Beyond Summer (5 page)

“I wish Mama could see the place.” As soon as I said it, I knew I shoulda kept my mouth shut. Bringing up my mother would only throw a wet blanket on our big day.

Cody’s face went straight. “I don’t think you wanna know what your mother’d say about this. She’s still griping because we let the trailer go back to the bank, remember?”

I nodded, and I didn’t mention Mama again. She was mad at Cody and me for leaving Hugo and moving to Dallas in the first place, and if she knew we’d jumped into buying a house before Cody was even through the academy, that would just be one more thing for her to rise up on her hind legs about. She’d give me a great big financial speech, and tell me we didn’t have any business taking on a house loan until we’d paid off every single credit card, and saved up an emergency fund, and blah, blah, blah. Just thinking about it made me queasy, and I was queasy enough already.

“We’ve gotta do something about that oleander bush,” I said, when the boys squirmed out from under the porch and took off for the backyard. “Take it out, I guess.”

Cody pulled back and squinted at me. “Why? It looks good there. I bet it’s been there forever.”

I took in the plant, thinking that it most likely had been there a long time. Branches had grown through the porch railing and all in the lattice underneath, so that it seemed like part of the house. The first time we came to look at the place, I’d caught the sweet smell of it the minute we got out of the car. It was sad to think of killing it.

“They’re poisonous,” I said.

“What are?”

“Oleander bushes. They’re poisonous.”

Cody’s chin jerked, and he spit out that little “Khhh!” sound I couldn’t stand. Like I was making it up or something. “My mom had those all over the yard, and none of us got poisoned.”

“Well, you guys probably didn’t happen to eat any of it, Cody.” I hated it when he acted like he was Mr. Big Daddy who knew everything, and I was the little nincompoop who got pregnant right out of high school.

“So we’ll tell the boys not to eat it.” His shoulders went up and down, like it was that simple. Just tell kids not to do something, and they wouldn’t. Where’d he been for the last five years of Benjamin’s life, and the last three years of Tyler’s? Oh, yeah—hanging out at the deer blind with his daddy, or out four-wheeling and fishing with the guys he worked with at the county sheriff’s department. He didn’t have a clue what it was like to be home with the boys all the time. Whenever Cody was supposed to babysit, his mama was right there to do all the work, and Cody sneaked off to the backyard with the bird dogs, or ended up in the barn doing some project for his daddy.

“You have to baby-proof everything when you’ve got kids around, Cody. They try stuff out when you’re not looking.”

He snorted softly. “They’re not babies. It’s not like they walk around picking junk up and putting it in their mouths.”

Heat crawled over my back and made a muscle go spastic at the base of my spine. I reached around to rub out the cramp. What with getting the furniture into the house and then taking the boys down to Chuck E. Cheese to celebrate, this was feeling like a long day. I wanted to go inside, curl up on one of the mattresses still on the floor, and go to sleep, but there was lots to get done yet. “You never know what they’ll do. It’s not worth having a poisonous bush in the yard.”

Cody stuck his arms out and posed like he was a sci-fi robot about to take on the bush with his death ray. “Evil Plant of Death. Must destroy.”

“That’s not funny, Cody.” He was only putting on the goofy act to get me off his case. If I left it up to him, that bush would still be there six months from now, but the freezer would be stocked with fish fillets, as soon as he found a place to drop a line in the water. “I don’t want that plant there, okay?”

“The boys aren’t gonna eat the plant.”

“I mean it. I’ll chop it down myself if I have to.” Cody gave me a weird look, and I knew he was trying to figure out why I was pushing so hard. I couldn’t exactly tell him it wasn’t the boys I was worried about. It was the new baby. The one that would be showing up in about eight months, give or take. Cody didn’t know about the baby, and I hadn’t figured out how to tell him without starting a meltdown. Telling Mama the next time I talked to her would be even worse. She’d have a conniption so big you’d be able to see it hanging in the sky over southeastern Oklahoma, like a wall cloud.

Cody lowered his death-ray fist and gave me his confused look, like there was some ridiculous woman thing going on in my head. He crossed his arms over his chest. “What the heck is wrong with you all the sudden? I thought we were celebrating the new house. Happy-happy, remember? Havin’ a good time.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me.”
When you tell him, you have to make it sound like you got pregnant on accident. If he thinks you did it on purpose, he’ll be so mad, he’ll never get over it.
“I just want you to help do things with the house. You can’t spend all your time either at the academy, or crashed out on the sofa, or looking for someplace to fish. We have to get the house ready.”

An eyebrow hung low over one dark eye. “Ready for what?”

The baby. Our baby girl.
“Just the kids and stuff. It’s an old house. There’s things that aren’t safe for kids in an old house—like plugs, and we need to check for lead paint, and take care of the cords on the blinds, and put batteries in the smoke detectors, and things like that.”
Maybe you should just go ahead and tell him. Right now, while he’s happy, and his mind’s on the house.

“You watch too much TV.” He tipped his head toward the sound of the boys playing in the backyard. Tyler was squealing, and Benjamin was hollering something about Pokémon. Any minute now, they’d be in a fight. “
I
grew up in an old house.” Lifting his arms, he turned his hands palms up, as in,
And look at the wonderfulness of me.

“Yeah,” I said, smirking at him. He could be such a smart-aleck. “Exactly.”

He smacked himself in the chest and coughed out a breath like I’d taken a shot at him and he was catching the arrow where it went in. Not likely, since Cody was tough as leather and just about as easy to make a dent in. “Oh-ho! That’s it. Them’s fightin’ words.”

The next thing I knew, he’d scooped me up and tossed me over his shoulder.

“Cody, put me down!” I squealed, but of course he wouldn’t, and with him two hundred pounds of muscle now, I didn’t have a prayer of making him do anything. He twirled me in a circle, and I watched the grass, and the pecan tree, and the yellow house, and the brush along the creek next door, and the slide in the little kiddie park across the creek, all blend together into a swirl of color. I saw the oleander bush, and Tyler running around the corner of the house, his stocky legs pumping hard, his head a dark, fuzzy burr, like his daddy’s. He skidded to a stop and crossed his arms over his chest, just like someone else I knew.

“Daddy, pud-a-Mama-down!” he ordered, shaking a finger at us. Then I couldn’t see him anymore, because Cody spun me around and scooped up Tyler in his free arm, and we were bouncing along together, laughing.

I heard Benjamin come around the corner and complain, “Daddeee!” Grabbing my arm, Benji tried to pull me free, headfirst.

Cody stumbled sideways, and the thick smell of oleander filled my nose. I felt the leaves brush my arm.

“Oh, no!” Cody cried out. “It’s . . . it’s . . . the evil Bush of Death!” He staggered backward, gasped his last, then collapsed to the ground just a few inches short of making a pancake of our oldest kid. The three of us landed in a pig pile, Benjamin jumped on top, and we rolled around, laughing and tickling and wrestling in the dried-up crust of last year’s oleander leaves. When the craziness died down, I turned onto my back, and Cody lay beside me, and we just stayed there, looking up at the corner of the house, and the pecan branches overhead, and the clear, blue summer sky. Our little piece of sky. Over our trees. Over our house.

The house that was worth everything it took to get here.

Next door, a window blind pulled back, and then fell into place again. Whoever the neighbors were, if they were watching, they probably thought we were nuts.

It wasn’t the first time Barbie had wrecked the Escalade. It was just the first time I’d seen my father cry about it.

All of a sudden, I wished I hadn’t started the morning by trapping him in the game room and going off about my getting stuck with the Fearsome Foursome after Barbie’s fender-bender. It was just that I’d been ready to behead someone since last night, when I learned that Barbie wasn’t at the hospital, but with her massage therapist, Fawn, drinking wine and trying to recover from the trauma of crashing into the Baby Bundles. When she did come home, Barbie brought Fawn with her, and they uncorked a bottle of wine in our kitchen, so I couldn’t say what I wanted to. Barbie knew that, of course. She wasn’t always as blond as she looked. Sometimes she actually thought things through. She had a little bruise on her cheek where she’d hit the steering wheel, and Fawn helped ice it while Barbie droned on about what a blessing it was that the kids weren’t in the car when it
went crazy
. Somehow, the wreck had become largely the fault of the vehicle, which was now sitting in the driveway with the front end crumpled on one side, and the grille hanging in pieces.

I left the kitchen, so as not to kick off World War III, and went up to my room and vented to Emity in a text message.
Gonna bite someone’s head off tomorrow
, I said before we signed off.
Europe’s not even far enough away. So sick of this.

LOL
, Emity ended.
Spare the innocent children, K?

I sent her back a laugh, then went to bed. I dreamed about
la tía loca.
She was swimming in an Olympic-size pool with the sibs. They were wearing matching pink bathing caps with puffs of chiffon and furry pink slippers. The fur expanded underwater, so that their legs looked like Q-tips with pink ends as their feet fanned the water, sending strange currents swirling toward the surface. They were performing synchronized swimming maneuvers. Even the baby. The team made a pyramid with their legs, and Jewel was on top, holding an inner tube that looked like a giant Cheerio.

I actually woke up in a good mood, but halfway down the stairs, I caught the lingering scent of incense from Fawn’s visit last night, and I was mad all over again. I caught my dad in the game room and told him exactly how I felt about Barbara stopping off for a winefest and a whinefest with Fawn, while I was stuck home babysitting. “I can’t handle them. The nanny can’t even handle them. I didn’t ask you guys to have a bunch of kids no one wants to take care of.”

It crept into my consciousness that my father hadn’t moved or responded in any way, and that possibly he wasn’t even listening to me, but I was on a roll. I stabbed a finger toward the upstairs, where Barbie, blissfully asleep as usual, knew that the nanny would arrive at seven to wake up the sibs. After the morning tantrums and breakfast were taken care of, Barbie would descend below stairs to tackle the dressing and hair combing, thus bringing the pack to the level of cuteness required for playgroup dropoff at church. “I’m sick of everything being about Barbara. I’m sick of not being able to come home without her dumping kids on me. I’m sick of . . .”

The light from the window caught my father’s face suddenly, and there was moisture sparkling in his eyes. I’d never seen him cry. Even at my grandparents’ funerals, and the day my parents told me they were splitting up, my father had been as steady as Lincoln at the Memorial—stoic and thoughtful, with a pale patina of regret, as if he’d studied the mask that should be worn at such times. By watching, you could tell how he was
supposed
to feel, but not how he really
did
feel. He was a mystery, a cipher, but then, that was nothing new. His lack of accessibility, as my mother referred to it, was one of the reasons she left. She needed depth, meaning, connection. Being married to him was a starvation of the soul she could no longer endure, after twelve years. She was ready to spread her wings and fly, to do something that mattered, to be fulfilled.

I couldn’t really blame her. Even at eleven years old, I understood what she meant. It was painful to know that we didn’t fit into the larger equation, but I could relate to what she was saying. Before she was someone’s mom, someone’s wife, she was
someone
. She was a journalist working her way up through local news, which was how she met my father. Now she wanted to be someone again.

I wondered what she would think if she could see my father now, his hand clutched over the surgically implanted hairline that my mother thought was ridiculous, his fingers tightening into the skin of his forehead, his lips forming a thin line, trembling. His eyes were turned toward the window, two blue pools draining down his cheeks, where the skin was smooth and free of sun damage, thanks to the laser treatments at Barbie’s favorite spa. The skin-care package was a Christmas present, to let him know Barbie was thinking of his well-being.

My mother had responded with an Internet laugh when I told her about it.
LOL. Guess she just realized he’s over fifty. . . .

“Dad?” I whispered. The ground shifted under my feet, and I tried to catch my balance. Maybe something had happened to Barbie overnight—some sort of weird aftereffect of the accident. “Dad? What’s the matter?”

He sat unmoving until finally his lips parted, letting out a long draft of air. Trembling fingers combed his hair—the fuzzy part on top that didn’t look quite natural, and then the real stuff toward the back. He clutched it for a moment before his fist dropped into his lap. “You might hear some things today, Tam. At the country club, or just . . . around. You might hear some things. Don’t worry, all right? Just go about your normal day, and . . .” His eyes slowly fell closed, and his head swayed as if he were falling asleep midsentence. When he looked up again, moisture clung to his lashes, turning them dark. They were thick, like the boys’. “It’s just a normal Thursday.”