What Mr. Mattero Did

by Priscilla Cummings

  It was an old photograph, black and white, of Dad and his jazz band a long time ago, before he was even married to my mother. In the picture, Dad has thick, brown wavy hair that touches his shoulders and a droopy handlebar mustache that makes him look like an outlaw. He holds a clarinet with his right hand, a cigarette in his left, and grins like a smart aleck. Dad says he was a crazy fool back then. He was an alcoholic, too. It was only after he met my mom at a friend’s wedding that he became sober and started going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

  Mom is very proud of how my father recovered, and how he’s stayed sober all these years, but my dad never says much about it and doesn’t ever talk about those old days with the band. So the picture has given us—Cade and Song and me—countless hours of amusement and wonder. And sitting on the stairs that day, I really did wonder: was there something else secret about my dad’s past? Was there something secret now? Why did those girls say those things about my dad? Was there still something we didn’t know?

  I stood up abruptly. I hated myself for even thinking that. How could I? Rushing back to my room, I changed clothes and got out of the house. The only place I could think of going was the horse barn. Stomping through the pasture, I hoped it wouldn’t be a problem, me showing up even though it wasn’t my day to volunteer. I didn’t have my glasses on. I didn’t wear them to the barns. But when I spotted someone in the paddock brushing a white horse, I assumed it was Mrs. Dandridge and lifted my hand to wave.

  “Melody!” she exclaimed upon seeing me. She set the currycomb down, wiped her hands on her jeans, and opened her arms to me. It was not a normal greeting; I guessed she had heard about what happened.

  “You poor thing,” she said. “I saw it on the news.”

  I let her hug me and squeezed my eyes shut.

  After she pulled back, she held my arms. “Look,” she said, “no one here knows—or cares, Melody. Certainly the kids don’t!”

  “Is it okay for me to come today? I’m not signed up,” I said, trying hard not to cry and to keep my voice from trembling.

  “Melody, you can come here whenever you want. There’s always something you can do. Even if there’s not, you can just hang out.”

  Shyly, I dropped my eyes, but I was grateful she understood. She was right about the kids. None of them even knew my last name.

  “Calvin needs to come in,” Mrs. Dandridge said gently. “Would you like to get him for me?”

  I tried to smile, glad for something to do, and took a lead line to fetch the big bay from the pasture.

  It was a beautiful spring day, cool, but with a high blue sky. Up until then I hadn’t even noticed. When I returned to the barn with Calvin clomping beside me, some kittens skittered in front of us and chased each other the length of the barn. I felt better as I brushed the dirt off Calvin and picked a stubborn burr out of his long black mane. If only because I had something else to focus on for a little while.

  By the time I returned home everyone else was back, too, including my father, who sat on his favorite recliner in the family room. The ugly bruise on his face had not gotten any better. Mom perched on the edge of the couch opposite Dad and nervously rubbed her hands together.

  “What’s happening?” I asked, stopping beside Cade, who leaned in the doorway with his shirt untucked and his thumbs hooked in his pockets.

  Mom looked up at me. Her face seemed really tired.

  “Your father couldn’t take the lie-detector test today,” she said. “The person who does them didn’t come in. Maybe tomorrow, they said.”

  I felt really sorry for Dad. I knew he wanted to get it over with. “So that’s no big deal, is it?”

  Dad came to life. “Well, actually it might be,” he said. “Your mother went online today and read up on it. She says polygraph testing has no scientific basis, that it’s unreliable. Here,” he said, picking up a printout from the coffee table in front of him. “Look at what that professor wrote. He said the test doesn’t work. That it’s always been prone to false positives.”

  I squeezed past my brother and went into the living room to take the papers from Dad’s hands.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “Even if you’re telling the truth, it can make you look like you’re lying?”

  “That’s right,” he confirmed.

  I sat down on the couch beside Mom and heard her sigh. “Fred,” she said to my father, “I told you yesterday I was worried about this.”

  Dad opened his hands. “But that detective—that guy, Daniels—he said they put a lot of stock in the lie-detector test. He said it would be pretty important for me to take it.”

  The four of us looked at one another.

  “What about the lawyer?” Mom asked. “What did she say?”

  I didn’t even know they had talked to a lawyer.

  Dad shook his head slowly. “She barely had time to talk to me.”

  “I don’t like that woman!” Mom snapped. “She doesn’t seem interested in your case, Fred. Maybe she doesn’t believe you—”

  “Mary!” Dad stopped her. “She’s all I have right now, okay? She’s the lawyer provided by the teachers’ union. We can’t afford to hire someone else. And she said I ought to take it.”

  Mom crossed her arms. “I don’t know. I have a bad feeling about it.”

  Dad got up and walked over to the sliding-glass doors that opened onto our deck. He put his hands on his hips and stood looking out into the backyard for a long moment. “I don’t think I have a choice,” he finally said. “How’s it going to look if I refuse?”

  The next day, Mom picked me up after school so we could go together to get Dad at the police station. His car had a dead battery, and Mom had taken him to the station earlier for a one o’clock appointment. Cade was working, but Mom had the rest of the day off, and we had decided that after getting Dad, we’d take him out to eat, then rent movies, and drive over to Annie’s house to pick her up.

  It had been raining, and Mom pulled out an umbrella when we arrived at the police station. We huddled beneath it and picked our way around the puddles. It was at that moment that we ran into Jenna, who was leaving the station with her father. Only I didn’t realize it was Jenna until we were inside, which is when it dawned on me how I knew Jenna in the first place—from the middle-school play!

  “That’s one of them!” I exclaimed, rushing to the window, where I could still see her walking to a car in the parking lot. Everyone knew the girls’ names by now: Claire Montague, Suzanne Elmore, Jenna Cartwright.

  Mom appeared beside me. “Which one?”

  “Jenna Cartwright,” I said. “She was one of the pirates.”

  “Pirates?”

  “In Peter Pan,” I explained impatiently. “The middle-school play.”

  There were over thirty pirates in the production, most of them sixth- and seventh-graders I didn’t know, and all of them wearing eye patches and striped bandannas. But I recognized Jenna because of her long blonde hair with the red and brown highlights. Stupid highlights, I thought. I would never put a bunch of chemicals on my hair.

  Even if she couldn’t see me, I sneered at her. She never would have remembered me from the play because I was the crocodile, hiding out in my heavy papier-mâché head with many teeth and lying on my stomach on a skateboard, which is how I moved myself around.

  I narrowed my eyes as the car Jenna was in drove away, and I felt angry, like I had missed an opportunity or something.

  Just then, Dad came into the room quietly. He had his Redskins hat in his hand but no expression on his face.

  Mom and I stood up, bracing ourselves. It was the kind of moment when you wished you didn’t have to move forward, but you knew you had to.

  “Well?” Mom asked carefully. “Did you pass?”

  “Yes,” he replied, without emotion. “I passed.”

  Mom and I rushed forward and threw our arms around him. We couldn’t get Dad to share our enthusiasm, but it was a step forward. It was good news because we knew
that lie-detector test was important to the police.

  Finally, a small break, a little hope. We could breathe easier. We each put an arm around Dad and walked like that all the way down the sidewalk to the car. Then we celebrated by going to our favorite restaurant. Luigi’s is just a little Italian café in a strip mall near our house. It’s kind of tacky, with colored Christmas lights around the front windows and plastic flowers on the tables. But it has comfortable booths and soft lights—and Luigi’s makes the best white pizza in the whole world.

  It was still raining when we arrived. We made a run for it and stood inside the front door shaking the water off, and Dad actually smiled for the first time. We were seated right away, and in our corner booth, Mom handed out the menus. As I reached for mine, I noticed Mrs. Smith, an English teacher at my school, coming in with her husband, who is one of Cade’s high-school football coaches. Mom saw them, too, and beckoned with her hand for the Smiths to come over.

  Mrs. Smith waved back and held up a finger, like “wait a minute” because the waitress wanted to seat them.

  “It’s Lorraine Smith, and her husband, Jack,” Mom leaned over to tell Dad, who was studying the menu. “I told them to come over.”

  “You’re forgetting, Mary. They’re not supposed to associate with me,” Dad reminded her grimly.

  “Oh, come on,” Mom scoffed. “This isn’t a courtroom. This is Luigi’s!”

  Dad’s eyes didn’t leave the menu.

  “Should we tell them about the lie-detector test?” Mom asked.

  My father barely moved his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

  But a sparkle had returned to my mom’s eyes. “Maybe I will tell them,” she said, winking at me. “I think we ought to get the word out.”

  Dinner was great. Mom and I shared a white pizza, and Dad ordered his favorite ravioli Bolognese. We even talked a little bit about what we would do over the weekend, about planting some new azaleas and Dad grilling some of his short ribs. Mom kept glancing toward the front. I knew she was waiting for the Smiths to come over.

  But the Smiths did not come over. As we paused by the front door, waiting for Dad to pay the bill, we peered into the other half of the restaurant and could see that the Smiths had already left—or, perhaps, had not stayed.

  We rode quietly to the video store after that, the rain coming harder and smacking at the windshield. I offered to run in alone, and Mom pressed some money and the video-club card into my hand. Quickly, I picked out two movies, an old one Mom wanted, and a scary one for Annie and me. Then we swung by Annie’s to pick her up for the sleepover at my house.

  We were a little early, but I could see my friend, a dark silhouette, in the big picture window of her living room watching for me.

  “I’ll help her get her stuff,” I said, taking the umbrella for the walk up to Annie’s front steps.

  When she opened the door, I greeted her and told her about the movie. “That scary one—the one we watched at Jane’s, remember?”

  “Come on in, Mellie,” she urged. “Get out of the rain.”

  Inside the front door, I folded the umbrella carefully, trying not to drip all over their front hall. Annie wasn’t smiling, and I worried that maybe she didn’t like the movie I’d chosen. “Look we can always watch something else,” I offered. “Cade’s got a whole library of DVDs.”

  “It’s not the movie,” Annie said. “It’s just that I can’t . . .”

  I waited. “Can’t—what?”

  “Go over to your house,” Annie finished, dropping her eyes.

  “Why not?”

  Annie screwed up her face. “Look, Mellie. Maybe you could come over here instead.”

  At first, I was confused, but then a very cold feeling started to grip me. “What do you mean?”

  Annie drew a breath. “My parents won’t let me go.”

  My mouth dropped. I couldn’t believe that because Annie and I were best friends!

  “But you can come here, Mellie.”

  “Annie, you can’t come over because of what those girls said?”

  She pressed her lips together and met my eyes.

  “You know my dad didn’t do anything!”

  She nodded and bit her lip. “I’m sorry.”

  I turned away from her, yanked open the front door, and left fast, not even closing the door behind me or putting the umbrella back up.

  “Mellie?” Annie called after me. “Mellie! Please don’t go away mad!”

  But I didn’t turn around. Not once while I walked down her sidewalk in the pouring rain. Not even after I slammed our car door shut.

  15

  Claire

  IT SOUNDED SO EASY. Sure. Put two fingers way, way back on your tongue to kind of gag yourself—and then heave-ho! But have you ever tried it? Huh? Because it does not work. Not for me anyway. All it did was get me worked up and frustrated. I don’t know how those bulimia girls could do it. I’m telling you, if I could have, I would have, because every day I was coming home from school and eating way too much on account of I was so nervous. I hated myself for it, but I was really worried about getting fat again.

  Fat and ugly. That’s how I saw myself. “Disgusting,” I even said out loud one night while I stared into the bathroom mirror. I had just brushed my yucky, thin, wispy hair straight back so I could wear a headband, but the headband made me look like a stupid clown. It’s like I couldn’t even do anything cool with my hair either.

  I yanked the headband off and threw it in the sink. Then I sat heavily on the lid to the toilet, checked out my poor, aching finger, and started crying.

  A complete and total loser is what I felt like. It had been a week since we reported what Mr. Mattero did, and every day it seemed like things were getting worse, not better. Not that most kids said anything. Most of them didn’t. Most kids at school didn’t give a damn one way or the other! They were too busy with their own perfect little lives to worry about our problems. But there were some—those snotty little band members and the goody-goodies in the chorus—who gave us the evil eye every chance they got.

  And every time I saw Melody Mattero I got a stomachache. She was easy to spot. No one else at school had a long braid like hers. Watching her walk through the hallway, her feet skimming the floor, her head hanging down, I knew she was hurting. Well, I was hurting, too, but no one knew it!

  Suzanne and I were still friends. I was really glad she came back to school, that her parents gave Oakdale another chance. But she wasn’t the same. She seemed incredibly quiet—even more than she was normally.

  “Nothing bad will happen,” I tried to tell Suzanne one afternoon at her house. We were in her basement, sitting on the floor beside all her exercise equipment shuffling cards, only neither one of us felt like playing anything.

  “But I’m afraid,” she said. “I mean, what if they believe Mr. Mattero and not us? Then what are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know.” I kept shuffling those cards.

  And that’s when Suzanne’s big sister, Addy, suddenly appeared like a bad dream from out of nowhere. She was home on a break from her college, and I guess she had been on the stairs eavesdropping, the little sneak. She came down with her arms crossed and her head cocked sideways, and she asked us straight out: “Did you guys lie?”

  “What are you doing, spying on us?” Suzanne spit back at her.

  Addy came closer. “Did you guys make up that stuff about your music teacher?”

  Suzanne turned away. “Get lost,” she muttered.

  I kept my eyes on the cards and divided the deck into two piles.

  But Addy stood right over us. “You better not have,” she said. “You tell a lie like that, you’ll have to keep lying to cover it up. And the more you lie, the more you’ll have to lie.”

  Suzanne whirled around on her butt and tried to kick Addy right in the shins. “Bug off, freak!” she yelled. Let me tell you, a whole other side of sweet little Suzanne pops out when her sister’s around. Not that Addy is always
so evil. I mean, she did bring us those Foakleys from New York. But sometimes she’s such a damned know-it-all. She was the first person in any of our families not to support us. I guess that’s why Suzanne reacted so viciously. Plus we were both on edge.

  Anyway, Addy wasn’t the only person getting weird.

  Jenna was acting a little strange herself. Like one day on the way to class she says out of the blue, “Claire, you’re not selling me out, are you?”

  “What are you talking about?” Honestly, I was completely baffled.

  “Did you have that second interview with Detective Daniels?” I stopped. We all three stopped. “Of course. Suzanne did, too,” I said.

  “We had to,” Suzanne added.

  “Did you tell him you couldn’t remember some stuff?” Jenna asked.

  “No! I told him everything I told him the first time.”

  Jenna zeroed in on me. “Then why did he tell me that? Why did he tell me you were having trouble remembering?”

  “I don’t know!” I fired back at her. “I didn’t say anything different, and neither did Suzanne. Why would we? You think we want to get in trouble?”

  Jenna backed off and held up a hand to stop us. “All right, all right. Forget it. Forget I said anything. I’m not mad.”

  We walked on, but then we paused at the water fountain. After Suzanne finished getting a drink, Jenna says to us, “Look, I’ve been thinking about something.”

  I rolled my eyes. I almost didn’t want to know what it was, but Suzanne wiped her mouth and asked her, “What about?”

  “You guys,” Jenna said quietly, crooking her finger so we’d bend our heads close to hers. “I’ve been thinkin’, like, how we need boyfriends.”

  “Boyfriends?” I repeated.

  Suzanne giggled and shook her head like it was a joke.

  But Jenna didn’t laugh. “Seriously. They could protect us, you know?”

  “Protect us from what?” I asked.