All We Had

by Annie Weatherwax

  Peter Pam bought me “green” cleaning products and gave me an old upright Hoover she’d found standing in someone’s trash. Mel fixed it up. He touched up the paint and polished the chrome. He carried it in his arms up our walkway and presented it to me as if it were a bride. “Isn’t she a beaut?” He set her down, unwound the cord from the neck, and demonstrated how she worked. “She’s got a high and low beam and her wheels pivot, making it easy to navigate in all directions.” And with one easy tap of a foot control, he showed me how to secure the handle upright and set her into park. It was awesome.

  But in mid-May, it poured. The leak broke through our ceiling, the cardboard hinged open like a door. A gush of dirty water spanked my linoleum. Bits of ceiling plaster flew everywhere and a dead squirrel—thwack, thwack—bounced off the counter and landed on the floor. Like a volunteer fire department, Peter Pam and Mel showed up without my asking with a piece of plywood and a screw gun, but life was falling down around me and nothing could keep it up.

  My mother took me for a drive. She wouldn’t tell me where we were going.

  “You’ll see,” she said. “Besides, you could use some fresh air.”

  We were heading in the direction of Walmart, but then she turned. She stepped on the gas and pulled onto the highway.

  She and I barely saw each other anymore and when we did, we hardly spoke. When we slept together we didn’t spoon, and half the time one of us would end up sleeping on the couch.

  But the highway always brought us back again.

  My mother turned up the radio and went faster. We opened our windows. The landscape widened and the sky stretched on forever.

  On the highway, life’s possibilities were easy to imagine. I looked out the window and saw a motorcade escorting us along. A whole new life projected on the road. One that included incredible things. For example, lunch with Hillary Clinton. In the reflection of the windshield, I saw us at a table enjoying Diet Cokes.

  My mother sat forward and turned up the volume.

  “These boots are made for walking”—she looked at me and smiled. This was one of her favorite songs. She swayed and snapped her fingers.

  The day was warm and long. The trees were full. The sun shined through the leaves and left brushstrokes of yellow on the earth. Wildflowers—purples and saffrons, oranges and blues—stippled the edge of the road. One day the planet might be too hot for anything to blossom, but that day, it was hard to imagine.

  My mother was really hamming it up, slapping the steering wheel. “One of these days these boots are going to walk all over you!” She galloped in her seat and her voice went low. Moments like this were all we had, so I let myself go and the two of us laughed.

  An hour later, she shook me awake. “Here we are,” she sang. I had fallen asleep and in that time, her fake, cheerful twin had come back. I could tell by the way she was sitting upright in her seat. She turned left, she turned right. She turned left, she turned right. Each time she was careful to come to a full stop and use her blinker—two things I’d never seen her do before.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” she asked.

  I looked around. We were driving through the center of a town. The houses lined the streets in even rows.

  “And”—she rounded the corner onto Center Street—“you’re not going to believe this, but”—she pulled to a stop—“there’s a Starbucks!”

  “Are you high?” I couldn’t help but ask. She and I were Dunkin’ Donuts girls through and through.

  She put the car in park, tapped me on the knee, and said, “Oh,” as in, Oh, don’t be silly. “I’m going to go grab an iced chai latte, do you want one?” She sprang out of the car.

  Across the street, an orchestra was getting ready to give a concert on the green. The audience sat in white folding chairs waiting, I imagined, for something cheerfully baroque. The green was dotted with tender saplings perched on mounds of ochre-colored mulch, as if they’d been dropped neatly into place that morning. The sky above was primary blue. A cute puffy cloud went by, giving the scene just the right touch of ironic fake realism.

  “I knew you’d like it here,” my mother said, ducking back into the car with her latte.

  “I have no idea where we are.”

  “This is Westland,” she said.

  “Wasteland?”

  “No, Westland,” she repeated, “as in north and south. You know, Westland, where Vick lives.”

  They’d changed the rules, she told me, and the loan Vick was working on for us hadn’t gone through. The bank would kick us out soon. So, she said, “We’re moving in with him.”

  She always did this. If she was afraid to tell me something, she’d just slip it into a conversation and act as if it were a given truth. I could tell by the way she was innocently scratching her cheek that she was hoping she’d gotten away with it. But I shot her one of my most melodramatic looks of disgust. I twisted my features as much as possible and, in case she needed help seeing it, I thrust the expression at her and flew out the door.

  Fat River was the only place I ever loved and no one was going to take that away from me.

  Ta-da-da-da. Ta-da-da-da. Suddenly there was music.

  The first few notes of Beethoven’s Fifth thundered out from the orchestra as I stormed along the shoulder of the road.

  Mel had told us we could move back behind the gas station if we lost the house. My mother wouldn’t hear of it though. She was sick and tired of living so close to the edge. But I didn’t care about her anymore. I decided right then and there, I was going to live in the gas station without her.

  My mother pulled the car back onto the street and stepped lightly on the gas to follow me.

  An empty paper cup crossed my path. I stepped on it, delighted by the crunch.

  Peter Pam and I had already measured the space. She had all sorts of decorating ideas. “A nice braided rug would brighten and warm the place right up,” she’d told me.

  “Ruthie!” my mother called. “What are you doing?” She was steering with one hand and shouting at me over the seat through the open passenger-side window.

  There was a patch of dirt behind the station where Arlene said there used to be tomatoes so I could have my own garden.

  “Get back in the car!” my mother shouted.

  The violin section played furiously. They jerked their heads, they snapped their strings. At the end of every riff, in a wild madcap gesture, they flung their bows toward the sky.

  I sped up. My mother did too. This time when she caught up with me, she stopped and got out of the car. “I mean it, Ruthie,” she screamed over the roof. “If you don’t get back in this instant, I’ll leave without you!”

  “Pffft!” I sputtered. See if I care! Then I flipped my fingers under my chin like I was Italian.

  A woman across the street gaped at us and drew her Williams-Sonoma shopping bag closer in. I walked faster. My mother got back in the car, pulled forward, got out again, and assumed the same position at her door.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she yelled, but I didn’t answer.

  This time when she got back in the car and stepped on the gas, the wheels spun.

  This prompted a loud gasp from the two women now watching us.

  “You know, you can be a real a-hole!” My mother was out of the car again yelling. “For the first time in, oh, let me think—” I stopped, jabbed my fists on my hips and glared at her like, This should be good!

  She had propped up her elbow with her hand and was tapping her finger to her lips, looking up in a mock thinking pose. “My entire life!” she yelled. “I’ve cleaned up my act and finally gotten us a decent place to live and this is how you thank me?

  “And another thing . . .” She tore her bag off her shoulder, dug out a pack of cigarettes, and pawed at them madly. One after another, cigarettes spilled out and broke. “You think I�
�m stupid, don’t you?” She finally managed to get a whole cigarette out and shoved it into her mouth. “Well, let me tell you something.” The unlit cigarette quaked, then she removed it and yelled, “I’m not!” and put it back again.

  Her new haircut indicated otherwise. It was shoulder length on one side, cropped on the other in an asymmetrical look that just screamed Idiot! to me.

  “I know exactly what you’re trying to do. But I am not going to let it happen. Nope!” When she jerked her head only half her hair swayed.

  She fished out her lighter from her bag, sparked a flame, lit her cigarette, and, without thinking about what she was doing, she slammed the lighter down on the ground and lurched toward me. “Not this time!” she barked. “There is no fucking way I’m going to let you talk me out of this one.”

  A small group of women had gathered across the street gawking at us as if they’d unwittingly been sucked into a bad made-for-TV movie.

  The street behind them was lined with shops that looked as if they’d been pressed in molds like candies and the row of tulips along the sidewalk exuded an unnaturally high wattage of color. God had turned up the contrast on life and dropped me into a badly sculpted play set.

  The only thing that looked real was the ash on the tip of my mother’s cigarette. She moved the cigarette to her mouth. She inhaled. A line of smoke spiraled up, the ash grew longer, and a sprinkle of it drifted to the ground.

  “He not only owns a house with a pool, it has three bathrooms! Count them!” She shoved three fingers in my face and wiggled them. With the cigarette she pointed to the tips of each one. “One, two . . .” She enunciated the words slowly like a nursery school teacher, but her hands shook like a hard-edged old lady’s. The ash hung by a thread. An explosion of percussions boomed across the green. “Three!” My mother touched her last fingertip, Beethoven’s Fifth crescendoed, and the ash fell. In my head, when it hit the ground a mushroom cloud erupted. A blast of radioactive dust smacked the ground and obliterated the planet.

  In the space that followed, a dead silence hushed across the green like snow. For a moment the audience sat awestruck. The women across the street held their breath. My mother inhaled and a brand-new ash sizzled.

  I cleared my throat. I blinked. “Mel said he’d put in a new shower stall.”

  “Encore!” the audience clapped and shouted.

  My mother’s shoulders dropped. “Ruthie.” She sighed, as in Don’t be so naïve.

  “Delete, delete, delete,” a bird in the sapling nearest us chirped.

  “Please,” my mother said. Her tone had softened. The women across the street moved onward. The sun angled downward.

  “Please, Ruthie. He has a washing machine and a dryer and a dishwasher that works. The plumbing doesn’t clatter and not a single window is broken. And I’m tired.” Her bottom lip began to quiver, but I told myself I didn’t care. “I just need a place to rest.”

  I took a deep breath. I felt my insides soften.

  She was only thirty-two, but the weight of a hundred hard lifetimes was etched across her face. Last winter’s cough had never fully gone away. The rattle in her lungs had worsened. And no amount of makeup could cover the heavy darkness that had settled beneath her eyes.

  My mother began to weep. She dropped her head and her shoulders shook. I could see the winged bones of her back beneath the thin fabric of her dress. A length of hem hung below her knees, weighted down by the safety pin that had held it up for days.

  “Don’t cry,” I said. When my mother cried, nothing else existed but her sadness, and her sadness ran so deep that if I didn’t stop it, it would drown us both.

  She raised her head and looked at me. A well of wounded dreams shimmered at the bottom of her eyes.

  “Don’t cry,” I said again. I reached out and took her hand. “Everything will be okay, I promise.”

  “The summer, Ruthie, that’s all I’m asking, so I can catch my breath. And after that, if it doesn’t work out, we’ll move back.”

  A breeze kicked up. The leaves on the trees fluttered and a netting of light flickered across the road. A flock of birds cut across the sky and drew a curtain on the sun.

  “I promise,” she said.

  When I thought about hell, I thought about life without my mother. She was all I ever really had. I tried to picture who I’d be without her and the only image that came to mind was of a ghost.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Farewell

  Relax and drop your shoulders,” Peter Pam said to me. We were sitting cross-legged on a pair of oversize pillows on the floor in her apartment.

  Peter Pam’s apartment was like a womb. Maroon Indian-print fabric was stapled to the walls. Plumes of it bloomed off the ceiling.

  Life was crashing down on me and there was nothing I could do but watch it happen. I’d given up on our house. I now balled my trash up and chucked it on the floor. Sometimes I’d pick it up just for the satisfaction of throwing it down again. Once, on my way to the kitchen table I dropped a bowl of cereal and instead of cleaning it up, I took my foot and ground each bit of it into the linoleum. It had taken me months and months to get our house fixed up and—snap!—just like that, it was trash again.

  “Now close your eyes,” Peter Pam said, “and think about nothing.”

  What was nothing? What did it look like and how did it smell? My mind was prone to wander, asking unanswerable questions until I wanted to shoot myself, but the sound of Peter Pam’s voice calmed me.

  “See yourself standing at the top of a mountain. The sky is all around you. A breeze grazes your cheek.”

  I began to see the place clearly. I was in the Alps somewhere. I looked around me. A smattering of wildflowers bloomed in between patches of melting snow.

  “You take in a full breath of crystal-clear air. Your heart rate drops.”

  I saw myself from above standing at the highest place on earth. I widened my stance, opened my arms, arched back, and looked up as if to say to God, Here I am. I am right here.

  Something touched my cheek and eased me back into the room. Peter Pam slowly filled my vision. She was shaking me. “Rooster,” she said. Rooster was the nickname she used for me in urgent situations.

  “Rooster!” Snap snap! Her two fingers appeared in front of my face as I came to.

  “Oh, thank the Lord.” She patted her chest. “What happened to you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It was weird.”

  “You had this look on your face like you were never coming back. It scared me.” She pulled me into her. The stuffing in her bra crackled. Then suddenly she pushed me back. “You weren’t messing with me, were you?” She lowered her eyes, cocked her head, and studied me.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know what happened but it felt as if I slipped through time.”

  “Wow.” Her face softened. She let go of my shoulders, sat back against the wall, and settled me in her arms again.

  “What was it like?” she asked after a while.

  “It was beautiful.”

  She scrunched us closer together.

  A long soothing silence swaddled us. Dave jumped up, circled Peter Pam’s lap, and made himself a bed. Peter Pam caressed him with long, wistful, head-to-tail strokes.

  “You know what I think?” she finally said. “I think the meaning of life is this.”

  “What?”

  “This.” She raised her hand and drew the universe with her finger. Then she pointed back and forth from me to her to Dave. “This,” she said again.

  I sighed and smiled at her. I closed my eyes and rested there. Dave began to purr.

  If I never made another friend, I wouldn’t care.

  “You’ll be all right.” She tilted my head back and kissed my forehead. “I know you will.”

  We left Fat River on a Sunday morning in June 2008. By th
en our electricity had been cut off and an eviction notice had been taped to our door.

  Early that morning before the restaurant opened, Arlene threw a party. It was a sad little gathering that wasn’t much fun. To begin with, Tiny’s petty cash was almost gone so Arlene had to get a discounted day-old cake. It said “HAPPY 90th LARRY!” on it. According to Arlene, the cake was half off because the girl behind the counter told her that the very moment the baker finished the exclamation mark, Larry croaked. None of us knew Larry, but we were in mourning anyway. Even Mel—the most even-­tempered person I’d ever met—sat down and joined in our sadness.

  My mother wasn’t there. She claimed she had too much packing to do, though her stuff had been packed and ready weeks ago. She and Arlene were barely speaking anyway. She was through with Peter Pam and she told herself that Mel was just like every other boss she’d had: a real prick.

  When my mother pulled up to get me, she turned the car around so it faced the street. She sat there idling, low in the seat, in an extra-big pair of sunglasses as if she were afraid to be seen.

  “Think of it like a summer vacation,” Arlene said, patting my hand.

  “And you can always come back,” Mel added.

  I slid out of the booth. I knew this episode with Vick would never last. I gave it only weeks before my mother started hating him. But when Arlene and Mel pressed me in a hug between them, the lump in my throat grew so big I couldn’t swallow.

  Peter Pam and I told ourselves this wasn’t good-bye. We would meet again. “I promise you,” she said. My chin began to quiver.

  “Now don’t you start.” She shook her finger. “You’ll get me going.” She dabbed at the corner of her eye with her pinky. “And my mascara will run.”

  I opened my mouth to say good-bye.

  “Hup, hup.” She pressed her finger to my lips. “Shh, I don’t want to hear it. Now give me a hug.” And she gathered me in her arms.

  The three of them followed me out. Mel wheeled my bike up to the car. He had given me a bicycle rack, and he helped me put the bike on it. I got in the car and looked out the window. Under the flashing hot dog sign, like gracefully descending musical notes, they stood in order by height—Arlene, the tallest, Peter Pam, and then Mel. My mother stepped on the gas. They waved good-bye and in the dust that turned up behind us, they vanished.