Between the Notes (15 page)

M
om shook me awake on Saturday morning. “Time to get up. I want to leave in a half hour. I made you some oatmeal.”

I looked at the clock on my little desk. “It’s only seven. I thought you said they open at nine.”

“Yes,” said Mom. “But the lady at the food pantry told me they start lining up at eight. To get the good stuff.”

Mom had broken it all down for me the day before, how the food bank collects and sorts all the donated food, then supplies it to the pantries, which dole it out to people at risk of hunger. Mom kept calling them “the hungry.”

“We’re not hungry,” I had said.

“No, we’re not.” She’d been scrubbing at a stain on the counter that was never going to come out. “Not yet.”

I rolled over in bed and groaned. “Do you think we’ll see anybody we know?”

“We might.” Her voice had that high, tinny sound like when she’d first told me about moving here.

I swung my legs to the floor. “Might as well get this over with.”

Mom had already driven Dad and the twins over to Dad’s office so he could get some work done while they played with the shredder. He had let them shred some documents once and you’d have thought they’d died and gone to heaven. Now he saved up all his shredding so they could do it for him when he worked on weekends. He’d even purchased a shredder with a special safety device so they couldn’t shred their fingers by accident.

Mom called up to me as I was getting dressed. “Wear something, uh . . . not too flashy.”

“Dress like a poor person,” I mumbled. “Got it.”

My hoodie supply was running a little low, so I pulled on the humblest sweater and jeans I could find. Instead of the knee-high leather boots I usually wore with it, I donned my oldest, most beaten-up pair of Chucks. I didn’t brush my hair or put makeup on.

“How’s this?” I said, twirling around in the kitchen.

“I didn’t say you had to look like you’d been attacked by birds,” she said. “Go brush your hair.”

When we were finally on our way, Mom explained that the pantry was at a church. “It’s a choice pantry,” she said. “That means we get to choose what kinds of foods we want. Some of them just give you a box that they’ve preselected.”

She kept rambling on about what to expect, but I honestly didn’t want to know. I just wanted to get it over with.

We drove out of our neighborhood, passing my school and
heading in the same direction James had gone the day we escaped. We passed the beheaded deer and the wine-bottle tree. My heart started to pound. “Mom? What church is this pantry at?”

Mom fumbled in her purse and pulled out a square of paper. “Northbridge,” she said, passing the note to me. “Northbridge Methodist.”

I groaned. That was James’s church. The cemetery. “Is it okay if I stay in the car?”

“I need your help,” said Mom with a look of despair. “To carry things. I don’t think they have carts.”

We had a pile of canvas shopping bags in the backseat of the station wagon—the Volvo. My parents had sold the Mercedes but the Volvo was already paid for, so that’s the one we kept. Still, when we drove into the church parking lot, it was definitely the nicest car there.

“Oh, my,” Mom said as we circled around to the food pantry entrance. There was a line of about fifty people already waiting. This was “the hungry” she’d been talking about. Not visibly starving like on TV, when they show children with distended bellies and skeletal limbs. These people seemed tough, like hunger was the least of their problems. It was the rough ones who stood out to me first. The guy with wiry muscles and a face etched with lines, smoking a cigarette. A woman who looked like she’d beat me up if I so much as blinked in her direction. They glared at us as we drove past. Did they think we were going to take their food?

“Oh, my,” Mom said again.

“We don’t belong here,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Mom drove all the way around the church and pulled into a spot facing a car that looked perfectly respectable, except for the passenger window was cracked and held together with clear plastic tape. It had a handicapped tag hanging from the rearview mirror.

We stayed in the car and watched more people arrive and get in line. One family drove up in an RV, which I assumed was their home. I noticed quite a few handicapped tags, and a number of people with walkers or canes. They weren’t so tough. More weary. After a few more minutes, a man came out of the church and handed plastic laminated numbers to those in line, and everyone dispersed a bit, going back to their cars or sitting on a grassy embankment.

“Let’s go in now,” said Mom, though she didn’t actually make a move.

I wasn’t ready. “Not yet,” I said.

A car pulled into the spot next to ours. I turned to look at the driver. It was Chandra Mandretti. My eyes went wide, and hers narrowed. We both looked away. Oh. My. God.
Chandra Mandretti went to the food pantry.

I sucked in my breath.

Mom gave me a quizzical look but was too busy working up the nerve to go inside to ask what I was gasping about. She turned off the ignition and studied her reflection in the rearview mirror. Even in her not-too-flashy clothes, she could’ve been dressed for
lunch at the country club. Although I was wearing my rattiest sneakers, I had forgotten and put my leather jacket on.

We did not look needy of free food.

Mom took her earrings off and dropped them in her purse. They were the small diamond studs that Dad had given her for a birthday a few years ago. “I forgot I had these on,” she said apologetically.

“I thought you said we didn’t have to be destitute to come here.”

“We don’t. We’re being silly.” She reached into the backseat for the canvas bags we’d brought. “Come on.”

I glanced at Chandra as I got out of the car, but she had her elbow propped in the window to hide her face. Her mother had gotten out and gone to collect a number by herself. But I couldn’t do that to Mom. Not this first time.

When we got to the door, a man with a bright-orange
VOLUNTEER
tag handed us the number sixty-seven.

“We’re new,” said Mom, as if we were joining a social club. “I understand there’s some paperwork we need to fill out?”

He took us inside to a lady volunteer who gave Mom a form with questions about our name and address and monthly income and how many people were in our family. She also offered us some literature on SNAP benefits. “That’s what they call food stamps now,” the lady explained.

“Food stamps?” I hissed in Mom’s ear. “Seriously?”

Mom just kept this smile plastered to her face and wrote her
answers in the little blocks. She added up her hours of work for the past two weeks and doubled it, calculating a monthly income, and wrote the figure down.

“What about Dad’s income?” I asked.

“Nothing to report,” she said.

“Family income, it says. You need to put Dad’s down, too.”

She tapped the pencil on the paper and leaned toward my ear. “Your father is not bringing home an income at the moment, Ivy. Everything he earns is going toward the bank debt on his business.”

“What?” I glanced back down at the dollar amount Mom had written, what she brought home from her part-time job at the newspaper. “Seriously? How are we paying for Brady’s therapy?” I asked.

“We’ll talk about that later,” she whispered.

The orange-badged volunteer reviewed our form and seemed satisfied that we were as poor as we said we were. She waited with us until a man with a microphone called out “up to number seventy!”

We shuffled into line with the other hungry. The realization that we were really and truly one of them came on much the way the sensation of hunger does, with a dull ache in the stomach. Only this one felt a bit more like a sucker punch. How did things get so bad, so fast? I wanted to bend over and lean my hands on my knees to catch my breath, but that would only make it worse. People were already staring at us.

When we got to the front of the line, Mom tried to give our number to the man, but he explained that we should hand it in at the end. There were different sections for different kinds of foods. Our volunteer lady pointed out the canned stuff, like fruit and veggies and tuna, boxes of pasta and rice, cookies, and crackers. She called them “shelf-stable products.” There was a center section for fresh fruits and vegetables, and another for bread and muffins and other baked goods. “The refrigerated items are in the back,” she said. “Meat, eggs, yogurt, milk, cheese.”

Hanging on every shelf was a sign that indicated how many of each item you were allowed to take, based on the size of your family. Mom kept reading them aloud, as if I couldn’t understand the simple system. Or maybe she didn’t want the others to think we were claiming more than our share. “We’re a family of five, so we take three boxes of cereal,” she said. A family of two was allowed to take one.

“Two pounds of ground beef.” She pulled them from the refrigerator. A smaller family could take only one.

“You don’t have to announce it,” I murmured in her ear.

We stopped to watch a little cooking demonstration going on, teaching people how to prepare a nutritious meal from groceries that were available. They were making a chicken Caesar salad.

Mom kept saying things like, “Oh, look, they have Cheerios!” and “It’s just like the market!” But it was
not
just like the market. People didn’t snake through the aisles single file like this at the market. They didn’t get excited about two pounds of ground
beef. And the market never ran out of groceries. By ten o’clock when we finished our shopping, the shelves were almost bare. And people were still showing up.

“Should we give them some of ours?” I asked Mom as we hauled our bags to the car.

She paused and considered, resting her bags on the pavement for a moment. “No,” she said firmly, snatching them back up. “I’m sorry. I can’t worry about everyone else. I have to worry about us.”

We got in the car, and Mom put her earrings back on. Her hands were shaking, but I didn’t say anything about that. I turned and saw Chandra still sitting in the car parked next to us. She looked at me again and nodded, before turning away.

As we drove toward the exit, I saw a car I recognized. Its front bumper was held together by duct tape. Leaning against the passenger door was Rigby Jones, one of Lennie’s friends. I might’ve pretended I didn’t see him, but he raised a fist and bumped it toward me. I smiled and bumped back.

“Who was that?” said Mom.

“Kid from school.” I twisted back around to wave good-bye. That’s when I noticed the orange badge. Rigby wasn’t using the food pantry—he was a volunteer.

“Everything is not as it seems,” I mumbled.

Once we were a few miles away from the church, Mom let out a huge sigh, as if she’d been holding her breath that whole time. “I’ll make that Mexican rice and beans with chicken that your
father likes,” she said, “and the chicken Caesar. That’s a good idea. A meat loaf, or maybe a meat sauce . . .”

She was over the challenge of getting the food. Now she had to find a way to stretch it, because at our income level we were only allowed to visit the pantry once every three weeks. I wondered what poor looked like for the people who could shop there every single week.

“You were going to tell me,” I said, “how we’re paying for Brady’s therapy.”

Mom didn’t reply right away. She probably didn’t want to tell me, only said she would to shut me up earlier. “I don’t want you to worry about it.”

“Mom.” This was getting ridiculous. I was worried about it. If I’d known, I would have been looking harder for a job.

“Okay, okay.” She fidgeted at the steering wheel. “Insurance pays for some of it. And all the money we made from selling the furniture, jewelry, appliances. That’ll pay for the rest. For a while.”

“Then what?” I asked.

Mom took a deep breath. “We’ll figure something out.”

I looked out the window as we headed home, newly determined to find a job.

L
ater that day, I headed over to the used-book shop, but the elderly woman working there laughed when I asked if she was hiring. “Barely make enough to pay myself, dear,” she said.

So I went into the Save-a-Cent. The man working behind the customer service counter gave me a little clipboard with an application to fill out. When I handed it back to him, he said, “We’ll let you know if there’s an opening.”

“You don’t have anything?”

“There’s a waiting list,” he said. “And I’ll be honest. A lot of the applicants are older and have families.”

“I have a family,” I said.

“Are they relying on you to put food on the table or are you just looking for some extra spending money?”

I shrugged. I didn’t want to admit that I might need to help my parents buy food. “Extra money, I guess.”

“We’ll let you know,” he said, shoving my application into the back of the folder.

I started to walk out, then turned back around. “I’ve seen other kids my age working here. Do they support their families?”

“Actually, yes,” he said, nodding. “Some do.”

“Oh,” I muttered, turning and walking out. Maybe I should’ve considered that country club job, but it was too late. The auditions had started an hour ago.

Brady was on the front lawn when I got home, throwing his gravel into the road. Kaya was sitting on the porch with a coloring book.

“Where’s Mom?” I asked.

“Upstairs talking to Daddy,” said Kaya.

I looked around for Carla, but she was nowhere to be seen. “Who’s watching Brady, then?”

She sat up very straight. “I am!”

“What if something happens? You’re six years old.”

“If Brady leaves the yard, I’m s’posed to holler as loud as I can. Like this . . .” She took a huge breath.

“No!” I stopped her. “I get it.” Had Mom forgotten that Brady would have a total freak-out if Kaya yelled like that?

I went over to my brother and took his arm. “Brady, come with me. We’re going inside.”

He yanked his arm away and went back to his rocks. “You go,” he said.

“You need to come with me,” I said. “Now.”

He scooped up a pile of rocks and kept throwing them, one by one.

I batted the gravel out of his hand and seized his wrist. “Enough with the rocks, Brady! You can’t put them all back. You’ll never put them back!”

He dropped them then, and his hands went to his ears. Pounding. He started that silent-screaming thing again.

Kaya rushed over to us. She pushed me in the stomach.
Hard.
“You ruin everything,” she said. “Leave him alone.”

I stumbled away from them, almost falling over the bike I’d left in the yard yesterday. Mom and Dad hadn’t even asked me about it. They were too busy worrying about money to pay attention to me or even Brady.

I ran up the back stairs to get them, but when I reached the top, the door was ajar and I could heard them arguing.

“What about unemployment? Can’t you get that?” my mother said.

“I’m not unemployed, Susan.”

“You should’ve been there, Mark. Those people were poor, and not because their multimillion-dollar businesses were failing. I felt like a fraud.”

Dad slammed something on the counter. “I’m doing the best I can. You want me to give it all up? Go begging for a job at Sheffley’s?” That was Dad’s competition, and the biggest printing company in the state. They weren’t known for treating their employees particularly well.

“No,” said Mom. “I just hope it turns around soon. I don’t know how long I can keep this up.”

“It’s not that bad, Susan. We have a roof over our heads, we have food, we have clothing. The kids are in their same schools. Brady is thriving here. He’s—”

“He’s playing in the gravel by the side of the road! He’s palling around with the neighborhood thug!”

Ah, so she didn’t think so highly of Lennie after all.

“That boy is no thug. His only crime is living in a poor neighborhood,” he said. “Don’t be such a snob, Susan.”

Mom gasped. “A snob? Now I’m a snob because I want something better for my mentally disabled child? For all my children?”

“
Our
children,” Dad corrected, his voice louder. “They’re
our
children and
we
made this decision together. It’s not going to kill them to learn that everything in life doesn’t come to them on a
goddamned
silver platter.”

My hand flew to my mouth as if I was the one who’d cursed. My dad
never
swore. He
never
raised his voice at Mom, either.

Their voices got lower then, and I heard Dad saying, “I’m sorry. I’m doing the best I can.” It sounded like he might cry.

I pushed the kitchen door open then. Dad was sitting on one of the kitchen stools, and Mom had her arms wrapped around him. They were sort of rocking back and forth. They looked up when I stepped inside and realized I must’ve heard the entire argument. Or maybe they just didn’t have the energy to put on their everything’s-just-fine faces anymore.

“I’ll get a job,” I said. “I just put an application in at Save-a-Cent.”

Dad’s whole body slumped even farther than it already was. “You don’t have to do that, Ivy.”

“If they don’t have anything, I can try some other places. And there’s . . .” I took a deep breath, for courage. “There’s this job at the Morgans’ country club. . . .”

“It’s too far,” said Mom. “I’m already driving your father to work and myself to work and Brady to therapy and . . .”

“Okay then, I’ll find something around here that I can walk to,” I said, relieved that the country club option was out. “I could give piano lessons, maybe . . .”

Dad sighed and Mom stroked his back, and we all just stood there not saying anything for a few minutes. We could hear Brady’s gravel landing in the road, one tiny fistful at a time.

Kaya could take care of him just fine, apparently, and I ruined everything. I climbed the two flights to my room and sat by the attic window, looking down on my neighbors. Looking down
at
my neighbors, that is. I couldn’t exactly look down on them anymore, could I?