Hand Me Down

by Melanie Thorne

  “My dad would make me pay for the stuff I took.”

  “My mom said he’ll just think he’s doing more,” she says. Her mom told her where to look for the box. “And if he suspected, he’d blame my mom before he confronted me so he’d have an excuse to call her.” Like my father, Rachel’s dad is still in love with the woman who left him. Unlike my father, Rachel’s dad is a good person and married a woman who never wanted to settle down. I feel bad for him in the evenings after dinner when he sits in his recliner with his slippers on and a glass of wine, watching cable news channels or episodes of MASH, and it makes me wonder if anyone has a functional relationship with the person they love.

  Sometimes Rachel and I watch cartoons, or read Cosmo articles out loud to each other. “Energize Your Life: In and Out of Bed” or, “How to Please Your Man.” Rachel occasionally asks me to repeat certain instructions and advice, and she writes it down in her journal.

  “You don’t even take notes at school,” I say.

  “I don’t want Frank to think I’m inexperienced.”

  Sometimes we put swimsuits on and go over the levee to the river, lie out on a small sand bank or a big log. We talk about sex, since she’s probably going to do it soon, and who is going out with whom, and who is doing it, or at least almost, and about starting our second year of high school.

  “Where you gonna be?” Rachel asks. “Maybe we can get our lockers together,” she says, stretching out across a log wider than our shoulders, chest to the sun.

  “I wish I could tell you.”

  “How much longer you going to be back and forth?” she asks. “Not that I don’t like having you here or anything.” She pokes me with her pink-nailed toes.

  I dip my feet in the river and watch them disappear under chocolate-colored mud. “Maybe my mom’ll let me get my own place,” I say. It was more likely than Terrance getting his own apartment. “But she’ll probably make me live with one of the old ladies at church. Our pastor made an announcement at the end of the service last week.” To Pastor Ron’s credit, he seemed reluctant to bring it up with me sitting right there in front of him. “Even though Pastor Ron didn’t say my name, the whole church knows it’s me who needs a room, and everyone knows why.” I curl my toes deeper into the brown-black silt. “I’m now a cause for all these Christian do gooders who want to help. The same ladies who give me sad eyes when they see me in the foyer and ask how I’m ‘holding up’ if my mom isn’t with me.”

  “At least you’d get to stay in town,” Rachel says as she dangles her long, tan leg in the water.

  “It’s so embarrassing,” I say. “I hate my mom.”

  “My dad said she called last night while we were on our walk,” Rachel says.

  “He told me, too, but I didn’t call her back,” I say. “She doesn’t want me to live with her, but she wants to run my life.”

  “I’m sure she missed you,” Rachel says.

  “I doubt it,” I say, though I continue to nurse a small hope that she did.

  Rachel says, “It’d be so rad if you got your own place.”

  I shake my head and brush a fly off my knee. “She can’t afford it,” I say.

  “Hey.” She sits up and adjusts her bikini top. Her boobs are much larger than mine. “Maybe you could emancipate yourself like Drew Barrymore. Divorce your parents. They’re totally fucked anyway.” She looks at me. “No offense.”

  I shrug. “It’s true.” The wind picks up and goose bumps run up my arms and legs. I pull my feet from the mud and swish them around in the cool green water until they’re clean.

  Rachel says, “I’m sorry, Liz Wiz.” She pulls her long brown hair into a ponytail and adjusts her square sunglasses.

  The sun hangs low in the sky and mosquitoes buzz where the air is still. A breeze pushes clouds across the horizon, disturbs the biting swarms, and mixes the heavy heat with river cooled drafts. I say, “Can you get welfare if you’re emancipated?”

  She stops fiddling with her hair and looks at me. “You’d really do it?” she says.

  The clouds move faster, tumbling in white drifts above our heads. “Maybe Jaime could come with me,” I say, picking sand out from under my chewed nails. “We would do better on our own.”

  “Everyone needs a family, Liz,” she says.

  “What if your family sucks?”

  “I was joking,” she says. “About the emancipation thing.”

  I say, “Good joke.”

  I ask Rachel to take the bus with me downtown the next day. A homeless man who reeks of stale booze asks us “pretty ladies” if he can have our shoes. We’re both wearing flip-flops. He says, “I can pay,” and pulls from his pocket two pennies, a Ping-Pong ball– size wad of multicolored chewed gum, and a dead cockroach. He shoves his hand under Rachel’s nose. “Your choice,” he says. “But the roach’ll keep you company.”

  Rachel’s eyes bulge and she starts shaking. I grab her hand and we stand together. “No, thanks,” I say, nudging his outstretched hand aside. “We like our shoes. Excuse us.” We walk past him out into the midmorning sun, jumping off the bus steps and onto the sidewalk. The air smells of exhaust and the rumbling traffic is constant on these busy streets. I triple-check the directions I wrote down last night and turn left.

  Rachel says, “I’ve never been down here by myself.” She clutches my arm.

  I pat her hand. “You’re not by yourself,” I say.

  “That dude on the bus was scary.”

  “He wasn’t that bad,” I say, thinking of my dad, of Terrance. “I wonder what he would have done with our shoes.”

  We sweat as we walk past crumbling brick buildings and grimy storefronts for old-fashioned tailors and appliance repairs and a barber shop with the red-and-white candy cane pole out front. It’s not noon yet but the sun is high enough that the heat has settled in the air and feels thick and heavy. The courthouse steps are spotted with a rainbow variety of pigeon poop, and Rachel and I both look up and then duck our heads as the blue-green birds circle above us. There’s a metal detector, but it doesn’t seem to work since it beeps at everyone, and Rachel and I both have to step to the side and lift our arms to be personally wand scanned by a burly guy sweating through his khaki polyester guard uniform.

  After a half-hour of waiting in line at the self-help center behind a tattooed pregnant girl who can’t be much older than us, we finally get to talk to the “facilitator,” a large black woman with sparkly purple fingernails that extend an inch above her fingertips.

  “Hi,” I say. “How are you?”

  Her brown eyes barely glance up from her computer screen. Solitaire. She makes a noise like “Humpf.”

  I say, “I was hoping to get some information about filing for emancipation?”

  She doesn’t say a word, but points to the wall next to her booth where there is a six-foot panel of probably fifty plastic slots for papers.

  “Um,” I say, eyeing the rows of brightly colored forms, some a foot or more above my head. “I have to fill out some forms?”

  She rolls her eyes and moves an ace to the top of her board. “And you said you needed help.”

  I say, “Could you please tell me which ones?”

  She reaches out a fat hand with skin rolls and, barely looking away from her game, pulls out four little booklets, a pamphlet, and a single sheet of paper, and plops it all down on the six-inch counter in between us. “There,” she says. She looks past me to the line and opens her mouth, but I say, “Is there any way you could help me? With these?” I put my hand on the pile of papers.

  “I can’t give legal advice,” she says. “I can’t help you fill out forms.” She opens her mouth to call the next person again, but I say, “Wait. Please? Isn’t there someone I could talk to?”

  The woman must hear the tremor in my voice because she looks at me for the first time. She eyes me up and down, taking in my blond ponytail, my height, my T shirt with a unicorn on it. “You trying to be on your own, little thing?” She raises
a pierced eyebrow.

  Rachel says, “Her parents suck.”

  The facilitator snort laughs. “Oh, honey. Don’t everybody’s?” She sighs and clicks her fingernails across her desk. “Look, there’s a court mediator. Put your name and information on this list.” She hands me a clipboard. “Someone will call you. Next!”

  On the air-conditioned bus, I make sure Rachel takes the window seat and I flip through the three-inch stack of paperwork the woman gave me. I immediately see a problem. “You have to get your parents’ permission to be emancipated?” I say.

  Rachel says, “Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of being emancipated?”

  I say, “You also have to be able to prove financial independence.”

  “What bullshit,” Rachel says.

  I lean back against the seat and watch men and women in suits and dresses walk in small groups, laughing, talking, some eating sandwiches or burritos as they move. They probably complain about their jobs, but I’d work fifty hours a week to get away from Terrance and the mother who doesn’t act like one. At least adults have freedom. I sigh. “Well, so much for that plan.”

  “It’ll be okay, Liz,” Rachel says, but I’m not so sure.

  A few weeks later Mom’s car is parked in Rachel’s shady driveway on a Monday afternoon just as we get back from the river. Sun-lazy and still high, I don’t understand what’s happening as she starts screaming at me before we reach the house.

  “Get in the car!” she yells. “Get in the car now!” She punches my arm as I move past her toward Rachel’s front door, and then she raises her hands above her head like she’s going to pound me with both her fists. Rachel flinches and jumps away. I stand my ground and stare at Mom, her eyes narrowed and teeth gritted, and wait for the blow to come. I almost want it, want an excuse to take a swing at her face, break her jaw, and shatter her glasses. But instead of hitting me, she presses her clamped fingers to her own temples and screeches. Rachel gapes at me with bulging, tear-filled eyes.

  “What’s going on?” I say when Mom quiets. I haven’t seen her this pissed off in a long time.

  “You! I’ve had it with you.”

  “What did I do?” I say.

  “Get in the car,” Mom says even-toned and low-pitched, pressing down her hair with her palms and then smoothing under her eyes with her fingertips. “You’re leaving.”

  My stomach clenches. She can’t be taking me away again already. “Why?”

  She looks me in the eyes for the first time since she arrived. Her green eyes look glassy for the split second before they harden and she says, “You know why.” She gets back in her Ford Taurus. “You think you’re so smart,” she says, her hand on the armrest, her leg hanging out the door. “Emancipation is not a freakin’ joke, Elizabeth.”

  “I wasn’t joking,” I say. “I wanted to talk to you about it.”

  Her eyes burn holes in my cheeks from five feet away. “You’re going to wish you were joking,” she says and swings her leg into the car.

  “But I didn’t even file,” I say. “How did you find out?”

  “Go get your stuff,” she says.

  “Can we at least talk about this?” I say. “Don’t you want to know why I thought I’d be safer on my own?”

  Her eyes show fear for a split second before they narrow again. “Would you like me to call that court mediator for our talk?” she says and her voice is full of venom. She slams the metal door and starts the car. A Rod Stewart song drifts out of the window. “If you’re not back down here in ten minutes, I will come upstairs and drag you out by your hair, you ungrateful snot.”

  In her room, Rachel cries while I shove shirts and underwear into my backpack, which has become a familiar task. “I am so sorry for you,” she says.

  “I’m sorry you had to see that,” I say as I roll up a pair of shorts. “Do you want your swimsuit back?” I say. “I can change really fast.”

  “You can keep it,” she says. She paces the room and tears keep sliding down her face.

  Rachel watches me pack my toiletries and tie my shoes to my backpack strap by their laces. She doesn’t blink. “Your mom is fucking crazy,” she says suddenly, and sobs harder. “How come you’re so normal?” she says.

  “I’m not,” I say. My hands tremble and tears blur my sight as I try to zip up all my clothes crammed into the big pocket of my pack In some ways I’m just like her. I inhale a shaky breath and slump onto Rachel’s bed.

  “Why aren’t you freaking out?” Rachel says.

  I look up at her. Her mascara is smeared in black smudges around her hazel eyes and gray lines stain her cheeks. “I am,” I say. “But I’ve told you about my mom before, right?”

  She snorts air out of her nose in an almost laugh. “I kind of always thought you exaggerated for effect.” She wipes at her eyes. “You should call social services, or something. Seriously.”

  “She’s not that bad,” I say.

  Rachel stares at me. “I would be balled up and shivering in a corner right now if I were you,” she says and sits next to me. “Where do you think she’s taking you?”

  “I have no idea,” I say, the perpetual lump in my throat scratching its way to the surface. “And that’s really scary,” I say, my voice shaking. Rachel puts her arm around me and I turn into her shoulder and release the tears I didn’t want Mom to see. “What if she sends me somewhere far away from everyone?”

  We both jump when Mom honks the horn. Rachel’s eyes widen. The horn blares again, and Rachel looks afraid and younger than me in this moment.

  Rachel says, “Would she really come up and drag you out by your hair?”

  “Probably not,” I say, but I don’t want to test it.

  Rachel squeezes me again and cries into my neck. “I love you,” she says.

  “I love you, too.”

  “I wish you really were one of my sisters.”

  “Me, too,” I say.

  In the car Mom barks, “Buckle your seat belt,” and doesn’t say another word for miles. Images of teenage boot camps invade my mind, and I imagine endless push-ups and group showers. I picture a mental institution where I’ll be medicated for my attitude, and not allowed to use real silverware at mealtimes. I might have pushed too far this time, and I’m not sure what Mom is capable of these days. I keep the swelling mass in my throat down by convincing myself she can’t afford any excessive forms of punishment, but I can’t keep my lungs from their rapid inhalations.

  After forty silent minutes in the car I know where we’re headed, and my breath starts to slow to normal. No Christmas lights shimmer on the boats lining the causeway into Sonoma County this evening, no black abyss to cross in the dark without directions. Mom’s tan fingers squeeze the wheel like a coiled python, and her eyes never leave the road ahead. I sit as close to my door as I can manage, my thigh pressed against the armrest, my shoulder touching the cool glass. I’m jealous of the moving air outside, wafting through the tall green grasses, brushing the rusty-brown cattails, soaring above the wetland, free to go anywhere it wants.

  Where Mom is taking me is the only place left, and Jaime’s already there so it makes sense. Whatever happens next, at least we’ll be together.

  10

  Mom grips my wrist with her strong-boned hands and jerks me from her light blue sedan toward the Cranleys’ house like I’m a criminal. She pushes me into a painted white chair at Deborah’s kitchen table, tells me not to move, and whacks the back of my head with her palm while Deborah gets tea.

  “You better freakin’ behave yourself here,” she says and pinches my forearm. “This is your last option.”

  “What about Tammy’s?”

  “She won’t want you back,” Mom says. “Not after I talk to her.”

  “You’ll lie,” I say and know she would.

  Deborah returns with a tray carrying two mugs painted with little roosters, and sugar in a white ceramic serving piece. Mom sips her tea and talks about my future like I’m not right here.


  “She needs better influences,” Mom says to Deborah. “More stability.” Mom’s eyes shine with tears that weren’t there when she hit me two minutes ago. “I don’t know what’s wrong with her.” She leans forward and whispers, “She went to the courthouse to talk to someone about emancipating herself.”

  Deborah puts down her mug. “What?”

  “Like Drew Barrymore,” I say.

  Deborah’s blue eyes scrunch with concern behind her glasses. “You’re still growing, Liz,” she says. “There’s plenty of time to be an adult.”

  “I’m more mature than Mom,” I say.

  “See?” Mom says. “Listen to that disrespect—”

  “Respect is something you earn—”

  “Not when you’re a child,” Mom says, and smacks the back of my head a little softer this time with just the tips of her fingers. It makes me wonder if Dad hit her harder when we weren’t around. Deborah clears her throat. “Liz, things won’t be so bad here.” She smiles and pats my hand, her nails a soft peach color that clashes with her orange hair.

  “Parents are supposed to take care of their children,” I say, my chest prickling with familiar pain.

  “Enough, Liz,” Mom says, sighing like she’s bored. “We’ve been over this.” She positions her fingers in a pyramid above her nose, her thumbs under her chin, and shakes her head with her eyes closed. For a second I think she might cry; that maybe she’s realized that Terrance isn’t worth giving us up. For just a sliver of a minute, hope sneaks into my gut like it’s not sure it belongs, and I want so much to invite it to stay.

  But Mom opens her eyes and spreads her arms out, gesturing to Deborah’s suburban-housewife kitchen. “This isn’t the worst thing that could possibly happen to you,” she says. “It’s not like you’re homeless or hungry or dying. Nobody is beating you. You’re not a Third World slave child,” she says. “Stop complaining.”

  “Mom?” Jaime’s voice is suddenly in my ears and she appears, rubbing her eyes, her hair frizzy at her forehead and temples. “Liz? What are you doing here?”

  Deborah widens her eyes at me and Mom, and puts an arm around Jaime’s shoulders. “Did we wake you?” Deborah says and leads Jaime away from us.