by Deb Caletti
She flicked me with her thumb and forefinger, the kind of small gesture in close quarters that did make me want to pummel her. “Don’t,” I said.
“Cruisin’ for a bruisin’,” she said, which is something Grandma would say when Aunt Annie walked out before she’d helped with the dishes. But Sprout didn’t flick again. The power girl/Rosebud stomped around in her heels on the plastic train seat, and I went back to my biology homework. Cells dividing, one thing breaking up into two, two things breaking up into four. The blurred evergreens gave way to an expanse of water, a rocky shoreline under a gray May Northwest sky, two men in a boat, shingled houses. We were about halfway there. I erased a mistake, blew the bits of rubber dust from the page. I thought, Four weeks until summer. I felt Sprout’s eyes on me. I looked over at her.
“You have such long eyelashes,” she said. She made a curve in the air with her index finger. I smiled and wrote, Cell division is a process by which a cell, called the parent cell, divides into two cells, called daughter cells. Sprout fished around in her hat and pulled out her phone, which Mom insisted we each have for “emergencies.” Sprout’s was bright pink, and the emergency at the moment was the need to photograph my eyelashes. She held up the little camera lens very close to my face, and I heard the phone’s own electronic version of a shutter snap. She looked at the result, showed me the picture.
“Big eye,” I said. Sprout waved it around in spooky, big eye fashion. She then started taking up-close pictures of things while I finished biology. Close up of the knee of her jeans, the A on the cover of the Amtrak magazine, the scar on her right hand that she got when she fell off her bike. I pulled out the lunch Mom packed for us because she was convinced Dad would forget to feed us. It wasn’t forgetting exactly, I thought, just that he got so wrapped up in what he was doing he sometimes didn’t think about food until he himself was hungry. Then it was, Wow, I’m starved, and we’d get cheeseburgers and fries and onion rings and milk shakes and whatever else we wanted. And the milk shakes—he’d ask them to make us something that had never been made before. Half and half, or a mix of things. The poor fast-food guys didn’t know what to do. Dad never liked doing things the regular way, even something as mundane as eating. So, okay. Maybe he didn’t like doing parenting the ordinary way either.
DOROTHY HOFFMAN SILER PEARLMAN HOFFMAN:
The first young man I ever was sweet on was Ernest Delfechio, back when I was fifteen. This was before Rocky Siler, even. My first kiss. Fifty years ago, and I still remember it like it was yesterday. It was by the concession stand at the high school football game, and he used his tongue. Holy moly! That was pretty racy, let me tell you. The times were different—there wasn’t sex all over the television like there is today. People would never have talked about what Bill Clinton did with that intern. Ernest Delfechio’s kiss shocked and thrilled me, oh boy. I was in such a tizzy afterward that I came home and went to my room and played Pat Boone’s “Love Letters in the Sand,” Ernest Delfechio’s favorite song. I played it over and over again on my record player, thinking about that kiss.
My mother asked me, “What do you like about this young man?” I remember this, because I thought it was a strange question. What did I like about him? He liked me. All the other girls liked him. Take one look! That hair of his—he could have been a movie star.
I guess the real answer was that I had chemistry with Ernest Delfechio, and I had it with Rocky Siler, and Otto Pearlman, too. Let me tell you, you either have chemistry or you don’t, and you better have it, or it’s like kissing some relative. But chemistry, listen to me, you got to be careful. Chemistry is like those perfume ads, the ones that look so interesting and mysterious but you don’t even know at first what they’re even selling. Or those menus without the prices. Mystery and intrigue are gonna cost you. Great looking might mean something ve-ry expensive, and I don’t mean money. What I’m saying is, chemistry is a place to start, not an end point.
Later I remember finding out that Ernest Delfechio hated Pat Boone. I’d heard him wrong. “Love Letters in the Sand”—it was his sister’s favorite song.
Sprout and I ate tuna sandwiches and apple slices and Oreo cookies. The train stopped and started again, stopped and started, which meant that Portland was coming up. I zipped everything back up into my pack, shoved the little plastic bags into the brown lunch sack and crumpled it up. The train eased and slowed, and the people on the train rose and shuffled and reorganized and filed out, same as Sprout and me. We would do as we always had done—walk outside through the wide hall of the station, where we’d search for Brie’s black Mercedes by the curb. Brie Jenkins was Dad’s girlfriend of just over three years, and she’d been in his life since he came back into ours. She’d meet us and bring us to Dad’s because he always used the morning hours when he wasn’t traveling to work on his book. I made the mistake of telling Mom this once.
“His book.” Mom blew out a little puff of air from her nose and shook her head. “He can’t meet you at the train when he sees you twice a month? You know how long he’s been working on that book? Since forever.”
“I don’t mind,” I said. I didn’t. He got so excited about that book when he talked about it. Gabriel Garcia Marquez has nothing on me! It was the story of his Armenian family, told in magical realism. “And the book’s really good. He showed me a little of it.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Mom had said. We were in the kitchen, me looking for a snack after the long train ride home, her opening a can of food for our old dog, Ivar. “Don’t tell me. Something about his father, the diamond merchant. And his grandfather, who so believed in love that he turned into a stone after his third daughter married the old, fat, rich grocer.”
His grandmother. And he wasn’t a grocer, but a man who sold silks. But then, at her words, my chest began to ache; it felt like it was caving in on itself. I didn’t say anything. It would have been at least eight years since she’d seen that same few pages of “new work” he’d read aloud during a party of Brie’s friends a few weekends ago. Everyone had applauded, but Brie had seemed ticked off. I closed the cupboard door. I didn’t feel hungry anymore. Then again, smelling Ivar’s food could do that to anyone.
At the train station that day, we stood on the sidewalk and looked up and down for Brie’s car. Taxis scooted in and away, doors slammed, people waited at the curb, the luggage at their feet sitting like obedient retrievers.
“She’s late,” Sprout announced. She was playing with the end of her long braid, whisking it back and forth, back and forth against her palm.
“She’s never late,” I said. “Your tooth, right here.” I pointed to my own tooth, in the place where Sprout’s was brown with Oreo. She fixed hers with the edge of her fingernail, smiled big until I nodded my okay. I looked far up the line of cars—still no Brie. I felt a little skitter of worry. Brie, tall, blond, beautiful, who seemed both strong and fragile as glass, lived by the clock. She had taken over her father’s business when he died, a service that escorted visiting celebrities when they came to Portland for various events. Brie was never late because you couldn’t be late for movie stars and politicians. You couldn’t be late for sultans of other countries and rock stars who needed to get to a radio show by nine forty-five exactly.
“She’s late, big deal,” Sprout said. She loved Brie, in the way you love someone that you’ll never in a million years be. Sprout would try to be Brie for a moment anyway—she’d toss her head back and say, “So…” in that same way Brie did. One train ride home, I left the seat beside Sprout to sit somewhere else for a while, because she’d used so much of Brie’s perfume that I was getting a headache. I came back, though, because when I looked over at her, she looked sad. You could almost see the cool, confident puffs of cotton blossom perfume marching away from her in determined avoidance, this small person with her hair coming loose in chunks from her braid.
“I’m going to call,” I said.
“Don’t get her into trouble with Dad,” Sprout said.
“What if she’s not coming?” Sprout said. She held her hat close to her chest, her fingers through the holes of the crochet.
“Of course she’s coming,” I said, although I wasn’t sure at all.
I thought about calling Mom, and just as that thought was working out whether to stay or not, I saw Dad’s car, a little classic 1953 Corvette, white with red trim, that he kept in perfect condition. The top was down, and right there at the curb, three people turned to look at him. It’s a weird thing about Dad, but people always notice him. He has this mane of black hair (which he wears in a braid, same as Sprout) and a beaky, Armenian nose, and he’s tall and broad, and when you stop to think about it, not that great looking. Still, people are drawn to him, same as you’re drawn to that orange rock shining underwater amidst all the gray ones. He’s a performer in one of the longest-running juggling/vaudeville troupes around—the Jafarabad Brothers. Being a performer—maybe that’s another reason why he has this charisma. He works on a stage, and maybe there’s this piece of him that’s performing whether he’s actually on a stage or not. People’s eyes go to him. They’ll watch him picking out a grapefruit in Albertson’s.
That day, he didn’t notice everyone else’s noticing, as he usually does. He waved his arms toward us. “Get in, get in,” he said. “Traffic…Who thought it’d take this long to get to the fucking train station? Aren’t train stations supposed to be close? Aren’t train stations supposed to be convenient?”
“Where’s Brie?” Sprout demanded.
“Gone,” he said. “Stick your stuff in the back.” I heard a pop and the trunk opened. I tossed in my backpack. I saw a plaid blanket there, and a shopping bag full of some presents I recognized from Christmas with Brie’s mom. The sweater she’d given Dad, still in the box with the snowman wrapping paper; dress socks, bound in their white strip of packaging. That they had come from JC Penney had seemed to embarrass him, which I guess I understood, since he was used to much more expensive places.
Sprout had squeezed herself half on my lap and half on the gear shift. I buckled the seatbelt around us both. “You okay?” I asked, and she rolled her eyes.
Dad told us a story about Thomas as he drove, something Dad said was hilarious, about Thomas and Dad being recognized in a restaurant by some fans, but it was hard to hear the details with the wind whipping around us. Thomas was one of the Jafarabad Brothers. Dad was the main guy, with the stage name “Anoush Hourig,” Brother Anoush, whose name means “Sweet little fire,” which Joelle, his wife before Mom, thought up. Dad’s real name is Barry Hunt, and his other “brothers” are Siran and Ghadar, or, to us, Uncle Mike and Thomas. None are related, but Uncle Mike started the troupe with Dad before we were born, when he was first married to Joelle. “Ghadar” has been about five different people; the latest is Thomas, who used to live in New Jersey. The big joke is that the names are girl names in Armenian, but only Armenians know that, and they like being in on the laugh.
We got to Dad’s house, which is right on the river, an angled two-story shingled house that looks like a fairy-tale cottage gone mad. Cobblestones lead to the front door and down to the river, and the fireplace is made from big rocks. We pulled into the drive, and when Dad cut the engine, Sprout let out a long groan.
“Get me outta here, I can barely breathe,” she said. “Where has Brie gone? Did she go to LA to visit her mom? Did she take Malcolm or is he here with you?”
I got out of the car and let Sprout free. She was obviously more clued in than I was—I’d assumed Brie had gone on a business trip or something. But the questions meant something more to Sprout. You could tell by the way her eyes were darting around, searching for clues. These weren’t the kinds of questions that were only information gathering—they were anxious ones, begging for reassurance. “I don’t see her car,” Sprout said.
Dad got out, slammed the door. He wiped a smudge on the hood with the sleeve of the white tunic he wore with his jeans. “No, no,” he said. “Gone. Gone as in, gone, gone. Left. Sayonara. Nice knowing you, Barry. Thanks for the memories….”
He opened the front door with his key, and we stood in the entryway. Sprout looked stricken. “What do you mean?” she said softly, but you could tell what he meant by just stepping foot inside the house. Malcolm was Brie’s four-year-old, and he usually left evidence of his presence—tennis shoes by the door, plastic dinosaurs, Legos in the living room, a Ziploc bag of cheese crackers abandoned on the stairs—a trail of his activities same as breadcrumbs in a forest. But there were none of those things in sight—the house was clean. And it was quiet. There was no slam of a door or the pounding, running feet that we usually heard when Malcolm knew we’d arrived. There was no sound at all. It was so quiet, you could hear the kitchen clock tick-tick-ticking.
“I can’t believe this,” Sprout said. Her cheeks were flushed. “She can’t be gone.” Her voice wobbled. I took her hand.
“Charles, these things happen. I don’t want some big reaction on your part. If anyone should be having a reaction it’s me.” “Charles” was what my Dad called Sprout. No one on Mom’s side called her that. It was another strange thing about divorce. Sometimes even your own name was different.
“Why did she leave?” I asked, but maybe I had some idea already. I was trying to work up some sense of surprise, but it wasn’t what I was feeling, not really. I could pretend surprise out of politeness for Dad, but surprise was a lie. Brie was fifteen years younger than Dad, and he sometimes treated her as if she wasn’t quite ready to be out in the world without his help. Maybe he had his reasons. Probably he had his reasons. But I’d hear her through the wall in the next room. “I run my own business, Barry,” she’d say. “I’m perfectly capable of figuring out which skirt goes with what shoes.”
“I don’t know why she left,” Dad said. We followed him to the kitchen, where the walls were covered in wood from an actual barn, a deep brown, cozy wood. He opened the refrigerator and took out a Coke. “And, frankly, I don’t care. She’s the one making the mistake. After all I’ve given her?” He popped the cap, took a long swallow. “She’ll come running back, won’t she, and then it’ll be too late. You betray me? Simple. Good. Bye.” He wiped his hand in the air as if Brie had just been erased.
“Will we ever see her again?” Sprout said. “Will we ever even see her?” Sprout’s voice rose. She clutched that hat so tight in one hand, squeezed my own hand in her other.
“You want to? Charles, I don’t get why you’re all out of control, here. Brie never did anything for you. For any of us. She was a taker.”
“You said to treat Malcolm like my brother. Brothers don’t just disappear,” Sprout said.
Dad looked at me and made his eyes say Can you believe this craziness? He shook his head. He looked at his watch.
“Come on, Sprout,” I said. I let go. I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t even know what Come on meant, or what place I was urging her toward. Just someplace else, I guess.
“I’m going upstairs,” Sprout said. “I don’t know how you could do this. Goddamn it.” She would have never tried this at home. For some reason, at Dad’s we were the Good Child and the Bad Child. Sprout turned into some little tyrant here that she really wasn’t. Her back looked both fierce and dejected as she headed up.
Dad looked down at his hands, gave them an appraising look. He opened a drawer, took out a pair of fingernail clippers, and fit them over the curved moon of one fingernail. “Charles doesn’t know how much she hurts me,” he said. Click.
“I know,” I said.
“I try and try, and you know, honestly”—click—“I don’t know what I could have done different.”
“Nothing,” I said. “It was a little sudden. She’s just…confused.”
“Very confused.” He put the clipper
s down and looked up at me as if we agreed more than we did. “Does your mother allow her to talk like that? A ten-year-old girl, with that mouth? How is she going to turn out? You’ll help with dinner? Maybe something with chicken? Or we can go someplace.”
“Sure,” I said. Eleven-year-old girl with that mouth, I thought but didn’t say. I slung my backpack over the back of one chair.
“I’m going to write for a while,” he said. “You know Saturdays. The only day I’ve got. And once June hits…” June meant that the Jafarabad Brothers were on the road a lot. June meant that Dad “lived out of a suitcase,” though I noticed that “I live out of a suitcase” is one of those complaints that is actually bragging in disguise.
“Okay,” I said.
He turned as he headed out, as if he’d just remembered something. “How’s school and all? College applications? Et cetera, et cetera?”
“The counselor at school said I should apply to Yale,” I said. “Can you believe that?” I felt embarrassed to say it. Even the word itself seemed huge and made of ivy-covered brick.
He clapped his hands together, then gripped me in a hug. “I knew you’d be doing something fucking outrageous. My daughter at Yale.” He released me, held my shoulders. His dark eyes bore into mine in a display of deep connection and utter confidence. “Golden child,” he said.
I smiled. “It’s really competitive. I don’t even know if I want to go there. It’s just something she suggested.”
“Of course you’d want to go there,” he said. “You are not just anyone. The Hunts have never been average. You deserve the best,” he said.
“The best is expensive,” I said. “Even with a partial scholarship—it’s crazy expensive.”
“Well, we’ll have to talk,” he said. He kissed my cheek, a big on-purpose noisy smack. I felt pleased and hopeful. This was the thing about Dad. He could make you feel so special. He went upstairs to his office, and I played a game of Masterpiece with Sprout to cheer her up, because it was her favorite. We sat on her bed in the room we shared at Dad’s house, selling and buying treasures with paper money.
