Chapter 59
— Chapter 59 —
I missed Aubrey’s birthday. I didn’t get to bring her blue and yellow cupcakes or give her Step’s car. I try to make up ways that she could be happy, imagining that Steena changed, Charlie too. Austin is suddenly a really nice kid. Or maybe, at least, Aubrey has learned to expect so little from them that who they are doesn’t matter as much. She probably got a car for her birthday that doesn’t take five tries to start. She lives in a big house with a solid roof and a fireplace that doesn’t smell like cat piss when it rains. She has nice clothes and good makeup and won’t have to work at the grocery store or wait tables. Her life is easier without me. I tell myself this story over and over again until I can almost believe it.
Before Aubrey left, Shray and I were planning to throw her a little celebration on the Saturday after her big day. We were going to build a fire pit in the yard and have what Shray called an “art party.” He found little packets of minerals that burn in different colors when you throw them in the flames. We were going to sit by the fire and paint, roast potatoes, tell stories, and take pictures. But I forgot all about it until the Sunday bartender shows up to relieve me for the Saturday night shift.
Even though I don’t feel like being by myself, I take my shift meal home. I go down to the basement to work on the dining set, don’t bother to change, eat while I’m working. I blast my old Nirvana Nevermind cassette loud enough to make the speakers on my purple Sony boom box rattle. I don’t want to get stuck in my thoughts, so the game is to stay busy until I’m exhausted enough to fall asleep.
I sold the dresser. Gus loaded it in his pickup and we took it to Aubrey’s furniture guy. When the guy asked how much I wanted for it, I worked up every bit of bravado I had and said, “Two thousand.” Gus winced, and I thought it was because I was aiming too high, but the guy paid without haggling.
A few days later, when Gus came in for lunch he said, “I went to check on your piece.” He pulled out his phone to show me a picture of the price tag: ~$4k written in pencil and Sold scribbled over it in red ink. “Next time, you got to go higher.”
So, I’m going to ask for four thousand for the dining set, since there are six chairs and two extra leaves for the table. Gus gave me a bottle of furniture stripper that smells like fermented oranges, and it left the wood a beautiful pale blond. Until I started carving into our furniture, I didn’t realize how much of the color was stain, not wood.
I remove the back panel from the first chair, clamp it to Step’s workbench, and with a chalk pencil, I draw a dogwood flower at the end of a branch. I don’t center it—the branch travels across the panel and ends in the flower, with leaves and offshoot branches sprouting everywhere. I use my chisel to break the fibers along the border of my design so I can come back with the gouge and clear away the background.
I don’t hear footsteps on the basement stairs, so when Shray is suddenly standing next to me, I scream, raising the chisel above my head like a dagger.
“Hey, Aunt Frey,” he says, and I scream again, because the shock is still in my brain. Shray laughs. “Sorry! It’s just me! No stabbing!”
He’s wearing a suit. Nothing interesting. Slim-cut navy blue with a skinny black tie. His hair is jet black, slicked against his head. There’s a thin smudge of navy eyeliner under his eyes.
“Come on,” he says, grinning. “We got to rescue Aubrey.”
We take Step’s car, because I blocked mine in when I came home and Shray is almost out of gas. But he insists that we drive with the windows up because he doesn’t want to mess up his hair.
“I’m trying to blend in, Aunt Frey. Stealth.”
I concede, but I swear the car smells like bananas and it makes me nauseous.
Shray talks a mile a minute, trying to get me up to speed fast, even though he’s physically incapable of leaving out any detail he finds interesting. “Aubrey messaged on AIM this morning and was like, ‘My mother lost her damn mind,’ because a truck showed up and dropped off like a metric ton of hay bales. We thought Steena was going overboard for Halloween or trying to rope Aubrey into a family photoshoot for a Thanksgiving mailing. But it was like… a lot of hay bales, Aunt Fray.” Shray looks at me, eyes wide. “And then another truck showed up with buckets of sunflowers, and those weird pumpkins that look like they’ve been bleached, you know? And their gardener brought over a bunch of guys to move the hay bales. But then the catering truck got there. So that’s when we knew.”
“Oh shit.”
“Yeah,” Shray says.
“How bad?” I ask, as if there’s any degree of this situation that wouldn’t be a disaster.
“Steena invited Aubrey’s entire grade. And then some. Plus, all the real estate people they work with and people they sold houses to. Basically, the whole fucking town is there.” Shray whispers the word fucking because his mom doesn’t like it when he curses.
“Carter?”
Shray nods. “I was not invited.”
I think he’s hurt, even though he knows it’s about Steena, not Aubrey.
“Well, I wasn’t invited either,” I say.
Shray looks at me and sighs. “I’m really sorry I didn’t call you… or like, stop by. I worried if I did, and Aubrey found out, she’d be mad at me too, and then she wouldn’t have anyone.”
“That was good thinking,” I tell him. “You’re a really good friend.”
“But I missed you, Aunt Frey!” He leans over and tries to hug me while I’m driving but backs off when the car swerves.
“I missed you too, Shray,” I say when I get us righted on the road. “How is she?”
“She’s not, like, in danger, just miserable. She says they’ve kind of been on their best behavior, but Steena does this thing where she acts like she’s being nice and just, like, chips away at her.” Shray sounds mystified.
“Yes,” I tell him. “I have experienced that thing.”
Shray, I realize, has not experienced behavior like that. Not from family at least, because the Singhs are kind people who love each other. It’s their goal to protect their family members from hurt, which is so far from my family’s objective that I think we should have called ourselves something different. If the Singhs are a family, we were a cesspool of genetic overlap. I’ve spent so much time in my life worrying that my family might not have been bad enough to justify walking away. I never thought about how they weren’t good enough to keep me happy and healthy and here. And I know they haven’t been good enough for Aubrey either.
Shray also says that Steena and Charlie haven’t let Aubrey see him outside of school. They forced her to quit her job at Gristedes. Steena makes her take the bus from school to the real estate office and do her homework in the waiting room. They confiscated her cell phone and bought her a new one, and Aubrey is pretty sure they can track her whereabouts and read all her text messages. But she’s been playing along because they took her to the DMV to get her permit on Tuesday. She’s also funneling her belongings from home to school so Shray can sell them at the junk shop for her.
“Hey, check it,” Shray says before we get to Steena’s street. “Turn here.”
The road is unmarked and unpaved. It snakes up the back of the hill. There are tree-cleared lots, but no houses, weeds growing tall in the dirt.
“They’re held up on building permits,” Shray says. “Aubrey parks up here when she needs to get things from the house. Sneak attack. No one will see us coming.”
I wonder if Wells Realty and Development is actually held up on permits, or if this stalled project is a way for Charlie to keep someone else from building behind his house while also claiming a tax loss.
“Development is as much about where you don’t build as where you do,” I heard him telling my father at Sunday dinner once. Step nodded along as if Charlie was imparting the secrets of the universe.
We park at the end of the empty cul-de-sac. As we trudge through the sparse woods toward the house, we can hear that Black-Eyed Peas song about getting a party started blasting from outdoor speakers. Steena and Charlie’s lawn is lit up like a carnival with patio heaters glowing and strings of lights crisscrossed overhead, so night looks like day and the cold has lost its edge.
“See,” Shray whispers, pointing to the hay bales set up like tables with burlap runners and bouquets of sunflowers. The seats are sliced logs.
There’s a scattering of smokers outside: adults among the hay bales, kids in the shadows by the woods, a cater-waiter in black and whites with his back to the wall of the house, hoping to go unnoticed.
On the patio there’s a DJ stand, a bar, and two lines of catering tables filled with dip trays and chafing dishes. Hanging over the French doors to the living room, a huge burlap banner reads, Happy Sweet Sixteen, Aubrey! in Steena’s perfect, sweeping script.
Shray splits off to look for Aubrey in the house where most of the guests are milling around. There’s no way Steena will recognize him with hair-colored hair, and she can’t possibly know every kid she invited.
I head toward the patio but catch sight of Uncle Angelo making a plate for himself at the catering tables, the cigar in his teeth shedding ash into the chafing dish. I turn and walk the other way.