The Lemonade Year

by Amy Willoughby-Burle

  Michael runs back out to Nicole, holding up a pair of Matchbox cars and shouting for her to “Lookit, lookit, these are so cool” before she has a chance to respond to me.

  Michael plays over by the window, and Nicole and Ray resume their conversation. I feel like the third wheel that I am, but in this case the cart would fall over without me, so I stay.

  “I’m glad to hear about the job, Ray,” Nicole says. “Sounds like something you could be good at.”

  “They’ve got me working on this computer manual rewrite thing,” Ray says. “It’s not all that exciting, but I’m learning everything there is to know about what they do and what they’re changing. So I’ll be the first to know all the new procedures.”

  Ray talks like he’s casting a spell, searching for the right incantation to win over Nicole. She starts asking him questions about his job, giving Ray a chance to say the right words for a change.

  “The other day, one of the main systems went out, and the whole place shut down,” Ray says, getting animated and excited. “They had one of their senior guys on it, but he couldn’t get it back up. I managed to find what was screwing it up and got everybody back online.”

  Michael comes back over to us and drives the cars over our feet. He looks up at me and wrinkles his brow. Then he looks at Ray.

  “Are you two married?” Michael asks Ray.

  “No,” Ray says. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because this place is a mess,” Michael says. “You need someone to clean it up.”

  “Michael,” Nicole says to him sharply.

  “It’s ok, buddy,” Ray says and touches the top of Michael’s head, then snaps his hand back like he’s done something he shouldn’t have. “It is a mess in here. This lady is my sister.”

  Your aunt.

  “Maybe you could marry Mommy,” Michael says.

  “Michael,” Nicole says again and shakes her head at Ray.

  “You always say you need help around the house,” Michael says with his little hands on his hips, imitating her. “Maybe you guys can get married and clean each other’s houses.”

  “I’m talking about help from you, little man,” Nicole says.

  Ray’s absence in their life is a neon sign, blinking on and off and sputtering out.

  “I don’t know if your Mommy would have me,” Ray says, glancing quickly at Nicole.

  Nicole watches them talk with a wistful look on her face as if there might have been a time when she wanted that too. Her phone rings, and she searches her purse for it.

  “I’ll just be second,” she says. She goes down the hall into the bedroom, and Ray takes the opportunity of being alone with Michael to ask a question.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “Ray,” I hiss. “What are you doing?”

  Ray shoots me the stink eye and then looks back at Michael.

  “Somebody Mommy knew a long time ago, before I was born,” Michael says.

  I wince. It might be a well-deserved sucker punch, but ouch.

  “Yes,” Ray says quietly. “That’s right.”

  Nicole comes back and apologizes, but doesn’t explain. We sit in the living room and stare at the walls. This is awful. Ray looks miserable. He looked less nervous at his sentencing. When Michael moves away from us, Ray speaks again.

  “Thanks for coming by,” he says. “I know the place is a wreck, but I’m trying.”

  “I can see that, Ray,” she says, but her face says that she doesn’t think he’s trying hard enough.

  “You haven’t told him?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’d like there to be a time when you do.”

  “I’d like that, too, but I’m not holding my breath.”

  “Who does he think his father is?”

  I find myself looking back and forth between them like I’m at a nerve-racking tennis match.

  Ray has the deck stacked against him. I wonder what Nicole has told Michael about his father—what evils Ray will have to come back from. Jail. Worthlessness. The dead. Something even more impossible than that.

  “I told him his father was sick and had to go away for help,” she says. The explanation stings, but it’s got its truth. “That way I can bring you home well. Or I can kill you off. Whatever need be. And that’s up to you, Ray.”

  I imagine being killed off in one’s own life—like a soap opera character who suddenly falls down a flight of stairs and breaks his neck because the actor who played him got arrested in real life.

  “I’m well, Nicole,” Ray pleads and then curses under his breath. “Please tell him his father is well.”

  I’m shocked by the ferociousness of his feelings. It’s endearing and sad at the same time.

  “I can’t rush it,” she says. Her voice isn’t mean, just firm.

  “I’ve missed five years,” Ray says, watching Michael jump cars off the windowsill.

  “And whose fault is that?” she says at last.

  “Ok, so spitballing,” Ray says, sitting on the coffee table in front of her. “We keep meeting here and there, and you finally tell him who I am. How do you explain that I’ve been here all this time? That I’m back from whatever imaginary place you sent me to, yet I didn’t run right up to him and tell him who I am?”

  “I don’t know that part yet.”

  Ray curses again and stands up quickly, knocking back against the table.

  “This isn’t helping your case,” she says in a hushed voice.

  “What?”

  “That you’re cursing at me every other sentence.”

  “I’m cursing around you, not at you.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “Because why?” he asks. “Because you said so?”

  “Because you said you were clean,” Nicole says and the words pour out of her. “Because you said you loved me. You said ‘I’m going out for a pizza’ and you never came back and I’m sitting there waiting for that stupid pizza because I’m starving and pregnant and afraid to tell you because I thought you might ditch me and then you ditched me anyway without any reason at all.”

  There’s not much Ray can say to this. It’s true. I think about slipping out—sneaking on tiptoe toward the door. Maybe I could excuse myself to the bathroom. Maybe I could jump out the window.

  “I got busted that night,” Ray says. “I didn’t stop for pizza. I went out to meet up with a guy and got wasted and forgot where I parked so I wired a car but was too jacked up to drive it and I crashed it and landed myself in jail on drug charges, grand theft, DUI, and every other stupid thing I’d ever done.”

  She takes a deep breath and exhales loudly.

  “Did you know the baby was yours?” Nicole asks. “When I came to tell you I was pregnant.”

  “Yes,” Ray says. “You said you didn’t want it to be mine.”

  “I didn’t.”

  Michael looks over at us, and Nicole smiles at him—able to flux between anger and love seamlessly.

  “Do you now?” Ray asks.

  Nicole looks him full in the face, and both Ray and I brace for the coming tirade. But it doesn’t come. She reaches over and takes hold of Ray’s hand. He looks at her in shock.

  “Ray,” she says, “prove yourself wrong for once. This is your chance. I didn’t have to call you. I could have let you leave town after your father’s funeral and never said a word. Take that for what it’s worth and try this time.”

  I hope so hard that Ray will listen to her.

  “You know I’m going to screw up,” he says. “Why torture me with a carrot on a string that I can’t ever get to?”

  “Let’s just take it one step at a time,” she says. “Hold down that new job you got. Better yet, go all out and do such a good job that you get promoted one day. Clean up your apartment. Meet us at the park Fr
iday, and we’ll go from there.” She stands up and calls over to Michael.

  “Can I keep these?” he asks me, holding up the cars.

  Ray opens his mouth to answer, but Nicole speaks first. “Why don’t you leave them here—that way you’ll have something to play with next time we visit.”

  Next time. Ray catches it, too, and his head snaps up from where he’s hung it low. Nicole gives him a half-smile and nods.

  “I’ll walk you out,” Ray says and leads them through the door.

  It’s funny how you can see things clearly from the outside. When you have no real stake in an issue, it all makes perfect sense what each party should say and do, but from inside the thicket, it’s hard to see a way out that doesn’t result in briars and scrapes and a lot of tears.

  Ray comes back upstairs and raises his eyebrows at me.

  “It went well,” I confirm.

  “I thought so,” he says. “Better than I expected.”

  I wonder what that was.

  “Next time,” I say, “try it without me.”

  “A little weird for you?”

  “A smidge third-wheelish.”

  But really, I’m glad that he asked me to stay. My big brother wants me around. My big, tattooed, ex-con, tortured and somehow still lovable big brother wants me around.

  16

  At work, there has been more whispering around the watercooler, as it were, about mergers and shutdowns, and I try to ignore the gossip and keep taking pictures of citrus drinks and condensation on fancy glasses. I think about that bowl of lemons Lola referred to.

  Oliver and I have not seen each other since the night he told me about Cricket. I know he says he wants to be with me, but something stands between us, and since I can’t see what it is, I don’t know how to deal with it. I think about calling him, but I don’t. I guess he must need time, too, because he hasn’t dialed my number in days either.

  When my phone does finally ring, it’s Lola doing fish face.

  “Can you come help me, Sissy?”

  I don’t even have to ask if she means now. It’s the deep dark of night, and she’s breathing too heavy and trying too hard to hold herself together.

  When I get to Lola’s house, the front door is open. There’s a light on in the kitchen, and I walk through the familiar house not expecting to trip over a piece of broken furniture. So when I do, I curse at it. As my eyes become more accustomed to the dark, I see that Lola’s house is in shambles. Ransacked.

  “Lola,” I scream out. “Where are you?”

  She steps out from the kitchen into a beam of light. “Here,” she says.

  I rush to her, stumbling over things that aren’t where they should be. I fold her into my arms when I reach her.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “A break-in, we’re assuming,” she says.

  While Lola was at the airport picking up Chris someone broke into her house and tore it to shreds. Isn’t that the way it goes? As soon as you think you’re on the right track, you leap over a burning log and run smack into a monkey with a sledgehammer.

  “Where’s Chris?” I ask.

  “He’s on the back porch on the phone with the police,” she says.

  “Are you ok?” I ask the dumb question.

  “The gallery just delivered my remaining unsold paintings yesterday,” Lola says after a minute. “Whoever broke in slashed them up pretty bad. Threw paint all over the ones I was working on.”

  “Lola,” I say. It’s all I can manage in that sort of desperate shock that makes it possible for you to only utter someone’s name and nothing more.

  “Well,” she says, “the gallery kept a couple for display, so it’s not a total loss.”

  I think about all her work, her art, her effort—gone. “I don’t understand why someone would do that. Did they take anything?”

  “Not much that we can tell,” she says. “The usual—television, laptop—but mostly I think they were just having fun busting things up. Or maybe they were mad that I didn’t have more stuff they could pawn. The paintings are the worst loss.”

  “I guess you could repaint them,” I say, searching in vain for something that will make it better.

  “That’s not showing very much faith in myself, is it?” she says. Her bizarre ability for insight makes me jealous. “To think that the best I can do is what I’ve already done. No, something different, I think. Something new.”

  She says it with a wistfulness in her voice that speaks of something to which I’m not privy. As if she’s already rising up from some other loss than this. Like this is a clearing out, a preparation for something better. Lola breaks down and then rises back up every time.

  The braces she wore on her ankles gave her superpowers. I had always seen them as a cage, a bright and shiny binding to the reality of what life could do to knock you down. I think she saw them like that, too, at first. But she learned how to manipulate them, to trick them. She triumphed over them. Even the memory loss was a gift. Without the recollection of what life was, she was free to make it into anything she wanted. Even now, she uses her memory frailty not as an infirmity but as a many-windowed escape.

  Nights like this, I see her the way God must see her—her light and soul. I envy both of them.

  “Is Cassie still at Jack’s?” she asks me, more concerned with everyone else around her than she is with herself. True Lola fashion.

  “Yeah,” I say, thinking for a moment that I should try to spin my response so that it seems like a good thing. But it isn’t, so I don’t. “Everything is awful.”

  “Sugar and water, Nina,” Lola says. “It’s not too late.”

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  A few days later, I meet Lola at the landfill. That’s what we’ve taken to calling what’s left of her house. The punks had busted out most of the overhead lights so Lola didn’t see the whole of the disaster until the light of day. Everything was broken, the walls were covered in graffiti—and not even in an artistic way, Lola had lamented—and nearly every window was broken out.

  “I guess this makes a case for having neighbors a bit closer than I do,” Lola says while we work to clean up and throw away the remains.

  “It’s not like you’re in the middle of nowhere,” I say, pointing up the road. “There’s a house right over there.”

  “Mrs. Grande wouldn’t have heard anything if they were in her own house,” Lola says. “I’m glad they came here and not there. She would have tried to fight them off, the feisty little thing, and would have probably gotten herself hurt, or worse.”

  “You are the most gracious person I know.”

  “How’s Ray?” Lola asks. She reaches down to pick up a piece of something. She turns it over and over in her hand, squeezes her eyebrows together, and then tosses it back on the floor.

  “He’s good,” I say. “You should visit. He’s got the place set up really nice. Beer in the fridge and everything. Just like he’s planning to stay a while.”

  “I will.” She steps away from me and deeper into the broken remains of her house. “If he wants me to.”

  “Why wouldn’t he want you to?”

  “I told him,” she says and picks up something that looks like part of the washing machine.

  “About Chris? I think he knew about that already.”

  “No,” she says. “I told him that I knew what happened.”

  “What do you mean what happened?” I pick up shards of glass from a broken picture frame and put them carefully into the trash.

  “You know what I mean.”

  I stand there with my mouth agape.

  “Close your mouth,” she says. “You’re letting flies in.”

  “Lola,” I say, frozen to the ground. “I didn’t know that you knew.”

  “Sure you did.” She picks up a shard I missed. “But I app
reciate the effort. I do. I told Ray as much, but you know how he is.”

  I do, and now I’m torn between fear and amazement. He knows she knows, and still he stays. This would be the perfect flight opportunity for Ray, but yet, here he remains, nest built and all. Suddenly everything seems fragile.

  “You’re afraid that he’ll leave?” I ask, beginning to understand why she’s staying away. “He’s not going anywhere. He’s here.”

  She looks at me and kicks at the edge of the knifed-up couch. “Nothing is a given. I don’t think I can stand it if he goes away again.”

  “If you won’t even talk to him, what’s the difference if he’s here or not?”

  She looks at me and chuckles. “It’s not about me. You guys always made it all about me.”

  “Babe,” Chris says, coming into the room carrying one of Lola’s paintings. “Look at this.”

  It’s the Space Mountain painting with the word “Sorry” written in yellow spray paint across the center.

  “Well, at least one of them was remorseful,” Lola says. “Maybe I’ll keep this one. The lettering is pretty well done.”

  Chris sets down the canvas and retreats back into the depths of the house.

  “Why now?” I ask, shifting the question.

  “It was time,” she says. “Dad is gone. The jig is up. It’s ok. Really.”

  “Is it?” I am brought up short by the memory of everything that ever was.

  “Yeah. It would have been ok back then too, but just for me. It wasn’t time for everyone else. Mom needed me to forget, so I played along. Ray needed to forgive himself.”

  “Do you think he has? Forgiven himself?”

  “No,” she says. “But he’s served enough time. So have I. I understand the desire to create something new from the wreckage. But it was time. I kept my promise as long as I could. It’s not about me anymore.”

  “Your promise?”

  Lola shakes her head at me, but smiles. “That night on the porch when we were little,” she says. “I’d heard Mom and Dad fighting about me and the way things were before. Bits and pieces had already come back to me, and I was figuring it out pretty fast. I told you I wouldn’t tell. And I didn’t. But I think it’s time we all got on with moving forward, don’t you think?”