“No!” she yells. “I’ll leave you both here, I swear to God I will, because if you think I’m gonna let my best friend die alone in that goddamn hospital just because her asshole daughter thinks I should climb down a cliff and maybe kill myself just to rescue another little asshole who was probably driving too fast and—”
“Please,” I say, wringing my hands. “Please come down here and help me.”
“Oh, for . . . I’m telling you, he’ll be fine,” she shouts.
“No he won’t!” I scream, losing it. “He’s hurt and bleeding and if he hadn’t gone off the road he would have hit me instead, do you get that, and I’m not just going to leave him here!”
Silence.
“Fine. It’s your funeral.” Candy shrugs, steps back, and suddenly my canvas bag and purse go flying past me down the bank and hit the side of the truck.
“Hey!” I shout, and scramble the rest of the way down the hill to snatch the blazer out of the dirty, torn-up snow. “What the hell? I—”
She turns and disappears.
The car door slams.
The engine revs.
The headlights veer off, brighten the road, and soar away into the distance.
I turn in disbelief, and meet Evan’s stunned gaze. “Oh my God. She left us here. She drove away and left us here!” I pace a few steps, knuckling my forehead, and stop, finally noticing Evan worrying his bloody bottom lip. “I don’t believe it.”
“Uh . . . do you think she’ll call someone?”
Yes. No. “I don’t know. I hope so.” I take a deep, steadying breath because if I don’t stay calm, it’s all over. Look at my bags lying in the snow, at the rumpled blazer in my arms. “I better go put this stuff back up there on the road, just in case. Maybe somebody else will come by and see it.” I bend and lift the canvas tote, feeling a hundred years old. “I’ll be back.”
“I’ll be here,” he says and another tear slips down his cheek. “Sorry.”
“Me, too,” I say, and start slowly back up the hill.
How I Came to Know Candy
MY GRANDMOTHER LUCY HUFF WAS A gentle, wounded woman of reminiscence and routine who found pleasure looking backward rather than forward, and every night when the supper dishes were done and she was tucked into the corner of the couch with an afghan across her lap, Cricket, the old blue parakeet dozing behind her in his cage, and her second glass of coffee brandy almost empty, she would lean back, her gaze distant, and begin with something like You know, Sayre, where’s there’s life, there’s hope or I was taught never to hate the person, only the behavior or Every family needs a peacemaker, someone who will sacrifice their needs for the good of the others . . .
With that said, she would then launch into any one of a hundred martyred tales of past trials, punctuating each with a sigh and a satisfied But I never gave up. I kept trying, and it always worked out.
When she got to the one about how my late grandfather Big Joyner Huff had betrayed her with upward of four local ladies, always adding And I use the term lady very loosely, and him returning to her afterward, shamefaced and bearing bejeweled gifts, hat in hand and humbly asking to be taken back, she would tease the ever-present tissue out of her sleeve, dab at the corners of her damp eyes, and say What else could I do? He was a big man with big appetites, he was used to getting his own way, and I loved him. He always promised he’d never be unfaithful again and I always believed him. And besides, where would I have gone and what would I have done? He was my whole world. No, for better or for worse my place was with him.
She said that once in front of Mailey Biggs, one of her old school friends come back to Sullivan for a visit, and Mailey gave her an incredulous look over the rim of her teacup and said, “No offense, Lucy, but for better or for worse did NOT mean better for him and worse for you.”
My grandmother goggled at her.
Mailey Biggs sighed and said, “Not to speak ill of the dead but take off those rosy glasses for a minute, will you? I mean, you’re talking to me. That man was a dog, pure and simple, and he didn’t care who he hurt as long as he got what he wanted. Hell, he came on to me that night I babysat Dianne while you two went to that Christmas ball over in Hamlin. Remember how he dropped you off at home and came alone to pick her up? I hustled him out the door, of course, because you were my friend, but there were others I know who didn’t.” She shook her head and set her cup down on the table. “He was a selfish man, Lucy, and from what I’ve been hearing, the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree.” She sniffed. “Di-anne dumping her child on you and running around wild with that no-good Fee girl, getting into nothing but trouble.”
I perked up at this because Dianne was my mother, and Candy the Fee girl.
“She’s what, twenty-two now? That’s not a child anymore, Lucy. That’s old enough to know better. She should be working steady and making a life for her daughter.” She sent a vague wave in my direction. “It’s a crying shame, because Dianne was a good baby before Joyner went and spoiled her. Anything for my little princess. Remember him saying that? She could do no wrong in his eyes, not even when she was wrong. He let that child get away with murder, and my God, the way she talked to you.” Mailey clucked her tongue. “If my Annie had ever shown me such disrespect, her father would have grounded her for a month. But not Big Joyner. He made every excuse for her and threw you right under the bus at the same time. Shameful.”
“He was a good father,” my grandmother said faintly. “He was very generous.”
“Guilt money,” Mailey Biggs said with a snort. “Lord have mercy, how many times did you call me up crying while the princess was pitching a hell-on-wheels tantrum because her daddy had promised he’d be home to help her with her homework or take her shopping and instead he’d stay out till all hours drinking and whoring around and leaving you to make up some lame excuse for him?”
“Well, they were very close,” my grandmother said, fiddling with the cuff of her blouse. “Naturally she was disappointed.”
“Disappointed enough to give you a black eye?” Mailey said with a shrewd look.
“That was an accident. She just didn’t like to be controlled,” my grandmother said, and catching sight of Mailey’s raised eyebrows, said in a rush, “I don’t know why you’re dredging up all this unpleasantness now. Joyner is gone, God rest his soul, and I will miss him until the day I die, and I would appreciate you not coming in here and stirring up the past. He was a good husband and father, and that’s the way I prefer to remember him.”
Mailey Biggs studied my grandmother’s flushed face for a moment. “All right, Luce. If that’s how you need to remember it, then have it your way.”
I was seven when Mailey Biggs said that, not old enough to understand everything but old enough to remember most of her words and my grandmother’s stiffly polite reaction, which was to rise, pick up both teacups, and thank her for stopping by.
And so Grandma Lucy’s stories continued, but after Mailey Biggs’s visit she started drinking three glasses of coffee brandy and even darker tales would surface, snatches of memories dragged from the shadows about a daughter who was moody, critical, and impatient, whose assessing gaze often made her uncomfortable, and who, despite her best efforts, she just couldn’t get close to.
“She would run to her daddy for everything, like she had no use for me at all,” Grandma Lucy said, idly swirling the brandy around in the mug. “I was sitting at the kitchen table once, crying after an argument with Big Joyner over . . . well, over one of his lady friends. Do you know, she’d had the gall to show up at my front door with a tie pin he’d left at her house—a tie pin I had given him for his last birthday—and I told her to leave my husband alone or I would call the sheriff and have her arrested for harassment. Well, she must have run right back and told him, because he got furious with me and we argued and he walked out. Probably hurried right back to her, too.”
Cricket, the parakeet, pecked at the little blue bell in his cage, making me jump, but Grandma Lucy didn’t even seem to hear it.
“My goodness, I’ll never forget this,” she continued, her gaze dark and distant. “Dianne must have been listening the whole time because once Joyner left, she came right into the kitchen and gave me this awful look of disgust—she was fourteen then, and filled with nothing but scorn for me anyway—and said, You do it to yourself, you know. He’s never gonna stop because he doesn’t have to. Don’t you get it? He has all the power. He knows he can do anything to you, and all you’ll do is sit there and cry, boo hoo hoo, and then take him back anyway. God, you’re so stupid, Mom. Why won’t you see? You love Daddy more than he loves you, it’s that fucking simple, and that makes you the weaker one.” Grandma Lucy’s voice was trembling. “And then she shook her head, hard, and put up her hands as if to block the sight of me and said, You know, I can’t even stand to look at you sometimes. I swear to God I would rather die than be like you. And then she walked out, and didn’t come home that night. Later, when Big Joyner got back, he was angry with me for letting her go.” She sighed. “It was a very difficult time.”
She went on about my mother, a child who’d never cared if she hurt people, blamed others for her bad choices, blossomed early, and disregarded every rule. A girl who was chased by many a boy, came home drunk for the first time at thirteen, caught in school with coke at fourteen, suspended, immediately reinstated and the record expunged thanks to her father’s intervention.
“I told him she should have to take her punishment, but he wouldn’t stand for it,” my grandmother said, slumped on the couch and staring at the last of the brandy in her glass. “He was furious at me for even suggesting it. He said Dianne swore the cocaine wasn’t hers, she was just holding it for someone and that she was going to college when she graduated and he would be damned if she had to carry around any kind of black mark on her record and blah blah blah . . .” She waved a drunken hand. “She was right there listening the whole time, of course, looking like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, but I knew the truth.” She struggled to sit up and pointed a finger at me. “People think Joyner was so smart, but he wasn’t. Not when it came to his daughter. Mailey was right about that. Dianne was never held accountable for anything. People thought I let her have her way, but let me tell you, there was no let involved. Her father was the only one she’d listen to, and even then, only when it suited her.”
I glanced at the framed school picture of my mother sitting on the other end table. It was her sophomore year photo, the last one taken before she’d had me and dropped out. Her hair was cut short, bleached white-blond, and she was peering out from under heavy lids, blue eyes gleaming like she knew far more than she was telling. She looked wicked, disturbing, and beautiful.
“She would make her helpless-little-girl face and do her “Oh, Daddy,” snuggly routine and he would fall for it every time. Stupid man. He always got her out of trouble, and between you and me,” Grandma Lucy’s voice grew hushed, “I think it ruined her. I do. She’s a bully and a liar. Even her guidance counselor at school said she had an antisocial personality because she just didn’t care about anybody but herself.” She nodded at me, grave and owl eyed. “Of course I didn’t dare mention that to Joyner, as he would have stormed down to that school and raised holy hell, and gotten the counselor fired for even suggesting his daughter was flawed, but I believe that counselor was right. Oh yes, I do.”
I stared at my late grandfather’s posed, studio portrait hanging above the mantel. His face was florid, his chin high, and his chest puffed out. He looked like a rooster.
“Dianne always said I was so stupid and weak but I’m not the one who screwed up my life, am I? No, not me. Not good old pitiful, stupid Mom. No sir.” She nodded at me, smug. “I kept trying, and I made it. She hasn’t made anything except a baby and a mess. So who’s the smart one now?”
I lived with my grandmother until she died when I was almost eight, and these tipsy, rambling monologues were pretty much how I learned about my family history.
Well, and eavesdropping on my mother and Candy.
Pieced together, I learned that before my mother turned fifteen and went to the hunting cabin where I was conceived, before five months later when she and Candy shoplifted the pregnancy test from Dell’s Drugs to confirm the cause of her increasingly rounded belly, before I went on to be born and ruin her life forever, my mother, Dianne, was a surprise late-in-life baby, a difficult, pampered only child with a successful future all mapped out. She was a pretty, possessive, strong-willed daddy’s girl who loved her big, burly, indulgent father deeply, and her passive, long-suffering mother in a scornful and irritated three’s-a-crowd kind of way.
This might not have become such a problem had Big Joyner Huff been able to stand alongside his wife and say no to his daughter, then stick to his word through the resulting teary eyes and trembling bottom lip, the pouting and pleading, and finally the cold, accusing stares, icy silences, and her ability to make life miserable for everyone involved.
But he couldn’t, so thanks to my grandfather’s inflated ego, guilt, deep wallet, and reluctance to be seen as anything but a benevolent god in his daughter’s eyes, he became putty in her hands.
Until the night she brought Candy home with her as an insurance policy of sorts, to guard against her parents totally freaking when she told them she was seven months’ pregnant.
Now, there are three different versions of this story—my grandmother’s, my mother’s, and Candy’s—but all three are alike in one aspect: that the next morning my mother found Big Joyner still sitting in the exact same leather chair they had left him in the night before, his Johnnie Walker black still in the glass, his bottle of heart pills on the floor next to him, and dead.
I had no chance of welcome after this tragedy, and according to Candy, who is chronically ignorant and enjoys telling this part of the story way too much, it’s a miracle I wasn’t born deformed by my mother’s grief, with fetal alcohol syndrome or whatever degree of messed-upedness came from recklessly hard, nonstop partying, the kind that’s vodka and beer and coke and meth, spoons and needless and pipes. The kind of partying that left my mother numb so she wouldn’t have to think, wouldn’t have to feel, wouldn’t have to remember that the last thing she’d shouted at her stunned and devastated father before storming up to her room with Candy in tow was, You’re such a fucking hypocrite! So I screwed around and got caught. So what? I learned it from YOU.
It didn’t matter that the autopsy revealed time had run out naturally for Big Joyner’s fatty, enlarged heart, and his last five months had been nothing but borrowed time anyway. It didn’t matter that he’d kept the condition a secret from everyone so as not to be treated like an invalid, and disregarded most of his doctor’s dietary orders.
Nothing mattered but that he was dead.
My mother was stoned for the wake, and didn’t make the funeral.
And according to their stories, during labor my mother had screamed and sworn and said all kinds of terrible things including, I hate this fucking thing! Get it out of me! while Candy was right there in the delivery room holding her hand, gagging, and going, Okay, that’s really gross as the sight of me crowning made her throw up all over her own feet.
I learned that my mother breast-fed me for three days, then said the hell with it, turned me over to Grandma Lucy and a bottle, quit school, and left with Candy, and that my grandmother, drowning in grief and with an unwanted infant to take care of, didn’t even try to stop her. I learned that my incredible disappearing father had no name other than That Asshole, and when the infamous hunting cabin was finally sold to new out-of-towners, my mother shrugged and said, I should have burned that friggin’ place down a long time ago.
For seven years I lived a stable, routine existence in the blue house in town with Grandma Lucy, her memories, melancholy sighs and ab
sentminded affection, her Michael Bublé CDs, ambrosia salad, and Wheel of Fortune. I had clothes, food, a bedtime ritual, Sunday school and a few friends, Halloween costumes and Easter baskets, a bookshelf in my room, winter boots and a chair at the kitchen table. The blue house was my home, and Grandma the woman waiting there for me, and I guess I could have loved her like a mother had it not been for the occasional whirlwind visits from Dianne, my real mother, the intense, unpredictable, dangerous, and exotic teen with the fast temper, smoker’s breath, kohl-rimmed eyes, and backroom broken-heart-in-barbed-wire tramp stamp, the girl who showed up unannounced and destroyed our peace, rummaged through Grandma’s purse for money, and strode around like she owned the place.
At first her visits unsettled me, left me nervous, angry, and strangely excited, but after a while, on those few occasions when she swept me up and sat me on her lap, left sticky, strawberry-scented lip gloss kisses on my face and fruity alcohol exhales in my nostrils, there was a stirring in my heart that made me brave and full of longing, made me plant shy kisses on her cheek, wind my arms around her neck, and bury my face in her shaggy, dyed-black hair, wanting to stay that way forever.
But the moment I gave in and clung she would withdraw and disentangle me, ignoring my cries to stay, tugging free of my stubbornly entwined arms, sometimes with the help of Candy, who didn’t care if the jagged edges of her bad French tips scratched my skin or her cheap bracelets caught in my hair, and finally, impatiently, telling me to stop being so fucking needy and shoving me back at my grandmother.
I’d be upset for days after she left, having stomachaches, snapping at Grandma, bursting into tears for no apparent reason. I wanted my mother, then I didn’t, then I did again. As I got older, I couldn’t understand why I didn’t see her more, why she didn’t live with me like other mothers did with their kids, why I couldn’t be with her.
When I asked that question on one of Grandma’s good days, she would say something like, “Because she can’t take care of you right now, Sayre, and besides, I would be so lonely if you weren’t here. You don’t want Grandma to be lonely, do you?”