Hand Me Down

by Melanie Thorne

  His nostrils flare like I’m garbage he can’t stand the smell of. He says, “I didn’t expect to be bothered while working in my own home.”

  I don’t tell him it’s only his house because Tammy wants it to be. She picked the condo out by herself. “I didn’t know you were here,” I say. “Sorry.”

  “Why is the heater on?” His brown socks come down the steps and he rotates the thermostat.

  “It’s cold.”

  “It’s plenty warm in this house. No reason to waste energy.”

  “Is Aunt Tammy here?”

  “You lose most of your body heat through your head,” he says. “Put a hat on.”

  “Inside?”

  “A hat will keep you warm in most places, Elizabeth,” he says. “Please turn off the television,” he says when he’s halfway up the stairs, his vest rustling like tent flaps or parachute pants. I push the power button and watch my reflection on the screen put spoonfuls of cereal in my mouth.

  The next day in algebra, Dean tugs lightly on my ponytail and whispers two inches from my ear, “Why would a girl like you leave sunny Califor ni a for bloody snow-pissed Mormon central?” His voice is deep, thick, and combined with the accent that makes me feel like I’m slipping into a warm and silky bubble bath, he sounds older than his sixteen. I could listen to him all day, I write to Rachel.

  “A girl like me?” I say. He smiles wide, showing the gap between his front teeth. He has a round pale moon face, spotted with deep brown freckles and blue eyes. His hair is long, straight, and pulled back into a ponytail at the base of his neck. I shrug. “I got kicked out.”

  “Whoa, tough girl,” he says, circulating his fingers through the strands of hair in my ponytail. “What’d you do?”

  “Nothing,” I say. “It’s a long story.” He nods as if he knows, and I wonder about his family.

  I call Jaime when I get to Tammy’s after school. “What’s it like living in the house that looks like nobody actually lives in it?” Jaime asks.

  When Jaime and I visited during summers past, we were warned not to touch the walls. Tammy had just moved in and everything was brand new: the walls, the white carpet, the rosewood kitchen floor, the pale stone tile of the bathrooms. Every surface was perfect, spotless. We tried hard not to touch anything—“Careful,” I whispered to Jaime going up the stairs—but we would still see Tammy sometimes scrubbing our dirty little fingerprints off the otherwise unblemished white.

  “Tammy’s really nice,” I say.

  “Does she let you touch stuff?”

  I say, “She makes my lunch every day.”

  “Crystal’s taking me to school now,” Jaime says.

  I say, “That’s great” at the same time she says, “It sucks.” I chew on my fingernail. I can’t tell if she’s sucking her thumb or not.

  “Kids here can’t say things suck,” I say. “They think it’s cussing.”

  “That’s stricter than Mom.”

  “I know.” I try to think of ways to phrase all the things I want to say: How much is Dad drinking? Are you staying attentive? Please tell me you’ve stopped smoking. “I love you.”

  Jaime’s thumb is definitely in her mouth when she says, “I miss you, too.”

  At dinner Tammy says, “How did your algebra test go?” while busying her hands with her napkin and the arrangement of the plates and glasses on the table. She hasn’t eaten much since Sam arrived, and she’s been jittery, which is not like her.

  I smile. “I got an A minus.”

  She says, “Not an A?”

  “An A minus is still pretty good,” I say, my smile fading. “Isn’t it?” My shoulders hunch.

  “There’s no reason we can’t do better,” she says. I gape at her with glassy eyes but she doesn’t notice. She says, “Let’s just try for the full A next time.” She pours herself another glass of wine and refills Sam’s as well.

  I slump in my chair and pick up my fork to have something in my hand. “I did better than most of the class,” I mutter, poking at my meat with the silver tines. Little squirts of pork juice escape the holes and mix with the applesauce.

  “Was it your best effort?” Sam says and I’m forced to acknowledge his presence. His arrival had surprised Tammy, and she apologized for not telling me about his plans for a visit sooner. He was a week early, she told me, but was only staying six weeks instead of nine. “I hate when he does this,” she’d said. “As if my schedule is less important.” But she didn’t say a word about her irritation to Sam.

  Sam has been here four days and Tammy has spent all of her free time with him. They go for walks down to the mall to buy action movies on DVD that can only be watched by the two of them on Sam’s laptop. Sam says DVDs will replace videos someday, so the discs are a better investment, but I think it has more to do with his desire to separate me from them. I don’t complain. I don’t really want to watch Tombstone or Braveheart anyway. Tammy took yesterday off work and they went skiing so early that she couldn’t drive me to school, and I had to wait outside in the frozen air for the giant yellow school bus. She apologized the night before and she still made my lunch in the morning, so I haven’t abandoned hope even though this whole scenario is alarmingly familiar.

  Sam cuts his pork chop and asks me what I learned at school over the squeal of his knife scratching his plate.

  I cringe and say, “Nothing.” I push applesauce around with my fork. I don’t like pork, but tonight Tammy didn’t ask me what I wanted.

  “Nothing at all?” he says, putting the chunk of white meat onto his tongue.

  “Nothing new,” I say, putting down my fork again and pushing my plate away.

  “Ah ha,” he says and swallows. “That can’t be true,” he says and I look at Tammy. She stares at him with her chin in her palm, her pork chop barely touched, her wine gone, watching him sneer at me. His square shoulders move under the poofy orange vest he always wears, today over a brown T shirt. His big head in its wide-brimmed Australian outback Crocodile Dundee hat casts a shadow over the table. I’m already looking forward to when he leaves.

  “Can I call Jaime?” I say.

  Sam says, “It’s actually impossible to avoid learning anything, Elizabeth.”

  “Tammy?” I say. “Can I?”

  Tammy sits up and clears her throat. “Of course,” she says.

  “It happens all the time,” Sam says. “Whether you like it or not.”

  Tammy smiles at Sam. “After you finish your homework,” she says.

  “So,” Sam says, turning to me. “What did you learn today?”

  “I relearned how cold it is here without the heater,” I say. I am wearing two of the sweaters I wore to school and still when I take my hands out of my pockets it hurts to move my fingers. Sam sets the thermostat at sixty-three degrees and won’t let me turn it up.

  “Where’s your hat?” he says and my hands clench in the front pouch pockets of my sweater.

  “Thank you for dinner,” I say to Tammy and stand up.

  She says, “You hardly ate.”

  “I’m not that hungry.” I rinse my plate and wash my hands, the warm water stinging like tiny bites. “I have homework to do,” I say.

  “See, you might learn something yet,” Sam says and turns to Tammy. She beams back at him, and I am careful not to touch the railing as I walk up the stairs.

  The summer my mom and Terrance dated, she forced me and Jaime to go with them on singles group outings to beaches and carnivals and concerts in the park. We spent a weekend camping near a dried up river where I was climbing rocks and stumbled upon Mom and Terrance, making out, his hand up her turquoise T shirt and her hand in the butt pocket of his sandblasted jean shorts. I froze, feet unable to move and eyes glued open in horror like victims in slasher movies. Terrance noticed me over Mom’s shoulder and watched me while his lips and tongue hungrily worked at my mom’s mouth. His hands moved to the waist of her shorts and he winked at me as he slipped his fingers under the cloth-wrapped elastic.
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  I covered my eyes then my mouth as bile rushed up my throat. I spun around and sprinted as fast as I could through the dry pine needles and scratchy underbrush until my chest heaved. A dead tree had fallen across the path where I stopped and I kicked it. I kicked and bugs came out, ants, beetles, millipedes, and spiders. I kicked the tan termite tunnels and crumbling bark until my tennis shoes were brown and smothered in wood chips. I stomped and crushed and let the cracking wood and my own heavy breathing fill my ears until the log was almost sawdust. I puked into a mound of earth until my stomach was as ravaged as the tree.

  “How was your walk?” Mom said when I got back to camp sweaty and coated with forest. A fine dust on my legs stuck to the soft white-blond hairs she wouldn’t let me shave. She had a yellow daisy tucked behind her ear.

  Terrance said, “Ours was awesome,” and smiled all his crooked teeth at Mom. She blushed. I didn’t eat a bite of dinner.

  Jaime and I had to sleep with the rest of the children of the divorced under the flimsy picnic netting instead of a real tent, and the mosquitoes and the wind bit right through my cotton sleeping bag all night. Most of the kids had spent the day swimming or hiking, had eaten a full campfire-grilled dinner, and were excited about sleeping in the “wilderness.” They lay fast asleep, their little chests rising and falling, and I would have given anything to be able to trust in the security of my parents’ judgment, feel safe here in the woods because Mom was close by, like I had once upon a time. But instead, I was wide awake, spraying every bug that crawled toward my face with insecticide, and praying to a God I was still unsure about to give me back my family.

  Mom was in the women’s tent, maybe ten feet away, but I felt like she was miles in the distance. On the other side of the campsite sat the adult males’ tent, and Terrance the enemy. Several sets of snores like semi-truck horns from men used to sleeping alone echoed out into the silence surrounding the dark towering pines. Next to me, Jaime’s thumb rested between her lips, her bangs a mess across her forehead. I wiped at a little brown smear on her cheek, melted chocolate from the s’mores Terrance had made earlier. “Want one, Liz?” he’d asked me and even though I love them, as I watched his hands turning sticks of marshmallows over the fire, all I could think was that he had touched Mom’s breasts, and God knew what else, a few hours ago, so no marshmallows for me, thanks.

  I focused on the sky, and inhaled deep, cool breaths full of bright pine and earthy tree moss scents and asked the spotted gray moon for a sign that I wasn’t going to lose Mom, that Terrance wouldn’t really be able to steal the one constant I’d had my entire life. It hit me then, staring up at millions of stars, that the reverse wasn’t true for Mom. While I’d never had a life without her, she’d had twenty-three years without me. I had been a surprise, the beginning of the end of her freedom, and I guessed she resented me for that. Maybe Dad did, too. I turned to Jaime’s peaceful face. “We’re in for a bumpy road, little sister.” I kissed her sticky cheek and thought about how they’d planned to get pregnant with Jaime. She was the daughter Mom and Dad had actually wanted.

  After that trip, Terrance was always around. We picked him up for church, we picked him up for dinner, we picked him up so he could pick up the laundry we’d washed for him. Mom stayed out past our bedtime even on weeknights to take him back to his apartment or give him another driving lesson in the summer twilight. She said she was teaching him to drive stick shift, but I had seen the hickeys on her neck.

  The singles group spent a humid Saturday at the end of August hiking up Feather River Falls. When we got to the waterfall, a rainbow stretched across the pool where the river churned up white between granite boulders. Powdered river floated in a misty haze thick enough to blur my vision. I pretended I was alone on the planet, the first to visit this holy place where all sounds became the roar of water, all sights blurred into soft edges, and all things were impermanent. Small drops sprinkled my forehead like liquid dust and for a few minutes it felt like maybe there was a God, and maybe He was here, and maybe He does watch us and love us and want us to be happy.

  On the walk down from the waterfall my mom saw graffiti on some rocks that said, Squeeze my tits and she whispered to Terrance, “Yeah, babe, please do.” They kissed with a smacking sound, Mom moaned a little, and I realized whatever God wanted for me, it was not happiness.

  By the time school started, Terrance had mastered the manual clutch enough to drive us all to church, to Taco Bell, to the unemployment office, and he let his hand rest on Mom’s thigh with increasing frequency. I elbowed Jaime and pointed at his arm stretched across the two front seats. Her eyes widened. I stuck out my tongue and pretended to gag.

  After one Sunday service, we sat outside Terrance’s parole office.

  “Mom?” I said. Jaime had fallen asleep next to me in the backseat. “Are you and Terrance having sex?”

  Alarm flickered in her eyes before they narrowed. “That is absolutely none of your business,” she said.

  “How come he puts his hand on your leg?”

  “It’s to show that he cares about me.”

  “Is it okay to make out before you’re married?”

  Her hands turned to fists in her lap. “This is not an appropriate conversation for an eleven-year-old.”

  I said, “So it’s not a sin?”

  Terrance was walking across the parking lot, his white high-tops bright between his skin and the asphalt. Mom stared at his chest without blinking until Terrance waved. Mom jerked back to life and swiveled her head to look directly at me with her eyes big, her nostrils flared. She said, “I don’t want you to bring this up again, okay?” I nodded. Terrance got in the car and kissed her, his black mustache covering her pink lips.

  She was already pregnant with Noah.

  I pull off an A on my next algebra test but my overall grade is not so good. None of my grades are up to Tammy’s standards or my own. With Sam around, Tammy and I no longer run errands or go shopping or take walks. She does those things with Sam. So far, I haven’t heard them having sex, though my brain often plays a radio show of Mom and Terrance’s late-night rendezvous as a cruel sort of preparation.

  All I do is lie in bed wrapped in my blue Macy’s comforter and wool throws, reading about lives that aren’t mine, preferably lives that take place in warm locales. I browse Tammy’s bookshelves like they’re my own personal library, choose titles like Siddhartha, Like Water for Chocolate, Fahrenheit 451—anything that sounds interesting—and devour each in a few days. Sometimes Dean’s voice narrates the books in my head, and his soothing inflections make the stories better.

  The live Dean continues to play with my hair in class, and one day I tell him I have a C. He says, “How is that possible?”

  “I never do my homework.”

  “Why not?” he says. “This stuff is cake for you.”

  My eyes fill up halfway and threaten to run before I can stop them so I wipe at my left eye like I have something in it. Sam’s insistence that hats can replace the heater is making my scholarship dreams harder to reach. Even in the house my fingers are too cold-stiff to write English essays or math problems, and Tammy and Sam giggling together downstairs makes it impossible to concentrate. Now that I never miss class, I’m behind on take-home assignments. It’d be funny if it weren’t my future.

  “Maybe we can do it together sometime,” he says. I nod three times, unable to maneuver my mouth. He fidgets with his pencil. “Do you want to hang out after school tomorrow? It’s discount movie day downtown.”

  Yes, of course, yes. The bell rings. “Yeah,” I say and manage to smile at him.

  “Great,” he says, putting notebooks and books into his backpack.

  “Great,” I say.

  I write to Rachel in biology, I think I have a date. It’s the British guy with the sexy accent. He’s a junior and totally cute.

  Biology is the only class I have an A in right now. I got 104 percent on the last test without studying at all. Today we are learning ab
out viruses.

  “We would call viruses intelligent if they were alive,” Mrs. Rayler says. She has tons of energy and a tendency to repeat herself, which is why I can only half-pay attention and still do well. She also doesn’t believe in homework. Mrs. Rayler continues and I write to Rach, Terrance is like a virus. He latches on to vulnerable cells and reproduces but we cannot call him intelligent. I can’t believe I’m going out with an older guy.

  When I get to the condo, it’s still early afternoon but Sam and Tammy are watching a movie. Since Sam arrived, Tammy has often rearranged her schedule.

  “Hi kiddo,” Tammy says as I take off my boots and coat.

  “It’s cold in here,” I say. The fake fireplace churns little blue flames tipped with orange, but the warmth only radiates about four inches. I sit down next to Tammy on the couch and pull the throw over me. “I had a good day today.” I rub my hands together. “I think I even have a date tomorrow.”

  “That’s great,” she says.

  “He’s British,” I say and she smiles. “He has the coolest accent and he invited me to a movie.” Sam turns up the sound on the TV.

  “Where did you meet him?”

  “He’s in my math class, he’s—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, would you two please quit your yapping?” Sam says. He turns the sound up on the TV to almost max.

  I say, “You talk all the time when I’m trying to watch TV.”

  Sam’s eyes go wide. He says, “The difference is, I live here.”

  The air is ripped from my lungs like he punched me in the chest. I can’t breathe for a second as I wait for Tammy’s reaction. This is it. This is when she’ll have to make a choice, and my history of being in this position tells my gut to get ready to leave.

  “Sam,” Tammy says, surprise and irritation in her voice like a mom who witnesses her child do something she just forbade. “She lives here, too.”

  My ribs relax and I almost burst into tears. I didn’t expect her to stand up for me. I start to smile until I see Sam glaring at me from under the dark brim of his hat. His brown eyes squint with loathing and I can’t figure out what I did to earn it. He shifts his glower to Tammy and she sucks in a quick breath like she’s been slapped.