“No, that’s okay,” I managed. “I’ll have a burger and fries. Some water.”
“Sure,” she said, and took off.
“Now, I don’t know how your mom did things, but don’t you go expecting to eat a lot of fancy dinners out,” Grandfather Harold said, his voice deep and ragged, the kind of voice that would scare a little kid. Hell, the kind of voice that was already scaring me.
I didn’t know how to respond. If they thought my life with Mom had been fancy after their son abandoned us, they were crazy.
“And don’t be expecting any fancy dinners at home, either,” Grandmother Billie said, frowning at the saltshaker, which she turned in circles between her hands. Almost like she was nervous. What did she have to be nervous about? “And you’ll be cooking some of them yourself, so don’t be expecting to be waited on. We run a house, not a hotel. Everyone pitches in.”
“Okay,” I said, my voice a squeak.
“Yes, ma’am,” my grandfather corrected.
The waitress brought my water, and I picked it up and sipped it, grateful to have something to cool down my burning cheeks.
“Don’t drink too much,” Grandfather Harold said. Lecturing must have been his strength. “We don’t plan to stop again until we get home. You got an emergency, you’ll have to hold it.”
I put the glass down, uncomfortable silence pressing over our table like a thick covering of fog.
The waitress brought our food. Once I started eating, I was surprised at how hungry I was, at how good hot food tasted. My grandparents dug into their matching chicken-fried steaks, shoveling gravy-drippy forkfuls into their mouths. A dollop of white gravy clung to my grandfather’s bottom lip.
“We don’t got that much space at our house,” Grandmother Billie said after a few bites. “On account of everyone living there. We believe in taking care of family when they’re in need, and unfortunately you’re not the only one in need.”
“Goddamn flophouse,” my grandfather said, crumby spittle collecting in the corners of his mouth. He licked one side clean and I had to turn my eyes toward my plate to keep from feeling nauseous at the sight of his food-covered pink tongue slithering out between his dry lips.
“So we’ll find a place for you, but it probably isn’t gonna be the same kind of bedroom you had in your old house.”
“ ’Course that bedroom’s halfway to Marceline by now anyhow,” my grandfather said. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to make a joke or if he was just insensitive. He seemed to specialize in the latter.
“We could put her on the porch sofa for the time being,” my grandmother said, turning to Grandfather Harold, her forkful of meat suspended and dripping over her lap. He didn’t answer, but she didn’t seem to be looking for an answer. “It gets cooler out there at night than in the house, anyways. And it’s all covered,” she added, “so you wouldn’t need to worry about that. We’ll figure out something else for you in the winter. Maybe set up a room in the basement.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, thinking that the last place I wanted to be “set up” in was a basement. The very thought of setting foot in a basement made my palms sweat.
“It’s a shame what happened to your mom,” Grandmother Billie said between bites. “But there’s nothing to be done about it. Terrible things happen every day. To everybody, not just you.”
Again I was reminded of Mom’s theory that Billie and Harold were unhappy people because of the pain life had dealt them. I wondered what terrible things had happened in their lives, and if Mom was right, and they’d simply shut down to shut out the hurt. I wondered if I would end up cold as a reptile, unhappy, jaded, someday telling someone fresh in their grief that “terrible things happen every day.”
We ate in silence for a while, each of us staring at our plates. I was full before I’d even gotten halfway through my burger, but still nibbled on my fries.
They tasted like the school’s fries, which were the best thing in the cafeteria. Almost every day Dani and Jane and I would get a chocolate milk shake and a large order of fries to split. We’d sit the shake and the fries in the middle of the table and take turns dunking the fries into the ice cream.
People who saw us do it for the first time would always act all grossed out about it, but then they’d give it a try and next thing you knew they’d be eating fries with chocolate shakes at their tables, too. It was the sweet and salty, hot and cold together that made it perfect.
Sort of what made Dani, Jane, and me perfect together. We were all different. We complemented one another.
I missed them so much my ribs ached as I breathed. Jane didn’t even know I’d left. That is, if she’d made it through the tornado okay. Would I ever find out? If Dani’s mom didn’t pick up her phone soon, I would be well on my way to my new life in Caster City. I tried not to think about what this meant: If I was living in Caster City, three hours away, I wouldn’t be sharing fries and shakes with my two best friends anymore. I wouldn’t be sitting cross-legged next to them on the edge of the stage during theater club meetings, and I wouldn’t be spotlighting Dani’s face as she belted out the lead lines anymore or listening to Jane practice a new piece on her violin. I wouldn’t graduate with them.
I maybe wouldn’t ever see them again.
It was so unfair.
“Of course, Clay will be there,” Grandmother Billie said, adding to the conversation after such a long pause it took me a minute to understand what she was talking about.
Immediately, Dani and Jane were forgotten, as were my fries. “Will be where?” I asked.
“Ma’am,” my grandfather reminded sternly.
“Will be where, ma’am?” I repeated.
She looked up at me, chewing, her forehead wrinkled in thought. “At the house. Like I was saying,” she said.
Of course, that made sense. Clay would be at their house every now and then. He was their son, after all.
He was also my father. The father I hadn’t seen in sixteen years.
“He’s…” I hesitated, so many questions racing through my mind. He’s still alive? He’s not in jail? He’s the kind of guy who visits his mother? “He’s in Caster City?” I finally landed on.
“Of course he’s in Caster City. That’s where the whole family is. His sister, Terry… his nephews… us.”
“He only ever lived up here because it’s where your mother wanted to live,” my grandfather remarked. My insides burned at the thought that I would, after sixteen years, finally see my father. “He was born in Waverly, about an hour thataway.” He pointed out the window with his fork. “But we left that town years ago, moved on down to Caster City. Clay refused to come with us. Said love went where it needed to go. When she ruined his life, he come down to his family. Shoulda never stayed up here, to be honest.”
My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. I peeked at the incoming text from Dani: Mom said she needs to talk to Ronnie. Sorry. I’ll keep working on her.
I put the phone back in my pocket, my stomach twisting in knots. This was happening. I was going to Caster City with these people. I was going to see my father, after all this time. “So does he come over a lot?” My throat felt coated by French fry grease. I cleared it nervously. “Ma’am?”
“No,” she said, still giving me that look, as if she expected me to know about my father’s life, even though I’d never been a part of it. She set down her fork and took a sip of iced tea. “He lives there. With us. And his wife, Tonette, and their two daughters. You’ll meet them all tonight.”
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
Grandfather Harold was true to his word. After we left the diner, we didn’t stop again until we got to Caster City. Not that I asked him to. I sat in the backseat and thought about what they’d said. I was going to meet my father today. For the first time ever, really.
It was evening when we crunched up the gravel driveway, but the days had been getting longer, so dusk was just starting to fall. I peered nervously through the windshield at the ti
ny house we were approaching. It was white, with falling-down shutters and a front stoop covered on three sides with wooden lattice, which had holes punctured throughout. I wondered if that was going to be my bedroom. I didn’t see how I’d possibly live in such a place until winter.
Two boys who couldn’t have been any older than eight burst through the front door as we settled into park. Neither of them had shirts on, and their faces were filthy. Their voices drifted through the car’s open windows.
“Give it back!” one of them yelled, clobbering the other on the back of his head with a fist. “Ya turdface, ya smelly fartwad!” They fell into mutual headlocks and spewed cusswords while rolling around on the damp ground, punching and gouging at each other.
My eyes widened in surprise. I held my breath waiting to hear Grandfather Harold’s response. But if my grandparents had heard the boys, neither of them acknowledged it. At that moment, Marin seemed so very innocent to me. Like a little angel.
Grandmother Billie tugged at the hem of her shirt and the thighs of her pants, then leaned down and peered at me through her open door.
“This is it,” she said. She shut her door and ambled up the walk.
Welcome home, Jersey, I thought. This is it.
As I opened the door and unfolded myself from the backseat, a woman stepped out on the front porch, holding a diaper-clad toddler on her hip. The baby’s hair and face were as messy as those of the two boys on the ground.
“Nathan! Kyle! Cut that out!” she yelled. The baby pointed at the boys and babbled something loud and unintelligible. The woman shifted her attention to me. “You can come on up,” she called.
But my body didn’t want to move. My legs trembled and my arms shook under the weight of my backpack. I wasn’t sure I could keep from throwing up the burger and fries that still churned in my stomach.
This was not my life. Cussing children and dirty babies whose gender I couldn’t even identify and scowling grandfathers and a sofa on the porch for a bedroom and no friends, no school, no Kolby standing outside watching storm clouds roll in. And somewhere in there… my father. The man who’d abandoned me. He’d ruined Mom’s relationship with her family, so that when he left, we were completely and totally alone. And without Mom, it was just me. Alone. In this place.
At that moment, I would have given anything to have Marin back, to have Marin ask me to dance with her. I would have East Coast Swung until my legs gave out. I would have hummed right along with her.
I turned my eyes upward and blinked hard, wishing I would wake up from this nightmare.
But it didn’t happen.
“Come on, she don’t bite,” Grandfather Harold said, startling me back into reality. He tugged on one of the straps of my backpack, but I held it tight.
“I’ve got it,” I said, and then when I felt his shadow shrivel me, added, “sir.”
He paused, then grunted. “Suit yourself.”
I followed him up the walk, which was cement crumbled to almost as much gravel as the driveway, past the boys, whose breathless exertion had finally drained the cusswords out of them. Instead, they lay mostly static on the ground, groaning in various wrestling holds.
“Hey,” the woman said when I hit the porch, stepping back warily, as if Grandfather Harold were escorting a dangerous animal into the house. “You coulda come on up. Didn’t you hear me?”
I met her gaze but didn’t know what to say. Was this my father’s wife? Was this the woman who’d replaced my mother? This woman in a threadbare and faded maternity top and unbrushed hair, with a bevy of foulmouthed children?
I turned my eyes to the wooden porch boards and followed my grandfather into the house, hearing the woman yell after I’d passed, “You boys, I told you to cut that out and get your butts inside the house!” The baby echoed a garbled version of the latter end of her sentence. At once I felt sorry for the kid, while at the same time grateful that this was not how I’d grown up. Except now it was going to be part of how I grew up.
Grandmother Billie was standing in the living room when we came inside. A couple of teenage girls scowled at me from the couch. The shades were drawn and the TV was on, giving the room a dark, impenetrable aura.
“She meet Terry?” my grandmother asked, talking about me in third person.
“We passed her on the way up,” my grandfather answered, as if the terse, one-sided exchange could be considered an introduction.
I recalled the conversation from the diner. Grandmother Billie had mentioned my father’s sister, Terry. So that woman out there was my aunt, not my stepmother. I wasn’t sure whether this was good news or not. In a way, finding out that my stepmother was loud and foulmouthed would be better than continuing to wonder what she was like. There is relief in the known, even if the known is ugly.
“These here are Lexi and Meg,” my grandmother said, gesturing to the two girls on the couch, who’d gone back to watching their show and didn’t even bother to look up at the mention of their names. Instantly, I was flooded with guilt. How many times had Marin felt like this, with me refusing to acknowledge her so I didn’t miss some lame crap that some lame reality star was saying? “I guess they’re your sisters.” I pushed Marin’s purse closer to my side with my elbow.
“Half,” one of the girls intoned, giving me the most cursory nasty flick of her eyes.
“Well, yes, half sisters, I suppose,” Grandmother Billie corrected. “Come on. I’ll show you where you can sleep.”
I followed her through a cluttered kitchen. Food-caked dishes clung to the sink, and the microwave door stood open. We walked out to an enclosed porch that looked over the backyard, letting a whoosh of fresh air into the stifling kitchen. Grandmother Billie held the screen door for me with one hip.
“We call this our family porch,” she said. “But for right now it’s yours. You can pull the shades on those screens for privacy, I suppose, but you can’t lock the door to the house because it locks on the inside.”
She tossed an armload of bedding onto a couch that looked a hundred years old, with big orange flowers on top of a backdrop that might once have been white but was so coated with the outdoors it appeared almost beige.
“You got any clothes?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I bought a few pairs of clean underwear at the pharmacy. I need to do some laundry.”
“Well, you’re a little thick to borrow from Lexi or Meg, but maybe Terry’s got something you can squeeze into.” She eyed me up and down, making me feel bloated and uncomfortable. “It seems to me that beggars shouldn’t be choosers, anyway,” she said, and I had to restrain myself from asking her what the heck she was talking about, since I hadn’t said anything about not wanting to borrow Terry’s clothes. She sized me up a bit more, then added, “You can get settled, and then when you’re done, come on in and wash the dishes. Lexi’s gonna be real happy she ain’t got to double up on chores now you’re here.”
She left, and I sank down onto the couch, not sure what to do to “get settled.” I didn’t have anything to put away. I was afraid to leave everything I owned unattended, especially in this place. And the last thing I wanted to do was go back inside that kitchen and do dishes that I hadn’t dirtied.
I gazed at the screen door leading out to the backyard, wondering what would happen if I walked through it and never stopped. Just headed out, walking, walking, walking. Be my own hero. Save myself.
To where, though? That was the problem. I could walk all I wanted. What I didn’t have was a destination. I didn’t have a home. This was it. This couch tucked away on a “family porch,” whatever that was, out in the middle of nowhere, where little boys cussed like sailors and half sisters sneered at you.
Nothing like my old home, where Marin played on the swings outside and Mom sat on a lawn chair and painted her fingernails Easter colors while humming that old Spandau Ballet song she loved so much.
“Jersey, watch this!” Marin would call if I so much as came close to the back door when she wa
s out there. She’d do something that she thought made her a daredevil—like tilt her head way back while swinging or stand up at the top of the slide or hang upside down from her knees on the trapeze bar.
“Monkey Marin,” Mom would call out cheerfully, then turn to me. “Come on out, Jers. I’ve got robin’s-egg blue.” She’d hold up the bottle of fingernail polish and shake it.
“No, thanks,” I’d say. “I’ve got homework.”
But I didn’t. Hardly ever was it really homework that was keeping me away. It was always something completely stupid.
I never once sat outside and watched Marin and listened to Mom hum and let her paint my nails. Not one time.
“This much is true,” I whispered to myself, sitting on my grandparents’ “family porch,” remembering the lyrics at the end of the song. I wiped a trickle of tears off my cheek, then reached into Marin’s purse.
I popped a piece of gum, unfolded the paper, and drew a picture of my sister hanging upside down from a bar, a thought bubble saying, “Watch, Jersey!” Marin is a monkey, I wrote. And then added: Mom is robin’s-egg blue.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
I heard a door slam inside the house, followed by muffled shouting—sounded like those two boys and my aunt Terry again—and hurriedly zipped Marin’s purse shut. I wedged it between the back of the couch and the wall and then did the same with my backpack. I guessed that meant I was settled in.
I made my way to the kitchen sink and began washing the dishes, jumping each time someone made a sharp noise behind me—which happened every few minutes. I could hear the family convene in the living room. The volume on the television ratcheted up, my grandmother and Aunt Terry talking, occasionally barking a laugh or groaning or making loud “ooooh” sounds. These were the sounds of a home, but they weren’t the sounds of my home. Nobody was asking how my day went, whether or not I had homework to do, how the spring musical was coming along, or whether I was ready for finals. There was no humming, no chirping cartoon voices in the background, no hiss of Ronnie popping open a beer. The sounds in this house didn’t belong to me—they belonged to another family, one I wasn’t a part of. In some ways it seemed like a lifetime ago that I’d last heard the sounds of my home. It seemed like I’d belonged to another family in a different life, a dream life, one that wasn’t even real.