The Great Jeff

by Tony Abbott

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Tony Abbott

  Cover art copyright © 2019 by Mina Price. Cover design by Nicole Brown. Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

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  First Edition: March 2019

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Excerpts on pages here, here, here, and here from THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET. Copyright © 1984 by Sandra Cisneros. Published by Vintage Books, an imprint of Random House, Inc., and in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf in 1994. By permission of Susan Bergholz Literary Services, New York, NY and Lamy, NM. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Abbott, Tony, 1952– author.

  Title: The great Jeff / by Tony Abbott.

  Description: First edition. | New York ; Boston : Little, Brown and Company, 2019. | Summary: Thirteen-year-old Jeff’s life spirals downward into homelessness after his alcoholic mother loses her job.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018020156| ISBN 9780316479691 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780316479707 (ebook) | ISBN 9780316479677 (library edition ebook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Homeless persons—Fiction. | Single-parent families—Fiction. | Poverty—Fiction. | Middle schools—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.A1587 Gr 2019 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018020156

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-47969-1 (hardcover), 978-0-316-47970-7 (ebook)

  E3-20190214-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER 1 ME

  CHAPTER 2 DUCK SOUP

  CHAPTER 3 BEST FRIENDS

  CHAPTER 4 A CHURCH THING

  CHAPTER 5 THE DAYS OF THE WEEK

  CHAPTER 6 ON THE PLATFORM

  CHAPTER 7 MOM

  CHAPTER 8 SWEPT AWAY

  CHAPTER 9 ANOTHER MOM

  CHAPTER 10 THE APPLE

  CHAPTER 11 ALL ABOUT ERICA

  CHAPTER 12 UNDER A FAKE SKY

  CHAPTER 13 HELP ME

  CHAPTER 14 THE GIRL IN MY CLASS

  CHAPTER 15 WE WON’T BE THE POOR PEOPLE

  CHAPTER 16 SATURDAY

  CHAPTER 17 MEN

  CHAPTER 18 THE KEY TO NOTHING MUCH

  CHAPTER 19 MY HOUSE

  CHAPTER 20 DAYS AND NIGHTS

  CHAPTER 21 THE BLUE HOUSE

  CHAPTER 22 OUR SHAME

  CHAPTER 23 HOPES

  CHAPTER 24 GETTING COLDER

  CHAPTER 25 THE SIDESPOT INN

  CHAPTER 26 BEAUTIFUL MORNING

  CHAPTER 27 THE FACE OF JESUS

  CHAPTER 28 ALL OF THEM

  CHAPTER 29 WE MOVE AGAIN

  CHAPTER 30 GHOSTING

  CHAPTER 31 A MINUTE TO CALM DOWN

  CHAPTER 32 WHAT NOW? WHAT MORE?

  CHAPTER 33 WHAT THEY CALL IT

  CHAPTER 34 ROLLER COASTER

  CHAPTER 35 MOMMY, OH, MOMMY

  CHAPTER 36 RUNNING ON EMPTY

  CHAPTER 37 WINNER OF EVERYTHING

  CHAPTER 38 LEAVING

  CHAPTER 39 IT WAS WHAT IT WAS

  CHAPTER 40 THE COLD AND THE PAIN

  CHAPTER 41 IN THE WHITE WORLD

  CHAPTER 42 HOSPITAL

  CHAPTER 43 WHAT HURTS TOO MUCH

  CHAPTER 44 THE END OF THE BEGINNING

  CHAPTER 45 BROTHERS

  CHAPTER 46 THE HOUSE ON HARRISON STREET

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  To young people and their families

  CHAPTER 1

  ME

  I was five when I saw my first person die.

  My grandfather worked for the railroad. He was a conductor until he lost half of one of his legs to diabetes two years after I was born. That’s a sugar disease that kills your circulation. Your nerves die because your blood doesn’t get all the way to the things farthest away from your heart. Your feet and legs.

  Grandpa seemed old to me then. I realized later he wasn’t really. Sixty-seven. Not old enough to just die. But he looked ancient, gray and white, not much of him there.

  It was my fifth birthday. I was standing in the doorway of his room. Grandpa had lived with us for a few years but hadn’t come with us when we went away that weekend. He didn’t really go anywhere. We came home and found him gurgling in his throat. Jeff, my mother called from the kitchen. Jeff, don’t bother him. She was phoning 911 and his doctor, whose name was written next to the wall phone. My father was around somewhere, but I don’t remember where.

  My grandmother had passed away from heart problems before I was born, so Grandpa was alone. Mom took care of him and loved him more than anyone. He had a funny smell that day. His breathing was wet and crackly. Grandpa loved me a lot, I think he did. When his eyelids fluttered and opened, I went over to his bed. It was in the corner of the little downstairs room between two gray walls. He smelled like pee. Where is his caretaker! Jeff, get back in here. I looked down the sheet covering him to see if I could find pee stains. His regular leg looked like a bone resting on the pillow under the sheet, that’s how skinny it was. One white foot stuck out. It was black on the bottom of the toes and on his heel. The other leg ended above where his knee would be.

  When I looked at his face his eyes were on me.

  “Jeffie,” he said.

  My mom was calling Jeff, Jeff, but the louder she got the less I heard her. He said some wet things for a while and he sounded choky. I answered when I thought it was a question. His breath was thick and bad, and not all he was saying made sense to me.

  When he told me the thing that was going to be the last thing he said, I didn’t know it yet, so I tried to answer him. While I was talking he coughed funny and his mouth stayed open and he was dead. I was the only one in his room for that. After a minute or two of looking at him I touched his cheek. His skin was warm even a little after he died.

  I remembered Grandpa this afternoon when my mom came home from work and was calling “Jeff! Jeff!” from the second she opened the door.

  Don’t ask me why I thought about an old man lying in his bed between two gray walls, but I did.

  “In the basement,” I yelled.

  “Get up here.”

  Normally Rich Downing is over on Fridays and we read comic books together or watch TV in my basement. Other days he has things to do and doesn’t come. Sometimes I go to his house, but it’s weird there.

  When I came up the stairs to the kitchen she whispered, “Is your friend Tom here?”

  “No, Mom,” I said, “it’s Rich now. It’s never Tom anymore. He’s not my friend. Rich is. Rich has come over every Friday for a long time now.” I tried to tell her that
he was actually in the bathroom right now, but she cut me off.

  “Well, I’m on vacation!” She slammed her bag on the kitchen table, spilling stuff out of it. Her eyes were wet and red. That wasn’t new. The new part was that they were bloodshot right after work instead of the morning after being out with her nurse friends.

  I think I laughed somehow. “Vacation? Disney World, obviously. I’ll go pack—”

  “They fired me.”

  “What?”

  “Fairchild cut two nursing positions. And when the fat one made a stink, saying they fired her because she was fat, they turned right around and gave her my job. Jeff, I don’t have a job.”

  My blood froze. “So what does that mean? When are you getting it back?”

  “Ha.” She opened the refrigerator and pulled out a tall green bottle. “You don’t get it back, smarty. And because I’ve only been there since July, less than three months, I won’t get unemployment benefits either. Honey, we’re up the creek.”

  Which is not what she really said.

  “What about St. Damien’s?” I asked.

  She drank her glass empty and refilled it. “What about it?”

  St. Damien’s is the Catholic high school you go to after St. Catherine’s, which I had to leave after seventh grade because of no money. Rich still went to St. Catherine’s. Everybody I knew still went there and was planning to go to Damien’s next fall. Some of the teachers were moving up, too.

  She looked at me. “Well?”

  If you really want to know, my father ripped something out of me when he stopped paying for Catholic school, and I had to go to public school with only a year left. That’s a curse. I’d built up a thing at St. Catherine’s. A style. Not everybody liked it, but everybody knew it.

  If you know me, you won’t think I can love anything and you’d be wrong. St. Catherine’s had a smell I smelled every morning when I walked inside from the bus. That smell said that no matter what I’d left at home, I was going to be all right there. Not that I ever asked for it either, but Mrs. Tracy always cut me some slack when I said something off-the-wall. Not all the teachers did but she did. Hard to build up an adoring fan base at a new school, floating around with nine hundred other kids.

  I stared at her face through the bottom of her wineglass. “Dad said after this one stinking year, he’d send more money. You said you were saving, too, and together it would be enough so I could go to Damien’s next year.”

  “Saving? When did I say that?”

  “In the summer. ‘Because it means so much to you,’ you said. I hate public school, Mom, I hate it.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to hate it a little longer.”

  “But all my friends—”

  “Friends?” Her face pruned up. “Jeff, your friends abandoned you. They let you go like you were nothing. Real friends don’t do that. Ha, but your friends did. Some friends, I say.”

  It was true, I guess. Some of them abandoned me. One of them mostly.

  “Not Mrs. Tracy. Not Rich either,” I said. “Who by the way is—”

  “And your father? Well, he was plain lying to you. He lies to everybody. Sometimes I think that’s where you learned it. Listening to him.”

  “Thanks a lot, Mom.”

  She made a noise in her throat and lowered her glass. “I’m sorry, that wasn’t fair, but come on. Your father doesn’t have two shiny dimes to rub together.” Which she said as if it made her happy. “But I’ll tell you what. He’d better pay up now. He’d better chip in, and not for school, that’s all I have to say.” She poured out a third glass. “We’ll catch up on our rent.”

  “Rent, what rent? I thought we owned our house.”

  “If you think that, you don’t pay enough attention.”

  “You never said we didn’t own it. People own houses.”

  “We never owned it, honeybunch. And I’m a little late on last month’s rent. Except, you know what, I’ll get it from your father now.…”

  She didn’t finish but started buzzing around the kitchen, turning over stuff as if she couldn’t find her cell phone, which had slid out of her bag onto the table. She fluttered all over, muttering, because she didn’t want me saying anything else. I knew the way she did things. The room belonged to her now, and I was just standing in it.

  My father hasn’t lived with us for almost four years. He’s a paper dad, if you know what I mean. If there was a test and the question was, Who is your father? I would have to put his name down: James R. Hicks. But he was gone long before he left the house. He hated when Grandpa came to live with us. He wanted to hide him away, give him the closed-in back porch instead of a regular room.

  “He’s always here!” he’d say when he came home from being out.

  “Because he can’t walk!” my mother would answer, which I’m sure Grandpa heard.

  Then my father “fell in love” (which I don’t really know what that means) and Mom found out and he moved out of the house. For a little while he was living in Stamford, which is a few towns down, and I used to see him fairly regularly. Then he moved to New York with his girlfriend, and I don’t see him as much, only on holidays, a few times a year.

  He paid Mom some, because when your dad bolts it doesn’t matter why or what he says, he still has to pay for the kids he had with your mother. More paper, right? Public school was free and St. Catherine’s wasn’t, so when money got tight, like Mom said it did this past summer, they bounced me down to public school for the year.

  With her cell phone tucked between her ear and her shoulder, Mom clanked among the bottles on the shelf in the fridge, keeping the door open with her knee. “Is that it? Where’s the other one?”

  Did she think I drank it?

  There were guys after my father left. I heard names, that’s all. Carl. Paul, who she called Skip. She talked about Ron for a few months, but he faded away, too, or moved. She never brought them home, I don’t want you to think that. How gross would it be, my mom with a boyfriend? But I never saw them. Maybe she just didn’t want them to meet me. Bottom line, none of them lasted very long.

  She let the fridge door close and slammed her phone on the tabletop, swearing a streak at my father. “Voice mail, my foot!”

  She grabbed her glass again, when the toilet suddenly flushed and Rich was there and we both stared at Mom sucking red drops from her empty glass.

  “Who in heaven’s name are you?” she screamed.

  Rich stared at me while the color drained from his face. “Uh…”

  “Good one, Mom. Terrify the guests, why don’t you. Come on, Rich.” I pulled him back down to the basement while she leaned against the counter and called after me in a sloppy voice. Jeff, Jeff. I knew she’d soon be crying. She always cries after wine.

  “Well, that was nice,” I said to Rich when we got downstairs. “But that’s”—and here I jerked my arms out like a stand-up comedian—“Mommy!”

  He laughed, so I kept this evil grin on and wiggled my eyebrows and did a silly walk to keep him laughing, which he did, but he didn’t know who I was doing.

  “I get it,” he finally said. “My dad explodes sometimes. Maybe I should go.”

  “Nah. It doesn’t matter.”

  Rich went home anyway, closing the door behind him while my mom whimpered on the living room couch.

  Funny, when I think about the last person to really love me, and the first person to have so much trouble with it, I see my mother running into my grandfather’s room that day he died. She swatted my hand away from his face as if I’d done something horrible, started bawling like she was now, and kissed his wrinkled dead cheek over and over, saying, “Daddy, oh, Daddy.”

  CHAPTER 2

  DUCK SOUP

  So you’ve probably guessed this isn’t going to be a laugh riot.

  On the other hand, I should tell you how funny I am. How I go around basically happy. I had this friend for a few years who I already mentioned, Tom Bender. I cracked him up every time. Just saying h
is name now makes me want to spit, but I could make him choke on his tongue with what I came up with. Smart stuff, too. I’m quick in my head and it goes right to my mouth. Hilarious.

  Most people at my new school don’t get my kind of funny. I mean, they do, a little. Like Colin and Josh, but they’re only in two of my classes. And I’ve been there only a few weeks, so no one’s had the full Jeff experience.

  I’m like the kid who has to touch stuff in stores when he passes down the aisle. I see things and have to respond. It’s how I flow. Some people think what I say is mean. Or that I try to hurt them or that I don’t care if I do.

  Some of what I say or do might sting, but I don’t always mean it to. I just see things going on and make a crack. Like Groucho Marx. I still remember when I was nine and saw the Marx Brothers movie called Duck Soup. Tom Bender was there for that. It’s a crazy story about a fake country going to war. I couldn’t catch my breath and my throat and chest hurt I laughed so hard. Groucho does this silly crouching walk and twitches his eyebrows and gets a lot of dirty looks, like I do. Tom said I was like him, but without the mustache. Sorry. I won’t talk about Tom again.

  Not that any of that matters. When people make up their minds about you, they only see you one way, which is the easy way for them. What I’m trying to say is that mostly when I wake up, I have a smile on my face. Sometimes I laugh myself right out of bed. It’s only later, when I remember, that my stomach begins to hurt.

  Mom finally caught up with Dad on the phone late that night. I don’t know what he said, but they arranged that we’d go visit him in New York the following week.

  “Once we get to his apartment,” she said at breakfast on Saturday, as if his place were all chandeliers and fireplaces, “I’ll tell him exactly what happened with my job, and what a stew we’re in, then we’ll have a talk.”

  “I have things to say, too. Plus, his place is tiny.”

  “And there’s something you need to know,” she said, lowering her voice and pressing my arm with her fingers. “Until then, until we see your father, you’re not saying anything to anybody. Not a word about me losing my job. Not a single word.”