While I spread the blanket in the shade, he ran in to put on a different shirt, a plain orange polo. I set out some apples and pears and PB&Js, plus the good, really chocolatey granola bars that my mom thought she was hiding in the upper cabinet. Tony sat down, and we ate, staring at the bookcase.
“Well,” I said, biting into an apple, “there’s nothing as exciting as this, is there? Watching paint dry, I mean.”
Tony swallowed a big bite of his sandwich. “It’s fine by me,” he said. “Sometimes it’s too much excitement you have to worry about.” He took a sip from his water bottle. “You want to know what I like about living here? It’s this, peace and quiet.”
I nodded, not totally sure what he meant. Excitement was always a pretty good thing in my book. Neither of us said much after that. We just ate and listened to the birds tweeting and the neighbor’s spaniel barking at the back door to be let in. A car cruised slowly by, and after ten minutes, another one. If Tony didn’t like too much excitement, he was in the right place.
“We can probably start the blue paint later,” I said. “If you want to keep helping, that is.” I looked down at the blanket, hoping he’d say yes.
“Yeah, sure,” he answered. “It’s not like I have anything else to do.” He stood up and brushed some crumbs off his jeans. Then he stretched his arms over his head, blocking out the sun for a second and sending stripes of shade across the blanket. “Here’s the thing, though. I’m helping you with this painting thing, so I need you to help me with something, in return.”
“What is it?” I asked. Homework? No, he was a year ahead of me, doing stuff I didn’t understand.
“Come to McDonald’s with me after school on Thursday,” he said.
“What?” That wasn’t exactly the excitement I was hoping for. “Why?”
“I’m meeting my mom there. McDonald’s. On Broad Street.”
“Your mom? But I thought she was—”
“Yeah, she is, but she gets to see me sometimes, as long as the social worker is there. They don’t want me to visit her at the rehab place, and she can’t leave it by herself.” Tony put his hands on his hips. “You know I don’t like the social worker.”
“I . . . know, but . . . I don’t know, Tony,” I said, shaking my head. It seemed like it would be really weird. “I don’t even know your mom at all.”
“You’ll be my moral support,” he said.
I didn’t say anything.
“Come on, please?” He gave me a big smile. “I’ll buy you a shake and some fries.”
I was leaning toward going anyway. I’d been craving fast food since last weekend. Plus, I had seen Tony talking to Rachel recently by her locker. I didn’t even know they knew each other, but maybe he was trying to help me out with the whole Rachel situation. If that was the case, I owed him another one.
But then I remembered something.
“This girl at school told me someone overdosed at that McDonald’s.”
“Yeah? So?” Tony replied. “People OD all over the friggin’ place.”
Do they? I plucked some dandelions within reach of the blanket, started braiding their stems. “Has your mom ever overdosed?” I asked quietly.
Tony looked away from me, and then said, real low, “Twice. That I know of.”
He sighed. “She’d been on these pain pills after her car got rear-ended, and she hurt her neck. But then she just couldn’t get off them, and she couldn’t get a prescription for them anymore, so she switched to even worse stuff, and she started dating some sketchy guys. The first time it happened, her boyfriend found her and called the ambulance, and then he took off, and she never saw him again. Nice, huh? He was probably the one who gave her the drugs to begin with.”
I put down my dandelion stems. “I’m so sorry,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. How could anything I said make it better?
Tony sat back down on the blanket and took three of the stems I’d put in a pile. He started neatly braiding them. I gave him a funny look, which he noticed.
“My mom used to ask me to braid her hair sometimes. She said I was better at it than she was.”
We both kept our heads down, working on our dandelions. I started weaving mine into a crown.
“I don’t have all the details about the second time it happened,” Tony said. “I couldn’t get the social worker to tell me anything.”
He tossed his braided stems into the grass and wrapped his arms around his knees. “So, are you coming, or not?” he asked, and I saw something in Tony’s face that I hadn’t seen before. He was usually so good at hiding it, but he was really hurting. He was scared. And who could blame him?
“Yes,” I said, “I’ll go.” I set the crown I’d made on his head, and he laughed, then took it off and set it on the blanket. “But only if I get large fries.” I bumped his shoulder, and he bumped mine back.
“Okay,” he said, hopping up off the blanket like he’d gotten a jolt of energy. “Should we do the blue paint?”
He pointed toward the can sitting just inside the garage door, right next to his beloved basketball.
“Let’s wait a little while longer, make sure the primer is all the way dry,” I said. I hopped up, too. “How about we play some basketball? I mean, I don’t know much, but maybe you can teach me?”
I remembered when Dad used to play ball with me. It was all fun and games when I was little, but sometime after I got to maybe third grade or so, he seemed to get frustrated that I wasn’t improving. He’d tell me to “quit messing around.” Third grade is when girls can join a league at the Y, and I think Dad assumed all along that I was going to join. But I’d known all along I never would. Weird how we could both be so sure.
Tony ran over and grabbed the ball and dribbled it back to where I was standing in the driveway in front of the hoop.
“Can you dribble?”
“A little,” I said. He passed the ball to me, and I immediately bounced it off my foot. It had been a while since I’d done this.
Tony took it back. “Like this,” he said. “Use your fingers, not your palm.”
I tried again, and again. Tony was a patient teacher, and I was pretty surprised how much fun I was having. We moved on to my shooting form, laughing and goofing around, when Dad pulled up, home early from work.
I started to scoot out of the driveway, but Dad called out, “You’re fine! I’ll park out here!” He parked in the street and got out, then walked up the driveway toward us with his briefcase. “Looks like you’re feeling better, Maggie,” he said, and then to Tony, “How was school?”
Dad had that goofy look on his face that adults get when kids are cooperating nicely with each other without being told.
“School was fine,” Tony said, nonchalantly, as though he’d forgotten all about getting sent home for a dress code violation.
I held out my hands for Tony to pass me the ball, and then I took a shot and in it went, swoosh, all net.
“Nice one, Maggie,” Dad said.
He was so pleased with us that he must not have realized it was too early for Tony to be home from school. Although, it was too early for Dad to be home from work as well. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I noticed Dad’s smile start to fade, his face clouding over. He crossed his arms.
“Listen, I’m glad I got here before Mom and Grandma did,” he said.
“Grandma’s coming here?” I asked. Mom was supposed to get her settled at the assisted living facility today. “Is she coming for dinner?”
“Well, yes, for dinner,” Dad said, “but then . . .” He shifted his feet a bit, his pointy, shiny work shoes glinting in the sun. “She actually needs to stay here, at the house, just for a bit. The facility, you see, they messed up, said they had a room, but it wasn’t in the memory unit, where Grandma needs to be, and Mom had her all packed and ready, and so, well, Mom’s just going to keep an eye on her here for a bit, temporarily.”
Temporarily. There was that word again. I glanced at Tony, who was f
rowning. But I was excited about the prospect of Grandma being in the house. We could cut out pictures from magazines, of designs we liked, like we used to. She could help with the contest. I tried not to get my hopes up, though. With Grandma’s illness, I didn’t know what to expect.
“Where is she going to sleep?” Tony asked.
My dad ran a hand through his hair, which made it look even crazier than it usually did. He stared a moment at Tony, who was standing there with the basketball tucked under his arm. All the happy sounds from a few moments ago—the bouncing of the ball on the pavement, our laughter—all of that was gone. Even the birds had put their tweeting on pause.
“Would you mind sleeping on the pullout sofa for a little bit?” Dad asked Tony. “We can’t very well expect Grandma to crawl up into Maggie’s loft, plus she’ll want a private space, so the spare bedroom is really the best choice for her.”
“The spare bedroom?” Tony said. He was squeezing the ball tightly between his hands like he thought if he pressed hard enough, he could pop it. I could see the muscles tensing on his arms.
Dad kept talking. “It was Susan’s idea to bring her out here immediately, and I told her it didn’t make sense until we had a final confirmation from the assisted living people, but she went ahead and—”
Just then, Tony screwed up his face into a grimace and whipped the ball, super hard, against the house. It made a loud sound, and there was a black mark where it had hit the siding before rolling away into the grass.
“Tony!” my dad called, but Tony was already running into the house. He slammed the door behind him.
I felt my anger bubbling up in my gut. Tony shouldn’t have to sleep on the couch, though Grandma shouldn’t either. There had to be a better solution, and weren’t the grown-ups in charge of figuring that out?
“Why did you have to tell him to leave his room?” I said to Dad. “I could sleep on the couch, and . . . and Tony could sleep in my loft.” I wouldn’t like it, not that the couch was so bad. It’s just that I wouldn’t really like anyone—especially a somewhat smelly boy—sleeping in my room. But Dad shouldn’t have kicked him out of his space.
“He already had to leave his apartment,” I said, my voice rising. “And he was just getting settled here, and now you go and change everything on him.”
“I thought you’d be okay with Grandma staying here,” he said, “you, more than anyone.”
“Yeah, I don’t mind Grandma being here,” I said. “It’s not about Grandma, Dad. It’s about you messing everything up with Tony!”
I watched as my dad’s face flipped through a whole catalog of emotions, and while I didn’t necessarily want to stand there, waiting to see which one he landed on, I also couldn’t stop myself. There were things inside me that I needed to say, new things, surprising things, and now that I’d started, I had to see it through.
“Did you ever even really try to reconnect with him?” I asked. “Did you really try, or did you just give up? Because maybe it would have been nice to have a brother all this time, you know? Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad!”
“Maggie, I don’t really appreciate your tone,” Dad said. “There are a lot of things that you do not understand—”
“Then explain them to me!” I shouted. I was so tired of not knowing things.
Just then, Mom’s car turned into the driveway with Grandma in the passenger seat, wearing a blue scarf and a scowl.
Dad dropped his hands to his sides and let out a long exhale, like a ball with a slow leak. “Wonderful,” he muttered.
Mom pulled the car up, a grim expression on her face that stretched her lips into a thin line. She got out and headed around to Grandma’s side. “You look much better, honey,” she turned and said to me while opening Grandma’s door.
“Maggie wasn’t feeling well this morning, so she stayed home from school,” she explained to Grandma, who didn’t reply.
“Hi, Grandma!” I waved to her as she slowly made her way out of the car, but she was looking, not at me, but dismissively at my dad, who gave her a deflated smile. She didn’t answer me, and I felt some tears sting my eyes. Grandma stood in the driveway with her big black purse in front of her, and I wondered if she had packed a sandwich for the ride. I wondered whether she’d eaten it already.
Nobody had dinner together. Dad said he had to catch up on some emails since he’d left work early, so he was eating at the desk in their bedroom. Tony and I ate quietly, and quickly, at the kitchen island, while Mom served up a plate for Grandma and took it to the spare room (Grandma’s room? Tony’s room? What were we going to call it?) on a tray I’d decorated with heart stickers when I was in kindergarten. I could hear words floating down the stairs, Mom trying to coax Grandma to eat, like Grandma was a stubborn toddler.
“Just try a bite,” she was saying. “I made it just the way you like it.”
But Grandma had her own agenda. “And do you know when a bed will open up, Susan? When someone dies, that’s when. That whole place is filled with ghosts.”
Ghosts made me think of scary movies, which I didn’t like. When Olive and Rachel and I had slumber parties at Rachel’s, we always watched scary movies because Rachel’s parents never bothered coming down into her basement to see what we had on. Rachel loved them, and Olive sort of did, but she would mostly shriek, while I hid under a blanket.
I had never really thought of ghosts as real people, though, like people who had just died at the assisted living facility. I never thought of Grandpa as a ghost. Did Grandma? Did Grandma think about becoming a ghost herself? I shivered.
Later, Tony and I spread out on the sofa bed doing our homework, while Mom sat in a chair with a bunch of paperwork from the facility. Dad had made up the bed with the extra sheets and blankets earlier, while we were out of the room. It felt like I hadn’t said a word to Tony since our picnic.
I whispered, “Have you talked to Dad, after the whole . . . thing from earlier?”
Mom glanced up, and Tony shook his head. I noticed his duffel bag behind the chair, clothes spilling out like they’d been packed in a hurry.
Suddenly, Grandma entered the room, almost as quiet as a ghost, and stared at Tony. She turned to Mom, asking, “Who’s this?”
Mom set her paperwork on the coffee table. “It’s Tony, remember? I told you about him in the car,” she said, and I wondered just how much she’d actually told her.
“Hmmf,” Grandma said and went back upstairs before Tony or I could say a thing to her. Mom followed her. I had thought Grandma and I could look at some decorating magazines tonight, but it was too late, and she was too out of sorts. I could see I’d have to choose my moments carefully.
“Not too friendly, is she?” Tony asked me after they were out of earshot.
“Oh, but she is! She usually is. We used to talk about design things together, especially landscaping designs because she’s always liked flowers.” I wondered if she remembered that she liked flowers, that lilies were her favorite. “Tony, I wish you could have known her before. She’s different now. My mom says she doesn’t have a ‘filter,’ like, stuff comes out of her mouth without her thinking about it first.”
“That stinks,” he said.
“What? That she doesn’t have a filter?”
“No, that she had to change.” Tony looked back down at his notebook. “I hate that.”
I scooted closer to him, looking over his shoulder. “What are you studying?” I asked.
“Science. I’ve got a test tomorrow.”
“Do you want me to quiz you?”
“Nah, that’s okay.”
I filled in an answer on my math worksheet, but I couldn’t concentrate. I kept thinking about the argument with Dad.
“Are you sure you want to sleep here, Tony?” I asked. “Because I’d totally let you use my loft, if you wanted.”
He put down his notebook. “You would?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
Tony paused for a bit, like he was considering
the offer, but then he picked up his notebook again. “Thanks, but, it’s okay. I don’t want to make trouble.”
“Make trouble? You’re not making trouble. I’m offering; you’re not making me. I told Dad it wasn’t fair to make you move again.” I stood up and re-tucked the corner of the sheet.
“Yeah, I heard you,” Tony said quietly.
“You did?”
“The window was open. And you weren’t exactly whispering.”
“Oh.” I felt kind of embarrassed all of a sudden.
He picked at some fuzz on the blanket. “It’s not like I’d already gotten so attached to that bedroom that it’s a big deal to leave it. I mean, I’m in a strange house, living with people I barely know. It doesn’t really matter where I’m sleeping, does it?”
That kind of hurt. “Of course it matters.” I turned slightly away, letting my hair cover my face. “We’re not that strange.”
“I didn’t say you were strange! It’s just the situation.”
We didn’t say anything for a minute, until I said quietly, “Did you hear the rest of what I said?” None of this had to be strange. It was our parents who made it that way.
“Yup, heard that, too.” Tony smiled at me. “Guess I shouldn’t have whipped the ball like that. I was just so angry.”
I shrugged. “You had a right to be.”
“Yeah, it’s just that . . . it’s pretty complicated. You know when you asked me about what I thought of Dad?”
I nodded.
“Well, like I said, I like him, but I didn’t tell you everything. You have to understand, my whole life, my mom has been telling me my dad was kind of a jerk, that he was just some dude who was passing through town, that he wouldn’t even remember her name. I mean . . .” Tony looked away from me. “Maybe he could have tried harder, but it’s not like my mom was helping things.”
“Dad told me you’d moved away, but then he saw your mom in town a few years ago and tried to get in touch,” I said. Things had changed so quickly. Just last month, I would have lost my mind to think of Dad having a kid with . . . not Mom. Now it was like it was normal. “I think he wanted to see you, but . . . it didn’t work out.” I didn’t know what exactly happened when Dad saw Tony’s mom, but something about it led to my mom finding out about everything, which led to them thinking about getting divorced, which led to Dad telling Mom I shouldn’t live with him. . . . And all of that was just part of the “things you do not understand” that Dad kept mentioning.
The Rule of Threes Page 12
