Chapter 13 #3
“I’m not. Watch.” I quickly typed a reply: “What are you doing in California? Are you coming home soon?” I sent it and we both waited for a moment before I shook my head.
“She’s going to ignore that. She won’t answer many questions, but especially hard ones.
When she was in New Mexico, I asked if she was still with the same guy and she said yes, and then I asked if she’d sold my grandmother’s wedding ring and she didn’t respond.
I can’t find it so I’m pretty sure that she did sell it at one point.
It belonged to my dad’s mother, not hers, and he had wanted Willow to have it.
But he didn’t leave a will so…it doesn’t matter,” I said. “You should be home, sleeping.”
“You, too.” He looked around the lobby. “This pisses me off.”
“It’s not as nice as your house,” I agreed.
“I’m not talking about the motel. I mean all this bullshit with your mother and that lech,” he said.
“I don’t mind much about my mom,” I assured him. “We weren’t ever very close, so I don’t really miss her and I don’t care that she’s gone. It’s like how you are with your parents.”
“It doesn’t upset you. Nothing does,” he said, and I nodded. Then he took my fingers away from my head, where I’d been pressing very hard. “This thing with your cooperating teacher bothers me a lot. He prevented you from getting a job because you weren’t interested in screwing him.”
“No, I don’t think that was it. Or, maybe that wasn’t totally it,” I said. “He really believed that I was bad at teaching. He criticized me all the time, how I was interacting with students, how I lesson-planned, how I…how I did everything.”
“Because he was pissed that you rejected him.”
“Or because I really did a terrible job. But I’m applying to other places, and I’ll do better there.”
“You are? Where?”
I pointed to my laptop on the reception desk. “One district in Kansas is looking for someone immediately. I could get an emergency credential.”
“I thought you were going to stay for your ten-month contract in the cafeteria.”
“I probably will. This is just an idea,” I said. “Before, I was thinking that I had to be in Michigan for Willow, but she doesn’t need me now. She got a job.”
“Really? With no driver’s license or experience?”
“Boyd’s parents hired her,” I explained, and he nodded. “I hope she’ll work hard. Sometimes she needs pushing.”
“That won’t be your problem, though.”
No, it wouldn’t. “You should go home,” I said. I was still unsure about why he’d come at all. “I’m concerned about your sleep schedule.”
“Damn, Zoey. Jesus. You don’t need to worry about me, too.” He looked at the couch. “Maybe I’ll stay until you finish. Because then you’re driving home on those empty roads, and I was thinking about that, too. You should live closer to where you work.”
“Oh, ok. Yes, I’ll find a new place that’s closer. I haven’t spent enough of time lately looking at listings.”
“I don’t mean now,” Everett said. “Did you think that I was telling you to move out?”
I nodded.
“No, that’s not it. I don’t want you to be driving on those empty roads, that’s all I’m saying.”
I wasn’t exactly clear about his message.
He didn’t want me to live in his house with him, since it was far away, but he didn’t want me to move either?
I was sure about one thing, though. “You shouldn’t stay here tonight.
I can’t let you use one of the rooms because the cleaning service quit three weeks ago, and I know for a fact that the owner only made the beds and rehung the towels rather than changing them out for new ones.
And the bugs are back, roaches, so it’s very gross. ”
“This couch is good.”
“No,” I said, “it’s not. I’m pretty sure that I’m going to get fired tomorrow anyway, so you won’t have to worry about me driving home late anymore, except when I’m at Jannie’s.”
“That’s another—wait a minute, why would you get fired?”
“I already fell asleep a few times,” I admitted.
“I got warnings about it and last week, the owner saw me on the camera and came in through the back so that the sliding doors wouldn’t wake me and he could catch me at it.
He was very mad. It happened a lot over the summer, after the fire.
” The air in my apartment had been so thick with the smell that I’d woken up coughing, and I’d had terrible dreams, too.
“Anyway, he said that if it happened again, I was gone.”
“Good.”
“That’s not good,” I disagreed. “I need this job because I have to save to get a place of my own. If I’m going to move to another state, that will be expensive.
I’ll fit as much as I can into my car but I’ll have to buy a bunch of new stuff when I get there, and I’ll need gas and at least one new tire. ”
“You can’t drive to another state because your car is a piece of shit that’s about to fall apart, and you’re driving on those empty roads in it.”
“Why are we talking about the empty roads again?”
“I don’t know!” Everett exploded. “I don’t know why I got so worried that I couldn’t sleep, and now I’m thinking about your mother running around the country and not answering you after she left you with all those electric bills.”
“She took my money, too,” I added. “I had been giving her most of my salary for rent and utilities, but—”
“Damn. Jesus! What the hell is wrong with her?”
“She was angry,” I explained. Kind of like he was, right at this moment. “She thought she deserved something better than being stuck in a house she’d never liked, with my dad dead, and with me a disappointment and Willow injured.”
That explanation made things worse. “So she took your money. She took your fucking money?”
He’d gotten even louder. “We only have two guests right now, but you can’t yell,” I admonished.
“I wouldn’t have given her so much every month, except she’d told me that she had big mortgage payments to make on the house.
I found out after she left that my grandparents had it paid off years ago, but then she’d gotten some loans and used it as collateral.
Maybe that’s why she keeps moving around,” I mused, “so that they can’t find her and repossess more stuff like they did to her car. ”
“How much money do you need?”
I shook my head. “None.”
“I mean, how much did she take from you?”
“I never figured out an exact amount. Why does it matter?” I wondered. “It’s gone now. She keeps complaining to me about prices and how much she has to spend, so she must not have it anymore.”
“It sounds like there has to be something criminal about that. We should call the police.”
“I gave it to her freely,” I said. “Anyway, I wouldn’t want my mom to go to jail. She really did have a hard life.”
He muttered a lot of words that were more of the bad swears I’d heard the first time we’d met.
“Why are you so angry about this? Why are did you come to the motel and why are you going batshit whacko?” I asked. “I don’t understand.”
“I was looking at your dinner plate in the sink and I saw that you didn’t finish your food.
You ran home and made a meal for us but you didn’t have time to eat it yourself,” Everett answered.
“Then I went to the garage because I couldn’t find my phone, and I saw all those boxes with the smokey stuff in them. ”
“I’ll get rid of—”
“No, I don’t care that it’s out there,” he said. “But I was thinking about everything you owned getting ruined. It’s family stuff, pictures and papers.”
“A lot belonged to my dad,” I agreed. “I have Willow’s things, too, that I thought she might want someday. She might decide to risk getting stretch marks to have kids, and they would like to see her old dolls and toys, or some of her baby clothes.”
“And you’re trying to rehab all that, to clean it up for her. Is your stuff in there too?”
“Not much is mine,” I said, because my mom hadn't saved any of the things from my childhood. “Do you have a lot of mementos?” I imagined him as a baby, with his brown eyes and his dimple, and curly hair that stood up in the cutest way you had ever seen.
“Uh…I think so. I think it’s in my grandma’s house, in one of her attics. She had albums of pictures printed out and stuck down. She used to make me look at them.” He had calmed slightly, and I was glad enough that I smiled. “You remind me of her.”
I lost that expression immediately. “You’ve said so before.”
“Actually, you’re not at all similar,” he told me.
“You don’t look alike and you don’t talk the same way.
Your personalities are very different, because she was pretty lazy.
” He smiled. “I guess the only thing you have in common is that you’re both so nice.
She would have liked you. She always hated all my friends and my girlfriends, too. But she would have liked you a lot.”
I found myself smiling again. “Thank you.”
“If you’re going to get fired anyway, why don’t we get out of here?” he suggested. “My couch is a lot more comfortable and nothing’s happening at this place. You only have an hour left. Text your boss and say you’re done.”
“I don’t like being here at night, alone,” I confessed. “I could get another job instead.”
“You should be home at night, safe,” he answered as he stood. “Let’s go.” He reached out his hands to me.
I took them.