The Great American Whatever (12 page)

“Yes!” I say, clapping once. “Of course. You do that. I'm gonna dash.”

I turn and look both ways, as if you have to on this road (you don't), and just before I step off the sidewalk to head back up to my hot room and wonder why I came outside at all: “Oh, Quinn!” Mrs. D. says. “You'll be interested in knowing something.”

I turn back around. “Uh-huh?”

“Rick's finally coming back to town!”

“Wait, Ricky
Devlin
?” I say, like a moron, but that's the only way I can picture his name. “Ricky Devlin” is always how you say his name, like he's Charlie Brown or something. Stop and picture it for a second: None of the other Peanuts ever calls him just Charlie. . . .

She giggles. “Yes, Ricky Devlin. My Ricky.”

“Oh, wow. The golden boy returneth!”

“He and his partner are going to be here for two weeks while the movie shoots.”

Brain. Overload. “I'm sorry, wait, what?”

Mrs. Devlin bounces the shovel handle on her hip. “Well, honey, didn't your mother tell you?”

I look back at the dangerous wooden roller coaster that is my house. “No,” I say. “I mean, maybe she did. I've been forgetting things a lot.”

Mrs. Devlin shakes her head. “Of course you have, hon. Of course you have.” From this angle—with the sun coming up slow behind her chimney, and me knowing that Tiffany is asleep inside and that her boyfriend is staying down the road at a Hilton—Mrs. Devlin looks like a mirage.

“Ricky and his partner, Juan, are coming in from LA to be guests on the set of his movie. They're embroidering chairs for them and everything.”

“The
No Such Thing As Fire
sequel?” I say. If this were a cartoon, my eyes would have bugged out of my head. But this isn't a cartoon, this is the live-action tragedy known as my life, and so my glasses have remained snugly in place.

“No, hon, this is something else. Very indie. Look it up online. The
Post-Gazette
did a huge piece; it was in
Variety
, the whole deal.”

You
go
, Mrs. Devlin. I love that she's so Hollywood now, she can't even bother to give me the logline to her son's newest movie—at seven fifteen a.m. on a weekday in the summer, by the way.

“Well, that's amazing.” I scratch my arms. Apparently I'm covered in mosquito bites.

“They're looking for extras for a crowd scene this week, in Station Square,” Mrs. Devlin says, finally turning around to head back to her precious weeds. “Maybe you and Tiffany could have fun in the background together, like the old days. I can ask Ricky.”

“Almost like the old days,” I say to Mrs. Devlin. “Except Annabeth won't be directing this one.”

Unless she . . . will be? Somehow?

I actually stand here one second longer, because this news—that Ricky is actually gay, and that he's about to shoot an independent movie back home, when all his other films have been big-budget CGI cheese-fests—it's all such a crazy casserole of headlines that for all I know, Annabeth
is
directing it.

Annabeth's directing and Mom's playing the romantic lead.

And Dad's coming home, and not just to pick up his shorts.

And I'm happy again.

“No, that's right, hon,” Mrs. Devlin says, yanking so many weeds at once that she accidentally pulls out the one, lone, robust flower, too. “Annabeth's not directing this one.” She points over my shoulder, and I look back. “I think your porch lights are flashing.”

Y
ou would not say Venessa is “thrilled” to see me, but I'm a paying customer and she can't kick me out. I think that's in the Constitution somewhere.

I take my iced coffee to the practically Parisian leather armchairs and wait for Geoff to bop over. Except he doesn't bop over. He walks over. “I seriously can't talk for long today,” he says. “Venessa kinda rode me hard the last time you were here.”

I
slowly
raise my eyebrows. “And you liked it.”

“Quinn, come on.”

Something's up when your straight friend doesn't laugh at sex references.

“Okay, I have a favor to ask y—”

“I can install it tonight,” he says. “Like, I can bring it over after Family Dinner Night.” This is a weekly thing in Geoff's house, even in summer. Can you imagine such traditions being performed without irony?

“Oh, the AC,” I say. “Yes, I need that.”

“Well, what
else
?” he says. He's being really impatient with me. Unusual. I kind of rely on Geoff for, like, all-you-can-eat niceness.

“Um, I was sort of hoping you could get a message to Amir, through Carly.”

Geoff slaps his hands down on his green-aproned thighs. “Dude, seriously. This is like medieval times. This is embarrassing. You should just send a smoke signal or something.”

“I'll buy a phone tomorrow. For my birthday. Happy birthday, me.”

“No, you won't.”

“I will, I will,” I say. But Geoff's right. I won't. Also, my phone isn't even broken. I technically don't even need a new one.

Uh-oh. She's baaaack.
“Geoff.”
Venessa heads to the fixings bar to refill the soy milk, and Geoff looks at her and then back at me, and goes: “Fine, I'll get one message to Amir,
one
more time. But that's it. What is it?”

“Why are you so pissed with me? Why are you being such a little
bee
otch?”

Geoff doesn't say anything. He just stands there with his lips pursed.

“Just tell him to, like, pick me up for the film festival around seven tonight, outside my neighborhood—like, just before you turn in, after the Jiffy Lube on Willow.”

“I
know
where you
mean
, Quinn.”

“Jesus, okay.”

Venessa clanks the soy milk down and turns to head back to the counter, and so I turn to head back to my bike. And right before taking off, I try to flash the all-new peace sign back at Geoff through the window, but he's not looking at me. He's pretending to wipe down the counter. But the counter was already spotless. I saw it. I see everything. It's the worst.

On my way home, I pull over and look for fireflies, but all I see is grass and litter, grass and litter, and I'm thinking maybe I never saw a firefly the other day to begin with. That maybe I'm the unreliable narrator of my own life.

• • •

I'm in our basement, which is twice as humid as New Orleans looks in
A Streetcar Named Desire
.

“It should be on top of one of the filing cabinets,” Mom's saying from the top of the stairs.

She swears there's some old stationery down here, and she's anxious to write a note to Mrs. Devlin to thank her for organizing the black ribbons on our block.

“I'll find it, Ma. Just go back and watch your stories.”

So she does. She takes off, and plumes of dirt rain down on me.

Apparently the ribbons went up on all the trees in January, as an “awareness tribute to Annabeth” and to “driving safely,” but neither Mom nor I got the memo.

Actually, we probably did—the mail upstairs is approaching a Pisa-level of tipping over on the counter, and I bet a community announcement went out and got lost in the pile—but we've still kind of refused to do anything but let it build up.

I'm making my way through brittle yellow stacks of newspaper clippings down here, old articles proclaiming my grandpa's latest patent. He's what you'd have called an inventor or an entrepreneur, which is French for:
never made enough money to leave Pittsburgh.

Finally I see Mom's old stationery—her monogram printed in bumpy purple ink—and when I swipe it from the top of the filing cabinet, it leaves behind this dust-free rectangle on the glass of a framed photograph. It's of a beautiful woman on her wedding day. She is marrying a terrible man, who is annoyingly good-looking. Like: movie-star handsome; it's unfair. They are standing underneath a tree that looks like the tree we have out front, the one that Annabeth and I tied the stray dog to that we weren't allowed to keep.

But it isn't that tree. My parents got married in Ohio, after a lusty courtship. They went bowling on their first date, and my mom was so goo-goo over Dad, she wore the bowling shoes home and was fined twenty dollars. Why do people have to fall out of that kind of love? He is smiling so hard in this wedding photo.

“Something in the water in this town,” Mom used to say, all those years later, when they moved to Pittsburgh and Dad wasn't smiling anymore, when he would come home from the office and disappear into the basement and not even care enough to slam the door. He wasn't even passionate enough to slam it.

What was he doing down here? We don't have a TV, or a carpet, or even finished walls. Was it just because this was the only place he could hide?

I'm thinking yes. I'm thinking yes, because that's kind of what I'm doing right now.

“Found it, Ma,” I say, turning their wedding photo facedown on the filing cabinet, bringing the stationery up to her in the sunroom, and directing myself to
smile for her, dammit,
while I do it.

I
spritz myself once with Dad's cologne. I swab my face twice with Mom's rubbing alcohol. I put on my only white collared shirt and then I spend fifteen minutes figuring out how to roll up my sleeves the “sexiest” way. No, I seriously Googled “the sexiest way to roll up sleeves,” and got 2.3 million hits.
GQ
did a whole slide-show thing.

How is time so elastic that you can piss away an entire day and
then
be late for your first one-on-one date ever?

I'm leaping down the stairs three at a time when I note that Mom's barricading herself at the foot of them. There is almost a whole crash scene here, but she doesn't flinch.

“Will you put this in the mailbox for the morning?” she says.

“You mean just walk it across the street?” I say, taking Mom's card for Mrs. Devlin. You should see my mom's handwriting. The thing is art.

“No, no, no,” she says. “It's actually against the law to not mail a piece of mail. It's a federal offense to open a neighbor's mailbox.”

Well,
that's
a new level of nuts. But I kiss her cheek and say, “No problem, Ma. I'll just put it in our mailbox. But
first
”—I pull a few newspaper clippings from behind my back, presenting them to her like an inky bouquet—“I thought you'd have fun looking at these. There's like a hundred piles of them in the basement.”

She grins.

“It's a bunch of articles on Grandpa's inventions and stuff.”

“Well, his almost-inventions. Nothing ever got off the ground.” But you know what? She's not saying it like she's disappointed; she's saying it like she can't believe she doesn't reread these every day. This lifeline to a past when her life was still going to turn out nice. Maybe even mythical. The daughter of a mad, wealthy inventor.

“I've gotta jet,” I say, “but don't read them all at once, or you'll get a toothache!”

No idea what that means, but I say it in that detective voice that always makes her laugh—and so I'm caught short when I rush by Mom to head out the door, and instead of giving me that signature chuckle, she just goes: “You're sure putting on a lot of cologne for
Geoff
, lately.”

I don't even respond. I just let the door slam shut behind me. Then I stand on our crumbly porch and think,
Shit
, and I drop the card in our mailbox, and I keep walking.

• • •

Nobody wears watches anymore. I don't know what time it is, but I feel like I've been standing out here for longer than I should. I was already running late, I mean.

But you should see the sky tonight.

Screw your astrology apps. Screw your games. Look up sometime. There is a whole wing of positive psychology—my therapist told me—that says the greatest way to affect your outlook on life is to consider what you already have more than what you
don't
have. And so I might not have a cell phone on me, or a sister at home, or a Dad at all, or a future, but holy shit I have the sky.

A car pulls around the bend from Willow to Morrow, and even though it's too big to be Amir's old Saturn, I still find myself adopting an exaggeratedly casual posture, literally yawning as if I hadn't prepped for this date by putting on my best underwear (you never know?) and a white shirt and one exact spritz of Polo.

But it's not Amir.

The car kicks up enough dust to back me up into a neighbor's chain-link fence, and that sends their dog, Lucy, running up and barking at me.

“Quiet, Lu,” I say, bending down. Lucy actually starred in a Q & A short. It was called
White Puff of Magic
(ugh, the titles), and even though it was only like six minutes, it was a pretty sweet and effective movie.

My latest film was the most ambitious. It was going to be a full-length feature. Annabeth shot the first four scenes last fall, and I looked at the footage and thought the whole thing felt too dark—it was meant to be a slightly black comedy, but it was coming off as super self-serious. So I asked Annabeth to reshoot, and she grunted in my general direction and said, “I'm in the middle of filling out my college applications, you ungrateful ingrate. How about you write that character recommendation I keep asking you for, huh?”

Annabeth had to include a couple of character recommendations from “adults in mentor positions” for her college applications. She asked her AP Psych teacher to write one for her, but Mrs. Wadsworth went: “I have to write about thirty of these every year, Annabeth, so what I'd ask is that you write a first draft, and I'll go from there. Okay?”