by Laura McNeal
I had nothing to say to this. I looked hard at the sulfur streetlight on the other side of the parking lot, which was the same noxious color he shone on our life. I knew that my father did practical things and my mother did creative things, but I thought that was okay with both of them.
“Do you want to get something to eat?” my father asked. He spoke softly, as if all that anger could be forgotten now.
“No,” I said.
“So you just want me to take you home.” There was an edge to his voice again, and I knew he thought I was being a pill. I was a pill. I was a pill so big he couldn’t swallow it.
“I guess,” I said. I wondered where he was staying the night. He started the car, and in the moment that he began to drive slowly across the parking lot, the door to the Café Chartreuse opened and two people stepped out. One was a woman, and the other was Robby. I hoped that if I kept my mouth shut, my father wouldn’t recognize Robby, but the streetlight shone fully on their faces as we approached.
“Hey. Who’s that with Robby?” my father asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. Mary Beth had glanced into our car, and so had Robby. We were trapped.
My father stopped the car and rolled down both of our windows. “I thought that was you, Robby,” he said. “Sorry I missed your birthday party.”
“No problemo,” Robby said. Mary Beth was standing at a slight distance from Robby with her hands in the pockets of her coat. She looked as if she were hoping to remain anonymous, but my father stuck his hand out the window in her direction and said, “Pleased to meet you. I’m Robby’s uncle, Glen DeWitt.”
“Mary Beth,” she said, smiling as she had when she was handing out slices of Robby’s cake. It was a reserved, strictly courteous smile. She offered it to me and nodded slightly.
“Enjoying the Fallbrook nightlife, huh?” my father asked.
“I just got off work,” Mary Beth said.
“How’s Paul doing?” my father asked, indicating the café and Mr. Eckert with a little nod. I wondered if my father had ever complained, when he was at the café without me, about what a drag it was to have a wife and a child, something Mr. Eckert might have remembered when I told him my father had moved out.
“Oh, he’s fine,” Robby said. “He asked about you.”
This led nowhere, maybe because my father knew people in town weren’t likely to take his side. There was an awkward pause, and then my father said, “So where are you headed now?”
I thought this was a little nosy, but Robby looked unperturbed, maybe even glad to lay out his plans. “I promised to show Mary Beth three things in Fallbrook she didn’t know existed but that she will definitely like.”
“Three?” I asked.
“That sounds ambitious,” my father said.
“I lack no confidence,” Robby said, and this appeared to be true. When he raised a hand to wave at us, Mary Beth waved and followed him to the car under the pepper tree, leaving me alone again with my father.
“So where are you staying tonight?” I asked, and then regretted it, not really wanting to imagine his preferred life.
“Our new condo,” he said.
“Our what?”
“A condo in San Diego. We sold a little triplex in Scottsdale and needed the other leg of a ten thirty-one exchange, so I thought, hey, why not buy myself something that would be a good investment and keep me within striking distance of my little girl? I was hoping you’d come and stay with me for the weekend, see what kind of furniture you’d like to put in the second bedroom.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant by “we.” Usually, that meant him and his business partner. But now it might mean him and the person who owned the apartment in Paris. It certainly didn’t mean my mother.
“Oh. There’s something I have to do tomorrow,” I said.
“Can’t it wait? I was really looking forward to spending the weekend with you.”
“It’s a big project,” I said. “It’s half my grade.”
“Why don’t I just drive by the house, you pick up your books and whatever you need, and you can work on the project in the condo? There’s this big window overlooking the bay. You can see Coronado Island. The aircraft carriers. Little white sailboats. It’s beautiful, I’m telling you. I have a desk right by the window where you can sit.”
“I would,” I said, “but it’s a group project.”
“Okay,” he said, giving up. “Next time.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Next time.”
Twenty-six
My mother was sitting at the desk when I came in that night, a bowl of cocoons beside her computer.
“How were the birds?” I asked.
“We saw a grebe,” she said. Then she went back to considering the cocoons. There were nine little white ovals even though she’d started with twenty-five worms, and based, my mother said, on the research she’d been doing all evening, she would need to kill them if she wanted to get the silk off the cocoons in one unbroken strand.
“What do you mean, ‘kill them’?”
My mother looked glumly at a page of text on her screen. “I guess they bake them at silk factories. They bake most of them, anyway. A few of them they allow to go through metamorphosis or there wouldn’t be any eggs at the end of the cycle.”
We were both silent for a few seconds. Then I said, “So the worm builds the cocoon in order to become a butterfly—”
“A moth, actually,” my mother said. She showed me a picture of a white moth. It had a black dot on each wing and a face that seemed mostly mustache. It was nothing you’d want to prevent from entering the world.
“It eats twenty-four hours a day for three weeks to build the cocoon to become a beautiful furry moth,” I said, “but then you kill it while it’s still a worm.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “But Louise says she tried it one time and the stench was terrible. You’re supposed to bake them at a low temperature for a long time—all day, I think, or maybe a few days, and she said she almost had to burn down the house, the smell was so awful.”
“Ugh,” I said. “Don’t you think that’s a sign that you shouldn’t kill stuff for thread?” I gently touched one of the cocoons. “How much silk would you really be getting out of this, anyway?” I asked.
“Well, each strand is a mile long.”
We looked at the cocoons. Each one was smaller than my thumb.
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to bake the dear cats,” my mother said. Early on in her research, she’d discovered that people who are fanatical about raising silkworms call them “cats,” which is short for caterpillars. “But you know, the moth doesn’t have that much to look forward to. The silk business is easier if the moths can’t fly, so the bad fliers have been preserved over the centuries while the good fliers have been killed. Apparently, when the moth eats its way out of the cocoon, it will just wait for a mate right there in the same spot. You don’t need a net or a cage or anything. The moth will mate, or not mate, and if it’s a female, it will lay eggs, and then it will die. It will never even fly across the room.”
“Maybe silk isn’t the business for us,” I said, fingering the cocoon I liked best. It was actually two cocoons bound up together because the second silkworm to spin itself into a cottony tomb had lashed herself to an existing egg—that of her lover, I liked to think—as if to make sure she could find him when they woke up in totally different bodies.
I tried to slip away to brush my teeth, but she closed the computer, stood up, turned to me, and asked me warily, “Aren’t you going to tell me how it went with your father?” My mother had her hair pinned up and she was wearing a pair of dingy slippers with flannel pajama pants. Over the pants she wore a big chenille hooded sweater that made her look smaller and somehow younger. She’d been getting smaller over the past few months, anyway. She didn’t cook, so we didn’t eat much, and she’d started running again, something she’d never had time for when my father was around.
“What size are you now?”
I asked.
“Don’t avoid the question.”
“He invited me to stay the weekend at his new condo in San Diego.”
“His what?”
I told her what I could remember about taxes and the ten thirty-one exchange.
“I don’t believe it. I just don’t believe it. Of all the—” She stopped. She was a color I hadn’t seen before, a scary shade of wax. “Go outside, will you please?” she asked. “No. I’ll go outside. You stay here. Don’t follow me.”
I stayed where I was for a few seconds after she shut the door, and then I went to the lamp. I turned it off. I flipped the switch in the kitchen, too. In the darkness of the messy living room, I made my way to the window to make sure she was all right. In the moonlight you can see all sorts of things, and I saw my mother walking furiously under the avocado trees, kicking at the leaves so they flew up around her. I saw her hit one of the trees with the side of her fist and grab a branch and shake it really hard, as if she’d like to rip it from the trunk, but it was too big, so it barely moved. Lavar’s house wasn’t soundproof, so I heard every name she called him, and I heard her say the most painful thing of all, “Oh, I wish I’d never, ever been born.”
I should have gone outside and hugged her, as she would have hugged me, but for some reason I couldn’t. The child-me that had patted her cheeks and kissed her, where had she gone? I stayed still like the tree trunks until she wiped her cheeks and crossed her arms and started back up the front steps. Then I did the only thing I could do that I thought might make her feel better. I stretched out on the foldout couch that I hadn’t bothered for several days to fold up and I pulled the wrinkled sheets and blanket over every part of me, even my head, so that when she came in the house, she could pretend I was fast asleep and knew nothing at all about how he hurt her.
Twenty-seven
I dreamed I spun myself into a white chamber with no doors or windows using my own hair, which turned white as I pulled a single strand of it from my temple and moored myself to the white egg beside me that I thought contained Amiel, but when I broke free of the shell I’d waited in for what seemed like years, the white egg had a hole in it like the end of a kaleidoscope, and when I looked through it, I saw that he was dead.
The noise that I heard through the real cocoon of my blankets was my uncle pounding on the door, shouting at me to get dressed because we were getting donuts while they were still hot.
I struggled to the door and gave the first excuse I could think of, and the least probable. “I’m on a diet,” I said.
He laughed out loud. “We’ll get you the diet donut!” he said. “Where’s your mother? Tell her I’ll buy her a donut, too. You can either be thin or happy, right?”
I wondered how this applied to Frenchwomen. I shuffled to my mother’s room and considered the evidence, which mostly amounted to strewn clothes and sheets. I trudged back to the porch. “She must’ve gone running,” I said. I wished at that moment that I was running, too, pounding along dirt that other people had pounded into a trail.
I washed my face. I brushed my teeth. I glumly followed my uncle to the Packrat, where Robby was sitting with his eyes closed. He dutifully extracted himself from the cab so I could take my seat in the middle. “Bonjour le you,” he said. “Bonjour le donuts.”
Sunday mornings always felt so much cleaner, as if the windows of the world had been washed. Mission Road was empty, and just ahead of us a coyote appeared, its coat all rumpled and thick like a German shepherd’s, its eyes, as it turned to regard us, both haunted and indifferent.
“So, Robby,” my uncle Hoyt began. “Your mother said you went on some sort of date last night, huh?”
“Yep,” Robby said. He nodded. I studied the olive trees on one side of the road. Nobody ever harvested olives, not even my uncle, and yet they grew everywhere in Fallbrook. I made a mental note not to point out this untapped market to my mother.
“Nice girl?” my uncle prodded.
“Yep,” Robby said.
“Someone from school, I guess?”
“Older,” Robby said.
“What’s her name?”
“Mary.”
“Mary. Okay. What’d you do?”
We reached the crest of a hill and I could see the place on the horizon called the Sleeping Indian, a huge land formation that looked, once you’d heard the name, exactly like an earthen man stretched out on his back. Beyond his body, on clear mornings like this one, you could see the line of blue that was the ocean.
“I gave her a tour of unknown Fallbrook,” Robby said. He was looking out the window as we passed Willow Glen, and part of me leaped out of the car and started walking north.
“Sounds good,” Hoyt said. “What does that mean, exactly?”
“First we took a little walk,” Robby said, nibbling a little at the edge of his thumb.
“You took a walk at night?”
“Downtown. I took her along the promenade.”
I knew this was something Hoyt would be glad to hear about. He was a big one for civic projects, and his name was on the plaque honoring the men and women who’d donated time and money to the promenade, a half-finished path that led from the library to Fallbrook Street. For three blocks, you could stroll along a path of wood chips, maples, sycamores, and oaks. The landscape committee had planted hibiscus, too, and passionflowers and fortnight lilies and bougainvillea. They had installed trash cans and informative signs and benches that vandals beat with what appeared to be iron crowbars in the middle of the night. On one side of the newly planted trees, the land dropped away into a creek bobbing with trash left by teenagers who wrote unpronounceable gang signs in black spray paint on the concrete, but you could also see white egrets and the occasional duck. On the far side of the creek, little stucco houses that looked like they’d been in Fallbrook back when it was just a bunch of lemon farms stood in the shade of far older trees, and in the tiny yards, prickly pear cactus plants made fences for goats, chickens, and, in one yard, a pig. Unfortunately, most of the people who used the promenade in the daytime were scary men in possession of liquor bottles, so I hadn’t walked there in a while.
“She’d never seen the promenade?” Hoyt asked.
“Nope,” Robby said.
“I thought you said there were three things,” I said to Robby.
“Right,” Robby said. We were approaching town now. The truck idled between El Toro Market and Gilberto’s taco shop and M & M liquor store with its signs for phone cards to Mexico and Western Union and Corona beer and strange Mexican candies flavored with chili and tamarind. Sunlight made everything look new and hopeful. “Number two was the bridge to poverty,” Robby said.
“The what?” my uncle asked, turning left with the green arrow that sent us slowly along Main Street, past the Got Holes tattoo parlor and piercing gallery, the Mexican clothing stores that displayed dresses on transparent torsos hung outside the doors, the panadería that sold menudo on Wednesdays and every day sold sugar-sanded cookies as thick as cinnamon rolls. After the panadería, the Mexican businesses just stopped and the places we normally shopped began: Village Sports, Village Vac, Village Shoes.
Robby said, “That iron bridge that goes from the promenade over the creek.”
“Well, that’s kind of a dark name for it,” Hoyt said.
I had to agree that the bridge was a little strange. I remember thinking, when Hoyt took us to see it, that someone had gone to a crazy amount of trouble to make a footbridge maybe five people would ever use. The sides of the iron bridge were a cutwork pattern of reeds and herons and egrets. It didn’t lead anywhere except from the promenade to the stucco houses fenced with prickly pears, and you couldn’t see it from Main Street.
“What else?” my uncle asked. He was a little puzzled, I could tell.
“I thought she’d like number three best of all,” Robby said, “but it was the wrong time of day.”
We waited. My uncle pulled into the parking lot and I could smell the scalde
d sugar smell of the donut shop. Sunlight bounced off all the cars as Robby said, “Took her to see the ostrich. Unfortunately, the ostrich was asleep.”
Twenty-eight
My mother had a job interview that afternoon, so she was trying on clothes when I came home. My clothes, actually. All of her pants were too loose, she said, so she was rummaging through my closet, which used to be Lavar’s coat closet and was too packed and disorganized for easy rummaging. “Where’s the job?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s a bookstore,” she said.
“Which bookstore?”
“One of the chains,” she said.
“That sounds fun,” I said. “You like books.”
“Yeah!” she said. I could tell she didn’t think it would be fun.
“Does that pay more than subbing?” I asked.
“It will be in addition to subbing,” she said. “The opening is for evenings and weekends. That’s why my interview is on a Sunday. Besides, it’s almost summer, remember?”
“You’re going to work two jobs?”
“Until summer,” she said. “Why are these clothes so wrinkled?” she asked.
“Because we never iron them,” I said.
She found a brown skirt and a pleated white blouse that I hadn’t worn for a long time because Greenie said it made me look like a librarian, and my mother told me to turn on the iron.
“Maybe I should get a job,” I said, watching her apply the eyeliner, wipe it off, and draw another shaky line. Both of her eyes were blue, which made her homochromic. This was a word we used to toss around as a family when we were a family.
“If you were sixteen and had a license,” my mother said, going at the lips now, “it would be easier. Or if we lived in town so you could get to work without a car.”
