Hand Me Down (22 page)

I say, “Gross.”

“It’s actually very clean,” Mom says.

Terrance says, “Cleaner than human spit.”

“Dogs eat poo,” I say.

“Let’s go inside,” Mom says to me and we go back through the sliding glass door and sit at her kitchen table, the same beige-and-pink cushions we’d sat in when all this shit started. She inhales, opens her mouth, and then closes it.

I look around her new kitchen: honey-colored cabinets, white counter, and raised bar area with room for stools underneath, high slanted ceiling with a fake chandelier light fixture above the table. I sigh. It looks like it would be a nice place to live.

“It’s a big house,” I say. Bigger than all the apartments we’ve ever
lived in, with luxuries like a backyard and a garage that Jaime and I never had.

“I know there’s room for you here, Liz,” Mom says, “but that’s not the issue.”

“I know.” I know that even if they had nine bedrooms, space wouldn’t be the issue.

She takes a deep breath and exhales. “You were right at the airport before you stomped off,” she says. “Our appeal was denied.”

“I bet Dad helped with that.”

Mom looks angry for a minute as she thinks, but then she sighs. “Well, there’s not much we can do about that now,” she says. “We have to deal with what we’re given.” Outside, Terrance has turned on the hose and he squirts Noah and Angel as they run around in the grass. Mom sighs again. “I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out a way for us to all be together,” she says, and I wait for the “but” that will send me somewhere new, but she just stares off into space.

Terrance makes a rainbow of water and Noah runs back and forth under it with his arms above his head. Angel barks at the stream of water and tries to catch it in her mouth every few seconds, but jumps away and snorts as water goes up her nose. Terrance picks laughing Noah up and spins him around. Noah laughs harder, water dripping from his chubby and tan chest and arms.

Mom lets air out of her nose in that “hmf” sound that’s actually a small laugh in our family. “We talked about Terrance getting his own place, and about moving you into an apartment nearby where we could watch you.”

“That would be so cool,” I say.

“I’m going to talk to Pastor Ron, too,” she says, “to see if maybe someone at church has an extra bedroom.”

“Please don’t make me live with people I don’t know again.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” she says, and rests her forehead on the table. But it’s her fault I’m in this mess and I refuse to beg.

While Mom is “racking her
brain” for a solution, I spend most nights at Rachel’s. We stay up late and watch R rated movies with all the lights off, giggling, rewinding and rewatching sex scenes. We light candles and cast spells from the books Rachel’s mom gave her. I recite an incantation for independence and Rachel mixes cayenne pepper and bay leaf for an increased eroticism spell.

“Remember, you have to really want it to work,” Rachel says before we read the chants. She holds my right hand with her left and we each light a white candle on our other side. “Visualize your goal,” she says and closes her eyes.

I close my eyes and see myself sitting on cement steps in front of a college campus library under a blooming, sweet-scented cherry tree, laughing with a few smart classmates, on my way to an advanced literature class, or heading home to my loft apartment. I have a job, make my own money, and need nothing from my parents.
I will be free
, I repeat in my head.
I will be free.

We also smoke weed almost every day. She leads me up to her balding, skinny, and single father’s room after he leaves for work in his brown slacks carrying his worn leather briefcase. “Bye, Maple y Rachel y,” he usually calls from the bottom of the stairs in a silly
cartoon voice. Rachel rolls her eyes every time, but I know she’d miss it if he stopped. Lately she seems to be more aware of how lucky she really is. Her dad provides for his family even if he dabbles in old habits from his teen years in the sixties. He may be eccentric and a little bitter, but he’s a real father, and I’d choose him over mine any day.

“Bye, Dad,” she says, and then she grabs my arm and heads across the hall as soon as his key clicks in the lock. In his musty closet on the top shelf in a faded yellow cigar box, Rachel’s dad keeps a plastic bag of drugs wrapped inside a paper lunch sack. All his clothes are brown, and a green suit jacket with elbow pads hangs in yellowed plastic. Rachel steals a nug or two of his weed every couple of days. She says, “Even if he noticed, what would he say?”

“My dad would make me pay for the stuff I took.”

“My mom said he’ll just think he’s doing more,” she says. Her mom told her where to look for the box. “And if he suspected, he’d blame my mom before he confronted me so he’d have an excuse to call her.” Like my father, Rachel’s dad is still in love with the woman who left him. Unlike my father, Rachel’s dad is a good person and married a woman who never wanted to settle down. I feel bad for him in the evenings after dinner when he sits in his recliner with his slippers on and a glass of wine, watching cable news channels or episodes of
MASH
, and it makes me wonder if anyone has a functional relationship with the person they love.

Sometimes Rachel and I watch cartoons, or read
Cosmo
articles out loud to each other. “Energize Your Life: In and Out of Bed” or,
“How to Please Your Man.” Rachel occasionally asks me to repeat certain instructions and advice, and she writes it down in her journal.

“You don’t even take notes at school,” I say.

“I don’t want Frank to think I’m inexperienced.”

Sometimes we put swimsuits on and go over the levee to the river, lie out on a small sand bank or a big log. We talk about sex, since she’s probably going to do it soon, and who is going out with whom, and who is doing it, or at least almost, and about starting our second year of high school.

“Where you gonna be?” Rachel asks. “Maybe we can get our lockers together,” she says, stretching out across a log wider than our shoulders, chest to the sun.

“I wish I could tell you.”

“How much longer you going to be back and forth?” she asks. “Not that I don’t like having you here or anything.” She pokes me with her pink-nailed toes.

I dip my feet in the river and watch them disappear under chocolate-colored mud. “Maybe my mom’ll let me get my own place,” I say. It was more likely than Terrance getting his own apartment. “But she’ll probably make me live with one of the old ladies at church. Our pastor made an announcement at the end of the service last week.” To Pastor Ron’s credit, he seemed reluctant to bring it up with me sitting right there in front of him. “Even though Pastor Ron didn’t say my name, the whole church knows it’s me who needs a room, and everyone knows why.” I curl my toes deeper into the brown-black silt. “I’m now a cause for all these Christian do gooders who want to help. The same ladies who give
me sad eyes when they see me in the foyer and ask how I’m ‘holding up’ if my mom isn’t with me.”

“At least you’d get to stay in town,” Rachel says as she dangles her long, tan leg in the water.

“It’s so embarrassing,” I say. “I hate my mom.”

“My dad said she called last night while we were on our walk,” Rachel says.

“He told me, too, but I didn’t call her back,” I say. “She doesn’t want me to live with her, but she wants to run my life.”

“I’m sure she missed you,” Rachel says.

“I doubt it,” I say, though I continue to nurse a small hope that she did.

Rachel says, “It’d be so rad if you got your own place.”

I shake my head and brush a fly off my knee. “She can’t afford it,” I say.

“Hey.” She sits up and adjusts her bikini top. Her boobs are much larger than mine. “Maybe you could emancipate yourself like Drew Barrymore. Divorce your parents. They’re totally fucked anyway.” She looks at me. “No offense.”

I shrug. “It’s true.” The wind picks up and goose bumps run up my arms and legs. I pull my feet from the mud and swish them around in the cool green water until they’re clean.

Rachel says, “I’m sorry, Liz Wiz.” She pulls her long brown hair into a ponytail and adjusts her square sunglasses.

The sun hangs low in the sky and mosquitoes buzz where the air is still. A breeze pushes clouds across the horizon, disturbs the biting swarms, and mixes the heavy heat with river cooled drafts. I say, “Can you get welfare if you’re emancipated?”

She stops fiddling with her hair and looks at me. “You’d really do it?” she says.

The clouds move faster, tumbling in white drifts above our heads. “Maybe Jaime could come with me,” I say, picking sand out from under my chewed nails. “We would do better on our own.”

“Everyone needs a family, Liz,” she says.

“What if your family sucks?”

“I was joking,” she says. “About the emancipation thing.”

I say, “Good joke.”

I ask Rachel to take the bus with me downtown the next day. A homeless man who reeks of stale booze asks us “pretty ladies” if he can have our shoes. We’re both wearing flip-flops. He says, “I can pay,” and pulls from his pocket two pennies, a Ping-Pong ball– size wad of multicolored chewed gum, and a dead cockroach. He shoves his hand under Rachel’s nose. “Your choice,” he says. “But the roach’ll keep you company.”

Rachel’s eyes bulge and she starts shaking. I grab her hand and we stand together. “No, thanks,” I say, nudging his outstretched hand aside. “We like our shoes. Excuse us.” We walk past him out into the midmorning sun, jumping off the bus steps and onto the sidewalk. The air smells of exhaust and the rumbling traffic is constant on these busy streets. I triple-check the directions I wrote down last night and turn left.

Rachel says, “I’ve never been down here by myself.” She clutches my arm.

I pat her hand. “You’re not by yourself,” I say.

“That dude on the bus was scary.”

“He wasn’t that bad,” I say, thinking of my dad, of Terrance. “I wonder what he would have done with our shoes.”

We sweat as we walk past crumbling brick buildings and grimy storefronts for old-fashioned tailors and appliance repairs and a barber shop with the red-and-white candy cane pole out front. It’s not noon yet but the sun is high enough that the heat has settled in the air and feels thick and heavy. The courthouse steps are spotted with a rainbow variety of pigeon poop, and Rachel and I both look up and then duck our heads as the blue-green birds circle above us. There’s a metal detector, but it doesn’t seem to work since it beeps at everyone, and Rachel and I both have to step to the side and lift our arms to be personally wand scanned by a burly guy sweating through his khaki polyester guard uniform.

After a half-hour of waiting in line at the self-help center behind a tattooed pregnant girl who can’t be much older than us, we finally get to talk to the “facilitator,” a large black woman with sparkly purple fingernails that extend an inch above her fingertips.

“Hi,” I say. “How are you?”

Her brown eyes barely glance up from her computer screen. Solitaire. She makes a noise like “Humpf.”

I say, “I was hoping to get some information about filing for emancipation?”

She doesn’t say a word, but points to the wall next to her booth where there is a six-foot panel of probably fifty plastic slots for papers.

“Um,” I say, eyeing the rows of brightly colored forms, some a foot or more above my head. “I have to fill out some forms?”

She rolls her eyes and moves an ace to the top of her board. “And you said you needed help.”

I say, “Could you please tell me which ones?”

She reaches out a fat hand with skin rolls and, barely looking away from her game, pulls out four little booklets, a pamphlet, and a single sheet of paper, and plops it all down on the six-inch counter in between us. “There,” she says. She looks past me to the line and opens her mouth, but I say, “Is there any way you could help me? With these?” I put my hand on the pile of papers.

“I can’t give legal advice,” she says. “I can’t help you fill out forms.” She opens her mouth to call the next person again, but I say, “Wait. Please? Isn’t there someone I could talk to?”

The woman must hear the tremor in my voice because she looks at me for the first time. She eyes me up and down, taking in my blond ponytail, my height, my T shirt with a unicorn on it. “You trying to be on your own, little thing?” She raises a pierced eyebrow.

Rachel says, “Her parents suck.”

The facilitator snort laughs. “Oh, honey. Don’t everybody’s?” She sighs and clicks her fingernails across her desk. “Look, there’s a court mediator. Put your name and information on this list.” She hands me a clipboard. “Someone will call you. Next!”

On the air-conditioned bus, I make sure Rachel takes the window seat and I flip through the three-inch stack of paperwork the woman gave me. I immediately see a problem. “You have to get your parents’ permission to be emancipated?” I say.

Rachel says, “Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of being emancipated?”

I say, “You also have to be able to prove financial independence.”

“What bullshit,” Rachel says.

I lean back against the seat and watch men and women in suits and dresses walk in small groups, laughing, talking, some eating sandwiches or burritos as they move. They probably complain about their jobs, but I’d work fifty hours a week to get away from Terrance and the mother who doesn’t act like one. At least adults have freedom. I sigh. “Well, so much for that plan.”

“It’ll be okay, Liz,” Rachel says, but I’m not so sure.

A few weeks later Mom’s
car is parked in Rachel’s shady driveway on a Monday afternoon just as we get back from the river. Sun-lazy and still high, I don’t understand what’s happening as she starts screaming at me before we reach the house.

“Get in the car!” she yells. “Get in the car now!” She punches my arm as I move past her toward Rachel’s front door, and then she raises her hands above her head like she’s going to pound me with both her fists. Rachel flinches and jumps away. I stand my ground and stare at Mom, her eyes narrowed and teeth gritted, and wait for the blow to come. I almost want it, want an excuse to take a swing at her face, break her jaw, and shatter her glasses. But instead of hitting me, she presses her clamped fingers to her own temples and screeches. Rachel gapes at me with bulging, tear-filled eyes.