The Exact Location of Home (11 page)

So I keep myself busy all day, and after school, I don't even stop at my locker. I leave out that side door by the ISS room.

Mom's still at the hospital doing her required volunteer hours when I get home. Aunt Becka meets me at the door.

“Take those shoes off, and for God's sake be quiet,” she hisses. I set my backpack on the bench so I can get my shoes off, but she grabs it and holds it out, waiting for me to take it back.

“Richard's sleeping.” Aunt Becka's eyes dart toward the stairs and back to me. “He got in this morning, and he's not happy you're here.”

That makes two of us
, I think. She hands me the backpack, picks up my sneakers as if they're a dead animal, and holds them out, too. “Downstairs, okay?” She looks up the stairs again and bites her lower lip. “Just take everything down and be quiet.”

I'm leaning against the wall doing my math homework with a pencil I borrowed from our librarian, Mr. Smythe, when Mom gets home. She must have gotten the same treatment because she comes downstairs holding her white nursing shoes in one hand, juggling her purse and a pile of her textbooks in the crook of her other arm.

She puts everything down, ruffles my hair, and opens her mouth—probably to ask how my day was—but before anything comes out, a door slams upstairs. Loud.

“I still can't believe you didn't think to talk with me before you decided to open a boarding house, Rebecca!”

Mom inhales a sharp breath but doesn't say anything.

Upstairs, it's quiet for a second.

Then, Richard's voice booms again. “What?!”

Aunt Becka says something too soft for me to hear.

“You're bloody right it's not going to be for long. I have important papers stored down there. I have research materials I need access to. I am not paying a four-thousand dollar a month mortgage so you can run a homeless shelter out of my office!”

Loud footsteps clunk across the floor over our heads—Richard apparently doesn't take off
his
shoes when he comes in the house. Then the basement door swings open. Mom steps in front of me as Richard bullies into the room.

“Excuse me, Laurie.” He pushes past Mom toward a desk that Aunt Becka must have pushed into the back corner of the room. “I need some papers from
my
office.” When he gets to the desk, he explodes again. “Rebecca!”

Aunt Becka creeps down the stairs. She reminds me of how I used to go into the basement in our own house when I was little. I thought there were monsters down there in the dark.

Here, there really are.

“Where the devil is my notes file from the Peru trip? You've moved everything around so I can't. Find. A blessed.
Thing
!” On the last word, his arm slashes across the desk, and papers fly all over the room.

A manila folder lands at my feet. I bend to pick it up, and Richard lunges at me.

“Give me that and get out of my way!” He grabs the folder and shoves me aside. My shoulder slams into the wall. The rabies shot shoulder. The slammed-into-my-locker-by-Kevin-Richards shoulder.

Mom takes my elbow, steadies me, and pulls me back into Aunt Becka's laundry room. She closes the door but we still hear him screaming at Aunt Becka.

Finally, his footsteps thump back up the stairs, back across the floor over our heads, and Mom opens the door.

Aunt Becka's sitting on the pull-out sofa with her hands over her face.

Mom's quiet at first. She sits down next to Aunt Becka, puts her arms around her, and strokes the back of her smooth blond hair.

Finally, she looks up at me and says one word.

“Pack.”

 

“Are you warm enough?” Mom whispers over to the passenger seat of the pickup truck. I'm curled up in the sleeping bag I used to take on camping trips with Dad. He got it for
me when I was nine. If I push my feet to the bottom and stretch out, it doesn't even reach to my chest.

“I'm fine,” I whisper back. I close my eyes again, but the lights in the hospital parking lot are motion-activated, so every time a car or ambulance drives by on the side road, a streetlight blasts on, right in the window and through my eyelids.

“Try to sleep,” Mom says. “You have school in five hours.”

That's easier said than done when you're in a too-small sleeping bag in a parking lot. But at least it's better than Aunt Becka's house.

 

In the morning, I wake up with a cramp in my left leg and the truck door handle poking into the top of my head. Mom's shaking my shoulder. “It's seven o'clock, hon,” she says. “You need to go to the before-school program for breakfast, and then you can use the gym shower after recreation time. Everyone will think you're just showering after exercise. Here, put this in your backpack.” She hands me a miniature bottle of hotel shampoo.

I look at the label. “Montreal Imperial Plaza Hotel? When did you steal this shampoo?”

“It was in the bag Becka gave me when we left.”

I put the shampoo in my bag and remember Aunt Becka's face when she rushed up to hand Mom the bag as we left. She didn't say anything out loud. But her eyes said, “I wish you could stay.”

Mom's said, “I wish you could leave.”

She couldn't. And Mom wasn't about to stay after what happened with Richard. So we've been residents of the hospital parking lot all weekend. We also spent a bunch of Saturday at the public library. I hung out in the science section, and Mom went through every apartment listing in the newspaper. But she didn't find anything we could get without a security deposit up front, and we don't have six hundred dollars.

“Are you ready?” Mom starts backing the truck out of our parking spot.

I'd laugh if my legs weren't so sore from being all folded up in this seat all night. “Well, let's see … clothes … yep, slept in them. Backpack … used it as a pillow. Fancy hotel shampoo for the homeless kid? Check. I guess I'm ready for school.”

She steps on the brakes so hard my head jerks forward. Hers whips around so she's facing me. “You are not homeless. I know we've had a rough couple nights, but I'm taking care of this. Today.”

My heart jumps. “Are you calling Dad?”

“No, I am not. I'm going to social services to see about help.”

“Why can't you just talk to Dad? I know you guys—”

“Kirby.” She presses her lips together and looks up at the dome light. “Your father is not part of our lives right now. And he isn't going to be any time in the near future. He'll talk to you about why when he's ready. Lord knows when that will be, but I'm not calling and neither are you.”

I'm in an awful mood. I'm cold. I'm tired. And I ought to just shut up. But the angry voice rises in my chest and spills out before I can think. “You are being so stupid! I can't believe you're doing this to me just because you don't want me to see him. You're putting us through all this because you're too stupid and stubborn to call him. But if Dad
were here, I'd be taking a shower in a house right now, and I'd have slept in a bed last night instead of the seat of this stupid rusty truck, and none of this ever would have happened!” I feel tears, hot on my cheeks, and wipe them away fast. “Why won't you just call him?”

My heart pounds, waiting for her to yell back.

Instead, she turns around, puts the truck in park, and rubs her forehead with her hands, like she's trying to wipe away all my words.

Finally, she turns back toward me. I'm ready for her to shout, but the quiet voice she uses is even worse.

“You have no idea—no idea—how much I would give to wave a magic wand and fix this. You can't begin to know—and I hope you never find out—what it's like to have your child sleeping in your vehicle because you can't pay the rent.” Her eyes shine with tears. “I will take care of this. I will. Not your father. Me. And I'm going to deal with it today. I'll pick you up after school.”

I nod. I don't yell any more. I don't say anything until she drops me off at school, where the other free breakfast kids are waiting for the doors to open at 7:15.

“I'll see you at two forty-five. We're going to the doctor's after school for your rabies shot.” Mom blows me a kiss. “Have a good day.”

Not likely. The first person in the breakfast line is Kevin Richards.

“Move over, Zigonski.” Richards plunks down his tray of French toast sticks and peels the foil lid off his imitation maple syrup. He drinks it right out of the little plastic box and uses the strips of French toast to mop up what's left.

I slide down the table a ways and pick up my fork.

He eyes my backpack on the floor next to me. “Did you do the social studies?”

“Yeah.” I open my milk carton and stick in the straw. Richards drinks his from the carton and wipes his face with his sleeve.

“Got it here?”

I sigh. Guys like Kevin are always trying to bum homework from guys like me. Usually, I can just walk away. Down the hall. Into my next class. But at the before-school program, there is no “away.” Thirty kids whose parents can't afford breakfast are crowded into two long cafeteria tables. Three teachers with plastic coffee mugs in their hands and bags under their eyes guard the doors until it's time to go to the gym for the activity period.

Richards reaches down for my backpack.

“Get your hands off that!”

He stops. “I just want to borrow it. Geez. What's your problem?”

What's my problem? Everything I own that's not boxed up and shoved into a damp corner of Aunt Becka's basement is in there. That's what. “I'll get it,” I say.

He pulls his half-done homework out of his social studies book and paws around in his backpack. “You got a pencil?” he asks.

I pull out Mr. Smythe's pencil and hand it to him. “I need that back.” He nods, squints at my paper, and starts writing on his.

“At least change a few words,” I tell him.

“These sound good, though.”

While Kevin copies my answers to questions three through five, the rest of the breakfast table fills in. I've been eligible for the before-school program for years—ever since Dad left—because Mom's income puts us in the category for free French toast sticks and fake syrup. I've just never come until now. I guess I never realized how many kids from my classes show up here every morning.

There's the crowd I expected to see, for sure. Like Richards. He lives with just his mom and his little brothers, and you know she can't make much money as a part time receptionist. There's a bunch of other tough kids—Randy and Dylan, Josh and his twin sisters Kim and Bethany, who live in the trailer park by the river.

But then there are weird kids here—kids who don't look poor at all. There's Michael Martino, whose mom works at the adult day care center where Gianna's Nonna goes. I thought she was a nurse. Don't nurses make enough money? There's Jessica Hawkins, the only kid who ever beats my score on a math test. And there's Ruby. I see her talking, smiling and talking to the cafeteria lady punching in her student id number, before she sees me. I look around, thinking I'll hide, but that's impossible here.

“Hey there!” Ruby walks up and sits across from Richards and me. She doesn't look even a little surprised.

“Hey,” I say.

“Here.” Richards slides my homework back to me on the table and I put it away, relieved to have something to do. Ruby raises her eyebrows but doesn't say anything about me letting him copy.

Kevin punches me in the shoulder but not as hard as usual. I'm not sure but I think it might even be a friendly kind of tough-guy punch, like they do sometimes. “I'll catch you down in the gym,” he says and waves for Dylan and Josh to wait for him.

“You guys pals now?” Ruby picks up one of her French toast sticks and dips it into the syrup.

“Uh, no. He wanted my homework and I didn't exactly have an escape route, so …”

“Gotcha.” Ruby pulls the paper off her straw.

“So … uh … how's the bird thing?” I ask.

“Really good,” she says. “We've been working on the posters. You should come over to Gee's house later. We're going to do some more.”

“Sure. I mean … maybe.”

I take another sip of my milk and take another bite of French toast. It's cold now. “I didn't know you came here. I mean, for the before school thing,” I say.

“Mostly at the beginning of the month …” Ruby says, matter of fact, “… when Mom's first paycheck goes all for rent and car insurance. Next week will be better for groceries, and I'd rather eat at home and walk with you guys, so that's what I do.”

I pick up my milk again, but it's empty. I pretend to drink from the straw anyway because I don't know what to say. I mean, obviously I had noticed that sometimes Ruby
walked with Gianna and me to school and sometimes she didn't. I'd never noticed it was always the first part of the month.

“I guess I just didn't know that,” I say, finally.

She smiles. “You wouldn't. It's not a big deal. It's how we solve a problem, Mom and me, and it works fine. I just don't talk about it.”

“Listen, about that—I mean, with me. I don't really want people to know I'm coming to this now. I mean … people here obviously know, but—”

“Gianna,” Ruby says.

I nod.

She picks up her tray, and I follow her to the garbage cans to dump our napkins and syrup cartons.

“I won't say anything.” She turns and looks at me. “Is everything okay, though? I mean, I know it's probably a tough money time, but it's okay?”

Part of me wants to tell her about Mrs. Delfino's son and his greasy hair and his letters. About the liquor store boxes with the ants crawling over my stuff. About Aunt Becka and her white carpet and purple-green bruises. About the hospital parking lot. About Dad, and how Mom still won't call him for help.