Last Summer

by Holly Chamberlin

  They shouldn’t have wasted their time.

  I am so tired that my whole body is shaking. But I won’t be able to sleep. I checked Mom’s medicine cabinet but there weren’t any sleeping pills. I went through her dresser drawers just in case, but there was nothing. Maybe the doctor across the hall from Dad has something in her office. But I don’t know how I could get past her receptionist.

  Maybe I’m just stuck being awake for the rest of my life.

  40

  Meg was sprawled on the couch in the living room, waiting for her father to come by and fetch Petey. She had been thinking about what Stella had told her and Rosie the other day in Perkins Cove. She had had no idea life around someone like Mackenzie could be so miserable. And she was thinking about how nice it had been of Mrs. Patterson to take them to Old Orchard Beach. Meg had felt a little awkward around her at first, but Mrs. Patterson had been really nice, offering her sunblock and buying her food, and by the end of the day things had seemed pretty normal, almost like old times. Not quite, but almost.

  The doorbell rang and Meg sighed. She wished that her mother was home to deal with Peter Giroux, but her mother was at work. Of course.

  Meg opened the door. “Hi,” she said. Her father was dressed in his usual sloppy way—baggy jeans, a T-shirt proclaiming that he braked for hotties, and dirty sneakers. He badly needed a haircut, and by the looks of his dirty fingernails, Meg guessed he could probably use a shower. She had pretty much gotten used to the two missing teeth, though when he had first lost them to gum disease Meg had felt embarrassed to be seen with him. Whose fault was it that he hadn’t been to a dentist in, like, twenty years? His own, that’s whose fault it was.

  “Hey, whassup, Megarino?” he said, smiling hugely as he loped past Meg into the house.

  Meg felt her face get hot. She hated when he called her that, and all those other stupid nicknames he came up with. But long ago she had stopped begging him to use her real name. He never listened, so why waste her time? And she had long since stopped being afraid of him. Her father’s bark was much worse than his bite. It was the only halfway good thing about him.

  “Where’s my kid?” Mr. Giroux asked, scanning the living room as if Petey was hiding behind a piece of furniture. More likely, Meg thought, he was looking for something he could steal and then sell. Her mother had warned her to watch her father carefully when he came to the house. They were already missing a silver candlestick Frannie had inherited from a great aunt. “He ready yet?”

  “He’s upstairs,” she said. “He’ll be down in a minute.”

  “Don’t want to miss the opening pitch. Yo, Petey!”

  Meg flinched at her father’s shout.

  Petey’s still almost girlish voice floated back. “Coming, Daddy!”

  A complete silence followed, which, Meg thought, was nothing unusual. Her father never had anything to say to her. But she had something to say to him.

  “Why didn’t you send me a birthday card?” she asked.

  Her father widened his eyes in an exaggeration of surprise. “It was your birthday? Oops. Sorry, Megorama. Guess I just forgot. Got a lot on my mind these days.”

  Yeah, Meg thought, like how to pay for a keg of beer and how to get a new girlfriend, someone who didn’t know about your lack of a steady job and the family you’d left behind. “You’re so busy you can’t even remember your daughter’s birthday?”

  Peter put his hands up in protest. “Hey, cool down. Chillax. What’s the big deal?”

  “The big deal is that it was my birthday.”

  “Jeez, I’ll make it up to you next year. I promise.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Meg shot back. “You always break your promises.”

  Peter Giroux’s face took on a mean expression. “That’s no way to talk to your father,” he growled.

  “Why not?” Meg challenged. “I’m only telling the truth.”

  “I kept my promise to take your brother to a Sea Dogs game, didn’t I? Hey, Petey!” he called again. “Hurry up, let’s go!”

  “That’s only because Mom reminded you, like, a hundred times.”

  “No,” Peter spat out. “It’s because your brother doesn’t give me crap. He has some respect for his old man. You’re way too much like your mother, Megarrific.”

  Meg felt as if she had been slapped. She felt as if she would cry. But there was no way she would give her father that satisfaction. Instead, with every effort of her will, she said, “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  Before her father could reply Petey came racing down the stairs, his too-big baseball cap askew. “I’m ready, Daddy!” he cried. His face was shining with excitement.

  “Hey, looking good, Petey.” Peter guided his son toward the front door.

  “Have a good time, Petey,” Meg said, watching them leave the house. “Don’t eat too much junk food.”

  “Okay,” Petey said. “But can I get ice cream, Daddy?”

  “You can get all the ice cream you want,” he said loudly, almost, Meg thought, in defiance of her caution to Petey.

  Her father shut the door behind him without a word of farewell to his daughter.

  Her father and brother were barely in Peter’s much-abused, heavily rusted car before Meg, still standing in the living room, began to sob.

  41

  Frannie was in the dairy aisle in Hannaford. Since when, she thought, frowning at the display in front of her, had everything become so expensive? And since when had yogurt come in so many varieties, styles, and flavors it could take you a week to choose one? Frannie grabbed the carton of yogurt with the cheapest price tag and placed it into her cart. Maybe it was high fat, or maybe it was low fat. Maybe it was prune flavored or maybe it had those probiotics, whatever they were, that helped regulate your digestive system. Whatever. Her time was too precious to waste agonizing over dairy products.

  And she was tired, even more so than usual. She had been up until all hours the night before, reliving the afternoon and evening. Because when she had gotten home from work she had found Meg sitting on the couch in tears, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Peter had had something to do with Meg’s distress.

  “What did he say this time?” she had asked her daughter, sitting beside her and gently putting an arm around her shoulders, half-expecting Meg to pull away.

  But Meg hadn’t pulled away. “Nothing,” she had mumbled. “The same stuff.”

  “Yes,” Frannie had replied with a sigh. “Your father is predictable.”

  “And he calls me those stupid names.”

  “Yeah. He used to do that with me, too, before the divorce. Franerific. The Franstigator. It was beyond annoying.”

  And after a moment Meg had blurted, “Sometimes I hate him!”

  The force of Meg’s declaration had surprised and saddened Frannie. She had never made excuses for or tried to hide her ex-husband’s bad behavior from her daughter. At the same time she didn’t want Meg to actually hate her father. But the hate was partly her fault. She hadn’t taught her daughter to respect her father because she hadn’t found anything in him worth respecting. Maybe she should have lied about Peter, painted him as a good man and a loving father. No. That would have been impossible. Meg wasn’t stupid.

  “Don’t say that, Meg,” she had said then, not angrily.

  “Why not? You hate him.”

  “No,” Frannie said, truthfully. “I don’t. At least, not anymore. Mostly I feel bad for him. He can’t help but be the way he is.”

  Maybe that statement wasn’t the truth (change was usually possible, but Peter was too lazy to even try to change) but at any rate, it had been the end of the conversation. A bit later, when Meg had washed her face with cool water, Frannie had persuaded her to go out to dinner, just the two of them. They went to the nearest Applebee’s, and by the meal’s end, Meg had recovered enough to smile, just a bit, and to thank her mother for “hanging out” with her. Frannie had been touched by Meg’s thanks. To hav
e a teenaged daughter who actually wanted to hang out with her mother ... Well, that was special.

  Frannie wheeled the cart in the direction of the cereal aisle. She hoped the store wasn’t out of the generic brand of the cold cereal Petey liked. Mostly, when you bought a box of cereal you got half a box of air. You might as well buy generic air, Frannie thought. It’s cheaper.

  And speaking of cheapness ... Peter had returned Petey two hours later than promised and without the five-dollar bill Frannie had given her son in case of an emergency. Petey had been exhausted but seemed happy enough, babbling on about details of the game and how they had met Daddy’s friend Buster there and how after the three of them had gone somewhere for pizza. A few artfully casual questions had unearthed the fact that Peter had taken his son to a pub, not a walk-in pizza joint, but as long as he hadn’t driven back to Yorktide drunk she couldn’t really complain. When he had dropped Petey off he had seemed completely sober. Unless he had become very good at faking sobriety ...

  Frannie snatched the last box of Petey’s favorite cereal from the shelf and headed on to the condiment aisle. The Giroux family was out of mustard. Petey liked yellow mustard. Meg liked honey mustard. Frannie was partial to Dijon. She scanned the prices for the generic brand in each flavor. For whatever reason, the yellow mustard was cheapest, so yellow mustard it would be. Frannie tossed the plastic bottle into the cart. Sometimes it was just downright boring to shop on a tight budget, even though it took more brainpower than simply grabbing what was closest or packaged in the brightest container. Witness her experience in the dairy aisle! Overwhelmed by yogurt. Was this what her life had become?

  Frannie moved on to the paper goods aisle and wheeled the cart past the selection of holiday cards, wrapping paper, and small stuffed animals. Obviously, she thought, this is an aisle my ex-husband isn’t familiar with. When no birthday card had shown up for Meg she had called Peter, though what she had hoped to accomplish by calling him was anybody’s guess. Characteristically, he had given several ridiculous excuses for having forgotten or ignored his daughter’s birthday, excuses he had to know Frannie wouldn’t believe. Like that his psychic buddy had told him it would bring bad luck if he sent a card to his daughter this year. Or that he’d bought a card weeks ago, really, and had mailed it right away, so it must have gotten lost or something, goddamn postal service.

  Frannie tossed a six-pack of paper towels into the shopping cart, followed by a twelve-pack of toilet paper. She wondered if other people’s kids went through as much toilet paper as hers did, but she certainly wasn’t about to take a survey and find out. Maybe she should tell Meg and Petey just how much toilet paper cost.... But regulating toilet paper struck Frannie as the one economy she couldn’t bring herself to make. She had to maintain some sense of dignity.

  At least Peter wasn’t living with them on Pond View Road. Talk about excessive use of toilet paper! Frannie almost smiled at the thought. But Peter was a bum and didn’t deserve a smile. She had never apologized for his careless and sometimes cruel behavior, and it was too late to start. Meg was too old now to believe that her father really cared about her but was just forgetful when it came to birthdays and other holidays. She had lost what naïveté she had ever had early on. Maybe that was common for children in a single-parent home with a careless absentee parent like Peter. It would be interesting to see how Petey matured and if he, too, would realize before long that his father was a severely limited man. But the father-son relationship was so very different than the father-daughter relationship, and Peter had always shown a marked preference for his second child. It was unfair, but that was the way it was.

  Maybe, Frannie thought, she would ask Meg if she wanted to talk to Sister Pauline again. It might help if Meg could talk about her father to an adult other than her mother. Frannie sighed and put the jar of fancy pickles she was contemplating back on the shelf. No one really needed fancy pickles. Pickles weren’t even supposed to be fancy. They were only cucumbers, after all. They were supposed to come in a wooden barrel and be sold on the sidewalk for a nickel!

  She wheeled her laden cart to the front of the store and scooted over to the shortest line. Just ahead of her was a young mother. Her child, surely less than a year old, was strapped into the seat of the shopping cart. The young woman was obese. The tank top she was wearing strained across her back, outlining every bump and stitch of her bra. Her hair was lank and unkempt. A large tattoo of a snake or a dragon ran down her left arm and there was a black and red tattoo of a skull on the back of her neck. The woman was trying to pay for her groceries with food stamps. Without actually eavesdropping, Frannie could tell that something was delaying the transaction.

  Thank God, Frannie thought, the Giroux family had never had to rely on food stamps. Some families simply had it a lot worse than her own family did. “There but for the grace of God go I.” Or, in other terms, the Giroux family had gotten lucky, pure and simple. She wondered what chance that little baby in the cart ahead of her had of breaking away from his parents’ troubled world and making a better life for himself. If his parents didn’t have access to opportunities for education, how would he get access to them? Who would save him from repeating a pattern of poverty and all the problems that stemmed from it?

  Frannie knew she should be grateful for what she and her children had and not dwell so much on the negatives, like not being able to justify the purchase of a silly magazine or a fancier brand of peanut butter, or even three types of mustard at once. No wonder, she thought, my daughter is a Miss Grumpy Pants. She got it from me! I should be more like Marlene from the office. She was a person to emulate, always looking for the positive in any situation, even the difficult ones like having a son with autism and a mother who was rapidly losing her eyesight.

  Finally, the young woman ahead of Frannie was able to complete her purchase and wheel the cart out to the parking lot. Frannie began to unload the contents of her cart onto the conveyor belt. It would take a miracle to transform a bitching and moaning Frances Giroux into a happy and grateful Marlene Gervais, she thought. But miracles had been known to happen.

  “Would you like to donate a dollar to children’s cancer research?” the smiling woman behind the checkout counter asked, pointing to a sign posted against the cash register. The sign advertised a statewide charitable organization.

  “Yes,” Frannie said, reaching into her bag for her wallet. “I would be happy to.”

  42

  Sunday

  I have nothing to say.

  Still Sunday

  Why did I even bother to open this diary? I even bore myself. It’s all a sick joke.

  43

  What Stella had said the other day in Perkins Cove about her experiences with Mackenzie, Courtney, and Jill had given Rosie a lot to think about. So a couple of days after the trip to Old Orchard Beach, which had been lots of fun though she knew her mother hadn’t really enjoyed it (she hadn’t said anything but her discomfort was written all over her face), she decided to go online and read up on the whole topic of bullying. She knew some stuff, of course, from the anti-bullying and bullying prevention programs at school, but clearly, Rosie thought, there was an awful lot she didn’t know or hadn’t paid enough attention to.

  The family’s computer was located in her father’s small home office in the basement, near her mother’s sewing room. Rosie sat down at the desk and went online. There was so much information, a lot of it repetitive and some of it contradictory, but her father had taught her good research skills. She knew how to locate the better sources and how to spot the sites that were ill conceived and badly written. Her dad had taught her that websites like that were likely to contain faulty or downright wrong information and were a huge waste of time.

  After over an hour’s worth of reading, Rosie was beginning to realize that what Dr. Lowe (and even her mother) had suggested about Mackenzie Egan was probably right. Mackenzie was not inherently evil but weak and maybe even afraid. Quite possibly she was the child o
f a home in which she had learned early on that nobody, certainly not a parent, was to be relied upon for anything. In a deeply uncertain world, this child had learned that it was better to attack before you were attacked. It was better to seize control before control was seized from you. It was better to watch people suffer than to suffer yourself. It made a kind of sense, really.

  From what Rosie knew of Mackenzie Egan’s home life, which admittedly wasn’t firsthand information, she thought it likely that Mackenzie’s bullying tactics were in reality a damaged or twisted sort of self-defense mechanism. She wondered if this scenario held true for Courtney and Jill, too. It didn’t for Stella, who, by her own admission, had just been looking for a place to feel welcome when things at home had gotten bad.

  Rosie exited the last site she had been reading and put the computer to sleep. She wasn’t sure if what she was feeling now toward those girls was actual compassion, but whatever it was, it felt right. Not that she was going to be stupid and actually approach them and say, “Hey, let’s be friends!” There was a line between compassion—if that was the right word—and self-protection. You could learn how to turn the other cheek, but you didn’t have to present your face to be slapped.

  The door to the basement opened and her mother came down the stairs, carrying a basket of dirty clothes and towels.

  “What are you up to?” Jane asked after putting the basket on top of the washing machine.

  “I’ve been reading up on bullies and bullying,” Rosie said. “But I’m done for the day.”

  “Was any of the information helpful?”

  “Yeah. It’s just that there’s so much information. There’s a lot to sort through.”

  Jane came over and perched on the edge of the desk. “It’s certainly an important topic.”

  “Yeah,” Rosie agreed. “You know, Mom, I can’t help but wonder what Mackenzie will think of my being friends with Meg again. I wonder if she’ll think I’m stupid.”