything to say about it anymore.”
“Maybe so, but it’s not fair. Your foster parents could . . .”
I punch her shoulder lightly. “Nancy. Come see me play.” I nod to Walter. “You’re free, friend. Go make memories.”
Walter winks and gently takes Nancy’s elbow.
“I feel for Frankie,” Marvin says, “but, whew!”
“I know,” I tell him, “but he’ll only be here a little while, and if we stay vigilant, we can sidestep the olfactory assault.”
It’s past midnight. The team has been here, wolfed down some burgers, and split. I weathered Pop’s repeated admonitions about letting my emotions affect my play, and now Marvin and I are digging in the fridge.
“Man,” he says, “I still don’t know how you survived your family.”
“It’s a wonder,” I say. “But it’s not as bad when you don’t have to count on them.”
“But you did have to count on them, I mean, back before.”
I say, “According to my therapist, they counted on me. I was ‘parentified.’ And pretty much your parents saved me.”
Marvin smiles. “You saved me. Every time you got sent back home, I’d pray your mom would screw up before my birthday. I’d put in my order for castanets or art supplies, and if you were still gone I’d get some kind of ball and a closet full of Adidas gear.”
I glance through the kitchen doorway at Pop laying out the rules for Frankie. Along with all else, Frankie keeps outrageous hours.
“It’s the curse of your gender.”
Marvin’s watching Pop, too. “He thinks I’m gay.”
“I know. He asks me all the time. ‘Does Marvin have a secret friend?’”
“Next time he irritates me, I’m gonna come out.”
“You’re not gay.”
“I know,” he says, “but I’ll come out anyway.”
“You think Pop doesn’t like you.”
“He likes me,” Marvin says. “He doesn’t like who I am. It should be the other way around.”
“What’s the difference?”
“If he liked who I am, you know, the things I really care about, he would automatically like me. But he has this utterly primitive idea of what a guy should be. He knows he can’t change who I am and he’s too thickheaded to know he’ll be blown away by that someday. No lie, I’m gonna rock.”
He will.
“You’re the kid Dad always wanted,” he says, “if you forget you’re a girl. I love you like a real sister because when you’re getting the lecture you just got, I’m not on the receiving end.” He elbows me. “You just want to be sure he doesn’t find about all the sneaking around.”
Marvin’s right. Pop knows I see Nancy at my games; he doesn’t like it, but what can he do? He doesn’t know how often I sneak to see Nancy or Sheila, or even Rance once in a whil
e when I’m feeling sorry for him. I’m as two-faced with Pop as I am with them. It’s not easy to be honest when nobody wants you to be doing what you’re not going to stop doing. Momma knows way more than she lets on, but she gets it, so we have an unspoken deal.
It’s only a couple of days before Sheila shows. I’m sitting on the front steps untying my shoes after a long, slow run when she steps out of the passenger’s side of a Nissan pickup that looks like it should have machine guns in the back. Yvonne sits behind the wheel, cigarette dangling from her mouth, staring ahead.
Sheila looks a little contrite because even she knows it’s not cool to leave your five-year-old for however long you want, with people who could report you with a phone call. But she also knows Momma and Pop want as little involvement with social services as possible. Momma says it’s best to have a relationship with Sheila for Frankie’s sake, and report only if things get dangerous. If we reported every time, he might bounce in and out like Sheila did all her life. Left to his own devices, Pop would put out a contract on anyone named Boots, figure some way to get Frankie into a loving home that isn’t his, and be done with it. Truth is, if Frankie were here full-time, going head-to-head with Pop’s controlling ways, he’d take a dump in Pop’s sock drawer.
“Hey, hot stuff, is the rat still here?”
I say without looking up, “Did you call?”
“Yeah,” Sheila says. “Jane said she’d have him ready.”
“Then she probably does.” I nod toward the front door.
Sheila hits the doorbell and I walk around back. I always feel bad and really angry when Frankie goes home with her, even though he’s never here long before he goes psycho missing his mom. I know why, but that doesn’t make me like it. It feels crazy to be attached to a kid with Frankie’s unpredictable behavior, but he couldn’t have been born that way. Sheila wasn’t born the way she is, either, and when I remember that, I give her a break; if I’d gone into some of the foster families she went into, I’d be mowing people down in movie theaters by now.
July 6—Session #Who’s Counting?
ANNIE BOOTS