What Makes a Family

by Colleen Faulkner

  I glance at Henri and pull the front of my robe together, trying to cover as much of my bare skin as I can. The other girls, including Minnie, are walking around in their costumes, more naked than not, for anyone in the tent to see. Anyone who works backstage, that is. They’ve seen it all before. The marks are out front, filing in after they pay Bilis their hard-earned nickels and dimes. We can hear their excited talk and nervous laughter. MJ and JJ and Sparky are already playing music in the pit. That’s what Bilis calls it. I don’t know why. There’s not a hole.

  Henri offers me the fag hanging from his mouth, but I shake my head. He’s not as good-looking without his beret. He lost it the week he was gone. I take a puff of a cigarette once in a while, but I’m not going to do it now, mostly because I’m annoyed with him. I was surprised he didn’t put up any fuss when I told him I was going to be a coochie. I don’t know why I thought he would care if I danced practically naked in front of men, but it still hurt that he didn’t. Not only did he not protest, but he actually said something that made me think he thought he ought to have part of the money I’m going to be making. I set him straight on that quick enough. I already have to give Jacko a cut of my tips. Henri’s not getting a penny. And I’m not dumb enough to keep my money hidden in a sock in my trunk in the truck, either. Bilis keeps it for me. I thought about asking Minnie, but her Spotty helps himself to her stash when he’s down on his luck at craps. If I’m going to shake my bubs for nickel tips, I’m sure not giving my money to anyone, and if I were, Henri would be last in line.

  The music is working up to the first act, and JJ is clashing his cymbals. Minnie pats my bottom through the robe as she goes by to go onstage. I can hear Bilis, calling the last marks into the tent.

  “You’re going to be great,” Minnie assures me.

  “Sure I am,” I tell her. I’ve learned that the best way to do something you’ve never done before, even if you’re scared stiff, is to pretend to know what you’re doing until you know what you’re doing. And the same goes for almost-nudie dancing. I’ve been telling myself that since I told Jacko I’d rather dance naked behind a fan of red feathers than pick up one more shovelful of lion dung.

  Minnie throws me a kiss and sidesteps through a curtain and onto the stage, and all of a sudden I’m breathing so fast that I’m starting to feel light-headed. And then Bilis is beside me. He’s in a blue and white seersucker suit and straw boater’s hat that makes him look quite dandy. It’s funny, but now that I’ve gotten to know him, I forget he’s a dwarf. He’s just Bilis. I told him that one day, and he said he felt the same way about me; most of the time he forgets I’m a redhead.

  “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” Bilis tells me, taking my hand in his. He’s talking quiet so no one else can hear him. So Henri can’t hear him, I think.

  “I want to do it.” My voice sounds shaky. I’m more scared now than I was when I sneaked out of my house the night I ran away. “I gotta make more money than I’m making,” I tell him.

  “Move in with me,” he whispers, looking up at me, into my eyes. “Move in with me, and I’ll show you what a real man is like.”

  I almost laugh, but then I realize he’s serious.

  “I’ll take care of you, Sarry. We could have a good life together, you and me. I’ve got a lot of money saved. We could get married, and I’ll take you to Paris for a honeymoon. I’ll take you to London and introduce you to my mother and to Big Ben.”

  My breath is starting to come slower now. I can hear men clapping and hooting out front. Minnie and Millie must be knocking them dead out there. “Who’s Big Ben?” I ask Bilis.

  He smiles at me like I’m a child. But I know he doesn’t think I’m a child; otherwise he wouldn’t be offering to marry me. He wouldn’t want to make business with me, which clearly he does. It doesn’t offend me, though. In fact, I think it’s sweet. I almost wish I felt that way about him. Because I’d really like to go to Paris.

  “I can’t marry you, Bilis,” I whisper back to him. “Henri and I are getting married.”

  “Are you?” he asks me. “When’s that going to happen?” He’s still got my hand, holding me tight.

  “I’m sorry, Bilis.” I look down at him and smile, feeling sad. Because I really am sorry. “But I don’t feel that way about you.”

  He brings my hand to his lips and kisses it. Just like a gentleman. “I think you could learn, Sarry.”

  My gaze goes to Henri, who’s still sitting on the crates. He’s looking at us, but there’s no reaction on his face. He doesn’t care that Bilis has my hand, kissing on it.

  I look back at Bilis. “I should get in place. I don’t want to make a late entrance, my first time.”

  “You absolutely sure you want to do this?” He’s still holding my hand.

  “I have to, Bilis.” When I look down at him, he looks so sad that I lean over and brush my lips against his. I kiss him right on his kisser. In front of Henri.

  Bilis squeezes my hand and lets go. “You just say when you’ve had enough of this, Sarry, and we’re out of here. Alrighty?”

  I wipe a tear from the corner of my eye, but it’s not a sad tear. It’s a happy tear. Because at this second I feel like I can do anything. I can be anyone I want to be. Because Bilis believes in me. Because he loves me.

  “Alrighty,” I tell him, and then I throw off my robe and grab my feather fans and walk up the stage stairs to the entrance, just like I know what I’m doing.

  27

  Abby

  “Wow, Grandpop,” Sarah says from across the picnic table from me. She’s sucking crab meat from the carpus of a claw. “I think these are the fattest crabs we’ve had all summer.” She reaches for her hammer to open the claw and rubs a smudge of Old Bay seasoning off her chin. Like me, she likes to dip lumps of crabmeat into the salty spice. “Heavy.” She makes eye contact with me, and her blue eyes sparkle with mischief.

  Some days I could thump my daughter, but sometimes . . . I just want to hug her and cover her sweet, freckled face with kisses.

  “Think so?” my dad asks, using the tip of his penknife to work some meat out of the body of his crab. He doesn’t crack a smile. He takes his crabs very seriously. “I got a light one, two back.”

  Sarah and I grin at each other.

  “Wanna chase grasshoppers?” Ainslie asks Sarah, jumping up and down behind her, tugging at her elbow. The four-year-old is adorable, with her father’s gorgeous eyes and her mother’s dimples.

  “Let me finish this crab, and then we will,” Sarah answers. “Why don’t you pick some flowers for Mom Brodie while you’re waiting for me?” She points at some dandelions in the grass, and Ainslie bounces off.

  “Anyone else want another beer?” Joseph stands and tips his beer bottle back to get the last drop.

  “I’ll take one,” Celeste says. She’s sitting beside Daddy, whacking a claw with one of the wooden mallets. I can’t believe she doesn’t have any crab goo on her.

  Self-consciously I blot my T-shirt with a balled-up piece of paper towel.

  “Abs?” Joseph asks. There’s something in his tone that makes me look up at him. He tilts his head ever so slightly in the direction of the back door.

  “I’ll get it. Bathroom break.” I hop up from the picnic table bench, wiping my hands on the paper towel. I’ll wash them when I get inside. Picking crabs is the one event that requires washing your hands before you pee. “I’ll check on Mom Brodie,” I tell our mother, even though we’ve brought the baby monitor receiver out. Even though Mom Brodie hasn’t moved or said a word in days.

  Birdie had just sat down at the end of the table in one of those old-school lawn chairs made with the nylon webbing, and was eating coleslaw from a paper plate with a plastic fork. She’s been in and out of the house ten times. I don’t know what she’s been doing. She makes such a fuss about us all sitting down together for a meal, then won’t sit with us. I’ve never understood it. Drum thinks we make her uncomfortable, which seems
silly to me. We’re her family, for heaven’s sake. We love her, and she loves us. How can we make her uncomfortable?

  “Anyone else need anything?” I ask. I point to Celeste’s plastic cup that I know very well doesn’t have water in it. I’d bet the money due me for editing that freshman organic biology textbook I just finished that what’s in her pink cup is coming from a bottle out of her suitcase.

  Celeste smiles sweetly and shakes her head.

  In the kitchen, Joseph turns to me, two empty beer bottles in each hand. “She’s right, you know.”

  It takes me a second to realize what he’s talking about. Selective memory, I guess. Or maybe I’m learning my mother’s MO. What I don’t like, I just don’t retain.

  I walk to the sink, the linoleum floor cool on my bare feet. I don’t know where else in the country there’s still linoleum on kitchen floors. I find it appalling and comforting at the same time. The flooring must be thirty years old, the pattern faded from my mother’s mop. I gingerly hit the handle of the faucet with the back of my hand and thrust my hands under the water.

  Joseph comes up behind me. “Come on, Abs, could you really enjoy that money, knowing Blondie might be getting evicted?”

  “She always lands on her feet.” I pump soap from a dispenser into my hand.

  He bumps my hip with one of the beer bottles, and I move to let him get under the sink where he keeps a plastic bucket for recycling. Birdie’s not really on the recycling bandwagon, but she tolerates Joseph’s bucket as long as he empties it. He collects the recycling in a bin in one of the sheds and hauls it to the city recycling depot, which he established.

  The bottles clink as they hit the bottom of the bucket, and when he steps back, I close the cabinet door and rinse my hands again. “What if she’s right?” I say.

  “Mom? That’s what I’m saying. She is right. Celeste deserves her share.”

  I shake my head. “Mom Brodie. What if she’s right? What if giving Celeste the money will be a waste? What if we’re just fueling the Celeste problem by giving her money to throw away?”

  He shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter.”

  I grab a tea towel that’s hanging from the handle of the oven. It’s got a big red rooster on it. It goes with the salt and pepper shakers, I guess. I dry my hands. “The money Mom Brodie left me could change my life.” I think for a minute. “No. I’m perfectly happy with my life. But it could change Drum’s life.”

  He goes to the fridge, grabs a cold bottle of beer, and holds it up. I shake my head. He gets a second and closes the door.

  “Drum’s not happy teaching anymore. He hasn’t been for a while. He wants to make changes. Big changes.” I lean the small of my back against the counter, still drying my hands with the rooster. “He wants to quit his job. Sell the house. Move to a place on the water. Open his own glassblowing studio.”

  “I get that. But why do you need money? Why don’t you move here? You know Drum wants to.”

  “He’s never said that,” I say quickly. “Not exactly,” I add.

  “Because he knows you don’t want to.”

  I press the heel of my hand to my forehead. “Can you imagine me living in this house with Birdie?”

  I look up to see him with what Celeste refers to as a shit-eating grin.

  “I already do, practically,” he says. “Hasn’t killed me.” He waggles one of the beer bottles at me. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And what about what Mom Brodie wants?” he goes on, faster. “You know you’re the one she wanted to pass this farm to. Not me. She thinks I’m slow-witted.”

  “Well, you are,” I tell him. “But not any more slow-witted than any other man.”

  The grin again. But there’s also pleading in his eyes. And I thought the middle child was supposed to be the peacekeeper. In this family, the middle child has always been the rabble-rouser.

  I close my eyes. “Joseph, I cannot live with Birdie,” I say quietly. “She’d be the ruination of my marriage. Of my relationship with my children. Of me. I’d throw myself off the bridge in six months.”

  He sets one of the beers on the counter and opens the other with a bottle opener. “Fine. We’ll table that discussion for later.”

  “No, we’re not tabling it until later. We’re tabling it until . . . forever,” I say, hearing how ridiculous I sound as it comes out of my mouth.

  “Okay, so back to the money. It’s simple, Abs. It should be split three ways.”

  I rest one hand on my hip. More of me agrees with him than I want to admit. But I want this money so badly for Drum. He deserves it. He deserves all the happiness I can find for him because of the happiness he’s given me. “You don’t think Mom Brodie has a right to do with her money what she wants?”

  “She’ll be dead. It will be our money. We can do with it what we want.” He tips the bottle to his mouth.

  I toss the towel on the counter, annoyed with him, annoyed with myself. I want the money. But I want to do what’s right, too. I’m so torn. Mom Brodie must know best, right? She always does what’s right, doesn’t she? But then I see the image of her tattoo in my mind, and I wonder about the choices that led to her lying on a bed in the early 1930s and letting someone tattoo her upper thigh. And then there’s the matter of her age. There’s a really good possibility that she lied to Big Joe, and he married a teenager instead of the consenting adult he thought he married.

  It’s pretty naïve of me to think that Mom Brodie always made the right decision.

  “Think about it.” He opens his arms wide, a beer in each hand. “All I’m asking is that you think about it. Call Drum. See what he thinks.”

  The back door opens, and Celeste walks into the kitchen. “What are we getting Drum’s opinion on?” she asks. She’s holding her hands out as if she’s a surgeon about to put on sterile gloves.

  “You don’t want to hear about their boring domestic life,” Joseph responds without missing a beat.

  I’m impressed with my little brother’s quick thinking.

  “Probably not,” Celeste says. “Marly cheated on you with a hunky doctor. Happens all the time.” At the kitchen sink and pumping soap into her hands. “I’ve got to get this smell off. I knew I should have skipped the crabs.” She hits the faucet, and the water comes on. “You tell him?” she asks, looking over her shoulder at me.

  I meet his gaze, knitting my eyebrows questioningly. He lifts his hand ever so slightly and lets it fall. Later, he’s telling me.

  “So did you?” Celeste demands.

  “Did I what?”

  “Tell him.” She rolls her eyes at me and then looks over the other shoulder. “Mom Brodie has a tattoo.”

  “Get out.” Joseph swears. He sets the open beer bottle on the counter for her. “You saw it?”

  “When we were giving her a sponge bath.” Celeste reaches into the little drawer under the sink and pulls out the nail brush. We keep it in the drawer just to use after eating crabs. If you’re not careful, the smell can follow you for days. Which is fine on Brodie, but once you cross that bridge, nobody appreciates the smell of crabs and Old Bay seasoning wafting from someone’s hands.

  “Get out of here,” he repeats. “What is it?” He holds up his hand. “Wait. Please don’t tell me she’s got a butterfly tramp stamp. No, no wait.” Now he’s laughing. “Grandpop’s name on her bicep?”

  “Better than that.” Celeste grins. No one likes to tell a secret better than our sister. “Way better.”

  I cross my arms over my chest. “I thought we agreed we weren’t going to say anything.”

  She shuts off the water and reaches for the rooster towel. “We didn’t agree to anything. You told me not to say anything in one of your usual, big sister, we-have-to-do-whatever-Abby-says declarations.”

  Her words smart. Do I really make declarations? I thought it would be wrong to tell Mom Brodie’s secret. If she’d wanted anyone to know about the tattoo, she’d have shown it to us.

  “What is it?” Joseph
asks. Then he glances at me. He’s laughing. “Sorry, but come on. Now that I know she’s got one, I have to know what it is. You know how I am with tats.” He indicates his left bicep, covered in an amazing vine and flower pattern. Somewhere, woven in the greenery, is Ainslie’s name, but you’d never know it unless you were really looking for it.

  Celeste reaches for the beer on the counter. “You want to see it?”

  “No,” I say. “Absolutely not.” I look at him. “It’s on her upper thigh. Do you really want to see your grandmother’s thigh? Your dying grandmother’s thigh?”

  “Hell, yes.”

  Celeste giggles. “Come on.”

  I don’t go with them. Joseph is back in a minute. I hear Celeste’s footsteps on the staircase.

  “It’s beautiful, Abs,” he tells me.

  I nod. “But I don’t think Birdie and Daddy need to know about it. She didn’t want us to see it, Joseph.”