If You Really Love Me (2 page)

“My grandpa’s coming to visit. That’s gonna be good. I haven’t seen him in a couple of years.”

“Yeah.” Shivers start going through me. It’s freezing out here. Before I can catch myself, I lean onto Cary, pressing against his shoulder.

He snorts and grins, giving me a sidelong look. “Why the hell didn’t you put on a jacket and shoes before you came out here?”

“Can we go down to your place?” I reply, feeling stupid.

“Sure. Can’t have you turning into a Popsicle on me.” He pushes himself up.

I stand up, shoulders hunched against the cold. Cary throws an arm around my neck. We start down the stairs side by side. Cooking smells come from one of the apartments—fried liver and onions. The aroma makes me hungry, despite the fact that I hate liver. I haven’t eaten since breakfast.

“Anything happening in the boyfriend department?” Cary asks quietly.

“No,” I reply.

“Are you trying to
make
anything happen in the boyfriend department?”

“No.”

“Well, I don’t think anybody’s gonna leave a guy in your stocking for Christmas. If you want to date as much as you claim you do, you better get off your ass and ask somebody out.”

“It’s not that easy, Cary. It’s not like asking a girl out.”

He sticks out his hand, shakes with an invisible guy. “How’s it going, man? You want to go to the movies with me sometime?” He looks at me, smirking. “Now how hard is that?”

“First I have to find a guy who won’t hit me in the head when I ask him that.”

We’ve made it down to the landing. Cary opens his mouth to respond but stops at the sound of my apartment door slamming open above us.

“Ellis!”

The sound of my mom’s voice makes me cringe. Cary pulls his arm off my shoulders. We both look up, just as my mom leans over the railing, glaring down. “Get in here!” she snaps at me. Then she retreats into the apartment.

“She sounds happy,” says Cary.

“See you later, man.”

I go up the stairs fast. I don’t know what’s got Mom angry, but I do know that she will get even angrier if she thinks I’m dragging my feet. When I reach the balcony, the door to the apartment is still open.

I walk into the kitchen and close the door. Mom is standing next to the sink, in blue jeans and pink sneakers. She still has on her jacket and her gloves. Her long blonde hair is tied back in a bun. She is thirty-six years old, and the men in the neighborhood think she’s hot. She’s got curves like a teenaged girl. Her face is glowing with rage. My chest gets tight, and I hold my breath.

“What are you? Five?” She jabs downward with her hands. “Can’t you wash dishes without getting water all over the fucking floor? I almost slipped in this crap.”

I want to kick myself. Usually, I clean up the spills I make when I wash dishes, but I got distracted when Cary came up and knocked.

I am about to go for the mop when Mom comes at me. She punches me in the side of my head with her fist. “Ow!”

“Clean it up! Clean it up now!”

“Okay, just give me a second.”

“I said now!”

I flinch because she’s drawing back for another blow, and she’s a hard hitter for a woman. I rush to the utility closet for the mop, the side of my head already throbbing. Move fast—that’s always the best thing when she’s like this. Usually she stops hitting when she sees me jumping to do what she says.

Not this time. The kitchen is small, and there’s no way to go around her. She slaps me in the back of the head as I go by with the mop. I duck down, hoping to avoid any follow-up from her.

“When are you going to stop being so stupid, Ellis?” she asks as I clean up the spilled water. “When are you going to start thinking for yourself? I shouldn’t have to tell you every single thing. You should know that if you spill water on the floor, you have to clean it up. I shouldn’t have to tell you that. It’s just common sense.”

I swirl the mop over the floor in fast but deliberate motions. Mom looks me up and down as I work, and suddenly there’s new outrage flooding her eyes. “And
why
were you outside in a wet shirt with no shoes or coat? It’s thirty-four degrees out there. Does anything click in that head of yours? Ever?”

The truth is that I only thought I’d be outside for a couple of minutes. Mom’s too angry to hear that or anything else from me, so I keep my mouth shut and go on with the mopping.

Mom turns away, gets a glass from the cabinet, and goes to the fridge. “I had a hell of a day at work,” she says as she pulls her bottle of wine from the fridge. “Two women sneaked out on me without paying, and I had to cover their checks. Then this old buzzard got all handsies with me, and I had to keep fighting him off. Jesus. Talk about gross….” She fills the glass, sticks the bottle back in the fridge, and takes a long, deep drink. She sighs as if a load of bricks has been lifted off her back. “I’m going to get a bath. Me and a couple of the girls from work are going over to Tootsie’s. When you get done there, put on a dry shirt, for God’s sake.”

She takes her glass of wine and goes to her bedroom. Tootsie’s is the honky-tonk out on Rochester that Mom likes. It serves dinner and features live bands and has a dance floor. She likes line dancing with her friends from work. Sometimes she picks up men there, but they’re mostly guys just passing through town, and none of them are in the picture for long. Mom will have a bite with her friends, and then they’ll take to the dance floor.

There’s not much food in the house. I hoped Mom would make a supermarket run on her way home today. When I finish with the floor and put the mop away, I check the cabinets and the fridge. They still look mostly bare. I’m tempted to ask Mom for some money so I can walk up to the supermarket or to McDonald’s, but that might set her off again, especially since she got stiffed by a couple of customers today.

I take off my wet jersey and go to the little alcove off the kitchen where the washer and dryer stand ready for duty. Mom keeps a hamper there for my dirty clothes, and I stuff my jersey into it. I go to my room, pull on a clean shirt, and return to the kitchen. I get out the saltines and the tub of oleo and sit down at the table. Despite being starved, I eat slowly, spreading butter on crackers and popping them into my mouth one by one. Cary’s not the only one who needs a job around here. It would be good if I had my own money, and if I had a place of my own. I’m almost eighteen, but around Mom, it’s like I’m still some little toddler. I’m too old to get slapped around, jumping every time Mom goes boo.

I did something really crazy at school once. It cost me my friends, and it’s why none of the kids talk to me now. It’s why Mom started slapping me around. It created such a big mess I don’t even like to think about it. It cost Mom a lot of money, setting her so far back financially it took her almost a year to get back on her feet. I feel so guilty for doing that to her.

What can I do about the crapheap my life has become? I want to pay Mom back the money she had to shell out to cover for me, every dime of it, but how? I apply for work at fast food joints, but none of them ever calls. Without a job, the only thing I can do is what I’ve been doing for the past two years—try to stay out of Mom’s way. Until I can get out of her way for good.

I owe her that.

T
HERE
’
S
NOTHING
like the Southern Market on a Saturday morning. About a hundred different vendors set up shop in these three huge, barnlike buildings on the old fairgrounds, selling everything from produce to meats to shoes to original artwork. It not only draws plenty of locals, people from the burbs flock there too. Even on a cold, cloudy weekend like this one, the place is loud and bustling and colorful as customers look over stuff, haggle for bargains, snack on corn dogs and chicken-on-a-stick, and enjoy the songs played by the street musicians.

I hardly ever have any money, but I like to come here. I like to come because everything is so noisy and busy that no one really even notices me. Not like at school where kids notice me but pretend they don’t. Mom didn’t come home last night; her bed was empty and still made up when I woke this morning. She either met a guy at the honky-tonk or got drunk and spent the night at one of her girlfriends’ places. I got dressed, ate the last of the cereal and milk, brushed my teeth, and walked the six miles to the Market.

I like to watch the crowds and see what turns up for sale. Sometimes really weird, unexpected stuff goes on the shelves. One Saturday, there was like a ton of Marvel and DC comics from the fifties and sixties in a bookseller’s stall. Another Saturday, an antique dealer had toy train sets that he said came from the time when his grandfather was a boy. The comic books and the trains were cool, but they were selling at prices that made my eyes pop.

I have another reason for coming to the Market today. After touring the stalls and watching the crowd in action, I stop by Mr. Luigi’s produce stand. He’s in his sixties, says he left Italy and became a US citizen forty years ago, but he still has this warm, buttery accent that makes me think of fresh-baked rolls. A big man who’s sort of medium in height and still pretty strong, he sometimes pays me to unload crates from his pickup truck and help him arrange the fruits and vegetables in the wide, shallow display trays. He has four sons who are in their twenties and thirties, and when they’re around, they do all the heavy lifting, and I don’t make any cash.

Today, I’m in luck. Mr. Luigi’s manning his stand by himself. He has a head full of curly hair and a thick beard that are black, sprinkled with silvery gray. He spots me as I approach and a big grin splits his face.

“Ellis! My son by proxy!” He grabs me, like always, in a bear hug. “You’re getting so tall, but you’re thinning out too. You gotta eat more.”

“Hi, Mr. Luigi.” I’m smiling, but the remark about my weight embarrasses me. “You need any help?”

“I always need help. Look here.” He turns, waving toward the back of his stall. He has already carried in the crates of produce, which are stacked neatly in the back, but he’s only unloaded about a third of them. Apparently, business has been good for him this morning, because his bins are starting to look bare. “I can barely keep up. Go to it!”

A couple of ladies are picking over the cantaloupes, and a man walks up asking for Granny Smith apples. Mr. Luigi hurries over to his customers. I grab a crate filled with little plastic baskets of blueberries and start lining them up in neat rows in one of the display trays. It’s easy, good work.

In no time at all, the exertion gets my body warm all over, which is a nice relief from the morning chill. More customers show up. I want them to find what they need at Mr. Luigi’s and not go wandering off to some other vendor’s stall, so I work fast but carefully. Sweat breaks out on my forehead and the back of my neck, but by the time that happens, I’m done. The empty crates are all stacked at the back of the stall, and all of Mr. Luigi’s display trays are packed full.

Mr. Luigi breaks away suddenly from the cash register to pull me aside. “Great job, Ellis. You do good work,” he says, grinning. “I give you ten dollars an hour, okay? And I figure you work three hours.”

I frown. “No, it was more like an hour and a half—”

Mr. Luigi shakes his head sternly, looking at me as if I’m giving him sass. “Three hours,” he says. He yanks his battered old wallet out of his back pocket, plucks three crisp ten-dollar bills free, and presses them into my hand. “There you go. Thank you, Ellis. You’re a hard worker, and a good boy.”

“
Grazie
, Mr. Luigi, grazie,” I reply, using one of the Italian words he taught me and blushing hard.

“Now you go have fun. It’s Saturday. Not a day for you to be stuck in this place. Here….” He hurries over to the cash register, reaches under the counter, and comes up with a brown paper bag. He opens it, pulls out a plastic-wrapped sandwich, and comes rushing back to me. I start to refuse this extra charity, but he is already shaking his head again. “You take this. Eat it. My wife make me two sandwiches. I don’t need a two-sandwich lunch. It’s peanut butter. Good for you.”

Before I know what’s happening, Mr. Luigi has eased me out of his stall with the sandwich in one of my hands and the money in the other. He waves good-bye as he goes back to his customers. I roll up the money and stuff it into my pocket. As I head out of the building, I unwrap the sandwich and bite into it. The peanut butter is the crunchy kind, which I really like. I think Mr. Luigi’s sons are lucky.

The sandwich is history three minutes later, and so is the heat my body built up from working. The wind is blowing, which makes everything feel even colder. I zip up my jacket to the neck, shove my hands into my pockets. Dinner from Pizza Hut would be awesome, but that would take half the money I just made.

It is six miles back to the apartment, and another mile past the apartment to the supermarket. I walk the distance at a rush.

T
HE
PARKING
lot is full of cars, so I know the supermarket is packed. It always is on Saturday. I prefer to come on Sunday, when most people have done their shopping and gone off to church, but there’s no food in the apartment, and I can’t wait until tomorrow. The automatic doors slide open with a big swishing sound as I approach. When I step through them, the heat inside the store feels so good it makes my whole body tremble. There’s something about winter and gray days and being cold that makes me want to curl up under a bunch of quilts and sleep for days.

The supermarket is bright and crazy noisy—cash registers beeping, plastic bags rustling as sackers stuff groceries into them, voices booming over the PA system announcing specials or calling for the manager, kids yelling and running. I grab a cart and wheel away into the crowd, heading for my first stop, the bread aisle. Mom’s not into cooking so much these days, and she never taught me how to do it. I can’t do much more than fry eggs, make sandwiches, and broil hotdogs, so I get stuff that’s easy to work with. Bread, peanut butter, jelly, hotdogs, eggs, frozen chicken nuggets, cereal, milk, cans of soup, salad mix, and dressing. The salad mix and dressing are for Mom’s sake. She likes salads, which is sometimes all she wants for dinner. She sort of got me hooked on them too.