All We Had (2 page)

“So what?” I failed to see what else was new.

“We-have-no-money.” She enunciated loudly and slowly as if I were deaf, then picked up her cigarette and sucked on the end of it so hard the hollows of her cheeks caved in.

“Fine!” I shrieked. “I'll go by myself.” I grabbed my bags and
dragged them toward the door.

Usually our fights escalated rapidly until we were shouting the single word
jerk
back and forth at each other, as if we were married. But this time, there was silence. The only sound was the
tick, tick, tick
of the knife on the chopping board.

“My hand is on the doorknob!” I yelled. “I'm turning it! I'm pulling the door open! Have a nice life! Good-bye, adios, arrivederci, sayonara!”

A truck sped by in front of me. An empty Bud can rattled along the curb behind it. A cloud of exhaust and the bitter smell of gasoline lingered in the street. The sun felt hot enough to burn the earth to ashes. The air was so stifling, I could barely breathe. My eyes fell out of focus. The city sounds of traffic moaned and slowed until I could hardly hear them. But the sound of my mother's knife on the cutting board grew louder. My tactics usually worked, but I feared today they wouldn't.

I took a step out the door.
Flap, flap, flap.
In the other room, the wheel of fortune spun around.

We had planned our whole lives out together. We dreamed someday we'd own a house. My version of it was always yellow with black shutters for contrast. A custom-made welcome mat would sit in front of the door with our names—Ruthie and Rita Carmichael—written in script at an angle. In my mother's version the house was white and our names were written on the mailbox. But we both agreed: our house would sit back from the road on a corner at a pleasing angle and we'd have a pool.

“Bye.” I swallowed. I started to close the door behind me when her chopping stopped.

A long moment passed.

“Wait,” she finally called. “I'm coming.”

“Okay, that's it, come on. Let's go, move it, fast, before he gets home.” I knew the drill. My mother traveled with a tattered old suitcase and two garbage bags and I was lugging her last one. She stood in the doorway and waved me on. I headed for the car but when I realized she wasn't following me, I went back and found her waddling out of the kitchen with the TV resting on her belly. “We can sell it at the pawn shop,” she said.

So I looked around and grabbed the closest thing—a toilet-bowl-shaped ashtray with a figure of a man squatting over it with his pants down. “He's shitting cigarette butts,” Phil had said. “Get it?”

“That's it,” my mother said, “just that one thing, now let's go.” I ran my ashtray out to the car and when I turned around my mother was stumbling down the walkway. She was now balancing the TV with one hand on her hip. In the other hand she carried a lamp. “I really like this.” She lifted it slightly to show me. So I ran back in for another ashtray.

And, even though my mother had sworn we'd never do this again, before we knew it we were robbing him.

CHAPTER TWO

Deliverance

W
hen I think about my mother, I think about our car—a 1993 Ford Escort. It was the only thing we owned. I was ten when we bought it from a lot on West High Street. The salesman had thick leathery skin with lines crisscrossing his face as if a kid had scribbled on him with a Sharpie.

He kept telling my mother how everything about the car was deluxe. The seats, the windows, the wipers—even the blower for the AC and heat were all high-speed and deluxe. But he had a really big lisp so the word sounded more like
de-lux-thh
. I remember the visible splatter of spit. It was gross.

My mother didn't notice, though. She was too busy admiring the car. Walking around it, coquettishly grazing her fingers over the hood.

“Do the seats go back?” she asked, batting her eyes, donning a fake Dolly Parton southern accent.

I don't know how she did it, but if just one person from Lifetime TV could see her acting, she'd become a superstar overnight.

Her performance that day was so good it took her only ten minutes.

“A woman's gotta do what a woman's gotta do,” she said, emerging from his office, swaying her hips and dangling the keys off her fingertips. Back than I had no idea what that meant. “It's just the way life works,” she added, which cleared up exactly nothing.

As I got older her explanations became less wordy. “I only blow them, I don't fuck them. There's a difference, you know.”

We stopped and sold what we could—Phil's DVD player, sound system, and old laptop. The rest of it, the guy said, was junk. So we put it back in the car and made our way past all the neighborhood places—the laundromat where the owner shook her cane and cursed if you didn't clean the lint tray, the
cash checks here!
and
cell phones for cheap!
place, and Glamour Glitz, where my mother once worked sweeping hair. Broken-down cars sat on cinderblocks in every other driveway. Engines, batteries, spark plugs, and cables were strewn about like guts. Brightly colored plastic baby crap cluttered the front yards of run-down houses. We rode by shacks and empty parking lots and a spattering of makeshift churches with hand-painted signs,
jesus has risen!
and
jesus saves!
and one that just had his name spray-painted at an angle across the door.

My mother loved to drive her car. There was a dent in the middle of the hood, a rattle in the trunk, and once in a while the car backfired. But she would steer it, palm open on the wheel, as if she were gliding down Hollywood Boulevard in a Cadillac.

That day, though, she looked as if she'd just buried a friend.
She sat stiff and grim in her seat. The road in front of us, littered with garbage, reflected in her sunglasses. Her jaw jutted forward. She looked straight ahead but I could tell she was seeing noth
ing.

“You didn't love him,” I ventured.

She shook her head. “What do you think, life is one big Hallmark moment? Pfft,” she sputtered. “
Love,
that's a good one.”

She went back staring dismally out the window. I let some time pass before I spoke again.

“He had a pencil dick,” I reminded her.

“I could have dealt with that,” she said.

“His mustache was always covered with crud.”

“He wiped it off,” she argued.

“His crack was always showing and he had pimples on his neck.”

“No, he didn't.”

“Yes, he did. I saw one.”

She mumbled something to herself and shook her head again.

My mother's mood could backslide fast. I waited, then tried a more subtle approach.

“You know what I think? I think our pool should have a slide.”

The mere thought of having a pool could bathe my mother with light. “A pool . . .” she'd sigh, a glint twinkling in her eyes. But this time, nothing in her stirred.

“We could build an outdoor bar,” I added. With this she glanced at me. “And we could get those giant umbrellas to set up everywhere.”

She considered this. “Would they tilt?”

“Of course!” I said a little overenthusiastically. “We wouldn't
think of having any other kind. And we could get those rafts—you know, the ones that have a place to put your cocktail.”

“I love those,” my mother said as I knew she would.

“It's going to be awesome. We'll put a cabana on one end and a snack bar on the other and maybe we'll have a diving board, too.”

A few minutes went by. We were driving under the overpass to Route 57. The beams above were streaked with bird shit, some of it dripping and wet.

“You know what . . .” she said. She pulled the car over, put it in park, took her sunglasses off, and twisted in her seat to look at me. Through the seam in the pavement above us a sliver of light fell across her face. It flickered like a strobe as the cars
thump-thump-thumped
overhead.

“I've been thinking. You're right. I think it's time for a change of scenery. What are we waiting for? We have a car and we have money now.” It was true, we got $950 for Phil's stuff and we hardly ever had that kind of ready cash. “And you know what else?” my mother added. “I think it's time you and I head to Boston. We're going to end up there anyway.”

My mother was not certain about much, but one thing she knew for sure was that I was smart enough to get into any college, and Boston, according to her, had all the best schools.

She and I had lived on and off the street, or in shelters. We moved in and out with boyfriends—sometimes with breathtaking speed. The few times that we could afford to rent our own apartment never lasted. Even when my mother worked four jobs, it was hard for us to pay our rent. And we never stayed in one place for more than six months. But I hardly ever missed a day of school. She made certain that every school system knew who I was and where the bus should pick me up.

“Yup.” My mother nodded, agreeing with herself. “Harvard is going to hand you a scholarship, I just know they are.”

I didn't really see how I'd end up in college, but the thought of it could bring her out of any slump.

“Maybe when I graduate, I'll become a doctor,” I said.

“Oh my God. I was just thinking the same thing. You'd make an excellent one.”

A smattering of garbage blew down the street and sprinkled the hood of the car. She grabbed her pack of cigarettes off the dashboard, lit one, then pitched the match out the window. “I'm even thinking that when we get to Boston,” she said, shifting the car into gear, “once and for all”—she took a long hard drag—“I'm going to quit smoking.” She blew the smoke sideways out the window. “Dammit, let's do it.” She stepped on the gas and we drove out from under the dark overpass and into the light of the wide-open freeway.

We went from zero to sixty in no time. I was out of school and she was out of work. We had no place to be and not a thing to lose.

With the windows open, strands of my mother's hair flicked and flashed in the sunlight, trailing behind her like ribbons. In between places was my favorite place to be. With the past behind us and the promise of better things ahead, few things ever felt as good.

I stuck my head out the window. The rush of air whipped around my face, flapped my lips, and made my eyelids flutter.

Gas tanks and power grids raced by. Mounds of gravel zigzagged across the earth and cranes punctuated the sky at sharp
angles. When the city receded in my mirror, it couldn't go fast enough.

My mother glanced over at me and smiled. She reached forward, pushed a CD into the player, and turned the volume up.

“
We—are—fam-i-ly. I got all my sisters with me!”
Sister Sledge—our favorite and the theme song to our lives—blared out. We swayed and sang the lyrics at the top of our lungs. The freeway widened, the landscape emptied out. The engine hummed
and I pictured the car lifting off the ground. We'd sail across mountains and by clouds, we'd dip in and out with the birds. “Look, there's China!” I'd shout. We'd hover just long enough to wave at all the people. Then we'd surge into orbit, leaving only the rush of sound and a white, wavy streak in the sky behind us.

This was how our story always went. With the wind at our backs we soared like bandits narrowly escaping through the night. And no matter where life took us or how hard and fast the ride, we landed and we always stayed together.

Daylight faded. The sky became a show of waning color. Yellows shimmered into blues. The sun singed the underside of clouds with orange. Poetry was everywhere.

Then,
boom!
—the car backfired. A burst of sparks erupted from the tailpipe.

“Oh my God!” I yelled. “We're on fire!” My mother looked in her rearview mirror. When she swerved off the road and slammed on the brakes, an assortment of Phil's shit went flying.

She grabbed her purse and we both jumped out. Smoke poured from the back end. My mother thought fast. She clicked
in her heels to the passenger side of the car, ducked in the window, and grabbed her supersize Diet Coke from the holder.

“Stand back!” she yelled. In a single dramatic motion, she chucked the top on the ground and pitched the Coke at the muffler.

With a startling pop and a hiss, a giant vaporous cloud enveloped us and we doubled over choking. My mother took her bag off her shoulder, covered her mouth, and coughed into it.

Her purse was black vinyl, and oddly shaped like a giant pork chop. She never went anywhere without it and, like a man with a Swiss army knife, she used it for everything. She jammed parking meters and fixed vending machines by batting them hard on the side with her bag. I'd seen her use it as a weapon. She'd wind it up, let it go, and with the shoulder straps flying, it'd spin through the air until
bam!
she'd hit her target every time. She used it as a pillow on the bus. She swatted flies and shaded her eyes from the sun with it. I'd seen her hold it up against the wind and rest it on her head when it rained. And sometimes it just punctuated her mood. She'd fling it fast and hard on the ground, or lob it, tired and slow, on the couch.

“For Chrissake.” She flapped her bag up and down this time, using it as a fan.

“Really,” I coughed, “who knew Diet Coke was so toxic?”

Once it was safe, my mother inched her way forward. Clutching her purse, she bent over slowly and peered underneath the car.

It was almost dark by then. The freeway had quieted. A warble of insects pulsed through the air.

“The muffler's dragging on the ground,” my mother reported from her bent-over position. She stood up and pushed her bag
back on her shoulder. She put the key in the trunk. It popped and with a creak, slowly opened.

When we robbed Phil, we ended up with a lot of worthless stuff like his coffee mugs that said
my love is like diarrhea, i can't hold it in
. “Collector's items,” he'd claimed. We stole his blender that only worked when the kitchen light was on and his toaster that set the toast on fire if you didn't dig it out.