Raising Hope (16 page)
My eyes teared up, and I rubbed them angrily. She wouldn’t get to see her first grandchild, I thought, and I wanted to shake my fist at God and tell Him to goddamn Himself. What had my mother ever done to deserve this? Just minded her own business and worked herself to the bone to take care of all of us after my dad left. I wondered for a second if I should call him. Ha! I didn’t even know how to get in touch with him. Besides, he didn’t deserve to know anything about her. I was certain of that.
Her breathing was ragged, like it hurt, and I wished so much that it didn’t hurt her.
Give some of that pain to me,
I told God.
She’s had enough of it. I’ll take it for her, okay?
There wasn’t any answer except the sound of Ma trying to get air.
Then Ma’s eyes opened, and I sat forward on my chair, trying to be ready to give her what she’d need. But she was focused on something across the room, and then she took in a huge gasp of breath. When she let the breath out, she was gone.
“I love you, Ma,” I said, touching her bony hand that was still warm. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d said those words out loud to her. We just didn’t go in for that in my family, and I thought about what a damn stupid shame that had been. “I love you,” I said again, hoping she could hear me somehow, wherever she was. I just sat with her, holding on to her hand while I could still feel warmth in it. I imagined I’d sit there forever, that this would be a fine way to live out my days, just sitting beside Ma, keeping her company. I guess I couldn’t stand to let her go.
After a while, I heard footsteps coming into the room and then a rustling of the curtain. “How’re we doing?” Christine asked me quietly.
“She’s fine,” I replied. “She died about ten minutes ago.”
“Oh,” Christine said sympathetically, coming over to touch one hand to me and one to Ma. She looked me right in the eyes and said, “She was a lovely person,” and that was when I began to cry and cry. It’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair, I thought; and I was mostly thinking it wasn’t fair that my mother had to up and die for me to see that I’d miss her every remaining day of my own life.
“Okay,” I say, lifting my head from the steering wheel and wiping my swollen eyes hard. “Okay, pity party’s over.” Looks like I’m going to have to talk myself through this little scene I’m throwing. First thing I’m going to do is turn around and go home. I don’t need a damn pregnancy kit to tell me the obvious. Don’t need to pee on a stick to know that something’s going on in my body. I’ll need a doctor, though. Someone who can deliver the damn baby when it’s ready to pop out.
“You’re not having the baby, Ruth,” I say aloud as I turn the key and pump the gas pedal. “Look at the facts.”
The facts . . . I drum my fingers on the steering wheel as I wait to turn onto the highway from the shopping center parking lot. The facts are that I’m in no position to be a single mother. What in hell would I tell Hope, and Sara Lynn, and Mamie, for God’s sake? By the way, I’ll be bringing a baby into the household we all share, and never mind how I happened to come by it. Ha! That’d go over well.
A little, timid voice inside me speaks up—
What about Jack?
—and I shout it down. What about him? He doesn’t want a baby. He’s going on sixty! Hasn’t he always said how much responsibility it was raising Paulie and Donna? And what would he tell them? That he’s having a kid younger than his grandchildren? No, he wouldn’t want to have to deal with that mess. And I won’t make him, either. I can handle this myself.
Haven’t I always handled everything myself? Watching Ma die. Raising Hope. Well, there’s Sara Lynn involved in Hope’s upbringing, too. I do give credit where credit is due. Something in my heart moves just thinking about Sara Lynn, and I wish so badly I could tell her about the jam I’m in. But there’s still a part of her that thinks she’s better than me, just like back in high school, and I don’t want to prove her right. Ruth the loser; Ruth the slut. I’ll be able to see it in her eyes, and I won’t be able to stand it.
The car behind me honks, and I jump out of my skin. “Fine, fine,” I mutter, raising my hand in apology when I see the green light. Nothing else to do now except turn out of the parking lot toward home.
I
’m riding my bike to the library so I can use the computer there. Not that I told anyone at my house what I’m up to. Are you kidding? That would have started a game of twenty questions: “Why can’t you use the computer at home?” “Why do you need the computer, anyhow? It’s summer; you don’t have homework.” “I hope you’re not using those weird chat rooms to talk to strangers. Are you?”
It’s always like this. Absolutely no privacy whatsoever. I know just how Anne Frank felt living in that attic with her family breathing down her throat. She complains about it a lot in her diary, and I always nod and think, Amen to that.
When I got up this morning, the coast was pretty clear. Ruth was at work, and Sara Lynn was off looking at some garden for her magazine. So I sat with Mamie on the porch while she read the paper, and then I sort of casually yawned and stretched. “I guess I’ll ride my bike down to the library this morning,” I told her. “I want to find a book to read.”
“That’s fine, dear,” she said, turning a page of her paper. “Are you looking for anything special?”
See? Even going to the library under the pretense of taking out a book gets me the third degree. How many pages do you think your book will be? Are you in the mood for a made-up story or something true? Who is the author? Do you think she’s a decent person?
I gritted my teeth and said, “No. Just looking.”
“Well, be careful, and wear—”
“My helmet,” I finished, scrambling up from the porch floor. “I know. I always wear my helmet.”
“Would you mind picking me up one of the books I like? Mrs. Shelton likely will have set aside a new one for me.”
“Sure,” I told her. “Not a problem.”
I giggle now as I turn my bike onto the library sidewalk. Mamie always refers to “the books she likes” instead of just spitting out clearly what she means. “The books she likes” are cheesy romances, the kind that have a lady with a big chest and dazed expression on the cover, a lady who is sort of swooning into the arms of some guy who looks like a pirate. Not that he’s wearing an eye patch or carrying a sword or anything, but he always looks the way I imagine a pirate would look without his costume—a little sinister.
Sara Lynn
tsk
s her tongue whenever she catches Mamie reading one of these books—“bodice rippers” is what Sara Lynn calls them. “Reading another bodice ripper, Mama?” she’ll ask, raising an eyebrow.
“I’m only passing the time,” Mamie will reply, her lips pursing and her eyes flashing. “A person’s world gets a lot narrower when she’s older and hasn’t as much to keep her busy.”
“Hmmph,” Sara Lynn will say skeptically.
“Oh, Mamie, you’re the spring chicken out of all of us,” Ruth will chime in hastily, trying to keep the peace. “You’ve got more romance going on in your books than any of the rest of us has in real life. Keeps you young, right?”
I park my bike in the bike rack and run up the stone steps of the library with my backpack slung over one shoulder. When I pull open the heavy wooden door, the air-conditioning makes the hairs on my arms stand up. I walk over to the computer area, where I sit down and take a deep breath. I’m sick of sitting around waiting for things to happen in my life; I’m finally going to make them happen. So I’ve made a plan. I’m going to look for my father on the Internet, find his address, and send him the letter I wrote. All I get when I ask Ruth or Sara Lynn about him are the same dumb answers. “Why do you want to know?” “Why are you asking?” “It was a long time ago.” “I don’t know.” Well, if they don’t care to tell me anything about him, that’s their problem. I’m his daughter, and I want to know. I want to know right now.
Okay. Have you ever noticed how when you make a plan to do something, you’re all excited? You keep patting yourself on the back for your sheer genius, telling yourself it’s too bad your talents are being wasted in this backwater town.
Then you start to put your plan to work, and you’re still feeling good. You’re thinking, Boy, not only can I think up a really cool plan, but I can make it happen, too. Look at me go!
Then everything starts going wrong. Way wrong. Like the fact that you didn’t count on there being tons of Robert Tellers on the Internet. Like the fact that all you know about your father is his name. Could he be the Robert Teller who won the Boonetown, Iowa, big-pumpkin contest? (Lord, I hope not.) Could he be the Robert Teller who’s the owner of a chain of department stores down south? (That would be nice.) Could he be the Robert Teller who competed in the National Spelling Bee? (No, because it’s for darn sure my father’s not in fifth grade.)
Aaargghh! I throw my pencil down and bury my face in my hands to rub my eyes. Here I thought I’d just waltz right in and find him; little did I know I’d be a fool looking for a needle in a haystack.
“Hey.” I hear a voice, and I look up. There’s a boy about my age sitting at a computer a couple of desks down from me. He’s got the reddest hair I’ve ever seen and braces that glint in the overhead library lights.
“Yeah?” I say, trying to sound cool.
“Are you okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You kind of had your face in your hands, and you were all bent over. I didn’t know if you were going to faint or something.”
Great. He’s basically telling me I looked like a big dork. “No,” I say coldly. I narrow my eyes and raise my chin. “I wasn’t going to faint.”
His face gets as red as his hair, and he shrugs. “Jeez, forget it. I was only wondering if you needed any help.”
I stare real hard at my computer screen and swallow a few times. I didn’t mean to sound like such a jerk. I thought he was making fun of me. I didn’t know he was just trying to be nice. And now I’m the one who’s been mean and made him feel bad. Ugh. Sometimes I think I should just live in my closet and not speak at all.
I take a deep breath and turn to him. He’s back on the computer, biting his lower lip as he types. “Hey,” I whisper. He doesn’t hear me, so I say it again a little louder. “Hey!”
He looks up like he’s worried I’m going to tear into him again, like he’s feeling a little uncomfortable around me. “Yeah?” he asks.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound like that. You know, all snotty and mean.”
“It’s okay.” He shrugs. “No big deal.”
“I’m . . . I’m kind of under a lot of pressure with this, um, project I’m doing. I’m not usually a mean person.”
“What are you working on?” he asks.
“Um . . .” What the heck am I supposed to tell him? Oh, I’m just looking for my father who hasn’t wanted to see me since I was born? I settle for saying, “It’s kind of a long story.”
“Oh,” he says. He doesn’t turn back to his computer. He just looks at me. I look away, sort of embarrassed, because I can’t help but think it seems like he might think I’m pretty. Maybe. I mean, he’s not covering his eyes and saying, “Ick. I can’t look at that dog face anymore.”
“What are you working on?” I ask him hastily, trying to make my embarrassed feeling go away.
“Nothing,” he says. His voice sounds kind of sad and mad, and I don’t know whether I said the wrong thing. Then he explains, “I just moved here. So I don’t have any friends to hang out with or anything. I just come here and surf the Net.”
“Don’t you have a computer at your house?”
“Yeah. I mean, we will when our stuff gets here and we unpack all the boxes.”
“Where’d you move from?”
“New Jersey.”
I nod and try to look like I’ve been all over, like being from New Jersey doesn’t sound so exotic to me.
He sighs and says, “So what is there to do around here?”
I laugh. “Not much.”
Mrs. Shelton bustles over to us, her plaid skirt stretched tight across her wide hips. “Shhh!” She has her finger to her lips and shakes her head at us. “No talking in the library.”
I roll my eyes at the new boy and shrug. I turn back to my computer screen when I hear, “Psst!”
I sneak a glance over at him. We’re really not supposed to be talking, and I don’t want to get in trouble again.
“Do you want to go someplace?”
I don’t know that I’ve heard him right. I mouth, “What?”
“Do you want to get out of here so we can talk?”
I nod like it’s no big deal, but my heart sort of clenches up all excited and nervous. This is the first time a boy has ever asked me to do anything. I focus real hard on the computer screen, pushing the buttons that will get me back to the library’s main page. I wish my hands weren’t trembling as I slide my notebook off the desk and put it into my backpack.
“Ready?” he asks. He’s pretty tall for a boy about my age. Most of them are shorter than I am. “How’s the weather up there?” the boys in my class tease. “That’s original,” I say back, rolling my eyes and acting like they’re not hurting my feelings.
“Okay,” I whisper.
We walk out of the library, our sneakers squeaking on the waxed marble floor. Then we’re outside, and we look at each other kind of shyly.
“No talking in the library,” he finally says, mimicking Mrs. Shelton’s crisp, prim voice.
I laugh at him, and he grins like he’s happy I’m laughing.
“You want to just sit here and talk?” he says, flopping down on one of the stone steps.
I’m a little disappointed because I thought he was going to ask me to do something with him, maybe get a soda at the diner or something. It’s not like I like him or anything; it’s just that it would have been nice to be asked. I shrug. “Sure,” I say, and I sit next to him.
“I’m Dan,” he tells me, putting his elbows back on the step behind him and looking out at the street. “Dan Quinn.”
“I’m Hope Teller,” I reply.
“You’re the first kid I’ve met here,” he says.
“How . . . how old are you?” I ask.
“Thirteen. How ’bout you?”
“Twelve. I’m going into seventh grade.”
“At the middle school?”
I nod. “Mmm-hmm.”
“Me too. Eighth grade.” He sounds really glum about it.