Not That I Care (6 page)

I wasn’t in much of a joking mood. “At least I have a gift.”

“Hey!” She opened the door and found me crouched on the floor. “You can shut your smart mouth, miss.”

I hadn’t meant to say it like that, like my father. I just meant, Leave me alone. So I explained, “Nothing personal.”

“No?” She stood over me, with her fists on her hips, which made her look solid and fierce, although she’s only five foot one, like I am now.

“Just,” I said, “I’m happy you think I have a gift.”

Mom sneered. “It wasn’t meant as a compliment.”

I said, “No kidding.” We had a really charming relationship at that point. Not that it’s about to win the congeniality prize now.

She whirled around, stomped out of the bathroom, through my room, and out of the living room, slamming doors behind her. I sat in there by myself for a while after that. I think I might even have taken a bath, but that might be my imagination. Anyway, the next thing I remember I was standing at her bedroom door, and it was late that night, and I was asking if she wanted to play gin.

She loved playing gin; I had fallen asleep so many nights listening to her and Dad flipping cards onto the table. They had fun when they did that, I think.

“I hate seven-card gin,” Mom grumbled. Her TV was on, and her covers were pulled up around her. There was a container of yogurt on her bedside table with a spoon in it.

“I can hold ten cards now,” I said, holding up my hands to show how much they’d grown. I remember thinking,
Anything just don’t hate me
.

“OK,” she said and reached over to her night table where the cards always stayed, in the tight brown leather container my father had bought for her for Valentine’s Day when they were in Boggs High together and madly in love.

“You want to see a card trick?” I asked her, thinking a little magic might cheer her up.

“Can we just play gin?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s a stupid trick anyway.”

We played a few hands. I dropped all my cards once. She didn’t yell at me, just scooped them all up and said she’d had nothing, anyway, I’d done her a favor.

“You’re welcome,” I said. “Did you and Dad have a love seat?”

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said quickly, turning to watch a deodorant commercial on her TV.

“Morgan?” She shuffled, making a bridge out of the cards that fluttered flappingly into a neat stack.

“Nothing!” I looked at her with my most adamant face.

She started to deal the cards. “About ballet . . .”

“I really do hate it,” I answered as fast as I could. “Isn’t it my deal?”

She scooped up the cards and handed me the deck. “Thank you,” she whispered.

That’s when
Little House on the Prairie
came on. We both turned to the TV and watched the opening. I forced myself to go back to playing cards. She’d been playing solitaire a lot; I’d heard the cards slapping on one another.

“You want to take a break and watch this dumb show?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Not really.”

“So do I,” she said.

She took the cards and slipped them back inside their leather case. I snuggled under the covers with her and we watched. We both agreed Michael Landon was so cute, his name should be Cutie. Toward the end of the show, he pulled up his horse-drawn buggy beside his daughter, Laura, and said he’d be done working soon and did she want to go fishin’?

Mom and I sunk down on her pillows.

“Wouldn’t that be nice?” Mom asked.

“I hate fish,” I reminded her.

“Yeah,” she said. “And can you imagine having to go to the well so often?”

“And wear a hat to bed?”

We agreed we were way better off than the Ingalls family. I fell asleep in her bed that night, and I never put my ballet slippers back on. It just would’ve hurt Mom.

eleven

C
J didn’t quit with me, obvi
ously. This summer she made it up to performance level, which means she’ll be taking five classes a week this year. She was so proud, I had to be happy for her, even if I couldn’t help pointing out that she wouldn’t be able to play soccer like all the normal people. I wonder if that annoyed her. But she knows I only mean it’s fun to be inseparable, like we used to be. I thought she knew that.

She never told anybody the real reason I quit. She told Fiona I got bored of it, and Fiona can think whatever she wants, CJ stood by me. Fiona is such a boring bun-head, CJ and I always say. I had better turn-out than she did. She was jealous of that, and of my friendship with CJ. I could be on my way to prima ballerina, too.

Gabriela is showing her key chain and explaining how she has two homes, her mother’s and her father’s, and that it’s hard for her—she has trouble keeping track of where her shoes are and knowing who to ask to sign her permission slip, but at least she gets to bring her cat back and forth with her. Everybody squirms, listening to this. It’s too personal. Gabriela is really nice but so clueless.

twelve

F
ifth grade, when I was turning
eleven, was the first time Mom took the camera out and dragged me in front of my cherry tree to pose. I didn’t want to; without Dad there it was just depressing. While she was positioning me, Ned muttered something about no cherries ever growing on my cherry tree and how my father had probably just bought the wrong kind.

Mom agreed. She said something like “defective” as she was trying to figure out the focus.

I yelled, “It is not defective!”

“Right,” Ned said.

“It’ll have cherries by next year on my birthday,” I insisted, and Mom snapped the picture. I look angry in it.

“Don’t get all worked up about it,” Mom said. “Can we please? I have to set up for your party.”

“It will,” I said. “You’ll see.”

“Fifteen screeching kids on their way,” Mom complained. “I can’t deal with this today.” She hurried inside to hang streamers.

“It will,” I whispered again. Nobody was listening to me, so I got on my bike and rode for a while.

When I got back, my guests had already arrived and Mom was furious at me for running away. “Just like your father,” she whispered. She gave me the Silent Treatment, all through my party.

The next weekend, I stole a bottle of vitamin-rich plant food out of Mr. Hurley’s shed. Every Saturday morning before Ned and Mom woke up, I poured little capfuls around the tree’s roots. I kept the bottle hidden under my bed, because I didn’t want to explain. Mr. Hurley would never notice; he had three bottles of it all lined up in his gardening shed. Whenever I went over to CJ’s, I watched him, how he watered and worried over his plants. I watered my cherry tree and walked around it, all that summer and fall. I even stopped checking my red tulip at the Hurleys, out of loyalty to my tree.

In the winter, last year, I did nothing, because Mr. Hurley did nothing.
Let it lie fallow
, he said, when I casually asked how do you help the garden in the winter.
Let it lie fallow
, he said,
let it rest so it can save its energy for the spring
. He asked if I was getting interested in gardening. I just shrugged and said not really.

When the snow melted, he went back to feeding his garden and worrying over it, so I started with the little capful and the watering again, too.

“Pacing around it isn’t gonna make it grow cherries, you know,” Ned unhelpfully told me.

“No kidding,” I said, rolling my eyes. He thinks he’s so brilliant.

By the end of March, there were blossoms all over the branches. Almost every morning before school, I woke up early, made myself some tea, forced myself to sit at the table and drink it, and then went out back before Mom and Ned stopped snoring. I climbed up my tree and checked for cherries.

Nothing.

At night I prayed.
Come on, Saint Chris
, I said, hoping friendliness might influence him.
One cherry. How hard can one little cherry be for a saint? I’m not asking for world peace here. A measly cherry, on a cherry tree. It’s not for myself, Chris—it’s for my mother, so she’ll know my father didn’t plant her a defective tree when I was born. She’d be so happy
.

Nothing.

Mom drank her coffee each morning standing in the kitchen, looking out the window at the tree, and I knew she was thinking, what a stupid defective tree. I watched her.

A month before my birthday, I told her one morning, “I think this might be the year we get cherries.”

She shrugged. “I don’t even like cherries that much anyway,” she said.

“Yes, you do.” I hiked myself up to sit on the counter. “You love cherries.”

“Morgan, don’t agitate me today, OK?” She spilled out the rest of her coffee. “Get off the counter. I have an exam tonight, and my boss is on my case, and I’m just way too stressed to be patient with your fantasies. OK? Like it or not, you play the hand you’re dealt. This is our life, so we have to get used to it.”

“I am used to it,” I told her, still up on the counter.

“Good.” She shoved her feet into her shoes and grabbed her keys off the hook. “So can we stop with wishing for cherries to magically appear?”

I quit praying for magic and came up with a plan.

I hoarded my allowance. We won a softball game that week, but I made up an excuse that I couldn’t go to the pizza place after, had to ride right home, because I was grounded for cursing at my mother. A total lie—I just didn’t want to waste the money on a slice of pizza. I needed it.

The day before my birthday, I limped around school saying I had hurt my ankle, so I’d get out of softball practice. I hobbled away from the gym, then jumped on my bike and rode to the grocery store, all my money in the pocket of my khaki shorts.

That night, Mom took me and CJ and Ned out to Red Lobster and said we could choose anything we wanted off the menu, including for dessert. CJ said she just wanted the shrimp cocktail. I don’t know if she was trying to save my mother some money or just watching her weight as always. I almost ordered the same, but my mother looked so disappointed I chose a lobster. It was delicious. I got a sundae for dessert, and CJ tasted it. She was practically falling asleep on the table, because she’d had ballet that afternoon.

After we dropped CJ off, I raced into the house to check the messages and e-mail. Nothing. “I’m sure he’ll call tomorrow,” Mom whispered, trying to hug me.

“Who?” I asked, pulling away.

“Why do you always pull away from me?”

“I’m tired.” I sat on the windowsill in my room with my face pressed against the glass, straining to see my tree, for a little while, then set my alarm for four-thirty A.M., checked the bag under my bed, and got under my covers.

The next morning I woke up just before the alarm buzzed. I think it must’ve clicked, because my eyes popped open and I slammed down the snooze button just as the buzz was starting. I flipped the switch to off, got out of bed, and pulled up the covers in one motion, and took the grocery bag out from under. I tiptoed to the kitchen, filled the teakettle with water, and climbed onto the counter to get a tea bag out of the box I’d hidden there. When the steam came out of the kettle, I poured it over the bag in my mug and watched the water darken. I dragged the tea bag around inside the mug and hummed “Happy Birthday” to myself.

“Happy Birthday to Morgan,” I whispered, pouring in the milk and watching the cloudiness curl into itself. Humming the rest, I went out to sit at the table and drink my tea. No presents on the table. Big surprise. Well, I got dinner. And I don’t need anything, I reminded myself. I wear my sandals every day it’s warm enough, and I take good care of my clothes, and it’s not like I played with toys or anything anymore, and I’ve never been the jewelry type. I finished my tea as quickly as I could, threw on some sweats, grabbed the grocery bag, and quietly, silently, opened the back door to step out into the cool.

The grass was damp under my sandals. I crossed our little yard quickly and left my sandals at the base of the tree, beside the grocery bag. I climbed up into a crook of the trunk, the plastic bag of cherries in my teeth and the roll of Scotch tape in my waistband. I had bought as many cherries as I could afford, almost four and a half pounds, which is a lot when your fingers are cold and the branches are a little damp so you have to wrap Scotch tape around and around each stem.

When I finished, it was six-fifteen. I climbed down and stood back, in the cold grass, to see. The branches hung heavy with fruit. One of them really drooped, where I’d overcrowded. It was beautiful. There were maybe a hundred cherries taped up there, but it looked like a thousand to me, with the sun coming up brightening the sky behind the tree. They looked like jewels. I grabbed the bag and my sandals and raced back inside, thinking,
This will show her
, and also,
I hope she likes it. She deserves a nice thing, and she really does love cherries
.

It felt like forever, lying there in my bed with my nightgown back on, waiting for Mom to get up. She hit her snooze three times, until I was ready to go clonk her over the head with the clock. After her alarm rang the fourth time, she grumbled and went into the bathroom. I heard the toilet flush and then the water running in the sink. She must’ve brushed every single tooth four hundred times, it felt like. Finally, she padded to the kitchen. The coffee beans were ground up noisily and water poured into the coffee machine. I buried my head in my pillow to keep from shouting,
Look out the window!

I listened past the percolating of the coffee machine for any sound. Nothing. What was she doing in there? The fridge opened and closed. Look out the window! And then I heard it. A gasp.

I couldn’t stand it anymore. I jumped up and raced into the kitchen, trying my best to look sleepy. “What?”

Her face was puffy, there was some mascara smudged under her eyes, her thick stack of curly hair was leaning toward the window. She looked beautiful. Her mouth was open but almost smiling. She didn’t move, just stood there pointing out the window. “The! The!” she said. She shook her head a little and breathed out hard through a spreading smile.