The Queen of Everything (21 page)

I told myself a bunch of self-pitying lies.
Then I got myself together. I wiped my face. Away from my father's staring, I
remembered why I had told Grandpa in the first place. I decided there was no way
in hell I wanted to be home when my father got back. He, after all, was the one
that was doing wrong, and maybe he'd better remember that.

I stuffed a few things in my backpack, got my
bike out of the garage. I would spend the night at my Mom's.

The funny thing was, I wasn't even surprised to
see Jackson's truck at the end of the block,

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just sitting there waiting for me with the
engine idling. He didn't say anything when he saw me. He just got out, lifted my
bike, and put it in the back of the truck. He got back in and didn't say a word.
Not even a sigh that said I required a great deal of patience.

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Chapter Ten

My mother had wanted to name me Daisy Blossom.
Daisy Blossom MacKenzie. I'm not kidding. Thankfully the only outrageous thing
my father had ever managed to do was marry my mother, and even that had been
more than he could handle. He put his foot down about the name. Not only was it
ridiculous, he'd say as he told the story, but a poor choice; daisies stink
worse than the inside of his shoes. So I have my father to be grateful to for
sparing me the misery of going through life with a name that sounds like it
belongs to a stripper with tit-twirling tassels.

I regretted almost immediately going to my
mother's that night. First of all, I could tell she was trying something new
with me, and

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nothing ticked me off more than her thinking I
required techniques. It was probably something she read about in some book
called
Daughters on the Cusp of Womanhood.
She tiptoed around me in wide
arcs, giving me space, I guess, holding herself back from asking what was wrong.
Keeping her mouth shut was not something my mother did without looking like she
was at a gym, trying to bench-press her weight. Every one of her actions
screamed what she wasn't saying, which did not encourage me to become open and
communicative. Screaming, any way you do it, never does. Actually, it only made
me curious to see just how long she might go before the words came out in some
messy explosion. I became so comfy and involved watching her bustle around
pretending to be casual, as her face got tighter and tighter as the skin of a
balloon, that I almost forgot what it even was that I was keeping from
her.

And then there was the problem of my mother in
the summertime. In a loose sundress lax on the job, sometimes letting a part of
her that shouldn't pop into view, she was so much my mother that it bugged the
hell out of me. You were certain to see grassy patches under her arms, not mowed
since winter, and freckles that speckled her back in various patterns, looking
like those paintings Mr. Wykowski showed us in class that are made by a thousand
dots of color.

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I don't know. Now I think that maybe you judge
a mother in a way you don't judge a father. Maybe just daughters do. In my mind
I was simply my father's child, no question--restrained, polished. And
shaven.

So by the next morning I wanted out of there,
but I wasn't ready to face my father yet. My plan was to stay around until it
was time to go to True You, avoiding Mom. Miss Poe had gone out to pick
raspberries, Hugh Prince was relaxing his strained nerves through the rhythms of
the marimba gourds next door, and Grant Manning was at the university lab trying
to get orcas to sing into his microphone. So my only option was to go out to
Nathan's shed and watch him work. Usually he was too preoccupied to talk much
and I could just sit on a stool or his old rocker and watch the sparks of his
blowtorch and the silvery drips of his soldering iron.

Mom had Max strapped into a high chair he'd
outgrown, trying to still his wiggles long enough to give him a haircut. "It was
a surprise to see you last night," she said. So casual it was killing
her.

"I know how you like unexpected visits," I
said, and banged out the screen door. I trotted down the porch stairs and almost
ran smack into Homer slinking around the corner, sucking away on Max's pacifier.
He dropped it like a

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drunk caught with a bottle of booze, then came
over for a pat.

I scratched his tan head. "You're neurotic," I
said to him. He smiled up at me like this was the best news he'd heard all
day.

Homer trotted amiably behind me to the
workshop. The Jell-O molds cemented to the outside of Nathan's shed actually get
hot to the touch in the summer, and standing next to them, you felt them radiate
a surprising warmth. A sign on the building had a picture of Max tacked to it,
and the message, if you have

any questions about my dad's art, just come to
the house and knock . Visitors to Parrish often pulled to the side of the road
and ventured over to gawk at the yard.

I pushed in the heavy wooden door to a shady
coolness and the sound of Bob Dylan whining as pitifully as Homer when no one
will throw his knotted sock. Nathan, in tank top, shorts, and sandals, bent over
what looked to be two copper pinwheel blades on a silver stand. The huge round
globes of his safety goggles were down over his eyes.

"You look funny," I said.

He wiggled his arms out in front of him. "Scuba
diver," he said.

"More like fly eyes," I said.

"Run! Protect your children and
women!

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The Human Fly will eat you all!" He flapped his
arms like a chicken.

"You're so weird," I said.

"I'm melting pennies on it," he said. He rubbed
his hand along the flat blade of the sculpture. At his feet, I saw the wrinkled
Front Street Market bag packed full of copper. "Everyone's contributed to this
one. Even the guys at Beer and Books empty their pockets when they see me
coming. I like the idea of it, pennies, all the places and pockets they've been.
Old ladies' coin purses, sweaty little hands of kids. Cash-register drawer of
some diner, who knows where. Life layers. I'm hoping they'll show through the
work when I'm done," he said.

"Oh," I said. You know, whatever. I sat in the
rocker he had in the corner of the shed, drew my knees up. Homer nosed around in
the basket of toys Nathan kept there for Max, looking for something to put his
slobbery lips around. "Homer, quit," I said.

Homer overcame his compulsion for a moment and
dropped down on the floor in front of me. I just sat there for a while, watching
Nathan and listening to the
har-har-har-har
of Homer's heavy breathing.
It sounded like he was remembering a joke that truly cracked him up. I couldn't
have been there more than ten

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minutes when Mom popped her head through the
door.

"Jordan?" My first thought was that she had
finally caved in; my brain had started negotiations on how much of the truth I
wanted to tell her. Then her face got all funny.

"God, Jordan," she struggled. Her voice wobbled
with tears. When the rest of her came into view, I saw that she held Max under
one arm, his bangs cut only halfway across like some baby punk rocker. He hung
under her arm in a haphazard fashion but looked too stunned at the sudden change
in plan to care. Nathan switched off the blowtorch, and the workshop got too
quiet. He lifted his goggles to his head.

"What?" I said. I was getting worried now.
My father,
I thought.
Oh Jesus, it happened. Something has happened to
my father.

My mother met Nathan's eyes. She wiped her own
teary face against Max's small shoulder. "The phone," she said. She pointed back
toward the house. "God, Jordan. I'm so sorry. It's your grandpa. Your grandpa.
Eugene."

"What? He's in the hospital?" I said. "He's in
the hospital?"

"He's dead. He's dead, Jordan. He
..."

"He can't be," I said. "I just saw him last
night."

She didn't say anything. Her shoulders just
started moving up and down in a swallowed sob.

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"I just saw him," I said again.

"After," she said. "Later. Last night. Oh,
honey," she said.

"But I just saw him," I said. I mean this was
ridiculous. He was perfectly fine last night.

"Honey," she said.

Oh shit,
I thought.
Shit. Whatever
had happened to him. had been my fault. My fault.

She came to me, put her free arm around me, and
pulled me to her. I was confused more than anything else. My chin rested over
her shoulder. Her body racked against my still one, and soon Nathan came and put
his arms around all of us. I didn't cry then. I mean, someone can't just be here
one minute and dead the next. I concentrated on the back end of Max, which from
my viewpoint I could see sticking out from my mother's arm. I saw his little
shoes, both laces undone. It can take a person a long time to die in your
mind.

"I loved Eugene," my mother said in a small
voice. She released me. "We need to get her to her grandma's," she said to
Nathan. We walked hurriedly across the yard. I wasn't sure what the rush was
now. If he was dead. We crossed paths with Hugh Prince and Marimba Janey who had
just strolled across the grass hand-in-hand, happy smiles on their faces. My
mother thrust Max into Hugh Prince's arms, and rushed into the house after
Nathan. Poor Hugh looked like a spectator

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who had wandered down to the field to get a hot
dog and had just been handed the football during a crucial play. His face was a
mirror of what I felt right then, that someone had just handed me something
unfamiliar, unwanted. Something I had no idea what to do with.

My grandmother's house was full of people when
I got there. When it comes to death, people move fast. I guess they think they'd
better move quickly to show good manners and compassion so Mr. Death will figure
they're nice people and pass them by. A lot of little old people grasped my
hands with their thin, loose skinned ones, and some folks I recognized from the
gas station patted my shoulder, and I just basically walked around and said the
things you do, except that it all seemed like we were only pretending. My aunt
Sonia, my father's sister; her husband, Bob; and the two kids would be coming
into town the next morning. I had to call Laylani and tell her why I wasn't at
work.

"Oh, Jordan," she had said. "You just know your
grandfather is in a better place." Well, no, actually I didn't know that. But
that's what people say when someone dies. All the old people and friends from
the garage said it too. He's in a better place. Like he packed his bags and went
to Hawaii. Like he and his Elvis hair had themselves resting against some lounge
chair, working on a

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tan. I wondered where he really was. I wondered
if he was cold there. It still seemed then that he was going to walk in and ask
what the hell all those people were doing in his living room. I just kept
expecting him. He would be very pissed off at these people who came over without
calling first. He would be very pissed we were pretending he was
dead.

Grandma had thrown an afghan over Grandpa's
chair, the one with the footstool that popped out, with the seat all soft and
worn. The one where he died. People avoided looking at it, as if it knew
something they didn't know and didn't care to.

My grandmother was doing what they called
"holding up well." Maybe that's another reason all the people come fast, in a
swarm. To catch you before you fall into that pool of raw grief. To make sure
your eyes don't stay too long on the jar of Hotter 'n Hell Hot Sauce when you
open the refrigerator door. Instead your eyes are forced to move, looking for
the 7-Up Mrs. Carpenter asked for because she was feeling a little
faint.

The only problem, though, is that those people
don't stay forever. They don't follow you into the night, pile into bed with
you. That's when you really need them, too. You could use Mrs. Carpenter lying
across the foot of the bed with her hair curlers in, and old Franklin,
the

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neighbor man, in striped pajamas with his plate
of midnight snacks balanced on his stomach, and Will Cutty shyly elbowing for
more room in his plaid boxers and white T-shirt, punching his pillow to make it
more comfortable. That's when you need them; that's when the person missing
becomes hugely gone and Dead seems the biggest thing of all.

It was decided that I would stay with Grandma
that night until Aunt Sonia and her family came the next day. I didn't like the
idea, but my father and Grandma and I were doing this guilty square dance and
Grandma, Lost My Partner What'll I Do?, got me. I didn't want to stay there.
That house felt strange to me with Grandpa's pill bottles sitting half empty on
the kitchen windowsill, his black grandpa socks tossed by his side of the bed,
the TV channel knob still marked to the place he had watched the night before.
In the bathroom drawer was the tube of toothpaste he expected to finish. It
seemed like he had not done a sad thing, but a mean one--selfishly going off to
the better place and not packing up his things. Leaving his black socks for
Grandma to pick up one more time.