The Favor (23 page)

“I told them.”

She sagged. “Bennett. Why? Why would you do something like that? Didn’t we talk about how drugs are bad for you? Even pot?”

“They were all bragging about how they could get drugs. I thought maybe everyone did it here.” He gave her a bleak look. “I didn’t want to do it, but they said they’d give me money. I wanted to buy the new Crazytown game, and you said you wouldn’t get it for me. They promised to pay me, but only after I gave them the stuff, and I said I wouldn’t do it until they gave me the money up front.”

She’d raised a dealer. Janelle clapped a hand over her mouth to keep herself from bursting into hysterical laughter. Some strangled chuckles leaked out, anyway.

Bennett looked alarmed. “I’m sorry, Mom!”

The school couldn’t know, or else Bennett wouldn’t just be sent home. He’d have been suspended. The other boys, too. “Mrs. Adams has no idea?”

Bennett shook his head. “I don’t think so. They told her we were just fooling around, and I said the same thing. She never said anything about the money or anything.”

Janelle pushed the Baggie deep into her pocket and took a long, slow breath. “You’re done with this, you hear me?”

“But the guys—”

“Done,” she said sharply. “Do you understand? You go to school and tell them your mom found your stash and took it away. Tell them you can’t get more. And you pay them back any money you took from them.”

“They didn’t give me any money,” he said sullenly. “That’s why we were fighting.”

Janelle rubbed at the spot between her eyes. “Do you understand me, Bennett?”

“Yes. Mom, I’m sorry.”

“Your grades, homework, all of it better improve. You’d better put your focus on school. I want to see an improvement, immediately. No comics, no video games, no TV, no computer. No iPad,” she added, “until I see that your grades are better.”

A moment ago he’d looked grateful; now Bennett’s expression darkened. “You don’t ever let me do anything. You don’t trust me to do anything!”

“You think I should trust you to do anything when this is the sort of thing you do?” she cried. “My God, Bennett, how could you be so stupid?”

“It’s not fair!”

“No!” Janelle shouted, startling them both. “What isn’t fair, Bennett, is that you took drugs to school and offered to sell them to other students! Do you even know what that could do to you? To me? Do you have any idea what sort of trouble you could get into? They could take you away from me!”

“Maybe I want to be away from you!”

She couldn’t speak. Couldn’t breathe. They stared at each other. The joints in her pocket seemed to have taken on weight, to be on fire; she could feel them burning her.

“You don’t mean that.”

Bennett didn’t answer.

“Why would you say that to me?”

“Because,” he told her, “you’re never any fun. Nan says when you were a kid, you were fun. But you’re not now.”

“I’m your mom. I’m not supposed to be fun,” Janelle said through numb lips. “I’m supposed to raise you with good morals and values, and make sure you’re taken care of. I’m supposed to make sure you’re disciplined and that you do well in school so you can be a success in life.”

The words exploded out of her in short, sharp jabs, stabbing the air between them.

“I’m supposed to be your parent. Not your friend,” Janelle said.

She put the truck in gear and drove them home in silence.

TWENTY-NINE

RYAN HAD ALWAYS called at night. Late. This time, Janelle was the one waking him.

“How’s Bennett?” he always asked.

“He’s been selling pot he says he got from you.”

Ryan coughed. “The hell? No. I never gave the kid any weed.”

“He got it from your house,” Janelle said. “The last time he was at your place, he was eight years old.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. Wow. Do you know what kind of trouble he could’ve gotten into? Or me?”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Ryan said. She imagined his familiar hand gestures, telling her to chill.

“He’s doing shit in school. He’s not making friends. And now this.” Her throat closed, and Janelle forced herself to take a breath. Then another. “And your damned weed!”

“I didn’t know,” Ryan told her. “I’m sorry. Believe me. You want me to talk to him?”

She found a small laugh. “You haven’t seen or spoken to my son in four years, Ryan. What are you going to do, tell him drugs are bad?”

“They are bad, for little guys.”

“Somehow I don’t think you’re going to convince him. No, thanks. I’ll just keep making a mess of my kid all on my own,” Janelle said bitterly.

Ryan was silent for a few seconds. “That kid is anything but a mess.”

“It all feels like a mess.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“No,” she said shortly. “Thanks.”

Ryan sighed. “How’s your grandma?”

“She has her good days and her bad days. That’s to be expected. She’s probably awake now. I should go check on her.”

“Tough business, taking care of someone like that. Just want to make sure you’re okay. That’s all. You don’t tell me anything, Janelle.”

That’s because you’re not my boyfriend anymore and haven’t been in years,
she thought, but didn’t say. “I’m fine. Tired.”

Normally, Ryan was light as air. The fiddling grasshopper instead of the toiling ant. Now he sounded so serious it disturbed her. “You should be careful, Janny. You’re in a weird place.”

He was the only one besides her dad who’d ever called her that. She hadn’t liked it, had only tolerated it while dating him because she’d imagined herself in love with him. Thick and cloying nostalgia swept over her at the sound of it, surprising her as much as his question had.

“Careful of what, exactly?”

“Trying to do everything yourself.”

“There’s nobody else to do it for me,” Janelle said.

“I know you, Janny. That’s what I’m trying to say.”

“I’m sure you think you do.” Across the alley, Gabe’s light came on. Janelle turned her face from it, though his curtains were drawn. From the baby monitor came the first noises of Nan waking. She hadn’t yet called out for Janelle to help her, but she didn’t always. Janelle swung her legs over the bed, feet finding her slippers. Gabe’s curtains twitched, then opened, and she twisted her body to shield the light from her phone that would alert him that she was awake.

“You can say you know me, Ryan, but the truth is, you didn’t know everything about me, and you don’t now.”

“I didn’t say I know everything about you. Just that I know you.”

“What did you do, a tea-leaf reading? Chant over a prayer bowl?” It was mean, and she wished she hadn’t said it.

Ryan didn’t sound as if he’d taken offense. “You might not believe it, but I loved you. Always will.”

“I know that.” It was true, but Ryan “loved” a lot of things. Weed, rainbows, surfing, spirit quests. “But I’m fine.”

“Is there a guy?”

“What? No!” She sounded as if she was protesting too much.

“Just asking. You know you could tell me.”

“I don’t want to tell you anything about my love life, Ryan. God.”

“Is he the one from that newspaper article? The one who shot his brother.”

The world spun, making her dizzy. “What?”

“You have a newspaper article about it,” Ryan said blithely, as if he hadn’t just punched her in the gut with his words. “You keep it in your yearbook.”

“You...” She couldn’t accuse him of snooping. The memento from her senior year had always been on her bookshelf, next to her commemorative coffee table book about the movie
Titanic
and one on polar bears. It had never been a secret.

“I asked your grandma about it once when she called and you weren’t home. She said they were your neighbors.”

Janelle’s mouth and throat had dried; she swallowed hard to moisten them. “His name’s Gabe. It was an accident.”

“You never talked about him to me.”

“I didn’t talk about a lot of things with you, Ryan.” The words were hard, but true.

“Is it him? He still lives in town?”

The lights on the monitor went from green to orange, then briefly, red. It sounded as if Nan was opening drawers. Maybe opening and closing the closet door. “I have to go.”

“How do you feel about your grandma dying?”

The question came out of the blue, yet somehow smacked Janelle hard. “How do you think I feel about it? Terrible!”

“But it’s going to happen, anyway, right? She’s old and sick. You can’t do anything about it. Anyway, everyone dies, am I right?”

“Yes. Everyone dies. She is old and sick, and I can’t do anything about it. What would you like me to do, Ryan? Mourn for months and months? Spend the last bit of time I have with her wondering how much I’ll miss her when she’s gone?”

Ryan huffed. “How can you be so practical about something so emotional?”

“Why,” Janelle said through gritted teeth, “are you being such an asshole?”

“And this guy, the one you like. There’s no point in getting close to him or anything, right? Because it won’t work out. It never works out, really. One way or another, everything ends. Right?”

They were her words, she realized. Said to him long, long ago, one night after they’d spent a few hours wining and dining, smoking up a little. It had been the first and last time she’d smoked since finding out she was pregnant. Bennett had been safely asleep. She and Ryan had talked about a lot of things that night. They’d been dating for nearly a year, with only two more left before the relationship ended. If you’d asked her then if she thought they’d be together longer than that...well, Ryan had asked, hadn’t he? And what had she said?

“Nothing lasts forever,” Janelle whispered now through numb lips. “You are the last person in the world I’d have thought would throw that back in my face. What are you trying to say? What are you trying to do?”

“I just wanted to make sure you were okay. I know you loved your grandma a lot. I know she was important to you. You never really talked much about when you lived with her, but I know she was.”

Janelle swallowed the bitter flavor of tears. “She still is. Jesus, Ryan. She’s not dead yet.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m being a major douche canoe.”

That made her smile a little. “You are. God. Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I got a little jealous.”

She laughed out loud at that. “Sure you did. After all this time, suddenly, you’re jealous? You want another go?”

Ryan laughed, too, sounding embarrassed. “Nah. We were a train wreck.”

It was true, but hearing him say it wasn’t very flattering. “So, what?”

“So, someone’s in your life, and he’s going to be able to hang out with you and your awesome kid... Oh, shit. Shit, Janny, I forgot. I’m sorry.”

Most of the time, Janelle was able to follow Ryan’s ramblings, but not this time. “Huh?”

“It’s just this guy showed up here a couple weeks ago. Said he knew you, he’d tracked you down, I guess. From our old place.”

“What guy?” It had been a long time since she’d lived with Ryan.

“This old guy. Shit, I can’t believe I didn’t tell you. I meant to, the next day, you know, but I got into something and then I forgot....”

“Ryan. Just tell me. Who was it? What did he want?”

“He said he wanted me to tell him where you were. So I said you’d gone home to Pennsylvania.”

Frustrated, Janelle spit out a sigh. “You told some stranger how to find me?”

“Oh, no,” Ryan said with another laugh. “He wasn’t a stranger. He said he was your dad.”

THIRTY

Then

THE LAST TIME Janelle actually saw her dad, he’d promised to take her on vacation to the beach. Not the normal beach, either, but one of those all-inclusive resorts with all-you-can-eat food and swimming and snorkeling and meeting dolphins and stuff. She knows better than to believe him. Her dad likes to promise lots of things and then not deliver.

But this is different than a pony or a new stereo or even the car she knows she will never get, no matter how many times he tells her that when she turns sixteen she’ll have one sitting in the driveway. This is a trip, and she knows for a fact her dad is going because he booked a gig. He’ll play guitar for the drunk people by the pool during the day and drunker people in the bars at night. This is a good job for him, because he gets to play music for money, and also have a place to live and food to eat. And, he tells her, he gets to bring his family down to enjoy it.

Dad left for the Caribbean still promising to send for her. Maybe over Christmas break, he says, but the weeks pass and Christmas comes and goes. Maybe spring break, he tells her on a postcard that arrives crumpled and stained sometime in February. But spring break also comes and goes without word, without an airplane ticket. And after that...she doesn’t hear anything again for a long time.

He isn’t dead, she knows that much for sure, because she hears her mom hollering at him on the phone one night when Janelle’s supposed to be in bed. Randall knows she’s listening at the top of the stairs, because he passed her in the hallway on the way to his bedroom. He squeezed her shoulder as he did, but he didn’t say anything, which was the perfect thing to say.

After that, sometimes postcards arrive from exotic locations, usually with nothing more than a scrawled signature. Envelopes with cash arrive even more infrequently, though those often also include photos. Janelle throws away the pictures but keeps the cash. She uses it to buy a VW Rabbit pickup truck.

Still, when it comes time to send out the graduation announcements, Janelle has only a short list. Her mom and Randall, of course. Relatives from her mom’s side who won’t make the trip to St. Marys but will probably send her gifts. Her uncles and aunts from her dad’s side already know, of course, but they get their own announcements stuffed into the pretty envelopes and carefully addressed in Janelle’s best handwriting. Most of them will come to the barbecue at Nan’s, and hopefully they’ll all bring presents, too.

Janelle has to ask Nan for her dad’s address, though. She’s not even sure Nan has it, but she asks. And Nan gives it to her.

Janelle sends her dad an announcement, along with an invitation to the graduation party. A week later, he sends her a long letter telling her all about what he’s been up to, where he’s been. She doesn’t care much about that, but the part about how proud he is of her...that does matter. Even after everything else that’s happened, that matters.