Have Mercy (Have a Life #1)

by Maddy Wells

  “She doesn’t mind.”

  “Have you ever asked her?”

  Actually, I hadn’t. But I thought she figured it made her hip and she never complained.

  “What do you think I should call her? Mommy?” I snorted.

  I didn’t expect the slap and it fell short of its mark. “She never said she didn’t like it,” I whined.

  “Well, I don’t like it. And I didn’t ask to be part of this, but like it or not I am. We’re in this together for now.”

  I followed Granny O’Reilly to the car and we drove all the way home and were parked in front of our house before she said anything. She turned off the ignition and we sat in the car, watching Mr. Hennings suck down a beer. “This is a weird time,” she said, finally. “You have real perverts running around and everyone wants to make an example of someone. That’s all it is, you know. They need to show they’re on top of things.”

  The way Granny O’Reilly wouldn’t look at me scared me. “When is Jane…my mother…coming home? She said she was only going to be charged, and she would be back. Couldn’t she get the bail?”

  “The bail wasn’t the problem,” Granny O’Reilly said.

  “Where is she? Why won’t she call me?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Complicated how?”

  Here’s the thing. Of all the things I hate about adults the biggest is their tendency to think that just because someone’s not a thousand years old they are too stupid to understand anything.

  “She doesn’t want the media swarming around. Let it die down a little.”

  Granny O’Reilly got out of the car and went to the edge of the driveway and kicked a beer can—which had slipped through Mr. Henning’s fence onto our driveway—out into the gutter. Mr. Hennings got out of his chair and stood by the porch railing, then let out a huge belch.

  “What are you staring at, you old fool,” Granny O’Reilly said. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  Chapter 22

  Granny O’Reilly closed herself in Jane’s bedroom. I heard her talking on a phone to her husband Ron. I couldn’t tell if she was on her cell or the land line by Jane’s bed so I ran downstairs and picked up the wall receiver in the kitchen. Dial tone. I ran back upstairs and lay by the crack at the bottom of Jane’s door.

  “…unfortunate incident… in Akron yet?… well thank god for that… a disaster… worse than you can imagine… the election, yes I know… with her father?… he has a wife and kid down there… why should the wife take her in…puhleese … a nice enough kid… can’t just leave her here… yes, a liability… yes, I’ll figure something out…”

  She asked him what was going on at Channel 37, the cable station where she was the fake judge. She was worried that someone named Laura was going to take her fake place on the fake bench while she was gone. “I don’t care what kind of contract I have,” she said. “Once they get used to seeing someone else you know any contract can be broken.”

  She emerged from the bedroom suddenly—I didn’t hear her say goodbye—and almost tripped on me. I was sitting cross-legged by the door but she was so preoccupied it didn’t occur to her why I was there.

  “Why aren’t you doing your homework?” she said.

  No one had asked me that question in so long I didn’t have an answer.

  “Get going,” she said. She clapped her hands and went back into Jane’s bedroom and

  turned on the television while I walked to my bedroom in the back of the house and opened my social studies book trying to remember what we were even talking about in class. It seemed so long ago, and since I was a liability what did it matter anyway. In a minute she was at my door.

  “How do you access cable in this house?”

  “We don’t have cable,” I said. Jane never got around to ordering cable when we first moved

  in, and we hardly ever watched television anyway.

  “How can you not have cable?” She sat down on the bed next to me. “Every house in America has cable.”

  “We can still get a couple of stations,” I said. “Use the ‘seek’ button.”

  “PBS is not technically a television station,” she said. “Where’s your DVD player? How do you watch Judge Jen?”

  Judge Jen was, of course, Granny O’Reilly’s television show. She sent DVDs of the show every week which Jane threw away without even opening. My face got hot. “I download stuff when I want to see something.”

  “I see.” She stood up and scowled. “What’s that noise?”

  Tim had let himself into the Trap and was playing some scales.

  “That’s the guitarist in my band,” I said. “We’re supposed to be rehearsing.”

  “You can’t rehearse until you’ve done your homework.”

  “It’s only for an hour. Jane always lets me practice for an hour a night.”

  “Well, you can do your hour after you’ve finished your homework.”

  “He has a job and anyway his father won’t let him come later.”

  “That’s because his father cares about him. Is the guitarist that boy?”

  I nodded.

  “Tell him to go away.” And with that, she left.

  I mean, could it get any more depressing? I’m almost sixteen years old and suddenly a bunch of strangers are telling me what to do. First that witch, Mrs. Valliere, and now my grandmother. I mean, grandmothers are supposed to spoil their grandkids, right? What did they think? That I didn’t know how to take care of myself? Who did they think took care of everything when it was just me and Jane?

  I took out my phone and called Jane again but pressed end call after the first ring. Then I called The Griffin. It rang a couple of times then went abruptly to voice mail so I knew he’d seen it was from me and pressed Ignore. Tears started running down my cheeks. I couldn’t help it. “What’s that, a tear? Cut it out!” The Griffin said when he was here and I was so happy to see him.

  Cut it out. Yeah, right.

  I marched down to the Trap. Kirby was behind the Pink Fade and did a bada bing on the cymbals to greet me. Tim smiled when he saw me then put his head down again to concentrate on his chords. I picked up my Fender, turned up the volume and we began to play his new song, Hole in the Sky. After we ran through it twice, I picked up the mike and began to sing:

  The world’s so black and blue

  There’s nothing left to say

  Words just pass me by

  I gotta get away

  There’s a beam of light

  It’s blue and bright

  It’s coming from a hole in the sky

  Chapter 23

  Granny O’Reilly came down to the Trap, listened to us finish Hole in the Sky then said, “Okay, everyone out. You have your own homes to go to.”

  “My band always eats with us,” I said.

  “They can eat at home. I’m sure their parents have lovely meals waiting for them in their lovely homes. You’ve had a very stressful day and you need to relax,” she said.

  “This is it,” I said. “This is what I do to relax.”

  “Who are you?” Granny O’Reilly asked Captain Kirby. “I haven’t seen you before.”

  “Janet Kirby, ma’m,” she said.

  “Tell her who you are!” I commanded. I couldn’t believe Captain Kirby was being so docile. If there was one person who I thought could stand up to Granny O’Reilly, Captain Kirby was it.

  Captain Kirby put her sticks in her back pocket. “I gotta go. My ma’s waiting for me. ‘Good night m’am.”

  “Me, too,” Tim said. “We got finals tomorrow. Don’t you have to study, Mercy? Well, you’re so smart you probably don’t have to. Good night, Your Honor.”

  I watched them leave with my mouth open. How could they leave me here with this harridan?

  Granny O’Reilly smiled with a corner of her mouth and pushed the button to close the Trap door.

  “Your friends have manners,” she said.

  “They’re not my friends,” I said, w
oodenly, “They’re my band.” I didn’t remember ever feeling so alone. That hole in the sky looked inviting.

  “Be ready to eat dinner in an hour. In the meantime, study for your finals. You didn’t tell me you were having final exams. But, of course, it’s the end of the year. I should have thought.”

  She wandered off to the kitchen, yakking about good manners, and I went up to my room to try to study Social Science, the only class I had any hope of acing. And why should I care, I thought, about social studies or anything. I had written off school in bullet points already. Put it and all my classmates in a box to be left in the bathroom of the bus station before I boarded the bus for Houston. Leave it right next to the box for Captain Kirby and the box for Tim. I shouldn’t have trusted them. I couldn’t trust anyone. I knew that and let myself be fooled. It wouldn’t happen again.

  My stomach was spazzing so bad and I felt so sad and I was sweaty for some reason. I went to the window and pushed it all the way open. As I leaned out a stone hit me in the chest.

  “Whoops!” Captain Kirby giggled. “Sorry. I meant to hit the window. Out of practice, I guess.”

  “You okay?” Tim asked, stepping out from behind a bush.

  “I thought you deserted me.”

  “Are you crazy?” Tim said. “We wouldn’t leave you alone with the Judge.”

  “You mean it?” I said then started crying. “You guys are…”

  “Shut up,” Captain Kirby said. “You’re getting your period. Meet us out here at ten o’clock.”

  Chapter 24

  Granny O’Reilly made some canned soup and sandwiches for dinner and kept apologizing for it. “I’m really a gourmet cook, you know?” she said. “But you have the worst stocked kitchen I’ve ever been in.”

  Tell me about it, I thought, although I missed Jane’s non-tasty no-hassle non-cooking. We ate out half the time and we never had conversations about the food which was fine by me. “Really, Gran,” I said, “It’s okay. We usually have nothing in the house.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Jane shops every day for food, just enough for that day, that’s why there’s nothing in the fridge.”

  “Puhleese,” she said. Her cell phone rang and she squinted at it. “I have to take this.” She went into the living room and I strained to hear her side of the conversation. “Well, I can’t afford to be out of the loop for an entire week. I may take her out of school early. Yes, she’ll miss her finals but what’s going to happen to the girl if I lose my job too? Then what?”

  She was talking to Mrs. Valliere.

  “Her moron of a father? Puhleese.”

  She came back to the table and stared at me.

  “Everything okay?” I asked.

  “Can you get Channel 37 Akron on your computer?”

  “We get it all the time,” I said. “For your show.”

  “Bullshit, but it’s not your fault. I need to see if they ran a re-run today.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I went to my bedroom, came back with my laptop and googled Channel 37 Akron, because of course we’d never looked at it once in the entire time I’ve been alive. “Hey, nice website,” I said. There was a feature story on a Pennsylvania teacher (Jane! Granny’s husband Ron would be calling soon) turning herself in for corrupting the morals of a 17 year old boy. I scrolled down. There was Granny O’Reilly on the left in a black robe looking totally fake judicial. “Judge Jen, Today at 4!” in a banner under her photo. “Hey, look! It’s you.”

  She smiled a little then frowned. “What’s that?” She pointed to a hyper-texted headline—“Girl Finds Out Her Aunt Is Her Real Mother”—under her headshot. “Click on that.”

  And as soon as I did, she let out a wail. “That’s not my show!”

  I started the video and a young blond woman in a black judge’s robe was listening thoughtfully to two sisters fight over a girl both claimed to be their daughter.

  “Jesus, couldn’t they do re-runs for a week?” Granny O’Reilly asked.

  “She’s pretty,” I said.

  “Of course she’s pretty. She’s thirty years younger than me. But she doesn’t have wisdom, you know? The reason I’m good, the reason my ratings stay high, is because I’ve lived a long life and I’ve seen things, you know, and I’ve been through a lot. Like your mother. You have no idea what she put me through and look what she’s doing to me now! But that’s why I can get up on that bench and be smart about people. Laura can’t be smart about people, she hasn’t lived yet.”

  I actually didn’t know what she was talking about, although she sounded a lot like Mr. Dow, but she was so upset I actually felt sorry for her. It looked like the audience was having a really good time. So were the sisters. Even if Laura wasn’t as wise as Granny O’Reilly, she seemed to be a lot funnier. “Look! Oh my god, she’s going to let the daughter decide!” Judge Laura brought the daughter out to ask her who she wanted to live with and the daughter kissed both women and the sisters started hugging each other and all three were hugging each other and crying and kissing and the audience was crying and the Judge was dabbing at her eyes and Granny O’Reilly looked like she was going to be sick.

  “I can’t believe this!” Granny O’Reilly said. “I’m going to lose my show if don’t get back to Akron like immediately.”

  I turned off the computer. “You can go,” I said. “I’m finished with exams in two days and the rest of the week is just hanging around for the seniors’ commencement which we’re all supposed to go to.”

  “I can’t leave you here alone, can I?”

  “I’m dropping out of school in January anyway,” I told her. “To live with The Griffin in Texas.”

  “Really? He said it was okay for you to come?”

  “Of course. I’m his daughter, aren’t I?”

  “You can take a plane right to Akron as soon as you’re finished with school. I mean, it’s not like you’re a little kid.”

  “No,” I said, “I’m not a little kid. Definitely not a little kid.”

  “You seem mature.” She looked around the house. “I can’t imagine that your mother kept things going around here. I think you probably carried a lot of the load. Knowing her, that is, am I right? What was she thinking going to bed with a seventeen year old? Look at the mess she made for me. How stupid can you get?”

  “He told her he was eighteen.”

  “Why couldn’t she be like other mothers? And just have affairs with regular old boring men like everyone else?”

  It was what I’d asked myself a lot of times. I’d named us the Two Cool Society, but if cool meant doing things no one else dared to do then it was Jane who was cool not me. I was only along for the ride.

  “You mean men like my grandfather?” I asked. I met him once when I was a little kid. Then he died. “Was he boring?”

  “No, dear, your grandfather was the coolest.”

  “The coolest?”

  “Yes.

  “What about Ron? Is he cool?”

  She laughed. “Ron has traits that wouldn’t seem appealing when you’re fifteen but seem wonderful the older you get. I can’t explain.”

  ”That’s okay,” I said. I would put Ron and Granny O’Reilly in a box marked Open When Fifty-Five.

  “You’d better study for your exams, Mercedes,” she said. “Things keep getting more complicated. I’ll sleep on it and we’ll talk about what to do tomorrow. Frankly, I’m not sure how I would explain you in Akron. Reputation is everything in the media. One false step you’ve lost all credibility. And there’s Ron, of course. He’s thinking of running for the Senate. Who would I say you are?”

  “Your granddaughter?”

  “No, I couldn’t do that.”

  We said good-night and I went up to my room and lay on my bed looking up at the ceiling and wondering where Jane was hiding until ten o’clock when I climbed out the window and hopped on my bike to join Tim and Captain Kirby at the corner.

  Chapter 25

  �
�Where did you get the bike, Kirby?” I asked her. She was riding a Fezzari Fore CR5 road bike which I knew for a fact cost five thousand dollars. The guy at Milltown Chain wouldn’t even let me touch it when I went in to get the gears on my own bike adjusted.

  “Milltown Chain,” she said. “Test drive. Are we going to conversate or are we going to make a plan?”

  Tim kissed me and we all mounted our bikes and sped out to Sebastian’s Pizza on Route 11. Tim, who actually had some money from his job, paid for a pizza with everything and our sodas which we took to an outside table.

  “The way I see it,” Tim said, “You only have two more days of school, then you can leave. You can tolerate her for two days, can’t you?”

  “You got to stay to the end,” Captain Kirby said, “Or the whole year doesn’t count.”

  “I’m leaving anyway in January, so who cares?”

  “You’re a moron if you do that.”

  “But then, I have to go live with her. In Ohio.”

  “In Ohio?”

  “They won’t let me live by myself or with Jane without adult supervision.”

  “’They’ being Mrs. Valliere,” Captain Kirby said. “She thinks I’m your cousin. That could be helpful.”

  “She also thinks she knows you from someplace. Does she?”

  “Our paths may have crossed,” Captain Kirby said, concentrating on getting extra cheese onto her slice of pizza. “I’m in the system.”

  “Well, the question is,” Tim said, “Can you live with it for two days, or are you gonna leave now?”

  “I don’t think she’s going to stick around much longer,” I said. “She doesn’t want to be with me any more than I want to be with her. I mean, I don’t think she even knew what I looked like when she got here. She guessed who I was because I look like Jane. She has this television show she’s the star of that she’s freaking out about. I think Mrs. Valliere is the problem.”

  “You’ve seen the last of her,” Captain Kirby said.