The Center of Everything (4 page)

My mother looks up. “Who’s the horse?”

He stops chewing for just a moment, staring at her. But he says nothing, and after a while he starts chewing again, looking down at his plate as if she didn’t say anything at all. “Maybe a good Ford. Chrysler.”

My mother doesn’t look at him. She pretends he isn’t there. He looks at me and smiles. “What grade are you in now, sweetheart?”

I am not sure if I should answer, but he is looking at me, waiting. “Fourth,” I say.

“Fourth! Just one grade above Beth. How nice.”

“Who’s the horse?” my mother asks.

He swallows and points his fork at my mother, but doesn’t look at her. “Tina, I heard you-all needed money, and I’m willing to help you out. Just drop the horse business. Just drop it.”

She lowers her head. Daniel and Stephanie catch each other’s eye, and something about the way they do this makes me think of the deer in the corn field across the highway.

“I got Italian dressing,” Eileen says. “Tina, for the life of me, I couldn’t remember if you liked Italian or Ranch.”

My mother doesn’t say anything to this, and so it is quiet for a while except for the sound of people chewing. Still she isn’t eating, just sitting there. I put a cucumber slice in my mouth, and I am chewing it as carefully as I can when I hear a high-pitched humming sound, almost like the seat belt alarm in the Volkswagen. When I look at my mother, the humming gets louder, and I know it’s her.

People are still chewing, acting like they don’t hear. But she gets louder and louder, even with her mouth closed. Finally, the chewing stops.

“Tina?” Eileen says. “You okay, honey?”

My mother closes her eyes, and tilts her chin all the way back. She opens her mouth wide, and the humming sound turns into a long, slow whinny.

I am amazed by how good she is at this, how much she sounds like a horse.

My grandfather puts down his fork, his face like a rock. She neighs again, and Rita comes out from underneath the table, her ears pointed, tilting her head at the sound.

“Daniel, will you pass the salad dressing?” Eileen asks. “That’s right. Fourth. Just one year ahead of Beth, and one year behind Stephanie. Isn’t that something? Isn’t that something, Stephanie?”

Stephanie nods quickly. But my mother neighs again, this time even louder, more high-pitched. Rita starts to whimper, watching her closely.

“Drop it, Tina,” my grandfather says. “I’m warning you.”

“Not a horse, of course,” she says, no smile now. “You called me a whore.”

He puts his fork down. “Don’t talk like that in my house.” He is speaking softly and quickly, and it’s difficult to hear him.

“You said it! You’re the one who said it!” She leans back and laughs, holding out her arms. “Thanks for the introduction!”

He looks at Eileen. “Get her to stop.”

“Tina—” Eileen reaches over me, almost touching my mother’s hand. “Tina, please.”

“I’m a
mother,
” she says. “I’ve raised a
child
by myself. And that’s what you have to say about me? Still?” She waits, but no one says anything. “I feel
sorry
for you, then. I really do.”

There are veins on my grandfather’s forehead that I did not see before. I can see them rising, filling up with blood. He grips the table with both hands, holding on so tightly that his nine fingers turn white, like the table will fly away from him if he lets go. “Tina,” he says, slowly, carefully, still looking at Eileen. “I’m willing to forgive you. I suggest you start to show some appreciation for that, given the present situation you have gotten yourself into.”

“Forgive me,” she says. “Oh that’s so big of you. What a nice man you are.”

“Tina, honey.” Eileen’s voice is just above a whisper, pleading. “Let’s just try…”

“No.” She pulls her hand away, standing up. “I gave it a try, but I see that things are the same. Come on, Evelyn. Come on. Let’s go. We’re leaving.” She claps the way Eileen did. No more talking about horses. She pushes the bench back from the table, and now we are up, moving quickly down the baby-blue-carpeted hallway, back toward the front door. I hear his heavy footsteps behind us, his low voice yelling. “This is my house. I’ll say what I want when I’m right!”

But we are already out the door, moving down the stairs to the car. I worry he will chase us, but when we get outside, he stays at the top of the steps, holding on to the little black railing. My mother unlocks my door for me, and once I am inside, she turns and looks up at him. For a moment, they both stand where they are, staring at each other. He is breathing heavily, his eyes steady on hers.

“Then don’t come back.” He crosses his arms in front of him and brings them down quickly, like an umpire in baseball. “That’s it!”

My mother rolls her eyes. “You know, fuck you,” she says, pointing up at him. “Fuck you for calling me that. I don’t
want
to come back, okay?”

The women in the lawn chairs in the other yard have pushed up their sunglasses and put down their magazines.

My grandfather holds his hand up like he is going to wave good-bye, but then brings it down, swatting the air like he is sick of us anyway, like he has had enough. I don’t know if he thinks I’m a little pumpkin anymore or not, but it doesn’t matter. I’m on her side now. He made her cry.

He goes back inside, Eileen passing him in the doorway. She touches him on the shoulder and jogs across the yard toward us, her hand over her mouth.

“Tina, don’t leave like this,” she says, holding the edge of my mother’s window. “You don’t want to leave it like this.”

“Yes I do, Mom. Okay? Let go.”

“But honey, this might be your last chance.” She is speaking softly, reaching into the car to smooth my mother’s hair. “Come back inside, and the three of us can sit down and talk. Tina, in his mind, you did something wrong, okay? But we’ve been talking a lot, and he wants to forgive. He wants to forgive you, baby.”

My mother puts her hands in front of her face. There are tears on her neck now, seeping into the collar of the yellow dress. She hiccups, wiping her face on her shoulder. “He thinks I’m a bad person, and I’m not.” She thumps her hand against her chest, and then the steering wheel. “And it feels like I’m sick, Mom. It really does. We’re leaving, okay? Just let us go.”

She turns the key in the ignition, and the seat belt alarm and Frank Sinatra come on. Eileen lets go of the window, giving me a little wave, her other hand cupped over her mouth. My mother pulls on the gearshift once with both hands, and we roll away. The house grows smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror, until we turn, and then it’s just gone.

She can’t drive straight. There’s a stoplight up ahead on a yellow light, and she steps on the gas, trying to make it, but it turns red long before we get there.

“We’re never going back there, Evelyn, I promise you that,” she says, looking up at the light. She wipes her nose with the skirt of her dress. “Never again.”

“Okay.” I reach over to pat her on the knee. “It’s okay, Mom. Don’t cry.”

She smiles then. She isn’t really crying now, but her nose is still running. She leans over and kisses me on top of my head. Someone honks. The light has turned green. She tries to shift into first, but the gear won’t move. More horns.

She tugs harder, and again she tries to talk to the Volkswagen like it can hear her.
Come on, baby,
she says. Cars start to go around us, people yelling out their windows. Finally the gear pops into first, the engine racing. “Okay,” she says, making a sharp turn at the next corner. “We’re going to take a shortcut. No more red lights.”

We turn onto a gravel road, and soon there are no more buildings, just fields of wheat. We drive and drive, going right over potholes, a dead possum. We are going too fast. Rocks kick up and hit the underside of the Volkswagen, like popcorn popping.

Suddenly, she slows. She leans forward, looking up. “Evelyn, do you see that? Up ahead?”

I squint, trying to see. To the left, maybe a quarter of a mile away, there’s a whirling blur of something dark, rolling down from the cloudless twilight, like a column of smoke moving down instead of up.

“What is that?”

If there were clouds, it could be a tornado. It’s that big, moving that quickly. But there aren’t any clouds. The day is cooling into night, and already I can see Venus, low on the horizon. The whirling blur is coming from nowhere, like a puff of smoke for something to step out of, a genie or a witch.

We get closer, and I can see it’s not really a cloud, but a swarm of many small things, moving together. Mrs. Stanley said that one time grasshoppers came down from the sky and ate up all the Mormons’ crops in Utah, and they almost all starved to death. Eileen told me this had also happened to the Egyptians, only they were called locusts back then, and the Egyptians had deserved it.

My mother stops the car. “Oh my God. Honey, I think they’re birds.”

I lean my head out my window, pushing up my glasses. She’s right; it’s some kind of small, dark bird, thousands of them, maybe millions. They fall on the field below like rocks, shrieking, covering the still green stalks for as far as I can see, until the field itself looks like it is moving, or like this is the spot where all black birds come from, out of a crack in the earth.

“Oh my God,” my mother says. She says it again as a shadow passes over us, darkening the car. It’s more birds, an entire cloud of them, blocking out the sun. They form a stripe across the sky that starts out thin and thickens as they spiral downward, on top of the birds already there. My mother rolls her window the rest of the way down, and we sit and watch, silent. It’s like watching lightning. It’s beautiful, the sky full of an energy I can feel in my fingers. But I have an uneasy feeling in my stomach, listening to their shrieks. Anything could happen now. The Earth could spin out of its orbit and crash into the moon.

We watch. There are too many of them, and I can see now they are fighting, pecking one another out of the way. Some of them, the ones on the bottom maybe, the ones who were there first, are maybe getting killed, smashed flat by the weight of all the birds still falling from the sky.

Suddenly, they begin to slowly funnel back up, forming thick lines again, moving in the opposite direction from where they came. They fly up in waves, in pulses, and I wonder what makes them do this, how they decide who will go when.

“Wow,” my mother says, and then she says it again.

She starts the engine, giving the gearshift a tug. It doesn’t move. “No,” she says. She tugs again. I try to help. “We can’t get stuck here,” she says, slapping the dashboard. “No!”

But the Volkswagen doesn’t hear her. It doesn’t feel the slap, and it doesn’t care. I look out the window, and there is nothing, not one light on the horizon, and I get the uneasy feeling again. I press my hands together and pray to God to make the Volkswagen move, but this does not work.

She gives up after a while, turning off the engine so at least Frank Sinatra will quit singing.

“What should we do?” I ask.

“I don’t know.” She looks up at her eyes in the rearview mirror. One of my barrettes has come loose from her hair, dangling down by her ear. “Let me think for a minute.”

The field to our left is mostly dirt now, picked clean, only a few strips of stalk left over. But the field to our right is untouched, the corn still growing in neat, green rows. On the far side of the sky, I see the birds again. Their shadows pass the setting sun before they vanish for good, leaving us behind.

three

W
E ABANDON THE
V
OLKSWAGEN, LEAVE
it right there on the side of the road, dead and unburied. We walk over a small hill, and then we can see three houses, far away from the road and from each other. My mother spends a long time looking at each one and then points to a white house with a white fence and says, “That one.” It’s farther than it looks, and by the time we step on the creaking front porch there are lightning bugs, the sky dark with night.

The lady who answers the door opens it only an inch, just enough to see us with one of her light blue eyes. She says she will call someone for us, but does not invite us in. “Who is it you’d like me to call, dear?” she asks.

My mother opens her mouth to speak, but no words come out.

“Eileen,” I say.

My mother shakes her head and writes something on a gum wrapper from her purse. “Could you please call Merle Mitchell? It’ll be long distance to Kerrville, I think. I can give you some money.”

“No no,” the lady says, taking the wrapper. “It’s fine.” She shuts the door behind her, locks it.

I look up at my mother. “She’s acting like we’re
killers
.”

“Well, we could be for all she knows. How is she supposed to know?”

I look at our reflection in the window, and I realize that it is true: neither of us looks like a normal person. I am still wearing the stupid pink-and-white dress, and my mother looks a little crazy, the barrette still hanging down by her ear, trails of mascara under her eyes from when she was crying.

“That’s exactly right,” she says. “If ever some people come knocking on our door and I’m not home, I don’t want you to let them in either. I don’t even want you to answer the door.”

“But what if their car broke down?”

“Too bad for them.”

The lady opens the door just an inch again and tells us Mr. Mitchell said he would leave right away. We can wait on the porch, she says. She’ll leave the light on.

“Thank you so much,” my mother says. “Thank you.”

The lady shuts the door, opens it again, and asks if she can bring us a bowl of ice cream.

I ask what kind, and my mother pinches the back of my elbow. I can see the lady’s mouth through the door, her lips bluish and thin. “Um, I’m not sure, dear,” she says. “I’ll have to check and see what we have.” My mother says she’ll just have a glass of water, if that isn’t too much trouble.

When the door shuts again, she tells me it’s rude to ask what kind, and that beggars can’t be choosers. I’m sick of her saying this to me.

“We’re not beggars,” I say. “Our car just broke down.”

The lady comes back with a bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream and a glass of water, and since we are sitting on the steps now, she has to stretch to pass it to us so she can stay inside, keeping one foot behind the door, like a baseball player getting ready to steal home. I tell her thank you, and she smiles. She is younger than I thought she was, wearing an apron over a flowered dress, tennis shoes on her feet.

“Say thank you,” my mother whispers.

“I already said it.”

“Say it again.”

I say thank you again.

“Certainly,” the lady says, and shuts the door again. We both look down at the green ice cream.

“I don’t like mint chocolate chip,” I say.

My mother nods. “Yes. I know.”

“It’s the only kind I don’t like.”

She closes her eyes. “Yes, Evelyn, I know.”

She says she will eat the ice cream if I won’t, and that when Mr. Mitchell comes, we can ask him to take us someplace to eat, as long as his wife isn’t with him. If his wife is with him, she says, we won’t say anything at all.

“Why not?”

“Because I said so.” She points up at the sky. “Look, see that up there? That’s the Big Dipper.”

She’s telling me this like she’s teaching me something new, but of course I know the Big Dipper. It’s the easiest one. I also know the Little Dipper, Cassiopeia, and Orion’s Belt. Ms. Fairchild said the stars in the constellations are not really close together; it only looks that way because they are so far away from us. They only make shapes if you are looking at them from Earth. If you were looking at the Big Dipper from another solar system, she said, it would look like something else, or maybe like nothing at all.

I can hear cicadas from the field across the road, the sound a plastic straw makes when you bend it, back and forth, back and forth. Moths circle the porch light over our heads, and I watch them, my head resting in my mother’s lap. They are like the birds, fluttering and flapping on top of one another, trying to get inside. The bottom of the bulb is dark with the silhouettes of moths already dead, their wings still against the glass.

I wake to headlights shining on my face, the sound of Mr. Mitchell’s truck. He kills the engine and steps out, squinting to see us on the porch.

“Oh Merle,” my mother says. “Thank you so much. I’m sorry we had to call you out here. Come on, Evelyn. It’s time to go.”

“Don’t be sorry!” he yells. Even when Mr. Mitchell yells, it’s in a nice way, the way Santa Claus yells “Ho Ho Ho” outside of Wal-Mart at Christmas. “What the hell are you-all doing sitting outside is what I’d like to know. Didn’t they let you wait inside?”

My mother puts a finger to her lips. “Shh. It’s just an older woman. She was scared, I think.”

He picks me up and carries me down the steps of the porch, my mother walking behind us. “Come on, squirrel,” he says. “We’ll get you home.”

I squint into the headlights and see the outline of someone sitting in the passenger seat. It’s a woman, Mr. Mitchell’s wife. She gets out of the truck to let us in, and I see she is short, halfway between my mother and me, with broad shoulders. Her hair is cut close around her head, like a little hat, and she looks at us with small, staring eyes.

“Hello,” my mother says. “Thank you so much for coming all the way out here. This is my daughter, Evelyn.”

Mrs. Mitchell smiles quickly at me, but her small eyes stay on my mother, even as she leans down to pop the front seat of the truck forward for us. I get in behind the driver’s seat next to a bag of dog food. My mother sits behind Mrs. Mitchell, her legs folded, her chin resting on her knees.

Mr. Mitchell jogs around the front of the truck and slides in, whistling. “So, Tina, what do you think happened?” He looks over his shoulder while he backs out of the driveway, and when he catches my eye, he winks.

“The clutch gave out. I can’t get it into first. I knew it was going to happen, but I thought I could make it to Wichita and back.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you needed a car? I would have loaned you the truck.”

Mrs. Mitchell makes a quick, hissing sound with her tongue, like water sprinkled on a hot pan. We drive on in silence, until the back of the Volkswagen appears in the headlights.

“Do you want me to take a look at it?” Mr. Mitchell asks, pulling up behind it. “I could try to fiddle with the clutch a bit.”

Mrs. Mitchell turns on the overhead light and holds her watch up underneath it.

“Oh, that’s okay, Merle,” my mother says. “I feel bad enough, dragging you both out here.”

Mr. Mitchell says, “Don’t be ridiculous,” but Mrs. Mitchell says nothing. From where I sit, I can see only one side of her face, gray and unmoving. She is looking straight ahead, squinting at the white Volkswagen bug.

“That’s our car,” she says, like no one else knows this. She looks at Mr. Mitchell with her small eyes. “You gave them our car?” Mr. Mitchell gets out of the truck, letting the door slam behind him. We watch him pop open the back of the Volkswagen and stand there, looking at it and shaking his head. I’m scared to talk. Mrs. Mitchell is not saying anything, but something about her, something invisible coming out of the back of her head like ultraviolet rays, makes me scared to move, even my head, even my mouth. My mother isn’t moving either.

Mrs. Mitchell reaches up to the rearview mirror, tilting it so she can see my mother’s face. “So, uh…Tina,” she says. The way she says this makes it sound like just my mother’s name is something bad, something you don’t want to be called. “You don’t have any family or anyone who could have come and picked you up?”

My mother waits so long to answer that at first I think she won’t, but then she clears her throat and says, “Well, if I had, I suppose I would have called them.”

“I suppose. How long have you been working for Merle?”

“About four years.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I can see my mother is actually biting her tongue, the pink tip of it sticking out from between her teeth. She reaches over the front seat and opens Mr. Mitchell’s door.

“Let me out, Evelyn.”

I get out quickly, shutting the door behind us.

“No,” she says. “You get back in. I need to talk to Mr. Mitchell.”

“With her? No way.”

“Get in now.”

I get back in the truck. Mrs. Mitchell and I watch my mother walk over to Mr. Mitchell, her body making a shadow like the number eight in the headlights. I’m hungry, and I’m sick of this day. If I were at home, I would be in bed by now, asleep or reading Nancy Drew, my teeth brushed, my hair wet from the shower. They shouldn’t have left me in the truck alone with Mrs. Mitchell. The keys are still in the ignition. She could drive away, take me with her.

“So, Evelyn…It’s Evelyn, isn’t it?” she asks, turning around, smiling with only her mouth. “Why did you-all go to Wichita?”

“To see Eileen.”

“Who’s Eileen?”

“My grandmother.”

My mother and Mr. Mitchell are both peering into the engine of the car, winged insects swirling around their heads. My mother says something, and he laughs.

“So, where’s your daddy?”

“Huh?”

“Your father. Where is he?”

I shrug my shoulders. I don’t want to talk to her anymore.

She clicks her tongue, frowns. “Do you know who your daddy is, honey?”

I stare at her. She stares back, the muscles in her face tight and still. She reaches over the seat and tries to pat me on the hand. She has a diamond ring, a white flicker in the darkness. “You poor thing,” she says. “It’s not your fault.”

Mr. Mitchell and my mother walk slowly back to the truck, Mr. Mitchell with his hands in his pockets, looking down at his feet. When Mrs. Mitchell gets out of the truck to let my mother in, she doesn’t look at my mother, and my mother doesn’t look at her.

“If that car was a horse, I’d have shot it long ago,” Mr. Mitchell says, starting up the truck’s loud engine. “Even if you get the clutch figured out, the transmission’s bound to go next.”

“Well,” my mother says. “At least it got me to work.”

“Yeah. I’ll give you a ride until we can find something else for you.”

My mother says thank you, but it is difficult to hear her because Mrs. Mitchell makes another hissing sound. Mr. Mitchell turns toward her, braking the truck so quickly that we all slide forward and then jerk back. He and Mrs. Mitchell look at each other, unblinking, for maybe three seconds.

But it seems longer, sitting in the backseat.

And now I know my mother shouldn’t have called Mr. Mitchell for a ride, even if it meant we had to hitchhike, or call the police. Now Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell are in a fight, staring at each other right in front of us like they hate each other even though they’re married. I’ve seen my mother and Eileen look at each other like this, eyes flat, mouths unmoving, a long stare that looks like hate but could be something else, and nothing you want to get in between.