Rules for Life (15 page)

I was ashamed of myself. There was a lot about Anne that I didn't know and I realized that I wanted to.

Anne was chopping mushrooms at the kitchen counter, a red-and-white-checked dishtowel tucked in the waist of her pants. I hesitated in the doorway. “Um, Anne?”

She looked over her shoulder at me.

“I, uh, I guess I am sort of hungry,” I said. “What can I do?”

She smiled, a small smile but a real one. “You could grate some mozzarella.”

“Okay.” I rummaged in the fridge for the cheese and found the grater in the cupboard next to the dishwasher. We worked without talking for a few minutes.

Anne finished the mushrooms and crossed behind me to get the eggs. I'd shredded a little mountain of cheese onto a plate. “That looks like enough,” she said.

She beat the eggs with a fork and heated a little butter in a pan. I leaned on the counter and watched. When the omelet was done and cut in half, we sat across from each other at the table and ate.

Spencer wandered in, whiskers twitching. I lifted him onto my lap and fed him a cheesy bit of egg. He gobbled it down and looked expectantly at me. When I took the next bite for myself he put a paw on my hand.

“Can you teach me how to do this?” I asked, with my mouth full of fluffy egg, gooey cheese, mushrooms and some kind of herb I couldn't identify.

“Sure,” Anne said. “It's not that hard. Will you teach me how to make your spaghetti sauce?”

“Yeah, next time I make it.” I gave Spencer another taste, then took one myself and chased it with a big bite of the crusty bread Anne had toasted under the broiler. “The secret to the sauce is the meatballs. I don't use hamburger.”

Anne's fork stopped halfway to her mouth. “Aww, please tell me they're not tofu.” She smushed up her mouth when she said “tofu.”

“No, they're not tofu,” I said. “But what's wrong with it?”

“It looks like white play clay.” She shuddered.

“So? It doesn't taste like play clay.”

“You've tasted play clay?”

“I ate half a can of the fluorescent pink stuff the third day of kindergarten.”

“Why?”

I held up both hands and shrugged. “How else could I find out what it tasted like?”

Anne burst out laughing. “Yeah, but half a can?”

“I was trying to decide whether I liked the taste.”

“So did you?”

“Nah. It was like eating an eraser.”

“So's tofu,” Anne said, pointing at me as if she'd just scored a point.

I couldn't help laughing too. I liked the way it felt.

I fed Spencer his own food and gave him some milk. Anne and I did the dishes at the sink instead of loading them into the dishwasher. We were almost finished when Dad came in. I could see the tracks of his fingers through his hair. There was stubble on his cheeks and dark circles, like purple bruises, under his eyes.

“How's Jason?” Anne asked, grabbing a piece of paper towel to wipe her hands.

Dad closed his eyes for a second and my throat suddenly began to ache. I knew what was coming. He sat at the table and Anne got him a cup of coffee.

Jason didn't think he had a drinking problem. Jason wouldn't get help because he didn't need help.

“I don't know what to do,” Dad said, rubbing his face.

Anne put her hand on his shoulder for a moment and then slid it down his arm and took hold of his hand. I leaned, silent, against the sink. Anne looked over at me.

No way, I thought. Because even though she wasn't saying anything out loud, it was as though I could hear her asking me to come over to my father. Yeah. Then what? Hug and have a Hallmark moment? I stared at my feet but I could still feel Anne looking at me.

I was too tired to think straight—or even crooked for that matter. Jason. Dad. I had a totally screwed-up family.

And then I remembered Mrs. Mac telling me what her mother had said about families, the day Jason had shown up at the Seniors Center to borrow money from me: When family needs taking care of, you have to do it, even if you don't want to.

Right.

I didn't want to. But we were a family. Not what I'd wanted, that's for sure, but …

I looked up. Anne's eyes were still on me. Dad's were closed. His face was gray, the lines all going down.

Mrs. Mac was close to eighty. Which would have made her mother at least a hundred if she hadn't been dead. I was taking advice from a hundred-year-old dead person.

But I did it. I went over to Dad, put my arms around his neck and hugged him. It was clumsy, like I had half a dozen arms instead of two. “It's okay, Dad,” I said. “We'll figure something out.”

His free arm came around my waist and he hugged me tightly against him. It was a heart-tugging movie-of-the-week moment. But it felt okay.

35

I was lying on the bed, my wet hair hanging over the side, too wired to sleep, when someone tapped on my door.

“Come in,” I said, arching my neck back as far as it could go so I could see who was there.

Dad stood in the doorway. “Got a minute?” he asked.

“Uh, yeah, sure.” I rolled over and sat up.

“I wanted to tell you … ” He trailed off. His hands were jammed into the pockets of his khakis, but I could see them flexing and clenching.

He began again. “Anne and I have decided how we're going to handle things with Jason. And, uh, I wanted to tell you.”

“Okay.” I pulled my hair down over one shoulder and combed slowly through it with my fingers.

“I can't just give up on Jason,” Dad said. “I was wrong about that. But I can't pretend he's not a drunk and a drug addict.”

“So what do we do?”

He stared past me out the window for a moment. “He'll have food and somewhere to sleep but that's it.” The lines around his mouth deepened and he winced as he said the words, like it was painful letting them out.

“I'm not giving Jason any money or anything that he can sell for money. And when he's here, in this house, no drugs, no alcohol.”

“It sounds like a plan.”

“I need your promise that you won't give him any money either.”

“I won't. I swear.”

“I don't know if it's the right way to do this,” Dad said, looking at me again. “But this is how we're going to handle things for now.”

To my horror my eyes began to sting. All I could do was nod.

He cleared his throat and swallowed. I wondered what was coming next. “You were right,” he said slowly. “I've been a lousy father. If I could go back and be better, I would.”

A squirmy feeling came over me. I didn't want him to say it. It didn't seem so important to be right anymore. “You weren't that bad,” I said.

“I wasn't that good, either.” He closed his eyes for a second, shook his head. “I won't tell you I'm going to turn into Superdad. I will do better, but I don't know how much better that will be.”

“I, uh, was a brat sometimes too,” I said.

Dad smiled. “True. But you're a teenager. It's part of your job description.”

I gave him a small smile back and swallowed down the lump that had suddenly appeared in my throat.

“Get some rest,” Dad said. “Anne and I are going out to eat later. Why don't you come with us?”

I started to say no automatically and caught myself. “Um, yeah, ” I said instead.

“I'll give you a yell in a little while,” he said and then he was gone.

I flopped back on the bed and pressed my hands over my eyes. My eyelids felt like two little inflatable pillows. I was exhausted, but I wasn't sleepy.

I let my arms drop onto the bed. Long fingers of light stretched across the ceiling from the window. My mom's picture smiled at me from the dresser. What rule would she have for this, I wondered, for dealing with Jason and this whole deeply weird family?

Maybe there weren't rules for everything. Maybe sometimes you had to wing it. Rafe had told me that more than once. Maybe he was right. Not that I was going to tell him that.

I closed my eyes. Thinking was making my brain hurt.

After a bit I rolled off the bed and went over to the dresser. The little red notebook with all the rules was lying next to my mother's picture. I picked up the book and opened the bottom dresser drawer. The ultrasound picture was still there. I stared at it for a long moment. Then I turned the picture face up, set the notebook next to it and closed the drawer. If I ever needed to look at either one again, they'd be easy to find.

Jason didn't show up for four days. When he walked in, shaved, wearing clean jeans and smelling like spearmint gum, Dad told him what they had decided—what we had decided.

Dad stood by the kitchen table. Anne was in the doorway, arms crossed. I leaned against the counter, hands in my pockets. But the three of us could just as easily have been side by side, arms linked, singing “Blowin' in the Wind” or some other old-time song of solidarity.

“We love you, Jason,” Dad said. “Me, Anne, your sister, we're right here for you. If you want to be here with us, you have to do it straight and sober.”

Jason did all his routines. He joked; he made excuses. He was wounded and offended and finally he got mad and left, the door yawning open behind him.

36

I'm not sure whose idea the cooking lesson was. Mrs. Mac showed up at the door one day with a pan of cinnamon rolls—probably the best thing I had ever tasted in my life— and Anne was there and they started talking and then Lisa came and she joined in and somehow everyone ended up in our kitchen on a wet Saturday afternoon making cinnamon rolls.

“I didn't know you even liked to cook,” I said to Lisa.

She shrugged. “I figure between the munchkins at Dad's and my mom going macrobiotic, it's the only way I'm ever going to get anything to eat other than Zoodles and organic stir-fried bean curd.”

The whole process was too complicated for me. I'd rather go down to Rye's for a blueberry muffin and a cup of hot chocolate, sit in the window and watch the little piece of stubble on the left side of Rafe's chin that he always missed when he shaved.

So I greased pans, washed dishes and swept at least two cups of flour off the kitchen floor. Spencer went from person to person, getting his chin scratched. His purr sounded like a car with a bad muffler. Dad refused to even step inside the kitchen. “Call me when there's something edible,” he said. Then he grinned. “If there is.” Anne threw an oven mitt at him.

Rafe, on the other hand, hung around the kitchen like a dog waiting for someone to throw him a scrap from the table. Finally Anne sent him out to the gourmet coffee place for a pound of some kind of coffee I'd never heard of.

Anne and Lisa crouched in front of the oven door, gleefully watching the rolls bake and grinning like a couple of five year olds at a magic show.

Mrs. Mac was beating icing sugar and milk in a small metal bowl at the counter. I draped an arm around her and lay my head on her shoulder for a second. “Thank you,” I said.

She reached up and touched my cheek. “You're welcome, dear,” she said. “I like your family and your friends.”

I gave her a squeeze. “Me too.”

It was still raining. I stood in the front window and watched raindrops splash into the puddles. And then I looked up the street toward the corner. I couldn't help it. At least three or four times a day since Jason had taken off, I found myself at the window hoping somehow I'd see him coming up the sidewalk.

As I stood there, someone turned the corner. He—or she—wore an old, too-big green slicker. Water dripped off the hood. For maybe the hundredth time since the night he'd stormed off, I wished it were Jason.

And then, as the person got closer, I saw that it was.

Darlene Ryan
has been a swimming instructor, a copywriter and a late-night disc jockey. Now a full-time writer, she counts Robert Munsch as one of her heroes and tries to live by the immortal words of Ms. Frizzell from the Magic School Bus: “Take chances, make mistakes, get messy.”

Darlene wrote
Rules for Life
, her first teen novel, because, in her own words, “Families fascinate me. They are the people we're supposed to love the most and we often end up treating them the worst. This book began, like almost all my writing does, with What if? What if you could talk to your dad about absolutely anything? What if your brother was the world's biggest screwup? What would that make you?”

Darlene is also the author of
A Mother's Adoption Jour
ney
(Second Story Press), based on her experiences adopting a daughter from China, and
Kisses, Kisses, Kisses
from the University of New Brunswick. She lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

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