All We Had

by Annie Weatherwax

  In the parking lot, under a tent, a small band played. Tiny’s provided the food—hamburgers, hot dogs, potato salad, Coke, wine and beer. As if on thrones, Dotty and Hank sat at the edge of their party in folding chairs. Gazing around and holding hands, they beamed.

  Something always happened to send us tumbling to the bottom. My mother would lose her job somehow—she’d get sick and they’d lay her off or just replace her. But it had been ten months, almost a year, since we’d been in Fat River. It was the longest we’d ever stayed in one place.

  My mother eased into herself in a way I had never seen. She smiled and laughed more easily. She became more sure of who she was: smart, quick-witted, and clever. And she now appreciated things she’d never had time to. More than once I caught her marveling at the vastness of the sky. As for me? I stopped biting my nails, and for the first time in my life, I slept like a baby.

  The good times were affecting everyone. Even Svetlana showed up for the party, and Svetlana never went out in public. Arlene claimed it was because she had agoraphobia. Peter Pam was sure the cause was OCD and anxiety. But the truth was people stared at her. Mel had pulled up in his truck with her and a crowd had already gathered. They hushed and parted as she wheeled by them.

  Normally she’d just glare up at them and they’d scatter like Raid-blasted ants. But that day, she rode in on her chair as if it were a thoroughbred. A slight but discernible smile graced her lips.

  Then I realized what was different. Her wheelchair was brand-new. Mel had been saving up for months. And here it finally was. A red, sleek, and shiny three-wheel scooter with six speeds and a basket. And Mel didn’t have to push it. He walked beside her with a glow.

  Svetlana’s features were sculpted and fine. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a perfect French twist, and her almond-shaped eyes twinkled blue. She had just one Chardonnay but that was all it took. When the band struck up the tune to “Endless Love” by Lionel Richie, she put her glass down and shifted forward. She pulled out from under the tent and into the center of the parking lot. As if the gymnast inside her had sprung back to life, she started pirouetting in the gravel. A series of perfect figure eights reached a climax. Awe rippled through the crowd when she straightened the wheel, raised her arm, and steered with one hand. She tilted her head up and arched her back. When a cloud appeared and blocked out the sun, she took her red scarf off, trailed it behind her, and splashed the shadow with color.

  It was grace like I’d never known it.

  The next morning at work, Peter Pam and Arlene were still in disbelief. They’d never known Svetlana had that kind of unadulterated beauty inside her. “I mean, she always seemed like such a bitch.” Arlene said.

  “It is confusing,” Peter Pam agreed.

  Arlene glanced up with a slight smile. Her eyes twinkled as if she were reliving Svetlana’s performance. “Oh,” she sighed, throwing her dish towel down, “who cares how the accident happened. It’s just a damn shame. And you know what else?” Before anyone could answer, she said, “I’m even thinking I might have her over for dinner someday, you know, get to know her a bit.” This, of course, would never happen, but the times were bringing out feelings in people they never knew they had before.

  I will always remember that Sunday morning after the party. We were so busy debriefing about it that nobody noticed, but the sky outside had darkened. A gale of wind touched down so fast, the building shook and the dishes rattled.

  Our chatting stopped and we moved to the window to look out. The rain would come any minute now. Another gust blew straight across the parking lot.

  “Hey,” Arlene said, untying her apron and slapping it down on the table. “Come with me.” She reached down and took my wrist. “I gotta show you something. It’s perfect weather for it.”

  And before I knew it, we were outside. The dusty wind howled and whipped around our heads. Tugging me along, she shouldered through to the middle of the parking lot, where she stopped. She squatted, thrust her face forward, and grinned so wide it turned her eyes to slits.

  “You hear that?” she yelled over the wind.

  “Hear what?” I asked.

  “Come closer.” She pulled me in. “And close your eyes.” Then she assumed the same strange position, only she held it much longer.

  The sky was beginning to spit. Any minute now it would pour, but I did what she told me. I closed my eyes and listened. And then I heard it. Above all the other sounds, a low, deep, smooth note emerged and hovered there. It was the tone of the wind whistling through Arlene’s missing back teeth and it was beautiful.

  “Oh my God, that’s awesome!” I shouted.

  “Isn’t it?”

  Arlene knew how to do all sorts of things. She could weave in and out of the kitchen and around her tables. Juggling dishes and glasses, cups and saucers, bowls and coffee mugs, like Sam I Am, she never dropped a single one. She could snap her gum to the tune of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and she could twirl the bridge of her front teeth all the way around and put it back in place without opening her mouth—not even once.

  “Oh please,” she’d said to me, “that’s nothing. When I was younger and my damn knees weren’t so shot I could ride a unicycle.” And the next day she showed me a picture to prove it. It was creased and faded but there she was, age twelve, her arms outstretched for balance, tall even then, perched atop a bright red seat, grinning from ear to ear.

  The wind hushed and the tree branches swatted the clouds. A new jet stream of air rushed in and rain fell in buckets. Arlene and I stood together in the parking lot with our palms up.

  The days that year had taken on a rhythm like they never had before. They had a leisurely ambient flow, the kind of flow that lowers your heart rate. Life was never perfect. But I remember on that day, it felt close.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Well-Being

  At the end of July our realtor, Frank O’Malley, called us. One of the siblings had passed away and the family had taken another vote. They were selling the house.

  My mother was sick over the news. She crawled into bed and stayed there, missing a full day of work. It was the first time we’d ever had a consistent place to live and I didn’t know how badly she’d needed it until then.

  Days went by with her like this, but early one Saturday morning, a black SUV pulled up in front of our house.

  The car idled there while a man inside gathered some papers. The driver’s-side door opened. A moment passed, then a pair of boots hit the ground. He wore a cowboy hat and a suit. Prosperity was visible in the crease of his pants. He stood there a minute, adjusted his hat, straightened the knot on his tie, and walked to our front door.

  My mother and I answered his knock together. She was still in her slippers and robe. He filled the doorframe when we opened it. He held his hat in his hands. His hair was thick and dyed black. A visor of it swooped forward and shaded his eyes. The part down the side was perfectly straight, as if he’d used a ruler to make it. A marble could’ve fit in the dimple of his chin.

  “Who the fuck are you?” my mother asked.

  She didn’t trust men in suits. “Stay away from them,” she’d told me. “They’re ruining the world.”

  My mother looked over his shoulder to see where he’d come from. Where there was one, there could be a whole army of them.

  “Name’s Vick Ward, and I’m not here to sell you anything.” He smiled broadly. His teeth were so bright the spaces between them seemed spackled together.

  “Yeah, right.” My mother took a drag off her cigarette, blew it out the side of her mouth. “And I was born yesterday.”

  I chuckled, crossed my arms, shifted my weight to one hip, and stared at him, waiting for his response.

  Salespeople made us feel smart. When they called, my mother would pretend to listen to their pitches but really she’d be covering the receiver and she and I would be la
ughing. Then finally she’d say, “Let me go get my wallet,” but instead she’d hold out the phone and shout directly into the mouthpiece, “Fuck you, loser!” then slam it down. It was hysterical. It’d take us hours to stop howling.

  “Well, now, if you give me just one minute of your time and hear what I’m about to tell you, I can guarantee it will make you very happy,” Vick Ward claimed.

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  For the first time, he looked at me. His grin widened. His crow’s-feet deepened. “Well, aren’t you cute.” A barely discernible hint of sarcasm lingered in his voice.

  “Don’t call her cute,” my mother said. “She doesn’t like it.” When she went to go close the door, he stuck his boot in it. The toe was shiny and black. My mother looked down. Intent on crushing it, she pulled the door harder, but Vick went right on talking.

  “Did you know, a month after the people across the street bought their house it increased in value by ten thousand dollars? And you have better credit than they do. According to my records, you’ve never missed a credit-card payment.”

  “We haven’t made one yet,” I said. We’d gotten a no-interest, no-payment-for-a-year deal on the one we got at Walmart.

  “Yes, indeed.” He ignored me, his foot still in the door. “You are more than qualified to buy this lovely home. You don’t need a down payment, you don’t need a tax return, you don’t even need a job!” He was almost gleeful.

  “Didn’t we just see you last night on an infomercial dicing onions?” I snickered and looked at my mother, thinking this would make her laugh. But she wasn’t listening.

  She’d stopped pulling the door closed and was staring across the street. Another delivery truck had pulled up to Patti’s. The back doors swung wide open.

  My mother took a long hard drag off her cigarette. She eased the door open, tossed the butt onto the stoop, stepped out, and crushed it with the ball of her slipper. She glared at Vick Ward, blew a line of smoke straight up.

  “You got ID?” she asked.

  Behind our house, bolted down to a platform of overgrown cement, there were two lounge chairs that we’d thought were trash, but that summer we cleaned them up and discovered they were perfectly situated for a pool.

  So we lay around as if at a hotel, gossiping and dreaming like girlfriends. And my mother laughed at all my jokes. We snapped our fingers and ordered drinks from an imaginary waiter who we agreed looked like Leonardo DiCaprio. “He’s so cute!” she swooned.

  One night late that summer after work, she was straddling her lounge chair counting her tips and complaining how things had slowed. Fewer people seemed to be eating out.

  “It will pick up,” I told her, sure of myself, sipping my Coke.

  Through a line of trees the lights from the McDonald’s on Route 6 buzzed. Little bits of the yellow arches wove in and out through the shadowy branches. The breeze that night carried fragments of orders from the drive-thru. Individual words—please, double, burger, and large, drifted into our backyard and landed around us like paper airplanes.

  “It’s August,” I explained. “People go on vacation. Most people take at least two weeks off. Therapists take the whole month!”

  “Most people I know don’t take a single day,” my mother said.

  “It’s different now.” Feeling cocky, I took another swig of my Coke.

  For the first time in our lives, instead of falling further behind, my mother and I were moving up. That year it seemed as if the heavens had parted.

  “We’re not most people anymore,” I reminded her. “We’re homeowners. It’s a guaranteed cushion if you fall.”

  At first we thought it was too good to be true, but Patti told us she never thought they could afford to buy a house either. And we looked it up: American Mortgage, where Vick worked, had been around for years. There was hardly any paperwork. All we needed was my mother’s signature, and overnight we became queens and our little house became our castle. We spent hours dreaming how we’d fix it up. We could plant flowers in front, my mother said. And, oh, wouldn’t a bird bath be nice. We’d fix the leak in the ceiling and replace the siding and how about if we painted the kitchen red?

  “You know what?” my mother finally said. “You’re right.” She folded her dollar bills, sat back in her chair, and stuffed them into her pocket. “And you know what else?” She tapped me on the arm. “You and I need a vacation. Now, where do you think we should go?”

  Paris, London, Rome. We looked at the sky and sighed at the thought of each one.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Hatred

  Like a long, cool glass of water after hours of thirst, relief had finally come our way. A year went by. In school, I stopped caring what people thought of me. In my mind I saw myself as a star in a ticker-tape parade, perched on the back of a convertible waving to the masses. Sally Milander would see me on TV. I imagined her on her couch as I knew she would be: overweight, pregnant, and married to an asshole.

  Then, sometime in early 2007, things began to shift. The plastic tubing company north of here moved its vacuum-hose production to China. A few months after that, medical tubing went and a gang of teenagers sprouted up on Main Street. They’d ride their skateboards up and down the middle of the road and when they got tired they stood around, kicking the earth and smoking.

  One night just before closing, in June of that summer, two of the older ones came into Tiny’s and settled into one of Peter Pam’s booths.

  One of them wore a red cap, the other had a shaved head and a tattoo—a tangle of snakes weaving up his arm. The one with the tattoo did all the talking; the other one just sat there. His bloodshot eyes roamed around and surveyed the place. My mother and Arlene were already in the back wiping off ketchup bottles.

  When Peter Pam brought them their burgers, the one with the tattoos said something to her and the other one snickered. For a split second Peter Pam hesitated, like she wasn’t certain how to take it, then her face softened. She said something—mocking and teasing them right back. And before I knew it, they were laughing like friends.

  When they finished their burgers and got up, I was stacking coffee mugs behind the counter and Peter Pam was wiping down her tray.

  “See ya later, doll,” the one with the tattoo said to her as he walked by. Then just before he left, he turned, widened his eyes, and flicked his tongue in and out. A silver stud, pierced right through it, winked in the overhead light. His teeth were jagged and gray.

  “That’s gross,” I said.

  “Oh, please. That’s nothing.” Peter Pam pushed up on the bottom of her wig and lifted a hip like Marilyn Monroe. “They just know a good-looking girl when they see one.”

  Mel came out and locked the front door. He unplugged the neon chicken wing and the hot dog flashing in its bun, said good night, then left through the back.

  When the four of us finished cleaning up, we slid into a booth—me and Peter Pam with our Diet Cokes, my mother and Arlene with their Chardonnays.

  “Oh my God,” Peter Pam said, “I’m exhausted.” Then she unbuttoned her top button and started removing the stuffing from her bra: a wad of newspaper, toilet paper, and a few crumpled-up restaurant orders spilled out.

  Peter Pam refused to fill her bra with anything but recycled material. That’s how much she cared about the earth. Her boobs were always uneven and lumpy and anything could be in there. If you accidentally brushed up against one you’d never know what kind of sound would come out. One day, as she clutched her tray to her chest, her left breast squeaked. “Cat toy,” she’d explained when I looked up. “It was nice and round.”

  “Reduce, reuse, recycle,” Peter Pam sang, taking a plastic sandwich baggie out of her left cup.

  “Oh, please, not this again.” Arlene rolled her eyes and took a swig of wine.

  Arlene threw all her trash out on purpose just to aggravate Pete
r Pam and at the end of the night Peter Pam would dump the whole barrel upside down and fish out every tiny bit of plastic just to aggravate her back. They were like an old married couple in the way they loved each other but disagreed about everything.

  In Peter Pam’s vision of the world every living creature had its place. If she ever came across a spider or an ant, she’d walk it out, ease it off a magazine, and wistfully watch it go. But Arlene beat insects dead with a broom. And she was wild about it, letting out a string of hoots and howls.

  “Oh, look,” Peter Pam said, “a quarter!” as she pulled it out of her bra.

  Arlene picked up her pack of cigarettes and smacked the bottom against the palm of her hand so that two of them stood out. She grabbed the taller one with her lips, then reached across the table and offered my mother the other one. There was no smoking at Tiny’s but after hours, Arlene did it anyway.

  “I’m sick of hearing about the fucking earth,” she declared, picking up her Zippo lighter, extending the flame across the table to my mother. Then she lit her own cigarette the way she always did—like a Marlboro man, with her head cocked and one eye squinted.

  “I couldn’t give two shits about this planet,” she snickered, a little drunk. My mother laughed. She always took Arlene’s side on things.

  Even though she and Arlene were friends, my mother never got used to how fond I was of Peter Pam. She was too afraid of losing me. She’d grown up moving in and out with different foster families. In the middle of the night, social services would come and snatch her. So for a long time after I was born she almost never put me down. She told me she even fucked a guy once with me on her hip. “We rode him like a bull!” she’d howled.

  With the flick of Arlene’s thumb and a tinny pop, the flame on her Zippo went out and the lighter closed.