Also Known as Elvis (5 page)

Keeping her distance, Megan says, “Shut up, Jessie. Mommy does
not
want to know her
ex-
husband is in town.”

“Hey,
you
shut up,” my dad snaps at Megan, his face flashing the same red mine does when I'm angry or embarrassed. “She already knows I'm in town. I called her a couple of days ago. And FYI,
Miss Know-It-All, I am not her
ex
-husband yet. We never got divorced.”

“Yay!” Jessie cries, wrapping her arms hard around my dad's neck.

Steffi hands him the check and says, “That's not a very nice way to talk to your daughter.”

“You calling me out?” he asks. “Oops, there goes
your
tip.”

“Hey!” I say, but Steffi stops me with a firm hand on my arm.

“It's okay, E,” she says. “I shouldn't have said that, but I really hate it when people talk like that. Especially when the people are parents and the ones they're talking to are their kids.”

My dad hands her a bunch of singles, which he's counted out to be sure it's the exact amount of the check. “Well, when you have kids, you can talk to them however you want,” he tells her. “And I'll talk to mine the way they deserve. Fair enough?”

His face gets redder as he shrugs Jessie off, with a “C'mon, Jess, you're choking me here.”

Jessie's flip-flops slap the floor when she lands. She grabs for my dad's hand, which he quickly moves up to straighten his tie.

“So I'll be seeing you guys later,” he says to all of us. “Allie said it'd be cool for me to come by after supper. We got some catching up to do.”

“Why don't you do your catching up with your parole officer and leave us be?” Grandma Roseanne says. This makes my dad laugh.

“Sure can't say I've missed your nasty tongue, Roseanne. But when you land a good one, you land a good one. And that was a good one.”

For the record, my dad does not have a parole officer. He's a bum, but he's not a criminal.

When he turns back at the door and shoots a smile at us, I realize it's a salesman's smile. And that's just what he's doing: selling the new, improved version of himself to his kids, two out of three of whom aren't buying.

After the door swings shut, it's like the whole place lets out its breath. I'm really glad there weren't any other customers when he showed up.
And now that he's gone, I feel my own face getting red. Steffi notices, too.

“Easy, Elvis,” she says. “Why don't you take your break now? Want me to fix you a Dr Pepper float?”

I nod and, letting my own breath out, count to ten, the way she taught me to a couple of weeks ago when Kevin Hennessey pushed my buttons one time too many and I wanted to deck him.

A car honks out front, and Grandma announces, “That's Aunt Lindsay. Megan, Jessie, we're going.”

I say goodbye, to which:

1. Grandma grunts.

2. Megan says, “Whatever.” And,

3. Jessie runs over and hugs my legs.

After they go, it hits me what my dad said about my mom already knowing he was coming.
That's
why I'm so mad. She never told us. Not a word. But boy, has she been in a sucky mood for the past few days. Finding fault with everything I did (or didn't do),
yelling at the girls, slamming things, going outside to smoke (even though she says she's quit), talking under her breath on the phone. I figured she was talking to her sister, who's the one person I could think of who makes her nervous enough to need a cigarette. Now I know it was my dad the whole time, and the whole time she kept it a secret.

Steffi carries my float over to the booth I normally share with the Gang of Five, and I slide in after it, slumping down and slurping up the frosty goodness through double straws, wondering for the first time if what my dad wants is the same thing Jessie wishes for: to come back home, to be a dad again.

And this is where the frosty goodness gets stuck in my throat and it starts to burn. I hate to admit it, but there's a part of me that wants that, too.

My mom calls in sick to her job at Stewart's that night. She gets a girlfriend or somebody to cover for her. I'm like, “What do you mean, you're not going to work?” Like I'm the parent all of a sudden and she's the one cutting school so she can do something fun—although how seeing my dad ever made it into the category of “something fun” is more than I can figure out.

It is
so weird.
Because after being a total crab for the past two days, she's all of a sudden acting like that's exactly what's going on: like my dad coming over is going to be fun. She's got some pop star nobody's going to remember in twelve years blasting on the boom box (the music at our house sucks almost as much as at the Candy Kitchen) while she bustles around the house, stuffing dirty socks and smelly sweatshirts into plastic bags from the Grand Union and tossing them down the cellar steps,
shoving old magazines under the couch, trying to wipe away the three thousand rings that have accumulated on the coffee table since she stopped barking at us about using coasters, and checking herself out in the bathroom mirror every five minutes, putting her hair up on top of her head, then letting it flop back down to her shoulders.

“Wash your face,” she orders me for the first time in two years.

I look at her like she's got a screw loose, which she totally does, and more than one.

“Excuse me?” I say, but she's moved on to shouting at Megan, who's barricaded herself in the bedroom she shares with Jessie. Jessie, who makes a career out of pounding on the door for Megan to let her in, has been happily occupied for hours in the middle of the kitchen floor, chirping along to the so-called music and making some sort of homecoming present for our dad. I have no idea what it's supposed to be, but it involves about a thousand Popsicle sticks and at least two bottles of glue.

When I hear my mother yell at Megan to get
herself out here this minute and Megan yell back, “Make me!” I think maybe the fun times are over and I duck out the back door.

I head to my secret hideaway: the kennel where we kept the one dog we ever had. It looks like an abandoned prison, which it basically is, but in the back of it there's a wooden doghouse that's big enough for me to crawl into and hunch up. It's pretty much falling apart, so it kind of looks like whatever that is that Jessie's making our dad, but I like it anyway. I pretend to myself that it still smells like Penny in here, even though she's been gone for, like, six years, and I probably can't even remember what she actually smelled like.

What stinks about this being my secret hideaway is that it reminds me of my dad almost as much as Penny, because he's the reason we got a dog in the first place, and he's the one who built the doghouse. But he's not the reason we stopped having her. Her being gone is one of the few things I can't blame on him, as much as I wish I could. But I don't like to think about that.

It's really hot in here, being July and all, so I take off my leather jacket and roll it up into a ball to put under my head. Lying back, I get to thinking about Penny, which makes me sad, and I can't help wishing that she was the one who found her way back home and not my dad. Yeah, I know she's never coming back. I mean, dogs don't come back after six years, even in the movies. I'm not that stupid.

This gets me thinking about when Becca was in the Candy Kitchen the other day and told me she might be getting a dog. “No fair,” I'd said, like I was Jessie's age, and Becca had said, “ ‘No fair'? Really?” like she thought I was Jessie's age, too.

I act like I don't care about girls, but the truth is I don't know how to talk around them. Other than Addie, who's not really a girl.

(Okay, dude, she's a girl. I get that. But she's not a girl like
that
. Not to me, anyways.)

Thinking about dogs and girls is getting weirdly mixed up in my brain, so it's probably a good thing that Jessie pops her head into the doghouse
(my secret hideaway isn't that secret) and shouts, “Daddy's here!” like I'm not two feet in front of her.

“Big whoop,” I answer, which makes her look like I just popped bubblegum all over her face, so I quickly add, “I'll bet he liked the present you made him.”

“He thought it was supposed to be a birdhouse,” she tells me as she grabs my hand and pulls me up, “when it is
obviously
a pencil holder, but that's okay, because he said he liked it, and I told him I put a
lot
of work into it, and he told me it showed.”

As she pulls me toward the house, she stops all of a sudden, motions to me to bend down, and whispers, “
I
think he's come back to live with us.”

“Don't count on it,” I whisper back, but I can't help wondering if that's what's going on. Has he already said something to my mom? Is that why she's acting so happy all of a sudden? It doesn't make sense, but I don't know how else to explain it. Anyways, I can't say it's what I want. But I can't say it isn't.

When we enter the living room, it's like Time Warp meets “Do I know you.” I mean, there's my dad sitting in “his” chair, the one he sat in every night for the first ten years of my life, but which has been my mom's chair ever since he left. At first glance, he looks like he belongs there, like his leaving is just something I dreamed. That's the Time Warp part. But then, come on, who
is
this dude in the tie and button-down shirt? I mean, even if he wears ties now, why is he wearing one in our house? What happened to his leather jacket? Who
is
he?

My mom (her hair is up) sits all the way at one end of the couch, as if there are six other people squeezed in next to her and she's about to fall off the edge. She fidgets with the three magazines she left on the coffee table, while Megan sits way at the other end of the couch, studying my cell phone like there's going to be a quiz on it tomorrow.

“Hey,” I say to her, “that's
my
phone.”

“What do
you
need it for? It's not like you have a life.”

“Meggie, talk nice to your brother,” my dad says,
which makes me snort and Megan roll her eyes so big you could probably see them in Michigan.

And we don't live anywhere near Michigan.

I go to grab it out of Megan's hands and, miraculously, it buzzes.

It's a text from Joe.
Come over right now,
it reads.

Give me 15 mins,
I text back.

That's how long I think I can stand being in this house with my dad not talking about why he's come back, one sister hoping he'll stay forever and the other sister wishing he'd drop dead, and my mom having morphed into some kind of TV mom from Nick at Nite.

As for me, I know I said part of me wanted him back, but I don't know where that part is right now. I feel as confused about his being here as I do thinking about girls and dogs.

I half listen to my dad tell my mom about his job in Rochester, which is where he's lived for the past year and a half and is about as far as he could get away from us and still be in the same state, and how he's cleaned up his act, and yeah, he still has
his Harley, but he doesn't get out on it as much as he used to, because, you know, his job . . . and stuff . . . keeps him busy.

That's the way he says it: “ 'Cause, you know, my job” (PAUSE) “and stuff” (PAUSE) “keeps me busy.”

My mom does not ask what the “stuff” is, and I don't either, because

1. I'm only half listening.

2. I want to get over to Joe's house.

3. I don't care.

Then again, maybe neither of us asks because

4. We don't want to know the answer.

All this talk about his job in Rochester makes me start to think maybe he wants us to move there with him. I don't know which would be worse, his moving back in with us or us moving there. Okay, it's a no-brainer. There's no way I'm packing up and
leaving Paintbrush Falls and my friends to move to the Middle of Nowhere, New York, and hang out with my dad and his buddies from Xerox.

And by the way, with all his yak-yak-yak about his job, he hasn't even said what it is he
does.

“I've got ice cream from Stewart's,” my mom announces in this chirpy Nick at Nite voice. “Bear Paw. Your favorite.”

My dad nods his head. “Yeah, I like Bear Paw all right. You remembered.”

“Well, sure,” my mom says. “I may hate your guts, but I still remember what you like.”

My dad laughs at this, and so does my mom, and I think,
People, can this get any weirder?

As tempting as the Bear Paw ice cream is (it also happens to be my favorite, but I'm not telling my dad that), I've got to get out of here.

“That was Joe texting just now,” I say. “I have to go over to his house. We're, uh, working on a paper.”

“A paper?” my mom asks. Busted! I completely forgot it was summer.

“Not a paper
exactly
,” I say, thinking fast. “Well, you know how we, uh, you know how we write that humor column for the school newspaper?” (This part is true.) “Well, we have this summer project of writing a funny story that, like, you know, continues. . . .”

“You mean it's serialized?” (
Yes!
Work with me, Mom.)

“Right. And we should have been working on it before this, but we didn't, and we really need to get started, because we have to have six parts written before school starts, and Mr. Daly wants to see the first three parts before the end of July.” (Lies, lies, and more lies.) “And Joe's going away on vacation tomorrow.” (True.)

My mom is hesitating, but my dad jumps in and says, “It's okay. I'll be here for a week.”