Chapter 5 #3
I stare at her. “Because that wouldn’t bring me peace. Just the opposite. So how can there be peace in the family if apologizing for my thoughts causes me distress?”
Mom’s shoulders slump. “Hattie.” She turns my name into an enormous sigh. An enormous, exhausted sigh.
And, all at once, my limbs feel like sandbags again.
Margaret’s wearing a ridiculous grin. But I don’t understand how she can look so happy when Mom looks so miserable and I feel like death.
In fact, I have to lie down. Right now.
“I have to lie down,” I say, using the remnants of my strength to push out of my chair. “I’m going to wait in the car.”
“Fine,” Mom says, in a way that signals it’s totally not fine.
But I’m about twelve seconds from collapse, and since lying down on the floor at Bon Temps Grill is not an option, I’m picking the car.
If people watch me leave, I hardly notice. It’s all I can do not to stagger, I’m so tired.
Outside, I crawl into the backseat of Mom’s white Chevy Tahoe like it’s a foxhole. The hem of my dress rides up before I can pull the door shut behind me, but I don’t even care.
My eyes are closed before I even stretch out across the seat.
I’m a spent shell casing, split open. All my powder burned away.
The air inside the Tahoe is still and silent, but I can hear the hum of traffic on Pinhook Road. Mom parked in the shade, but with all the doors closed, it won’t be long before I start sweating. But it’s October, not July, so I won’t die in here.
The phone in my pocket, pressed between my hip and the leather seat, buzzes with a text. I don’t move. It might be Beck. I’m tempted to check. Our text chats make me feel light and swoopy and cozy at the same time.
Like riding on a magic carpet.
But a conversation should be two ways, and I have nothing to give right now, so I’d hate to take what he’s giving and leave him on read. That would be shitty.
Besides, it’s just as likely that the text message is from Margaret. If it is, there’s a fifty-fifty chance she’s messaging to console me or to guilt me into coming back inside to salvage lunch.
Contemplating either option adds another block of emotional lead to my constitution. At this rate, I’ll never leave the Tahoe’s back seat.
Yet I both want Mom to come out so we can go home and also want her to never come out because I know she’ll want to talk, and I can’t even.
I sigh, sinking deeper into the backseat.
And then, like an acidic burp from the maw of my subconscious, Grandma Eloise’s parting words to Mom burble up.
You had better let Randall know about this before I do.
What did she mean by that? Was that a threat? It sure sounded like a threat.
My stomach dips, but not in the magic carpet ride way it does when I’m talking to Beck.
But in a way it would if I were crossing a sketchy rope bridge over a steep ravine somewhere in the and a dry-rotted plank gave way when I put my weight on it.
Because what am I missing about Dad knowing that I offended Grandma?
Why is that dangerous?
And suddenly, I’m reaching for my phone because not knowing is worse than anything.
“Siri, call Dad,” I say, so I don’t have to dial or look at the screen.
Why does it take so long for calls to connect?
And why is it that the connection time always seems to be the inverse of the urgency of the call?
Like if you’re calling your dad to ask him what flavor barbecue sauce he wants for Saturday’s cookout: Stubb’s or Lilly’s? The call connects in nanoseconds.
But when your blurted insult destroys—as your Mom puts it—“peace in the family,” and your grandmother actually threatens to tattle to your dad, and you don’t know why that’s significant, and maybe it means the tribal elders will be taking a vote to banish you, AT&T suddenly functions like it's run by a hand crank in a bunker a la Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt?
Finally, the inside of the Tahoe fills with the tinny sound of the call ringing through. Once. Twice. A third time.
And then I’m relegated to voicemail.
“Hi, you’ve reached Randy Mercier, CEO of Offshore Solutions. Leave a message, and I’ll get back to you soon—BEEP!”
Oh. God.
Now what?
Do I hang up?
But the call is already recording me. Recording dead air. And Dad might hear the empty static and think I’ve been kidnapped or something.
But then, do I just tell him to call me back and say nothing? And what if Mom—or worse, Grandma Eloise—talks to him first? Will they make it sound like I’m solely the one to blame for the dearth of family peace?
And what if I am? Will Dad be disappointed? Will he be angry? Will he be on Grandma Eloise’s side as she seems to assume?
Will this be one more reason to put me in a group home???
“Um… Hi, Dad… It’s Hattie…” For some unknown reason, I pause here like I’m expecting him to reply. Which is dumb because this is voicemail. Also, his phone will tell him it’s me, so I didn’t need to say It’s Hattie.
Shit. Shit. I should just hang up. Except I don’t hang up. Because if Mom is supposed to tell Dad before Grandma does, then I want to tell him before Mom does.
Right?
Speak on my own behalf?
Do an end-run?
“I really need to talk to you, um, because—” Here, I’m not sure how to continue, and I’m aware that my voice sounds a little thready and my nose is stinging. I’m about to cry, and that’s the last thing I want to do right now.
So I tell myself to hurry.
“I didn’t mean to, but I called Grandma Eloise a cranky old twat.
At lunch. At Bon Temps Grill. And I really, really didn’t mean to call her that.
I just think it sometimes… Maybe most of the time because she’s mean to me—like all the time.
And Mom said if I didn’t apologize to her like, deeply and unequivocally, and not just for saying what I thought, I’d be—I’d be—I don’t know what her exact words were, but I’d be wrecking the peace in the family. ”
I pause here because now that I’ve blurted what happened, I don’t feel I’ve made a very persuasive case on my behalf.
Or even explained why I’m calling and why this should involve Dad in the first place.
“I… I’m telling you because Grandma threatened Mom that if Mom didn’t tell you, she would.
And I don’t even know why that’s a thing, but it made me feel weird and af-fraid—” Here, my voice breaks because my throat is getting extra clogged with a whole lot of feelings. “So I’m telling you because… because….”
Wait. Why am I telling him?
“Because I don’t think calling your grandmother a cranky old twat is a reason why someone should be sent to live in a group home, and I know that’s what Grandma Eloise wants.”
And just like that, the ugly truth and the uglier certainty come out all at once like pus from a popped zit.
“She hates me, Dad—” And here my voice goes all wobbly and warped because I’m legit full-on crying.
“She hates me, and she just wants me to go away. And I don’t see how Mom can think it’s my fault there isn’t peace in the family when Grandma Eloise is trying to get rid of me. And I’m just… just so, so t-tired.”
It’s at this point in my sniveling snot fest that Mom opens the driver’s side door. And as soon as she sees the wreck I am, the look of disappointed disapproval on her face melts to one of disappointed pity.
“Oh, Hattie,” she says, climbing in before reaching between the front seats to put a hand on my knee. I don’t immediately wrench it away, but I don’t love it either.
But jerking away might give her another reason to think I don’t belong.
“M-Mom’s here. I have to go,” I sob into the phone. “Please don’t send me away.”
Mom makes an exasperated sound as I hang up.
“Hattie…” She’s frowning-but-not-frowning at me.
She had the same pained frown on her face that time she hit a feral pig. We were somewhere in Arkansas after she’d picked me up from Camp Ozark.
Mom had pulled over because at first she thought it was a dog. It wasn’t.
The car had struck the pig and knocked him into a ditch by the side of the road, but he wasn’t dead. We’d just broken his back. I’d had to cover my ears because the sounds he was making—a kind of squealing scream—was just awful.
And Mom didn’t know what to do, so she’d called my dad—with that exact look on her face.
I couldn’t hear what he’d said. But it involved pulling the car up the road, turning up the volume on the Kim Possible soundtrack, and telling me to keep my head down and my ears covered. She said to wait in the car, and she’d be back in a few minutes.
It didn’t occur to me until I’d heard the pop-pop what had happened.
But I’d sat up then, uncovered my ears, and looked back at Mom, holding the conceal-and-carry pistol she kept under the front seat of her car, walking back with that look still on her face.
That look she’s now giving me.
The look she’d given a doomed feral pig she had to put out of its misery.
And it hits me.
I am the doomed feral pig.