The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2018 by Zulema Renee Summerfield
Cover design by Lucy Kim
Author photograph by Tucker Sharon
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ISBN 978-0-316-43476-8
E3-20180321-DA-NF
Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
House One: Kensington Drive How to Stand in Front of a Broken Home
A Brief History of Why Everything Sucks
Diminishing the Power
Fear #18: Drought
Before
Space Rocks
A Weekend at Dad’s
Discord
Gramma B
Nuisance
Fashions
Fear #37: Earthquake
Sorority
Bizarre Beginnings
Windsor
20/20
Fear #7: Home Invasion
DIY
King of the Rats
Spoiled
Chester
Keeping Track
Ask a Priest
Fear #22: The Russians
Sheila Collins
Tell It to Me Slowly
Let Down
Geode
Off-Limits
Semper Fi, Assholes
Platoon
How to Think About Ghosts
Premonition
Pressing
Call It Love
A Sight to See
Rhymes with “Boss”
Happy Trails
Matt Er Horn
The Crappiest Place on Earth
December 9
Fear #1: Disappeared
House Two: Citrus Grove Decisions
Citrus Grove
By the Pool
What Nuns Should Do
Night
Return
A Boy
Any Boy
Undone
Roster
New Nun
By the Pool
The Size of the World
Daddy’s Boy
Leonard
Display
The Thing About Fear
Confession
Rampage
Exercise
Hail Mary
When Someone Dies
Bundle
Ten Amen Square
Massacre
Retrieve
In the Pit
Passage
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Zulema Renee Summerfield
Newsletters
For my family,
and for Theresa
NENNY LIVES in two houses. The first house is haunted. The second house is not haunted, but still: some nights she lies awake in bed and cannot sleep.
* * *
A house is such a thing. A tremendous, monstrous, beautiful thing. Put your face to a window, your ear to a door. See how a house is built—by what darkness, by what light.
House One:
Kensington Drive
How to Stand in
Front of a
Broken Home
NOTE, FIRST, the crepe myrtle. How lovely and silken its wrinkled petals, you might shovel them up like taffeta snow. In spring, scoop fistfuls of petals into sturdy leaf boats, and at dusk, when the neighbors water their lawns and the gutters river up, sail your little crafts downstream, to other cities and children unknown. Have your fun while you can, though, because those petals don’t last very long. Soon the myrtle’s limbs will be ragged and bare.
It is 1988 and America is full of broken homes. America’s time is measured in every-other-weekend-and-sometimes-once-a-week. Her drawers are filled with court papers and photos no one looks at anymore. Her children have bags that’re always packed and waiting by the door.
In the driveway, note the brand-new Chevy van. On family trips, scuttle like a bug to get a swivel seat. Yell “Shotgun,” punch someone in the arm, cry to Mom if you have to—whatever it takes. If you’re not swivelin’, you’re snivelin’, ’cause the back seat reeks of sweat and swarms with ants when summer rolls around. They sneak up the tailpipe and find their way in, a little button of black squirm where someone spilt Hi-C from a can.
* * *
At Sacred Heart school one day, during Family History Week (which, it turns out, is completely made up), Katie Marion stands at the front of the third-grade classroom, beaming and proud, her family tree clutched to her chest. Something’s not right with her drawing. There isn’t a single broken branch anywhere. No bandaged grafts, no bark haloed by disease—just two clean branches starting at the top, a grandma branch and a grandpa branch, and then neat smiling non-fissures the whole way down.
“My grandpa met my grandma in 1949,” she begins. It’s so obvious she’s reading off a card taped to the drawing’s back. Katie Marion has a stupid mouth. She’s happy and nice and her mom brings her hot lunch every day. It’s a sin to hate her, which is unfortunate, because Nenny kind of does.
“He was a captain in the air force and she was a secretary on the base. They got married and had three kids: my dad, Uncle Roger, and Aunt Lisa, who died when I was three.”
This is said in the same emotional register of everything Katie Marion does or says, except for the time she got stung by a bee. Nenny wants to pencil out her own eye.
“My dad met my mom when he was the principal at this school. He’s not the principal anymore. They got married and had my sisters and then me. Mom says don’t be surprised if there’s another on the way—”
Wait just a pancakin’ minute. Hold the ever-lovin’ phone. Nenny knows she’s not supposed to blurt stuff out, because Sister Timothy will write on her report card “She blurts stuff out,” but blurting’s what Nenny does.
“Your parents are still married?” she blurts. Sister Timothy shoots her a warning glance.
And Katie Marion, stupid Katie Marion, she just blinks her big no-sin eyes.
“Well, sure,” she says. “Aren’t yours?”
(Pencil stab.)
“Yeah,” Nenny finally says, offering a dramatic pause. “But not to each other.”
It only takes a second before everyone figures out that this is the funniest thing they’ve ever heard. The whole room erupts in laughter, a
nd everyone’s clapping and slapping their knees—everyone except Sister Timothy, who yells “Go to the office!” as she thrusts the hall pass into Nenny’s hands.
A bright wave of laughter follows her, hot sizzling relief that someone said what they were all thinking. Katie Marion stands dumbstruck still, as surprised as if someone’s told her that God doesn’t exist or wishes don’t actually come true. Katie Marion’s an idiot, that’s for sure, but it isn’t her fault. Idiocy is genetic—just look at her stupid family tree. Besides, there’s grace inside Nenny somewhere. She could probably trace its source, if someone would only show her how. Grace to forgive, grace to excuse, grace to turn a thousand blind eyes. A grace simple enough to flash Katie Marion a quiet look as Nenny leaves.
Come on over to Kensington Drive. Stand outside of my house anytime.
A Brief History of
Why Everything Sucks
EARLY LAST year Nenny’s parents called the kids in for dinner, served them each a plate of macaroni and cheese, turned the TV off, and announced that they were getting a divorce. Tiny didn’t know what that meant, so Dad took a deep breath and explained. “Your mom and I aren’t going to live together anymore,” and to Nenny that made sense, because it was clear they were miserable, and Bubbles seemed fine with it too, because he was the oldest and could roll with anything—but Tiny? Poor Tiny? He just collapsed in a ball on the floor and cried. When he did that, Mom couldn’t help it: she started crying too. Bubbles slid off his chair and started to go somewhere but then stopped, standing by the table looking terribly confused. Finally Dad said, “All right, let’s clean up,” in a voice so sad and distant that Nenny knew for the first time what forever meant, and knew that it wasn’t good.
* * *
Within a matter of weeks, it seemed, everything changed. They sold the house in Yucaipa and Dad went to live in an apartment while Mom moved into a two-bedroom house with a woman named Corinne, who was another nurse at the hospital. Sometimes, when Mom was gone at work, Corinne took them to the orange grove at the end of the street. Someone had hung a tire swing. The grove was mysterious in a prehistoric kind of way. Shadows turned bluish and soft once you stepped in, and likely there were dead things there.
A strange mechanical ritual emerged: Mom went to work, the three of them ducked into the grove with Corinne, and then Tiny would swing, and then Nenny, and then Bubbles, and then Tiny again. While you waited for your turn you sat in the dirt and picked at your shoes, pushing sticks through the eyelets, unraveling the laces, until it was your turn again, and then Corinne would push you, quiet and gentle and slow. It was like slipping into a dream no one’d had before.
Corinne never tried to console them about the divorce and the change in their lives. For this, Nenny loved her.
And then Dad would show up, every other weekend and one night a week, looking like someone had blown him up and had left a weird, featureless man in his place. On Wednesdays he’d take them to McDonald’s and they’d eat in silence, and every other Friday he’d pick them up for weekends at his house. They were long weekends, dull and quiet in a sad, sort of lonely way.
* * *
Soon Rick came along. He worked at the hospital with Mom too. He was bald as a cue and was very no-nonsense. Rick had been in Vietnam.
Rick had two kids, Charles and Kat. Charles was skinny as a bean and, like Nenny, was about to enter third grade. Kat was sixteen. It didn’t matter what you said to her, she’d just snort and roll her eyes. Mom took Nenny and the boys to Rick’s every couple of days, where they watched Charles run around with sticks while Kat ignored them all, reading Seventeen in the shade. On the upside, Rick did have a pool—though more often than not swimming was just Charles doing cannonballs while Nenny and the boys stuck timidly to the sides.
Eventually Mom and Rick would emerge from the dark of the house looking rumpled and unkempt, and then they’d all eat pizza or Chinese food around a table that was far too small for seven people, while Rick’s cat eyed everyone suspiciously from the corner of the room. One day in June, Mom made an announcement: “Kids, we’re moving in!” Like this was somehow good news, like it made a whole ton of sense. What about the tire swing? Does Dad even know his way here?
So that’s how it is: Mom and Rick got married and Nenny’s got a new family and they’ve all got adjustments to make. That’s what Rick keeps saying, as if the fact that this sucks for everyone should make them all feel better.
Turns out, Dad does know his way here. Except that when he shows up now, he doesn’t even come to the door. He just sits in the car, staring straight ahead, honking.
Diminishing the Power
LITTLE NENNY has always been a nervous nelly. She was born with a natural predilection for alarm. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. This simple irrationality governs her whole life—top to bottom, inside and out.
Knock-kneed and a little stormy-eyed, she is far too small for the thoughts that haunt her. Do they contain her or does she contain them? If the heart is a receptacle, a little bin where all your troubles go, then Nenny’s overflows to the point of being overwhelmed.
Someone will leave the stove on and the house will burn to the ground. She’ll trip and break her neck on the stairs. She’ll go swimming and her foot will get caught in the drain at the bottom of the pool (she saw this once on TV). The house will fill with gas and no one will smell it and they’ll all just go about their business, la dee da, and then some idiot will come over and light a match and blow them all to smithereens. It’s going to happen because it’s happened before, to one of Kat’s friends who moved away to Michigan. Cross her heart and hope to die—except that’s the problem. She doesn’t want to die. Nenny doesn’t want to die at all.
You could make a catalog of these fears and sell it for a pretty penny. Give it a nice shiny cover with a drawing of a girl trembling and sweating and with her fingers crammed in her mouth. Call it something like When a Child Suffers the Inevitability of Doom.
Every Thursday night, Mom puts Nenny to bed. It can only be once a week because Mom works late, and also there are so many people in this stupid house and not enough Mom to go around. She sits on the edge of Nenny’s bed and takes Nenny’s hand in her own, pets it like it’s a dying hamster, and she takes a deep breath and tells Nenny to take a deep breath too, and they breathe in all the breath they’ve got and their chests expand like too-full balloons, and they exhale—whoooooooo—and Mom tilts her head and half smiles, half frowns with a look that means it’s time to get real, and she stops petting but still holds Nenny’s hand and says, “What’s been on your mind?”
“Everything,” Nenny says, because it’s true. It’s always true.
“Everything is on your mind?” she asks, and Nenny nods. “Everything is on your mind.” Mom makes this simple reaffirmation, then lets a quiet pause fill the room. She’s good at this, at stopping just long enough to let whatever you said float around, long enough to collect meaning but not long enough to gather dust. She is a nurse, after all.
“And how does that feel? To have everything on your mind?”
Part of Nenny hates stupid questions, wishes she could swipe all stupid questions off the face of the earth. But the other part of her, the more important, lasting part, would give everything to spend the rest of eternity in a half-dark room with Mom’s soft voice swirling around. Sister Timothy would send her to hell just for thinking it, but Nenny doesn’t care: she’d give her very soul.
“It feels bad,” Nenny says. “Really bad.”
“Okay. Where does it feel bad? Does it feel bad in your head? In your stomach? Can you point to where it feels bad?”
This whole thing—the breathing, the check-ins, locating the bad—they recently learned from Uncle Max, who is Rick’s brother and a counselor at a school for troubled boys. When you’re feeling something, find the place where you’re feeling it the most. It’s sometimes in your chest, sometimes in your head, often in your stomach, rarely in your toes. Once you’ve found i
t, close your eyes and imagine it gone. It’s called “diminishing the power.” It sounds easier than it is. They’ve been diminishing the power for months now, since the earthquake in July and Nenny’s freak-out: crying, puking, pulling out her hair.
“Is it here?” Mom says and points to her own head. “Here?” Her stomach. “Here?” Her heart. But Nenny doesn’t say anything now, and Nenny doesn’t point.
There aren’t enough fingers to point with.
Fear #18: Drought
THEY’RE TALKING about drought on TV and then it happens—the whole world runs suddenly dry. Tiny’s brushing his teeth and Nenny’s shouting, “Turn the faucet off when you brush!” but he refuses because he’s a jerk and he never listens to anything Nenny has to say even though the whole existence of everything depends on it—and then schlp! The water’s gone.
The water’s gone! They run to all the faucets in the house but none of them work, so they race outside to check the hose but the hose is useless, and they look at the grass and the grass shrivels up, and they turn to the flowers and the flowers shrivel up, and then the trees all shrivel up too, and Nenny shouts, “The pool!” because it’s their last resort even though everyone knows that if you drink pool water you’ll throw up everywhere and then poop in your pants.
Doesn’t matter, because the pool’s now dried up too.
They look to the sky then, and the clouds, terribly, begin to disappear. The clouds suck in and pucker up like an old lady’s face when she sleeps, collapse like little universes turning in on themselves before they finally evaporate, gone.
“Look what you did, dummy,” Nenny says. But when she turns to Tiny, there’s no Tiny anymore—just a pile of smoking and parched and dried-up Tiny clothes.
Before
WHO KNOWS why things fall apart, or why some things happen and others don’t, or why two people who loved each other once don’t love each other anymore. Nenny could speculate all night about Mom and Dad’s marriage or Mom and Dad’s divorce, and sometimes she does. She doesn’t exactly want to or intend to, but her brain does funny things when she cannot sleep—and often she cannot sleep.
Every Other Weekend Page 1
