Authors: Susan Vaught
I made my shoelaces spring again, then stood up. “No box,” I said, just in case J.B. decided to listen. “No rocks, no fox.”
Could be some kind of doctor’s papers. Or maybe a picture. What if it’s a letter you wrote? Do you think you really left a letter and your dad’s hiding it?
“Dad’s not hiding stuff. Rocks. He’s getting dressed.”
Maybe it’s a tape. You could have left a tape…
.
I hummed so I couldn’t hear him.
But it might be a suicide note. You might have said something about him in the note, so he hid it. Or maybe
he found out about something really awful you did, and he’s hiding the proof
.
I hummed louder as I picked up my memory book and headed for the door. No more forgetting the memory book. I’d written that down.
A note. That’s probably it. Or something that’ll get you arrested
.
Even though I got to the hall and shut the door, I could still hear J.B. talking about the note. But I didn’t want to think about notes. I hadn’t left a note. If I’d left a note, that would explain everything, and Dad would never hide that from me.
Would he?
A note. In the box.
I squeezed the cover of my memory book and stumbled down the steps. Maybe if I thought about shoelaces, I wouldn’t think about notes. Shoelaces were better than notes. If I said shoelaces, it wouldn’t bother Dad. But if I said notes like a note in that box, he might understand and get mad. Or worse, sad.
No note. Don’t say note. Say shoelaces. Say frog farts. Say anything else.
When I got to the kitchen, Dad was pouring healthy oatmeal into a bowl for me. I didn’t know if Mom was still asleep, since it was Saturday, and she slept late now, even though she never used to do that Before. Note. Box. Shoelaces. Shoelaces!
Dad had a conference to go to all day, for the next two days. Continuing education. CEUs. I wondered if I got CEUs, if I’d be able to do Algebra and Civics and Earth Science.
Civics, maybe. But probably not Algebra. Probably not Earth Science, either.
There probably wasn’t anything in that box. Especially not a note.
“Note—I mean, Civics,” I said as I sat down. “CEUs.”
No note!
When I stirred my healthy oatmeal. It stuck to my spoon. No, no, no, no note.
Dad grunted and ate a bite of his oatmeal, followed by a bite of not-so-healthy leftover pizza. Don’t know how he swallowed oatmeal-pizza, but he managed. With milk. Gross.
“Make you a deal, Jersey. If you go to my conference, I’ll do your homework.” Dad wiggled his eyebrows.
“Earth Science and Algebra, too? CEUs. Milk-pizza.”
“Ugh. No on the Algebra. Deal’s off.” He smiled. That made the circles under his eyes look bigger. He really needed to shave.
Shave. Shave. Shave.
I passed on the leftover pepperoni pizza when he offered me some, counted a lot in my head, and let him burn some Kool-Aid glue toast for me because it made him happy. Then I used it to scoop up the oatmeal. The oatmeal made the toast taste a lot less like Kool-Aid glue. Nothing like milk-pizza. At least I didn’t think it was. I managed to chew up and swallow a bite. Milk might help a lot with the glue, only it wouldn’t taste so good with the Kool-Aid part.
“Is, um, Mom—is she still asleep?”
Dad sniffed and put down his pizza. “She pulled an all-nighter at the bank. They’re being audited next week, I think. Just a normal audit, but still. It’s a lot of work.”
The circles under his eyes got bigger whenever he talked.
There was a fairy tale about that once. Every time some kid told a lie, the circles under his eyes grew. No, wait. It was his nose. His nose got bigger.
“Nose,” I said, only it came out “Naw” because of the glue toast and sticky oatmeal.
Naw
sounded less like
note
than
nose
. Good. Naw, naw, naw, naw.
“Are you seeing Mama Rush today, Jersey?”
“Naw. Wait! Yes. Glue.”
“Okay.” Dad grinned and went after his last bite of pepperoni pizza. “Finish up and I’ll drop you off on my way to the conference.”
“I told you already, you’re tense, boy.” Mama Rush’s voice sounded like a dog growling. She stared at my memory book. “Loosen up.”
I took a deep breath. Tried to make my face look relaxed. How did a relaxed face look? Hands on the table. Slow breathing. Look relaxed. Look relaxed.
The sun was bright.
I could see heat rising around our patio table at The Palace, but at least I couldn’t see Big Larry. For now, anyway. My eyes kept jumping from the glued ceramic piggy bank to the patio door, like the door might pop open any second. I was tense, boy. And I had sweat behind my ears. Gross. Wet ears. Worse than pizza and milk. But not worse than the glued piggy bank.
Loosen up. Loosen up. I was tense, boy. Boy was I tense. Wet ears. The pig looked like a pink alien with a great big butt-face. Its nose was all smashed. One of the ears squiggled
sideways. It didn’t have a tail, half of a back leg was missing, one front leg looked like my springy shoelaces, and the rest of it was all lumpy. Wet ears. It was hot. I think Mama Rush glued some of its smashed nose to its sides. Or maybe she glued pieces of something else all over it. I couldn’t tell. Those sides looked like pink butts, too. It was a really bad piggy bank.
Yeah, but it holds the money. Can’t have everything
.
That’s what Mama Rush said when she put it on the table. It holds the money. She turned my memory book around a little, squinting at my scribbles. Wet ears. Her lounging dress was red, and she had a red ribbon around her hair bun.
“You need a little computer.” Her gaze flicked toward the patio door, then back to the memory book. “Maybe there’s money in that box you’re worrying about. If there is, your dad should buy you a computer so I can read what you write.”
“Shoelaces. I think there’s a note in the box. Maybe. Money.” I glanced at the patio door and rubbed behind my wet ears. “Or a tape. Secret papers about me. Maybe I wrote a note.”
Mama Rush blew smoke out of her nose. “I can’t believe your father would keep something like that from you. Y’all had all that therapy—and he knows you’re hunting for answers.”
She was looking at the patio door, not at me. So I looked at the patio door, too. The table felt so hot under my fingers, from the sun. No wind. Nothing moving. The air smelled like wet and smoke and glue, with a little bit of flowers and perfume. The patio door wasn’t opening.
“Therapy. Shoelaces. Answers—what if he thinks the note’s too bad?” I couldn’t quit staring at the door. I wished Mama Rush would stop so I could stop, too. “He might think I don’t need to know. Or that it’ll make me upset again.”
She thought about this for half a cigarette. Both of us stared at the door. Smoke floated around the butt-faced pig like flat pieces of fog. From the corner of my eye, I kept seeing red from her lounge dress and ribbon. A red djinni today, looking at the patio door even more than me. Her eyes seemed kind of wet.
Was she waiting for Big Larry, too? Was he her boyfriend? He couldn’t be her boyfriend. Did she miss him? No way. How could anybody miss Big Larry?
Mama Rush sighed and closed the memory book. “What do you think about Number Two on your list, Jersey? Do you think it’s possible you did something to feel awful about—so awful you’d want to hurt yourself?”
“Yes, I did. I had to.” Finally, finally, I quit looking at the door, but only because Mama Rush stopped. I pointed at the memory book. “Almost out of reasons. Butt-pig. Alien.”
“You’ve still got one more on that list. Number Six, that Arroyo girl.”
“Awful guilt. It’s got to be guilt. I wouldn’t blow my head off over a girl. I like my head.”
The next thing I heard was a big cackle. “Boy, you used to dress up in your mother’s yoga tights, stick a Viking helmet on your head, and bash into the furniture—and that was just a prelude to football. You never treated your head very well.”
“Viking? Tights. No way.”
Mama Rush was belly-laughing now. “They were pink as
this piggy bank, and yes, you did.” She waved her hand and chopped up one of the smoke-fog-pieces. The butt-face alien pig rattled when she stamped out her cigarette in the glued ashtray. She used the ashtray I made her every time we talked. It had lots of burned spots, but she didn’t act like she cared.
“Not fair!” I grabbed my memory book and dragged it across the table to me. “I didn’t know you when you were little. If I did, I’d have stories on you. Butt-alien-pig. Tights? Tights.”
My face was hurting from smiling so big. And I was laughing in little chokes. Pink tights. Viking helmet.
Not possible.
Frog farts.
“Catherine,” said a deep voice.
“Farts!” My bad hand clenched tight. My teeth clamped together.
Mama Rush quit laughing fast. Her face went flat. Her eyes got squinty and her lips tightened up.
Both my hands made fists as I looked up at the man standing between us. Farts. Tights. He scared me. Sneaking up and talking. He was tall. Looked like he might have had muscles a long time ago. Talk. Talking! He must have come through the door while we were laughing. Sneak. And he called Mama Rush by her first name. I didn’t know a single person who did that. Except the tall sneak. Whoever he was. Not Big Larry. At least Big Larry didn’t make Mama Rush look like she’d eaten Dad’s toast and oatmeal.
“Kool-Aid glue.” I tried to relax my fingers. My bad hand throbbed. And my jaw. And my head was starting to hurt, like a toothache behind my brain.
The man stared at me. Mama Rush stared at him. She tapped her fingers on the table, sighed, and said, “Carl, this is Jersey. Jersey, Carl.”
Carl wasn’t anything like Big Larry. He didn’t act like Big Larry, either. No red face, no crying, no bad arm in a sling, no scooter. Carl had on jeans and a black shirt, and he would have looked lots younger except his hair and beard were silver white. He was frowning like my dad used to Before, right before he grounded me or took my computer or did something else creepy “for my own good.”
“I’m sorry to interrupt you,” he said in that deep voice, “but Catherine, can we please talk for a moment?”
Mama Rush still had that flat, narrow-eyed, tight-lipped look. Carl might not have been Big Larry, but he wasn’t any smarter. If Mama Rush looked at me that way, I’d duck. Or run. Probably both. But I’d known her since Viking helmets and pink yoga tights, and maybe Carl hadn’t.
She didn’t hit him, though. She just said, “We have nothing to discuss.”
Whoa.
My pragmatics might have sucked, but even I heard the ice falling off those words.
Carl—who must have been stupider than me and Big Larry put together—folded his hands and tried again. “Please. If you’d just hear me out, you might understand. It was a bad moment. A weak moment. I—”
“You what?” Mama Rush got loud in a hurry. On instinct, I scooted the alien butt-face pig and the glued ashtray closer to me before she could throw one of them. “You don’t have any better sense than God gave a box turtle! You got one mashed-up brain cell that can’t tell
right from wrong? Don’t make me get off this scooter, Carl. And don’t make me keep talking. You won’t like anything I have to say.”
This time, Carl got the message. People on the street in front of The Palace probably got the message. Part of my brain got the message, too. For a second, I saw faces. Girls. Not Leza, not Elana. Girls I didn’t know. Faces. Three or four at least. Some laughing. Some crying. Then Elana, or maybe it was Todd’s girlfriend, looking at me like Mama Rush was looking at Carl. Bad look. Faces. Faces. Bad. I shook my head to make the faces stop.
You’re so self-centered…
.
No. Not that. Not that now. Need to be quiet.
Carl—really, really, stupid Carl—he wasn’t quiet. He tried to talk again. I blinked. Faces. The faces stayed and went, came back and went. Self-centered, self-centered. You’re so self-centered.
Mama Rush started to yell. She didn’t take a breath, and she used lots of words I was never supposed to say again because I shot myself and brain-injured people don’t know when to use words like that and when to shut up.
If I were Carl, I definitely would have shut up. Even if I couldn’t see faces. But Carl needed stupid-marks like me, great big shiny ones on both sides of his head, because he kept going, “I—I—but, I—”
Mama Rush talked so fast and loud I only got pieces in between the faces.
“Floozy” and “faithless” and “far-fetched.” F-words to go with faces. Lots of f-words, and another one I can’t say. She used that one a few times, in different ways.
Girl faces. I shook my head again. Too many faces.
You’re so self-centered I bet you think I’m mad at you
.
Faces. Attila the Face. No. Attila the Red, who was still wearing red, appeared at the patio door, hit the autoopen button, and hurried over to where we were sitting. She had her hand on her credit card headset and she was breathing hard like she ran all the way from wherever Attilas come from.
“Is there a problem here?” Her eyes automatically went to me.
“Faces. Tights and Vikings.” This time, I did duck. Just put my head down, hugging the alien pig and the ashtray. Too many faces. Too much yelling.
You’re so self-centered…
.
You’re so self-centered…
.
“Young man, do you need to go home?” Attila asked.
Mama Rush came off her scooter. “How many times do I have to tell you people? This boy’s with me. He’s my visitor. And I say when I’m finished with my visitors, not you! Jersey, sit up straight.”
I sat up fast.
“See what I’ve been telling you, boy? See? You don’t loosen up, you’ll end up like
her
.” Mama Rush glared at Attila, then back at me. “Do you want to go home or not?”
Butt-face. Pigs. Faces. Tights. No matter what I said, I was so dead. Aliens! What should I say? No? Yes?
You’re so self-centered
—no. No. Shut up.
My lips started working. I tried to swallow, but that part of my throat didn’t work. Nothing came out but an idiot-sounding “Aaah, uuuhh …”