The Sometimes Daughter

by Sherri Wood Emmons

  Trent wasn’t a whole lot better, but at least he was big. When I decided to start the business, I’d gone alone to the first meeting with my supplier. Mitch was a big-time dealer, an eighteen-year-old dropout, and he creeped me out. After that first meeting, I always took Trent along. He might be stupid, but he was built like an ox and fast on his feet. Plus, he had keys to his grandmother’s garage, the perfect place to conduct business. At least it had been. Now we’d have to find someplace new.

  I flopped down on my bed to think about that. We needed someplace private but close to home, someplace where no one would notice the traffic. We did a lot of business.

  The phone rang downstairs and I ran to answer it.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Judy!” Treva’s voice still bugged the hell out of me. She was always so damned perky. “Is your dad home?”

  “He’s in the can.”

  “Oh.” She sounded disappointed. “Can I leave him a message? Will you tell him I’m still at the office, and he can just pick me up here.”

  “Will do,” I said, hanging up before she could say anything else.

  Honestly, I couldn’t see what Dad saw in her. Treva was pretty, I guess, in an obvious kind of way. But she talked all the time. I mean, all the time. It was enough to make my ears bleed.

  Dad came down the stairs, tucking his shirt into his khakis.

  “Who was on the phone?”

  “Treva,” I said, opening the fridge. “She says to pick her up at her office.”

  “Okay.” He kissed the top of my head. “I won’t be late. And remember, home by ten.”

  “Okay.”

  After he left, I heated the Chinese takeout in a pan on the stove and ate it with Doritos. I wondered if it would be safe to call Trent, and decided against it. No way Piper would let him talk to me today. According to Piper, I was the cause of everything her kids did wrong. Nothing was ever their fault. Like the time Trent got caught throwing mud balls at the Catholic school. Piper was sure I’d put him up to it, even though I was the last person on earth who’d do that. Nuns scared the hell out of me. Or when Luce stole a bike from the kid up the block. Piper told my dad that must have been my idea, too.

  I wondered, for about the millionth time, what it might be like to have a mom like that. A mom who made breakfast and came to school meetings and thought I could do no wrong. A mom who stuck around. A mom who wasn’t a lunatic. Probably it would be worse to have Piper as a mom.

  I sighed as I put my dish in the sink. It would at least be nice to have someone at home who cooked. Dad’s repertoire included pancakes, scrambled eggs, and spaghetti. Mama may have been nuts, but she was a good cook. Sometimes I could almost taste her stir-fry with tofu, if I tried hard.

  The phone rang again. Lee Ann sounded slightly stoned.

  “Has your dad gone?”

  “Yeah, he won’t be back till after ten.”

  “I’m coming over.”

  She arrived a few minutes later, clutching a bag of potato chips. Her eyes were bloodshot and glassy.

  “Geez, you started without me,” I said.

  “Just a couple tokes,” she said. “I couldn’t wait. My mom is driving me crazy.”

  We opened my bedroom window and lit a joint. Rufus curled up at the foot of the bed, watching us with his sad dog eyes.

  “I mean it,” Lee Ann said. “She’s making me nuts. You can’t believe how bad it is. She’s on me for every little thing. ‘Lee Ann, your room’s a mess.’ ‘Lee Ann, why can’t you cut your hair?’ ‘Lee Ann, you need to make more of an effort at school.’” She lit a cigarette and dragged deeply, blowing smoke out the window. “You’re so lucky.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Your dad’s really cool,” she said, leaning heavily against the wall. “And you don’t have to deal with a mom.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” My head felt heavy, like my neck couldn’t quite hold it up.

  “Seriously,” she said. “You have it made.”

  “For now, at least.”

  “What do you mean, for now?”

  “What if Dad marries Treva?” I stubbed out the last of the joint and popped the remainder in my mouth.

  “Oh, God, do you think he’s going to?”

  “I don’t know. He’s out with her all the time. And when they’re not out, she’s here, trying to be my new best friend.”

  Lee Ann giggled. “Well, if they get married at least you could borrow her clothes.”

  I stared at her, aghast. “Like I’d be caught dead in her clothes. Geez, Lee Ann, you’re wasted.”

  “What are you gonna do about the garage?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. We’ll have to find a new place, I guess.”

  “Bummer.”

  We sat in silence, watching the smoke from her cigarette curl through the screen in the window. It’s funny how interesting smoke can be when you’re stoned.

  “Hey,” she said suddenly. “I have an idea. What about that house by the railroad tracks, the one that’s boarded up? Carla told me there’s a window in back that’s broken. I’ll bet we could get inside.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Seriously, Judy, that could work. No one goes down there anymore.”

  “That’s because the little kids think it’s haunted.”

  We laughed at that. Everything’s funny when you’re stoned.

  “Let’s go,” she said, rising from the bed and steadying herself against the wall.

  “What, now?”

  “Sure, let’s go see it.”

  “Okay.” I pulled myself to my feet and swayed. “In a minute. First, let’s eat something.”

  We ate the entire bag of chips in the kitchen. Then we headed for the house. It wasn’t a long walk, only a couple blocks. When we got to the tracks, we followed them another block to where the little house sat back from the road, its windows boarded, graffiti on its siding. We walked around to the back and there, indeed, was an unboarded, broken window.

  We dragged an old lawn chair from the neighbor’s backyard and climbed onto it to open the window. Then we climbed in, brushing broken glass aside and giggling like idiots.

  It was dark inside. We waited for our eyes to adjust to the dim, then looked around the room.

  “Damn, we should have brought a flashlight.” Lee Ann swore as she stumbled on a loose floorboard.

  The house had been empty for a long time, as long as I could remember. It smelled musty, like wet leaves.

  “Let’s go,” I whispered, pulling at Lee Ann’s hand. “It’s too dark. Let’s come back tomorrow, when it’s light out.”

  “Chicken!” She laughed, pulling her hand from mind. “Let’s just see what’s in the other rooms.”

  “Seriously, Lee Ann, let’s go. We can’t see anything without a flashlight.”

  She sighed heavily.

  “Let’s go get some ice cream.” I knew that would get her attention.

  “Okay,” she said. “But tomorrow we’re coming back. And we’re bringing a light.”

  We climbed out the way we’d come in, balancing on the rickety lawn chair and then jumping to the ground.

  I looked back at the house as we walked down the railroad tracks and shivered. The place looked dark and creepy. No wonder the little kids thought it was haunted.

  You’re being paranoid, I said to myself. It’s the pot. Sometimes that happened.

  But in the gathering dark, the house looked spooky, like something dead and forgotten.

  “I’m gonna get strawberry,” Lee Ann said. “And maybe hot fudge on top.”

  I laughed. Lee Ann was so predictable. My best friend since the first day of kindergarten, she was funny and outgoing and fiercely loyal. She struggled with her weight and complained that she was fat. She wasn’t, really, just a little pudgy. Too much ice cream, too many chips. Still, the boys seemed to like her. Her boobs were huge.

  Since Vernita had moved away the year before, Lee Ann was the only person who knew
everything about my mom, everything about me. And she loved me anyway.

  32

  We didn’t go back to the house the next day. Lee Ann’s mother made her stay home to clean her room. I didn’t mind, really. I wasn’t anxious to go back. I sat in my room, doodling for a while, until I couldn’t stand the boredom. Then I walked to Lee Ann’s house and rang the bell. Her mother answered the door.

  “Hi, Judy.” She smiled at me.

  “Hi, Mrs. Dawson. Can I help Lee Ann clean her room?”

  She laughed and said, “Of course, you can, sweetheart. Go on upstairs.”

  I loved Mrs. Dawson. She was always nice to me. When I started my period, she took me to the store to buy pads. She bought my first bra for me. And whenever I came for dinner, she made meat loaf, because she knew it was my favorite.

  Lee Ann was sitting on the floor in her bedroom, surrounded by piles of clothes, papers, books, and photos. She grimaced at me. “What the hell am I supposed to do with all this junk?”

  “We could throw it out the window and burn it in the backyard,” I suggested.

  She laughed. “And then roast marshmallows on the fire?”

  “Come on,” I said, holding out a trash bag. “Let’s start with the stuff you can throw out.”

  This proved harder than it sounded. Lee Ann was kind of a pack rat. She argued over every item that went into the bag.

  “Not those! Those are my favorite overalls.”

  I held them up and traced my finger down a long tear in the seam. “They’re two sizes too small, and they’re torn,” I said, tossing them into the bag.

  We went through clothes first, tossing some, setting others aside for Goodwill, and folding the rest back into her drawers. After an hour or so, we had waded through the clothes, books, and papers. A huge pile of photographs remained on the floor. There must have been a thousand of them. I sighed. This would be the hard part.

  “Here,” I said, shoving the photos into the space between us. “Let’s start by making two stacks. ‘Definitely keeping’ and ‘maybe keeping.’”

  Forty-five minutes later, the definite stack was so tall we had to start a second pile. The maybe stack had all of seven pictures.

  Finally, I gave in. “Okay, let’s just put them all in a box for now and you can do them later. I’m hungry.”

  Lee Ann smiled, relieved, and ran downstairs for a box. I sat on the floor, flipping idly through the pictures. Lee Ann on the first day of junior high, grinning at the camera and giving the thumbs-up. The two of us at the pool, sporting our first bikinis, the summer I’d gone out to California, the last time I saw Mama. Lee Ann and Susan, maybe eight years old, pulling a tiny cake from an Easy-Bake Oven. I smiled, wishing my dad had taken more pictures when I was a kid.

  Lee Ann returned with a shoe box. “That’s not going to be big enough,” I said.

  “Let’s just see,” she replied.

  “Hey, look at this one,” she said, holding a photo out to me. “It’s all of us and our moms at the Christmas pageant in kindergarten.”

  I took the photo and stared at it. My own face stared back at me, smiling and holding my mother’s hand. Mama smiled at the camera. She wore a long broomstick skirt with a fuzzy blue sweater. Her blond hair cascaded around her shoulders like a veil. She looked so much younger, so much prettier than the other moms in the photo. She didn’t look much older than I was now.

  “Do you want to keep that one?” Lee Ann asked, watching my face closely.

  “No,” I said, “that’s okay.”

  I put the picture into the shoe box. Lee Ann promptly retrieved it and shoved it at me.

  “Keep it,” she said. “You don’t have that many pictures of your mom.”

  She was right about that. Daddy had a small album with a handful of photos from the time he was married to Mama—a couple pictures of their wedding at a state park, one of Mama in the kitchen holding a wooden spoon and covered in flour, one of the three of us taken shortly after my birth. When I was younger, I often spent entire afternoons looking at those pictures, staring hard, searching for some trace of what went wrong, why Mama left us. I hadn’t done that in a long time.

  I put the photo in my pocket to take home.

  After we’d boxed all of the photos, made the bed, and swept the floor, Lee Ann’s mom inspected the room and pronounced it clean. Then she made grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup for lunch.

  “What do you want to do now?” Lee Ann asked, wiping breadcrumbs from the table to the floor below.

  “I don’t care. What do you want to do?”

  This was our mantra for the summer. Like the vultures in The Jungle Book, we were constantly bored, unable to come up with anything fun or interesting. Sometimes we played cards or rode the bus to the mall. Sometimes we walked to the park to swim or plopped down on the grass to watch other people play tennis. We sighed and longed for the day when we gained the glorious freedom that came with having wheels. We had both taken driver’s ed in June, but neither of us was sixteen yet. I was marking days until my birthday—just twenty-three to go before I could get my license. For now, though, we were stuck with our bikes.

  “Want to see a movie?” I asked.

  “Can’t,” she said. “I’m broke.”

  “I’ll pay.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “You always pay.”

  That was true. Lee Ann always spent her allowance the minute she got it on ice cream and chips. I, on the other hand, had plenty of money. Dealing pot was very lucrative.

  “Let’s go to Smoots,” she said, standing.

  Lee Ann had a crush on the guy who worked behind the counter at the little grocery store. His name was Denny, he was seventeen, and he had his own car.

  “Okay.” I shrugged my shoulders.

  “But first do my hair,” she said.

  I braided her hair into a French twist and watched her apply eye shadow.

  “I don’t know why you wear that stuff,” I said. “You look good without it.”

  She just sighed and combed mascara onto her lashes. “Someday you’ll meet someone you’ll want to look good for,” she said, smiling at me in the mirror.

  “Whoever I like is just going to have to like me the way I am,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I’m not going to waste my money on makeup.”

  We snuck out the back door so Lee Ann’s mom wouldn’t see the eye shadow and walked to the grocery.

  “If he’s there, you go back to the frozen foods and let me talk to him, okay?” Lee Ann patted her hair.

  “I know.” I nodded. Personally, I didn’t think Denny would ever ask her out. We’d been in the store almost every day this summer. If he hadn’t asked by now, he probably wasn’t going to. Of course, I didn’t say that to Lee Ann. She was my best friend. I wanted her to be happy.

  “Hi, Denny!” Lee Ann’s voice was breathy and soft.

  “Oh, hey,” he said, looking up from the magazine he was reading.

  “My mom needs a few things for dinner. She’s always running out of stuff.” Lee Ann laughed.

  “I need something in back.” I looked over my shoulder as I walked toward the frozen foods. Lee Ann was leaning against the counter, smiling brightly. Denny looked bored.

  I wandered through the store, idly picking things up and putting them back on the shelves.

  “Judy?”

  I looked up from the box of macaroni I was holding. I didn’t recognize the guy standing in front of me. Then he smiled.

  “Matt?”

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  I hadn’t seen Matt Carmichael in years. His parents had divorced when we were in the fifth grade, and he and his mom had moved away. I’d always liked Matt. He was nice.

  “I thought you moved to Kentucky or somewhere.”

  “We did,” he said, grimacing. “We moved in with my mom’s parents for a while. But now we’ve moved back to Indy.”

  “Cool,” I said. “Are you going to Howe this fall?”

 
He nodded. “Yeah, we’re renting a place on Butler until Mom finds something she wants to buy.”

  “Wow.” I was impressed that his mother would buy a house on her own.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Mom went back to school while we were in Lexington. She got her teaching license. So she’s gonna teach at 57.”

  I laughed. “Aren’t you afraid she’ll hear all those stories about you?” Matt had been the class clown at School 57.

  He shrugged. “It’s been a while. I doubt anyone there even remembers me now.”

  We stood a minute, just looking at each other. He had grown up a lot. But I guess I probably had, too. It had been four years since he moved away. He was tall now and kind of cute, with shaggy brown hair and dark eyes. I became acutely aware of my ratty T-shirt and unbrushed hair.

  “You look good,” he said. His eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled. He was very cute.

  “I’m a mess.” I laughed. “I’ve been helping Lee Ann clean her room.”

  “Lee Ann Dawson? Is she still around?”

  “Yeah, and we’re still best friends. She’s here.” I gestured toward the front of the store. “Come say hi.”

  We walked to the counter, where Lee Ann was still leaning, smiling at Denny.

  “Hey, look who I found,” I said.

  Lee Ann looked at Matt for a long minute before she recognized him.

  “Matty O’Patty!” she said, grinning. “Where the hell have you been?”

  Matt’s grin faltered for a second. He sighed. “No one’s called me that for a long time.”

  Then I remembered how, in the second grade, Matt had played a leprechaun in the class St. Patrick’s Day play. And how, for years after, Lee Ann and Susan had called him Matty O’Patty. God, he’d hated it!

  Lee Ann’s eyes scanned quickly up and down Matt’s lanky form. “You’ve turned into a hunk!” she proclaimed.

  Matt laughed, and I saw a blush on his cheeks.