Waiting for Normal (2 page)
I did the dishes as perfectly as I could. I dried them and put each one away in the little cupboards. I wanted us to keep this new place nice.
The cleaning had gotten away from us when we’d had the house. Dwight had tried. He would come home from work and start the laundry and drag out the vacuum. The Littles—that’s what Dwight and I called my little sisters whenever we were talking about both of them at once—and I would scrub bathrooms or roll socks. We’d pick up the toys, stack Mommers’ magazines and empty her ashtrays. But after Dwight moved out, the place got bad. Really bad. Mommers was never up at breakfast time and I left a lot of mess from making toast for the Littles. (I was always running late for the school bus.) We used napkins instead of plates and that helped some. But then we couldn’t keep up with the trash. Picker’s Waste Removal quit stopping for our cans because the bill didn’t get paid. That’s one of the things Dwight didn’t like.
Now, with just the two of us, there weren’t so many dishes. I finished them up quickly. As small as the trailer was, I didn’t know where I should be that night. New places always do that to me. Even when I was little, when Mommers married Dwight and we moved into his house, I’d wandered from room to room like I had to try on each one, get it to fit. Soon Brynna was born and later Katie. Eventually, we were all right at home there, all filling up the space. But that was a long time ago.
“Addie! You’re pacing!” Mommers wagged one arm behind her to shoo me away. “Do you need to pee?” She laughed and scooted closer to her keyboard and typed.
I laughed too. But I knew she was done talking to me for the night. She was absorbed in her computer chat. I went up into my cupboard with a book. That first night, as I lay on my chintzy mattress, I listened to the sounds outside—the cars and trucks and especially the trains. I wondered what Brynna and Katie were doing. They’d be asleep, of course, or should be. I pictured Katie’s pink fist curled next to her mouth, Brynna’s cheek resting on her folded hands. I thought of Dwight filling up the bedroom doorway with all his height. “Are they out, Addie?” he’d ask. I’d whisper back, “Been gone for an hour.” Then I’d reach up a hand and catch the kiss he’d blow me and tuck my fist under my own pillow before sleeping. I caught a pretend kiss there in the trailer. I wanted to keep them all close.
I woke in the night to the rumble and clack, and to Mommers slamming her fist down on the table and swearing about the noise. I opened my eyes and saw her leaning toward the bluish light of her computer screen. I drifted back to sleep wondering when the train would come again, and if it would be a passenger train singing by, or a freighter clacking and swaying. But a few nights later I was done waking for the trains. Me, I’m good at getting used to things—been doing it all my life.
A
cross the street from the trailer was what I called the Empty Acre. (I don’t know if it really was a whole acre, but I was just talking to myself anyway.) It was a big parking lot of potholes that no cars ever bothered to fall into because there was no reason to drive through there anymore. The old Big N store at the back of the lot was empty too, though Mommers said you used to be able to get your discounts and your hoagie sandwich there. (A hoagie is the same as a submarine sandwich, or a poor boy, or a hero or a grinder, depending on where you come from—or in my case, where your parents come from. Mommers had grown up in Ohio, and that’s where they call it a hoagie.)
At the front of the Empty Acre was the filling station and minimart. On my way home from my first day of school I discovered a big glass apartment that looked like a greenhouse off the back of the store. It jutted out with a long sloping roofline that nearly met the bumpy pavement. The leaves of plants and trees pressed themselves against the inside of the glass. But I could also see colors and fabrics and bamboo furniture inside. Somebody definitely lived there.
I went right into the minimart that afternoon to scope things out. It’s good to know your neighbors. Funny thing about the corner—it had more businesses than residences. In fact, pretty early on I figured out I was
it
—the one kid living where Nott Street crossed Freeman’s Bridge Road.
I checked out the shelves in the minimart—everything from marshmallows and onion soup mix to sunglasses and disposable diapers. Amazing what a little store can hold. I walked around the coffee counter and noted the doughnut case, the microwave and the minifreezer full of ice cream bars and quick snacks. A man pushed past me to slap a beef and bean burrito into the microwave. I smelled cigarettes on him—a different brand from Mommers’, but just as bad. I closed off my nose from the inside and took my next breath through my mouth.
“Late lunch, Mick?” A woman’s voice sang out over the hum of the oven. I turned and caught my first glimpse of Soula. She was sitting on a lawn chair just a few feet behind me. I had missed her while I was busy looking at all the food and trying not to smell the burrito guy. Soula blended in with the displays, the ones that sell suntan oil and camera film and announce chances to win trips to Hawaii. She looked like an enormous plastic doll in a big flowered party dress. Of course, there wasn’t any possible way Soula would have fit into a
small
dress, but this one billowed. A pair of pink plastic flip-flops matched her toenail polish. She was a perfect fit for that glass apartment out back, and I thought to myself, It has to be hers.
“Hey, Soula!” The burrito guy nickered back at her. “How ya feeling?”
“Good today,” she told him. She touched the sides of her black hair like she was adjusting a hat. “Four down and four to go,” she told the guy. She winked a perfectly lined eye at him.
Four
whats
? I wondered.
A skinny man at the register spoke. “Don’t let her fool you, Mick. She’s a terrible patient.” He filled a see through bin in front of him with matchbooks and smiled knowingly at Soula.
“Don’t be ratting me out, now, Elliot.”
“Be good to yourself and I won’t.” He grinned and shook a finger at her.
They laughed as Mick paid for his food. As soon as he was out the door, Soula tapped her foot out in front of her and asked, “So what do you know, Little Cookie?” She was looking straight at me.
I gulped. “Uh …well, I know you’re Soula and he’s Elliot.” I offered. “And that was Mick with the burrito. And he’s a smoker. I’m kind of a snoop,” I admitted.
They laughed hysterically. I looked back and forth between them. Elliot’s head was back, his mouth wide open. He had a golden filling in one tooth and it matched the little hoop earring in his left lobe. His skin was all freckles on freckles, even up into his short red hair. I didn’t think I’d been that funny, but maybe they were just looking for a reason to laugh, the way some people do.
“And who are you?” he finally asked.
“Addison Schmeeter,” I said. “Or just Addie.”
“You like your new place across the way, Addie?” Soula asked.
I nodded. It was nice to know I’d been noticed. “We were a little surprised,” I said. “The train, I mean.” Again they laughed, and so did I when I realized they’d probably watched us move in. Soula dabbed her eyes and pulled her bright pink lips into an
O
around her teeth like she was trying to stop laughing. She shook out a few more chuckles in spite of herself. “But I like this corner,” I said. “It’s got just about everything a person needs when ya think about it. I figure this minimart covers everything except the laundry, and the Laundromat’s right next door to me. By the way, do you know why it’s called the Heads and Roses Laundry Stop? What’s with the mannequin heads and the plastic roses in the front window?” I asked.
“Well . . .” Elliot cocked his head. “The place is owned by the Roses, as in
Mr
. and
Mrs
. Rose. As for the mannequin heads . . .” He winked at Soula. “All we can figure is, why not?” For the third time, they burst out laughing, and that made me laugh too.
Finally, Soula settled down to a giggle. “Don’t mind us, Little Cookie. We just love a good chuckle. And you’re right. This corner does have it covered. And if you need something, all you have to do is ask. Now, pick out a pocket of Welcome Pie,” she told me.
“Welcome Pie?”
“That’s right.” Soula pointed to the glass case next to the microwave. “Pick one and give it a spin in the micro-nuker.”
“Apple’s the best,” Elliot said.
“I didn’t bring any money,” I said.
Soula winked at me with her perfectly lined eye. “It’s on us. Welcome to the neighborhood, Cookie.”
M
ommers asked, “So who’s the fat woman?” She’d watched me cross Freeman’s Bridge Road.
“That’s Soula,” I told her. “I stopped by there today right after school to say hello. She gave me this—for free.” I bit into the apple pie pocket. The filling squeezed out the sides and I wolfed another bite to catch it before it dripped.
“Disgusting,” Mommers mumbled.
The warm apple goo ran a trail between my fingers. I licked it.
Mommers’ bathrobe hung open over a dingy T-shirt. Her hair was pressed flat on one side—sticking straight out on the other. Her mascara was smeared below both eyes and she drummed her fingernails against a can of diet cola. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and she’d just gotten up.
“Anyway, Soula lives out back of the shop. I saw the place. It’s called the Greenhouse and it looks like one, too. Full of plants. She said welcome to the neighborhood,” I told Mommers.
“Some neighborhood,” she mumbled.
“It’s not bad,” I said. “Anyway, what are we having for dinner tonight?”
“Dinner?” She shrugged. “I just woke up.”
I watched Mommers sit down in front of the old computer. She lit a cigarette and waited for the online service to connect. “This thing’s a piece of junk.” She tapped her finger hard on the mouse. “Addison, I don’t want you hanging around that stinking gas station like some poor little puppy, hear?”
“Uh-huh,” I said. But already I was thinking that I would anyway. I liked Soula and Elliot, and I liked the apple pie pocket.
Mommers mumbled something else about fumes and poor health.
I fanned the cigarette smoke and raised an eyebrow at her—something I do very well.
She said, “Oh don’t start.” But then she laughed a little and gave me a sideways grin.
I loved it whenever I could get a laugh like that out of Mommers. In those couple of seconds, our lives seemed normal.
I sat up in my bunk to write in my vocabulary notebook. Mommers had started me on it after she saw a TV show on helping kids enrich their language skills. See, she had the Love of Learning. I didn’t. She had said my father didn’t have it either, and that’s what had really got between them and wrecked their marriage. I don’t know if she was exactly right about all of that. Like I said, my father didn’t live long enough to leave me with much for memories. But Grandio always said that his son was a genius, especially when it came to machines. My father loved making things go. He died racing cigarette boats out on the Mohawk River—that’s the river that flows beneath Freeman’s Bridge.
If my daddy was a genius, it didn’t rub off on me. I have a terrible time with school stuff. But Mommers always says that if you just
pretend
to be smart people will believe that you are. Long after she’d stopped caring about the vocab book, I kept it going because I figured she was right. I liked it best when I could get the definitions from a real person. Webster’s dictionary confused me, and alphabetical order drove me nuts.
I wrote
mortgage
first because I’d been meaning to get that one down for a while—ever since we’d moved into the trailer. Dwight had told me what it was.
Mortgage
is what you pay back to the bank when you have borrowed money from them to buy a house. It’s a deal you make and you have to stick to it. The money to pay the mortgage came from Dwight, and that is the money Mommers used on something that wasn’t the mortgage. (It was kind of the same as what happened to the money for Picker’s Waste Removal.) The bank took back Dwight’s house, which meant the deal was ruined, and that’s why we had to leave. Of course, Dwight had moved out long before that. Mommers asked him for a divorce. He didn’t want that, but he finally gave in. We stayed at his house until Mommers messed up—big time. After all the court stuff, Katie and Brynna moved in with Dwight since he was their natural daddy.
When the judge decided my sisters should live with Dwight, I knew it was going to change my life. I bet my name never even came up in that courtroom. But the decision meant I’d soon change my address, my school, my friends, and worst of all, the shape of my family. Twist and turn.
Reprobate
is what I wrote next, and of course I knew the definition wasn’t really
Dwight
like Mommers had said. And here again was the nightmare of Webster’s: Once I finally found
reprobate
, which happened to be at the very bottom of one page, thank you, I forced my eyes to hang on to the teeny tiny letters. But then I had to look up
morally
and
unprincipled
, too. I held a three by five card under the words to keep them still. Putting it all together, I decided a reprobate was a low life loser, a person who didn’t follow the rules, which of course wasn’t the definition of Dwight at all.
I think Dwight tried the hardest of anybody.
There’s that saying about someone’s heart being in the right place, and that’s why I couldn’t blame Dwight for moving Mommers and me into the trailer. He only had one heart and it couldn’t be everywhere. He told me, “I can’t fix all of it, Addie, so I’m fixing the part I can.” I knew by the skin around his eyes turning pink that he could have cried.
“What are you doing tonight, Addie?” Mommers asked suddenly.
“Two entries for the vocab book,” I said. “
Mortgage
and
reprobate.
”
She looked up from her keyboard and said, “Hmm. Two words I could have done without this month.” She sighed. “Can you use ’em in a sentence?”
