Bad Apple (14 page)

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Grandpa Joe is sitting up and seems focused on what I’m saying, which I hope is a good sign. He’s dropped ten pounds he can’t afford to lose since he’s been in the hospital, but he manages a couple of bites of the cupcake that I brought for him. It’s a cupcake I found in my locker and saved especially for Grandpa. The doctors say every bite counts, and these cupcakes have an obscene pillow of buttercream frosting.

“More cupcake, Grandpa?”

“I think I’ve had enough for now.”

“Come on. When have you ever refused dessert in your whole life?”

“Maybe some water.”

I swallow my disappointment and carefully wrap the cupcake in a napkin in case he wants another bite later. Then I take the cup of water and hold the straw so he can
take a sip. I wipe the drips from his chin with the sleeve of my favorite tattered sweater.

“Thank you,” he says. “What day is it? How long have I been here?”

“I don’t know exactly,” I tell him. “A couple of weeks?”

“I feel like it’s been a month. Or a year.”

“I feel like that, too, Grandpa.”

“Where’s Grandma?”

“Getting soda from the machine in the cafeteria with Mom and Madge.”

“Oh,” he says, and suddenly closes his eyes. Each time he does this, my heart starts to pound. Sometimes I run out into the hallway where they have the monitors for the whole floor mounted on the wall so that the nurses can keep an eye on the patients’ vitals. I watch to make sure that
his
heart is still beating, that the waves dart up and down the way they should, as if I actually know what that would look like.

His eyes flash open, and he tries to sit up higher in the bed. I’ve watched the nurses help him a million times, so I do what they do: I grab the sides of the quilted pad laid beneath him and use that to haul him up rather than tugging at his arms and at the delicate skin that hangs like swaths of wrinkled cotton from his bones. It’s harder than it looks.

“You’re getting good at that,” he says. I have to lean in close to hear him. “Wouldn’t think you’d be so strong.”

“I’m
your
granddaughter.”

“True,” he says. “So what’s going on with that teacher of yours?”

“Oh, nothing. He quit. He found another job, I think.” As I say this, my voice cracks. But Grandpa doesn’t notice. He’s closed his eyes again.

“How’s everyone doing?” my mom says from the doorway. Her voice sounds like she’s forcing it through clenched teeth.

“Okay,” Grandpa breathes. Grandma Emmy comes in and holds his hand. Madge paces in the background.

“He ate some of the cupcake I brought,” I say.

“Yeah, now he’s cured,” Madge mutters.

Mom ignores Madge. “That’s great, Dad.”

“I think I might have an emergency,” he says, trying to throw the sheet off.

“Let me get a nurse,” Mom says.

“I need to use the bathroom,” Grandpa says.

“It’s no problem,” says Mom. “Let me help you.”

“I don’t need help,” he says.

“Yes, Dad, you do. You’re not strong enough to walk on your own.” She suddenly notices me and Madge. “Give us some privacy, girls.”

Madge grabs me by the elbow and drags me from the room. When we’re out in the hallway, she says, “Nice going.”

“What do you mean?”

“The cupcake?”

“He has to eat,” I say.

“It goes right through him.”

I’m sick of Grandpa being sick. And I’m sick of Madge being Madge. I’m so sick of her that the sickness is a living thing, a spiked briar that twists up from my stomach and twines itself around my throat. “So we shouldn’t try? We should be like you and just give up?”

“What do you mean?”

“Never mind.”

“I want to know what you mean.”

“No, you don’t,” I say. “You don’t want to know what anyone means. You just want to stay as miserable as possible. We should go outside and dig a hole so that you can jump in and get it over with.”

She glowers at me like a thunderhead. But I glower back—harder, fiercer—and for once she’s the one who drops her head first.

On the way home, the silence is truly glacial, a frozen crust even the hum of the engine and the yammering of the radio can’t cut through. The doctors are now giving Grandpa something to make food more palatable, and something to help him hold on to it, but if a cupcake isn’t palatable, I don’t know what is.

Mom drops Grandma off at her house. “Mom, are you sure you don’t want to come home with us?”

“I’m fine, Annie,” Grandma says. She’s the only one in
the universe who calls my mom Annie instead of Anita. Not even Grandpa can get away with it. Must be something about mothers. Mothers can get away with stuff presidents can’t.

“I want to be in my own house,” Grandma says.

“I can make dinner for you.”

“No, no, no. I’m not hungry,” Grandma says. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Mom—”

Grandma pats her roughly on the arm and scoots out of the car before Mom can say anything else. We watch Grandma march up the sidewalk to her door, her purse clutched under her arm like a football. If I know her, she’ll make herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and eat it with a pickle. Or she’ll forget to eat completely.

Mom sighs and puts the car in gear. She’s erratic on the road, slipping over the line here, drifting there, but we don’t mention it. We also don’t mention the fact that she scrapes the side of the garage with the car on the way in.

“How about breakfast for dinner?” she says once we’re inside the house.

I shrug. Madge shrugs.

“Well,” Mom says. “
I
want breakfast for dinner, so that’s what I’m making. Pancakes, eggs, and bacon.”

“Shouldn’t we have some sort of vegetable?” says Madge.

“I’ll slice you a tomato.”

“That’s a fruit,” Madge says.

Mom doesn’t answer. She goes into the kitchen and gets
out the griddle and a couple of frying pans. It takes only about fifteen minutes for her to fill a few platters with food and get them on the table. When we were little, this was our favorite meal of all time—Mom’s, too—because it was so easy. But now it seems weird to enjoy it when Grandpa can’t, and when Grandma is alone in her house playing solitaire.

I’m trying to find the right way to tell my mom about Mr. Mymer, if she doesn’t already know from her husband. But Madge jumps in first.

“Where’s the ever-important orthodontist?” says Madge, pushing some eggs around her plate. Pib perches in Mr. Doctor’s seat, praying for bacon.

Mom takes pity on Pib, shredding a few bits of bacon and putting them on the table in front of him. “He had some late appointments,” Mom says. “He’ll be back later.”

“He couldn’t cancel them to go with us to the hospital?” Madge says. “What kind of husband is he?”

Mom pushes her plate to the center of the table, stands, and walks out of the room. Upstairs, we hear the bathroom door close and then the water pouring into the tub.

I stand up, too, and start clearing the plates.

“I’m not done,” Madge says.

I take her plate. “Yeah, you are.”

Most of the food gets dumped into the garbage, and the plates and platters loaded into the dishwasher. By the time I’m through, I’m the only one left in the kitchen; even Pib has found some new haunt. The water is still running. I examine
my fingernails, which are stained with paint and ink. I should take a bath when Mom is finished. Wash it all away.

In the family room, I flip on the TV and try to find something to kill time. Reality show, reality show, reality show. Singing, dancing, dog grooming. I pick dog grooming. A vicious white poodle terrorizes a groomer with a pink mullet. Pink Mullet Woman doesn’t have a chance. She’s booted from the competition after she’s bitten repeatedly, and the dog is criticized for the uneven puffball that is now his head. In her parting interview, Mullet Woman cries, her face going as pink as her hair. She looks stupid. I decide that it might be a good time to dye my hair back to its original brown. Plus, her mullet reminds me of Chelsea Patrick, and I want a bath more than ever.

I go upstairs to check if Mom will be out of the tub sometime this century. I find Madge sitting in the hallway next to the bathroom door, Pib stretched across her knees.

“What are you doing?”

“Shhh!” she says.

“What?”

“Mom’s crying.”

“I thought she was taking a bath.”

She rolls her eyes. “She turned the water on so we couldn’t hear her.”

“And I guess you’re here to remind her that water is a precious natural resource that shouldn’t be wasted?”

I expect her to glower at me again, but, like Mom, Madge
isn’t always so predictable. Her lips curl up in a ghost of a smile and she scratches Pib behind the ears. “Getting sassy in your old age, aren’t you?”

“That’s my cat.”

“And?”

“He hates you.”

“Funny way of showing it.”

I slide down the wall and sit next to her. Behind the crash of the water, I hear the faint sounds of weeping. I haven’t heard my mother cry in a long time, not since we watched a special on Animal Planet about the melting ice caps and the plight of polar bears.

“I don’t like it when she cries,” Madge says.

“Me neither.”

“What should we do about it?”

“You’re asking me?”

“No, I’m asking the bloody cat.”

“I don’t know what to do,” I say. “I don’t know what to do about anything.” I bang the back of my head against the wall. “You know what I did? I actually went to see Chelsea Patrick. Confront her. Like that was going to serve an actual purpose. She’s twice my size. She could eat me for a snack.”

“Wait,” she says. “Chelsea Patrick? The one you were friends with in middle school?”

“She’s the one who spread the rumors. She’s the police’s ‘witness.’ She’s the one who put up the stupid video. What was I supposed to do? Let her get away with it?”

“You knew who posted that thing? Why didn’t you say so?”

“I thought you knew,” I say. “And, besides, you never asked.”

“You mean I wasn’t interested.”

“That, too.”

“Well,” she says. “It’s not surprising.”

“That you weren’t interested?”

“That Chelsea put up the video.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Because she’s a sociopath, maybe? She freaked me out whenever she came here. Always talking about her creepy online friends. I didn’t know what you saw in her. I thought she was a freak.”

“If she wasn’t then, she is now.”

“And isn’t her mom that nutball who’s trying to get the books banned?”

“That’s her. She was at the school-board meeting when they talked about Mr. Mymer. I think she got cheek implants or something. She sort of looks like one of those decorative masks they put up at Chinese restaurants.”

“Nice.”

We’re quiet for a minute. The faucet is still running full blast. Pretty soon Mom will have depleted the stores of potable water for the entire tri-state area.

“Do you think she’s going to be in there for a long time? I have something I want to tell her.”

“I don’t think she’s in the mood to talk right now,” Madge says.

“Mr. Mymer resigned ’cause of that video. I heard it on the news. I’m surprised Mom hasn’t said anything yet.”

“I think she’s more worried about Grandpa.”

“I know. But that video proves I didn’t tell the truth. At least, I didn’t tell the whole truth. We bumped into each other at the museum and he sat with me for a while. I always had a little crush on him—”

“Oh, Tola,” she says, covering her face.

“And he was sitting so close to me. I grabbed his hand. I just wanted to hold it.”

“What did he do?”

That part wasn’t on the video. “He pulled away. And then he got up and left. I think he was disappointed in me.”

“And that’s it?”

“That’s it,” I say.

“Why didn’t you just tell Mom what happened in the first place? Don’t you think it would have been easier?”

“I was embarrassed about it. I was so stupid. And then I was angry that she didn’t believe me when I said he didn’t hurt me. This is all my fault.”

“Oh, it is not. So you touched the guy’s hand. So what? You didn’t rip off your clothes and run naked around the museum.”

“I still can’t understand why she didn’t believe me. It’s like she’s been mad at me for so long. Mad at you, too. Everyone’s
so mad all the time.”

“Yeah, well. That could be my fault.”

“What are you talking about?”

“As long as we’re confessing and everything…remember the affidavit I wrote for Dad?”

“Yeah. What about it?”

“I wrote about us being able to visit who we wanted when we wanted, just like I told you. But I also wrote about Mom kissing Mr. Rosentople. And I said that you saw it, too.”

“You did
what?
”

“I said that she was probably having an affair and that should be taken into account when the custody arrangements were made. I blamed the divorce on her. I thought if she didn’t harass Dad all the time about his work, he wouldn’t have left. Ever since he hooked up with the Saxon She-Beast, he never calls and we never get to see him. I was pissed off.”

“Did Mom see this affa-thing?”

“Sure. It’s a court document.”

“What did she say?”

“She said that Mr. Rosentople kissed her and not the other way around. And it only happened once. And that Dad was already emotionally ‘gone’ from the marriage.”

“But you don’t believe it.”

She hesitates. “Dad was, you know, like me. Not really into other people’s problems, thinking about himself a lot. I knew Mom was lonely. Sometimes when Mr. Rosentople
came over, she would flirt with him.” Madge shudders, and Pib shifts in her lap, gnawing on one of her fingers. “But now? My therapist says that maybe she wanted a little attention and that’s as far as it went. That Mom didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Huh. What else does your therapist say?”

Madge gives me a look. “What are you implying?”

“I think this therapist is getting to you.”

“Maybe.” She pets Pib, long strokes from head to tail. “You know, I remember everything that happens to me. Since I was two.”