Roll with It

by Jamie Sumner

  I watch him now as he closes his eyes and chews slowly.

  “Baby girl, this might be the best thing you have ever made. We’re gonna have to hide this from the women, or there’ll be none left by suppertime.”

  He winks and wanders out again. It’s stuff like this that makes me glad we’re here, even if Mom has to drive me to school and carry me into the bath and the squirrels will not shut up at six o’clock in the morning.

  “You are coming to this game whether you want to or not.”

  “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do less than watch a bunch of dudes run up and down the court while I sit in my chair at the end of the stands like a grandma.”

  I am lying on Coralee’s frilly white daybed and trying to stretch my toes. It’s something Hutch has got me doing to help with the aches that keep me up at night. He might be the best PT I’ve ever had, but I’m not telling Mom or she’ll stop feeling sorry for me. Then I’d have to wave good-bye to the extra ten minutes’ sleep in the morning and half hour of screen time at night.

  “Nope.” Coralee throws a stuffed unicorn at me. “You do not get to pull the cripple card. I am singing the national anthem in front of God and the entire middle school, and I want my best friend there to witness.”

  That catches me off guard. I’ve never had a best friend. Ever. The closest I came was in kindergarten when a girl named Pammy decided we would be friends and pushed my chair around on the playground at recess. This is way better. I want to hit pause on life for just a minute and savor it, like the most perfect first bite of pie. But Coralee’s aiming a pillow at me, so I say, “Okay, I’ll come! But I’m bringing Bert. With all his brothers and sisters gone, I think he’s lonely.”

  “Robots don’t get lonely.”

  “Don’t be like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a townie.”

  “Aw, I was just kidding. You know I love that weirdo.”

  The next night I’m sandwiched between Mom and Bert in a crowd of people trying to file past concessions. I keep an eye out for elbows. I actually got a black eye once when we were waiting in line to see Santa at the mall.

  It’s already one thousand degrees in the gym, and even though middle school sports are like Mommy and Me playtime compared to high school, there’s still a pretty good turnout. I spot Sierra and her clones in the front row taking selfies. Coralee’s nowhere to be found.

  “She’ll be warming up, no doubt,” Bert says, sounding suddenly British, which is what happens when he gets nervous. He’s got on a Lakeview Lions sweatshirt, but there’s a collared oxford underneath. And instead of sneakers, he’s wearing loafers with actual pennies in the tops. I guess I should give him points for trying, at least.

  “You two want anything from concessions? Soda? A Snickers?” I know Mom’s asking only because she’s looking for an excuse to get something herself. We hardly ever keep candy in the house.

  “PayDay, if they have it,” Bert says.

  “Reese’s for me, please. Bert, you would like an old people’s candy bar,” I tell him. “Come on, let’s get to the front. Coralee made me promise to take pictures.”

  I let him steer me because it’s just that crowded, and we get right up next to the rail of the stands. I spot Hutch squatting in front of the team in their folding chairs on the sidelines. He sees me and waves just as Mom gets back. I didn’t know he was the basketball coach, too.

  “So that’s your gym teacher whom I spoke to on the phone,” Mom says, and hands me a Sprite and my Reese’s. It’s already soft from the heat.

  “Yeah, Hutch, Mr. Hutchinson.”

  I watch her size him up like Mema does a melon that might possibly be rotten. And then the lights flash and both teams stand and Coralee walks out like a queen to the middle of the court. Her hair is bigger than I’ve ever seen it, like LEGO hair, and she’s wearing a red, white, and blue skirted leotard. Under the court lights, she sparkles like a firework.

  She takes the microphone from the ref like a pro and leans toward the home fans as if she’s about to tell them a secret.

  “Evening.” Pause. “Y’all ready to salute our fine country?” Pause. “And then beat those Badgers into submission!”

  Everybody goes crazy—yelling and clapping and whistling, or booing from the visitors’ stands. The ref shakes his head. But Coralee just winks at everybody and turns to face the flag.

  She takes two deep breaths like she’s about to dive, and then starts.

  “Oooo-uhhhh say can yoooouu seeeeeeee . . .”

  It is low and strong and beautiful and I am only just realizing I have never heard her sing for real. Normally, she’s just humming in the van or singing half lines in her room.

  When she hits “O’er the ramparts we waaaaaaaatched,” it’s like she is another girl altogether, and I have no trouble believing she’ll be famous. It’s so powerful it shakes my heartbeat all up. Even Mom has her mouth open in a big, silent O.

  I forget to take my phone out for pictures until the end, when Bert grabs it and starts framing shots. When it’s over and the applause dies down, she turns back to the crowd, takes a bow, and then says real low, “Coralee out,” and drops the mic. I whistle with two fingers like Mom taught me. Hutch laughs and bends over to pick up the mic and hand it to the ref. Back on the stands, Sierra is pursing her lips like she’s sucking on a Gobstopper. I hope singing isn’t her talent for the beauty pageant. Actually, I kind of hope it is.

  “That was amazing, Coralee honey!” Mom says when Coralee runs over to us with a towel slung across her shoulders. She’s breathing like she just ran the mile in gym.

  “Thanks, Ms. Cowan,” she says, and then turns to me. “Did you get pictures?” Bert hands over my phone. That’s the last I see of it for the rest of the night. She plants a big smacking kiss on his cheek that turns him bright red, and I laugh into my sleeve.

  None of us watch the game, and the Lions lose by ten, but the night was a success. I don’t even mind that not a single person spoke to me outside of Mom, Coralee, and Bert. Three is enough. Three is more than I’ve ever had before.

  9

  Cupid’s Arrow

  Mom is sitting on the floor in the living room with papers spread around her like a fan. It’s another Friday night, and Mema and Grandpa have gone to church for a potluck. I’m at the dining room table staring at one single blank sheet of paper. I have to give a speech on Monday, and according to Mrs. Roman, it has to be a demonstration speech where I teach the class something. Other than wheelies in the chair and how to whistle with two fingers, I’m out of ideas.

  “You want tea?” I yell over my shoulder.

  “Yes, please.” And then after a minute, “But, honey, you don’t have to scream. This house isn’t big enough for that.”

  I bring us two mugs of chamomile and the Thin Mints from Mema’s Girl Scout cookie stash in the freezer.

  “So, what are you doing?” I say, leaning over the papers. At first I think they’re essays she’s grading, because she’s been subbing a lot for the teacher who just had a baby. But I didn’t think they let subs grade papers.

  “Careful there!”

  She wipes crumbs off the top sheet and then starts to turn it over, but I catch a few words at the top and grab it. “Autumn Leaves Assisted Living.” My throat closes up.

  “What is this?”

  She sets down her tea and sweeps her hand over the whole pile, gathering it up like a stack of cards.

  “This, Ellie, is just in case. I’ve been talking with Dr. Hirschman and trying to come up with a plan for what to do when we can’t take care of Grandpa anymore.”

  “No.” I roll back and hot tea from my mug sloshes over on my legs. “That’s why we’re here, Mom. To take care of him so he doesn’t have to go anywhere else. You heard Mema. We are family. This is what we do.”

  Mom’s the fixer. But putting Grandpa in a home isn’t a fix—it’s giving up. She’s breaking all the rules. I’ve never wanted
to get up and run out of the room more in my life.

  “Ellie, listen. I know we’re family. But I also know what happens when you leave it too long. It’s not good for anyone.” She rubs at her forehead. “You think I want to put my father anywhere?”

  She’s acting like she’s trying to talk it through with me, but she’s not really. She’s talking at me. She thinks because I’m twelve, I won’t understand.

  “So that’s it, then? He does a few things that inconvenience people and we ship him off?” I tip my chair back, like a horse rearing up, and then let it thump down hard. It’s the closest thing I can do to a stomp and it’s not nearly good enough.

  She doesn’t answer.

  I feel the tears start, and the words come before I can stop them. “Is that what you’ll do to me, then, if I get to be too much for you to handle? Do you have a file of ‘homes’ for me, too?” There. I’ve said it. The thing I’ve never even let myself wonder until now, because Mom would never do that. Except I never thought she’d put Grandpa in a home, and here we are.

  I’m crying and I hate it and I see her looking at me like she wants to cry or hug me, and I can’t handle that, either.

  “No, Ellie! Oh, never!”

  I don’t want to hear it. I know she’d never really do it, but I feel dizzy, like the air’s been sucked out of the room, and I want to lay my head against something cool, a windowpane, a glass of ice water, until everything stops spinning. I roll away and down the hall so I can be alone in the dark.

  Everybody says what they want you to hear until they change their minds. I thought we had an unspoken code, Mom and me. When Dad left, when the seizures were so bad, when I hardly had a friend at school, when we came here—no matter what happened, we had each other. Because family is family. But I guess not. I guess family is only family as long as it’s convenient. I mean, I know what’s going on with Grandpa is not like what’s going on with me. I’m not getting sicker. I’m not a danger to myself or other people. It’s different. But it feels the same.

  There was a girl, Rita, at my elementary school, who I never told Mom about. She was in my grade but was already two or three years older. She had CP and some other stuff too—she drooled and wore a bib and couldn’t talk much. But she seemed to understand what was going on. She would follow us with her eyes on the playground from her motorized wheelchair in the shade.

  They bussed her in every day from the children’s home. That’s what it was . . . a children’s home for disabled kids whose parents couldn’t take care of them. I don’t know if they just gave up or maybe they were old or poor or had too many other kids to look after. Whatever it was, Rita ended up in the home. They always dressed her bad—mom jeans and old Disney sweatshirts, so she looked like a giant toddler. And even though I know they probably did their best to keep her clean, she always smelled funny—like hospital sheets and diapers.

  She was at school for only a couple of months. And then one day she was just gone, off the roster, and nobody told us what happened.

  One look at Autumn Leaves and all I can think of is Rita.

  Saturday is glitteringly bright with the sun shining off the ice on the grass. Mom didn’t say a word to me last night when she finally came to bed.

  I woke up in the middle of the night needing to go to the bathroom but stayed awake and held it until my stomach cramped. I wasn’t about to ask her for help. I tried praying to keep my mind off it. I prayed for Grandpa to be healed and for Mom to settle down and for Coralee to win the beauty pageant and for me to get strong enough to walk better so I won’t need help from anybody ever. I hoped God or Jesus or whoever was listening.

  Now I’m mixing up a batch of snowball cookies after lunch because I don’t want to talk to anybody or work on my speech. I’m just licking the spoon, wondering if I could make a piecrust out of this almondy sweetness for the contest in May, when someone knocks on the front door.

  “Well, who do we have here?” Grandpa says, and steps back from the door.

  I lean back from the kitchen to look down the hallway. You can see just about every room in this place if you lean back a little. For a minute I don’t recognize him. His dark hair’s slicked back and he’s in a suit so white it hurts my eyes. He’s holding a giant bouquet of red roses that match his bow tie.

  I roll down the hall slowly, like I’m on my way to the principal’s office. When I get up close, I see a sticker for Food & Co. on the green plastic wrap around the flowers. And then he kind of throws them at me and I have to catch them in my lap, which sends a dust of powdered sugar from my hands in his general direction.

  “Bert,” I say, like I’m talking to a tiger that’s gotten loose from the zoo, “what are you doing?” And then I calculate back in my mind to that first visit to school and those posters I have seen on the bulletin boards ever since, and it clicks. It’s the second weekend in February.

  “No. Uh-uh.” I brush the flowers off my lap and onto the floor, and then I back out of the doorway. “I am not going to the Valentine’s dance.”

  Bert opens his mouth. I hold up my hand like a crossing guard.

  “No,” I say. “Do you know how many bad movies there are where the poor little crippled girl goes to the dance? No way. I am not sitting in a corner while everybody drinks Hawaiian Punch and takes selfies and tries to dance like Beyoncé.”

  I can see it in my head—me, sitting at the edge of some sad strobe light while everyone around me pretends not to see. I look at Bert in his too-white suit and too-big shoes. Wallflowers unite. No thank you.

  Mom and Mema join Grandpa at the door behind me. Bert bends down and picks up the flowers, totally calm.

  “Well, hon,” Mema says, “why don’t you let the boy get a word in edgewise?”

  I point a finger at her. “You’re in on this, aren’t you?”

  Mema winks and Grandpa looks at his shoes. Mom is currently the only one who looks as confused as me.

  “Who said anything about the dance?” Bert says, and I’m spinning around between people, trying to figure out if this is one big joke.

  “We’re not going to the dance?”

  “Nope,” Coralee says, stepping up beside Bert and scaring the daylights out of me. She came from behind the holly tree again wearing her red dress from Christmas Eve. But now she’s covered in glitter and has a headband with heart-shaped antennae on her head. She looks like a very shimmery ladybug.

  “Do you think for one second I would go to a middle school dance? Laaaaame,” she says.

  “So where are we going, then?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  “Then I still say no.”

  Bert holds up his hand like a Boy Scout. “I promise, where we are going, you will not have to dance.” And then he places the flowers gently on my lap.

  “Promise on your most favorite purse.”

  “It’s a satchel.”

  “Promise on your most favorite satchel.”

  “I promise.”

  “All right, all right.”

  “Rock on!” Coralee yells. “You have exactly half an hour until this ship sails!”

  Mema turns to Mom and smiles. “You don’t mind, do you, Alice? I told Bert’s dad you’d drive.”

  Mom and Coralee follow me into the bedroom. I stare into the closet like it will magic the perfect outfit out of thin air. But how do you pick what to wear when you don’t know where you’re going?

  “Warm or cold?”

  “Definitely jacket weather,” Coralee says, and sits down at Mema’s old sewing machine in the corner. I stare some more. Corduroys. Sweaters. Jeans. T-shirts. Two winter dresses and three summer ones. Behind me I hear the pump, pump, whir of the sewing machine. Coralee’s got her foot to the pedal, and the empty needle bobs up and down.

  “Do I have to wear a dress?”

  “Do I look like your mother?”

  “No. No, you do not.”

  Mom pipes in. “Honey, I’m not sure about this. It is twenty-five degre
es out.” She puts a hand to the window. “Why don’t your friends stay here? You all can watch a movie.” We haven’t said more than two words since I found her with those papers for Grandpa last night.

  “I’m going. Where are my red leggings?”

  “Oh, I’ve got just the perfect thing to go with those!” Coralee jumps up and runs down the hallway.

  I hear the door open and slam shut. I can’t hear anything else. I wonder what Bert’s doing in there with Mema and Grandpa. Probably reciting the state capitals or mapping the stars or something.

  Mom turns from the window, and her hand leaves a foggy outline like a ghost. “You need more than leggings. Where’s your long underwear?”

  “I am not wearing long underwear!”

  “Ellie, I do not want you to catch a cold.”

  I yank on my leggings but can’t get them all the way up. It’s easier on the bed, but I don’t want to take the time to get myself out of my chair.

  “I am not a baby,” I say, which would have been much more impressive if she hadn’t been pulling my leggings up over my bottom.

  “I know that.”

  “I don’t think you do.”

  I hear the door open and shut and Coralee’s feet pounding down the hallway.

  “Got ’em!” She’s holding her white sweatshirt with the glitter heart and a red feather boa.

  The best thing about Mom driving is that I can pretend she’s not here. Bert’s up front giving directions because he won’t tell even her where we’re going, which proves he is much cooler than people give him credit for. It’s midafternoon now but still sunshiny, and I close my eyes for just a minute because it’s warm in here. Next to me, Coralee is humming something about the Chattahoochee River, and already this is better than any old dance.

  Half an hour later we pull into a parking lot. It’s totally empty. There’s a white fence running around the block with a tiny building about the size of Mema’s canning shed in front, and that’s it. I can’t see what’s behind the fence.