The Great Jeff

by Tony Abbott

  “Just what he told me not to do!” I almost laughed.

  Mom looked at me, then at the scratch, and shrugged. “You never liked people giving you orders.”

  “I know, right?” I dug into my bag, then stopped short. “Dang. I totally forgot my trunks!”

  She slowly unzipped her own bag. “Because you’re a Zamboni.”

  CHAPTER 26

  BEAUTIFUL MORNING

  It was dark as a coffin when I woke.

  Where was I? My mother snored in my left ear. Oh. The room. The motel. The motor inn. I couldn’t tell what direction I was facing. Black air all around.

  What time was it? What time of day was it?

  Clawing at the nightstand between us for her phone: 5:52 AM blazed white in my face. Bare feet on the thin cold carpet. Trying not to smash my toes into anything. I finally found the window and cracked open the heavy curtains.

  A universe of fog.

  The glow from the highway was sick yellow. Headlights were dull spots, like flashlights with dying batteries. The morning rush of traffic made no sound.

  My new world.

  I opened the room door and breathed in cold and exhaust. A second sniff gave me a nearby bakery and the odor of cigarette smoke. I thought of that girl smoking in the lot last night. That led me to Hannah and her face. Why do I think about girls so much? Rich’s dirty remark came into my head. I couldn’t even go there. School and classes and books and friends and even girls seemed stupid and pointless.

  I closed the door. I couldn’t stomach all the trouble of getting wet in the shower, then all the drying. Sniffing the armpits of the T-shirt I’d worn yesterday, I figured another day wouldn’t kill me. Or anyone else, if I kept my distance. Jeans, of course, only changing my underwear, which I dug out of my bag. I put on my first fresh pair of socks, starting a two-week run in them. Washed my face. Warm water. Brushed my teeth. But why? The thought of walking into school like this seemed the dumbest idea in the world. From my house to school is one thing, but from a skeevy smelly motel to a classroom full of normal kids?

  By the time I flicked off the bathroom light, Mom’s foot was out of the covers. I didn’t want to look at it. Grandpa’s cold white single dying foot. But I had to wake her.

  I jerked my knee into her mattress. “Mom?”

  A snort of air. “What? What?”

  “Time to get up.”

  “What? Okay—” She hit her elbow on the nightstand and cursed.

  “Keep it down,” I said. “You’ll wake the neighbors.”

  I thought it might sound funny, like a parent scolding a child, but it wasn’t funny, not even to me. My chest ached. Had I become the grown-up? Standing there fully dressed and waiting while Mom blinked herself awake?

  I felt cold and alone and couldn’t stop my tongue.

  “You know, I knew this was going to happen. I saw the whole thing coming.”

  “Jeff, what? What happened?”

  “Us. This. I knew we’d come here after Dad left. This is where we’d be. Eventually. And here we are. I knew it would turn out this way.”

  It felt as if someone else were saying those words, forcing them out my mouth, not me. Except it was me. I was saying this because I believed it.

  “You did not know it.” She sat up in bed now, her pajamas sliding off her shoulder.

  I turned away so I wouldn’t see. “Except I did. I do. I’ve been waiting for us to crash every day since he ran out. Now we have.”

  She stood up, fixed her top, and faced me. “Since he left?” She coughed a dismissive breath. “Him? We made our own lives since he left, you and me. We don’t need him. We’re making it up ourselves, and we’re okay. I’m telling you, Jeffie, we’re okay. This is just a little…”

  Don’t say bump!

  “…a little bump, that’s all. We don’t need him, and all his old rubbish and younger women and lies and no money, forget him.”

  “Except if we’re making it all up, why isn’t it better? What do we do now? What’s the next thing? You said you’d call friends—”

  “I will. Today.”

  “Why not skip that and go straight into the system?”

  “Don’t ever say that! Never. Never, Jeff.” She came across the floor and put her arms around me. “That will never happen. You will not, and I will not. Jeff, never.”

  I wondered how long until never would happen. Weeks? Days?

  Stepping back, she searched my face. I don’t think she saw much in the dim light of the parted curtains. She cleared her throat.

  “What do we do now? Ha. I’ll tell you what we do now, mister. You go down and bring us back some bagels and coffee from the lobby, while I get in the shower. Get some java for yourself, if you need it. That’s what we do now!”

  She’d taken over sounding grown-up now. She had to sometime. Her day was… how horrible was her day going to be? Calling friends, asking them for money or a couch to sleep on, not just for her, but for her son, too? How humiliating is that?

  All I had to do was sit at a desk all day and try to stay awake. She had to fall on her knees in front of everyone, stroke their hands, and beg.

  So I said, “Okay, Mom. Breakfast coming up,” and I said it as perkily as I could.

  CHAPTER 27

  THE FACE OF JESUS

  School was, I can’t even tell you. I’m not sure I understood a word of anything anyone said. After Mom picked me up we drove to where she’d rented two storage pods—the first month free, she told me. They weren’t far from the Sidespot. Our stuff was jammed in like you wouldn’t believe.

  “Movers!” she said. “Like animals.”

  Tables piled on tables, chairs to the ceiling, cartons upon cartons, trash bags of clothes pushed into every space in between. It started to avalanche when I tried to ease a bag out, so I left it.

  Mom rummaged for a purse she was sure had cash, and she found it. “Twenty-two dollars!” she crowed. My eyes stung. I turned away and dug into a carton marked Jeff, hoping to find the missing book. There were a couple of others, but not Mango. I had to face it. It was under a bed in a pink cottage on a lake two hundred miles from here.

  “You’re not going to start reading now,” she said, not expecting an answer.

  I tried to remember the look of Hannah’s mother’s copy, her stars penciled in the margins of the pages, but it wasn’t coming. Among the junk from my desk drawers was the holy card I’d found last year, the one with the face of Jesus on one side and a photo of my grandfather on the other. The photo was taken the year before he died. He had longish hair, greasy and dark. His face was thin. There was a shadow of stubble on his cheeks. His eyes were pockets, gray-brown and glassy as he looked into the camera. Behind him you could see the hazy shape of an old steam locomotive. He was already so sick and sad and missing a leg, but he wanted to show me train stuff. I was four and I remember he had his hand on my shoulder and I was smiling, but I was cropped out for the holy card. I slipped it into my pocket, thinking of him and of Mom, who was scrounging for more money, and for some reason I thought of Hannah, too, and I felt everything sink inside me.

  It’s weird that the moment you name it—being poor—it goes from being a bunch of blurry forms hovering around you like ghosts to a solid thing with arms and hands and a face and strength and hate. And the thing it hates is you, because the instant you give it a name, it knows you well enough to want you dead.

  The days went on.

  I tried to tell Mom no one knew or really cared, but she was so paranoid for school not to think anything weird was going on with us, she was careful to drop me at school and pick me up on time, all smiles. On days when I took the bus to my old stop I hung in our backyard until she beeped from the street, which was an okay system, unless it rained.

  Trucks were there nearly every day doing repairs. I wondered what it was looking like inside now, but I never went in. Warmer probably. They didn’t want the new pipes glopping up with old oil. There’d be saws and sanders and
smooth new wood everywhere, which reminded me of Grandpa. The mail was always in the box, a lot of junk mail, but it was all there. Mr. Andrade was good about that, at least.

  Except not “at least.” He didn’t owe us anything. We owed him. Seven thousand dollars. Plus repairs. We were the thieves.

  When Mom was busy until suppertime, I waited at the library, a twenty-five-minute walk from our old house. My bike would have been good for getting around, and Mr. Andrade would probably have let me keep it in the shed. I could hear him saying it was fine. But we’d sold the bike early on for, amazingly, more money than for the love seat and chairs put together, because she went to an actual bike shop to sell it.

  “There’s a big business in used bikes, kid,” the creep had said when he wheeled my Mongoose into the back of his shop.

  I felt then like that kid who had to leave Winnie-the-Pooh behind and grow up.

  I was heading to the library one afternoon, some afternoon, Thursday of our first motel week, maybe. The day before, I’d discovered the book was no longer where I’d hidden it. Maybe someone checked it out or maybe the staff tossed it because it was beat up. I hoped Hannah was there, so I might read hers, when I found myself slowing down at the corner of Gresham Road. Among the trees at the end was a church steeple.

  St. Catherine’s.

  It wasn’t that late. Mrs. Tracy might still be there. The hill blocked the sun. The air was crackly and cold. The cop lady had said, It’s getting colder, and I hadn’t understood what she meant. Well, this was what she meant. Walking around without a home to go to, lurking in backyards when it gets cold. It’s different from when it’s sunny and the days are long. Cold tires your muscles, your face. Cold makes everything harder.

  I pulled open the school doors. The halls breathed their old smell on me. A lone secretary in the office talked on the phone while flapping sheets of pink paper. I slipped up the stairs and searched for Mrs. Tracy’s new room in the eighth-grade wing. I saw her name over the last one on the left. I peeked in. The front lights were on, but the room was empty. I imagined her face, but it faded quickly. I searched the shelves under the window. The book wasn’t there. Of course. It wouldn’t be a book they’d read at Catholic school.

  I sat at the desk at the head of the second row, where I’d sat last year. A fleck of white drifted outside the window. I remember I used to look at the woods a lot. Now, deep in the afternoon, the sky was very low. Wind was moving the high branches, bare and gray. Another flake. Colder. It was getting colder. The policewoman’s face again.

  There was the past and there was now and I felt the room come down on me. My heart thudded, my vision tunneled. My face and head itched all over. I swallowed hard, trying not to let it happen. I needed to leave the classroom before I started to cry.

  The hallway was dead empty when I went out. The secretary’s office was dark.

  I pushed out the front doors and found Courtney Zisky and her long hair standing on the sidewalk by the flagpole.

  CHAPTER 28

  ALL OF THEM

  She did a double take when she heard the school doors suck open—seeing me, turning away, then turning back. It was comical, except for her face.

  “Jeff?” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  Courtney was as good-looking as last year. Better. Taller, her hair longer, her cheeks pink from the cold. Her coat was wrapped tight. I don’t know if she wore a sweater. I almost wasn’t going to tell you that I wondered about that, but why not?

  I didn’t want to talk. To anybody, especially not her, and I was mad that she’d seen me, so it came out angry. “Why do you care?”

  She jerked her head sharply. “What?”

  And in that word, that one word, it was like she was so disgusted she couldn’t believe it. Like she was a person and I was slime. My stomach wrung tight and all my old angry feeling came back. I felt humiliated with Mom, but I’m pretty sure she thought I was worth something.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t darken your towels again.”

  Which probably confused her, but is a line from a Marx Brothers movie.

  “Same old Jeff.” She smirked. “I don’t know what in the world you’re saying.”

  “Yeah, well, you never liked me.”

  She screwed up her face like she smelled my socks. “I never not liked you.”

  “You didn’t think twice about me, all the same. Even though… even though I voted for you, for class president last year.” My breath left me. “Just never mind.”

  “Hey, you don’t get to say that. And why should I think anything about you, Jeff? You were snotty in class. To Mrs. Tracy. To other people. You were plain mean to some of us. You know who I’m talking about.”

  All of a sudden Jessica Feeney was in my head, her scars, her melted hands. Except she wasn’t even the thing. It was that Tom was the only person—the only smart person—who ever gave a rat about me, but after Jessica he made every excuse not to hang out.

  No surprise there, right? I get to be too much myself, too comfortable, say what’s in my head, and everyone gets weird. That’s what I do. I make good things turn the other way. All anyone saw was that I didn’t want to hold her burned hand and all I know is that being me wasn’t good enough anymore.

  I stared at Courtney, feeling myself drain away to nothing. “Blah-blah-blah.”

  “People see things, Jeff, and they can’t figure out why you do and say what you do. I know I can’t.”

  “So you do think about me.” I grinned like some kind of dirty old man.

  “Right, because that’s the point of all this. You’re so full of yourself and think you know things, but you aren’t as funny as you think you are. Go home.”

  It was like she was smacking me left and right. Full of myself? Ha! I was full of nothing. And home? There I was in the parking lot at St. Catherine’s, looking down the sidewalk at some street, and I totally blanked on where I was supposed to go next. This way, that way? Where do I live? That’s funny, isn’t it? Somebody says Go home, but you don’t have one.

  “Jeff?”

  I spun around. Tom Bender was leaning oddly a few steps off, his pants flapping in the wind like always, last year’s blazer short at the cuffs. He might have been taller and thinner, but his face was the same, with his dumb look of half worry, half surprise.

  “So…” he said, his eyes, like always, waiting for something.

  Every terrible thing that happened between us last year surged up in me, and I started yelling. Not the string of cursing you might think. Just one long animal scream.

  “Ahhhhhh!”

  I ran, stumbling down the sidewalk, tripping into someone’s yard. My throat burned. I wanted to rip my clothes. I fell in the next yard, got up on my stick legs. I wanted to be home, bury myself in bed, pull a blanket over my head. But there was no home, no blanket, no bed of my own. Waves crashed and crashed on me, icing my spine all the way up. I fell again, got up, and ran.

  What was I doing there? What did St. Catherine’s mean to me anyway? I must have had a rotten time if the only person I came away with was Rich.

  Why did I come back here?

  To prove to myself that I don’t belong?

  CHAPTER 29

  WE MOVE AGAIN

  The next day, we got the bad news.

  “I didn’t get the job.”

  I sat in the front seat, sinking through the floor as she drove out of the library lot. Her breath filled the car. I was scared out of my head and angry, because I knew why she didn’t get it, why she really lost the Fairchild Manor job, and the hospital job before that, knowing that this would be the way with all of them.

  I wanted to ask, Why do you drink in the afternoon, Mommy? and she’d spit back, What? No! Shut up. No, Jeffie, honey, then get all teary, but I couldn’t.

  All that came out was a noise, a push of air up my throat.

  “I know,” she said. Her eyes were damp. “I was their second choice. They called. Out of fourteen appl
icants. That’s good. It means if something opens up, they’ll call me—”

  “Did they say something would open up?”

  “No. But if it does…”

  I couldn’t go there. “So. What’s next? Anything? Or nothing.”

  She put her hand on my arm, giving it a little squeeze. “We tighten our belts a bit. The motel’s letting us out of our week early, with a refund. It was nice but too pricey to keep going.”

  Was it? Was it nice?

  “I was talking to Erin again today, and she said we could stay with her, at her house, for a short while.”

  “Erin? Who’s Erin?”

  “Erin Petry. From the hospital. You know.”

  I didn’t. “Where does she live?”

  “That’s the great thing. On Birmingham Street in the north end. Just over the line.”

  I tried to picture her and the street. “How far from my school bus stop? Can I keep taking the same bus as for home?”

  She looked at me the longest time, and I knew she was hoping I would lose that word, just banish the idea of home from my head. “Not far at all. Across Park Avenue. You can keep using the same bus stop.”

  “Uh-huh, okay. I guess. Okay.”

  After collecting our stuff from Stinkspot, we ate supper at Duchess and drove around until eight, then pulled up in front of a house seven short blocks from our old one and not as nice as it. A tall, thick woman came to the door when we got out of the car.

  “Thank you so much for this, Erin,” my mother said. “A night or two, until we get things straightened out.” They did a cheek kiss in the doorway while I lugged the bags up the walk.

  Until we get things straightened out. Why was it we? Did I get us here? Should I be doing more to get us back on track? Should I be doing all of it?