Fingerprints of You (7 page)

Next to me, Emmy nodded. “I like the way you think, Lem.” Emmy had her own money too. She had worked that summer babysitting a couple of kids who lived in her neighborhood, and she said she wanted to use every penny of it to get the hell out of Morgantown, even if it was just for a week or so.

“It’s like they don’t understand we’re not kids anymore,” I told her. “I mean, I may not have a license, but I’ll have a baby and a diploma this time next year,” I said, and I meant it as a joke, a way to lighten the mood and verify my adult status, but once the words were out of my mouth I got a sick-to-my-stomach feeling that settled heavy in my lap.

“I want to know about the dad,” Emmy said after a while.

“My dad?” I asked, but she shook her head.

“The baby’s dad. Does he know?”

I thought of Johnny Drinko still in Virginia and how easily I let him have me in the back room of the tattoo shop that day. I’d never done it in a chair before, and I hadn’t been able to figure out where to put my legs, one foot hanging down toward the floor, searching for leverage, and the other awkwardly folded between Johnny’s knee and the armrest. He told me to bring both legs up to the seat as he reorganized my
body, and I ended up squatted above his lap like I was digging in the dirt. Burying treasure, or searching for it, maybe. He put both his hands on my waist then, pulling me onto him as he tried to find a rhythm. Eventually my leg fell asleep, a bloodless limb dangling.

“He doesn’t know anything about me, really.” I sank down into my chair. “He was older. Twenty-seven, I think.” I imagined Johnny Drinko spending the rest of his life in that small town in Virginia inking big-boobed women with frizzy yellow perms and drinking beer with his buddies at dead ends in the county. “He tasted like cigarettes, and we did it in a chair where he worked. I sat on top,” I told her. I could feel Emmy looking at me, but I kept my eyes on my fingers as they traced circles around my belly button. “It didn’t feel very good,” I said finally.

“Jesus Christ, Lemon,” she said, and I tried to decide if she thought I was disgusting, if she thought I was a slut, but then she said, “He sounds like such a scumbag,” which made me feel a little better. “So you’re not going to tell him, then?”

“I wouldn’t know how to get a hold of him if I wanted to,” I lied. If I had decided to tell Johnny Drinko about the baby, it wouldn’t have been that difficult to track him down at the tattoo parlor, but it was easier to pretend the option didn’t exist. Stella had worked hard to talk me into believing my father would have made things worse for us, in the same way I was working hard to convince myself Johnny Drinko would make things worse for me, and by that time he lived in a world far too detached from mine to bridge the gap.

In the morning I found Stella in the kitchen: Pop-Tart in the toaster, coffee in the mug, black with half a packet of sugar.
It was Thanksgiving Day, and I still had sleep in my eyes as I pulled on a sweatshirt. She stirred the mug and then used the spoon to check her lipstick in the reflection. November was the month of Fire Engine Red. She first discovered the color in lipstick form, and she kept a tube of it everywhere important: one in her purse, one on the bathroom counter next to the bars of hotel soap she always took when we traveled, another tube on her dresser top, the tip blunted from use.

“Fire Engine Red just sounds good, doesn’t it?” she said to me a few weeks earlier in Walgreens.

We were waiting for her birth control pills prescription, her in the makeup aisle, and me in the school-supplies aisle running my fingers over perfect five-subject notebooks and rolls of Scotch tape, boxes of paperclips, and scissors still shiny and sharp with newness.

“Get over here, Lemon,” she said. I stood by her as she took the tester, swiped the lipstick over her mouth, and looked in the little square mirror stuck next to the sale rack. “It’s good, right?” she said, and I nodded and told her she was beautiful just like I knew she wanted. Sometimes it was easier that way. “Fire Engine Red,” she read from the bottom of the tube.

The lipstick made her teeth look white. White like light-bulbs or the laces on new tennis shoes, white like the sugar she put in her coffee. “Your teeth look like snow,” I said, which I guess she liked the sound of because she reached over, pushed my hair away from my eyes, and rubbed her nose across mine, Eskimo style.

“This is the month of Fire Engine Red,” she announced, and then she took three tubes off the shelf. Afterward we went to the art supply store and found a matching paint for her canvases.

But with the sun slicing lines into the kitchen through the blinds that morning and my mom standing there in a cream-colored sweater and black miniskirt, with her hair pulled back off her face, Fire Engine Red was so bright and brilliant, it almost hurt to look at her. She squinted into the spoon again and wiped a smear from her teeth with her finger as I sat down at the table and opened my book to the dog-eared page I’d left off at the night before. I was working through a list of Tom Robbins novels and was anxious to find out what happened at the Rubber Rose Ranch to Sissy Hankshaw, the small-town heroine of
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
. Stella dropped the mug in the sink, and on her way out of the room she stopped at the table where I sat and placed the hot Pop-Tart in front of me, its strawberry jam bleeding onto the paper towel. She bent to kiss me on the forehead, and she smelled a little like paint and a lot like hotel soap.

I thought of telling her then. I almost grabbed her hand so I could explain it was my turn to go west. I had practiced it in my head enough times that it should have been easy to start with the I-know-you’re-not-going-to-like-the-sound-of-it-but-I-promise-it’s-going-to-be-okay part and to end with the I’m-almost-eighteen-and-you-were-my-age-when-you-left-for-San-Francisco part. I wanted it over with before I lost my nerve, but it was a holiday, a bad day for picking fights, so I let the moment pass.

“I’m heading out to grab the bird and the fixings,” she said. “I expect you to be here to help when I get back,” and then, “I’m fully prepared to admit your apple pie kicks my apple pie’s ass, which makes you in charge of dessert.”

For Thanksgiving, Stella, Simon, and I invited Emmy and her mom and her older sister, Margie, over to eat turkey and
drink wine and pretend we were thankful for all the things we had, when really I think we were all hoping to distract one another from the things we were missing. I was feeling pretty nauseous all the time by then, and Emmy’s family hadn’t heard from her dad in almost a month, but I guess the wine was pretty good because everyone seemed to get along okay, and everyone thought of something decent to say when we went around the table before dinner to name one thing we were glad about.

“I’m thankful my boss finally taught me how to give highlights, so I can make more money now,” Margie said as she swept her bangs away from her face.

“I’m thankful that I’m healthy,” Simon said. “And that we could all be together today. I’m thankful for the people I love,” he said, and he reached for Stella’s hand.

I thought it was sweet, him looking at her like he believed in them, but Mom shifted her eyes to the floor and pulled her fingers away, which reminded me of the bartender she told me about from Gibbie’s Pub, a man she’d met recently with her friends on a girls’ night out.

“I’m thankful for this food,” she said quickly, reaching for her glass. “And for Lemon,” she added when she put the wine back down. “For Lemon being safe and healthy, even if she is, you know.” She shrugged one shoulder, a new habit she saved for times when we talked about the baby.

When it was my turn, I said something lame and predictable about being thankful for having a family and food to eat and a house to live in, which was fine because I was pretty grateful for those things, but when it was Emmy’s turn, she froze, silent and shell shocked and gaping into her heap of mashed potatoes like no one else was there.

“You’re up, baby girl,” her mom prompted, nodding at her.

I thought maybe it was the joint she’d smoked in the backyard before dinner, but when I kicked her under the table and she looked me in the face, I could tell she might puke or might cry, sitting there thinking about her dad in Afghanistan a million miles away, imagining him eating sand and drinking warm water on Thanksgiving day.

“Emeline,” her mother said.

“It’s okay, she doesn’t have to go,” I said, hoping we could just skip over the whole thing and start eating, but I guess she snapped out of it when she heard my voice, because she looked down at her plate and said she was thankful Stella and I had invited them over for dinner since her mom burnt the hell out of the turkey the year before.

I thought that was pretty smart.

Afterward, Margie left to meet her boyfriend at the bowling alley, and the grown-ups went to the living room with another bottle of wine, so Emmy and I headed out for a walk around the neighborhood. Emmy had knitted a beanie for Dylan that week in home ec class, and she wanted to slip it into his mailbox and leave it for him as a surprise. He lived about a mile from my neighborhood, so we planned to sneak over and drop it off that night.

“It’s good for me to exercise,” I reminded Stella when she hesitated to let us leave the house together. “It’s good for the
baby
,” I said, just so I could watch her squirm.

“Just around the block,” she told me. “And make sure you wear your coat.”

It had rained that afternoon, so it smelled like water and roasting turkeys and maybe even snow, which made me feel better about it being Thanksgiving and Emmy being so
depressed. Snow would be clean and fresh, and I wished for the sky to split open and cover everything in white.

“I saw Tony Adams yesterday down at the grocery store with his wife,” Emmy said as we walked down the hill past the house with the yellow shutters, and I knew she was thinking of her dad because Tony had worked with Bobby Elder at Ervin’s Auto Repair.

And Bobby Elder had just died in the same city Emmy’s dad was stationed in.

“He’s in the reserves too, you know? But there he is the day before Thanksgiving picking up a can of cranberry sauce and a box of mashed potatoes with his wife like nothing’s changed. Like all his buddies didn’t just get sent away on a school bus.” She kicked a stick out of the road, and I watched it disappear into a neighbor’s overgrown lawn.

We were in front of the house with all the ironweed then, so I picked one out of the yard, which made Emmy smile as she tucked it into her hair. She looked a little less angry with the purple flower peeking out from behind her ear.

“How come he’s not there?” I asked.

“I guess he enrolled in the motor pool unit, since he worked at Ervin’s and all,” she said, which didn’t mean much to me because while Emmy had been researching the military during our library period once a week, I’d been alternating between Tom Robbins and childhood development books.

“Motor pool?” I asked.

“They work on the war trucks. Bobby Elder and Tony Adams did the exact same thing down at Ervin’s, but Tony joined the motor pool and Bobby was in infantry like my dad.”

The dogs behind the house with the half-moon driveway
were going nuts by then, so we turned on Ashland Avenue and headed into the dark toward Dylan’s neighborhood.

“Motor pool is a support unit, but they needed boots on the ground, guys like my dad. It’s chance, I guess. They called for infantry and left Tony Adams at home. It’s the luck of the draw,” she said, which reminded me of something Stella told me once when I asked her about my father.

I was five years old and upset and wanting a normal family like all the other kids in my kindergarten class had: two parents, a child or two. I didn’t understand why some kids had dads and I did not.

“It’s the luck of the draw, kiddo,” Stella answered. “You got a bad pick.” She said some boys were made to be fathers and some were not, which stopped me from asking about him for a little while. The stories she gave me about my dad were thin and detached anecdotes, sketches of a man who wasn’t good enough or smart enough to be a parent, and back then I didn’t know I had any other option but to accept whatever she told me about him.

The light was on in Dylan’s room when we got to his house, and we stood in the side yard and threw rocks at his window. Emmy had the beanie rolled up in her back pocket, and when she pulled it out she told me she had kind of screwed up the edge. “I messed up the pattern here,” she said, and pointed to the line where the blue fabric alternated to green.