The Great Jeff

by Tony Abbott

  To get her out of my mind I thought about those weird twins staring from the window. I thought about Josh’s apple. I thought about the bum’s apple. Then I thought about nothing.

  Sleep was a long black cold runway that didn’t end, until it suddenly snapped in half by a loud flicking and tapping on the steamed-up window nearest my head.

  “Mom?” My neck wouldn’t move. “Mom?” More stupid tapping at another window now. I arched up on my elbows. The windshield was pink. The front seat was empty. Mom was gone. What the—

  “Who’s in there?” said a voice. “Are you okay in there?”

  With my frozen fingers, I cranked the back window down a crack. Ice crystals flaked off. The sky was light blue, turning pink. I blinked at a face surrounded by fur.

  “What in the world? Did you… This car’s ice cold. Did you sleep in there?”

  My throat was dry as bone, my stomach hollow and gnawing at me, my head ringing, I couldn’t speak. I’d spent the night in our car. Mom had left me in there. She let me go. She was dead. Maybe I was dead, too.

  “Is there anyone I can call for you?” the furry man said. “The police? Is this even your car? Maybe I should call the police—”

  “What? No, no, no!”

  A distant voice, heels clicking fast. My brain was slow to pick up the clues, but I looked out beyond the furry man’s shoulder to see someone coming toward the car.

  “That’s my son in there. He’s all right. I was gone two seconds, for crying out loud!” It was Mom, all blustery, hurrying back, like she did at the diner in New Hampshire, like she does, all ready with a story. “We had a bit of car trouble, but we’re fine—”

  “He’ll freeze out here!”

  “Which is why I brought coffee, thank you. Cocoa, too. We’ll try the new battery, warm up, and be on our way, thank you!”

  I sat up, pushed cold fingers through frozen hair. She clicked the door locks and opened the passenger door. “Here, Josh, hot cocoa.” She held out a cup to me.

  I must have mentioned Josh when I talked about school. I took it up a notch. “Thanks, Sandra. I mean, Mom. I know you don’t like me to call you by your first name.”

  Clumsy, for sure, but it worked on Fur Man.

  “Josh. Sandra. You’re both all right, then?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, smiling at him. “We’ll be going soon.”

  The man backed away, nodding. “Okay. All right. It’s cold, is all.”

  “Thank you,” Mom said, slipping into the driver’s seat. “Thank you so much!”

  She settled her coffee into the cup holder and started the car. It took a couple of tries before it turned over, but it did and we drove slowly away.

  CHAPTER 32

  WHAT NOW? WHAT MORE?

  There was no question of my going to school that day. I guess neither of us could see the point.

  Of all places, Mom drove us to the beach, stupid on a frigid day. We didn’t talk for hours. What would we say? We had just spent a freezing night in our car. What was left? Huddling in doorways? Gutters?

  I looked out the windshield. Cold, bleak endless water, rolling and rolling under heavy clouds. It’s amazing how slowly the time can pass when you want it to be gone, and how it flies away when you try to hold it down.

  That moment with Hannah at the library was so utterly in the past, I wondered if those ten minutes had ever happened. Maybe I had imagined the whole thing.

  This—this—was what we were, Mom and me, in a cold car, in a barren lot where neither of us should be, overlooking the stone-gray water, smelling of ourselves, watching the day die in front of us, and too tired to feel anything but empty.

  It was so dark in my eyes I thought it couldn’t get worse.

  Then Mom spoke, repeating words she’d used in the attic.

  “It’s time.”

  As cold as I thought I was, my blood froze solid. I turned to her.

  “Mom, what now? What more…?”

  She had hinted a couple of weeks ago that if she ran out of every other place, every other stinking place in the world, we might have to spend a night or two in a shelter before we bounced back to something real. Bouncing wasn’t anything I understood anymore, and I knew we couldn’t do it. A shelter sounded like death. Worse than death. A place of failure. A place for people who admitted they had hit the bottom.

  She said it again now.

  “I called two-one-one. This morning. You were sleeping. They have a room for us. It’ll be warm. It’ll be ready tonight. Someone’s leaving. It’s not far from here.”

  She stuttered all this out like she could no longer put a whole sentence together, like it was too cold to bother. I got it. I understood how and why she talked like that. You don’t have enough strength or faith or whatever to say a whole sentence anymore. What was the point of making sense? What was the point of anything? There wasn’t any. There was only us, like this. This was who we are.

  “Honey, I’m… sorry…” She choked and practically fell into me, her arms around me, her cheeks wet and somehow warm.

  “Okay, Mom. It’s okay. We’ll do it.”

  “Just for a day. Or two days. A week, tops. I’ll get the job, I’m sure of it. My salary will kick in. In the meantime”—she sniffed—“your father will send us money.”

  Hearing that made me mad. “What does he have to do with anything?”

  “He’s trying to put some money together. He’s really trying. I talked to him, and he agreed. It will take a few days, but he knows he has to do that—”

  “He’s always known it. What’s different now?”

  “—then we’ll have a place again. I promise. My checks will start coming, we’ll be fine. Get back on our feet. By Christmas we’ll be in a brand-new place. I promise.”

  “Don’t promise!”

  But she kept talking so I tuned her voice out like I’d done so many times before.

  Back when we were selling furniture to shops in Bridgeport, she’d driven us past one of the shelters. She’d slowed the car and wrinkled up her face as if we were passing a prison. I remembered the people standing outside. Men mostly. A priest lady in a collar moving her arms. Clouds of cigarette smoke. Shifting feet. The dark tunnels where their eyes should be.

  Now that was us. That was us, too.

  CHAPTER 33

  WHAT THEY CALL IT

  “Welcome to the Hope Mission. I’m so glad you called.”

  The woman smiling in the office of the brick building said that when we entered the lobby. Hope? Seriously? Was hope anything at all but the flip side of hopelessness? Haven’t we already decided that hope is just the flip side of hopelessness? And Mission? They call the shelter a mission, but it isn’t a mission for people from just one religion. It’s open to losers from all religions, a bad joke I kept to myself.

  “I’m glad you called, Mrs. Hicks, and I’m happy to have a room open in one of our buildings. It’s nearby. Welcome, Jeff.”

  “Hi.”

  She motioned to a pair of chairs and we sat across her cluttered desk. She saw me eyeing the piles of paper. “Paperwork. Emergency shelters are especially full when the weather turns cold.”

  There it was again. The cold.

  “We actually live on the other side of town,” Mom said, and I wondered what she thought that meant. “I’m getting a job very soon and this is just a little bump.”

  The woman nodded, but her expression told me she’d heard that before. “Perfect. Good. Most of our residents do stay for longer than a month.”

  “A month?” My chest buzzed.

  “Sometimes. Our goal, of course, is to find permanent housing for everyone.”

  “Really, it’s just a stop,” Mom said, with a look at me.

  “But not the last stop,” the woman said, as if she’d heard that before, too. “Maybe it’s silly, it’s in our brochures, but we like to think of ourselves as a kind of greenhouse. I wrote it, so it could be silly. But it helps to know what we’re about. Not j
ust offering a room, but a place for people to grow into what they’re capable of. Like seeds, in a way, if that’s not too… but I can see by your faces that I may need to rewrite that?”

  She paused to look at me. “The point is, right from the get-go you’ll have help, a social worker assigned to you—”

  “Do we need that?” Mom said, interrupting her. “It really won’t be that long.”

  The lady nodded slowly. “I understand, but unstable living arrangements tend, I’m sorry to say, to keep going on, without help, and a social worker is the first step.”

  Emergency shelter. Greenhouse. Unstable living arrangements.

  “We won’t be here long,” I said. Mom touched my hand.

  The woman put her palms flat on the desktop. “Great. We love that. So. There are some questions, a few, just to help you move in. Jeff, I’d prefer you to stay for this, but if you don’t want to, you can wait in the waiting room.”

  I looked at Mom. Her lips were tight.

  “I’ll stay.”

  “Perfect.” From the top drawer of her desk, she took a form several pages long. She asked my age and what grade I was in and where I go to school. I told her.

  “Maybe you don’t know this,” she said, “but it’s mandated by the state that the school pick you up from here and bring you to school.”

  “A bus?” I said. “All the way down here?”

  “Not a bus, a taxi. Or a car. But they’ll come in the morning and drop you back.”

  “That…” I turned to Mom. “I don’t want to do that. People will know, won’t they? I don’t want that. Mom, can you still drive me?”

  She breathed out. “Yes. Sure. That’s fine.”

  Next she asked about Mom’s job and money situation, skills she might have, where we’d been staying since we left the house, how long in each place, and if there was a father in the picture. She asked about substance issues, which Mom tried to sidestep, but the lady wouldn’t let her, and Mom pledged not to drink at the shelter. The lady said they would have to check our bags. Both of ours.

  It hurt. It all hurt, the questions the lady had to ask and the answers Mom had to give. I realized only when it was over that we’d been holding hands.

  “Great. Good.” The lady smiled and dangled her car keys. “Follow me in your car, and we’ll get you settled.”

  We followed her five short streets to a medium-sized L-shaped brick building and parked.

  “You’ll buzz yourselves in and out,” she said as she keyed in a code and the door clicked open. “This used to be the old police station, as you’ll see.”

  What? I wondered. Jail cells? No. But there was a heavy young man with a beard sitting behind a counter right inside the door, like they have in old cop shows.

  “This was the sergeant’s office,” the lady said. The guy shook hands with us, welcomed me by name before the lady told him. They were expecting us.

  “We’re lucky you called when you did,” she said as she took us through the halls. “We only have three rooms for families—mothers and children only—and they go quickly. Too quickly. Single men are upstairs. You’ll never see them. Single women in the other wing.” She stopped in front of a black door, unlocked it, and flicked on the light. Two twin beds, floor lamps, a dresser, and a changing table. Then she gave us two keys and offered us a box of toiletries, a loaf of bread, and jars of peanut butter and jelly.

  “Thank you,” I said. “This is great.”

  “Katie, our social worker, will call soon to arrange an appointment with you. For now, we’ll let you get settled.”

  “Thank you,” Mom said.

  The lady meant to be kind and was kind and didn’t talk down to us or to me. She nodded once, smiled at me, and left.

  “Speaking of changing tables,” I said, “where’s Dad’s check, anyway?”

  “In the mail. He says. It smells like disinfectant in here. I guess it’s all right.”

  “Hey, this is a greenhouse, remember?” I said. “Maybe we’ll grow into trees by morning, with tree houses in them and we can live in those”—which meant who knows what, and I didn’t want to mock the nice lady, but then Mom reminded me that Grandpa had had plans to build me a tree house but lost his leg instead. That cheered me right up.

  That night was horrible.

  The ceiling was gashed with slivers of streetlight, like the ceiling in the pink cottage so many nights ago. There were five slashes of light, not a lot, but I counted them over and over until I must have fallen asleep. It was warm, though, and I liked that we could lock our door at night. The bouncer at the sergeant’s window meant no one would come pounding on our door or tapping our windows, so I was safe.

  I was safe but ashamed that Mom had brought us here.

  Maybe I did grow overnight, because by morning the room seemed airless and smaller than a closet. Plus I had peed in my sleep. I hadn’t done that since Grandpa died. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to soak my underpants, and because we had left most of our things buried in the car, I had only the one pair with me. It was either go commando or I don’t know what, until this kid outside the bathroom saw me and said he uses the iron in the room off the little kitchen.

  “To dry it before people come down for breakfast,” he said. “I’m Jano. I do it for my brother when he pees and we didn’t do laundry. Tad is five.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “This isn’t pee, it’s…”

  But I couldn’t come up with anything before Jano added, “I pee myself sometimes.”

  I didn’t know what to say then either, except: “Cool.”

  Which cracked him up.

  Then he told me to rinse the stain out with soap and water before drying the underpants with the iron.

  “Have you ever smelled plain hot dried pee?” he asked.

  “Uh, no.”

  “You really don’t want to.”

  Jano and Tad were really Janos and Tadeusz. After I dried my underpants, I had breakfast with them in the kitchen, where they told me their mother worked for the shelter while the three of them stayed there.

  “She moves furniture and does carpentry. She’s big,” Tad said, puffing himself up and making a face. “She’s saving to buy a car so we can drive to Ohio where our grandparents live.”

  “And where a job is waiting,” Jano said softly. “Maybe. We hope.”

  Jano was cool. They’d been there three months. His father was somewhere he didn’t know. I didn’t want to lie to him so I didn’t.

  “My mom has problems with drinking and losing jobs and money and we lost our house. Which I’ve never said out loud before, but, you know, why lie about it?”

  “Mommy used to do crack, but she’s clean now,” Tad said as if he’d learned the words listening to grown-ups. Then he added, “I like to be clean, but I don’t like baths.”

  Talking to them, and especially Jano, was so regular. Jano got it. His story was different from mine but the same, too. He was nine. Tad laughed a lot at things Jano said and did. He nearly choked when I Groucho-walked around the table. Then he decided to do it, then it was all three of us.

  When Mom came down to the kitchen, she was with a young woman with red hair and a clipboard. “I’m Katie. Hi, Jeff. Hi, kids!” Jano and Tad gave her little waves.

  “Talk later, yes?” she said, looking at me and Mom.

  Mom nodded, and Katie left.

  “She seems nice,” I said.

  “Social worker,” Mom whispered, then she started her fluttery thing, not wanting anyone to talk while she butterflied around. It got cold in there pretty quick.

  I made it to school late because of traffic. Mrs. Ward, one of the counselors, was waiting by the doors. I suddenly got hot, my skin boiling, and my sweats started.

  She smiled at me and tried to be casual. I smiled back.

  “You’ve been late quite a few times, Jeff. Is everything all right?”

  I started lying right away. “Yeah, yeah. Just we’re remodeling at home and things are e
verywhere and my mom has car troubles some days. It’s being fixed this afternoon. The car.”

  “Would you mind if I called her?”

  More smiling. “Really. We’re good. No more late days. I promise.”

  “I’ll call her anyway, if that’s all right with you.”

  There wasn’t any way out of it. “Sure. After supper. When she’s home from work.”

  As I walked away, it seemed like they’d suddenly turned the ceiling lights up to a thousand. My skin got so hot, my face and chest burned. I had to squint, the hallways seemed so bright. My stomach was empty and raw and gnawing at me. I’d had eggs that morning at the shelter, but I guess they didn’t last. The school knows. They know! But there was nothing I could do now. I tried to forget it and pretend life was normal.

  When I drifted into Mr. Maroni’s class, he was moving between the seats and you could tell he was happy to leave behind Of Mice and Men—a real bummer of a story, which I won’t give away—and get to our new book, “A strange little novel set in Australia called Pobby and Dingan,” that absolutely no one had ever heard of.

  “Enchanting, unusual, and utterly alive masterpiece of only”—he checked the end of the book—“ninety-four pages! It is”—he added in an accent—“one of my five-rit booooks evah!”

  It was supposedly about a girl’s imaginary friends who go missing. I wanted to be them. I was so far behind in everything, I could barely follow what he was saying, but I did understand that something different was going on in the class now.

  Ever since the Hannah Mango thing, Mr. Maroni had changed. He was definitely excited about each new book, but he was also quieter, more patient with us. It was like we all understood that because one of us, not him, had discovered something, it was both important and strangely sad. It didn’t matter that Hannah had said she was happy that This isn’t everything and I’m not stuck here, it sort of crushed you and made you feel hopeless somehow. Like being happy was only wishful thinking. I don’t know what it was exactly, but now the class made me sad and I think it made everyone sad.