Back Roads (8 page)

“I see,” she said, even though I knew she didn’t.

Then I noticed her hand resting on the cover of the date book. She probably thought I should splurge.

“I haven’t asked about your financial situation in a while. How are things going? Certainly your father’s estate is through probate by now.”

My father’s estate. That cracked me up. I was wearing my father’s estate.

“I told you before all he had was some life insurance through his job. The government took a third and the rest went to back taxes on the house, Mom’s lawyer, the funeral home . . .”

My voice died before I could finish the list. The cost of funerals had been as big a shock to me as the cost of dog food.

I decided I’d had enough. I reached for my cap sitting on the table and knocked over the water. I knew I was supposed to say I’m sorry and offer to help clean it up, but I couldn’t move. The water spread in a glossy puddle across the dark brown tabletop and started dripping onto the carpet reminding me of something that made my stomach heave, but I couldn’t focus on the right memory.

A bunch of them rushed in and out of my mind. Every spill I had ever made and every punishment I had ever received. Smacks in the head. Swats across the face with the wooden spoon. Belt whippings and backhanded slaps. Dad responding spontaneously, without feeling. The beatings coming, violent but impersonal and necessary, like cloudbursts. If Betty had ever been a witness, she would have agreed they were instinctual.

She jumped up from her chair and tried wiping up the water with Kleenex that kept falling apart in her hand. I heard her tell me not to worry and not to go, but I found my legs again and ran. I ran all the way to my truck and screeched out of the lot. She followed me outside and stood next to the building, a young-eyed old lady holding a handful of soggy white strands of my guts.

I was so rattled I almost forgot to stop at Yee’s. I must have looked bad because Jack Yee’s grin faltered and he asked me if I wanted a glass of water. I laughed until I cried.

For the first part of the drive home, I felt like puking. Everybody and his brother had a trash fire going in his yard since it was a nice night. The smell of burning plastic, grass clippings,
and shitty diapers filled the truck along with the hot egg-roll grease.

A lot of people still had their trees and shrubs hung with Easter eggs. Some would keep them there until Halloween. Some people had started bringing out their lawn ornaments and would keep them there until hunting season, when they would have to take them back in again so they wouldn’t get shot up.

I saw a woman I didn’t know by name but had been driving by all my life, polishing a peacock-blue reflecting ball with a green rag. I waved and she waved back.

I noticed she had put her Virgin Mary out next to the birdbath and behind some oversized yellow-polka-dotted red mushrooms with two elves perched on top. Her Mary wasn’t one of the gray stone statues everybody bought nowadays, the one where she’s staring at the ground like she’s not worthy. This Mary was one of the old-fashioned plastic kind, dressed in sky blue, looking toward heaven, a slight smile on her painted pink lips. Those were Mom’s favorites. She loved the colored robes and serene white faces. She had never seen one until the drive from Illinois after she lost her family, and she thought they were a sign from God that this was going to be a good place to live. She spent the whole drive through our valley counting Madonnas.

I was completely calm again by the time I bounced over the final ruts in our road. My heartbeat had returned to normal. My hands were behaving. I could pick a thought and stick to it. I wasn’t even bothered when I glanced down at the floor of the truck and noticed Mom and Dad’s wedding picture had surfaced again through the latest layer of trash. I just put my boot on it and pushed it back under.

When I pulled in the driveway, Elvis raised his head from where he was lying on the char-broiled couch. Once the worst of the burnt smell had disappeared, he had claimed it for his own.

The girls hadn’t made any mention of replacing the couch
indoors. They had covered the living room floor with pillows and sat on those when they watched TV. Every once in a while, I got a point across.

Misty didn’t appear wordlessly on the porch waiting for her egg roll. Jody didn’t come rushing out begging for her cookie and umbrella. I didn’t think much of it until I had my hand on the front door handle, then all of a sudden I was absolutely certain they were all dead. Someone had gunned them down and put them in a pile in the middle of the living room where the couch had been. I couldn’t tell one from the other until I noticed the eyes, open and vacant, staring out of surprised bloody faces. Jody’s gray eyes like Mom’s. Misty’s dark eyes like Dad’s. Amber’s blue eyes like mine. Then I knew who they were. Who they had been. They weren’t anybody anymore. They were a tangled heap of sticky red arms and legs and hair. Lots of hair. Gold and rust and brown.

Elvis started growling. I hadn’t seen him there. He had his muzzle low to the ground and his haunches in the air, his ears flattened against his head and his lips drawn back over his teeth. The black fur on his back stood straight up like the bristles on the brushes that used to brush all that hair. There was blood in his fur. Somehow I knew that he hadn’t been shot. It was the girls’ blood. He had been standing too close when the shooting started. So had I. He was growling at me. I looked down and saw blood spattered on my boots, on my jeans. In my hands I saw Uncle Mike’s gun.

I dropped it and the crash from it hitting the floor made me jump. I looked down again and saw the bag from Yee’s sitting on the porch floor outside our front door. Elvis was growling at me. For real.

“What’s the matter, boy?” I asked shakily.

He stopped growling immediately at the sound of my voice. He perked up his ears, cocked his head at me, and went trotting off with his tail waving.

I bent down slowly and retrieved the bag and checked to make sure Jody’s cookie hadn’t cracked.

Maybe one of these days I would ask Betty about these scenes that played out in my head. They were probably nothing but sometimes they bothered me because they seemed real. Not the way dreams seemed real but the way life seemed real. The only reason I’d bring them up to her would be on the chance there might be a cure for them—a pill I could take—because, like I said, sometimes they bothered me.

I opened the door. Normally I never announced my presence but tonight I shouted, “Where is everyone?”

Jody came running out of the kitchen, her eyes huge with excitement.

“Where have you been?” she asked me. “Why are you so late? We couldn’t wait any longer. We got too hungry.”

She paused to make a sound I had only ever heard little girls make; it was a sort of a cross between a shriek, a gasp, and a moan.

“You didn’t forget. Amber said you would forget. She said whatever it was that made you late would make you forget.”

She ran up to me, snatched the bag, and hugged my legs. I touched the top of her silky head.

“You seem happy,” she said, and took my hand.

“I’m not,” I assured her, and let her lead me into the kitchen.

“Where have you been?” Amber bitched at me. “You could have called.”

“I haven’t been anywhere,” I said.

“And why are you wearing a coat? Every guy I know is wearing shorts today and you’re stomping around in Sears work boots and a hunting jacket. I swear to God, you’re a headcase. I hope you’re a headcase. ‘Cause if you’re not then you’re just the biggest dork on the face of the earth.”

I took off Dad’s coat and hung it over the back of my chair, not to please Amber but because the kitchen was too warm.

“It’s better to be insane than unfashionable, is that what you’re saying?” I asked, and reached for the buns.

“You’re so funny,” she huffed.

“You’re wearing my shirt,” I said.

All three of them wore my T-shirts to sleep in. Half the time I got dressed by going through my sisters’ drawers.

“Take it off,” I finished, forgetting who I was talking to.

She gave me a terrible grin and before I could tell her to stop she had stood up and was starting to pull it over her head. She had on only panties underneath. String bikini ones with butterflies on them. She had the shirt pulled up far enough that I couldn’t see her face anymore and for one guilt-free moment, I stared dumbly at the tiny triangle of fabric where her thighs met, then the hips, the tummy, the curve of her rib cage before the welcomed repulsion overtook me.

I jumped up from my seat, grabbed her roughly by the arm, and pushed her back into her chair.

“You said take it off,” she yelled at me.

“Where were you?” Misty asked.

We both turned at the sound of her voice. She was chewing her egg roll with mechanical disinterest, holding it slightly away from her face with her elbow resting on the table. I noticed how the kitten collar didn’t slide down her forearm anymore. It stayed tight on her wrist.

“You’re an hour late,” she said to me.

I looked at the clock on the microwave and forgot about Amber. Misty was right.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “How can I be an hour late?”

“Maybe you were abducted by aliens,” Amber suggested snottily, “and they gave you some kind of drug to make you forget what happened. Too bad. Your first sexual experience and you won’t be able to remember it.”

She laughed hysterically at herself. I didn’t blame her for once. It was a smart insult for Amber.

“Maybe you got lost,” Jody said, opening her umbrella and twirling it between her fingers. “I needed another purple one,” she said, smiling. She had about six hundred purple ones.

“I was hoping you’d finally decided to split permanently,” Amber told me when she got done laughing. “Then I could get my license.”

I paused in the middle of fixing my hot dogs. It was my turn to laugh.

“It’s not funny, Harley,” she fumed. “You can’t stop me forever. I should just go ahead and borrow one of my friend’s cars and get it. The only reason I haven’t done it yet is ’cause I know you won’t let me get anywhere near the truck so what’s the point?”

“I thought the only reason you hadn’t done it was because you know I’d kill you.”

“You don’t have the guts to do anything to me.”

“You just don’t get it, do you?”

“What don’t I get?”

I looked around the table. Mom and Dad’s chairs were still here. One at each end. We hadn’t bothered moving them somewhere else just like we hadn’t bothered cleaning out their room. That would have been too much ACCEPTANCE.

Misty sat directly across from me, still chewing. She watched me and Amber, back and forth, superior and patient, like she had already reached the end of our argument and was waiting for us to catch up.

Jody was working on her list of things to do. Most of the instructions were short except for a big one at the bottom I couldn’t make out.

“I can’t afford it,” I said slowly to Amber. “Which word don’t you understand?”

“I understood all of them,” Jody said.

“Even if I was the greatest guy on the face of the earth who only cared about making you happy,” I went on, “I don’t make
enough money to give the Good Hands People a thousand fucking bucks. Do you understand me?”

Amber puckered her lips and blew air out her nose in frustration. “I don’t get it,” she said. “How did Daddy do it?”

“Dad made good money.”

“Driving a cement mixer?”

“Yes,” I cried.

“Why can’t you drive a cement mixer?”

“I can drive a cement mixer. I can’t get a job driving a cement mixer. There’s a big difference.”

I finally made out the last thing on Jody’s list. PUT TUTH UNDR MY PILLO.

“Did you lose another tooth?” I asked, not very enthusiastically.

“Yeah,” she said, and pointed out the hole in her smile.

“I suppose you can’t afford a quarter,” Amber sneered.

“Harley doesn’t pay for my teeth,” Jody assured us all. “The tooth fairy does. Except I don’t understand why the tooth fairy only gives me one quarter and gives Esme two quarters. Esme says it’s because I use Aquafresh instead of Crest.”

“Speaking of Esme,” Misty said to me. “Her mom brought you a present.”

Amber glared at her. “I wouldn’t call it a present,” she snorted at me.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“She stopped by this afternoon and left you some recipes and a book,” Amber explained, practically spitting the words “recipe” and “book” at me. “Are you turning into a fag or something?”

“Something,” I said.

“What’s a fag?” Jody asked.

“I guess you might as well be a fag since you can’t get a girl to make it with you.”

“What book?” I asked.

“A gigantic book,” Jody gushed before Amber could open her mouth again. “As big as a phone book.”

“About what?”

“The Art Institute of Chicago,” Amber said in amazed disgust.

“There’s a Post-It note on top with the page numbers of some pictures Mrs. Mercer thought you’d like,” Misty offered indifferently.

Amber shot her another outraged look.

“Since when do you know anything about art?” she asked me suspiciously.

“I know a lot of shit you don’t know I know.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” she huffed. “That’s just too weird and gross, Mrs. Mercer bringing you recipes and an art book. It’s like she thinks you’re a woman or something.”

“Or something,” I said again, and Jody laughed. I smiled at her.

“Go ahead and laugh,” Amber said, tossing her hair around. “But that woman needs to get a life. I thought she was done coming around here. I can’t believe the way she dresses.”

I wasn’t sure which comment to address first. I picked the one I was most interested in. “What’s wrong with the way she dresses? I’ve never seen her wear anything but jeans.”

“Yeah, but they’re always way too tight for someone her age.”

“Her age?”

“You should have seen what she was wearing this time.”

“What was she wearing?” I asked.

She screwed up her face in disgust. “These low-rise pink denim shorts and a tie-dyed crop top. It was embarrassing.”