Cool in Tucson (5 page)

Aunt Sarah called often and took her out to dinner and a movie for her birthday.   Mom was supposed to go too, but at the last minute she got a terrible headache.  Denny enjoyed being alone with Aunt Sarah till she started asking over dinner if everything was okay with Janine.  Denny wasn’t going to get caught in the middle of that.  She said, “Sure,” and changed the subject, and for the rest of the evening they kind of looked past each other and talked about books a lot.

Getting Mom to help her register for school in mid-August was like herding cats.  Mom never said no, but somehow she was never ready to do it either.  Finally Denny threatened to call Aunt Sarah, and then Mom brushed her hair and got in the car.  Her lipstick was on crooked and the teachers kept giving her long looks.  She was very angry by the time they came home, but Denny didn’t care because she had a piece of paper that said Denice Lynch was in fifth grade at Erickson Elementary.

Luckily Mom didn’t know the threat to call Aunt Sarah was mostly bluff.  Denny was determined never to ask Aunt Sarah for anything again if she could possibly avoid it, because of what happened when Mom got out of detox. 

A few months before Mom came home, Aunt Sarah came out to the ranch and said, “Denny should come in town now, and stay with me till school starts, she needs to get her clothes and books.”  Denny was so glad to get away from the aunt who couldn’t stand her and the cousins who whispered behind their hands and never included her in games, that at first she just enjoyed shopping and asked no questions.  But when it was  time to register she asked, shouldn’t she transfer to a school closer to Aunt Sarah’s house?  She had begun to believe that was the plan, that she would stay at Aunt Sarah’s house and Mom would come to visit her there.  She couldn’t tell for sure from Aunt Sarah’s answer, which was, “I guess we shouldn’t change anything till your Mom gets home and we see how that goes.”   

She was sure Aunt Sarah liked having her around.  Denny always did her chores and homework on time and made sure she was no trouble.  And they got along great, did projects together like trimming the hedge and refinishing an old Morris chair they found at a yard sale.  Aunt Sarah noticed everything, she knew without being told that Denny wasn’t welcome at the ranch.  And she certainly knew by now that Mom couldn’t be trusted to take care of anybody, even herself, so didn’t that settle where Denny should live?       

Mom came home on a Sunday in the middle of October.  While they were changing the bed where Mom was going to be sleeping with her that night Aunt Sarah said, “I know your Mom’s anxious to move into her own place as soon as possible, and Grandma and I’ll help her as much as we can.” 

Denny took a deep breath and tried to get the courage to ask, “But I’ll stay with you, right?” 

Aunt Sarah went right on talking, though, in that fake-cheery way grown-ups use when they know they’re telling a whopper.  “I’m going to miss you around here something awful, Denny, you know that?  I’ve really enjoyed this time we’ve had together.  But your Mom is just living for the day she gets you back, it’s all she talks about when I go to see her.”

Denny barely kept herself from saying, “Doesn’t anybody ever wonder what I want?”  She finished making her side of the bed with arms that felt heavy and hot with shame.  She had been so sure Sarah enjoyed the things they did together as much as she did, walks and homework, talking about books and movies and laughing at the same things. 

Aunt Sarah had found her a site on the internet called “Fanfiction,” where kids posted stories they made up about their favorite characters in TV shows and books.  When Denny wrote a story about SpongeBob Squarepants on the Nick channel, Aunt Sarah helped her create a fanfic name for herself and post her story on the site.  Denny got good reviews for her story, and she thought Aunt Sarah was just as proud and excited about them as she was. 

But that Sunday, making the bed, she realized Aunt Sarah had just been humoring her, and was probably counting the days till she got this kid off her hands.  Of all the days Denny could remember in her life, that one was the worst.  Mom had done some bad things—she forgot about Denny sometimes, left her hungry or cold with no idea when she might be back.  But Denny had always known Mom wasn’t reliable, so she got mad at her sometimes but not disappointed. 

Aunt Sarah was different, though.  She had always told Denny the truth, asked her opinion and remembered things that mattered.  Denny thought they were friends.  She got the worst hurt of her life when Sarah took her back to Mom.  From then on, she made up her mind not to pin her hopes on anybody that way again.

Mom brightened up for a while after she finally got Denny registered in school. She convinced herself it was all her own idea, and while she was still feeling proud of herself, she asked at the bar for a couple of extra shifts and got them.  Denny had to do a lot of reminding to get her there on time, but Mom used the money to buy shoes and a couple of almost-new outfits for Denny at Twice Is Nice before school started.  The day they did that shopping, Mom was smiling and humming coming home from the store, and Denny almost (but not seriously, she told herself later) let herself believe Mom was going to save herself and they could have a life like other people. 

And school made everything better.  It gave her someplace to go every day where people, some people anyway, made sense.  She made an effort to please a couple of the best teachers, ignoring her classmates’ muttered comments about sucking up.  Mrs. Thorpe helped her get into some accelerated classes, so homework got more interesting.  And that was good, because Mom’s reform period didn’t last.  She went back to having company a lot, and the guys she brought home were getting rougher.  

Denny spent more and more time in her room.  She almost always fixed her own food now, and sometimes, depending on how gross the company was, she had to be quick about it.  On the other hand, she had found a Laundromat only four blocks away, and the woman who ran it was good about showing her how to work the machines.  One good thing about this neighborhood, a lot of people had problems, so you didn’t have to explain why your Mom wasn’t around.

Money was her biggest problem, she couldn’t earn money yet.   She took to stealing small amounts from her mother, and larger amounts from the boyfriends.  They were always drinking and usually high besides, so they weren’t careful.  She went through their clothes while they were sleeping, and stashed what she took in small amounts around the house, under the laundry hamper and in the broom closet, never in her own drawers.  Even if Mom found some of it by accident she never found it all, and Denny never got caught. 

Evenings and weekends were tricky, and she couldn’t ever have a friend come home, but once school started she felt like she could keep most of her days somewhere between a C-minus and a C-plus.  And she could live with that average.

This Tuesday morning, as usual she spent the first few minutes after she woke up figuring out how to get through the day.  Checking on Mom came first.  If Mom was awake and alone Denny ate breakfast, asked for lunch money and went to school like a normal kid.  There was no man in bed with Mom this morning, but she was snoring hard and out of it.  Denny got dressed fast, put money from one of her stashes in her clothing and books, and bought breakfast at the Donut Wheel.  Then she had to run to make the school bus.

Once on the bus she could relax a little.  The school system was in charge of the day now till three o’clock, and then she had her room, and homework, and a book to read until bedtime.  And three more days of school before she had to negotiate a week-end. 

She managed her life like that, a few hours at a time till she’d made it through one more whole day.  She almost never let herself look down the long corridor of days and wonder how she was going to get to the relative safety of, say, age fifteen.

But at least she knew what she was going to do when she got there: talk to Aunt Sarah, sign up for all the right courses, get great grades and pass the tests as soon as they’d let her take them.  By the time she was twenty-one, maybe sooner if they still made exceptions, she’d be a Tucson Police Officer, sworn in with her hand in the air.  And then for the rest of her life she was going to keep everything under control.   

CHAPTER FOUR

Why can’t I control this stupid A/C?
  Hot and frustrated, Sarah pulled her car into line behind Gloria and the county van.  The fan was still blowing hot air.  She rolled down the windows to vent some heat, and heard the thunk of the cooler kicking in as they turned south on First Avenue and crossed the Rillito.

“The Ree-yee-toe,” Sarah always had to explain to visitors. “Spanish for ‘Little River.’ ”

“So little I can’t see it,” a friend had said recently, peering down. 

“Well, it’s dry right now.  Actually it’s dry most of the time now, the water’s all gone to the cotton fields and suburbs.  It was running full a couple of times this summer, though, after those big rains we had.”

“Hard to believe.  You like living where it’s so dry?”

“I guess.  It’s home.”  Like Delaney and Ibarra, Sarah belonged to the small percentage of natives in this city crowded with transients.  They clustered in the municipal jobs—police, fire department, courthouse.  

The three vehicles traveled in caravan from the north edge of town to the south, sticking to major streets with lights because the cross streets were filled curb-to-curb now with work-bound vehicles roaring in from the suburbs at daredevil speeds.  They all treated amber lights as if they were green and then blasted through the last half of the intersection on the red.  Sarah dodged around a fender-bender at the Grant Road intersection, and waited through three light changes to cross Speedway.   

“Well, that was an adventure,” Gloria said as she unloaded her gear at the Forensic Center.  “How about that jam-up on Speedway?”

“If somebody doesn’t do something about the streets in this town,” the county driver said, “pretty soon we’ll all have to get up at three o’clock in the morning to get to work.”

“Not me,” Sarah said, “I live in the Campbell-Grant neighborhood, right in the middle of town.”

“How can you stand to live downtown?  I got me a double-wide out in a wildcat settlement on the other side of Oro Valley.  Man, it’s nice out there.”

“So whoever does something about the streets in this town,” Sarah said, “I guess it won’t be you, will it?” 

“What’re you,” he asked her, scowling, “some kinda activist?”  He wheeled the body into the building on its gurney and they followed, Gloria loaded with nylon bags of fingerprint gear and Sarah carrying the clanking bag that held the disassembled fuming tent.

“You don’t need a table, do you?” Gilligan asked.  He looked as if he was already sorry he’d yielded to Sarah’s request. 

“No, the gurney’s fine,” Gloria said.  Gilligan led her to a small examining room, where she went to work with inkpad and high-gloss paper.  She was quick and skillful with the simple tools of manual fingerprinting, which everybody in the department agreed were still better than the electronically scanned ones they made at the jail.  When she finished with the victim’s fingers, she began putting the tent-frame together. 

“C’mon, you’re not going to need a tent in here,” Gilligan said, frowning.

“Well, the A/C makes quite a breeze.  Only takes a minute,” Gloria said, leaning gracefully over his taut little body like some exotic giraffe over a grumpy gazelle.  Her dazzling white smile, shining out of her round taffy-colored cheeks, seemed to promise him better days than this one in the antiseptic cold of the lab.   

Gilligan backed away from her Supergirl sexiness, shaking his head ironically.  “Okay, Einstein.  Don’t take all day with this experiment, please.”  He walked away punching numbers into his Blackberry. 

“Yo, have no fear,” she called after him, in her funkiest ghetto accent.  Shaking her head, chuckling, she set the frame in place on the gurney.  “That Animal, ain’t he something?”  She fastened the tent around the frame and squirted something out of a plastic bottle onto the little hot plate built into one corner.

Sarah looked at the bottle.  “Cyanoacrylate.  This is what you use now?”