“School!” she said. “I couldn’t do that. I was never smart like you.”
“Like me!” I snorted.
“Of course like you. Are you crazy? We’re all proud of you for getting in that special class for smart kids, and for doing so well on the drums.”
I almost laughed when she put the gifted class and band together in the same sentence, as if they were related. But I probably sounded just as nonsensical to Izzy when I talked about hair color.
“Dad always said you’d be the first person in the family to go to college,” Violet went on.
“Well, of course he would say that now. You and Sophia and Izzy haven’t been to college.”
“He said that when you were a baby. You picked up on everything so quickly. Mom said Izzy didn’t talk until she was three, but she didn’t have another baby to compare her with. She said if she’d had you first, she would have put Izzy in an institution.”
I laughed. That was the funny yet slightly wrong sort of comment I remembered my mom making. “News to me,” I said. “I thought you only kept me around for comic relief. That’s all anybody ever seemed to think I was good for.”
“Well, sure,” Violet said, “back when you were in third grade. But now you’re grown up.”
That, too, was news to me. My heart started pounding again. It knew what I had done to Will. My brain didn’t want to deal with it yet. But as Violet pointed out how old I was, my fear of having a boyfriend seemed immature. It might have worked for me in ninth grade.
Not now.
“This didn’t take as long as I thought,” Violet said, rescuing the last pair of panties from the sofa and twirling them around on one finger. “If we could get the kitchen counters and the stove cleared off, I could run to the store for groceries.”
I inhaled as if the house already smelled like Puerto Rican food instead of dust. “We could make carne guisada,” I said.
Her dark eyes flew wide open. “And pasteles? And—”
“Amarillos!” we both said at the same time with all the reverence of two hungry girls who hadn’t eaten fried plantains in months. If we made them, maybe Dad still wouldn’t eat them. I didn’t care anymore. I would eat them.
“Divide and conquer,” she said. “Kitchen or store?”
“Kitchen.” If cleaning would make me feel better about breaking up with Will, I still had a whole town to polish.
After the kitchen was in reasonable order, I went outside. As we’d cleaned, we’d thrown mounds of trash into the yard, which probably frightened the neighbors. I bagged it up and stacked it neatly by the curb. Then I raked the magnolia leaves. I was pleasantly surprised to see that grass was living underneath. With some rain in September, the yard might start to look like a yard again.
I crossed the street with my rake and looked at our house from a distance, really looked at it like a potential buyer would have viewed it if Dad had followed his original plan of flipping it. A previous owner had painted it an unfortunate dark brown, but it had good bones for someone who didn’t mind a funky 1950s bungalow with retro lines.
My heart thumped painfully again as I realized I was viewing this house as if I was Will, parked in his Mustang on the street, capturing the proportions with a pencil and a ruler.
“Uh-oh, what’s the matter?” Harper said beside me.
I jumped. I’d been so absorbed in my thoughts that I hadn’t heard her roll up on the sidewalk. She and Kaye straddled their bikes, watching me with worried eyes.
“We came to ask what was up with you and Will last night,” Kaye explained. “But your yard looks beautiful. Obviously something has gone horribly wrong.”
That’s when I broke down.
***
“I have a theory,” Harper said.
My crying jag was over, but she kept her arm around my shoulders, even though this must have practically dislocated her arm because I was seven inches taller than her. We sat on a handmade bench my dad had brought home and set under the magnolia tree, then lost under the leaves. Cleared of plant rubbish, it was a nice place to sit—or would have been, if the heat hadn’t been so oppressive.
Kaye stopped sweeping the sidewalk to circle her finger in the air, telling Harper to cut to the chase. In spite of my despair, I almost laughed at this interaction I’d seen play out between them countless times since third grade.
“Your sisters missed your mother,” Harper told me, “and they felt like your family wasn’t whole. Starting their own families was their way of getting back what they’d lost. The problem was, they were so young that it didn’t work. I mean, I get carried away buying art supplies and run out of lunch money. You”—she poked me—“can’t get up in the morning. Could you imagine one of us being the primary caretaker for somebody else?”
“No,” I said. Izzy seemed stable now, but I had seriously worried about her children at first. I still worried about Sophia’s baby.
“And the boys your sisters hooked up with are even worse,” Harper said. “They bailed on their girlfriends and their babies. Seems to me Izzy is doing a pretty good job putting her life back together, though.”
“Now she is,” I acknowledged. Two years ago was a different story.
“You’ve watched your sisters make mistakes. You’re younger, so you may have seen your mother leaving very differently from the way they saw it. You miss your mom, but instead of trying to fix your life by filling her shoes, you avoid further complications by sidestepping responsibility when you can. You have an allergic reaction when you do get put in charge. You stay out of any relationship at all.”
“But that’s a good thing,” I defended myself. “I’m a lot better off than my sisters.”
“But what if you don’t change?” Kaye asked. “At some point when you’re older, you’re going to look around and see that everybody is in a relationship while you’re alone. And pretty much everybody in your high school classes will have gone off to college.”
“I’m going to college,” I declared. “I’ll be a National Merit Scholar.”
Kaye raised her eyebrows skeptically. “Not if you don’t get your grades up and convince some teacher to vouch for you. I worry that you’re going to stay right here because you couldn’t be bothered to take the next step.”
“At least the house will be clean,” I said.
“True,” Harper said. “And maybe there will be other boys you can mess around with. But most people want a relationship sooner or later. Even those boys will move on while you stay put. And as for your relationship with Will . . .”
I held my breath, waiting, hoping, praying for Harper to give me some insight into how to fix this.
“I wouldn’t have paired you two up in a million years,” she said. “But now that I’ve seen you together, I get why you’re so compatible. You’re different from each other, but you each understand what makes the other tick. It would be a shame for you to let your knee-jerk reaction rule your life, and let him go.”
I shrugged. “Our time together was all a misunderstanding to begin with,” I said. “He misread me as girlfriend material. I misread him as a player. By the time we found out we were wrong about each other, it was too late.”
Kaye nodded sadly. “You’d already fallen in love with each other.”
“Well, I don’t know about him. That’s what he said, yeah. But I . . .” The full meaning of her words hit me. “Yeah, I’d already fallen . . . Oh, God.” I put my hands over my face, horrified that I was crying in front of them yet again.
Harper drew me closer on the bench. Kaye called, “Group hug!” and wrapped her arms around both of us. This was a little much in the heat, but I relaxed into their embrace and tried to stop panicking about Will.
Kaye knocked her booty against mine so I’d scoot over to make room on the bench. After I’d crushed Harper sufficiently, Kaye sat down, then stroked a
lock of hair out of my eyes with her middle finger. “Teen hygiene tip. If you try to get Will back today, bathe first. Guys love that.”
“Yeah, okay,” I grumbled.
“I agree with Harper,” she said. “After seeing you and Will together, I think you may be meant for each other. It’s obvious that he loves you. It would be a shame for your fear to be the only reason you let him go.”
We all turned as the front door opened. I hadn’t realized how late it had gotten—time for my dad to wake up. He called across the yard, “Lucita! What happened to the top four layers of the stuff in the house?”
***
Kaye and Harper left when Violet arrived in Dad’s truck with enough groceries for a feast. An hour later, she and Dad and I sat down to our first family dinner since we’d moved in, because we had cleared off the table.
“Lucita,” he mumbled between bites. “So good.”
“Thanks.” I wondered why he was into this meal now when he’d never wanted what I’d cooked before. Maybe the table made the difference. Or Violet. Or the fact that the meal was not offered with an air of desperate sacrifice.
“Violet,” he said. “Delicious. And—” He put his hand over hers on the table. In Spanish he told her that he was very glad she’d come home. He said he’d always thought she would return eventually. He’d wanted her to figure that out for herself. Love was a complicated thing, but that boy she had picked out would not be his choice for her. Then there was a series of epithets that involved Ricky’s private parts.
“I know, Dad.” Violet took a bite. “This house doesn’t seem like home, though, with Sophia and Izzy missing. I haven’t seen Izzy and the kids in months. Maybe I could cook again one day this week, and we could have them over, now that the house isn’t a death trap for the children and we’ve found all the chairs. I could drive up to get Sophia and the baby one weekend.” She gazed around the den/dining room/kitchen. “It would be kind of small in here for all of us, though.”
“The white house is for sale again,” I said casually.
Dad’s eyebrows shot up. Suddenly he looked more awake than I’d seen him in years. “Really?” The eager look settled into wistfulness. “I loved that house. I think about it a lot.”
“Me too,” Violet said.
“Me too,” I said.
“I looked forward to tackling that fountain,” he said. “Remember, in the atrium, with the mermaids?”
“I’ll bet it would be cheaper than it was before,” I said. “It’s been on the market a few times. Why don’t we buy it back?”
He laughed. “I wish. I work too much, lucita.”
“Yeah, you do,” I said. “Why? Izzy is stable now. Sophia is stable-ish.”
“Ish,” Violet echoed with a laugh.
“Violet will get there,” I said.
Violet snorted.
“And you don’t have to worry about me,” I told him. “I’ll get college paid for.”
“College!” he exclaimed. “I always said you would be the first one to go to college, but you’ve been hemming and hawing.”
“I decided I’m going,” I said.
“When did you decide this?”
“Today. I’m getting online and registering to take the SAT in a minute.” I had no doubt I could score high enough on the SAT to get a full ride to college, provided I could get really stressed out with responsibilities before test time. The way things with band and work and Will had been going, that shouldn’t be too hard.
“In the meantime, I would help you with the house,” I said.
“I would too,” Violet chimed in.
“I’ll only be here for a year before I leave for college,” I said, “but we could get a lot done.”
Dad put down his fork and nodded, staring into space. “I was about to sign up for another month of weekends at work. I didn’t know how to break it to you, lucita, but I was going to miss all your band performances at the ball games. It’s funny how you work so much that you don’t even have time to think about how much you’re working, or what you’re working for.”
“Yeah,” said Violet. “Sometimes when you’re in the thick of something, you lose perspective.”
I put my fist to my mouth and squeezed a sob back in. Talk about being in the thick of things. I’d been so caught up in my own childish way of dealing with my fears that I’d driven off my favorite pirate, maybe forever. But before that possibility settled into fact, I had to try to get him back.
I stood to take my plate to the sink. On my way, I stopped and kissed my dad on the cheek. “Please consider it. We’d rather have you home.”
***
I’d never been inside Will’s house, but he’d pointed it out to me on our tour of town last Wednesday. I rode my bike into his neighborhood, a newer development where the trees were small, the houses all looked the same, and there weren’t any unique architectural details for Will to draw. I felt a little sick as I laid my bike carefully on the lawn and walked up to the door. I put out a finger to ring the doorbell and noticed my hand was trembling.
Will’s mom was as tall as me, with Will’s worry line between her brows. She wore a tank top and shorts. Those clothes would have made sense if she was walking at the beach or working in the yard, but I was surprised she wasn’t freezing when she had the air-conditioning in the house set below zero. It seeped out, surrounding me and making me shiver as she said in her own clipped Minnesota accent, “Oh, hello. Will’s talked about you a lot. I’m afraid he’s asleep right now, though. He said he was feeling sick.”
“Sick?” I repeated. “Is he okay?”
His mom nodded. “I think he’s just homesick.”
I nodded too, because that seemed to be the thing to do. “Homesick.”
“There’s no cure for that but time,” she said sadly. “But thanks for coming by, Tammy. I’ll tell him you were here.” She backed me out of her house and onto her porch. She shut the door, sealing out my voice, before I could tell her my name wasn’t Tammy.
I stood there for a moment in the quiet night, listening to the breeze rattle the palm fronds. It was an evening for staying inside, where it was cool, and wishing you were back in Minnesota, away from me.
I walked down the sidewalk and picked up my bike. What else could I do? Yes, Will and I had argued, and we’d been genuinely mad at each other, with reason. But in the back of my mind, I suppose I’d assumed that we could fix it. We hadn’t flirted like we used to since the trouble began—it all started with that stupid title—but I’d thought we would get back there.
And now I knew we wouldn’t. I was such a poor replacement for his friends that I made him sick.
I got back on my bike and rode. The Sunday night was bustling with traffic. Folks were driving inland after a day at our beaches, one last weekend before Labor Day. Families had eaten one last meal out on the main drag and were packing into their cars to go home and prepare for work and school. I was riding the wrong way, heading downtown. I steered into the alley and propped my bike against the railing of the Crab Lab.
Employees kept the lights out on the restaurant’s back porch so they could do what they wanted without being seen from the alley. I was all the way up the steps before I could make out Sawyer’s shape in the darkness. When he saw me, he put down his beer. I walked into his open arms.
“Things didn’t work out with Will?” he asked, his breath warm in my ear. “You wouldn’t be hugging me otherwise.”
I sighed as I collapsed on the bench beside him. “I broke up with him.”
“Why?” Sawyer asked.
“Violet finally decided to come home, and we went to get her, and . . . I don’t know. I guess I started comparing Will and Ricky.”
“Will is not a shit like Ricky,” Sawyer said. “I am a shit like Ricky.”
This seemed like a new low of self-deprecation
, even for Sawyer. I nodded toward his beer. “Starting early, aren’t you? How many of those have you had?”
He didn’t respond to my question but asked, “What happened then?”
“I cleaned my entire house.”
“Oh, poor baby,” he cooed. “You are upset. I’ve got something for you.” He pulled a joint from his pocket. I watched him light it, closing his eyes against the smoke. He took a long toke and handed it to me.
I held it between my fingers and looked at it. This was what I needed: to forget a problem that couldn’t be solved. But my brain was stressed, which put my body in organization mode. It did not want this weed. I needed to take my hit so Sawyer’s pot didn’t burn down and go to waste, but every atom inside me screamed to hand the joint back.
Sawyer snatched it from me. When I looked at him in surprise, he was staring past me. I turned. Will was on the top step.
“That’s exactly what I thought,” Will said. He jogged down the stairs again.
“Go.” Sawyer nodded at Will, urging me to follow him. “Go, go, go.”
I ran after Will, leaping down the last two stairs in my effort to catch him before he reached his car at the end of the alley. Sweating in the hot night, I grabbed his elbow.
He stopped short and whirled to face me. “Don’t. I told you that I was done with you. You’re just like Beverly. When my mom said you came by, I thought maybe my instincts were wrong, but now I see I was right about you the whole time. I left town for five minutes and she was cheating on me. You and I have one little fight—”
“Little?” I broke in. “I put a lot of effort into that fight.”
He raised his voice for some reason. “—and you just move on like nothing happened, and go back to doing drugs and God knows what else with Sawyer De Luca.”
“I was not,” I said emphatically. “I was in the process of politely refusing a joint. Even if I had taken a hit, calling that ‘doing drugs’ makes it sound like I was shooting up heroin.”
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