Chapter 2 #3
As I’d been with Everett at the bar, I’d finally received my answer.
“Calm down,” my mom had written, which didn’t explain anything and this situation was serious.
Before I’d left for school that morning, I’d spotted a notice rubber-banded to our front door—I must have missed it when I’d dragged myself through the garage in the dark the night prior.
It said we had ten days before the water would be turned off, and we obviously couldn’t let that happen.
We also needed gas and electricity, and nonpayment of bills wasn’t something that she could ignore and expect that I would ignore it, too.
That was why I waited for her the next morning after I’d gotten a little sleep, but not much because I was very worried about this.
I had called in and let Anita know that I was going to arrive late to the school.
Since she was the admin who knew everything about everything, she was probably also aware that I had lied when I’d said, “Um…I guess I have car trouble.” I hadn’t planned ahead and thought up an excuse, which had been an oversight.
So now, instead of piling my gear for the day into the back seat and rushing away, I sat at the table to wait for when my mom came in. I had breakfast laid out, too, because food sometimes made difficult discussions easier. “Hi,” I said to her when the door opened.
“I thought you’d be gone.” She took off her boots and then she moved toward the basement stairs to descend to her room.
“Mom, stop. We have to talk about the utilities,” I told her, but she kept going. “Mother!”
She had disappeared and I stood to follow her. But almost as soon as I reached the top of the stairs, she was coming back up.
“Good,” I said, relieved. “We can discuss this. We can figure it out.”
“There’s nothing to say, Zoey. I’m so tired.”
“I know that you are,” I commiserated. “Maybe you could try to switch shifts. It’s hard on you to work nights.”
“You’re not understanding. I’m tired of my life and I’m not doing this anymore.” She dropped the duffel bag that she’d carried from the basement and threw up her hands. “I’m not doing this, not any of it.”
“No, I don’t understand,” I answered slowly. “Why do you have that bag?” It looked stuffed, like she hadn’t been able to close the zipper all the way. Clothes poked out through the opening.
“Zoey? Are you still here?” Willow called. “Did you wash my black leggings? The ones with the pocket in the waistband?”
My mom swung her head in the direction of those words, coming from what had been her former bedroom with my dad. “Does that make it clear? She never shuts up!”
“I know that you’re still angry,” I said. “What happened wasn’t her fault.”
“No? It wasn’t mine either, and I’m tired of suffering for it!
I’m not an old woman. Not yet,” she told me.
“I can’t do it anymore. Here.” She bent and took a moment to rummage through the clothes in her bag.
The last time I’d seen that particular duffel had been years before, when we’d taken a family vacation to the beach in Alabama, but we hadn’t done anything like that in a long, long time.
I pointed to the envelope that she pulled free of a lacy bra, one I didn’t recognize from our laundry. “What is that?”
“Money,” she said. When I didn’t reach for it, she threw it onto the table. “I’m leaving.”
“You’re going out?” I asked, but when she failed to answer me, I suddenly understood that she meant something a lot more permanent. “Are you saying that you’re leaving us?”
She still didn’t answer.
“Where are you going? Why?” No, I already knew why. She’d been mad for years but I had managed to hold us together. “Why now?” I specified.
I watched her face soften. She smiled! “I met someone,” she told me. “We’re going to be together.”
“What…”
“You and your sister are both adults and you can take care of yourselves. You were always the smart one, Zoey. Don’t let this ruin your whole life like it almost ruined mine.” She glanced around the kitchen. “This place is a little hell.”
“It’s not that bad!”
“Zoey!” Willow yelled from her room.
“Don’t let it happen,” my mom echoed. “You have to get away, too.”
“I can’t ‘get away’ and neither can you! I’m your daughter, and Willow and I are sisters, and there’s no…where are you going?” My voice was shaking and it was loud. “Mom. Mom! Stop!”
She didn’t. She picked up her bag and she walked out of the house, escaping from our little hell.
I also escaped, but only to go to work. “Is your car fixed?” Anita asked me that afternoon. I was supposed to be making copies for the upcoming social studies lesson and the administrative assistant’s desk was near the machine, the one that wasn’t broken.
“What?” Oh, right, I had told her that lie. “It’s fine,” I answered.
“Good, I’m glad to hear it. And how is everything going in your classroom? No problems with Phil?”
“What have you heard?” I asked her, because things weren’t going so great at the moment.
My cooperating teacher seemed to be permanently angry at me and I wondered if she would tell me why he disliked me so much, if it was my bad teaching or if it was something about my personality that was doing it.
But she said that she was only checking in, and that she was available if I needed anything.
As it happened, I did. “I have a list of questions about the district, all specific and weird stuff. Could you help me answer them?”
She was happy to, and I listened and took notes but I was distracted.
I had been for the whole day, so I didn’t notice when Brent drew a picture of a penis on his tablet that overlayed a photo of a grain silo.
I only saw when the kids around him exploded in laughter, and then the cooperating teacher stepped in because we’d just had a serious talk about my struggle with behavioral interventions—in other words, I wasn’t doing discipline right, and he had more deficiencies to tell me about, too.
I remained distracted when I drove downtown after school, so I missed a good parking spot and had to circle around the block again.
Then, after I’d pulled in, I sat in my car for a moment and pressed my thumbs into my brow bone before I stepped out.
I realized I’d forgotten to lock it and went back before I walked to the coffee shop on the corner.
Everett Ford was already inside, with a cup of a thick, green liquid in front of him on the table. “I was surprised to hear from you already. You work fast,” he greeted me.
“Anita knows everything.” I took out my phone and noticed that my mom hadn’t responded to any of my messages. Had she blocked me? I opened the page of notes I’d taken as I’d talked to the nice admin at my school. “I could have just sent this to you.”
“I had time. Can I get you something?”
“No, thanks. I don’t like coffee.” I pushed my phone over to him. “Here, you can see what she told me about bullying during gym and parent dissatisfaction with the high school advanced math classes.”
Everett’s gaze moved down the screen, and he flicked it with his index finger. “This is interesting,” he said, which wasn’t very true but I was glad if it helped him. “It’s not my child.”
“What? What child?” I had a flashback to the first time he’d walked into Jannie’s bar, when I thought that he’d hit kids with his car because I hadn’t understood him. “What do you mean?” I asked cautiously.
“My wife—the woman who will soon be my ex-wife—had a son,” he said. “He’s four years old.”
“Oh.” I was still confused, but I’d been feeling that way ever since I’d found the notice from the water department on my front door yesterday.
“Does your ex-wife live in Michigan? Is that why her son might go to school here?” I remembered how beautiful she was when I’d seen her pictures and the clip from her movie.
I was sure that I would have noticed her around, but my sister always did say that I was clueless.
“No, they’re near Los Angeles. I’m trying to get custody of him,” he said.
“He doesn’t have a father?”
“His father died and Eris, my wife—my ex-wife—is a terrible mother. Don’t repeat that,” he said immediately. “Please don’t. Badmouthing her only hurts my case.”
“I won’t. Also, I don’t know her, anyone else in California, or anyone who would know anyone there. Are you very close to him?”
“I never got the chance to know him very well,” he answered. “Eris and I dated long-distance for a few months and we weren’t married for very long.”
“But even so, you really loved her. You fell apart when she dumped you,” I pointed out.
“I shouldn’t have gotten so worked up about it except yeah, I really did think that I loved her. I thought she loved me, too.” He stopped and looked down at my phone again. “You just got a text.”
I grabbed the phone, because it could have been from my mother—but it was only Willow, reminding me to pick up the eye cream that she wanted. I wasn’t going to since it was expensive and now we suddenly had only one income, unless Mom came back. I wrote to her again now.
“How do you know if someone blocked you?” I asked Everett.
“Eris didn’t block me. She likes to send pictures of the men she’s with, which is great for my custody case.”
“That’s good. I meant to say, how would I know if someone blocked me?”
“Oh. Is it your boyfriend?”
“No, it’s my mother. This morning, she walked out on my sister and me, so I’m trying to contact her to make sure that she’s definitely not coming back because I’m going have to sell her stuff and figure out how to pay all the arrears on our utilities.”
Everett seemed shocked. “This morning? Your mother walked out on you this morning?” I nodded but he shook his head. “Was that your sister at the football game? How old are you two?”
“Yes, that was my sister Willow, and she’s twenty.
I’m almost twenty-two so we’re not minors.
It’s not as if my mother did anything illegal if she did leave for real, for keeps.
The problem is that I found out we owe a lot of money, and it’s hard to deal with it all because everything is in her name. Including the house.”
“You’re extremely calm,” he said, and he stared at me suspiciously. “Are you being serious? Did this actually happen?”
“Yes. I better go,” I told him. When he had texted me for the first time, I had gotten way too excited because I’d envisioned a possible romance, but that was ridiculous and there was no time for that now anyway. “Did you get everything you wanted from me?”
“I…” He stopped. “I guess that I did.”
“I hope your custody dispute works out for the best for the little boy,” I said. “I need to leave because I have a lot to take care of. I probably won’t even go to classes tonight because there’s so much. It’s all on me.”
He nodded. I waited, but he didn’t say anything else, so I did leave. Maybe I would see him around town but maybe not. And I had so much on my mind that I probably wouldn’t even think about Everett Ford, not ever again.