All We Had (7 page)

“You can have the whole fucking lot,” Arlene said to my mother about men. It was the last Friday in June. The restaurant was empty. My mother and Arlene were standing up against the wall. “I'm through with them!” When Arlene was off again with her husband like she currently was, complaining about men was her favorite thing to do.

Mel suddenly appeared from the kitchen without his baseball cap, smelling of cologne, and Arlene stopped talking. She watched him leave through the front door and back out of his parking space. When his tailgate disappeared around the bend, Peter Pam burst headlong through the kitchen doors.

“I can't believe we almost forgot!” Arlene said.

And the two of them sprang into action.

Arlene pulled out a white tablecloth from under the counter and handed it to me. “Here. Go put that on the table by the
window over there. And you,” she said to my mother, “get some fresh bread and butter.” Peter Pam walked around and spritzed the air with pine-scented air freshener. Arlene turned down the lights and set the music to smooth jazz. Everything was done in such a flurry, it took them a while to tell us what all the commotion was about: Svetlana was coming. Once a month, Mel picked her up and brought her back for an early dinner. And apparently she liked things just so.

It took twenty-three minutes for Mel to return with her. Arlene and Peter Pam knew this exactly because the minute before they arrived, we were instructed to put on clean aprons and stand behind the counter. Two seconds later, Mel pulled up to the restaurant.

Peter Pam and Arlene talked about Svetlana nonstop. Some of their most heated conversations were about her accident.

When Svetlana was young, she was an aspiring Olympic gymnast. But just before the trials she took a tumble down a flight of stairs and twisted her knee. According to Peter Pam, the injured knee sent her into a depression so deep that she threw herself in front of the truck on purpose. Her “
accident”
was no “
accident”
at all.

According to Arlene, she'd landed on her feet at the bottom of the stairs and a squirrel had caused the truck to swerve and hit her. As evidence, she'd cite the dead one they found plastered to the grill of the truck when they pulled it from the water where it had skidded off the bridge. But Peter Pam would point out there were no skid marks. They'd debate the time of day, the weather conditions, and the angle of the truck where it landed in the river, each building evidence to support their arguments.
The only thing Peter Pam and Arlene agreed about on the topic of Svetlana was that she was mean to Mel.

“He treats her like a queen and she barely looks at him,” Arlene said.

“Mm-hm, that's right,” Peter Pam nodded, as if this were church gospel.

“Why he hasn't wheeled her off and left her somewhere, I'll never know,” Arlene continued.

But just watching him, I could tell that no one had a sense of duty quite like Mel.

He got out of his truck, walked around, and opened the passenger door. When he ducked into the car, I held my breath and watched as he lifted this mythical creature out.

Svetlana was much younger than Mel. She was small and delicate and looked weightless draped in his arms. With an air of grace and drama, her fuchsia scarf grazed the ground. Mel carried her across the parking lot as if he were her knight and she his Russian ballerina.

“Whatever you do, don't make eye contact with her, she hates that,” Arlene whispered to us as Mel came through the door.

Mel gently placed Svetlana in the chair facing the window. He settled her at the table, unfolded her napkin, and spread it on her lap. Then he made his way to the kitchen, put his apron on, rotated his cap backwards, and cooked for her. When he was done, he sat with her and watched her eat. She didn't look at him and he didn't speak to her.

At the end of her meal, he carried her out, then lowered and placed her in the seat of his truck. And before he shut her door, he straightened her scarf and kissed her on the forehead. It was spellbinding to watch them together.

“I had no idea men like him existed, did you?” my mother whispered.

“No,” I breathed.

“He's a good one,” Peter Pam agreed, overhearing us.

“Why do all the bitchy girls get the nice guys?” Arlene asked, throwing her towel down and walking off. “For once in my life, I'd like to know.”

CHAPTER NINE

Home

F
at River wasn't much of a town. It had a hardware store, a gas station, a liquor store, and a bakery that was never open. It was not the sort of place my mother and I would ever live, but six weeks went by and my mother's tips remained good. Her jaw muscles relaxed and her shoulders dropped. For the first time in a long time she and I were saving money. In early August, when we discovered we had enough to rent our own place, my mother finally agreed to stay.

The only realtor in town, Frank O'Malley, worked and lived in a small space above the liquor store on Main Street. It was a Saturday when we drove to his office. We went to the back and up a flight of stairs like he told us to. My mother knocked on the door, but his TV was blaring and he couldn't hear us. She opened the door, stuck her head in, and yelled hello, but nothing happened, so we finally just went in.

The office was dark. A layer of dirt diffused the light from the skylight. A brownish hue languished in the air. His desk was
large and oak. Two tattered old leather chairs sat at slight angles facing it.

My mother yelled hello again and the volume on the TV finally went down. A few minutes later, the wall of heavy curtains behind his desk parted and Frank O'Malley appeared.

“I didn't hear ya,” he barked with an Irish accent.

He was a sturdy, graying redheaded man. Wires of hair sprouted off him in all directions, from his eyebrows, his ears, his temples. A fine tangle of red capillaries colonized the tip of his bulbous nose.

“I've just the place for ya,” he said when we explained what we were looking for. “It'd suit ya right down to the ground. And I'd be obliged if ya took it off my hands.”

He started going on about the owners and looking for the keys. The house, he explained, ducking behind his desk, checking all the drawers, was owned by the children of the family who originally owned it. Never a good thing, he stood up red-faced and told us. One of the siblings, he said, opening and closing drawers again, would call him and say they were going to sell it, then another would call and tell him, no they weren't. And it went on like that until he'd spoken to nearly all eight of them. As a result the house had been vacant for years. But our timing, he told us, was perfect. The family had taken a final vote, and for once a majority decided to keep it. Just last week, they'd put it up for rent.

Normally a long-winded story like this would bore me, but I could never resist the lilt of an Irish accent. And his was like music to my ears.

We had waited a lifetime for this. And here it was: me and my
mother together making enough money to rent a decent place and pay our bills.

“Ah!” Frank O'Malley stood up with the keys in his hand. “I knew I had these bloody things in here somewhere.”

The house was at the end of a dead-end in a cluster of prefabs and double-wides scattered like dice. Ours was the smallest on the street. A tiny one-bedroom built on a patch of earth that wasn't level, the house leaned a little to the left. The road wasn't paved either. It was gravel, and in some places, just dirt. There were overgrown shrubs under the windows and a pant leg of ivy grew up the trunk of an old oak out front. The house had light-blue aluminum siding so faded that parts of it looked white. But we fell in love with it right away. It was fully furnished. There was a couch to the left as you walked in, and to the right, in the front window, a table and two chairs. And there was a color TV at the foot of the bed, which was awesome because TV in bed was our favorite.

The sun was high and bright the day we moved in. The sky was clear and its color seemed deeper and richer than ever, like a million different blues mixed into one.

“After you, madame,” my mother said at the front gate. She bowed and pantomimed me forward. We could not believe our luck. We'd arrived at a place called home, and we had gotten there together.

The gate was freestanding and wobbly. You had to pick it up on its hinges to open and close it. There was no fence attached; it would have been easy to walk around it. But on the day we moved in, we made a big deal about walking through it.

“Oh, no, please, after you,” I insisted, mimicking her.

We went back and forth like that for a few minutes. I can't remember who finally entered first, but I do remember this:

The gate creaked and clicked when it closed and this seemed to set a whole world in motion. In the tree above, a mourning dove twittered away, leaves scattered, church bells rang in the distance.

“Yoo-hoo!” a voice called behind us.

When we turned, a woman was there, standing inside the gate as if she'd been lowered into place from above.

“Hi!” she chirped. “I'm Patti with an
i
.”

Patti with an
i
looked to be around twenty-five. She wore tight jeans and a pair of red flats. Her eyes were heavily outlined with blue liner, and a high ponytail erupted from the top of her head in a celebration of hair, like fireworks. She stood in the middle of the walkway, holding a plateful of brownies on the palm of her hand like a waitress.

“I live over there with my husband and kids.” She rotated with her plate, pointing kitty-corner across the street to a place that had all kinds of Big Wheels and scooters out front.

As she turned to face us again, the door to Patti's house flew open and a gaggle of kids—maybe three or four of them—spilled out. One of them ran across the street and plowed into her but she didn't seem to notice. She swayed like a pine tree and when she settled back down, her ponytail recovered to the top of her head. Somehow, she'd kept the platter of brownies perfectly still.

Another door across the street opened. Patti's next-door neighbor stepped out of her house. Behind her, a little dog jumped back and forth in the window, yapping at regular intervals.
“That's Pancake,” Patti explained. “He's a six-pound Chihuahua who acts like he weighs eighty. If it wasn't for the funny look on his face, he might actually be frightening.” Even from across the street, I could see the dog's pink tongue hanging out the side of his mouth.

“I can't say that about his owner, Miss Frankfurt. Now, she's scary.”

I looked over at the woman descending her front steps. Wearing a beige housedress, she was set low to the ground and bottom heavy like a butternut squash.

“She's an ex-nun and the principal of Fat River High, and before that my English teacher. The whole town knows her as the Grammar Nazi. She'd flunk you if you didn't dot your
i
's, which was how I got in the habit of dotting my
i
with a smiley face,” Patti explained without taking a breath. “When we bought our house six months ago, I had no idea that she owned the one next door. Roger, my husband, says I'm obsessed with her. But he doesn't understand. He's not from this town. I feel like she's still watching my every move, just waiting to flunk me at something. I mean, it's like living next door to the pope.”

Across the street, Miss Frankfurt minded her own business. She picked up her garden hose, opened the nozzle, and a shower fanned out in a perfect unbroken arc. Each drop crested and caught the light before falling with a patter onto her flower bed. When she was done, she grabbed her newspaper off her stoop and went back inside.

Patti took a breath.

A pair of yellow moths caught her eye; one landed on her brownies.

“Oh my God,” she blurted as if surprised she still had them,
“I almost forgot. These are for you,” and she handed the brownies to my mother. “They got a little burnt around the edges and the bottom, but the middle of them should be pretty good.”

After that first batch of burnt brownies, Patti showed up almost daily with something equally inedible. At first she brought over whole things—a whole pie or tart—then she started bringing over pieces. And once she brought over just a few bites; a sad little pile of white frosting and cake. Before long, she just showed up empty-handed and she never knocked.

She'd stick her head in the door and yell, “Yoo-hoo?” as she let herself in. She usually came by first thing in the morning with her mug full of coffee. Initially we offered her a seat, but she always said, “Oh, no, I can't stay,” and then that's exactly what she'd do. She'd stand at the door smoking and talking nonstop.

One morning we saw her heading our way. She'd slipped on Roger's work boots and was wearing one of his flannel shirts. Her pale yellow nightgown billowed out beneath it as she swooped across the street.

“Quick,” my mother said as she locked our door, “in the bathroom.”

Patti and Roger had just gotten a new set of binoculars from Walmart. “It's amazing how sharp they are,” Patti had told us. She'd been using them to spy on Miss Frankfurt and every day she reported her findings in painstaking detail. “She eats cornflakes, without milk, for breakfast. She bends over and touches her toes every morning. She has a nightcap of whiskey before bed. She brushes her teeth up and down instead of sideways. Pancake sits on her lap when she reads. And she kneels at her
bed every night when she prays.” The details of Miss Frankfurt's life were endlessly boring.

“Yoo-hoo,” Patti called as she approached our door. When she discovered it was locked, she rattled the knob. “It's me. Anyone home?” She knocked and pulled at the knob again. “Rita, Ruthie, are you in there?”

Then she started making her way around the house, peeking in all the windows.

Just before she got to the bathroom, my mother and I stepped into the shower stall. Through a crack in the shower curtain, I watched her. She reached up, cupped her hands, and tried to peer in, but a layer of dirt coated the window. She took her fingernail, scraped off a peephole, and shoved her eye up to it. It blinked and looked around.

Then she stepped back from the window and yelled, “Are you guys okay in there?” A moment passed. She pressed her ear to the peephole and listened. “If you guys are in there and you can hear me, don't panic! I'm calling the police!”

A minute later we relented. My mother barely opened the door. “Oh, thank God,” Patti said, and wedged herself in. “I thought you were tied up in here or something. Didn't you hear me knocking?”

“Oh, we heard you all right,” my mother said.

Patti cocked her head and looked at her, trying to decipher what this meant, but she couldn't quite make the leap.

“Well, anyway, thank God you're all right.” Even though it was August, she stood there cupping her mug in a pair of pebbly gloves that didn't match. She had bad circulation in the morning, she'd told us.

I was making toast and my mother stood at the kitchen table
sorting through her stack of Crate and Barrel catalogs. She collected them and dog-eared almost every page.

“So, I gotta tell you guys something.” Patti took a sip of coffee, put the mug down, and lit a cigarette, preparing herself for what promised to be another longwinded story. “So last night she was getting ready for bed. At first it was the same old routine. She brushed her teeth, she let her hair down. But then”—Patti took a drag off her cigarette, widened her eyes, and paused for effect—“after she knelt and said her prayers, she had trouble getting up. She gripped the edge of the mattress, but her hands slipped and she fell backwards! She had to crawl across the floor and hoist herself up on a chair. It was like watching a disabled crab. It was horrifying! I tried to get Roger to look but he just threatened to take the binoculars away. ‘They're for the birds!' he shouted. But I can't help it.” Patti raised a hand to the side of her mouth and whispered conspiratorially, “I mean she lives right next door.”

She dropped her cigarette butt into her now-cold coffee. A single line of smoke rose up out of the mug with a sizzle. “Well,” Patti sighed. She reached up, divided her ponytail in half, and pulled both sides to tighten it. “I better go check my laundry.” Then she turned and walked out.