Not Perfect

by Elizabeth Laban

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Fern came home with a note from the gym teacher:

  Dear Tabitha,

  Fern needs new gym shoes. She has been having trouble participating lately, and today I took the time to feel her toes. They are practically busting through the top of the shoes. No wonder she can’t run. I know parents are so busy these days, and so many things are overlooked or given short shrift. I know you wouldn’t want Fern to suffer. Please buy her new shoes soon.

  Thank you!

  In Partnership,

  Melanie

  “Did you read this?” Tabitha asked Fern, who was standing at the island in the kitchen pulling things out of her backpack. Tabitha noticed that even the way she stood had changed lately, since she was favoring her bad knee. She’d call about the X-ray tomorrow.

  “No, she just said to give it to you.”

  Tabitha went back to the top and read through it again. There was so much about the letter that irked her, not just the fact that she was being called out on shirking her parenting duties. Short shrift? Why did she have to talk that way? And why even say she knew she wouldn’t want Fern to suffer? Was that something you had to say? And “In Partnership?” Really?

  Tabitha marched to Levi’s room. He wasn’t home yet and she just walked in, went right to his closet and sorted through his shoes. Luckily they hadn’t spent much time clearing things out lately, so she found three pairs that were clearly too small for him and brought them back to Fern.

  “Here, try these,” Tabitha said, holding out a pair of ratty navy-blue Nikes that might possibly be in the ballpark of Fern’s size.

  “Are those Levi’s old shoes?” she asked, but it sounded like she was saying, “Are those shoes made of hot lava?”

  “Yes,” Tabitha said, without any more explanation.

  “I’m not wearing those,” she said.

  “Just try them,” Tabitha said. “Melanie says your shoes are too small.”

  “They are,” Fern said matter-of-factly.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Fern looked right at her.

  “Because you have enough going on,” Fern said. “You don’t need to worry about my shoes, too.”

  “That’s not true,” Tabitha said. “Your feet are very important. And it’s my responsibility to worry about them.”

  “Can we call Dad?” Fern asked, and Tabitha had to work hard not to gasp.

  “Um, sure,” Tabitha said, thinking they could call his number, he wouldn’t answer, and that would be that. She’d give another speech about how he was busy working, and how the mining unions in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan were suffering, and he was working hard to help with their rights, et cetera. They would go back to pretending that was normal for a while, and eventually Fern would ask again. How was it that they were able to do this—to pretend this was normal? And not for the first time Tabitha thought something awful; she thought: Thank goodness I don’t love him so much that I can’t live without him. Despite her hopes and dreams and her picture of what married life should be like, she thought: Thank goodness it didn’t go that way. “How about we see if any of these sneakers work, and after that you can call?”

  “They’re not gonna work,” Fern said, but Tabitha knew she would try on the shoes.

  Fern sighed heavily as she grabbed the dirty shoes away from Tabitha. They actually smelled pretty bad, though Fern didn’t mention that. She sat on the floor, pulling off her current pair and trying on the blue ones. They were much too big. She shook her head in a way that said, “I knew it.”

  “Try these,” Tabitha said quickly, handing over a not-quite-as-bad pair of red sneakers with a white Nike mark.

  Fern sighed even deeper and put them on. They were too small, which gave Tabitha hope. She handed over the third and final pair, light green with a yellow stripe that Levi barely wore because he thought they were too girly. At the time it was no big deal, they just went shopping for another pair.

  Fern looked at them with less disdain than she looked at the other pairs. She put them on, stood up.

  “They’re okay,” Fern said.

  Tabitha felt sorry for her. They were good shoes, shoes that looked like they might have actually been bought for her. But now Fern had to swallow her pride, basically say she was wrong. And she was willing to do it. She was such a good girl.

  “Tell you what,” Tabitha said. “Wear those for a few days and we can see. I’m too lazy to go shopping today, and I don’t want Melanie to send another note. You would be doing me a huge favor.”

  “Okay,” Fern said, like it really was okay. “Now can I call Dad?”

  It was Tabitha’s turn to sigh big.

  “Here’s my phone,” she said to Fern as nonchalantly as she could.

  “No,” Fern said quickly. “I want to use the regular phone, the house phone.”

  “Okay,” Tabitha said, surprised by her forcefulness. She leaned over and grabbed the phone out of its cradle, pressed the “talk” button and was relieved to hear the dial tone. That was a bill she hadn’t thought about in a while, and she hadn’t used this phone so she was glad to see it was still working. She handed it to Fern with the dial tone leaking out. Fern looked seriously at the phone, pushed the “off” button, and silenced the dial tone.

  “Is our number blocked?” Fern asked.

  “You mean does it show up on call waiting?”

  “Yeah, can someone tell it’s our phone calling?”

  “You mean Daddy? Will Daddy know? Yes, he’ll know. We had a blocked number for a while but we stopped paying for that service,” she said, then, “I think.”

  “How can I be sure?”

  Tabitha was getting a little annoyed. She wanted to say, Just call already, he isn’t going to answer anyway, but the longer she played along, the longer Fern thought she had the possibility of talking to Stuart. So . . .

  “Here, call my cell phone, just dial it: 2-1-5, 5-5-5, 2-3-0-9. Push ‘one’ first.”

  Fern hesitated, then she pressed the “talk” button again, then the “one,” then the first three numbers. She looked up expectantly.

  “Five, five, five; two, three, zero, nine,” Tabitha said slowly. There was a pause, and Tabitha’s phone began to ring. She looked at the display: Blocked Call it said. Huh.

  “So I guess we are still paying for that service,” Tabitha said. “You have to push ‘star-eight-two’ to unblock it.”

  Fern looked around for a piece of paper and a pen, which she found off to the side, and she drew a star and wrote 8 2.

  “Do you know Daddy’s number?” Tabitha asked.

  “Yes, I do,” Fern said seriously.

  They just sat there for a minute.

  “Are you going to call?” Tabitha finally said gently. A little hope was okay, but she couldn’t stand it anymore, the buildup, the inevitable disappointment.

  “I’m going to call from my room,” Fern said.

  “Why?”

  “I just want to,” she said. “I’m nine and I can have some privacy. Levi has privacy.”

  Levi. Shoot. He should be home by now. Okay, okay, she’d let Fern call, there’d be no answer, and then she’d think about Levi.

  “Fine,” Tabitha said as casually as she could.

  Fern hopped down from the high stool, and Tabitha noticed that she put most of her weight on her left leg. Once she steadied herself, she padded through the kitchen and turned left, out of Tabitha’s sight. Tabitha counted to twenty before walking as quietly as she could toward the kitchen door. She got there just in time to see Fern go into her room and push her door shut. Tabitha waited another twenty seconds. She found herself calculating how long it would take for Fern to realize he wasn’t going to answer, and then how long after that it would take for Fern to get over it. Would it be a matter of minutes? Would it ruin their whole night?

  Tabitha crept down the hallway and stood just outside Fern’s closed door. She wished she had a glass or something that she could put
to the wood to try to conduct sound. Did that even work? She waited. There was no sound at all coming from Fern’s room, and she wondered if it was all a farce, if Fern never meant to call but just wanted to evoke Stuart somehow, to let Tabitha know she was thinking about him.

  “Daddy?”

  Tabitha almost fell against the door.

  “Daddy!” She said it like he just emerged from the dead, which he basically did. Tabitha had her hand on the doorknob, she was about to force her way in. But something made her take it back. Her heart was beating so hard, she was surprised Fern couldn’t sense it through the door.

  “I know, I tried, I really tried,” Fern said. She was crying now. Could she be pretending? Had she gone crazy and was imagining talking to Stuart the way a traumatized kid created imaginary friends? There was a long pause.

  “Okay. Do you promise?”

  More silence.

  “I just wanted to ask you about this one . . . oh, okay . . . okay . . . I love you, too.”

  Tabitha had her hand on the doorknob again. She grasped it and was ready to push it open when Fern talked again.

  “But when are you coming home?”

  With that, Tabitha was in the room. She was by Fern’s side grabbing for the phone. The look on Fern’s face was pure terror. Fern held firmly to the phone, took it away from her ear, and without another word pressed the “off” button to end the call. All the while Tabitha pulled at it, fighting her for it. They fell onto their sides on Fern’s wall-to-wall bright-yellow carpet.

  “Ow!” Fern yelled—howled, really. Tabitha had just gotten the phone away and had it to her ear, frantically pushing the “talk” button.

  “Hello? Stuart? Hello?” she screamed into the phone.

  “You’re on my knee!” Fern screamed.

  Tabitha moved over, but would not give up on the phone. She went to recent calls and dialed back the number. It was Stuart’s cell, the one she had called over and over again with no answer. No voicemail. It rang and rang.

  “Was it really him?” she asked, her teeth gritted. She sounded like a crazy person in a crazy movie. “Did you really talk to him?”

  Fern was in a ball now, holding on to her knee.

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “Why are you so mad? Didn’t you want me to?”

  Tabitha backed off. Fern had no idea what had been going on. For all she knew Tabitha had been talking to him all this time.

  “Yes,” Tabitha said, pushing her hair behind her ears and wiping the sweat from her upper lip. “Yes, of course I did.”

  She turned her back on Fern for a few seconds, then she turned back and hugged her.

  “Is your knee okay?”

  “It hurts,” Fern said.

  “I’ll call about the X-ray tomorrow,” Tabitha said. She meant it.

  “Okay,” Fern said. “Will that hurt? I was going to ask Daddy.”

  “No, I promise, an X-ray won’t hurt at all,” Tabitha said.

  Again Tabitha wondered if Fern had become delusional. In fact, she decided that was really the only explanation for this. That was worse than almost any other scenario. It was one thing to have a bad knee, it was another thing completely to be living in an imagined universe. She decided to let it go, she simply couldn’t deal with it now.

  “Hey, did your brother say anything about what he was doing after school?”

  Fern smacked her hand to her forehead.

  “I forgot to tell you,” she said. “He and Butch were going to the library, the big one. He said he would be home by dinner. Or maybe he said by six. One of those.”

  Normally Tabitha would be livid that Levi relied on Fern to tell her where he was, and that Fern forgot to share the information, but she let that go, too. Fern could also handle only so much, she knew that.

  “Next time tell him to text me, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Tabitha said, hoisting herself up.

  “Okay.”

  As soon as her mother left, Fern took a minute to look at her knee. She pulled up her pant leg and studied it. It hurt way more than she had let on. It felt like people were pushing sharp nails into it—sometimes it felt like the nails were on the inside and sometimes it felt like the nails were on the outside. She was going to tell her father about it, ask him what to do, and ask him especially if it was okay to tell her mother, who seemed to have too much to worry about already, not counting the knee or the too-small shoes, but there was no time. He had to go. That wasn’t the first time she tried him, but it was the first time he answered. She hadn’t been able to get all the things right before—like making sure the number wasn’t blocked and calling from the phone they kept in the kitchen. She knew she needed her mother’s help, but she was pretty sure her father would be mad if he knew that her mother knew. Except she wasn’t sure how she knew that. What she did know was that her mother was mad, and that seemed worse, since her mother was right here. Fern wanted to make her mother be not mad anymore, but lately she seemed so mad, or like she was always thinking about other things. She didn’t seem to care about or do the things she usually did, and that worried Fern, who wanted to think of a way to make her mother happy.

  She got up slowly and limped to her bed and sat down. She reached under her mattress and pulled out the tattered, white envelope. The one she found on the morning her father left. She hadn’t looked at it in a while. It never changed. It was always the same. But this time when she pulled it out fifty dollars came along with it. She had forgotten about the money. First, she spread out the letter to make sure she had done it the right way, that she hadn’t made any mistakes. At least not big ones.

  Dear Fern,

  I am so proud of you. Everything you’re doing, especially in school, is exactly what I hoped you would do. I have to go away for a while, and you’re sleeping now, so I don’t want to bother you, but I wanted to tell you a few of my ideas. It might be hard to not talk, and I don’t know when I’m coming back, so I have a pattern we can do if you need to talk to me. Here’s what it is. Call from the home phone—make sure I can tell it’s the home phone—and call once, then hang up, call again, then hang up, then let it ring through. That way I’ll know it’s you calling—because I’m so busy with work I don’t want to talk to most other people right now. But don’t tell anyone—it will be our secret. I am not telling anyone else this pattern—it is just for us. If you can, try to listen to Mommy, it might be a hard time for her. Also, be nice to Levi if you can. Even though I’ll be away, I’ll be thinking about you. I already miss you, and I love you every day.

  Dad

  Yup, she did it pretty much right. The only bad thing was that her mom knew. And right there it said her mother might be having a hard time, so she guessed he did tell her something. She had done the right thing by not telling her mother about how much her knee hurt. Her father would be even more proud of her than he was before he left.

  Fern folded the letter again and put it in the envelope. Then she looked at the money. She had an idea. She kept the money out, but put the envelope back under her mattress. She thought about hearing her father’s voice. It sounded the same, maybe a little quieter. She felt good after talking to him. She’d worried he might not recognize her voice.

  She moved to the edge of the mattress and put her weight down slowly. She could stand it. She got up and put the money in her pocket. Then she went in search of her mom to tell her she wanted to pay for dinner tonight.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Michigan was playing Michigan State, and for some reason Tabitha cared. Well, she knew the reason, and his name was Toby, but she pretended she cared about the game. It was the same game she and Stuart had watched at the Fox & Hound the year before. It was a crazy, awful game, with Michigan State winning in the last ten seconds. They had all felt terrible as they left, except for Tabitha, who was sorry for them and the team, but was perfectly fine.

  She pulled Stuart’s T-shirt out from his side of the bed, smoothed the w
rinkles, and put it on with jeans. It was a cold November day, but she didn’t want to wear anything else. She went into the living room where the kids were watching The Princess Bride. The cable and Netflix were long gone, so now they just watched DVD after DVD. Fern complained at first, which surprised Tabitha, since she thought Levi would be the most bothered. But now they just acted like it was normal. It made Tabitha wonder what else they could easily live without. Lots of things, probably.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey,” they said at the same time.

  “So, you guys don’t mind if I go?”

  “No,” they said at the same time. Their attention was firmly placed on the television screen and the sword fight taking place there.

  “I’ll be back with dinner,” Tabitha said.

  “Please bring those mini burgers,” Levi said.

  “And the chicken fingers,” Fern said.

  “Will do,” Tabitha said. She pulled her red-plaid jacket out of the closet, then thought better of it and put it back. She scanned the coats and saw one of Stuart’s fall fleece coats—navy-blue and perfect.

  “Bye,” she called.

  When she got to the bar, it was as crowded as she had ever seen it. She walked in and looked immediately around for Toby, even though she was going to pretend, even to herself, that she didn’t care that much. She spotted the head of the alumni association chapter. He was dressed all in maize from head to toe, including his shoes, but his skin was painted blue, every single bit of it, at least every single bit she could see. When he turned around, she could see that his butt was green—the color of Michigan State. He looked crazed, walking from person to person, giving some sort of directions. The game was scheduled to start in eight minutes. People were milling around. She didn’t see Toby.