by Amanda Foote
“I believe you,” I said.
Cadence turned to Marlene then. “Don’t you have any children, Marlene?”
Marlene shook her head in response. “Never had kids. Never been married.”
I knew very little about Marlene’s love life, except that she never had much of one. My mom told me briefly one time that Marlene had only been in love once, and might never be in love again. She said, Sometimes there’s only one person for somebody. When you find that person, that’s it. They are yours. Marlene had somebody, but he passed away, mija. He sits with the angels now, and watches over your aunt. She doesn’t want anyone else, she said. She only wanted him.
Marlene jolted suddenly in her seat. “Heaven! You’re late for school!”
“Oh,” I said, also suddenly remembering that it was a weekday. I sprung from the seat and ran to get dressed. When I returned, Cadence had retrieved two gift-wrapped presents from her things and placed them on the table.
“Before you go, I got you both something.” She smiled. “I don’t really have much and I’m saving the money from your parents for Bliss, so they’re nothing special. But I wanted to repay you in some way for taking me and my baby in.”
One box was long, the other was quite small, no bigger than a box of chocolates. She pushed that one toward me, the other toward Marlene. I opened mine. It was a leather journal. Marlene opened her box to reveal a bottle of wine. She looked amused. “Cadence, I think you may already have me pegged.”
Cadence laughed weakly. I thanked her and put the journal into my bag, quickly saying goodbye to them both as I rushed out the door.
✽✽✽
“Why didn’t you tell us before?” Liberty Bell asked me, looking a little hurt. We were sitting behind the bleachers in the football stadium, cutting fifth period. At the end of lunch I had finally revealed to them that I moved because my parents died and told them about Cadence, but when the bell rang Liberty Bell decided we weren’t done talking about it, so we didn’t return to class.
“I don’t know. I didn’t want your opinion of me to be outweighed by your pity for me.”
“It wouldn’t have,” Bobby said. Liberty Bell and I sat against the wall and he faced us, the bleachers rising up behind him. There were thirty rows. I glanced up and he was watching me. “We wouldn’t have pitied you at all.”
Liberty Bell scrunched up her face. “Yes, we would have, you weirdo. It’s really sad that it happened to you. I can’t even imagine what losing my parents would feel like. But he is right, we wouldn’t have let our pity change our opinion of you.”
Half a minute passed and nobody said anything. Bobby munched on the remainder of his Doritos and Liberty Bell took a few small sips of her green tea. I saw four bugs crawl around us.
“So… what is she like?” Liberty Bell asked.
“Who?”
“Your new sister.”
“Oh.” I shrugged. “She seems nice, I guess. She seems really sick, but then we knew that she would. She seems like she’s probably a good mom.”
“What?” Bobby asked, confused.
“Oh, I forgot to mention that part. She has a kid.”
Liberty Bell snorted some of her green tea out of her nose and onto Bobby’s face. Unfazed, he used his sleeve to wipe it away and repeated, “She has a kid?!”
“Yep,” I said, stealing one of his Cool Ranch chips.
“How old is she?”
“Twenty one.”
Liberty Bell scoffed. “Why does none of this concern you?”
I shrugged again. “I’m just getting used to unexpected life changes, I guess.”
They shook their heads simultaneously and it was one of the first times since knowing them that they’d ever seemed like twins to me.
“That’s what’s sad,” said Liberty Bell. “You’re used to it, but you shouldn’t be.”
“I blame the rain,” I said.
✽✽✽
Liberty Bell and Bobby invited themselves over for dinner that night. Marlene didn’t seem to mind and Cadence was actually excited to meet my friends. She greeted them as enthusiastically as she could manage, but she seemed even weaker tonight than the night before. Bobby took to Bliss immediately, and Bliss clung to him like a moth to a flame, fascinated.
“She doesn’t meet a lot of men,” Cadence explained. “So when she does, she gets enthralled.” Marlene made rosemary chicken and potatoes and poured some wine for herself and Cadence, who drank it happily. It’s probably one more thing she wasn’t supposed to be having, but who was I to reprimand her?
Marlene was trying out a recipe she saw on the cooking channel, a first for her. In my time with her so far, I had found that Aunt Marlene really loved to watch cooking shows. More than she loved any other kind of show. At least, it seemed that way since she was constantly watching them. She’d say, “I think I’ll make sesame chicken tonight,” or, “Heaven, how does blackberry pie with homemade ice cream sound to you for dessert?” But she rarely cooked. She only liked to think about cooking, to talk about it. She never actually picked up a spatula for anything more than bacon or pancakes. She was not like my mother in that way.
My mother was a master in the kitchen. While her background was not forced upon me growing up, being that my heritage was evenly split between her loud, colorful Latina culture and my father’s quiet, humble Japanese culture, she still found ways to teach me what my abuela had taught her. We often ate filling meals like feijoada de domingo, though her most common meal was the simple but delicious arroz con frijoles. I did not take after her, nor share her love of cooking. Take-out was my personal chef of preference.
It’s one of the ways in which my mother and I differed so starkly, causing sometimes loud arguments in the kitchen when I refused to learn her meals. It’s one of the ways in which I wish I’d taken more time to get to know her.
Cadence had sweet-talked Bobby into feeding Bliss, but it didn’t require much because he was just as enthralled by Bliss as she was by him, and she was wiping potato bits all over Bobby’s face and clothes, but he didn’t even seem to mind. Liberty Bell chuckled at her brother and shared a glance with me, whispering to me under her breath, “Lady killer.”
But Bobby caught the whisper and very maturely spit his tongue out at his sister, which Bliss witnessed and then imitated, causing us all to laugh.
After dinner, Marlene commented how nice it felt outside, so we decide to sit on the porch and catch the last few rays of the sun before it set behind Rosebud’s house. A summer breeze rolled through under the porch awning and cooled down the night air. It was quiet for a while, our voices unnecessary as we listen to the music the cicadas make under the porch, until Cadence said good night and carried Bliss inside. Still silence. But Liberty Bell never was one to exercise self control when curiosity was knocking at her door, so she asked me bluntly, “Is Cadence going to die?”
I didn’t answer at first, the gravity of the answer weighing down my tongue. I glanced at Marlene, glass of wine perched on her lips, but she watched me and waited for me to respond to my friend. I carefully pushed the word out. “Yes.” I didn’t really know what that meant yet. I didn’t even really know what the sudden death of my parents meant yet, so how could I anticipate what it would be like to literally watch someone die?
Bobby looked up then and asked, “What will happen to Bliss?”
I stared at him but I wasn’t really seeing him. I sighed. “I don’t know.”
Before too long, they said their goodbyes and we went back inside.
Marlene returned to the kitchen and poured herself a second glass of wine from the bottle Cadence had bought her. “You seem to have made really decent friends, Heaven,” she commented. I nodded. “I’m glad,” she said. She tipped her glass back and took a long sip.
Marlene and I sat for three minutes in silence as I stared at these cat figurines Cadence had set up on the kitchen island, in a way to add her own decor to the place. They were carved out of marble an
d there were three of them. Their hands were all strategically placed, one covered its eyes, one covered its ears, one covered its mouth. They reminded me of my mom, and all her similar little trinkets tucked away in the boxes in my room. Someday I’ll donate a lot of those things, but I'll keep the cats.
In those three minutes, Marlene took eleven sips of her wine, lazily staring into the distance, the two of us comfortably sitting quietly. No need for conversation. I had been afraid before moving here with Marlene that being a writer she’d want to talk about feelings and stuff, but as it turned out she’s just as terrified of real conversation as I am.
Lucius, aptly named, ambled over and hopped onto the bar, wagging his pickle-stench butt in Marlene’s direction. She reached out and gave him a lazy, wine-drunk scritch.
It occurred to me that I’d never even noticed before when she would visit us in California that my aunt was something of an alcoholic. A glass of wine a night might be healthy, as some would say, but two glasses a night is pushing it if you ask me. Though I guess I can’t really judge. I wondered briefly if she drinks because she writes, or if she writes because she drinks. Were the two synonymous? “Marlene,” I said. “Why do you drink?”
She looked a little surprised, but thankfully not offended. She pondered the question for a moment, staring down at her almost empty glass. “Why does anyone drink?” she responded. “To numb the pain.” She downed the glass and we both went to bed.
✽✽✽
The chapel was filling quickly. Large and loud families were filing in one by one, taking their seats and opening their programs. We sat in a room downstairs in alphabetical order. We were waiting for the signal to get up from our rows and file neatly into the chapel. Liberty Bell was a National Honor Society student, which meant she got to wear a fancy white collar over her gown and sit in the front rows. She was in the row in front of me, two seats to the right, and Bobby, just a regular average student like me, was in my row three seats to my left. He had removed his cap and a teacher came up to tell him to put it back on. He did, but as soon as she turned away, he took it off again. He looked over at me and winked.
I had found out three days before that the mysterious girlfriend of Bobby’s that neither he nor Liberty Bell would fess up about until I bugged them was in fact a grade above us, and would be sitting out in the audience. Her name was Melonie and supposedly she fell for Bobby’s forearms long before she fell for his personality. But as this fact was delivered by Bobby and not Melonie (whom I still had not met), I didn’t give it much merit.
The teachers gave the signal and we all took to the stairs, staying as much in order as possible as we ascended and slowly we made our way into the center of the chapel and sat down in our assigned seats. According to Liberty Bell, the only high school in Shawnee holds their graduation ceremony in the chapel at the local university because there’s not enough room at the school to hold all of the students and their families. Seemed to me by the number of people standing around looking for seats that there wasn’t enough room here, either.
There was a guest speaker and then the valedictorian gave her speech, after which the principal said a few words and then names were being called and suddenly I was getting up and walking on stage and shaking hands and crossing my tassel from one side of my cap to the other and then it was over as soon as it started and I was surprised by how quickly it went by. Then I had to sit for twenty seven more minutes while everyone else’s name was called. Afterward, Marlene and Cadence and Bliss were waiting outside and Marlene took lots of pictures of us together and then she took pictures of Liberty Bell and Bobby and me, then Bliss and me, and then I met Melonie and she had bright red hair and big teeth and suddenly she was taking pictures with us too, then Cadence took over the camera and got some of Marlene and me, and soon enough Marlene was tearing up, then Cadence was tearing up and Liberty Bell was full-on crying, and Bobby was trying not to let on that he was sad too, and eventually Bliss started crying because everyone else was crying and I was the only one standing there looking like the dry bottom of the Grand Canyon. Cadence took two more pictures which made a total of forty nine and finally everyone stopped crying and we heard someone nearby say, “Ice cream, anyone?” which made us all want ice cream, so we climbed into our separate vehicles and drove to a place called Braum’s, which apparently had the best ice cream around and when I tasted it I knew they were right, and I began to wonder why they didn’t have Braum’s in Los Angeles. Then I remembered that I lived in Oklahoma now so it didn’t matter whether or not they had one in L.A. because I could get their ice cream here anytime I wanted, so I ate all of the peanut butter cup ice cream in my cone which had fourteen peanut butter cups in it, then I had the last of Liberty Bell’s and fed twelve tiny bites of ice cream to Bliss and enjoyed the rush of the evening and tried to forget the ache in my chest that kept reminding me how much my parents would have loved this.
✽✽✽
“We. are. graduates!” Liberty Bell was singing to the tune of “We Are Family” by Sister Sledge, a little off-key. “My brother, my friends and me!” She was driving, I was in the passenger seat, and Bobby and Melonie were in the backseat making out. We were headed toward Liberty Bell and Bobby’s house, where their parents were throwing a graduation karaoke party. Marlene and Cadence were invited as well, so they and Bliss were in Marlene’s car, not far behind us. It was just starting to get dark out and we were all still in our graduation gowns.
When Liberty Bell realized she couldn’t remember the rest of the song, she just kept humming the “We are family” bit over and over again until we got there. They lived in a fancy, doublewide trailer in the next town over, McLoud. Liberty Bell told me that technically they’re supposed to go to McLoud High School, but that Liberty Bell’s mom wanted them to go Shawnee High School because that’s where the old governor’s daughters had gone to high school and it was “well taken care of,” so her mom used her friend’s address so they could go to Shawnee High. She also told me that she and her mom “don’t really get along,” but that’s a story for another day.
We pulled onto their gravel road and that’s when Bobby and Melonie came up for air. There were a lot of guests crowded around a bonfire in a field beside the trailer, most of them holding beer cans and all of them cheering as we drove up. We got out as Marlene’s car pulled up behind us and a bunch of people I didn’t know rushed up to us clapping and cheering and yelling, and some beefy guy with a thick mustache shoved a beer into my hands, which I replaced into the ice chest when he wasn’t looking. Bobby and Liberty Bell introduced me to everyone but I forgot most of their names quickly, then we went inside where a little girl was screeching a Justin Bieber song into a microphone while the TV blared a NASCAR race in the background. Marlene walked in behind us with Bliss in her arms, and Cadence followed shortly.
We all ambled into the kitchen where Liberty Bell and Bobby’s mom, Dakota, hugged me and apologized for not meeting me after the ceremony because they had to leave as soon as it was over to come set up the party. She had the same dark straight hair as Liberty Bell (without the colorful streaks) but blue eyes instead of green. She wore a strapless shirt and shorts and she was barefoot and she had a tattoo on her right arm with Liberty Bell and Bobby’s names, and a barbed wire tattoo around her left wrist. She held a beer in her left hand and a large salad fork in the other, making a gigantic salad the size of my head. There were sixteen chunks of apple in it, fifteen when she picked one up and popped it into her mouth. Then their dad, Tobey, walked in from a bedroom behind the kitchen and he was kind of a stocky guy with a short beard and a mustache and he wore a black T-shirt, jeans and cowboy boots. He had on a NASCAR hat with a big number 48 on it. He had a tattoo sleeve. He grinned at us when he walked in. “Welcome to Oklahoma,” he said.
“Thanks,” I mumbled, but I’m not sure he heard me over the music. The song changed suddenly to a slower beat and I glanced over, surprised to find that Cadence had taken over and was singing a s
weet ballad by Dolly Parton. She actually had a really pleasant voice and for three minutes and forty-seven seconds, everyone in the vicinity had turned their attention toward her and were listening to the soft sound of her voice. Then her song ended and everyone went back to what they were doing and Cadence gave the mic back to the little girl who put on a Katy Perry song.
There were 23 adults total at the party. Eight children.
Melonie got a text and showed it to Bobby, who turned to his dad and proceeded to ask if it was alright if he and Liberty Bell went to a party at Sal Branson’s house. His father was hesitant at first, mentioning something about this party being their graduation celebration, but he finally relented, saying to Bobby, “Just don’t drink and drive.”
“Got it!” Bobby exclaimed, and after getting an “It’s okay, we’re having fun! Don’t worry about us, this is your night!” from Marlene who’d already opened a beer, Liberty Bell, Bobby, Melonie and I all got back in the car and drove away.
Sal Branson lived only three miles away from them in another doublewide trailer. When we arrived, there were dozens of cars scattered around the road and littering the gravel driveway, and hundreds of teenagers roaming around the yard and in and out of the house. I counted up to seventy-two but lost track after that because half of them wouldn’t stop moving and I wasn’t sure if I was counting people more than once because I couldn’t really tell them apart. We went inside and Bobby and Melonie immediately disappeared down the hallway. Liberty Bell and I shared a glance and a nervous giggle.
We made our way down the hallway because almost everyone in the front room was already passed out. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom and two of the bedrooms had couples making out, but the third one had a small party of fun-looking people playing a game of Truth or Dare. There were four of them, two guys and two girls, sitting in a sort of semi-circle on the bed. Liberty Bell asked if we could join them and they said yes, one of the guys looking Liberty Bell up and down and offering her a joint. She declined, but agreed to take a beer, which she opened and took a small sip of. She passed it to me and I took a sip as well. It was utterly revolting but I took another sip.
