Rules of the Road (15 page)

“That’s what it’s about. Had some fine men help me years ago. Just trying to return the favor.”

I took a deep breath. “Boy . . .I, um . . .I wish you could talk to my father. He . . .”

“Hits the sauce?”

“Yeah,” I said quietly.

“Your dad at a point where he wants to talk?”

“No.”

He sniffed. “You getting help for yourself?”

I told him about Al-Anon and the way we talked about things in my family.

“Best thing you can do for your dad is love him and pray for him and don’t let him step on you or let his disease infect you any more than it has.”

“I try.”

“So many hurting people,” Harry Bender said, looking out
the window. “I’ll tell you what, though, if you set your mind and heart toward a healthy way of living and thinking, you’ll find a way to climb out of the biggest pit life throws your way.”

He flipped his Stetson back on his head and smiled.

I didn’t say what I was thinking.

How I wished he was my father.

I sat on the white bed in the all-white guest room in Mrs. Gladstone’s house and really felt like a visitor. It was the kind of room that forced you to make the bed and pick up your dirty clothes even though it was against your nature. I hugged my knees and wondered what it would have been like if Harry Bender had been my father.

I saw him taking me out in the backyard when I was small and teaching me all about shoes.

I saw him feeding me little bites of barbecue when I was a baby.

Mostly I saw him just being there—someone you could count on who shot hoops with you after dinner. Someone who came to your school plays even though you were playing non-speaking tall parts, like trees and giant lizards. Someone who understood that what kids need most from their fathers is for them to be available and loving.

I curled under the covers and opened the letter my mother had sent me. “Hello out there,” it began.

A sickening anxiety washed over me. I looked at the white phone on the bedside table. I tried to swallow; I couldn’t. I felt a panic take hold.

I shouldn’t have left.

I had to call her. I reached for the phone. My hand froze above the receiver.

I closed my eyes and remembered myself as a little girl.

The phone rang. Dad was drunk, told me to answer it; say he wasn’t home.

“I don’t want to, Daddy.”

“Do it.”

I walked to it slowly, hoping it would stop ringing before I got there.

No such luck.

“Hello?” I said, small and scared.

“I’m looking for Jim Boller.” It was always an angry voice.

I gulped. Looked at my father, who was staring at me. “He’s . . .not here.”

“When will he be back?” the voice demanded.

“I . . .I don’t know.”

“Can you take a message?”

“I can’t write good yet.”

Click. The angry voice hung up.

I stood there like someday my lying was going to catch up with me.

“Good girl,” Dad said. “That wasn’t so bad, right?”

I ran into the other room to play with my plastic animals that I kept in a box under my bed. Once Grandma got me a miniature phone so my animals could talk on it, but I gave it back to her because the animals didn’t like it.

I shook the memory from my mind, grabbed the phone near the bed, punched buttons, waited, hoping I wouldn’t sound as nervous as I felt.

The hospital receptionist switched me to the ER and finally I got Mom.

“We’re fine, honey,” was the first thing she said.

I could hear someone groaning in the background, the sound of racing footsteps.

“You’re busy,” I said, feeling stiff.

“A car accident.” I knew she couldn’t talk.

“Do you want me to come home, Mom?”

“Of course not.”

“Is Dad . . .all right? I don’t think he means to do these things.”

“Right now, Jenna, I’m just dealing with the fact that he does them.”

I could hear a man say, “Carol, we need you.”

“Be right there,” Mom said. “Can I call you tomorrow, Jenna? Are you all right?”

“I’m okay. I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow.”

“Carol!” said the man insistently.

“It’s okay, Mom. We’ll talk. I’ll write you a long letter.”

“I love you, sweetie.”

“I love you, too.”

I didn’t get to ask her about Grandma.

I sat on the bed holding the letter; the weight of it rolled over me. I thought about how Mom had crawled out from such a painful marriage, how she’d pushed herself to look at the things she needed to change.

“If you set your mind and heart toward a healthy way of living and thinking,” Harry Bender had said, “you’ll find a way to climb out of the biggest pit life throws your way.”

Then for some reason I saw myself as a little girl again.

The phone rang.

Dad told me to answer it; say he wasn’t home.

This time I dug my red sneakers into the blue braided rug and said
no.

Not this time, Daddy.

The next day Mrs. Gladstone and I had a fight about her thinking I needed a day off and me saying I didn’t.

“You need to rest!” she hollered. “You’ve been on duty day and night.”

“I’m not too good at resting. It makes me nervous.”

“Now what in the world are you saying?”

Alice came out of the other guest room in the midst of it, looked me up and down like I needed fumigating, and held up a small pair of scissors.

“It’s time, honey,” she said. “You need bangs.”

“Um . . .no . . .I . . .”

But retired shoe models get pushy. She plopped me down on a bench in the hall in front of a floor-to-ceiling gold mirror. “Just a few wispy bangs,” she said, lifting my hair off my shoulders and letting it fall. “It’ll frame your face so nicely; give you some softness. Won’t hurt a bit.”

I said, “I’m not sure about this,” as she parceled out my hair over my forehead.

Alice stood back. “I’m sure. I was the lead hairstylist at the Queen for a Day Beauty Salon and Nail Emporium for seven years before I went into shoe modeling. My customers begged me to stay, they were hanging onto my arms on my last day, weeping themselves silly. You’d have thought somebody died.”

I groaned, closed my eyes. I hated the sound of snipping scissors close to my face.

She snipped a bit, a bit more, stood back.

More still.

“I’m taking some off the sides,” she said, not asking. Hairdressers never do. If they touch your hair, they think they own it.

“Not much,” I pleaded.

She took some off the sides, some off the back to even it out. By the time she was done, I was close to being a different person.

“
Very
nice,” said Mrs. Gladstone.

But Alice Lovett, retired shoe model wasn’t satisfied. She dragged me out the door in search of green clothing.

“Suck it in, honey.”

I sucked in my stomach and stood in front of a three-way mirror in the women’s changing area of Northrop’s Fashion Central, wearing a green shirt and a green checked skirt and a fat leather belt with a silver buckle that Alice had scooped from a fifty-percent-off basket like a prospector finding a hunk of gold in a stream. I grinned.

Alice adjusted the belt, poufed the shirt out a bit. “I always told my customers, the beginning of true beauty is how you feel inside.”

“I feel pretty good, Alice.”

“And that’s radiating outward,” Alice said. “Just look at that glow coming from you. It almost hurts my eyes.”

I did a little twirl in the skirt, laughing; the fabric lifted full and light over my knees.

“Green’s the color of new life,” Alice explained. “It shows off your red hair, and those big belts work on tall women. You’ve got a good waist.”

I looked down happily at my waist. “I do?”

“I couldn’t wear a belt like that to save my pension.”

We found another green shirt, a few green sweaters. I kept looking at myself in store windows, in mirrors. I was so used to not looking. Sales clerks’ eyes didn’t cloud up when they waited on me. They kept eye contact, didn’t look away. People always leaned closer to Faith when she was shopping.

When Alice and I returned to Mrs. Gladstone’s, I don’t mind saying it, I looked great. My eyes seemed brighter, my face looked sparkly, my hair was close to perfect. Alice was being humble like all great miracle workers, saying she didn’t do much, really.

Mrs. Gladstone beamed at me and insisted I take the rest of the day off. “Go,” she said, pushing me out the door. “Clear your mind.”

“My mind doesn’t work that way, Mrs. Gladstone. It needs to have things in it.”

“
Go!
”

But where?

I drove downtown, sucking in my beauty. Matt Wicks didn’t know what he was missing. Dallas is the second largest city in Texas, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to mention it to anyone living in Dallas. I was driving past the Dallas Public Library, thinking how Opal and I could make this day into a party. We’d walk into stores pretending we were rich, we’d make up stories about people we saw. Opal was always looking to have fun, even when it wasn’t appropriate—like in school.
School, I’d try to tell her, is about pain, pressure, and homework. But she’d never listen.

“The problem with you, Jenna,” she’d say, “is you’re too responsible.”

I guess she’s right, but I don’t think I can change.

I turned left and headed back toward the Dallas Public Library.

There was something I had to do.

I was sitting at a library study table. My grandma always said that God made libraries so that people didn’t have any excuse to be stupid. Close to everything a human being needed to know was somewhere in the library.

There was plenty I needed to know.

I’d just typed “Woldman, Ken” into the library computer, pressed “Search,” and came up with five articles about him. I had them piled in front of me on the table and was studying his angular face on the cover of
Fortune
magazine, trying to figure out what he wanted with more shoe stores when he seemed to have enough already. I looked at Ken Woldman’s blue eyes—bright like flames. He was looking right at me, it seemed, hands on his bony hips, shoulders shoved back. He didn’t look like a man who would sell second-class shoes; second-class anything, for that matter. He seemed to wear his power easily, the way you toss a sweater over your shoulders on a summer night.

His father had been poor, the article said. Ken Woldman had three newspaper routes when he was a boy, a lawn-mowing
service in high school that he still operates, giving students summer jobs. Before I worked at Gladstone’s I did everything to make money—baby-sitting, dog walking, selling pennants and visors at Wrigley Field. “
Awwwwwright!
” I’d holler at the people filing in to watch the Chicago Cubs get slaughtered, “
Get your Cub memorabilia herrrrrrrrrre!
” But my newspaper route got me on the road to big business. No one ever forgets their paper-route days, with the freezing weather and the papers flying in bushes. You remember how good you felt when you’d fling a paper and it would land on a front porch perfectly. The paper kids that survive and make the money know you can’t keep tossing losers—you get two per customer per year—but otherwise, those papers better hit their mark or it affects your tips, and the whole point any kid is out there is not for the thrill, it’s for the cash. So I knew that Ken Woldman had a good aim and could land something sweet on a porch. This meant more to me than the statistics on his businesses that were always climbing up.