Beyond Summer (19 page)

Cody wandered back across the room, huffing out a big breath, like I was on his nerves. I could tell that, considering a car was involved now, he was more interested.

Across the street, the woman and the girl were squatted down beside the tire.

“Yup, looks like a flat,” Cody agreed. “I’m gonna head on out and mow.”

“Don’t you
dare
.” Snapping a hand out, I caught his shirt. “Go over there and see if they need help.”

“They’ve probably got it under control.”

I smacked him in the stomach, because I knew he was just messing with me. No way Cody would go mow the yard while there were a couple women across the street with a flat tire. “Come on, Cody, do they look like they know how to change a tire?”

“They don’t even look like they know what neighborhood they’re in.”

“There’s no man over there, either. Just those two, the three boys that were tearing the house down the other day, a baby, and the grandmother I gave the cookies to. Not exactly sure, but I think she’s nuts.”

“Was she wearing green pants?”

“Cod-eee!”

He rested his hands on my shoulders. “So, we’ve got two blondes, a crazy lady, three wild boys, and a baby?”

“Yes . . . right. And a cat.” The women were opening the back of the Escalade now—looking for tools, I guessed.

“Sounds like a knock-knock joke. Knock-knock. Who’s there? Two blondes, three wild boys, a grandma, and a baby . . .”

“Cod-eee.”

“And we’re getting involved why?” he asked, but he was laughing, and before he went out the door, he glanced back at me and winked, his eyes glittering like shiny black beads. When Cody looked at me like that, I totally remembered why I fell for him in high school. He could be so cute when he wanted to.

The boys came out of their bedroom while he was jogging across the street. “Where Daddy go?” Ty wanted to know.

“Daddy’s going to see if the people over there need help with their flat tire.”

“The weirdo people?” Benji asked.

“Benji! That’s not nice! You don’t call people weird.”

Benjamin looked up at me with his eyebrows pinched in his forehead, as in,
I got that from you
.

The three of us stood watching through the glass while Cody introduced himself to the neighbors. Both women backed a few steps away, like they were scared of him. Only the younger one shook his hand. They talked about the tire for a minute; then Cody went around to the hatch to look for the jack and lug wrench. The older blonde went back in the house and the younger one stayed with Cody. A minute later, the crazy grandma came out, carrying the baby girl. Two of the boys followed her.

Ty perked up. “There’sa boys!”

“I wanna go,” Benji chimed in.

“You guys grab your shoes.” After watching these people for days, I was dying to get up close and personal—do a little private investigation, so to speak.

Walking across the street, I started to think maybe I should of minded my own business. The girl looked like the type who’d go around with her nose in the air. She was dressed like one of those models giving a preview of cute summer looks on the morning show. Her T-shirt had some kind of designer label on it, and she was wearing a short, pleated skirt, kneesocks, and tennis shoes, her legs long and smooth, a light caramel color—the kind of tan you paid for, not the kind you were born with, like mine. She looked young and hip.

The closer I got, the more disgustingly cute she was. I had a mental flash of how I probably looked—old Hugo football T-shirt that used to be Cody’s, jeans with holes in the knees and red paint dribbled down one leg, a sloppy ponytail with pieces of straight black hair flying in the wind. All of a sudden I felt like somebody’s frumpy old mommy.

“It’s Annah Mon-nanna!” Ty pointed at the girl, his body jittering as we stepped over the curb.

I felt even worse, if that was possible. “She’s not Hannah Montana,” I whispered out the side of my mouth. Although, come to think of it, she did look like Hannah. “And, Benji, no calling anybody weird, you hear me?” I muttered as we started up the driveway. Hannah was still occupied with Cody and the tire, but the crazy lady and the boys saw us coming. The boys slid around behind their grandma and hid in the folds of her bright-colored Hawaiian dress. She had some kind of scarf wrapped and twisted on her head, so that she looked like the Chiquita banana lady. “Greetings.” She held up a hand.

“Hi,” I answered. “We met the other day. We live across the street. The cookies . . . we dropped off . . . cookies?” I looked toward the house, and a bedsheet that was tacked over one of the windows flipped back into place, which meant someone was watching us from inside. I introduced the boys, and the baby girl reached toward me, trying to push out of her grandma’s arms. The grandmother handed her off like it was an everyday thing to give a baby to someone you didn’t even know.

The baby smiled, and babbled at me, and looked up at me with big blue eyes. I bounced her on my hip and talked nonsense, and she gave me a smile that was toothless, except for the bottom two in the center. In about two and a half seconds, I was in love. Baby love. She smelled like Johnson’s shampoo and powder, and that smell pulled at me like nothing else could. I missed having a baby in the house. I missed having someone who needed me and thought I was the center of the universe. The boys were already starting to find their own lives, but a baby girl would always be mine. As she grew up, we’d do all the special things mothers and daughters do.

My mind hopscotched forward, and I wanted to go home right away and tell Cody about the baby and have him be as excited as I was.

Cody looked up from the tire and saw me with the baby and frowned. I heard that squelching sound they use in the movies when somebody’s daydream rewinds like an old reel-to-reel tape. He stood up from the car, and the teenage girl in the short skirt stood up with him.

“I need to go grab a few tools to bend that fender out,” Cody said. “That’s what’s rubbing your tire. If you leave it that way, it’ll ruin the spare, too. The tire shop might be able to fix that, or else put a used one on the rim for you.”

The girl shaded her eyes so she could look at him. She was almost as tall as Cody was, but for a guy, Cody wasn’t tall. Just five-nine. “Oh . . . okay. How much does that cost?”

I heard that rewind sound in my head again.
How much does that cost?
Probably not near as much as that way-cute outfit she had on.

“Not too much—ten, twenty bucks, depending,” Cody answered. “I go by a shop on my way to work. I could drop it off for you tomorrow.” No way Cody would of been bending over backward to drop off a tire for someone who didn’t look like Hannah Montana. I felt a little pinch of jealousy.

“Oh, that would be so great,” she breathed, not seeming flirty, really, just like she was used to people doing favors for her. Cody jogged off toward our house. Some snarky part of me said,
All right, now he’s being too nice to the cute girl.

I peeked around the grandmother and introduced myself, so Hannah would know Cody was attached. “I’m Shasta. I live across the street.”

Her eyes flashed wide when she saw that I had the baby. “Tam.” She moved closer and shook my hand, then reached for the baby, but the baby hung on to me and started whining.

The grandmother chuckled, then leaned close to the girl and whispered, “She looks like the nanny—the little Spanish one. Jewel thinks she’s found Esmeralda.”

The girl, Tam, turned white, then pink. “Aunt Lute,” she gasped between her teeth, then glanced at me and mumbled, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” I told her. “I love babies; babies love me. These are my guys, Benjamin and Tyler.”

Tam bent down and said hi to Benji and Ty, and they were star-struck. This girl was the closest thing to Paris Hilton they’d ever seen. “I guess you’ve met Mark, and Daniel, and Jewel. And Aunt Lute.”

“A little,” I answered. “We were glad to see some kids across the street. The boys’d love to get together and play sometime.”

Tam shifted from one foot to the other, her gaze flicking toward the house. “I’ll have to ask my stepmom. . . .” I had a feeling that was an excuse to brush me off. The conversation ran out then. Cody came back, and Hannah wandered to the car to watch him finish changing the tire. I stood playing with the baby girl and letting the boys get acquainted until Cody was finished. The boys helped him gather his tools, and he handed them off to Benji and Ty, then picked up the flat tire to carry it across the street.

“Look what I’ve got,” I said, and turned the baby girl around so Cody could see her. “One of the little pink kind. How cute is she?”

He gave me a narrow glance on his way past. “Don’t get any ideas.” He didn’t even look at the baby, just headed back across the street with Benji and Ty behind him.

The girl in the fashion-model skirt gave me a curious look, and I felt myself blushing. “Guess I should give her back now,” I said, feeling like an idiot. My husband could be nice enough to her, and all he could say to me was,
Don’t get any ideas.
“So . . . ummm . . . let me know if y’all ever want to get the boys together to play.”

She gave me an uncomfortable look, and I could tell she wasn’t gonna be calling anytime soon for any playdates.

Of course she wouldn’t.

I looked too much like the little Spanish nanny.

The morning after the flat tire, Fawn came by to, as she put it, “get Barb out of the house for a while.” After days cooped up together, while Barbie ranted with Fawn on the phone or mellowed herself with Xanax and wandered off to the bedroom to sleep, I didn’t even complain about Barbie leaving me stuck with the kids and Aunt Lute. Barbie hadn’t been taking care of them, anyway, other than to occasionally bring one or two into the bedroom with her and curl up in a fetal position for a group nap.

Suddenly, I couldn’t imagine what I’d thought was so bad about our old life—why I’d found reasons to complain about the chaos in the luxurious home with the nanny and the endless supply of toys. Life here felt like a reprimand from God—a slap in the face meant to show me how ungrateful I’d been. Life could be so much worse. It
was
worse. The house was so small, we were stacked on top of one another. The television wouldn’t work because there was no cable, the kids were bouncing off walls and boxes, and furnishings sat piled like toys created on the wrong scale for a dollhouse. Aunt Lute paced the house day and night, disturbed by the fact that her scrapbooks, painting supplies, and stashes of hoarded treasures were piled in boxes on the porch.

After Barbie took off with Fawn, Aunt Lute decided to unpack some of her materials. She left an easel and palette in the living room, and the sibs promptly knocked it down. Paint splattered everywhere, and Jewel picked that moment to figure out that she could do the seal-flop across the room. While I was in the kitchen cooking hot dogs, and Aunt Lute was on the front porch unpacking more supplies, the living room became a finger-paint masterpiece of handprints and footprints and baby slug trails.

When I saw what they’d done, I sank down in the doorway and cried. Every part of me wanted to run away, but there wasn’t anywhere to go. We had one vehicle, currently with no spare tire, and a limited supply of pawnshop cash. The proceeds from Barbie’s ring had been enough to catch up on the car payments, and we had money left to live on for a few months, but there wasn’t anything extra to spend on luxuries like cable TV and trips to McDonald’s. If the sibs were left to their own devices for a millisecond, they wreaked havoc either by accident or on purpose as a form of passive-aggressive protest over their lost toys, lost house, lost dad. Lost everything. They had no way of understanding what was happening, and as far as they could reason, their only recourse was to act out until life went back to normal.

Aunt Lute came in the front door and discovered the paint, and me crying about it. “Ssshhh,” she whispered. “I think I’ve seen a pride of lions nearby.” Motioning to the boys, she tiptoed across the room, leading them out the back door in a colorful, yet from my perspective blurry, parade of paint-spattered clothing, hair, and limbs.

Pushing the moisture from my eyes, I rescued Jewel from the floor, read the label on a tube of paint to make sure it was nontoxic, then bathed Jewel in our one tiny bathtub and dressed her again. Through the window, I could see Aunt Lute stripping the boys to their underwear and hosing them down to get the paint off. In the context of the past week, it hardly even seemed like a strange thing to do.

The boys reentered the house half-naked, wet, and shivering, little streams of water dripping from their underpants and running down their legs. I heard Aunt Lute mopping the floor in the living room while I fished for clothes from the laundry pile and gave them to the twins, then dug out a top and shorts for Landon.

Something caught my eye outside as I was pulling his T-shirt over his head. The mom from across the street, Shasta, was heading down the sidewalk with her sons. They were laughing and pointing at birds in the trees, strolling like subjects from a greeting-card photo. Her long, dark hair swung across her hips as she stopped to show the boys a squirrel running on an electric line overhead.

Yanking Landon’s T-shirt into place, I picked him up, grabbed Jewel, and ran to the overstuffed bedroom at the end of the hall, where the three boys were sharing two single beds, because that was all that would fit. Daniel and Mark were sitting on a bed, their faces long and somber, as if even they realized they’d pushed things past the breaking point. Perhaps they were afraid Aunt Lute would take them outside and douse them with the garden hose again, because they shrank into the corner as I came in the door. They were wrapped in the covers, shivering still, their arms covered with goose bumps.