The Great Jeff

by Tony Abbott

There was a long moment of nothing, no fidgeting, no talking, nothing.

  “Exactly right,” Mr. M said. “At least that’s what I believe, too. Along with everything else, the word mango does act as a metaphor, doesn’t it? Hannah, go on.”

  So. Hannah. Not Anna. Hann… ah…

  “Okay, so…” She cleared her throat. “Esperanza spends the whole book telling you about where she lives, about the people, the color, the clothes, the danger, the humor, everything. It’s like the ripe part of her life. Full of so many things. But it can’t be forever, right? And then you realize that she’s also saying goodbye to it. She’s been saying it since the beginning, but we only see it at the end. She wants us to know everything she knows before she leaves it.…”

  She stopped, shifted her shoulders, and turned ever so slightly to the class, and her braids moved across them. Goddess braids they call them. She was four seats in front of me and two seats over.

  “It’s her life,” she said. “Esperanza tells you so much of it. Dark parts. And funny parts. I laughed out loud, my dad thought I was on my phone—”

  Giggles here and there. Josh laughed to himself. “Yeah.”

  “And it made me so happy when she rides the bicycle. I’ve done that, three of us on one bike? That made me cry, actually. And when she says about her ‘sad red house, the house I belong but do not belong to.’ Doesn’t that kill you? And when she and her friends drive into…” She searched the pages for a few seconds. “Into ‘a neighborhood of another color,’ and they roll up the windows. They roll up the dang windows! Not me, but my dad has told me that’s happened to him. It makes you mad and scared. And then, the circle… the circle!” She paused. “Well, I’m talking too much.”

  “No,” Mr. Maroni said. “You aren’t.”

  Hannah flipped the book to the end pages and read to herself while we watched her. “This part… ‘When you leave you must remember to come back for the others. A circle, understand? You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can’t erase what you know. You can’t forget who you are.’ My gosh, how beautiful is that? And true. We can’t forget. But then, listen… the last page.”

  Everyone turned to the end of the book. Josh held his between us.

  “‘One day I will say goodbye to Mango. I am too strong for her to keep me here forever. One day I will go away.’ So it’s like, yeah, we can’t forget, but we can go away. It made me cry, but mostly it made me happy. It makes me happy.”

  She paused to swallow and push her braids back. My stomach growled, and Josh whispered, “Whoa!” but my eyes were on her.

  “It means I’m not stuck here. I’m here right now. I might even love this place now. But someday, when it’s not right, I can leave. I won’t stay forever. This isn’t everything. I’m not stuck here.”

  She moved her hands over her cheeks, then set them down on her closed book.

  The class was stone silent. You could hear the air. The light from the window.

  The kids looked up from their books to see Mr. M’s reaction to this speech that most of them probably hadn’t even understood. I didn’t, not all of it. I just watched Hannah twist in her seat, embarrassed at how the quiet seemed to go on.

  And Mr. Maroni?

  His face told you. He wanted to shut it down right there. Drop the microphone, turn off the lights, leave the room, his job was done.

  “Yes,” he said softly. “Hannah, yes.”

  His eyes were glistening under the lights. What more could anyone say after that?

  The old Jeff might have said, Great. Done. What’s our next book? for a laugh. But I was as quiet as everyone else, watching Hannah settle and resettle in her seat.

  Going over what she’d said, this double sense of hope and hopelessness went through me, laughing and crying at the same time. My ears buzzed with the words.

  I won’t stay forever. This isn’t everything. I’m not stuck here.

  Her voice was like a current of water pulling me.

  Where, I didn’t know, but somewhere else.

  I was sweating bullets.

  CHAPTER 15

  WE WON’T BE THE POOR PEOPLE

  I’m not stuck here.

  The very next morning I thought this might actually be true, because when I sat down for breakfast Mom smiled big and told me we were taking a vacation.

  “Not like I said when I lost my job. A real vacation!”

  This was hands-down crazy to say when you’re running toward a cliff. My cereal spoon froze in front of my face. “Wait, what?”

  “It’ll be a little break,” she said. “We really need one! A short trip to get us out of ourselves. And it will barely cost us anything!”

  At first, I didn’t buy it. She must have schemed out something, a plan she wouldn’t tell me, but I couldn’t tell right away what it was, so I shoved the spoon in my mouth and played along.

  “Cool. Where?”

  New Hampshire, she told me. A place we’d been to a couple of times when I was young. It was off-season, she said, so she was able to book a great deal for the weekend. Off-season. Off-peak. Off-hours. That was our new style.

  “Are you saying this weekend?”

  “Yep! It’ll be so far from our life and troubles, Jeffie,” she said, “it’ll be like starting new, never mind that after two days we’ll be back. We need the change. I’ve been making all kinds of calls. After school tomorrow. It’s all set, honey.”

  “A vacation like the old days? Really?” I said. “We like this!”

  Then she blew me away again.

  “Let’s bring your friend Rich, too,” she said, getting his name right. “Why not? It’ll be fun. The big lake there. Maybe we can even spend time on the beach—in October! We can pay for him, too. We need to lose some stress. And eat big. Mmm, lobster rolls! They’re always in season.”

  “Seriously?” I said, still not believing it. “We won’t be the poor people?”

  Her eyes flashed like lightning. “Don’t you dare say that!” A second later, she walked it back. “Anyway, we won’t be this weekend. Call your friend. Here.”

  So I called Rich on her phone, and he flipped out. “Yes, yes! Mom, hey, Mom!” You could hear him screaming four blocks away.

  The sun was bright and big and the sky deep blue Friday morning when I looked out. It would be a good driving day, Mom told me, and not too cold.

  School was school. Nothing big happened. Hannah went back to being her quiet self in class. I saw her in the hall once and she looked at me with her brown eyes and nodded, but she didn’t say anything, of course, since I was just a face. Still, after she had read that bit in class, the book seemed like her book, so I wanted to read it in case.

  In case what? Who knows?

  After I got home, I packed my stuff and the book, which I found—because there might be a slow hour—then ran around putting lights on timers. I checked the mailbox and found it empty except for two of those strange letters. I brought them in, but Mom marched them right back out again unopened. Rich’s sister dropped him off around four, and I had to herd him into the car so he wouldn’t see our bare rooms. I tossed our packs in the trunk and bounced in after him while Mom slid behind the wheel and adjusted her mirror.

  “All set?” she said, smiling in a way I hadn’t seen since she lost her job.

  “Set!” Rich announced, like it was a roll call.

  “Set!” I said.

  “Road trip!” Rich yelled, and I yelled it, too.

  It was just past twilight a little over four hours later when we limped into Silver Beach Resort practically on fumes because Mom didn’t want to buy gas until we got into New Hampshire, since it was cheaper there.

  Silver Beach. Google it. It’s nice. I snitched a postcard at the desk to help me remember. Besides the long, low motel building, a half dozen pink cottages sat side by side on a sandy wedge of beach.

  Off-season, it’s cheap, Mom had said. They’re happy to have us here. She’d gotten us one of the t
wo-bedroom cottages facing the lake, a square flat-topped pastel-pink box that looked like a birthday present without the bow and had black windows you couldn’t see inside. After all those years it reminded me that my mom and dad and I must have driven past Silver Beach when we’d spent my fifth birthday in this part of the state, then we’d come home to find Grandpa coughing his last few breaths.

  Rich loved the cottage right away.

  “This is so cool. Not only pink, but on a lake.”

  “And nowhere near home,” I said.

  Mom unlocked the door. The cottage was dark inside, but we poured in, dumped our junk, and opened the back door onto the beach and the huge lake.

  Rich said, “Oh, yeah! This is what I mean!”

  He texted his parents a picture, saying he got here okay.

  The lakeshore was empty and cold. There were a couple of lonely beach umbrellas and the smell coming off the lake was a combination of boat fuel and wood smoke.

  While Mom unpacked, Rich and I sat on the sand until the stars were fully out and Mom called us inside to get ready to go out and eat. Lobster rolls were crazy pricey so we ordered burgers. We talked about maybe seeing a movie tomorrow night. Everything was open to us. Everything was doable. Everything was everything.

  Tired from driving, Mom sat in one of the outdoor chairs on the little patio and smoked two cigarettes.

  I tried not to think about going home, tried in my mind to be there at the lake, with the trees, the water, the little curve of beach. I tried.

  The television in the cottage was all right, a half dozen local cable channels, which Rich and I made fun of while my mom stretched out on the saggy couch. She said we’d have a big day of fun tomorrow, and Rich believed her.

  In the room we shared, Rich propped himself up in bed, reading some of my old comics, part of them aloud, but without the voices I used when I read them. I tried again to read Mango but kept drifting away. Skimming, I found a part where people who get lost in her neighborhood are afraid they’ll be attacked by people with knives, and I wondered if that was a metaphor or real. Either way, it was a hot story, a summer story, a city story, and it was cold here, so I didn’t get far. Other things weren’t right. The smell of gasoline for one. The dark closing like a lid over you. The big flat black lake that went on forever.

  Finally Rich decided to call it quits, pushed the comics to the floor, and turned his face to the wall. I peeked out from our room and saw darkness under Mom’s door. Turning off my lamp, I slid under the covers and looked up. There were three slash marks of light across the dark ceiling from a spotlight on the beach. They flickered out at one AM, and I went to sleep, too.

  CHAPTER 16

  SATURDAY

  I woke early on Saturday morning, our first real day there. My back ached from the saggy bed. I listened. Mom snoring, Rich still on his side, breathing slow breaths. I rolled out, slid on my pants and sweatshirt, and washed up quietly. It must have been a little after six. Opening the door let a slice of cold air into the room. I grabbed Rich’s jacket off the back of a chair and was out quickly and closed the door. I listened. No sound from inside.

  Wrapping his jacket tight around me, I crossed the sand to the water and stood in the wind, staring out at the lake. At that time of day, with the sun just coming up, the wind was clear and sharp and piney. The pink light hadn’t cleared the tops of the trees and overhead the sky was still solid blue but with no stars. I walked to the end of a concrete pier and just breathed. I heard Hannah talking like she did in class. Softly, like she was telling a secret. It makes me happy. I tried to feel that.

  A rowboat drifted past the pier, a rope trailing on the surface behind it. One oar sat inside the boat. I watched it being pushed slowly by the wind for a few minutes, wondering how far it would go before something caught it up. You don’t see rowboats around Belmont Street. I was trying so hard not to think of home, but there it was.

  Our mess was four hours and two hundred and fifty miles away, and I really wanted to leave it back there and find myself here—here—if that’s even a thing. But it probably wasn’t. She might think so. Hannah. Except I didn’t know her at all.

  I looked down. The water was oily and black in spots. The rowboat was floating farther out. Rich would be up anytime, then my mother. I fished into my hoodie pocket and found the hotel postcard. I scratched a note on the back and tucked it in the cottage door.

  Be back soon.

  Then—I can’t even say why—I lied and added—With doughnuts!

  I trekked up the main road and down one of the bumpy roads that led off it. Old pavement pretty soon gave way to packed dirt, then woods and water. Being in among the trees, which were like huge Christmas trees, I smelled not lake water, but the brown needles on the ground under my feet. It was calm there. Cold in the shade, but calm and stone quiet. A few minutes of that deep silence, and I realized I could be happy.

  “Hey.”

  I turned around twice before I saw her. The girl must have been five or less. She stood half on the step of a low cottage, half propped to keep the side door open. The cottage was nearly hidden in the trees. There was one of those new double-size Jeeps, with a bike rack, parked in a dirt space next to it.

  “Hey,” she said again, opening the door wider. She had pigtails and wore an unbuttoned winter jacket and rubber boots. I could tell from the look in her eyes that I’d surprised her. Grandpa said that when he was little people used to invite strangers into their kitchens for food because they were wandering around hungry. I wished I had a candy bar or something to munch to show I wasn’t a bum like that.

  I gave her a smile like a friendly person. “Hi,” I said.

  “Get off our road.”

  I wasn’t sure what I heard. “Sorry?”

  “This is a private road. Get off it. Mom!” She disappeared inside the house, the screen door clacking against its frame. I didn’t move. Was I waiting for the mother? Maybe I thought she’d apologize for her snot of a daughter.

  The mother came out, pushing aside the screen door like she wanted to unhinge it. She was in a bathrobe with bare legs and slippers.

  “Are you the one who stole our boat?”

  “Boat? What boat—”

  “This is a private court. Are you lost?” she said, half breathing in when she said it, as if she were nervous or afraid. “You need to turn around and go back up the road.”

  “I wanted to see the water,” I said. “We’re up at Silver Beach—”

  “Then if you stole our boat, we’ll know where to find you. Right now, there’s a sign. This is private. My kids are out here and other kids… so would you please…”

  She swirled her finger in a sharp circle. I got it. It meant: Rotate. Get yourself out of here fast. It was like a slap across my face.

  She didn’t raise her voice. It wasn’t that. It just shocked me how quickly she would go there. I don’t like you, Rich’s friend. The old life I thought I could leave for the weekend was right here with me. I was a bum, after all, and she could smell it. Her brat could smell it. I was stuck here. I bring here wherever I go.

  So I turned around. I walked up toward the road, but after a couple of steps, I turned back. Her eyes were still fixed on me, narrowed like gun barrels, and she was holding her daughter’s shoulders tight. I knew I shouldn’t have, but my hand moved up in front of me and I gave her the finger.

  She made a noise in her mouth and called a name—Donny or Johnny or Honey—so I ran the heck out of there and across the main road. When my pants started slipping, I stopped to cinch my belt, and a passing truck that wasn’t anywhere near me honked and swerved and kept on going.

  Donny or whoever came a few seconds later. I heard him running. I imagined a beard and a flannel hunter cap and a shotgun, but I didn’t look, didn’t show my face. He hurried up the dirt road after me, but I was already weaving my way across a sales lot of canoes and kayaks and ducked into a bait and coffee shop, slowing my steps as soon as I entered. I watched
from the window.

  The guy wasn’t a hunter, but a hipster, clean-shaven, in sneakers, glasses, and chinos and a green polo shirt. He walked purposefully across the sales lot of the boat rental place, then straight over to Silver Beach because I’d told his stupid wife that that’s where I was staying. He would trace me to the cottage and make a mess for me.

  All because I gave his wife the finger.

  Why come bouncing out of your cottage in your bathrobe like that? Why be so rude? Did I really look dangerous? I kept an eye on him through the window, but the guy wasn’t at Silver Beach long enough to talk to anyone before I saw him cross the lot again, swiveling his head every which way. He trotted back down his private road to his private court, the jerk. I waited a few minutes, trying to calm down before I went back.

  Rich was waiting in the cottage door when I got there. “There’s my jacket.” He looked me up and down. “Where are the doughnuts?”

  “They were out.” I ripped the note from the door.

  “Aww,” he said. “I could use some. Or a dozen.”

  “We’ll go”—my mother said from inside the bathroom—“we’ll go to Harvey’s. It’s a diner in Linton. Jeff, tell him.”

  Rich grinned. “Tell me.”

  “We’ll go to Harvey’s,” I said. “It’s a diner. In Linton.”

  “I hope they have doughnuts,” he said. “You got me all pumped for doughnuts.”

  In my memory, Harvey’s was one of those sleek aluminum diners that look like an alien ship dropped from the sky. But when we drove up a half hour later, it wasn’t like that at all. It was a wooden box with a peaked roof that I must have gotten mixed up with another diner somewhere else. There were only three cars in the lot.

  “Is it open?” Rich asked.

  “I see lights,” I said.

  “You do?” he said with a laugh. “Then you must have hit your head!”

  “That’s stars,” I said. “You see stars when you hit your head. And besides, I don’t think this restaurant has any stars.”