Bigger than a Bread Box (2 page)

That was near the end of October.

C
HAPTER 2

O
n Halloween, for the first time ever, Dad and I stayed home with the bowl of candy on the porch, eating all the peanut butter cups ourselves, while Mom took Lew trick-or-treating. Lew dressed up as a last-minute ghost, even though he’d asked to be a pirate. I watched him walk off down the street, a little blob of white holding Mom’s hand and a plastic orange pumpkin. It felt weird, lonely, watching the two of them walk off down the hill without us.

But, for the most part, I couldn’t see that anything had really changed after the fight, except that Dad slept on the couch. Mom had asked him to go and stay somewhere else for a while, but he said it was his house too, and he wasn’t going to be put out of it.

What I hated most was having to say good night twice. First to Dad on the couch, in the dark with the TV turned
down low, then to Mom in her bed with a book in her hand. During the day, there was a big pile of blankets that stayed on the couch, and that was pretty fun. When I came home from school in the afternoons, Mary Kate and I would make a big nest out of the blankets and watch TV and eat ramen with extra soy sauce. We would practice using chopsticks, and we’d eat and spill and watch shows we weren’t supposed to watch. I hoped that when Mom decided to stop being mad, and she and Dad worked things out, we could keep the pile of blankets downstairs.

I was beginning to think that everything was about to blow over. Then, one cold Wednesday morning, I came downstairs for breakfast and found that Mom had all our mismatched suitcases laid out on the floor in the living room.

“Where are you going?” I asked her.

“
We’re
going on a trip,” she said.

“What about school?” I asked. “It’s Wednesday.”

“You can miss some school this once,” she said, pulling an old sock from the bottom of a backpack. I wondered how long the sock had been in there. We didn’t take trips very often. Almost never.

“Okay … I guess,” I said. “Only where are we going?”

“Home,” she answered softly. “We’re going home.”

“Oh.”

I knew that by “home” she meant Atlanta, and Gran. That was the only place besides Baltimore she could
possibly mean when she said “home.” It was where Mom was from, where she’d grown up. Gran usually flew up to see us for Christmas, though Dad made a point of calling those visits “Hanukkah vacation.” He wasn’t very Jewish, my dad, but Christmas always made him grumpy.

We hadn’t been to Atlanta to see Gran in years. Mom was always saying we’d go next year, but when “next year” came, she never seemed to have the time off for a vacation. I tried to remember Gran’s house, but all I could picture was a lot of dark wood trim, purple curtains, and a yard full of flowers.

“Dad too?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure I knew the answer.

Mom didn’t say anything.

“When will we come back?” I asked after a minute.

She fidgeted with a broken zipper on a green duffel bag. “As soon as I feel like it makes sense to.”

I went to get some breakfast, like any other day.

Lew was at the table, putting dry Cheerios into a spoon with his fingers. He usually eats like that, fills his fork or his spoon with his fingers. He drops a lot on the floor, so it takes a while. When he has the spoon full, he puts it in his mouth.

I could see Dad through the cutout window separating the eating part of the kitchen from the cooking part. The window is there because once upon a time, before we lived there, the cooking part of the room was the back
porch. Now we don’t have a back porch, just three steps that drop down into our skinny little backyard.

Dad was standing at the sink with a coffee filter over one hand, staring off into space. He was like a statue of a guy making coffee, except that his hands were shaking. His mouth was a thin straight line, tight, like someone had sewn it shut.

“Hi, Dad,” I said, walking around to him and taking a banana from the bowl beside him on the counter. It didn’t feel like the right thing to say, but I couldn’t think of anything else.

“Hi, Becks.” His voice sounded like he had a sore throat.

I went back to the table and sat down next to Lew. Dad didn’t follow me; he just stood beside the sink, looking at me and Lew. Then he stared past us, at Mom and the suitcases, two rooms away.

I willed him to say something else, to stop what was happening. I tried to send him a psychic message. I peeled my banana very carefully and ate it as slowly as I could, to give him a chance to step in and fix things, but I guess he didn’t get the message.

I don’t know what happened after I went to the bus stop, but when I got home from school that day, the car was packed. I didn’t get to pick out my own stuff. I didn’t get to say goodbye to Mary Kate, who had stayed home from school because she was sick. I didn’t even get to tell her we were leaving.

Mom was waiting on the porch with Lew. Dad was standing down in the street, by our old green car, looking like he might throw up. His hand was on the roof of the car. I went over and stood beside him.

Mom started down the steps, dragging Lew along with her. When she got to the sidewalk, she let go of his hand and took out her keys. She seemed to be in a big hurry.

“Annie, don’t,” Dad said to her. He scraped a fingernail across the flaking paint on top of the car. Then he put his hands in his pockets. “Please,
don’t.
”

I thought maybe he would try grabbing her or hugging her or kneeling or something, like in a movie. He didn’t.

Mom lifted Lew into his car seat in the back. She snapped him in and shut the door. “Get in, Rebecca!” she said, opening her own door and motioning to the passenger seat beside her. She slid in and stuck the key into the ignition.

I stood there on the sidewalk, looking back and forth from my mom in the car to my dad beside me on the pavement. I remember it was really windy. Cold for fall. The sky was pale gray, almost white, like it is sometimes over the harbor. A gull screamed.

“Say goodbye, Rebecca,” said my mom.

“But—”

“It’s time to go,” she snapped. Then she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She let it out. “Don’t worry, you’ll see your father again. This isn’t the end of the world.”

She was wrong. It
was
the end of the world. Everything felt wrong, lopsided. I knew from the weird fuzzy humming inside my head.

Lew smiled and waved. “Bye, Daddy.” He thought we were running errands or something—going to the Safeway maybe.

My dad opened his mouth, but no words came out. His hands were in his jeans pockets. His shoulders were hunched, but he still wasn’t saying or doing anything.

I looked at him and I looked at him, and he looked different than he’d ever looked to me before. Thinner. He wasn’t wearing a coat. I memorized him. My heart felt cold in my chest, but I didn’t know what to say or do either.

At last I kind of fell into him. I rubbed my face against his soft flannel shirt. A button scraped my cheek.

Then he took his hands out of his pockets and bent over me, to hug me. I put my arms around his chest. He didn’t make a sound, and there were no tears, but his body was shaking all around me, like a silent movie of someone crying. Or maybe he was just shivering in the wind. He smelled a little like cigarette smoke and a lot like sweat. My dad. My dad. My dad was so strong. He
never
cried. “I don’t know …,” he whispered to me. Answering a question I hadn’t asked.

I felt frozen. Stuck to him, stuck
with
him in a bubble, in that hug so tight it was bruising my arms. We were going
to leave
him
—my dad—and there was nothing I could do. It wasn’t possible. It was too fast. I just hugged and hugged and hugged.

But then.

Then my mother, behind me, said in a tiny voice, “Rebecca, please? Don’t make this any harder for me.”

And I listened.

I didn’t have to listen. I shouldn’t have, but I did. I turned my head from my dad and unhugged him. I pulled away from his arms, wiggled out, opened the car door, and ducked inside. I looked at my lap. I didn’t look at him. If he wasn’t going to cry, then I wasn’t going to cry either. I could be strong too.

Dad followed, leaned in after me through the open door, grabbed my chin with his cold hand, and turned my face toward him. He kissed me on the forehead. He put something in my hand, folded my fingers shut, and squeezed my fist with his own big hand. “I love you,” he said. “I love you, Becks. So much love.”

Which was funny to hear out loud. He didn’t say things like that very often.

He reached back to touch Lew, but just then my mom turned the key, started the engine. The car made a big noise. My door was still open.

Over the noise of the car, through my open door, Dad said, “Annie, please? We can still … They’re my kids.… I’ll try to … Don’t
do
this.…”

“I already did,” she said. “We’ll call you when we get there.”

That was how we left him, through an open car door. My mom stepped on the gas. The car began to move. My dad jumped back to the sidewalk, off balance. When I turned around, I could see him standing in the street. He was calling after us. My
dad
was yelling in the street for everyone to hear; then he was running behind the car. He was calling, “Come back! Come back!”

I whipped back around to make sure Mom was seeing that, to make sure she had seen Dad yelling and running after us. But I guess she didn’t care, because she turned a corner, and we were gone. The open car door scraped the ground for a full block before I finally managed to pull it shut. The sound was terrible, grinding.

I put on my seat belt. What else could I do?

“Daddy?” Lew said, trying to turn around in his car seat. “Daddy?”

Nobody answered him, so he put his stinky blue blanket over his head and slurped his thumb.

We drove for a while like that. Mom turned on the radio to a news show full of serious voices talking about hurricane refugees. Under his blanket, Lew fell asleep like he always does on the highway.

After a minute, I opened my fingers to see what the cold thing in my hand was, to see what my dad had given me. It was a necklace, Grandma Shapiro’s white gold
locket, the one she was wearing in the picture on the living room wall, beside the other old black-and-white pictures of people I didn’t know. We didn’t visit much with our out-of-town family, and I didn’t remember ever meeting my father’s mother. There were only a few pictures in our photo albums, of me in her lap, and then of me and Dad at her funeral. I remembered Dad saying she’d died in that locket.

Dad didn’t talk much to his family. They mostly lived far away, in Florida. Occasionally we got cards from them, for Jewish holidays and birthdays, with pictures of college-age cousins whose names I could barely remember. Dad didn’t even go to family weddings. He didn’t like fuss, he said, any more than he liked Florida. Mom said at least Dad
had
a family.

I opened the locket with a fingernail and stared at the picture inside, a tiny photo of my dad as a baby, a little circle of faded color. He looked like Lew, with his hair in soft brown wings on either side of his round face. I closed the locket again and fastened it around my neck. It felt cold and smooth against my skin, and heavier than I’d expected.

I tried to remember the last time my dad had given me something, and I couldn’t. But Dad didn’t have to give presents or say special words, because there were all these little things about him. Like how he slapped his chest with his hands in the morning while he sang “You Are My Sunshine.” How he put extra butter on the popcorn
when Mom wasn’t looking. How he got really happy watching old black-and-white movies about manly men and pretty ladies. I didn’t watch movies like that by myself, but I loved them on Sunday afternoon with Dad. I thought about how he looked serious when he lit candles on Friday night, which was really the only Jewish thing he ever did. Whenever Mom was gone at dinnertime, Dad made scrambled eggs with cheese.

It made me sad, thinking so much about him, even though the memories were happy, so I decided to stop. Instead I stared out the window and watched the trees go past. I remember thinking that I was riding in the front seat for the first time ever on a long trip. It was a weird thing to be thinking, but I couldn’t help it. Usually I was stuck in the back with Lew drooling beside me or—if he was awake—flinging raisins and animal crackers at my head. Now, up front, I could see ahead. I could see everything for myself.

I watched the road without saying anything to my mom. Periodically she would point to some bird flying by or something, and sigh. I knew she wanted me to notice, to sigh with her, so that we could start chatting and then talk about things. But I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction. Mom always wanted to talk about things, about every last little detail of her life. I knew that talking would make her feel better, and that it would probably make me feel worse.

After about a half hour, she picked up her phone with her right hand and, with her left hand still on the wheel, dialed. I guess Gran didn’t pick up because Mom left a message. “We’re on our way” was all she said, which meant Gran was expecting us.