by Rachel Vail
“I just…can I have two?” Mom asked, closing her eyes. “Make it four. Four is okay. Damn derivatives market.”
I dropped the cotton on the counter. I had never taken pills out of a bottle, not even vitamins before. I poured out a handful of the small brown pills into my palm, chose four, and handed them to her. She tossed them into her mouth and swallowed.
“Do you want some water or something?” I asked belatedly.
“No,” she said, squinting at me again, as if she was just realizing I was there. “Why are you home?”
“I—it’s…Wednesday,” I said, checking the clock on the microwave. “I don’t have anything Wednesdays. Where’s Agnes?”
“Agnes?”
“Our, you know, Agnes.” Agnes! She was just always Agnes. It was sort of embarrassing to say “our.” “The, our, you know, cleaning lady.” Mom still looked blank, elsewhere. “She cleans Wednesdays, when Daddy does his after-school class and Gosia does the errands and then goes to pick up Quinn and Allison, and I take the early bus so usually when I get home Wednesday…Mom? Agnes.”
“Agnes?” Mom blinked twice. “I had to let her go.”
“Why?” I asked. “Where?”
Mom just smiled and exhaled. “Where indeed,” she mumbled.
“Mom?” I wasn’t sure even what to ask her, I had so many questions. “Why couldn’t you get the cotton out?”
“Oh, it just gives me the…the heebie-jeebies,” she said, shivering slightly. “Pulling the cotton out.” She shivered again, picking up her BlackBerry.
“Really?” I asked her. “Why?”
She shrugged wearily. “Pulling it out of the little neck of the bottle…” She pressed a bunch of buttons on the BlackBerry and said, “No, come on.”
Mom doesn’t get freaked out by anything, I reminded myself. Not blood or the car throwing a rod or even, like, when the toilet in the powder room blew up.
“I didn’t think anything…” I started.
“What?”
“Bothered you.”
“Not much does.” She tilted her head and stared steadily at me, her clear pale eyes unblinking. It made me feel clammy and apologetic. “Remember the last time the market tanked like this?”
“Um,” I said.
“Son of a…” she said, clicking faster on her BlackBerry. “Five years ago. And I saw it coming, I knew it, felt it, I was totally shorted. I got a dot-picture on the front of the Journal later that week. Remember?”
I had no idea what she was talking about. Luckily she wasn’t looking up, or pausing, so I didn’t have to fake a response.
“That’s when I went to Elysian—they all wanted me. But now here it goes, free-falling, two damn hours after I go out on a…” She stopped and looked up at me. “I’m having some trouble at work. Just between us.”
I nodded. Normally when I am with my mother, at least one of my sisters, but usually both, are there.
“Oh, shoot, I better cancel those tickets. They better not have charged, please…” she said, dashing to the computer on the counter and typing furiously. “We won’t be going to Paris this summer, to say the least.”
“Were we going to Paris?” I asked. “After camp?”
“We’re not. I gotta, ugh, sorry, hold on. Looks like Pfizer’s moving, I have to…” She typed so fast and hard I thought her fingers might drill through the keys, through the granite counter, down into the cabinet below.
“No problem,” I said. I should have signed up for chess class on Wednesdays, I decided, even though I hate and suck at chess. I hate and suck even worse at this.
“I don’t want you to worry, it’s just, I have to do a few things very fast, before Galen starts….”
“Okay,” I said, wondering when my sisters would get home. It’s easier for me when she talks to them and I just listen or space out. My only memory of being a baby is of her holding me while she talked to other people, my sisters, my father, the phone.
“I have to figure out how to…” she said tightly, fingers flying, pounding. “See, on top of the very complex position I took with the fund, there’s going to be a margin call coming in any minute, because I’m now under-collateralized on my own…. It’s kind of complicated, if you want to know the truth, Phoebe.”
I nodded again. Had I said at some point that I wanted to know the truth? I shrugged with one shoulder and checked the clock again. Any minute, they’d be home. Any minute.
“But I’m fixing it. And the fund, this is a golden opportunity. I had to go to the edge. I had to. Sometimes you just have to double down, that’s how you change your luck.”
“Uh-huh,” I agreed. Sure, double down, go to the edge, whatever. A little trouble at work. If I wanted to know the truth. Uh, no thanks? We have to cancel a trip to Paris I didn’t even know we were taking not because she wanted to go to Tuscany instead but because, it sure sounded like, we could not afford it. I didn’t even know how to think about that. It didn’t sound like a little trouble; my unshakable mother was kind of freaking out, right there in front of me, pounding at the computer like her fingers were nail guns.
I should never come home right after school, ever.
“The market can’t keep going down,” she mumbled. “Uh. See? It’s up a quarter point already, Galen. That’s good. That’s…” Mom made another few clicks on the computer before she logged out. The screen flicked back to a picture of me, Allison, and Quinn smiling on top of the back bowls in Vail, holding our skis, from February vacation.
After she stared at it for a second or two, Mom straightened up, her posture suddenly upright, normal again. “Tough it out and we can make great things happen,” she said. “Right?”
“Right,” I said. “We’re the Avery women.”
Her head snapped toward me. She squinched her eyes, focusing intensely on me. She nodded as if I had just confirmed something. “Exactly,” she said. Her phone started ringing. After glancing at it, she shoved it into her bag. Her BlackBerry buzzed. She grabbed it and opened her eyes wide. Her cell rang again inside her bag and her BlackBerry started ringing, too, in her hand. She cursed and then rushed toward the back door.
“Bye, Mom,” I called after her, but she was already gone.
5
ALL ALONE IN THE SUDDENLY silent house, I wandered through the kitchen into the dark oval-shaped dining room (when’s the last time I went in there?), trying to think about what had just happened with Mom but also trying not to. What I ended up thinking about, I guess as a compromise, was Kirstyn’s poetry.
Kirstyn won the eighth-grade poetry contest in March with a poem called “Child in the Ghetto.” It was really good, all about how this kid’s family had practically nothing but pride, no lamp, no table, but a floor so clean, to eat off it he was able… It had really deserved to win. I was the first person Kirstyn showed it to, of course, and it almost made me cry, the pain and beauty in it. My poem was all about how peanut butter glues your mouth together. There was a mean little voice inside my head during the poetry ceremony saying, How would Kirstyn know anything about a child in the ghetto? Her life is just as comfortable as mine and I knew almost for a fact that she wrote the poem sitting on one of the new top-of-the-line leather recliners in their new media room downstairs. So it seemed sort of, well, cheating, to write about a child in the ghetto when the closest she’s ever come to even knowing a child in a ghetto is listening to some rap music on her iPod.
But maybe that’s where I would live soon.
Maybe I would be a child in the ghetto and have really, really clean floors. Because that would be all that was left for us to be proud of. I would hold my head up and make something of myself, if that’s what happened, just like the child in Kirstyn’s poem; I would dream of a better day.
Yikes, I thought. I’m not sure I’ve got it in me to be that noble. I like it when today is a good day.
Maybe I am totally overreacting, I told myself, and forced myself to smile. Of course, I thought, I am so blowing it compl
etely out of proportion. Mom is not losing it, she’s just in work-mode. I normally don’t see her in the middle of the day, is all. It’s nothing.
I tiptoed from the dining room into the gleaming front hall, where nobody but the pair of cherub statues on pedestals flanking the front door ever goes.
“Agnes?”
No answer. She had to go, Mom had said. No. I had to let her go. Well, she sure seemed gone. I wandered over to the living room, the family room, the sun room, the den—nobody around. I am fourteen years old and perfectly fine at home alone, that’s not the point, it’s just, honestly? I think this was the first time I ever was.
“Where is everybody?” I yelled. Nobody answered. I headed up the front staircase but stopped partway up and sat down. I wasn’t sure where to go. I didn’t want to go up, I didn’t want to go down. Usually somebody was yelling at me to Come downstairs! Or, Go to your room! I might not always do it but then I knew at least where I was supposed to go.
I sat down, waiting, either for somebody to come tell me what to do or for an idea of my own, whichever came first. I leaned back against the wall and stretched my legs across the step.
If Mom told me something was wrong at work, she had definitely told Quinn and Allison, too. First. Right? Definitely. They’re older. If I were her, I would have told them way before I’d tell me.
I dug my fingers into the navy carpeting that ran up the center of the steps as I listened to the grandfather clock tick in the living room and wondered when everybody would get home.
It’s probably nothing, really, I told myself, and decided to think about whether we should have make-your-own-sundaes at the party or if that would be tacky and a mess. Tick, tock, tick, tock. Kirstyn wouldn’t really want to get out of doing the party. She just wanted me to reassure her as always, which is fine. She’s not as lucky as I am, her life isn’t smooth the way mine…Shouldn’t they be home by now? Does Luke like me, like me? Should I wear my hair down for the party or half up or all up? What if I’m actually not overreacting, and we are seriously going to be poor all of a sudden?
What if something really bad is going on and everybody knows except me?
I was still sitting there on the middle step when Quinn and Allison came home with Gosia, laughing as they clumped up the back steps about something that happened outside school, and then going shh, shh—as if the worst thing ever would be me overhearing their secrets. Last year most of the time Allison and I were always together and Quinn got all serious, practicing piano like every free minute, her hair pulled back tight in a bun and her eyebrows practically crossing each other on her pale forehead. But now Quinn and Allison are always laughing together and I’m the one alone.
I hate that.
I hate Allison, I decided, still sitting there. She is such a wannabe. With her crazy new group of friends in their black nail polish and Sanskrit in Sharpie on their sneakers. Bleh!
Allison spotted me as she and Quinn crossed the landing above me. Hands on hips, she screwed up her face like I smelled bad.
“What?” I demanded.
“Why are you on the front stairs?” she asked me.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“Well, get up and tell Quinn I didn’t cut school today.”
“Allison didn’t cut school today,” I yelled to Quinn.
“Whatever,” Quinn replied, going into her room and shutting the door.
“Shut up!” Allison growled at me, meanwhile. “You have the loudest voice in the universe! Do you want Gosia to hear?”
“Didn’t Gosia just pick you up at school?” So it was Gosia they didn’t want to hear, not me? Oh, hallelujah.
“Outside school, yeah. Are you coming up or not?”
“You cut?” I whispered, climbing the stairs toward Allison.
She grabbed me and pulled me into her room and, shutting the door behind us, said, “You have to help me choose a bikini.”
“Because you cut school?”
“No.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”
Allison blew air through her lips. “I’m going over to Roxie’s, along with, like, half the boys’ varsity swim team, and I have to choose a bikini.” She was talking as slow as Quinn talks normally, but making it sound like she had to because I was a mental defective.
“You look great in all your suits,” I swore to her.
“Shut up!” Her hands went up into her thick wavy hair and started twirling.
“I totally mean it, Allison. I would tell you if you didn’t, you know I would.” I hadn’t been in her room in a while. It was as neat as ever, and smelled good, too.
“True. You suck that way.” She spun toward the full-length mirror inside one of her closet doors and groaned. For the past year or two Allison has been convinced she’s fat and ugly and it’s no use even bothering with makeup. She thinks her hair is impossible, just because it’s thick, dark, and wavy. Her wide-spaced hazel eyes make her look like an alien, according to her, and her puckered mouth makes her look like a fish.
“You know who Tyler Moss is?” Allison turned decisively from the mirror.
“Um,” I said. I hate quizzes. A picture popped into my head: broad-faced guy with rosy cheeks and short dark hair and light brown eyes who was in fencing with Quinn. “Tenth grade, swim team, fencer?”
“Yes!” Her smile grew huge. “He’s seriously cute, don’t you think?”
I nodded. “Seriously cute.”
“I know it! Roxie said he asked if I was coming over.”
“No way! He definitely likes you!”
She grinned even bigger and said, “We’ll see.”
“So, but, you and Roxie cut school?”
“Me? Cut school? Come on. Print or black?” She held up two suits.
I chose the one she was holding slightly higher. “Print.”
“You think?”
“Try both and I’ll tell you,” I suggested.
“Okay,” she said, her cheeks bright pink and eyes sparkling. “You have to get out, though, because if I end up having a bathing suit crisis, it is not going to be pretty. But Phoebe, wait right outside my door, in case I need you to look. And tell me honestly, brutally, what you think, right?”
“Absolutely.” Right then I would have promised her anything. I headed toward the door. “Hey, Al?”
Allison was already back in her closet. “What?”
“What does had to let her go mean?”
She stepped out of her closet with both hands full of bathing suits on hangers. Allison is the only person I know who hangs up her bathing suits. “I hate every one of these. What does what mean?”
“Had to let her go,” I repeated.
“Fired her,” she said, dropping the suits on the bed. “Why? Who got fired?”
I wanted to tell her, as payment for letting me in, letting me be the one inside with Quinn out, but no. I couldn’t, not without telling her the rest. Even though she had told me about Tyler Moss instead of Quinn. But still, I couldn’t tell her about Mom.
“I read it in a book,” I lied.
“Random. Okay. I said I would be right there and I need to have a complete nervous breakdown first, so…”
“Sure,” I said. “Sorry.”
“I wish I…” Allison started, then stopped, raising an eyebrow. “You okay?”
Mom was home. She can’t pull the cotton out of medicine bottles. We might be poor. “All good!”
“Lucky you,” she said.
I smiled, closing her door. In the hall, I sat down against the wallpaper, waiting for her to model swimsuits for me, hoarding the information about Mom, Mom’s secret, in case it was a secret, in case she didn’t want anybody to know except me, for some reason. Just between you and me, she had said. So how could I go right off and tell Allison, then, first chance I got? Mom trusted me.
I sat there congratulating myself about how great I was that I could keep a secret from my sisters when my whole life all I wanted was to be in on theirs,
but I knew I wasn’t really so great. The bigger reason I didn’t tell Allison what had happened with Mom was because of how good it felt, for once, to be the one to know something first. It made me feel rich to have something my sisters didn’t.
Also, I didn’t fully get what Mom had said anyway.
And, if I said what I thought it meant out loud, it might be true.
6
I WAS EATING PASTA WITH BUTTER at the counter when Allison got back home from Roxie’s house. Gosia, our nanny or housekeeper or whatever she is now that we are too old for a nanny, had a plate covered in tinfoil ready for Allison. Gosia is not just gorgeous but is also a master pasta-with-butter chef; nobody makes it as good as she does and it is our absolute favorite meal. For the first time ever, Allison said, No thanks, she had already eaten. She went straight to her room and closed the door, saying she had a lot of homework to do.
Gosia and I shrugged at each other.
“How did I turn out so normal?” I asked her.
“No idea,” she agreed, and went back to the thick paperback she was reading. Quinn was in the living room, practicing piano. Daddy was in the den, listening to opera and paying bills. Mom of course was still at work. I called her and asked if I could sleep over at Kirstyn’s Friday night. She said, Sure, sorry, gotta go. I put my plate in the sink and, with absolutely nothing else to do, went up to doodle on my homework.
Mom didn’t come home while I was awake and Daddy went to a PTA meeting at his school. After I did as much stalling on homework as I could stand, I knocked on Allison’s door. She said to go away and stop being such a little pain in the ass, so we were back to that, apparently. I went to my room and IMed pointlessly with everybody about the party and watched TV in my bed until I fell asleep.
I woke up the next morning to Allison screaming that she couldn’t find the plunger for the wooden leg of her costume for her social studies project, she had put it right by her backpack and now where the hell was it? Gosia knocked on my open door as she passed it, holding a plunger. I checked the clock, cursed, and popped out of bed. I had to hurry or I’d miss my bus. As the front door slammed behind my sisters, I was yanking my jeans on. I grabbed my favorite T-shirt from the shelf in my closet. Gosia must’ve ironed it because it still smelled like the stuff she sprays on, which I love. I whipped my hair into a pony and, after a full two minutes with the electric toothbrush, swiped on lip gloss as I dashed down the stairs. As I slipped into my flip-flops, Gosia handed me my bag with all my stuff in it, including, I hoped, lunch, and an Odwalla Bar to eat on the way to the bus. “Bye,” I said only to Gosia, since the rest of my family was long gone by then.
