I’ll Meet You There (4 page)

“He’s still a sexist pig,” I muttered. “He, like, talks to my boobs more than me.”

Dylan pulled down the visor and looked in the mirror as she dabbed lip gloss on her
lips. “Yeah, but he’s probably extra horny right now, with all of us walking around
in shorts and tanks. I mean, the women in Afghanistan are covered up in, like, sheets
and stuff. Don’t they wear those things where you can’t even see their faces?”

I rolled my eyes. “
Dylan
. They do not wear sheets.
Jesus
.”

“Anyway, he’s still hot. I wonder what it would be like to … you know. I mean, he’s
still got what matters.”

“Oh my God, Dylan, shut up. I don’t need that image in my head.”

“It’s totally in your head, isn’t it?”

“
No.
” Except,
yes.

Dylan laughed and turned up the music. We had an hour of driving just to get to the
nearest Walmart, but it wasn’t too bad if you had some company and a working radio.

I stared out the window, at the unbearable flatness of the Central Valley with its
endless fields where workers bobbed up and down over the plants, their straw hats
and bandannas swaying like dancing flowers. Somewhere, in one of those fields, Chris’s
dad was supervising the picking, reminding himself that the crappy wage was worth
it because his son was going to college. And miles behind us, my mother was just getting
to Taco Bell, ready to spend another day in fast-food hell. And Josh was sitting alone
in a diner, thinking about whatever horrible stuff was going down thousands of miles
away.

I pressed my foot against the accelerator.

*   *   *

I’d splurged on new bedding for my dorm, and I couldn’t wait to show it to my mom.
It was the first thing I’d bought for school—having it made college feel more real
than my acceptance letter. I’d also bought a bunch of paper for a collage I was making
as a going-away present for Marge: thin-as-tissue Japanese rice paper, thick construction
paper, Canford papers to sculpt objects that burst from the collage, and the shimmery,
expensive sanded pastel paper that I hadn’t been able to resist. I hugged the bags
to my chest, thinking about roommates and being an art major. I hoped the stuff for
my dorm looked appropriately arty. It was hard to know, being in a town like Creek
View.

The birch trees planted around our little lot stood like friendly sentinels that welcomed
me home, and I could hear the distant shrieks of the neighborhood kids as they ran
through sprinklers and gunned each other down with water hoses. I looked at the forlorn
trailers and beat-up cars. The sky was still a bright cornflower blue, and the sun
shoved against everything it touched. The heat, the dust, the disrepair—it didn’t
bother me so much, knowing that I’d be leaving soon. Even our sea-green trailer wasn’t
too bad, though it could definitely use a paint job and a couple of the shutters were
about to fall off. I almost felt nostalgic.

I put the key in the lock, but at my touch, the door swung open and bright shafts
of light streamed into our darkened living room. For a second, I just stood on our
tiny front porch, my key still raised, heart beating fast. Mom was supposed to be
at Taco Bell until late tonight, and she was just as paranoid as I was about locking
the door. It wasn’t uncommon to have burglaries in the trailer park, so my mom and
I were borderline obsessive-compulsive about locking up, especially since my dad had
died. Not having a man in the house was something I didn’t think Mom would ever get
used to. Which was why she put up with skeezy Billy Easton, who came around to “help”
with repairs but really just wanted to ask my mom out for the thousandth time. Five
years, and he still didn’t understand the word
no
.

I stood on the front porch, paralyzed, until I heard my mother’s familiar cough coming
from her bedroom. I stepped inside and wrinkled my nose against the stench of cigarette
smoke that hung in the stale air.

“Mom?” I called, setting my things down on the floor and shutting the door behind
me.

No answer.

The trailer was dark, all the blinds closed and curtains drawn. I opened the kitchen
window to kill the sour smell. The darkness, the smoke, the heaviness that blanketed
everything—I knew what it meant.

Mom was having one of her bad days.

At her room, I took a breath before I pushed open the door, cheap plywood that made
it easy to hear her when she cried at night. She was lying in the middle of her bed,
wrapped in my dad’s bathrobe, and the room was thick with smoke.
Judge Judy
was on the tiny TV on top of her dresser, but it was muted, its light the only color
in the room.

“Hi, baby,” she whispered.

I moved close to her, then gently took the cigarette from between her fingers and
put it in the Coke can she was using as an ashtray. Stray pieces of ash from her cigarettes
dusted her nightstand and covered the collage I’d recently made for her of the Golden
Gate Bridge, a little reminder of me when I was away at school.

“Hey.” I smoothed back her hair, then planted a kiss on her forehead. “Wanna take
a shower?”

She shook her head.

“You sure? It always makes you feel better.”

“No.” Her voice was far away.

I pushed down the fear that I wouldn’t be able to bring her back this time, that she’d
never leave that dark place she went to on her bad days. Her eyes slid back to the
TV, and I concentrated on picking up her room. Work clothes were piled on the floor,
and crumpled packages of Little Debbie snacks littered the carpet beside her bed.
The shade on her lamp was cockeyed, as though she’d stumbled into it.

“You need me to give the Bell a call? Tell them you can’t go in tomorrow?”

Mom cackled, and I turned away to throw the clothes in her overflowing hamper so I
wouldn’t have to see the bitterness stamped on her face. I’d have to go to the Laundromat
soon—it looked like half her wardrobe was in there.

“Oh, sure,” she said. “Call them. I’d love to hear what Brian has to say.”

Brian was her manager, a smarmy zit-faced kid just a year or two older than me.

“What are you—”

“They fired me,” she said. Her voice had turned dull, flat.

“
What?
”

She stared at the TV, as if she couldn’t bear to miss one second of Judge Judy’s court
proceedings. “Yep,” she said. “After eighteen years, it was like,
Fuck you, Denise!
” She reached for her pack of cigarettes, and I leaned in close, grabbing her arms.

“Mom. Look at me. Are you serious right now?”

Her eyes filled with tears, and she nodded. “I screwed up. I screwed up bad.”

My stomach turned, like I’d put bad milk in my coffee. “Okay. What happened?”

She looked down, playing with a loose thread on her robe. “I was closing and … I …
I left one of the tills on the front counter. I was tired … just forgot it was there.
Some punks broke in after I closed up. I came in this morning, and Brian showed me
the tape. Little bastard. I could tell how happy it made him.”

“But it was an accident!” I said. How could some teenage manager fire her, after all
those years?

“Doesn’t matter—that kid hates me, always has. If it wasn’t this, it’d be something
else. Says he has ‘cause’ to fire me. Can you believe it? He says I left the cash
drawer out
on purpose.
”

“That’s insane. Why would he say that?”

She grabbed the cigarettes and fished one out of the pack. “Because I was upset that
he wrote me up at the beginning of my shift last night. I was late—just a couple minutes,
but you know how he always rides my ass. I called him a prick.”

“He can’t fire you for calling him a prick.” Besides, it was true.

The flame from the lighter flickered, then caught the cigarette. She sucked in the
smoke. “He’s saying I left the till out to get back at him. Says he has witnesses.”

“Mom, we can totally fight this.”

“No one’s gonna be on my side. Whatever. I’m out.”

She started chewing on her lip like she always did when she got anxious, and I knew
she’d be bleeding in a minute.

I squeezed her hand, but she pulled away and took another shaky drag of her cigarette.
“What are we gonna do?” she whispered.

Mom started crying for real now, big sobs that seemed to grate against her insides.
I pulled her to me and let her cry, her tiny body shuddering in my arms. I hadn’t
seen her like this since Dad had died. Her bad days could usually be taken care of
with a shower, some good food, a night in watching movies. After a day or so, she’d
come back to herself. But without a job to return to, how could I pull her out of
this?

“Sky.” Her voice broke, and I patted her hair, her back.

“Shhh,” I whispered. “It’s okay, Mom. It’s gonna be okay.”

“No it’s not,” she said.

She cried for a long time, and I held her while I watched the cold shadows that the
TV cast on the walls of her room lengthen and bleed across the bed. As I sat there
trying to hold my mother together, I realized that the thing I’d been fearing for
most of my life was finally happening: that I’d be so close to getting out, then just
at the last moment, something would happen that would keep me in Creek View indefinitely.
I always thought it would be a freakish thing, like a natural disaster or getting
a brain tumor. Not this.

JOSH

I’m walking across the field. Everything’s brown: brown huts, brown mountains, brown
dirt. Harrison is handing out soccer balls and candy to the kids. He’s laughing because
they keep screaming “I LOVE AMERICA I WANNA CANDY,” and Sharpe is lighting up another
Marlboro and my gun’s in my hand and my gear is fucking heavy and I’m so hot. Davis
is leaning against the Humvee, talking to Abdul. You’re shooting the shit with the
village elders.
As-salaam alaikum. As-salaam alaikum.
You call me over when you’re done and I say,
Let’s go to that wall, man. I need to take a fuckin’ knee
. The sky is blue blue and all I can smell is dust and the smoke from Sharpe’s cigarette,
and we’re going toward the wall but then I say,
Hold up, I’m gonna check behind that hut.
I raise my gun. Five steps to the hut. Four. Three. Two. Then I wake up. Sweating,
fucking sobbing like a little bitch. Just like every night. Looking for my rifle,
but it’s not there—
shit, where is it?
—and then I remember I don’t have one anymore. And my leg that isn’t there is burning—I
can feel it but it’s not there—and I look at the clock and fuckshitfuck it’s only
one in the morning and it won’t be light for hours. So I lie back down and stare at
the ceiling and run through every cadence my drill instructor taught me at Camp Pendleton
and then I repeat the Rules of Engagement and I think of all my favorite quotes from
Three Kings
and I play imaginary games of chess with you in my head and you always win because
I forget about the queen again. I’m so tired, so goddamn tired, but sleep isn’t happening.
It’s just me, the ceiling, and the night becoming morning.

chapter three

There were only two reasons the Paradise Motel stayed in business: we rented rooms
by the hour, and there wasn’t any competition for seventy miles in either direction.
All you could see from the highway were a bunch of scraggly trees and our old-school
sign at the beginning of a long dirt drive. Once the sun went down, the freaky-looking
angel sitting on top of the sign became neon pink and green, winking at drivers as
they passed on the highway. The motel itself squatted behind the trees—it was one
story with an inner courtyard in typical Cali style, with ten rooms and a pool, bordered
on three sides by Gil Portman’s orchard.

The Paradise needed a paint job bad—Marge said it looked like a kid had vomited an
orange Slurpee all over her walls—and the TVs didn’t have cable. But it wasn’t creepy
in that
Psycho
kind of way. In fact, we’d recently been featured on a blog called
Quirky California
because of our themed rooms. You’d be surprised how many people were into the unicorn
room.

Everything was falling apart at home and school was out, so I was happy to spend more
time than usual at the Paradise. There was something kind of cozy about the broken
stool I sat on behind the front desk and the way people would pop in at all hours
of the day and night. And I didn’t know how I would have gotten through Creek View
summers without the pool.

Working at the Paradise was fine when it was an after-school job, but I couldn’t imagine
myself sitting behind the counter in September, when I should be in San Francisco
feeling all chic and intellectual. But as the days rolled by, Mom got worse, not better.
It wasn’t just that she wasn’t applying for jobs—she wouldn’t leave the house. Whenever
I got home, she was always sitting on the couch, staring at nothing. For the first
time, I realized that maybe my mom wasn’t just depressed about Dad. Maybe she was
like me and felt the hopelessness of Creek View in her bones, but unlike me, she didn’t
have a ticket out. There had to be a way to help my mom and still move to San Fran.
I had eight weeks. At the beginning of the summer, I’d thought the days couldn’t go
by fast enough, but now all I wanted was time.

It was a Friday afternoon, and my shift was almost over. I tipped my stool back, leaning
my damp head against the wall behind me. There was a heat advisory, and the air settled
over me like a lead blanket, sapping all my energy. The only sound in the Paradise
lobby was the distant roar of cars and the whiny creaking of the overhead fan. Every
now and then, a big rig would sound its horn out on the highway, jolting me awake.
I swatted at the fly that kept tiptoeing down my neck and put the can of Coke I’d
just gotten out of the vending machine against my cheeks. I was in that dazed limbo
of overcaffeinated drowsiness, coming off another graveyard shift and trying to stay
awake until Amy showed up. I set my Coke down and let my head fall forward, not even
caring that I was lying on one of my collages. It was a crappy one, anyway.