Chapter 2 #3
“Hi pal,” I said, putting the back of my hand on his forehead to feel for a fever. “How are you doing?”
“It hurts!” he burst out, then flung his arms around my neck as I pulled him into my lap.
A while later, after extensive time in the bathroom and with a can of Vernors to settle his tummy, Charlie was finally asleep. Exhausted, I sat at the kitchen table, forehead in my hands. The car was dead. Roy could easily fire me if I kept skipping out on work.
What was I going to do? What was I going to do?
∞
“See, this is fun!” I huffed as we pedaled up a small hill on M-22. “I love bike riding!”
Charlie, red-faced and panting, glanced back over his shoulder at me and swerved off the narrow shoulder and into the road. “Look forward! Pay attention!” I shouted as another car sped past us. “Slow down!” I hollered as it disappeared over the top of the hill.
Charlie stopped. “No, not you, pal. I meant the car.”
He leaned his head onto the handlebars of his bike. “Emmy, I don’t want to ride anymore. I’m tired!”
I rubbed his sweaty back. It wasn’t very warm, but the hills sucked. And he had been up sick late into the night. “I know. We’re almost there. I have to get to the store. Martha opens at nine.”
I hadn’t made any progress about the car, so for this trip, at least, bikes were our only option. I had called around this morning, but none of the local tow places that had been open had quoted anything that I could afford. But the El D couldn’t sit in the parking lot of Roy’s forever.
I didn’t have a car back up plan. Charlie could take the bus to school, but I had to get to work. And get Cassie to her appointments. Charlie had to get to practice too, and there was not a public transit option. There were definitely things I missed about Ann Arbor.
“Let’s walk our bikes up then coast down.” He looked at me, then nodded, and started trudging up the hill. He was a little trooper. “Tara will drive us home when she’s done with her shift at the hospital,” I called to him. I saw his head nod tiredly again.
Finally we got to the top. I was feeling really glad we didn’t live in Colorado or some place with serious mountains. Not that I had ever been farther than Indiana.
Charlie stopped again. “Emmy?” he said in a small voice.
Uh oh. “Yes?”
“Remember when you asked me if I had eaten anything weird?”
Yes, the night before I had been afraid he had gotten into some kind of poison left over from my Nana, who liked to store stuff like plant fertilizer in a bag labeled “flour”. “Yes?” I repeated.
He looked at the ground. “Well…I ate the butter.”
“What? What do you mean, you ate the butter?”
Charlie looked as if he was going to cry. “Remember I wanted to have some by itself? And you said no. So I thought I’d just have a little piece, but then I ate a lot.” His voice had dropped.
“How much is a lot?”
“The stick,” he whispered.
“Charles Garrett Finn! You ate a stick of butter? No wonder you got sick!” Holy Moses, I had turned into Loretta. I just called him by all three names. “Charlie!”
A big tear dripped down his cheek. “I’m sorry.”
I reached over and ruffled his hair. This was exactly why you shouldn’t leave a child alone.
It was my fault as much as it was his. “Charlie, you know better. Don’t do anything like that again.
But as miserable as you were last night, I think you’ve been punished enough.
” Really, we had both been punished. As had the ancient plumbing system of our house.
He peeked at me through wet, spikey eyelashes. “I’m really sorry.”
“I know, sweet pea. And I know you’ll never eat another stick of butter. Mount up. We have a ways to go.”
By the time we made it to the grocery store for my shift, he was balanced on the seat of my bike and I was pushing both of them. We were both exhausted.
“Hi, hon,” my manager Martha called when we stumbled in. “Did you bring my favorite little boy with you?” She came to the front of the store to pass a cookie to Charlie, who took it and asked, “May I have some water, please?”
Martha stared at our red faces. “It must be warmer out than I thought.”
“No, it’s still pretty brisk,” I told her, heading to the back room to clock in. “But we had a little car trouble so we biked here.”
She eyed me. “Charlie, honey, Frankie came with me today. Can you give him his cookie, and maybe the two of you can head to the playground?”
Charlie looked at me for guidance. “Sure, pal. Stay together.”
Martha’s 18-year-old son was in the back room. “Hey, Frankie,” I said, as I grabbed my timecard and slid it into the ancient machine.
“You’re Charlie’s aunt,” he told me.
“Yep. He’s out front and he has something for you.”
Frankie had autism, and he and Charlie got along great. Most Saturdays, if we didn’t have a swim meet, Charlie would come with me to the NGS so they could hang out and eat the cookies Martha invariably served to them at nine in the morning.
Martha and I watched as they crossed the street, holding hands, to the windswept playground. Early spring up north was a little bleak. We could both keep an eye out while Charlie played and Frankie looked for and identified rocks. It was kind of his thing.
“Now,” Martha said, turning to me, “tell me about the car.”
“You can see it right there,” I told her, gesturing across the street and a few doors down. The El D sat lonely in the now-empty parking lot at Roy’s. “I’m not sure what’s wrong with it. Probably old age.”
“Watch the old age remarks,” Martha frowned. “Let’s see. What about my cousin near Glen Arbor? The one with all the junked cars in his field? He has a wrecker. He could pull your car back to his place take a look at it. He’s not a professional, but he won’t cheat you either.”
“Really? Martha, that would be amazing. It’s an arm and a leg to get the dumb thing towed to a repair place.”
“I’ll call him now. He’ll come by if I promise him some doughnuts, and he owes me a favor. If he can’t get it going, he’ll pay you for the scrap.” She frowned at me again. “You look tired, honey.”
Speaking of old age, I felt like I was a hundred years old myself.
By the time my shift ended and Tara came to pick up me, Charlie, and his gigantic pile of new library books, I wanted to lay on the sidewalk and sleep.
Tara insisted on walking over to Roy’s to see if she could do anything with the car, which was still as dead as a doornail.
She drove us home, chatting to me about a new website she found that specialized in jobs in academia.
“I’ll text it to you,” she said, and caught me shooting her the evil eye. “Just in case!”
We pulled up to Nana’s house, and I was in a much better mood than I had been leaving that morning, in spite of my exhaustion and Tara’s short harangue on “wasting my potential.” I felt so relieved by the idea that Martha’s cousin could fix the El D.
And it was a much easier trip in the front seat of a car rather than pushing a kid and two bikes.
“How are you going to get to work on Monday? I’ll be at the hospital already.” I shrugged an answer, my good humor evaporating again. “Think of Neil and the Escalade,” Tara advised me as we thanked her for the ride and unloaded the bikes. “It runs great.”
Charlie ran in, but I stood on the porch for a minute. It had been a few days since I had gotten the mail and I could see the box was getting full. I gritted my teeth and grabbed the stack of envelopes to sort on the kitchen table.
When I had been a kid, I had both loved and hated getting the mail.
I was constantly hopeful that there would be something for me—when I lived with my mom, I waited for a letter from my dad, saying he was coming back to us.
And when I lived with my dad, I waited for a note, a postcard—anything—from my mom.
Just a word to say she was ok. Each trip to the mailbox had been full of dread and anticipation.
Now it was all dread. Bill, bill, bill with red writing on the envelope.
Due, due, past due, past due, past due. Nothing from Mike.
I was trying to convince Cassie that if she didn’t want to divorce him, at the very least she could file for separate maintenance—a Michigan legal separation.
I tried to sell it as a “not really divorce.” Then we could start dinging him for some kind of support if he had a job.
I ordered the bills neatly by how long they were overdue, and put them into a pile on the table. I would deal with them later.
Charlie wandered in, looking bleary eyed. “Emmy, can I watch TV?”
I smiled a little at him. “Sure, pal. Relax for a bit.” It had been a long day.
I made Cassie a late lunch/dinner, and helped her take a bath.
She seemed to weigh even less than she had the day before, and she snapped at me for getting soap in her eyes then snagging her hair when I combed it out.
I hated combing it. I tried not to let her see how much of her beautiful chestnut hair was left in the comb after I ran it through.
I gave her the library books I had checked out for her, and the books on CD she could listen to on the ancient Discman I had unearthed in my quest to find something to sell in the house.
Cassie still didn’t want to see Charlie, and wouldn’t talk about why she hadn’t helped him the night before. “Emmy, I have cancer,” she told me, as if I had been unaware.
“I understand that, Cass, but—”
“I’m tired,” she said, and closed her eyes, resting her head on the towel I had placed over her pillow for her wet hair.
I looked out the window. Her room faced the back of the house, and from the bed she could see straight down into Nana’s moon garden.
Now, in early spring, the plants were just beginning to peek through, but pure white bleeding hearts, lily of the valley, white narcissus, and evening primrose would all bloom as the ground warmed up.
I still had some moonflower seeds that Nana always saved to plant along the fence.