Chapter 24
— Chapter 24 —
I don’t have weekend shifts at The Aster. Restaurants are busy on Saturdays and Sunday afternoons, and I’ll look like an asshole if I try to stop in at all the local spots to ask if they’re hiring. It would be one thing if I could get a drink at the bar and casually inquire. But I’m broke, so I’ll have to wait and go after my lunch shifts next week. Jam has to work all weekend but says he’ll come by Sunday night.
I intend to poke around the house. Clean something. Fix something. But I find my copy of Beach Music on the bookshelf in the den. Pat Conroy was my favorite writer when I was in high school, and I bought this book the day it came out, the summer right after I graduated. I gave it to Step when I was done, hoping he’d read it. I wonder if he ever did. The father in that book loved his daughter the way I wished Step loved me. I flip open the cover like there could be clues inside, but the next thing I know, I’m sprawled on the couch, reading a book that left such clear images in my mind it feels like I’m crawling inside a memory.
It’s snowing big fat flakes that melt almost as soon as they hit the damp ground, making everything muddy, but from the couch, I can watch the snow fall without seeing the end result. I read and sleep and read again. I cry at the description of Jack McCall shaving a piece of truffle into his daughter’s scrambled eggs, how he’s delighted to share joy with his child.
I make soup from the marrow bones Carlos gave me.
I wish for Aubrey to come back. She doesn’t.
The last cupcake is stale when Lenny and I eat it.
Sunday afternoon, after I finish my book, I work up the nerve to go into my parents’ room. I’m expecting the furniture to be gone, but Aubrey left everything exactly as it was. The horizontal surfaces of the dark pine bedroom set are so dusty they look three shades lighter than the verticals. There’s a basket of laundry on the unmade bed. Mostly Step’s undershirts. I know he’s the one who folded them because they’re in quarters and my mother folded shirts in threes.
Step’s battered Yankees hat is on the bench under the window, sun-faded. Their potted dragon palm tree is dead, trunk shriveled, fronds brown and papery like raffia.
My mother’s watch is on the dresser. It’s delicate, with gold hands like star points against a black background. I could never tell time on it because it didn’t have numbers, only dots. When I was very young, I loved to sit on my mom’s lap, releasing and closing the clasp on the inside of her wrist until she told me to stop. When I got older, she started quizzing me about time whenever I paid any attention to her watch. I’d have to start at twelve o’clock and count the dots, and somehow I’d still get it wrong. “That’s what I get for marrying your father,” she’d say, when I was flustered and ready to cry. It’s what she’d say when I failed math tests too. I don’t try to read the time now. It’s not ticking anyway.
Over on her nightstand, there’s a box of Pine Bros. honey cough drops and a copy of Never Let Me Go , the bookmark closer to the end than the middle. And on Step’s there’s a tumbler, contents long evaporated, faint white water lines ringing the glass. He was reading a library copy of Mornings on Horseback and, as always, left torn scraps of tissue to mark the pages he intended to revisit. It bothers me that no one returned the book for him. I’m sure the library waives fines for dead people, but I hate thinking that some kid doing a report on Theodore Roosevelt couldn’t check out that book when they needed to. I pick it up and wipe the dust off the cellophane cover, and then I freeze. Once I remove the tissues, I’ll never know which pages meant something to Step. I can’t decide if I care. I drop the book on the bed, and a cloud of dust rises from the corduroy comforter.
On weekend nights when she was at our house, not her dad’s, Steena would climb into bed with our mother, like she was claiming her. They’d watch infomercials on TV and giggle about jokes only they understood. It’s an inside joke and you’re on the outside was one of my sister’s favorite phrases, and it always made our mother laugh. Steena would share gossip about school, and babysitting, and her dad’s wife, and our mother would act like it was terribly important information.
Sometimes Steena cuddled into the crook of our mother’s arm, head on her chest, and our mother would smooth Steena’s hair and tickle the inside of her elbow as if Steena was still a little girl. When I wanted to say goodnight to my mom after I brushed my teeth, I’d peek in the doorway to assess the situation. Most of the time, Steena would see me but pretend she didn’t, and I knew to stay away. But if Steena was in a generous mood, she’d catch my eye and say, “Get in here!” And I’d jump in bed with them, and all three of us would cuddle under the big, soft corduroy comforter like we were in a television show about a happy family. Steena would let me hear all the gossip too, as long as I didn’t ask any questions and wasn’t a buttinsky .
When Step came in, exhausted, ready for bed, fraying flannel pajamas sagging on his shrinking body, he’d stand in the doorway, like I had. But Steena always gave him the stink eye and said things like “I just really need my mother right now, Step.”
When I was on the inside, under the covers with my sister and my mom, I would understand how he felt. But I’d think, You’re on the outside, Step , gleeful in a way that made me ashamed. Sometimes Steena and my mom and I would fall asleep in that bed, and Step would have to sleep in mine. On nights when I was on the outside too, he went downstairs to sleep on the couch, because Steena’s room was off-limits and he knew not to antagonize her.
I wish, for the dumbest fleeting moment, that I could climb into bed with my mother and my sister and know that feeling of being warm and on the inside for just one more moment. My mother’s voice sounded like a bell when she laughed. Steena’s hair smelled like Wella Balsam, and she’d let me rub the ends between my fingers as I fell asleep. I thought they were both so beautiful.
The pain starts as a dull ache over my left eye and sharpens, nerves at the base of my skull tingling like a warning. It’s what my mother always called a “sick headache,” but it hasn’t happened since I was a kid. I just want to go to my room.
I don’t turn on the light. Outside the sky is that split of yellow and blue that happens just before the dark takes over.
Aubrey made the bed. It sags when I sit on it. I lie down, but my brain feels too large in my skull to move with my body. I pull the sides of the comforter up and around me and wait for my head to settle. I can hear a train pulling into the station a mile away and imagine the clank of silverware downstairs as my mother made dinner. When I had a sick headache, she and Step kept their voices low if they could help it—the only time they tried not to fight. Later, Step would bring me a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of Ring-O-Noodle soup, and I would try hard to eat while he sat there and watched me in the streak of light from the hallway. I remember the worried look on his face and that, after I’d eaten enough, he’d take two Tylenol from his shirt pocket and hand me the tumbler he’d been holding—the water warm from the heat of his hand. Then he’d tuck me in again and let me go to sleep without making me get up to brush my teeth.
Those headaches were so painful that tears would fall from my eyes without effort. But I liked the way the world felt in that dark and that light. It was the closest to peace I ever had inside this house. It was the only time I felt cared for.
I’m completely zonked when Jam calls. I haven’t taken anything for the pain. I don’t want to get up to get soup or water. “I’m done with work, if you want me to swing by,” he says.
“I’m sleeping,” I tell him. “I need to sleep.”
I hang up the phone and slip it under my damp pillow.