The Secret Life of Prince Charming (2 page)

Sprout and I saw Dad every other weekend since he came back into our lives three years before. We’d take the train into Portland to visit him. From our home in Nine Mile Falls, Mom would drive us over the floating bridge to Seattle, where we’d wait on the wooden benches of the train station until it was time to board. I would bring my backpack to do homework on the ride, and Sprout would bring her hat, one of the ones Gram crocheted, putting little toys in it to take along—a pony with a mane and a miniature brush, or this small stuffed monkey she got in a Happy Meal, or three kinds of lip gloss and a mirror shaped like a heart. She would roll the lip gloss on throughout the trip and smack her lips together, admiring the shine in the mirror and sending small bursts of fruity bubble-gummy smells across the seat.

But that day, the day when I began to learn the importance of lifting things up and looking underneath, she had this power girl, a mini superhero in a skintight purple suit, whose red mask would light up when you pushed a button on her back. You have thousands of days in your life, if you’re lucky, but not many stay with you. You remember objects, maybe, or a person or moments—that bike you once had, or that birthday party, or that neighbor boy, Kenny, who used to dress in army clothes, or the first-grade class hamster you brought home for winter break. But the days you remember are the big days, when life goes suddenly left or right, and this was one of those days. And
so I remember that the power girl wore a suit of purple and black. Sprout would take power girl and dance her cheerily up my arm, flashing that mask.

“Sprout,” I warned. “Quit it.”

“She’s dancing,” Sprout said. “Girl’s gotta dance.” The mask flashed, on-off, on-off.

“She should be rescuing things,” I said, because I was only mildly annoyed, really. Sprout (Charlotte, her real name) was eleven, six years younger than me; enough that I always knew it was my job to look after her. This meant that I couldn’t pummel her for anything but her larger crimes. “Saving people. Performing heroic acts. Leaping across buildings.”

Sprout took my advice and the power girl jumped from my shoulder to my knee. “Her name is Rosebud,” Sprout said. She looked nothing like a Rosebud, with her pointy plastic breasts and wild black plastic hair and lethal plastic heels, but I kept quiet. “Rose. Bud,” Sprout said as the tall evergreens outside the train window sped past in blurry fast forward. “Someday I’ll just be sleeping and he’ll come along and wake me up with a kiss,” Sprout said. I looked over at her; she had her head laid back against the seat, her long black hair (which tangled like tree branches) in a braid behind her, eyes closed. Her lips were puckered, waiting. She’d done that conversational slipup, that thing you do when you forget that other people aren’t following along with you in your head. I connected the absent dots—Rosebud, Rose Red, fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty.

“You better hope not,” I said. “Any strange guy comes up to you and kisses you while you’re sleeping, man, you call the police.”

“He wouldn’t be a strange guy,” Sprout said as if this were obvious. “He would be
the one
.”

“God, don’t let Mom hear you say that.”

“I
wouldn’t.
I
know
that,” Sprout said. She was ticked off at me, because when you’re eleven, what makes you madder than anything is when people think you don’t know things that you do.

She flicked me with her thumb and forefinger, the kind of small gesture in close quarters that
did
make me want to pummel her. “Don’t,” I said.

“Cruisin’ for a bruisin’,” she said, which is something Grandma would say when Aunt Annie walked out before she’d helped with the dishes. But Sprout didn’t flick again. The power girl/Rosebud stomped around in her heels on the plastic train seat, and I went back to my biology homework. Cells dividing, one thing breaking up into two, two things breaking up into four. The blurred evergreens gave way to an expanse of water, a rocky shoreline under a gray May Northwest sky, two men in a boat, shingled houses. We were about halfway there. I erased a mistake, blew the bits of rubber dust from the page. I thought,
Four weeks until summer
. I felt Sprout’s eyes on me. I looked over at her.

“You have such long eyelashes,” she said. She made a curve in the air with her index finger. I smiled and wrote,
Cell division is a process by which a cell, called the parent cell, divides into two cells, called daughter cells
. Sprout fished around in her hat and pulled out her phone, which Mom insisted we each have for “emergencies.” Sprout’s was bright pink, and the emergency at the moment was the need to photograph my eyelashes. She held up the little camera lens very close to my face, and I heard the phone’s own electronic version of a shutter
snap. She looked at the result, showed me the picture.

“Big eye,” I said. Sprout waved it around in spooky, big eye fashion. She then started taking up-close pictures of things while I finished biology. Close up of the knee of her jeans, the
A
on the cover of the Amtrak magazine, the scar on her right hand that she got when she fell off her bike. I pulled out the lunch Mom packed for us because she was convinced Dad would forget to feed us. It wasn’t
forgetting
exactly, I thought, just that he got so wrapped up in what he was doing he sometimes didn’t think about food until he himself was hungry. Then it was,
Wow, I’m starved,
and we’d get cheeseburgers and fries and onion rings and milk shakes and whatever else we wanted. And the milk shakes—he’d ask them to make us something that had never been made before. Half and half, or a mix of things. The poor fast-food guys didn’t know what to do. Dad never liked doing things the regular way, even something as mundane as eating. So, okay. Maybe he didn’t like doing parenting the ordinary way either.

Sprout and I ate tuna sandwiches and apple slices and Oreo cookies. The train stopped and started again, stopped and started, which meant that Portland was coming up. I zipped everything back up into my pack, shoved the little plastic bags into the brown lunch sack and crumpled it up. The train eased
and slowed, and the people on the train rose and shuffled and reorganized and filed out, same as Sprout and me. We would do as we always had done—walk outside through the wide hall of the station, where we’d search for Brie’s black Mercedes by the curb. Brie Jenkins was Dad’s girlfriend of just over three years, and she’d been in his life since he came back into ours. She’d meet us and bring us to Dad’s because he always used the morning hours when he wasn’t traveling to work on his book. I made the mistake of telling Mom this once.

“His
book
.” Mom blew out a little puff of air from her nose and shook her head. “He can’t meet you at the train when he sees you twice a month? You know how long he’s been working on that book? Since forever.”

“I don’t mind,” I said. I didn’t. He got so excited about that book when he talked about it.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez has nothing on me!
It was the story of his Armenian family, told in magical realism. “And the book’s really good. He showed me a little of it.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Mom had said. We were in the kitchen, me looking for a snack after the long train ride home, her opening a can of food for our old dog, Ivar. “Don’t tell me. Something about his father, the diamond merchant. And his grandfather, who so believed in love that he turned into a stone after his third daughter married the old, fat, rich grocer.”

His grand
mother
. And he wasn’t a grocer, but a man who sold silks. But then, at her words, my chest began to ache; it felt like it was caving in on itself. I didn’t say anything. It would have been at least eight years since she’d seen that same few pages of “new work” he’d read aloud during a party of Brie’s friends a few weekends ago. Everyone had applauded, but Brie had seemed
ticked off. I closed the cupboard door. I didn’t feel hungry anymore. Then again, smelling Ivar’s food could do that to anyone.

At the train station that day, we stood on the sidewalk and looked up and down for Brie’s car. Taxis scooted in and away, doors slammed, people waited at the curb, the luggage at their feet sitting like obedient retrievers.

“She’s late,” Sprout announced. She was playing with the end of her long braid, whisking it back and forth, back and forth against her palm.

“She’s never late,” I said. “Your tooth, right here.” I pointed to my own tooth, in the place where Sprout’s was brown with Oreo. She fixed hers with the edge of her fingernail, smiled big until I nodded my okay. I looked far up the line of cars—still no Brie. I felt a little skitter of worry. Brie, tall, blond, beautiful, who seemed both strong and fragile as glass, lived by the clock. She had taken over her father’s business when he died, a service that escorted visiting celebrities when they came to Portland for various events. Brie was never late because you couldn’t be late for movie stars and politicians. You couldn’t be late for sultans of other countries and rock stars who needed to get to a radio show by nine forty-five exactly.

“She’s late, big deal,” Sprout said. She loved Brie, in the way you love someone that you’ll never in a million years be. Sprout would try to be Brie for a moment anyway—she’d toss her head back and say, “So…” in that same way Brie did. One train ride home, I left the seat beside Sprout to sit somewhere else for a while, because she’d used so much of Brie’s perfume that I was getting a headache. I came back, though, because when I looked over at her, she looked sad. You could almost see the cool, con
fident puffs of cotton blossom perfume marching away from her in determined avoidance, this small person with her hair coming loose in chunks from her braid.

“I’m going to call,” I said.

“Don’t get her into trouble with Dad,” Sprout said.

“I won’t,” I said, though I wasn’t quite sure how to go about that. He would probably be pissed at being interrupted. I heard the phone ring, that echoey
brrrrr
in a far place. No answer.

“What if she’s not coming?” Sprout said. She held her hat close to her chest, her fingers through the holes of the crochet.

“Of course she’s coming,” I said, although I wasn’t sure at all.

I thought about calling Mom, and just as that thought was working out whether to stay or not, I saw Dad’s car, a little classic 1953 Corvette, white with red trim, that he kept in perfect condition. The top was down, and right there at the curb, three people turned to look at him. It’s a weird thing about Dad, but people always notice him. He has this mane of black hair (which he wears in a braid, same as Sprout) and a beaky, Armenian nose, and he’s tall and broad, and when you stop to think about it, not that great looking. Still, people are drawn to him, same as you’re drawn to that orange rock shining underwater amidst all the gray ones. He’s a performer in one of the longest-running juggling/vaudeville troupes around—the Jafarabad Brothers. Being a performer—maybe that’s another reason why he has this charisma. He works on a stage, and maybe there’s this piece of him that’s performing whether he’s actually on a stage or not. People’s eyes go to him. They’ll watch him picking out a grapefruit in Albertson’s.

That day, he didn’t notice everyone else’s noticing, as he
usually does. He waved his arms toward us. “Get in, get in,” he said. “Traffic…Who thought it’d take this long to get to the fucking train station? Aren’t train stations supposed to be
close
? Aren’t train stations supposed to be
convenient
?”

“Where’s Brie?” Sprout demanded.

“Gone,” he said. “Stick your stuff in the back.” I heard a
pop
and the trunk opened. I tossed in my backpack. I saw a plaid blanket there, and a shopping bag full of some presents I recognized from Christmas with Brie’s mom. The sweater she’d given Dad, still in the box with the snowman wrapping paper; dress socks, bound in their white strip of packaging. That they had come from JC Penney had seemed to embarrass him, which I guess I understood, since he was used to much more expensive places.