“What is it with you and these serial killers? Trust me. Whenever a serial killer asks me out, I always say no.”
“Serial killers make themselves look very normal and very attractive to young women,” she says. “You could meet a psychopath and not realize what you were dealing with. That’s what can happen if you think you’re running out of time.”
“Okay, Mags, that’s it. I gotta go.”
I turn my chair back around and my stomach drops. Adam is standing at my door leaning against the doorjamb with his arms folded. He’s smirking at me. I swear, the guy is smirking. And I have no idea how long he’s been there or how much he’s heard. Damn that speaker phone.
I hang up and bark, “What?”
He’s not thrown a bit. He saunters in and sits down in the chair across from my desk. He’s still got that slightly smiling expression on his face. Let me be clear about something: Adam doesn’t so much as sit in a chair as he inhabits it. He slouches down, stretches out his legs. If his feet could reach my desk, I swear he’d put his feet up on it. He also still has that little gnome sticking out of his shirt pocket. Juliet this time.
This guy is impossible.
“So break it to me gently. This Gabora . . . is she really a nutjob? Like how bad is it really going to be? Is she, like, senile? I read the book after the meeting, and I can’t believe we’re publishing it. What were they thinking?”
“Close the door, please,” I say. While he’s doing that, I try to control myself. My face feels like it’s still blazing from a mixture of embarrassment, fury, and a whole host of other emotions that haven’t yet introduced themselves by their full titles. When he turns and looks at me, I say in the coldest voice I can muster, “Listen to me. Gabora Pierce-Anton is a respected children’s author, and she’s partially responsible for our jobs even existing here. She may not be to your taste, and she may not even be up with the current line of thinking about anything you care about, but she is an author who belongs to our company, and I want you to go into this tour with the attitude that you are going to contribute in such a way as to protect her, to make sure she’s all right and comfortable, and to show the utmost respect for her and for Tiller wherever you go. You are representing this publisher, and I am not going to tolerate all this joking about her.”
I might as well set the tone for this tour right this minute. That’s what I’m thinking.
He has not taken his eyes off me the whole time I’m scolding him. He’s looking right at me, right into my eyes, and then he sits up a little straighter and salutes me when I’m all finished. “Yes, ma’am,” he says. Like it’s all a big joke.
“Do not,” I say.
“Do not?”
“Do not even . . .” I can’t think of what I was going to say. “Do not even try to make light of this conversation,” I finish lamely.
“Absolutely not,” he says. “This is a very serious conversation. High seriousity.” But he looks like he just might start laughing, and I know that if he does, then I will start laughing, too, because, let’s face it, I am never good at this kind of thing. Scolding. Which is why I will probably make a lot of mistakes as a mom, and disciplining the children is yet another thing that will have to fall to Judd, and Adam is looking at me in such a way that I want both to smack him and, for some reason, to kiss him at the same time.
I stand up to shift the energy in this room. “That’s enough. I have some calls to make. You need to leave.”
He stands up and prepares to go. But then he stops at the door and turns and looks at me. It’s hard to describe the exact way he looks at me; his blue eyes are directly staring into mine, and his mouth is a hard line, like he’s trying hard not to smile.
“So,” he says, “just for the record, with all due respect, I don’t happen to think you’re running out of time.”
CHAPTER TEN
Every year when Maggie would drive Hendrix and me to meet up with Mama at the ice cream place halfway between New Hampshire and Woodstock, my heart beat so hard that the blood pounded in my ears like a drum. It was because the best time of my year was about to begin, but first we had to get through the very worst time.
Maggie called out to us in the backseat as she drove, saying all these things she was worrying about as we got closer. Things like, “Don’t go swimming if there’s not a grown-up watching you,” and “Be sure to take your vitamins every day and make sure you eat plenty of fruit and drink milk, because you don’t want to get sick while you’re there.” She said, “If anybody is smoking something, and it smells funny to you, I want you to promise me that you will go outside and get away from it.”
I poked Hendrix when Maggie said that, just to make him laugh.
The switch from Maggie to Mama at the ice cream stand was always a bad moment. Everybody was all fake nice about it, but I could feel the tension. Maggie didn’t like to take us to the place to hand us over, and she certainly didn’t like to see Mama, but I heard her telling Daddy one time that as much as she hated it, she was always the one who was going to do the switch because she didn’t trust him to see Mama again.
“What do you think I’m gonna do, Maggie?” he yelled.
And she said, “How about the mistake you made with her that other time?” And then she laughed like she was joking, except she wasn’t, you could tell from her eyes. “I’ve gotta keep my eye on you, mister.”
I thought about that for a long time. I knew by then that my daddy and mama had met at Woodstock, and that he got married to her there and made me and Hendrix, so was that the mistake? Were me and Hendrix the mistake?
But how could we be a mistake? People can’t be mistakes.
Everything changed as soon as Maggie pulled her station wagon out of the parking lot to head back home. That’s when Mama stopped acting like she was a calm grown-up lady, and she did this little dance with her arms in the air that she said a person should always perform when seeing somebody after a long time. It was a silly dance, really, shimmying and clapping and then a full-body hug, spinning around, and then a dip. It made her laugh every time. I was always willing to join right in, but Hendrix was a little shy and had to be coaxed. She’d go over and take him by the hands and jiggle him around until he was laughing.
She was fabulous, our mama. That was my new word the summer I was seven. I used the word fabulous over and over because that was the word my mama liked, too, and also everything about her was fabulous: the floaty clothes she wore, her long yellow hair cascading down her back, messy and tangled up, like a nest of something. It felt like she could do anything. Life was like one big party time, with people coming to sleep over without even having to call first. Music was always playing, either on the record player or from somebody sitting on the floor playing a guitar. One guy who came over a lot had a harmonica that he played nearly nonstop. My mama was always singing “You Are My Sunshine.” It ran through my head all the time, that song.
Also, there was a big firepit in the center of the yard, with stacks of wood around it, where we’d sit at night and sing songs. The house was next to a big, open field, which was dotted with flowers—white and pink and yellow, like someone had thrown little bits of paint here and there, just for fun.
When I wasn’t out running around with Hendrix, Mama and I sat on the porch and she taught me to sew things.
She also told me stuff she believed, like how you were supposed to have as much fun as you could. You had to find work that was like play, and then you could be having fun all the time. Some people didn’t know that life wasn’t supposed to be hard.
“Which is fine for them,” she said. “If people want to think that life is hard for them, then they are welcome to that idea, believe me. But you don’t have to see it that way. You can look for good things instead.”
Look for good things.
Nobody at my New Hampshire house ever talked like that; there was always some big problem going on, and even if we’d been outside at night, Daddy or Maggie would never have stop
ped walking and said, “Look! Just look at those millions of stars!” And yet Mama said that nearly every night.
Mama was always looking for signs. Seeing a cardinal meant that somebody we loved was thinking of us. If we saw a snakeskin, that meant that we were going to have big changes. If your right palm itched, you were going to get some money—and if your left palm itched, that meant you were going to have company. Or maybe I have it backward.
She also had a lot of beliefs. She said, “Things always work out for the best.”
She said, “We were put on this earth to be happy and free.”
She said, “Everybody just wants to be loved. And if you close your eyes and think really hard, you can picture love flowing to every single person out there in the world. And they will feel it because all love is energy.”
She said, “When you miss somebody really, really bad, all you have to do is think of them, and if you think hard enough, they’ll feel it and they’ll start thinking about you, too. Like if you sing them a song, your voice will travel up into space and find their voice singing it right back to you.”
One day, just she and I were sitting on the porch, and I was sewing a big red heart on one of the dish towels, and she said, “Watch this. I’m going to flow some love to Hendrix right now, and he’s going to come out of the house and find me, because he felt all that love swirling around the house looking for him.”
She closed her eyes and scrunched up her face, and sure enough, in a few minutes Hendrix came drifting out of the house and sat down next to her. She and I both laughed.
“What?” he said. “Why are you laughing at me?”
“We’re not laughing at you,” Mama said. “I sent you some love in the air, and you felt it. And you came out.”
“Well, Frances was laughing at me,” he said.
“My name is not Frances here,” I hissed at him, and I looked at Mama quickly to make sure she hadn’t heard. I didn’t want her to know about my Maggie name.
But Mama was humming a little song, and she didn’t seem to notice what Hendrix had said, or maybe she just didn’t like to get into discussions about what our life in New Hampshire was like.
Instead, she jumped up and said, “Let’s go swim in the river, and we’ll look for rocks and feathers, and then tonight—tonight we’ll catch us some fireflies.”
“Will we keep them in a jar?” Hendrix wanted to know.
“No, no, heavens,” she said. “They would die in a jar. They’ve gotta go see the other fireflies, just like we have to see all the people.”
“We could poke holes in the top,” said Hendrix, and she picked him up and swung him around and told him he could keep a firefly in the jar for ten minutes, but then he’d have to say good-bye and let it fly back home.
I was a different girl there, and Hendrix was a different boy. The grown-ups treated us like we were part of the whole scene, and they said bad words around us without saying, “Ooh, pardon my French,” and they told funny stories, and they fell down on the pillows sometimes, kissing and hugging. That was where I learned the startling fact that everybody has a butt.
Mama also let me turn on the oven when we made bread, and I could sit on the counter while she cut up vegetables because I had my own little knife. Hendrix and I picked blueberries, and Mama taught us to roll out the crust and push it down into the pie plate.
One day, when we were eight, everybody in the house had a cartwheel contest outside in the field, and Mama could do the most. Then we played Pile Up, and everybody got on top of everybody else and we were all laughing and pushing and yelling, and I think it was the most fun I ever had. I nearly peed my pants I was laughing so hard. Only Hendrix wouldn’t play. He sat down on the ground just watching us, with his head resting on his hands.
Then that night, in the dark, he said to me, “Do you think it’s okay that Mama does cartwheels and plays Pile Up?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Because . . . because it’s not like she’s a real mom, you know?” he said. “No other moms do that stuff.”
“Are you crazy? That’s the good part of her,” I told him. “It’s because she knows how to have fun and have adventures. She doesn’t always get so worried about every little thing!”
“I think she should worry a little more,” he said quietly. “I had a splinter in my foot, and she said it would just go away.”
“And did it?”
“No,” he said. “I took a knife and pushed it out myself.”
“That’s good, Hendrix. That’s a good skill to have.”
“Phronsie, I am eight years old. I shouldn’t have to take out my own splinters with a knife. It’s like we don’t even have a mom when we’re here!”
You see? Already it was turning out that there was a Maggie Team and a Mama Team. If the two teams had different dugouts, like with the Little League, you could see that Hendrix would go to the Maggie dugout and I’d be across the field in Mama’s dugout, making clover necklaces and waving to him from far away.
When we’d get back to New Hampshire after our two weeks with Mama, there were always a lot of questions. “What did you do? Who lives in the house with your mom? What kinds of food did you eat? Was somebody watching you the whole time? The whole time? Was your mother well, or did she do kind of nutty things?”
I made Hendrix promise he wouldn’t tell the part about how he ate the brownie with the dope in it. I had to pay him fifty cents and do his job of collecting the eggs from the henhouse for a whole month, but it was worth it. He didn’t mention it.
And then, a funny thing: After my daddy and Maggie asked us those few questions, there was never anything else they wanted to say. Mama didn’t get mentioned for the whole rest of the year.
She’d send a box at Christmas and on our birthday, and it would be filled with odd little things: pieces of ribbon, a ukulele song book, feathers, buttons, torn-up pages from a calendar, and some loose squares of old jeans. Maggie would shake her head and throw the whole thing away because, she said, the box smelled like that hippie smell, patchouli.
“Robert, I tell you, she’s getting worse,” I heard her say one time. “Why even bother to send a box if it’s not going to have anything in there a kid could play with? Broken glass! They could have gotten hurt.”
But I didn’t think so. I knew that everything my mama sent to me meant something wonderful to her. They were messages, all meant to be reminders of things we’d done together: the stuff we’d collected, the songs we’d played on the ukulele, the jeans we’d embroidered. I knew she was sending me some love, the best way she knew how. And I’d sneak out to the trash can and get the stuff Maggie threw away and put it all under my bed. And at night, I’d sit on the floor and bury my face in it, just breathing in the scent of my mom.
I didn’t talk to her on the toilet paper roll anymore because I knew by then that was stupid, but I did write her letters. I told her how I kept everything she ever sent and that I made a collage in art class with the buttons and feathers. And then I folded my letters away because I didn’t know her address, and I knew my father would never mail them for me.
I’d get in my bed at night and sing “You Are My Sunshine” and pretend that she was singing it right then, too, and that our two voices were meeting somewhere up in space.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I’m exhausted by the time I get home from work, but I call Hendrix to tell him about the Thanksgiving plan. Over the years, despite our different dugouts, he and I have done pretty well at divvying up the responsibilities of being the children of the Robert and Tenaj and Maggie Triumvirate, as we call it.
We have staked out our territory, family-wise.
Hendrix has always been the perfect child when it comes to being loyal to the whole farming, life-in-New-Hampshire thing. He stuck it out with farming, year after year, wearing his maroon down vest in the winter and his ratty old T-shirts in the summer, working side by side with our dad, planning, planting, pruning, growing, harve
sting, hiring field hands, driving the tractors, tallying up the figures—both he and my father committed one hundred percent until it became clear that the farm’s situation was so dire that it could no longer support Hendrix and his family. At which point—and with the permission of our father, who gave it wholeheartedly—Hendrix and Ariel took their three little boys and moved to Massachusetts, where he got a job managing a tractor store, and she started working as a school secretary.
But I’m the perfect child when it comes to staying in touch with everyone; I’m the one who makes the phone calls and arranges the visits. I ask about everyone’s health and what they’re having for dinner, and who they’ve talked to recently, and I know my parents’ aches and pains, the bitterness they don’t want to talk about, their fears, their silences, their quiet evenings, their deep well of sadness that can never be erased and never be spoken of.
And furthermore, what I know is this: that deep down in the dark recesses of their three o’clock in the morning thoughts, Hendrix and I are the flesh-and-blood reminders of an affair that shouldn’t have taken place.
Getting Hendrix to settle down on the phone is a feat in itself. He’s always got about five things going at one time. In the background, I can hear Ariel banging pots and pans and talking to the children about homework and washing hands and, “What’s that on the floor? No, pick it up. No, now. I said pick it up now.”
“Can you talk for a second?” I say to him. “I just need to tell you—”
“Wait a second. Ariel, it’s Phronsie. Phronsie. Yes, on the phone. Kids, can you please just pick up whatever that thing is and be quiet for like one tenth of a minute?” A beat of silence from him, with protests roaring in the background. “You can’t? Are you quite sure? Try it anyway, how would that be?” He comes back to the phone. “Hello, sister of mine! I’m so sorry about all this commotion. How are you? It’s been way too long!”
“I’m good,” I say. “You sound . . . busy. Kids doing okay?”
He says everybody’s fine. Work, school events, house stuff. You know. The whole nine yards. He has that tired but satisfied tone you hear so often in married couples with kids.
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