by Deb Caletti
“Ouch,” Nick says. I can feel Jane flinch beside me.
The cousin peers in the window of the True Value door, then bangs on the glass.
“It’s not open yet, asshole,” Nick growls. Another happy graduate of Indigo’s School of Assertiveness Training.
The cousin bangs the door a few more times, then kicks at the sidewalk with the toe of his boot. He gets back into the car, slams the door shut again, and then revs the engine. He sits there for a minute, trying to decide what to do. He apparently has forgotten this prior sequence of events, because he turns the key again, when the engine is already on. The car screams in mechanical outrage. Trina gasps, releases a whimper-cry.
“It makes me sick,” Funny says. “God, I need a Xanax.”
We watch him drive off. Jack feels the heaviness in the room and wants out. He noses Jane’s palm to plead for a walk. We’re all quiet. I bring Trina a second piece of pie. Nick clears his throat. I feel weighted with other people’s misery. There is a part of me that understands Jack. I just want out of here too.
The bookstore guy arrives; and then there’s one of the Nine Mile Falls librarians, who comes in with Joe Davis, the minister/handyman who fixed our plumbing once. I’m starting to swing into full gear again, when I hear the circus come to town—meaning, my phone is ringing. Shit, I forgot to turn it off. I can sense Jane snap to attention as she waits for my response, but I just ignore the phone. The ringing stops, then starts up again. Stops and starts again, in that insistent way that means emergency. I can feel the choice in front me—phone emergency versus Jane’s anger, but what really wins out is curiosity. It’s probably one of those urgent wrong numbers you get that immediately insert you into stranger’s lives—Uh, Beth? I’m running late, because Dan’s wife Sue had this thing with her pancreas…—but I can’t stand not knowing. On the fourth call, I drop my menus onto the counter and dash.
I fish madly for my phone. Severin, the screen says. Severin?
“Man, this better be good, because I probably just lost my job,” I say.
“Indigo,” he says.
“I cannot be-lieve you are calling me at work.”
“I started walking, but, fuck, it’s a long way. Can you come and get me? Indigo, please.”
“Where are you? I’m in the middle of my shift.”
“I wouldn’t ask, you know it. But I started walking from Meer Island, and I’m on the freeway, and it’s a lot farther than it seems when you’re driving.” His voice is ragged. It sounds thin, thin as those really, really old Levi’s of his, the ones that had been washed so much they got a new hole every time he kneeled down.
“What happened?”
“The swimming party? I get to the door, and she asks me why I’m dressed like that. Why I’m not wearing pants and a tie.”
“Who swims in a tie?” I’m not getting this.
“She wasn’t asking me to the party. She was asking me to be a waiter at the party.”
“Oh my God,” I say. “Goddamn it.”
“I know, Indigo, okay? I know. Don’t start. Just come and get me. Please?”
“I’m coming,” I say.
“What do you mean, you’re leaving? You can’t leave.”
I untie my apron. The bookstore guy’s Farm Scramble is up. Joe needs a coffee refill. “It’s my brother. An emergency.”
“What kind of emergency, Indigo? It better be good, okay? He’d better be in the hospital or something.”
It’s one of those times when you can tell the truth won’t do. “He’s…” I think quickly. “He is in the hospital. With a…With a…” Shit. “His pancreas burst.”
“Pancreases don’t burst!” Jane says.
“Burst pancreas.” Joe chuckles. “Heh, heh, heh.”
“I gotta go,” I say.
“We both know you’re lying, Indigo. The least you could do is respect me enough to tell the truth,” Jane says. She looks calm. She sounds calm, even. Severin’s desperate voice, though, has filled me with urgent, hurry-up. I speak fast.
“Severin, okay? He needs me to come get him. His girlfriend invited him to this swimming party that wasn’t a swimming party, and now he’s…”
I realize how lame it sounds. I should have stuck with the burst pancreas. Jane folds her arms. She shakes her head, and I see that her face is getting the red flush again. “Honestly,” she says. “He can’t wait? You’re willing to pick up and ditch me like this because your brother’s girlfriend did a shitty thing?”
“He’s really upset. Really upset.” The words hang. They sound silly and frivolous, tinsel words.
Jane unfolds her arms, twists her watchband around in circles. “Listen, Indigo…Honestly,” she says again.
“Jane, I’ll make up my shift, I promise.”
“You know, this all just doesn’t seem…I’m not sure this is working.”
“Wait a minute,” I say.
“If you leave me in the lurch like this…I’m just thinking. Maybe you should take some time off. Until you get your head straight about this money and all….”
I’m standing behind the counter and she’s in front of it, and something seems backward in this, so I go out front too. “You’re firing me,” I say.
“Oh, no,” Nick says.
“Indigo—”
“You are.” I’ll tell you one little thing about me, and that is that I’m not too keen on being bossed around. If, say, my Mom tells me to empty the dishwasher, I like to wait a little bit, you know, not hop up and do it right away, because then it feels more like my own idea. That’s a little problematic when you have an actual boss. But Jane, she’s more like a friend than a boss, and we understand each other. Friends don’t fire you, though. Bosses do. And the fact that my boss is suddenly all bosslike is making this awful feeling rise up, like when you shake a can of Coke before opening it. This firing? If there’s going to be a firing it’s going to be my own idea.
“Indigo. I can’t keep making concessions for you. Your priorities seem—”
“I quit.”
“Wait. Let’s sort this through, okay? I’m just saying you might need a little time…”
“Quit. Finit. Finished. The end. Sayonara.”
Trina waves her fork in my direction. “Just a second here. You can’t quit.”
“Everyone needs to go to their corners,” Joe says. “Time out.”
Funny just sits there with her pen raised above her notebook, and Nick looks struck. The bookstore guy’s Farm Scramble is getting cold. “I think those are my eggs,” he says.
But there is no way to back out now. I’ve said the words. And there are some words you can’t take back. It’s like trying to get popcorn back into the kernel. It’s over. I’m leaving. We’re through. You can try, but there’s no forgetting that someone wanted out.
I toss my apron right there onto the floor where I stand. I swing my backpack over my shoulder. I let the bells bang on the door behind me. And I try to ignore this feeling in my chest. This heaviness, a searing rip. The sense that my heart is breaking. I ignore it, get into my car, and step on the gas.
A Hostess delivery truck driver lays down on his horn. “Watch it, you lunatic!” he shouts out his rolled-down window.
“Shut it, Twinkie,” I shout back.
13
I bring Severin home. He doesn’t say anything on the drive, and once we’re back, he goes to his room and shuts the door. I sit down in the rocker, which has found a new place by the shoved-aside coffee table. I quit my job. I can’t believe it. I quit my job.
“Do you think God’s a baseball fan?” Bex asks. Since school let out and since we bought the new TV and Xbox, Bex has given up on tsunami victims, given up on her friends Max and An Ling, who she used to play with after school sometimes. Bex just wants to lie on the floor in front of the TV, be swallowed up and devoured by the huge screen and whatever is on—Wheel of Fortune, Animal Planet, the Travel Channel, the Daytona 500 racing game. Now a field of green fills our livi
ng room, as do men in white uniforms, cool and pure as vanilla ice cream.
“I don’t know, Bex, why?”
“They always pray before a game,” she says.
“Do you want to go swimming or something? I’ll take you to Pine Lake.”
“No.” Her chin rests in her open palms. Her legs are crossed at the ankle. She has a Band-Aid on one shin, but I have no idea how she could have gotten scratched, since she hasn’t moved from the TV in days. Freud is curled up in a spot of sun by the front window.
“I don’t really want to either,” I say. “How about CNN?”
“Nah. There are so many more choices now that you got Premium Cable.”
We watch baseball. We watch a men’s diving championship, which is more interesting, due to the embarrassing bathing suits. Bex does a lot of snickering and pointing. We share a bag of Cheetos and then we watch some woman trying out Paris restaurants. Bex puts in a video game and her cartoon car makes cartoon loops around a cartoon track.
Mom comes home just after six. “God, what a shitty day,” she says. “Bex, I told you no TV today.” She heads straight for the kitchen, and I get up and follow. I’m actually stiff and creaky from sitting in that chair so long.
Mom drops her purse onto the kitchen chair, and her mail onto the table. “Indigo, please. Don’t let her sit and be a zombie like that.”
“You don’t mind if I’m a zombie,” I say.
“Zombie,” Chico says. “Zombie. Zombie. Zombie.”
“Would you feed Chico, please? I don’t worry about you being a zombie because you never were exposed to endless entertainment on a life-size television when you were her age. You didn’t go from compassionate Samaritan to hypnotized TV child. The other day, she was watching bass fishing.” Mom rubs her temples with the tips of her fingers. “Of course, you were never as prone to extremes as Bex either. I’m worried she’ll join a cult someday, or get involved with some guy she’ll never leave even if he’s jobless and wears a Budweiser cap….”
“Maybe we should sign her up for some summer camp thing. Horseback riding or crafts, or—”
“They’re just so expen—No! Jeez. I didn’t mean to say that. Forget I said that. We’re not having this conversation. Ack!” She pounds her head twice with her fist.
“Mom, this is stupid! What good is this money if I can’t share it with you? You, who needs it? This is ridiculous.”
“So, it’s ridiculous. I don’t like the idea of crazy spending. It worries me. If there was a thoughtful plan, it’d be another matter. Some sense of applying the brakes. But it feels like all, buy this, buy that, buy whatever.” She does what we do when we don’t know what to do. She opens the refrigerator and stares inside. She lets the door slap shut again. “Indigo—you know, I just haven’t processed how to handle all this money stuff yet.”
“I know,” I say. I lift the door to Chico’s cage. Chico eats these bird pellets, but he also needs regular, healthy human food too. I give him some broccoli from the fridge, a bit of wheat bread, a little pinch of leftover chicken. “Chico good boy,” he says. Sure.
“And I can’t process it right at this moment. This has been one shitty day.” She drops into a kitchen chair. She shoves aside the stack of mail. She rubs her temples with her fingertips. “There’s a full moon, or something, because Dr. Kaninski’s schedule was just packed. So we’re seeing twice the amount of people, and no one’s got their insurance cards, and then there’s an emergency call from this father who says his son’s locked himself in his room and he’s got a gun, and Dr. Kaninski’s at lunch and then it turns out the son doesn’t have a gun, after I interrupt the doctor’s pad thai, and then this woman calls for the second time in a month to get more meds when she has a three-month supply, and then the day is finally over and I go to my car and I’ve got a flat.”
“Oh, man,” I say. “You should have called me.”
“For you to do what? Change my tire? Offer me moral support while I panic?”
“I can change a tire!” I say. “Okay, maybe I can’t change a tire.”
“Dr. Kaninski changed it for me.” She chuckles. “A psychiatrist changing a tire. His golf ball tie was flipped over one shoulder. I feel stupid not knowing how to change it myself. I doubt I could have jacked the thing up, though…”
“I think that means you have penis envy,” I say.
“Male arm muscle envy, and no other body parts, thank you.” Mom takes off her shoes. There’s the clunk of her heels under the table. “Hot, tired, and sick of humanity. This calls for fast food,” she says.
“Agreed,” I say. “It’s been a shitty day for everyone.”
“What happened?”
“Trust me.”
“Do me a favor? Take a poll and figure out what everyone wants to eat. I’ll meet you at the car.”
“I’ll drive” I say.
“Forget it,” she says. “I value my life.”
Taco Time, we decide. I’m counting on insta-fat and salt served in cardboard food boxes to lift my mood, which has gone gray and senseless as ash. I’m not the sort to get depressed. Usually, the times I can count on it hitting are when we’ve had two weeks of straight, gloomy rain, and when I hear those ads for some depression medicine or clinical study on the radio. Are you feeling helpless or hopeless? Does your life seem meaningless and empty? Are you full of the awareness that we just put up with a bunch of endless crap, punctuated by brief moments of brightness, and then we die? Depression ads are so depressing. If you don’t have it before one of those things, you have it after. Those usually are the only real times a fuzz of gloom descends on me. But now I feel this tug and pull at my inner joy, a gradual darkening, the way they used to get the room ready for a movie in elementary school. The screen is yanked down. The heavy curtains dragged shut, first one, then the other. Finally, Justin, get the lights. I’ve just graduated from the inane prison that’s high school and I’m the relatively new owner of two and a half million dollars and I’m feeling depressed? Melanie (and most of my peers and a few teachers and Severin and sometimes Mom) may have been right after all—I am crazy.
We get into Mom’s car, which now has three regular wheels and one tiny, undersize spare that looks both forlorn and wrongly hopeful. Then Mom forgets her keys and has to go back in again. It’s practically a law in our house that you can’t leave the house without forgetting something. You say good-bye to a member of my family, and it’s just a rehearsal, because a second later they’ll come dashing back in. Finally, we’re buckled up, and the minute Mom starts up the car, my phone rings.
“In, listen. I’ve just had a brilliant idea.”
Uh-oh. The last brilliant idea Trevor had was when he thought he’d surprise his mom and give her the afternoon off from day-care work. He carted off six little kids and put them into her minivan while they were playing outside. When Mrs. Williams came out to the backyard and found it empty, she screamed with the full-power open-throttle fear and outrage of a bear whose cubs have been snatched. It was so loud, the guy on parole across the street took off running even though he didn’t do anything wrong, and old Mrs. Jaynes, the neighbor lady next door, who’d been on a ladder picking apples from her tree, flew from it in airborne surprise, breaking a hip and flinging apples in all directions. An apple was even later found in one of Trevor’s mom’s flowerpots, and another, weirdly, in a baseball mitt one of the toddlers had brought over. Poor Mrs. Jaynes has used a walker ever since; she shouldn’t have been on a ladder at her age, but still. The police stopped Trevor and the minivan as they were pulling out of Burger King; they were all wearing golden crowns and singing a sloppy rendition of “Wheels on the Bus.”
“I’ve had a lousy day, Trevor,” I warn. Mom backs out of the driveway, looking both ways. Ever since I got my own car, everyone else’s driving has been driving me crazy. I never realized how slow she goes. We’re moving at maybe five miles an hour. I wouldn’t even have known we’d left, except the trees and houses are stepping back
ward oh so slightly out my window. At this rate, we’ll be at the mailboxes by Tuesday.
What happened? Mom doesn’t say, but mouths instead.
I’m expecting Trevor to ask the same thing. He’s always been a good boyfriend that way, and is alert to comfort and misery clues. Offering his sweatshirt, remembering that girls actually need to use the bathroom, stuff like that. But this time, I’m not sure he even hears me.
“I was just driving home from work, and it hit me,” Trevor says.
“A Hostess truck?” I say. I still hear that jerk’s horn.
“What? No, this idea. I’ve been thinking about how to expand my product line, you know. I mean, I’ve got a good line of Catholic products, I think. But what about other religions? Am I limiting my sales base? So, I’m just running through the list in my head, okay? Methodists. Well, the fact of the matter is, Methodists aren’t funny. Protestants, Methodists, Lutherans—none of them are funny. They’re pot roast, green beans, potatoes. What’s funny there? Then I realize. Mormons. You’ve got the whole bigamy thing. Bigamy’s hilarious.”
“That’s kind of going low, Trevor. Kind of cliché. They don’t even really practice bigamy.” Irritation rushes in. I know where this is heading. Another way to spend my money. I hate the way he sees me lately. Like I’m a human ATM machine.
Mom scrunches her eyebrows. Bigamy? she mouths.
“What’s the matter with you, In? Jesus, you’re sounding uptight.”
“I told you, I had a bad day.”
“Well, then I guess you’re not going to like my ‘I Heart My Wives’ T-shirts.”
He’s still being a Teflon listener. Everything I’m saying is sliding right off of him.
“Why don’t we talk about this another time,” I say. “Right now? I’m tired of the whole topic.”
There’s silence on the other end, the kind of silence that’s very noisy. Unsaids say so much more than saids. I feel the sharp corners and dangerous ledges in the quiet.
