“Nothing.” Aunt Zalea mostly ignored her husband. And her children.
“Do you know if she went over to visit my parents?” I had asked my Aunt Zalea, my mom’s sister, to check in with them since no one was answering my calls again, but I had never heard back from her.
“No. I’m sure she didn’t go see your mom. She’s been in the kitchen for days, trying to make weed mouthwash, and it tastes so bad and smells rancid. It’s been taking up all her time.”
“Your parents are nuts,” I told her.
“I know. I’m so glad to have a normal person in my life,” she said. I started to feel better about our argument, but she quickly let me know that she meant her boyfriend, not me. “I love Hunter so much. I don’t know what I’d do without him.”
It made me get a little nervous. I didn’t think it was a good idea for Maia to get too serious about her high school boyfriend. Hunter was fine, but Maia was going places. I didn’t want him and their relationship to hold her back. “Yeah,” I said, very careful again. “It’s nice to have someone in your corner. I bet he really supports you going away to school too, since I’m sure he loves you just as much as you love him. He wants what’s best for you, right?”
“Uh-huh.” She sounded distracted. “Jolie, don’t do any more college stuff for me, ok?”
“Ok. I won’t, without talking to you first. I realize I should have asked you, and I’m sorry.”
We hung up with me rubbing my forehead. I should have told her that I was going to write those emails—she was totally correct, I should have. I had overstepped, acted like I would have with Nola, instead of remembering that Maia was an adult, practically. My headache grew a little. I didn’t like how that conversation had gone. She hadn’t sounded right.
“Your cousin?” Luca asked. He had been typing on his own phone while I talked, but since he was only five feet away, of course he could hear every word.
“I sent in stuff to the colleges she applied to without telling her. I was trying to be proactive, like your friend said we should be at the college meeting. Maia didn’t appreciate it.” I closed my eyes for a moment. “I shouldn’t have done that without asking her. But I’m worried that she’s going to miss out.”
“I get it. You want to help someone, so maybe you stepped on toes. Like if you got someone’s car repaired because you were worried about her.” He got up and made his way back over to the couch.
“Exactly like that,” I answered. I scooted closer. “Did I ever say thank you, by the way?”
“You did, very unhappily. Put your head down here.” He pointed to his lap.
“I thought we weren’t going to get into any penis stuff.”
“I’m not asking you to blow me, Jolie. Lay your head down and I’ll help you with your headache.” It was pounding away. I put my head on Luca’s lap and he started gently rubbing my temples. “Does that feel good?”
“Mmmm…”
“I guess so.”
It was so relaxing, so close to him, so warm and cozy, that I thought I might go into a trance. “Luca? I think I should go to bed. I’m going to fall asleep.”
“That’s ok.”
My last coherent memory of the evening was Luca’s finger tracing gently over my lips as he whispered goodnight.
∞
My foot slipped in the mud and I swore under my breath. I was practicing not doing it out loud while I ran, so that I would be out of the habit of using inappropriate language while exercising by the time track and field season started. It was just not good to yell “damn” and “fuck” while wheezing along next to a bunch of fourth graders.
“What did you say?” Chad asked. He ran backwards along the trail to me, back to where I was barely making it up the slope, and somehow he didn’t fall on his ass as he did it. We were finally doing our run together before my faculty meeting, and it was as bad as I had forecasted. He had been waiting for me, slowing down, encouraging me to keep going. I wanted to kill him, him and his positivity.
“Nothing,” I panted. “Didn’t say anything.”
He jogged in place while I tried to move forward. “Did you slip again? You really need new shoes, Jolie. Have you thought about how many miles you’ve put on those?”
“No,” I panted. When I thought about running shoes, I only thought about how expensive they were and how much I dreaded putting them on my feet because it meant I’d be doing this.
“Your shoes are probably why you hurt your ankle before,” Chad said, not even winded in the least.
“What?” I didn’t understand, then remembered how I had lied to him about how I had hurt myself in the first place. I hadn’t wanted to mention flailing on a wet sidewalk while I avoided a drunk guy mauling me; falling while exercising had sounded better. “Yeah, hurt it hiking. It’s fine.” It was killing me, currently, but I was gritting my teeth and bearing it as well as I could.
“How many miles do you usually do, again?” he asked, looking at me curiously.
I wiped my forehead with my t-shirt sleeve. “Enough.” I didn’t have sufficient air for a lot of speech.
Chad took it as an opportunity to talk to me, instead. He talked about running for a while, war stories about pounding through injuries and training in terrible conditions, which I guessed was supposed to inspire me. He told me stories about his students, which were much more interesting, and made me glad that I taught second grade instead of middle school, because they sounded like privileged little hellions. Then he moved to other topics.
“You’ve met my wife Kelsey, haven’t you?”
“Uh…” I huffed, thinking. “Maybe. Yes, came to a meet.”
“That’s right, last spring.” We ran a little. “We’ve separated.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“It’s really hard,” he sighed. “She says it’s not me, it’s her.”
Sure.
“She moved in with a roommate about a month ago,” Chad continued. “A very good friend of hers. Just friends. Do you ever kiss your friends?” he asked me suddenly.
My mind went to Luca. “Uh…” I said again. Even exhausted and with my ankle feeling like someone was stabbing it with a knife, when I thought of Luca, I got all strangely quivery.
“Like your friend, the kindergarten teacher. Do you ever kiss? Because I saw my wife kiss her roommate. It looked like, well, their mouths were open.”
“Nope, never kissed Lanie like that.” Maybe the issue in their marriage really was her, and her liking to French her “friend” rather than her husband.
“I didn’t think so,” Chad said sadly.
“Sorry,” I told him. We kept running. I did feel sorry for him, because he was a nice man, just like I had told Luca. He kept talking about his wife, whom he had started dating in high school. He seemed pretty lost.
“Everyone tells me to get back out there right away. Do you do dating apps?”
I shook my head.
“I’ve been out a few times. Maybe ten, fifteen.”
I stumbled again, but it was from shock. This guy was still married, and women were going out with him? “Already dating?”
“It’s been almost a month since my wife moved out,” he reminded me.
In less than a month, he’d gotten over her enough to go out with 10 to 15 women? And 10 to 15 women were jumping up out of their chairs to go out with him? What the actual hell? The one “date” I’d had in the past four years was when I propositioned a man in a bar and got thrown up on.
“You doing ok?” Chad asked, looking down at my ankle. I nodded curtly. “I was going to ask about your friend, the kindergarten teacher we were talking about. Is she available?”
I stopped feeling sorry for him. He wasn’t nice—he was a player, just like every other guy. “Taken,” I said shortly. I was sure she would be soon, when her own roommate realized that he was already living with the perfect woman for him.
“All the pretty ones are,” Chad sighed. “I hope I find someone soon.”
&n
bsp; By mistake, my foot went in front of his and he stumbled too. Totally by mistake.
In my defense, I was not at my best self. I hadn’t slept well the night before and the whole day I had been close to nodding off, my head hurting, and pretty out of it. The phone had rung in the living room at about one in the morning, jerking me out of my dreams. I had woken up in my bedroom, totally confused by my whereabouts because the last thing I had known, I had been on the couch with Luca. He had left a note that I’d found by my coffee machine later in the morning, saying he had put me to bed. And right now, despite the pain of running, I got shaky and bubbly inside again as I thought of “bed” and “Luca” together. I stumbled again on the trail but dodged Chad’s hand as it came to my elbow. “Fine!” I snapped at him.
When I’d heard the phone in the middle of the night, I had leapt out of bed with my heart pounding. A call at that time was never a good thing. And when I heard my stepfather, Ron, on the other end, I freaked out that something else had happened to my mom. But he was only calling to let me know that he was going to drive to Washington. My uncle, Maia’s dad, was sitting in jail up there because of a little dust-up after he was denied crossing into Canada. Despite what he thought about the Constitution and the Treaty of Paris, the Canadian authorities had other ideas about their border and turned him back, again. My uncle had driven away and gotten into a bar fight and Ron was going to bail him out.
“After I spring him, I’ll make a weekend of it,” Ron said to me over the phone. “I haven’t been up that way in years.”
“Wait, why are you calling me?” I had asked, trying to wake up. “What does that have to do with me?”
“I said, I’m going away for the weekend. Your mother needs someone here.”
And apparently, that person was supposed to be me. “But why are you calling me now, in the middle of the night?” I asked.
“Is it?” Ron had asked me, surprised. Not having a job or responsibilities decreased his reliance on things like clocks and calendars.
“Are you worried about leaving Mom alone with Kayla? You don’t think she can take care of her?” I’d asked him, and he hadn’t wanted to answer, but it was a yes. Even Ron now seemed aware that my mom wasn’t able to care for my youngest sister alone. I hadn’t been able to go back to sleep after hanging up with him, so I’d spent the rest of the night worrying about them, and deciding that I would have to drive home and see things for myself. It would be good to get Kayla and Nola together and for us to visit my mom. And now that my car was running well, I didn’t need to be nervous about driving so far. I got lost in thought again as I huffed along the trail, ignoring Chad and worrying about my mom and my little sister.
“Watch it!” Chad grabbed my elbow and pulled me away from a tree root.
“Thanks.” I stopped, and put my hands on my knees. “You go ahead. I need to walk.”
He stopped too. “You can keep it up! Only about another mile.” He ran in place, and smiled encouragement. “Let’s go, Jolie!”
“No. Go.” I pointed down the trail. “I’ll meet you.” Chad shrugged and took back off at about double the speed we had been crawling along at together, and I picked my way carefully back down to the school, tired, sweaty, and aching in various parts of my body. Then I cleaned myself up for the interminable faculty meeting. Lanie and I kept ourselves occupied by putting quarters in a bag whenever one of the admins said one of their dumb edu-babble buzzwords, and playing that game was the only thing that kept me going.
I practically stumbled home later that night to Nola, and paid the babysitter who had picked her up from school a sum that practically equaled my next rent payment. It seemed like years had passed instead of just one day. As I crawled into bed, I sent off one last message, to Luca: “Long day. I’m exhausted. Talk to you tomorrow?”
He wrote back, right away. “Yes, tomorrow. I’d like to hear your voice.”
And I went to sleep, and dreamed of that.
Chapter 11
Well, fuck. I looked around my mom and stepdad’s apartment, my mouth hanging open. “Mom…what?”
“I know, it’s a little messy,” she said, her hands fluttering around like they always had when she got nervous.
“A little messy” was incorrect. Looking like a scary junkyard, yes. Like no one should be living there, let alone my mom and little sister, definitely. I wanted to kill Ron, kill him dead. But he was already up in Washington to bail out my uncle, and then heading off to party with him for their weekend away.
And I was here at my parents’ apartment, horrified at what had happened to the place since I had last seen it, when Nola and I had left on the day after Christmas. Food dried on plates, trash everywhere, piles of clothes and papers and junk, and dirt. It was just dirty. I didn’t understand how it could have gotten so bad in less than two months, because I had cleaned it top to bottom right before we had left. “Mom…”
“Some of Ron’s friends stayed with us for a few weeks,” she explained.
My eyes went right to Kayla. I knew a lot of Ron’s friends, and she shouldn’t have been around them. Maybe that was why Ron and my mom hadn’t been answering my calls.
“You know how Ron is,” my mom said vaguely. “When will he be back?”
“Sunday,” I told her. Nola and I had driven up after school today, so I would only have Saturday and most of Sunday to get the apartment back into shape. And obtain a weapon so I could kill Ron when he came home, if I didn’t do it with my bare hands.
Nola and Kayla had already run into her corner of the living room to look at toys, and they were happily engaged with whatever they had found in the mess back there. But I couldn’t let Nola stay here. Or my mom, or my sister. “Mom, you have to pack a bag for the two of you. You’ll come sleep at the motel with us tonight, ok?” Because yes, I had sprung for that too, on top of all the gas to get us up to my hometown. Although the car did seem to blow through less fuel now that Luca had gotten it all fixed.
Luca. Nope, I would not think of him at this moment. We had been talking every day, and writing back and forth. Despite sternly telling myself not to, I did start thinking about him, about some funny things he had said. I wondered what he was doing tonight before I snapped back to the dirty apartment I was standing in.
“Jolie, we don’t need to sleep anywhere else,” my mom was saying. “We’re fine here. Are you girls hungry after your drive? I can fix you something.”
I wouldn’t eat anything out of that kitchen and Nola certainly wasn’t allowed to. “We’ll go out to eat, all of us. Has Kayla had dinner? Have you?”
“I’m hungry!” my little sister called. A pile of old records, vinyl LPs that Ron still liked to listen to, tipped off a chair and fell with a crash on to the floor.
“We’re out of here,” I announced. “Mom, pack, please.”
I got the three of them set up with a very late dinner, the best my budget would allow, and I went out to the parking lot to start making calls and sending messages. My sisters, my brothers, my aunt, and my mom’s old friends—I called everyone I could think of to come to the apartment the next day to help me clean so it would be habitable for my mom and Kayla. Everyone who bothered to answer me was busy and couldn’t make it, but most of them, including my siblings, just ignored me and my appeal for help. Finally, Maia called me back and agreed to come and watch my mom and the girls the next day, so at least I wouldn’t have to worry about them being in the mess while I literally debugged it.
“Maia, have you been over there, to their apartment? Have you seen how they’ve been living?”
“No. Not since you were here at Christmas,” she admitted.
“Did you know that Ron’s friends were staying with them?”
“My mom may have mentioned something to me. I probably should have told you.”
“Yeah, probably,” I said. I rubbed my forehead against the headache. I had asked a lot of people to check in on my mom and Kayla, including my cousin. I had been hoping I coul
d trust them to keep an eye on things and let me know if it wasn’t going well, but I hadn’t done my part of hounding them to make sure they were doing what I had asked. Clearly, we had all failed in this situation, and thinking about the apartment and Kayla in it, I felt a wash of guilt that made me almost nauseated.
“Sorry,” Maia said. “Is it that bad?”
“It’s bad,” I said shortly.
“I’ll help you tomorrow. Sorry,” she repeated.
“Great. Thanks.”
“Everything ok, Jolie?” my mom asked when I came back into the restaurant. Their table was three down and one over from the table where I’d been sitting when I told Ty that I was pregnant, a few years before. I turned my body in the bolted-down chair so that I wouldn’t have to look right at it.
“Everything’s great,” I said, and picked at a French fry. I didn’t have any appetite. “Just great.” Kayla and Nola were yawning over their little burgers and it was time to go. It wasn’t much later that the four of us were back at the motel, jammed in the double bed that was supposed to be just for me and Nola. Her feet were in my stomach as I clung to the edge of the mattress for a while, but then I gave up and went out to sit in my car, out of the tiny, stuffy room that smelled like cigarettes even though it was supposed to be non-smoking. I brought my phone with me to make a call.
“Hi,” Luca answered. He almost always picked up right away. “I thought I might hear from you sooner. How was the drive?”
“Ok. The car ran great.”
“We know who to thank for that,” he congratulated himself.
I hadn’t given him any money yet, not one thin dime. Not one penny. “I know how much I owe you, and I’ll pay you.” I sighed. “Soon.”
“I’m not worried about it. What’s wrong? Why does your voice sound like that?”
I poured out how worried I was. How dirty the apartment was, how Ron was letting his friends stay over. “He shouldn’t. He really shouldn’t. They shouldn’t be around Kayla.”
“Why? What’s the matter with them?”
I was quiet for a moment while I thought of how to say it. “A few of them behaved pretty inappropriately with me. I was a lot older, but I’m afraid they’d do it to her, too. She’s too little to know how to handle them.”
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