Love Me Tender
Authors: Audrey Couloumbis
For my daughter,
Nikki,
protector of rabbits
and loved ones
ALSO BY AUDREY COULOUMBIS
Getting Near to Baby
Maude March on the Run!
The Misadventures of Maude March
Say Yes
Summer's End
Love Me
Tender
Contents
Love Me
Tender
Chapter 1
EARLY FRIDAY afternoon, Daddy left mad.
He carried his guitar. The weather had turned so hot, the sweaty circles on his T-shirt looked like the wings of an insect against his back.
I followed him, dragging his duffel and panting. “Daddy, this thing is too heavy. What all are you carrying in here?”
What, besides his blue suede shoes and tight white jeans, did he need?
“Stuff,” he said, and kept on going.
Okay, he needed a round brush and his diffuser and this tube of hair gunk he called “the genuine article.” He'd dyed his honey-colored hair so black it made me think of fur, only I couldn't name an animal that would gleam navy blue in the sunlight, coated in Brylcreem.
Daddy always walked with a swagger as soon as he combed his hair in this rolled-over way. But this time it was a fast ticked-off swagger; I had to move it to make the driveway with any time to spare for questions.
I only had one: You're coming back, aren't you? Only I couldn't get up the nerve to ask.
I let the duffel drop next to his feet. He'd hung his white Elvis jacket from a curtain rod installed in the cab of his pickup truck. I saw a yellow butterfly had been trapped inside, drawn to the little rainbows bouncing off the shiny sequins.
That butterfly clamped itself to the back of Daddy's shoulder as he set his guitar case into the leg space of the passenger seat. He took no notice, saying, “I'm relying on you, Elvira.”
“Me?” I lost my breath a little bit.
He threw the duffel into the back of the truck. He said, “Don't let things fall apart once I'm gone.”
“Like what?”
Daddy looked like he shouldn't have to tell me. He went around and got into the truck. That yellow butterfly was blown off a ways as the truck started up, then came back to flutter around like it was lost. I watched Daddy till he turned the corner, taking the back road out to the airport.
Now my breath came too fast. What did he expect me to do?
I went back into the house.
The minute Daddy started packing, Mel, my mother, took to the recliner like soap to a sponge. She hadn't moved. I said to her, “He would have taken you along if he could.”
“He could have taken me if he wanted me along,” she said. Her straight dark hair had been twisted up off her neck while I was out there with Daddy, and the ends stuck up at the back of her head like the bristles of a broom.
“Okay, but then we'd've
all
had to go. By car. Lots more luggage, and about a million bathroom stops.” She shot me a dirty look. “For Kerrie, of course,” I added, but I'd been thinking about this. If this was Daddy's logic, it was, well, logical.
“I took care of my little sister when I was thirteen,” Mel said.
“That was in the Dark Ages,” I said. “There are laws against abandoning your children now.”
“My folks went out of state to a funeral,” she said, her eyes on the TV screen. “They left me in charge.”
“That was more in the nature of an emergency, I guess.”
“Miss Nelda would look in on you.”
My eyes went wide. “She uses a walker. You can't expect her to jog over here every couple of hours.”
“Okay, then. You could report to her.”
“You don't mean that,” I said, wondering how else to reply to a woman who had recently turned into a walking time bomb. “If you did, you'd have said it before Daddy left.”
There were gunshots on TV.
Mel settled more deeply into the recliner. She's a movie junkie—that's what Daddy calls her, anyway, when she shells out for extra movie channels. Personally, I never thought this was a bad trait in a mother, just I had never seen the junkie part take such hold of her.
“I hope I don't have to tell you not to mention this idea to Kerrie,” I said. “She'll have to be peeled off you like a Band-Aid for days. Weeks, even.”
My sister, Kerrie, had recently turned eight, but she'd started behaving like she was three again. She wasn't the only one. “I hate it when you stop talking to me in the middle of a conversation,” I said.
“I know.” She flipped the channel.
Mel was not herself, I could see that. But she was not herself in the worst possible way. If she got tired in the middle of the railroad tracks and lay down to take a nap, wouldn't she get up if she heard the train whistle?
“You're really annoying me,” I said.
“I know,” we both said at the same time, and I left the room. I didn't know who to be mad at first: Daddy, who'd chugged off without so much as a wave good-bye, or Mel, who'd sent him away mad.
Daddy had entered a competition—he didn't like for us to call it a contest. He explained how the words make people feel. The person in a contest is a contestant, one of many trying to win, and the whole feel of the word is weak. But competitions are all about competency, and competence is strength.
The Elvis Bake-Off, that's what Mel called it, and anyone with half a brain would pack up and go after she ridiculed their competition that way. Daddy went out the door, singing, “You ain't nothin’ but a hound dog, a-cryin’ all the time.”
We all knew the next line:
Well, you ain't never caught a rabbit and you ain't no friend of mine.
The song echoed through my mind, over and over. I looked in on Kerrie, who was sitting in the middle of Mel and Daddy's bed.
There was stuff tossed all over the room, partly the usual mess of closets too small to hold everything, partly Daddy's packing mess. Kerrie added to it with a lot of cut-up newspaper.
She'd been trying for days to master the art of folding paper and cutting it to get connected paper dolls. She was sometimes successful enough to try it on white paper, but then she'd mess up again.
“I've got it,” she said, unfolding her latest effort. They connected at the toes, but not at the hands. She wasn't using newspaper.
“What kind of paper is that?”
“Sheet music,” she said. “But old stuff.”
“All of Daddy's stuff is old.”
“He said I could have it.”
I looked at the paper dolls. “You should stick to news-paper a little while longer.”
At hour four, after the third movie started, I heated boil-in bags of creamed spinach and buttered shoepeg corn. It was too hot to bother with anything else.
Kerrie, with some of Daddy's pink sponge rollers flopping around her face, begged for cheese macaroni. I guarantee if I had started out to make cheese macaroni, she'd have pined for creamed spinach.
I served Mel's meal on a tray, like she was ill. “Elvira?” she said, like it would be anybody else. “Would you adjust the bright?”
She acted like she didn't even notice the food. Only, when I came back for the tray, the plate looked clean enough to get by without washing it. “Are you getting up soon?” I asked her.
“I just need ten minutes alone,” she said, like we'd been badgering her for her opinions on how to end world famine or something. Actually, she said those words about a million times a week.
“When your ten minutes are up, it's Kerrie's bath time, and she doesn't listen to me unless I'm holding out a Popsicle.”
“So give her a Popsicle.”
I hate my family.
I know that's supposed to happen when you turn thirteen, but a year ago I would have said it's not going to hap-pen to me. I loved Mel and Daddy. Not that they looked perfect to me. I mean, they didn't look perfect to anybody, I'm sure.
Daddy hardly ever talked sports or politics. Instead, he kept an elderly car in mint condition. He stocked his juke-box. If he had a day off, he drove all over to flea markets in search of records. And he looked at gardens. Every so often, he was asked to do his Elvis thing at an anniversary party.
Mel bought falling-apart furniture at auctions and fixed it up to look almost new. This was more comfortable and less embarrassing to live with than it sounds. Most of my friends think anything made of “real wood” means it's an antique. As for Daddy, they only thought he was weird until they heard him sing.
It's like my parents got infected with a virus that made them love anything old and secondhand. They could've gone on this way forever with no complaint from me. Only, in this past year, my feet went from size six to size nine.
I had this in common with my mother, and I was not in the mood to forgive. Neither was she. “Don't think shoes and bras are cheap. Try to wear something out.”
My sister said, “Can I have the sneakers you painted?”
I had my doubts about her too. “Because they're old and secondhand?”
“Because I like them.”
“They're yours, I guess.”
I also shot up four inches, making me the tallest girl, not just in my class but in the whole next grade. I “developed.” That's how they put it in health class. Kindly.
Daddy started worrying about how my clothes fit. Basically, he wanted me to wear a tent. And when I didn't want to wear a tent, he said to Mel, “Next thing you know, she'll be coming home with a tattoo on her behind or a ring in her navel.”
I said, “That is just uncalled-for.”
“Maybe so,” he said. “But I don't want my daughter looking like she bears a factory stamp or perforations of the kind seen on a ticket stub.”
“How about if I stick a record label on my forehead,” I said. “Would that be okay with you?”
He sent me to my room, which really wasn't fair. I had been explaining my parents’ weirdnesses to my friends for a long time; it wasn't my job to make sure I kept fitting the box I came in.
The thing is, I never expected Mel and Daddy to wake up on my thirteenth birthday sounding as dated as their furniture and music. I thought they were going to be the cool parents.
I think even they thought they were going to be cool.
During the same year, Mel got pregnant.