All the Roads That Lead From Home (12 page)

“Fabulous!
You’re all settled in!”

“Yes,
ma’am. Thank you,” said Mary.

“Oh, for
Heaven’s sake! No one ever calls me ‘Ma’am.’ Joan will do fine.” My mother
stood there, smiling like a feeb. “Your stepfather seems awfully nice. He hopes
you’ll be comfortable here with us, but that you won’t stay away too long. I
think he misses you already.” When she got no answer, she said, “Well, I’ll
just leave you two alone to get acquainted,” and flounced out.

Mary
flopped down on the bed, threw her arms above her head, and stared at the ceiling.
The stubble in her armpits was like tiny black seeds.

“Dinner’s
at six,” I said, and closed the door as quietly as I could.

***

We established a routine.
Mary made breakfast, I got my mother up and off to campus. After breakfast I
did the dishes and went into my room to read. Mary rode my old bicycle to the
store with money my mother left taped on the TV. I did laundry in the
afternoon, and Mary cleaned house. When my mother came home Mary made dinner.
At first I didn’t help her, then my mother made me. “Can’t you see how lonely
she is?” she hissed. “Go on, now, and try to
make friends.
” The kitchen
was small, and Mary’s thick, sad body made it smaller. By then I’d come to
wonder about the scar on her left hand, a small, white crescent, like a moon in
the morning sky. I watched it rise and fall along the counter top, in and out
of the dishwasher, on the handle of the refrigerator, up to a stray hair she
pushed behind her ear.

All we
said to each other were things like, “Here’s the frying pan,” and, “Where do
you guys keep the paper towels?” At table my mother tried to draw her out.
“You’re a good cook, Mary. Did you learn that at home?” and, “My, the way you
ride that bike all over tells me you’re used to hard exercise. Isn’t that so?”

Mary just
shrugged, which I could tell pissed my mother off. She wanted gushing thanks
for being allowed to stay in such a nice house, in such a nice neighborhood,
with such nice, nice people. When Martha called to see how things were going,
my mother said, “Oh, fine, I suppose. Certainly hasn’t learned the art of
conversation, though, has she?”

When the
novelty of Mary wore off and life got back to normal—a new normal, I mean—my
mother went back to moping, usually in the late afternoons.

“Thing is,
guy dumps you, all you can do is say, ‘Later, Slick,’” said Mary one afternoon,
peering at the pimply chicken she’d put in the oven.

“Two guys.
The second one moved to California.”

“Yeah,
why?”

“To be an
artist or something.”

“The creep
who hooked my mom thought he can write poems. As if.”

Her face
was hard. She peeled potatoes slowly, lifting the skin from each as if she
wanted it to bleed. She’d been here for three whole weeks, I realized. When she
wasn’t doing chores, she stayed in her room and played solitaire with a grubby
deck of cards she’d brought with her.

“Better
spill it,” she said.

“What?”

“Whatever’s
on your mind.” She pulled a piece of potato skin from the blades of the peeler
and dropped it in the trash can below the sink. I waited for her to look at me.
She didn’t.

“Okay.
What was so bad about living at home?” I asked.

Mary put
the peeler on the counter and faced me, hands on hips. One of her blue eyes had
a splash of yellow I hadn’t noticed before, like a single flame. She stepped
toward me and pinched my right boob, hard.

“Ouch!”

“That. He
done it to me over and over, then he done a few other things I don’t need to
show you.”

My boob
throbbed. “Didn’t you tell someone?”

“Like who?
My mom’s so in love with the jerk, she’d never believe me.”

“What
about the police?”

“Sure. I
can’t prove shit.”

“Didn’t
you at least try?” The flame in her eye didn’t seem quite as fierce.

“No.”

“You
should. He’d get in a lot of trouble. He could even go to jail.”

“He could.
Only what would my mom do then? She can’t go one day without a man to hang her
arms around.”

My mother
stood in the doorway to the kitchen in a tight pair of jeans and a lace
underwire bra. In her hand she had a sweater I’d put in the wash. “This goes to
the dry cleaner! How many times must I say the same thing?”

“I’m
sorry,” I said.

“It’s all
well and good to be sorry, but here’s my sweater, all shrunken down like an
African head.”

She held
it out to me, a pink fuzzball that was always too tight, even when it was new.

“Maybe the
dry cleaner can do something with it,” I said.

“Not
unless he’s a bloody magician.”

“Maybe you
can buy another one.”

“As if
money just grows on trees.” She sighed and went upstairs to her bedroom. Mary
looked at me and shook her head.

“No wonder
your old man split. No offense,” she said.

“He left
because he found someone else.”

“Yeah, but
why was he even looking?”

For all
the reasons I’d never told anyone and suddenly wanted to tell her, like how my
mother rode my toy rocking horse in front of company once, and hosted an
elegant party in bare feet, and answered the door wearing a shower cap she’d
forgotten to take off. Mary laughed, the first time she had since coming here,
and went on laughing, even after my mother slammed her door against the noise.

***

August came, and with it
my mother’s birthday. Mary baked a cake and decorated it with sloppy pink
hearts. My mother stared at it a while before saying, “Thank you,” and then
asked me to give her just a tiny slice. Mary and I were both on our second
piece when the phone rang.

“Hey, kiddo,”
he said, when I picked up. “Thought I oughtta call and wish You Know Who a
happy birthday. She there?”

“It’s
Dad,” I said, my hand over the receiver.

I could
see her thinking she might just refuse to speak to him, then she took the phone
into her room. They didn’t talk long. I was sure she told him it was time to
come to his senses and to stop all this nonsense, and from how bummed she was
afterwards—so much that she lay down on the couch with a cold rag on her head—I
knew he wasn’t coming to anything, and certainly not home.

I put the
dishes away, then found Mary in her room, reading a fashion magazine. She’d
rearranged the furniture a few days before. The bed wasn’t in front of the
window any more, but facing it, so she could see outside the minute she opened
her eyes.

“She down
again?” she asked.

I nodded
and sat in the rocking chair we’d gotten from the attic. I thought about my
dad. I’d seen him only twice since school ended. He’d driven by a couple of
times with his girlfriend. They’d bought a house a few blocks away, a short
walk, if an invitation ever came. As for Mary, she hadn’t had a single phone
call from her mother in all the weeks she’d been there, which bugged her, I
think, but also made her glad, because then they couldn’t talk about her going
back home.

“That’s a
nice dress,” Mary said, showing me the picture she meant.

“It’s OK,
I guess.”

“You don’t
like clothes, much, do you?”

I
shrugged. I usually wore T-shirts and blue jeans.

“I love
‘em,” said Mary. “I should learn how to sew, make up some of my own.” Her own
clothes looked like shit, the kind of stuff you found in thrift stores, lots of
polyester and puffed sleeves.

“Be nice
to have something new for the first day of school,” she said.

“Don’t
remind me about school.”

“Only a
couple weeks off, now.” She looked at me suddenly.

“What?” I
said.

“Bet you
she didn’t sign me up.”

“Who?”

“Your mom.
That weird friend of hers said if I was still living here in August, then I’d
have to go to your school, on account of the one I went to last year’s about
twenty miles off, and the bus probably won’t come all that way just for me.”

“Shit!”

“I got an
idea. Call the school, pretend to be her, and say you want me to go there. Say
we’ve become real good friends, and that you don’t want to split us up.”

“Why can’t
you?”

“Because I
don’t talk fancy enough.”

I’d have
said no except that the flame in her eye had gone all wobbly when she asked me.

The next
morning, with Mary beside me, I took a deep breath and picked up the phone.

“Yes, I
realize time is running short, but surely you still have room? She’s had the
most difficult time, poor thing. I’d hate to do anything that would impede the
fine progress she’s making,” I said. The secretary agreed to mail the required
paperwork, and said I’d have to provide a copy of Mary’s birth certificate when
I sent it back.

“We have a
problem,” I said, when I got off the phone.

“Yeah,
what?”

“They want
a copy of your birth certificate.”

“I got
it.”

“You do?”

“Hey, once
I learned I was getting sprung outta there, I took everything I might ever
need. Even my book of what you call it, from the doctor, vaccinations.”

She
grinned. Her hair was clean, with no dandruff at all. And she’d stopped wearing
that awful makeup. I was glad to see her look more like herself, like a girl
who’d do fine at my sort of snotty school. We made a plan to get her some new
clothes downtown with a credit card my mother never used. If that worked, maybe
we could get her a decent haircut, too.

Four days
later Harv appeared at the front door in a T-shirt, Bermuda shorts, and
sandals. His toenails were thick and yellow. Mary saw them, too. She caught my
eye as he made his way across the living room to my mother’s shriek and
outstretched arms.

“What in
the world are
you
doing here?” she asked.

“Seeing
you.”

“But—”

“Can’t
paint worth a damn, babe. And that’s the truth.”

They set
up in the back yard with a pitcher of martinis my mother made and spent the
rest of the afternoon getting smashed. Mary and I ordered a pizza and ate it
her room with a dusty fan I’d found in the basement. Then we watched an old
movie on TV about some nutty woman who finds religion and blows off her family
so she can do good works for everybody else.

The next
day was Sunday. After the martinis my mother and Harv had gone out somewhere
and come home late. His van was still in the driveway.

Mary was
outside, looking up. The sky was silver and the air still.

“Looks
like we had company last night,” she said, when I joined her.

“Yeah.”

“They make
noise?”

“Not that
I heard.”

“Lucky you.
Nothing worse than hearing people fuck. You wouldn’t believe the racket in my
mom’s room, once Romeo moved in.”

We heard
someone slamming the kitchen cabinets, and went in to see. It was Harv, still
in his shorts, and an old T-shirt of my father’s that had bright blue paint
stains on the front.

He looked
at us with bloodshot eyes. “Hey, there. Either of you girls know how to make
coffee?”

“Just
instant,” said Mary. That was a lie. She made my mother freshly ground coffee
every morning. She put the kettle on to boil without looking at Harv. She
brought down an ancient jar of instant coffee, set it on the counter by Harv’s
car keys and said, “Spoons are in there, sugar’s over there, three scoops and
you’re good to go.”

I followed
her into her room. She opened the window with a single, sharp push.

“What’s
wrong with you?” I asked.

“Him. He
got no business coming around.”

“Maybe
not, but he’s here.”

She sat on
her bed, and studied the braided rug. “Nothing pisses you off, does it?” she
said.

“What the
hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“Your
folks split up. Your dad hangs out with some young chick, your mom turns into a
three-year-old, then this clown shows up and acts like he owns the damn place.”
Her face was full of color. She went on staring at the rug. Thunder boomed in
the distance, and a slow breeze came in through the window screen. In the
kitchen Harv banged one drawer, then another, looking for the spoons Mary had
already pointed out.

“Christ!”
she said, and stood up.

“I’ll do
it,” I said. I went out and found a spoon. I poured him his water, stirred the
coffee in, and put it on the kitchen table. He sat down.

“You
wouldn’t have any cream and sugar around, would you?” he asked. I passed him
the sugar bowl, and got the carton of cream from the refrigerator. Mary was
wrong. Harv pissed me off plenty, wanting me to wait on him like that.