by Sarah Dooley
Doctor visits came and went, little appointment cards stuck to the refrigerator with magnets I made in art class. Worry tipped over into silliness. We would go out and get chocolate cake for breakfast, or stay home from school to roller-skate, or watch movies till three a.m. on weeknights. Mama Lacy stopped going to work. She couldn’t dance with us anymore, so we put her in charge of the music. She started wearing scarves that matched not just her outfits but the rooms she and Mama Shannon had painted in the brightest of their favorite colors. She always, always smiled when she caught me looking at her, but I wasn’t always able to smile back.
Mac and cheese turned into butter noodles. Real milk to powdered. Cinnamon Toast Crunch to cornflakes. Then the boxes showed up. Some marked EGGS. Some marked CHARMIN. They came by the trunk load from the grocery store, empty, and got packed in the car a week later, full. Not full of eggs and toilet paper, but of our lives, loosely sorted by room. Kitchen Stuff. Bedroom Stuff. Give Away. Keep.
I was seven. I knew we were moving back to West Virginia, but mostly I was excited about the road trip and our late dinner at Mack and Morello’s. It wasn’t until we were sitting in the restaurant that it hit me:
We would not be coming back to Asheville.
We would not be coming back to Mack and Morello’s with its orange floor and its familiar, twinkling lights.
We would not be coming back to our apartment, which we left all alone.
Now that it was time to go, I finally thought of my yellow bedroom. My toes curled up, missing the blue linoleum in the kitchen. My fingers opened, as if reaching for the glass doorknob to the closet. I hadn’t said good-bye to the building. I had only packed the little things, not the painted walls and the carpet and the comforting surfaces of the only home I knew. I thought about my handwriting on the boxes. Give Away. Keep. In the end it wasn’t up to me. It didn’t matter what I wrote.
When my hand came open, the plate slipped out. It was a flimsy paper plate, nothing breakable, but the way the ketchup and mustard splattered, I couldn’t stop looking. Orange floor. Red ketchup. Yellow mustard. Orange floor I’d never walk on again. Red ketchup, yellow mustard that would never taste right after that. The radio played, quiet. Something happy. Nobody ate, but we sat there long enough we could have eaten twice. Afterward, we drove and drove, exactly like this.
I remember waking up now and then. I can still remember the crinkles in Zany’s forehead and the way, just for a while, just on that trip, it seemed natural to call her Zoey Grace. It’s strange she was about the age then that I am now.
Back in West Virginia, things were different. Mama Lacy got sicker and me and Zany couldn’t ever manage to say the right thing. And Mama Shannon, Mama Shannon was a basket case. She went back and forth between stern and distracted, putting her car keys in the refrigerator and the hot dogs on the coffee table, then getting mad at us for leaving the hot dogs out or for losing her car keys.
After a while, though, things got better. Mama Lacy got better.
My dreams don’t let me stay in that part.
I skip ahead years, to when the cancer returned. Appointment cards on the refrigerator, this time the magnets store-bought. This time nobody talking about anything. Everybody was calm.
That night last year, in the hospital corridor, I rocked from toe to heel, heel to toe. I tugged at my skirt and itched in my sweater. I kicked at my pointy-toed shoes. Mrs. Madison had come over to get me ready to go, and she picked my clothes. I longed for jeans and sneakers. I couldn’t bear to stay still and quiet in the waiting room, yet all there was to do was wait.
Mrs. Madison had to give Mama Shannon permission to go in to see Mama Lacy. Mrs. Madison, who Mama Lacy could just barely be civil with, was allowed to go in, and Mama Shannon, who had spent the last sixteen years at Mama Lacy’s side, had to ask permission. In North Carolina, it was OK. In North Carolina, they had done all the paperwork years ago to make decisions for each other, but now we’d moved home, and with Mama Lacy sick, we couldn’t afford to do all the right papers again. Watching one mama ask permission to see the other, it felt like all the air left the building for a minute. Even once I started breathing again, I felt like something had changed for good.
Something about Mama Shannon’s face when she asked Mrs. Madison to let her in to the ICU was going to stick with me. Every time I sleep, I go back to those moments, cold linoleum and a scratchy sweater. I can smell the disinfectant and hear the clock ticking. Sometimes I think I won’t ever wake up.
chapter
15
The heater’s off and everything feels shifted, like time has passed. It’s so dark I can’t see where I am and for a minute I think I’m still asleep and dreaming. But I never know I’m dreaming in my dreams, so that can’t be true.
I sit up and the seat belt pulls against my shoulder, which is the first reminder I’m in a truck. I can’t see anything through the windshield except a set of headlights going the other way, and in their light, snow has started to fall. The car passes us and the windows fade to dark.
I feel like I’ve been asleep for a hundred hours, but the sky’s not light yet. Beside me, Zany is dozing with her forehead on the steering wheel. It takes me a really long time to puzzle out that we’re parked on the shoulder of the highway in the middle of the night. Even longer to figure out why.
I’m about to wake Zany and then I remember she’s the driver, and maybe she ought to sleep a little more if she’s going to continue to be the driver. I’m too tired to argue with her anyway and that’s what we do when we’re both awake.
A phone rings.
We don’t have a phone, so this strikes me as odd. I remember that Adam had one and wonder where it ended up. Still groggy with sleep, I feel around in the darkness and my hand discovers the ringing cell phone wedged under the front seat.
I hit the green button to answer half a second before I realize that this is Adam’s phone, and answering it means I’m in his truck, which is proof I helped steal his truck. I stab buttons, trying to end the call before the police I’m certain are on the other end can get a trace.
But then I hear a voice say, “Hello?” all distant and tinny, and it doesn’t sound like the police. Cringing, I lift the phone to my ear and wait for the voice to come again.
“I know you’re there, Zany,” Adam says after a minute.
“Oh. Hi.” Relief and sleep work together and my voice comes out low and rough.
“Zany?”
“Uh-uh, she’s sleeping. This is Fella.”
“Oh.” A pause. “So you did steal my truck.”
“No, um . . . I mean, no, this is Fella. Zany stole your truck.”
“Of course she did.” He laughs once, short. “I knew I liked her. I’d have done the same damn thing. Is it still in one piece, the truck?”
I fiddle with the broken air vent at my knees. “I mean, as much as it was before.”
He snorts a breath that might be a laugh. Then says, “It’s my dad’s truck. He’s never let anybody else drive it before. I couldn’t believe it when he told me he’d left it for me and he wanted me to bring it. He’s so worried about the truck. With everything else to worry about, he wants to know where the truck is and if I’m being careful with it.”
I remember a parking lot in the early morning when Zany turned fifteen, Mama Shannon in the passenger seat of the Subaru and my sister behind the wheel. I remember starts and stops, starts and stops, while I sat on the sidewalk nearby, scratching stick figures with a rock on the concrete.
“Mom didn’t want me to drive it,” Adam says. “She didn’t want me to come. She doesn’t get along with him. They haven’t talked in years. Even . . .” He sighs and swears. “Even now.”
I don’t really know what to say. I know a little something about families not getting along. Even before Mama Lacy died, back when she was just sick, we had our share of fighting in my
family. Mama Lacy tried over and over again to get Mrs. Madison to be as nice to Mama Shannon and Zany as she was to me. Not that Mrs. Madison was unkind—she was perfectly polite, always invited my family in, offered them coffee and pop and deviled eggs or whatever she had in the fridge—but that was part of the problem. She treated Mama Shannon and Zoey Grace as guests in her home. Guests, not family.
I can’t think what to say to help Adam, but the silence has gone on long enough, so I say, “We’re not stealing your car!” My voice gets higher-pitched, and Zany stirs in her sleep. Forcing myself to speak more quietly, I repeat, “We’re not. We’re only borrowing it. We’ll get it back to you in the morning.”
“It’s morning already,” Adam says. “Practically four. How far’d you guys get?”
I hesitate, wondering if he has the police on the line. Then I realize it doesn’t matter. I have no idea where we are.
“I don’t know. I’ve been sleeping. Now it’s Zany’s turn to sleep.”
There’s a silence.
“I’m sorry about your truck,” I add. “We really will bring it right back. I know it was crazy to take it. I know, it’s just, you weren’t using it for the next little while, and Zany has this thing about how we have to scatter Mama Lacy today because it’s her birthday. Can you picture that, your birthday only coming every four years? She liked to joke about how much younger she was than Mama Shannon.”
“So you all, like, have a spare mom, then.”
I immediately tense up. People aren’t always nice about the two-moms thing.
“Not anymore,” I say pointedly, and I hear the air punch out of him.
“Right,” he says. “Sorry.”
“Well . . . look, are you going to call the police?” I ask, just as Adam says, “I can’t face him.”
I’m too flustered, and it’s too dark, and I can’t keep up.
“Can’t face who? What?”
“You’re just a kid. You can’t—I can’t—my dad.”
More of the cobwebs clear. I sit up straighter. “You can’t face your dad?”
His sigh rattles over the line. “I’ve been standing in the hallway for over an hour.”
My brain slams into panic mode when it sinks in that this means we dropped Adam off over an hour ago. Have we been sleeping ever since? I wonder how far Zany drove before she pulled us over. How completely late we are on our mission.
He should go in, I think. But I can’t tell him that. We’re in his truck, talking on his phone. He’s doing us a favor, not calling the police. So I wait.
“He probably won’t even stick around till morning. Which—isn’t even—I can’t—I don’t even want to think about that right now. I can’t go in.”
“Adam—”
But now that he’s told me his problem, he’s quick to dodge. “Hey—y’all are famous. I saw you on TV.”
This makes me sit up straighter still. Even though he’s only trying to change the subject, I have to find out what he means. “We’re on TV?” I open my arms and let Haberdashery crawl up into my lap. He turns in a circle and settles down to sleep.
“The news put your pictures up in case anybody’s seen you. They don’t know which direction you’re headed or nothing, but you should call your mom. She’s worried.”
“My mom? Not just Mrs. Madison?” I’m thinking of the earlier radio broadcast.
“No, she said she was your mom, and she mentioned both of you. They’ve got a news alert out and everybody’s looking for you. The police called your mom about her car being abandoned, I guess, because they say you might be hitchhiking or that somebody might have you.”
Guilt rushes through me. I think of Mama Shannon as I last saw her, asleep on the sofa in her tiny apartment. Think of her waking to find Zany gone, checking the driveway and not seeing the car, checking her voice messages. Being worried enough to check with Mrs. Madison and discover I was gone, too. Or maybe it had happened the other way around. Maybe she was awakened by a ringing phone and it was Mrs. Madison calling to find out whether she’d taken me back in the middle of the night. My brain starts cooking up a scenario in which Mrs. Madison sent the police to Mama Shannon’s house, and that’s how she got woken up—by a big, booming knock on her door. All because of me and Zany—as if she didn’t look tired and sad enough already.
“Are you going to call her?” Adam asks. “I mean, you’ve got my phone. Why not call her?”
“Hey, how are you calling me, when I’ve got your phone?” Two can play the changing-subject game.
“Well, since I don’t own the only phone ever invented in the world, I’m using a pay phone.”
“You should go in.”
He swallows so loud I can hear it through the phone. “I can’t talk to my dad. I can’t talk to him when he’s well. I can’t talk to him ever. What am I supposed to say now that’s not going to come out wrong?”
“Everything’s going to come out wrong. You do it anyway.” I sniffle, partly from the cold and partly from something else.
“Did what you said come out wrong?” he asks in a voice almost pleading.
I fiddle with the crooked heat vent till the cover comes off in my hand. I hope Adam can’t hear me breaking his truck. I catch my breath and get ready to confess.
“I didn’t say nothing,” I admit. “I stood in the hallway till it was too late.”
There’s a long, cold silence and then Adam says, “I’m going in, okay? I’m going to try.” And, quieter, “You should try, too.”
chapter
16
“Mama Shannon?”
“Oh my god. Where are you, Fella? Are you okay?” Mama Shannon can’t fit enough words into the fast talking she’s trying to do, but I get the idea. I know she’s frantic, but it’s almost a comfort to hear something other than tired sadness in her voice.
“We’re okay. We just—we had somewhere to be. Just for a little bit. We won’t be too long.”
“Fella, where are you?”
“I don’t know. Zany’s in charge and she’s asleep. I just didn’t want you to worry. You—I heard you were worried.”
“Of course I’m worried! I wake up to find out my girls are gone in the night from both their beds? What am I supposed to think happened?”
“You’re supposed to think we’re together and, as long as we’re together, we’re okay.”
She breathes in and out and in again so quickly that I think she might be about to cry. “Honey, I need to come get you.”
“You can’t. We broke your car.”
“I’ll get there. I’ll leave right now. You just tell me where I’m going.”
“Mama, we’ll be—we’ll be home in the morning, okay? I love you.” I sniffle, gasp in hard to keep from crying out loud. “I’m sorry we scared you. I love you, okay? I’ll see you soon.”
I end the call to find Zany staring at me, awake, from the driver’s seat.
“Who was that?”
“Nobody.”
“Where did you get that? Is that Adam’s phone? He didn’t take it with him?”
“It was under the seat. I guess it came out of his pocket, or he was so frazzled he forgot it. I can’t believe you slept through it ringing and me talking. You must have been tired.”
“Talking to who?”
“Adam called. He noticed the truck was gone.”
She pushes herself up a little straighter in her seat. “Did he call the cops?”
“Nah. He’s busy. I told him we’d get it back by morning. And he saw us on TV.”
This catches her attention. “Both of us?”
“Mama Shannon was worried.”
“Mad worried or scared worried?”
“Both, and cry-worried, too.”
Zany swears. “I didn’t want to scare her.”
“But what did you think
was going to happen?”
The phone in my hand starts ringing then, making me jump a mile. I quickly hit the red button to hang up on the caller before Zany can find out it’s Mama Shannon.
She had just been about to turn the key in the ignition, and now she’s stopped again. “Who was that?”
“Nobody.”
“Fella—”
“Do you have to go to the bathroom yet? Because I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Fella.”
The phone starts to ring again, and again, I hit the End button. Then the Power button to turn the thing off entirely. “Maybe we should let you sleep a little longer,” I suggest, watching her fight a yawn.
“No, if I go to sleep again, who knows who you’ll call? And we’d better not sit still too long if our faces are out there.” She was not thrilled to hear about Adam seeing us on the news.
“Well then, let’s at least stop for pie or something. I’m starving.” I point to a Waffle House logo on a big blue sign that announces attractions for the upcoming exit.
“Ophelia. We cannot stop at a Waffle House when there’s an alert out for us.”
“Oh, yeah.” Now all I want is pie. My stomach growls and I know Zany hears it, because she sighs.
“All right. Here’s the deal. You’re going to stay in the truck. I’m going to go in and get us something to eat and bring it out to you. If there’s only one of us, we won’t look nearly as suspicious.” She pulls the truck onto the road.
“And you’ll get pie?”
“Geez. Yes, okay? I heard you. Pie.”
“And you’ll bring something for Haberdashery?” He wags his little nub tail when he hears his name.
“I’ll get him something, just not pie,” Zany offers.
We get off at the exit, but Zany is so tired she drives right past the Waffle House. It’s still snowing, not enough to make the roads slick, but enough to make the inside of the truck seem sleepy and cozy. I have to nudge Zany and point, and she drives two more blocks before she finds a good place to turn around.
