Like Family (22 page)

Sometime in the middle of the night, I woke up with my heart thumping the way it does when you can’t get your bearings. Something
big floated close to my face, but when I flinched back, I saw it was the couch, scratchy as a dish sponge, inert. Rising up
on my elbow, I could see the various lumps of my sisters in their bags and, across the room, Floyd, fast asleep in the living-room
chair. Instead of a blanket, he was partially covered by the sombrero, and his mouth was open so wide I could have tossed
a nickel in and not hit teeth. He started to snore a little as I watched him, a puppy-dog snore, light and wheezy, but soon
got serious about it. His lower lip began to wobble as he blew out, Fred Flint-stone style. Just when I was sure he was going
to wake the whole house, he woke himself, choking on his own breath. He sat up, blinking, and looked straight at me, or seemed
to. It was hard to tell because he didn’t say a word, just sat there with his eyes unfixed but pointed in my direction.

Everything was so quiet that I could hear the mantel clock and the small clock over the stove ticking apart, off a bit, competing.
My sisters were still except for Penny scritching her feet back and forth against the silky lining of her sleeping bag, one
foot cuddling the other. When I looked up again, Floyd’s eyes were still open and unmoving. Was it because I didn’t have my
glasses on that his face looked mild and dreamy, so strangely young that I could almost see why a twenty-year-old Gloria would
fall for him all those years ago? It was just us two awake in the whole world. Was Floyd waiting for me to say something?
Or did he just want to let the moment be?

“Hi,” I ventured quietly, conspiratorially, and at just that moment, he snorted loudly and started up again, rattling away,
getting louder with each exhale. He was asleep, sound asleep with his eyes wide-open, like a zombie. Like the living dead
with a sombrero. He’d never been there at all.

T
HE
NEXT AFTERNOON, WE
all climbed into Floyd’s truck — kids and dogs in the back — and went to visit Floyd’s new girlfriend, Goldie. She lived
in the same town, not ten minutes away, with her own house and yard. When we nosed up the dirt drive, her collie, Maxine,
let go a happy yelp and danced up to Floyd’s open window. Clearly, Floyd was a favorite. Over near the barn, Goldie stroked
a massive red gelding with a currycomb. Seeing us, she fluffed her own hair up with her free fingers, slapped the gelding
affectionately on the butt and walked over. She wore a man-size faded-blue Western shirt, tight Levi’s and boots, the heels
of which lifted dust as she crossed the yard, smiling.

Floyd greeted Goldie by throwing both of his long arms over her shoulders to grab her firmly on the ass. This drew a cluck
of appreciation from Bub, snorts of
Well, I never
from Noreen and Hilde and flushes from us girls. Sex, particularly grown-up sex, had us simultaneously baffled and fascinated
and grossed out.
Yuck,
I thought, but kept looking.

Goldie was older than Bub and Hilde but younger than Floyd — forty-five or forty-six, I guessed — and was still quite pretty.
She had a round, tan face, tired brown eyes and superfine frosted hair I can only call
beige.
Her coral lipstick crept up past one half of her top lip as if she’d put it on without a mirror. Though Goldie had been married
before, she was childless.

“This is my baby,” she said, rubbing her thumbs behind Maxine’s silky ears. “Aren’t you my baby? Yessums.”

Floyd had been married for some twenty years to Dot, whom everyone still liked. They had three children: John, Michael and
Carlynne. John and Mike were in their early twenties and married and talking about starting families. Carlynne was nineteen
going on eight. She couldn’t read or write her name and got picked up at her house three days a week by one of those miniature
school buses and taken to special classes where they taught her to make change and separate lights from darks and plan a menu
around the food pyramid. I never knew what to say to Carlynne. When she was in the room, I held my book way up in front of
my face, hoping she’d leave me alone.

“What are you reading?” she’d ask, and I’d point to the cover, though I knew this was mean. “Oh,” she’d say, walking away.
Just that, just “Oh.” I do remember one really good day with her though, when she came out to the house to go riding with
us. Bub got her settled on my pony, Queenie, because Queenie was hefty for a Shetland and would take Carlynne’s weight better
than Chip or Velvet or Teddy Bear. It had rained the night before and the fields were still a bit soggy, so we skirted the
road for a while, then cut over to the dry ditch.

Usually the ditch was so water-robbed it turned the dirt into parchment paper. Dust would rise up in little poofs from the
horse’s hooves when we cantered through. That day, though, the rain had stirred the ditch bottom into a soup of mud and manure.
When we clicked the ponies into a trot, mud rained up, flecking my glasses so I couldn’t see a thing. Carlynne wore glasses
too, and I could see she was struggling to stay on, flop-flopping way over to one side, which was never a good thing. We slowed
the ponies back to a walk, but Queenie was too fired up. She kicked her rear hooves a little, whinnied and took off like a
shot toward home. That was one thing about Queenie, she was barn sour and bitchy, and probably knew before we had left the
yard that Carlynne wouldn’t be able to rein her in.

Once Queenie broke loose, the rest of the ponies took off after her. We let them because we wanted to help Carlynne, calling
out advice at her back —
tell her to whoa, stop kicking your legs, jerk back on the reins — but
Carlynne couldn’t even sit up straight the way Queenie was flying through the ditch. They rounded a tight corner, and then
we heard a yelp and a loud
oof.
When we caught up, we saw Carlynne plopped right down in the middle of the ditch on her backside, feet straight out, hands
back. She looked so funny there, nearly unrecognizable in her mud bath, and we shouldn’t have laughed but we did. When we
finally hauled her up, we lost it altogether because under her was a Carlynne-size dent, a perfect impression of her ass.

After several tries, we got Carlynne boosted up on Patches behind Tina and started for home. We rode for a few minutes with
no noise except the reins slapping a little on the horses’ necks; then Carlynne suddenly popped up with “That was fun.” I
thought she was being sarcastic at first — that’s certainly how I would have said it — then it occurred to me that Carlynne
didn’t
do
sarcastic. She wasn’t old enough for that and might never be. Although her body was a woman’s, Carlynne was in every other
way a little kid and, like little kids, could say what she thought straight out and mean it. That made her lucky — lucky and
different in a good way, and for that one muddy minute, I was happy to be jealous of her.

A
FEW WEEKS AFTER
the visit to Floyd’s, we were in the car again, this time to Dos Palos to visit Bub’s aunt Birdie and her husband, Lester.
They had a little farmhouse on a ditch bank and kept hogs and willful chickens. In their big garden out back, empty bleach
jugs spun upside down on poles, the sides slit at increments and bent out like a pinwheel. When a breeze came, the jugs clicked
like playing cards in bicycle spokes, keeping, in theory, the rabbits and blackbirds at bay. Noreen stayed at home this trip,
but we brought along Cousin Krista for her considerable entertainment value. She’d say anything to anyone and was the one
person in Bub’s large, peculiar family that we felt absolutely comfortable with. Krista was now twelve to my fourteen, and
in the five years we had known her, she’d only gotten more adorable. Her heart-shaped face was buttery with a tan and clear-skinned;
even her lashes and eyebrows glinted with sun.

“It’s my favorite foster cousin Penny,” she shrieked when we picked her up at Gloria’s, running to throw her arms around Penny’s
neck, nearly downing her. “And my other favorite foster cousin,” she said, leaving Penny to come and maul me. “My most other
favorite foster cousin of all.”

When Krista said “foster cousin” it wasn’t only
not
an insult, it was a compliment, the best kind of in-joke. She was making fun of the way everyone else acted like they treated
us so well and of how grateful we were supposed to be. She could do an absolute dead-on impression of Hilde getting mad and
puffy and ridiculous, and had only perfected her Stevie Nicks over the years, tossing her hair, flipping an imaginary skirt:
Thunder only happens when it’s raining.

Krista was the only thing that made a weekend at Birdie and Lester’s bearable, where before the breakfast dishes were cleared,
everyone was talking about what we should have for lunch. They didn’t have a TV, so we played crazy eights and old maid and
Chinese checkers on a set missing too many game pieces. Penny didn’t want to go outside because she had listened too well
when Bub told the story of the time a rooster jumped at his face, trying to spur him, and how he had to whack it with a shovel
four or five times before it would die. So we stayed inside. We sprawled on the floor, picking at the nap on the carpet, pretending
to have long conversations with our make-believe boyfriends on an old rotary phone that was as heavy as a cast-iron skillet.
Finally, Hilde and Birdie got tired of us and told us to go out into the yard, roosters or no.

No doubt about it, Dos Palos was a hole, the land dry and flat, sunbaked to a single pale brown-green color. The sky was thin
and white, and the sun was white. Dust devils ripped along the dirt roads, going nowhere, stirring up less than you’d think.
The soil pebbled like cornmeal in some places and was so flaky and riddled with cracks in others that you could push a stick
in and pop out a thin, flat chunk of earth like a puzzle piece. Underneath, the soil was much darker and slightly moist to
the touch, as if it had once known a whole lot of water, was maybe even underwater, a lake bottom or the bed of an enormous
river. Now it was just the bones of that, the dry ghost of something better.

We skirted the roosters, which
did
seem to be looking at us with some menace, and headed out to the barn, where Bub and Lester were getting ready to go fishing
on the Delta-Mendota, a man-made canal full of catfish and carp. Once, on a fishing trip there, I caught a sucker fish nearly
a foot long. I fought hard for him and was so proud and so attached to the idea of the fish that I carried it around on the
stringer for a good part of the afternoon. I named him Harry and told Bub I was going to take him home and put him in the
goldfish pond in our yard. He said fine, but why didn’t I let him swim around in the bucket until we got ready to go so he
didn’t dry right out? I did finally put him in some water, but it was too late; he flopped over once and then lay still, floating
at a strange angle, his gills popped open and stuck there looking stretched out, like the neck of a cotton T-shirt that would
never lay right again.

We lobbied to go with Bub and Lester to the Delta-Mendota, but they said they didn’t want us along this time. They
would
help us get set up to fish there, though, along the ditch out front, which was some four feet across and shallow, its brown
current tugging at weeds and water bugs.

“Are there really fish in there?” Tina asked. She stood barefoot on the bank in a pair of Bub’s cast-off jeans and one of
his white undershirts, but it was Hilde’s influence that showed in the downturn of Tina’s mouth as she looked dubiously at
the ditch.

“Sure there’re fish,” said Lester, “but if I was you, I’d get at those crawdads instead.”

He took up five feet of fishing line, tied an old, spent spark plug on the end for a sinker and then wrapped a piece of raw
bacon around that. We watched him toss it in and watched the slow list of the line as the water moved around it. There was
no hit, no sudden dip indicating a strike, so we were surprised when Lester started drawing the line back in and even more
surprised to see the crawdad surface, holding hard to the droopy bacon, looking like a cross between a baby lobster and a
bug.