The Worst Years of Your Life (37 page)

“We utilized an irrigation system,” Merry said.

When we got out of the car, I saw a dog tied to the cornerpost of the front porch. He was yellow, but he looked part Lab and part something else. He was smaller than a Lab and had floppy ears. “They'll never believe this is their dog,” I said. He strained at the rope and wagged his tail. “Is that the best you could find?”

“Now don't speak ill of our canine friend,” Merry said. She took the two bags of groceries we'd just purchased out of the trunk of her car and thrust them into my arms. Then she leaned further into the trunk and emerged with a small TV set.

“What's that for?” I said.

“For you,” she said, and grinned. Her teeth were too white.

Inside, while Merry unpacked the groceries, I wandered through the house. It was nearly bare of furniture. I could find no evidence that my father or Merry had ever lived there, not even a photograph. There were two rooms with single beds and small dressers in them, and one of those bedrooms was strewn with a woman's clothes. I tiptoed into another room where my grandmother, balding and feeble, lay in a hospital bed under a pile of old quilts. There was a smell like sour milk. “Grandmother,” I said. She lifted her head and yelled out, in a surprisingly strong voice, “Run, run—the Baptists are after you!” I backed away.

In the den, Merry was bustling about in the corner, unplugging a large TV set and hoisting it from a table onto the floor. A slight red-haired woman wearing a black jumpsuit leaned against the wall with her arms folded, watching Merry. Merry was talking to the woman but not looking at her. “I figured you really didn't need this fancy set,” Merry said, “and we can really use it, what with Dick's poor vision.” She lifted the little TV she'd taken from the trunk and set it on the tabletop. “There. That'll do fine.”

“Does it work?” the red-haired woman said.

“Been working for years. Came from a motel liquidation.”

The woman snorted. “I guess it's black and white.”

“It's good quality,” Merry said, patting the small TV like a pet.

A little while later I stood out in the driveway. Merry sat behind the wheel of her Lincoln, her elbow crooked out the window. She'd only stayed long enough to unload my things and swap TV's, and now she was heading back to Ohio. I held on to her door handle. It was getting dark. “I can't do it,” I said.

“It'll go smooth as silk.” Merry winked her green eye at me. “Read those want ads every day, sugar. Should be anytime. I'll be back before you know it.”

I tried to think of something that would slow her down, if not stop her. “What should I tell Dad?”

“I wouldn't tell him anything.” She started the car. “Considering your track record. And his.”

“What'd he do?” I said, but she didn't seem to hear me. She stepped on the gas, flicking her hand in a wave as she spun out onto the dirt road.

I watched the red dust settling and thought about Iowa—our two-story white house with its porch swing and our sweet-smelling lawn that rolled under my treehouse down to the cornfield. At home, on a summer evening, the air would be full of humidity and comforting sounds—crickets, country music from passing cars, the distant voice of the baseball announcer at City Park. Daisy would be cooking my father's dinner—maybe pork chops and baked potatoes. I couldn't picture what my mother would be doing because she lived with Smitty, in his Victorian house across town. For years, Smitty and my mother had eaten breakfast together every morning at the cafe, and every afternoon she helped him with his business affairs. Finally, after she'd spent all of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with Smitty, my father said to her in a joking voice, “You like him better than you do us. Why don't you just move in with him?” She called his bluff and did just that. Since Daisy had already taken over at our house, it wasn't that much of a change.

I stood there in the driveway till the sun had dropped behind the mountains. Then I untied the dog and took him inside.

I
GOT INTO A ROUTINE
right away. Every morning at breakfast I read the entire newspaper, saving the lost-and-found ads for last. When I'd finished my Grape-Nuts I placed the bowl on the floor, and Captain Crunch Junior stepped up and licked the bowl clean and then some, causing it to roll around the kitchen floor.

“You kids stop that racket,” my grandmother screamed from her bedroom.

The red-haired woman, who turned out to be my grandmother's live-in nurse, sat across the table from me, reading
Silent Spring
by Rachel Carson. She was half Mexican, her name was LeeAnn, she was forty-two, and her hair, she told me, was naturally red.

The first morning I was there she'd said, “Aren't you going to get bored? How long are you staying?”

Merry hadn't warned me against telling Lee Ann about our scheme, but I knew I shouldn't. Besides, having a secret made me feel important. Merry had chosen me to help her, and since I was in a position to help, why shouldn't I? “I'm here on a rest cure,” I told LeeAnn. “For my mental health.”

“Well then,” said LeeAnn. “You'll fit right in.”

After breakfast I would grab an apple from the fridge and make three peanut-butter sandwiches. In the living room, which was totally empty, I tied a rope to Junior's collar and we set out for a walk down the dirt road toward the mountains. Strange-looking houses lined the road—adobe houses with scraggly yards from which dark-skinned people stared at me. Sometimes I pretended Lisa Lazar skipped along beside us, barefoot, in her silly green bathing suit. The air was clear and dry, and the sky was so blue it almost hurt to look at it. We strolled past cactus plants and lizards sunning themselves on white rocks. To the south were rounded hills with ribbons of pink running through them. The mountains loomed straight ahead. We walked and walked until I let myself realize we must be miles from my grandmother's house. Nobody knows me here, I thought, and nobody knows where I am. That thought was a signal that we'd gone far enough for one day. Junior and Lisa and I found shade under a pine tree and split the sandwiches and the apple.

When we got back, worn out and thirsty, we napped till dinnertime—frozen dinners and Purina Dog Chow that Merry had left. In the evenings I watched the little television in the den with LeeAnn, who was always doing something else at the same time, like sewing a hem or balancing her checkbook. At seven she spoonfed my grandmother her applesauce, and at nine she gave her a sponge bath. During commercials we talked about all kinds of things, including the existence of God. Neither of us believed, although we both wanted to. I couldn't bring myself to tell her about Lisa.

One night, while we were watching “Nightmare Theatre” and LeeAnn was knitting a Nordic sweater, she told me she thought Merry was a sleazebag. “She's sold off every antique, everything of value in this house.”

“What's wrong with that, if nobody else wants it?” I said, realizing I sounded just like Merry. “Merry looks out for herself,” I said. “I kind of admire that.”

LeeAnn shook her head, clacking her needles together. “I think it's disgusting. At least wait till the poor thing's dead.”

“So why do you work here?”

“I won't be here forever,” she said. “Besides, I always liked Mrs. St. John. I grew up down the road.”

“Did you know my father?”

“He used to let me ride his pinto pony.” She held up the front of her sweater and admired it. “Merry used to make us kids march around in a parade just so she could be the majorette. Your father was always helping people, fixing things.”

This didn't sound like my father. Whenever he was home from his job at the newspaper, he spent hours sitting in his chair, staring out the living room window at the cornfield behind our house, tapping his empty pipe on the edge of the coffee table. Daisy would bring him fresh glasses of iced tea and rub his shoulders, and sometimes he remembered to say, “Thanks, honey.” Their behavior sickened and infuriated me, but I knew better than to let on.

LeeAnn resumed her knitting. “You seem like such a well-adjusted kid,” she said.

“Young adult,” I said, and we both laughed.

Later that night, Junior hopped up onto my bed, settled himself on my feet, and fell asleep. I lay awake, wondering what LeeAnn would think if she knew the truth about my family and the horrible thing I'd done. I wondered if she'd think I was crazy. Other people thought I was.

After the incident with Lisa, my father took me to a psychiatrist in Indianola. He wore a hearing aid and kept asking me how I felt. “Fine,” I kept saying, feeling sorry for him.

He sighed. “Is there anything bothering you?”

“Well,” I said, “I keep wondering where that girl's parents were when she went out into the deep water. Why weren't they watching her?” The psychiatrist wrote something down in his notebook, and I knew I'd disappointed him.

At night, after my father and Daisy were asleep, I would pace around our house, shredding tissues and gasping for air. During the day, while they were at work, I lay on the couch watching soap operas with the sound off. Once my mother dropped by, dressed in her pale pink suit, my favorite, the one she wore to the Garden Club meetings. She sat down beside me on the couch, trying to appear calm, but her eyes were fixed and tense, like a cat's. “The whole town knows what you did,” she said. “Do you realize your father had to publish an article about it? In Smitty's paper?” My father had worked his way up to editor-in-chief, but my mother never let us forget that Smitty owned the paper. She grabbed my ankle and shook it. “Why would you attack the little girl? What were you thinking?”

I couldn't stand seeing my mother, the president of the Magruder Garden Club and Ladies' Literary Society, behaving like this. I couldn't stand her helpless hand-wringing. I said, “I hated that girl's frilly bathing suit.”

My mother burst into tears. “What's wrong with you?” she said, but didn't wait for an answer. She got up and ran out of the room.

Junior, a hot weight at the end of the bed, let out a loud snore. I jerked my feet out from under him, but he didn't wake up. I knew what was wrong with me, and my mother did too, even though she pretended otherwise. I had become a delinquent because I did not intend to take my turn as Daddy's nursemaid. I did not intend to make myself useful.

A
FTER MY FIRST DAY
in New Mexico, I didn't go in to see my grandmother again. It was too depressing. I never called home, and when they called me I said I was having a very educational experience. I told my father that Merry was off on a short business trip—going to some motel liquidations—and that she'd left me in the care of Grandmother's nurse, LeeAnn, and that LeeAnn had taken me sightseeing on her days off. I mentioned some places I'd read about on the back of the New Mexico state map.

“How's Mom?” he asked me.

“Sweet,” I said. “But kind of confused.” I told Daisy I'd bought a square-dancing dress with the fifty dollars she'd given me and she pretended to be horrified.

Once my mother called and said that she'd seen Lisa's mother in the Jack and Jill, and that Lisa was doing fine. “Outwardly,” my mother added. Every night Junior slept at the foot of my bed.

“The ad appeared after I'd been in New Mexico nearly a week. “Lost: Yellow Lab, from a convenience store near Española. 2 years old. Goes by Captain Crunch. Reward. Call Steve and Cyndi Richardson.”

That morning Junior and I walked past the horse pasture, past the school bus converted into a house. We kept following the road when it turned and climbed uphill through some pine trees. A hawk circled overhead, screeching. We'd never gone this far before. Lisa turned and ran back down the hill. I realized that the real Lisa no longer looked like the girl in the bathing suit. For one thing, the bathing suit wouldn't fit. She was a year older. She was bigger, taller, and smarter.

Junior stopped and gazed back at me, questioning.

“Lisa may not ever want to swim again,” I said. “Did you know that?”

He sat down on his haunches, his eyes on my sack of sandwiches.

The phone number in the ad was busy till eight-thirty that night. “He showed up at my door hungry and weak, like he'd walked a long way,” I told Cyndi. “Does your dog have a little white spot on the crown of his head?” Merry had coached me on what to say.

“Yes!” Cyndi shouted. “You're the first person who's mentioned the spot. I've gotten four calls already, and nobody's mentioned the spot. It's him, Steve. We found him!”

“I'll send you a picture, so you'll know for sure.” I tipped back in my chair, feeling cocky. Merry had taken a picture of Junior, a tad blurry, and it was already in an envelope with the address and a stamp on it.

“You don't have to,” Cyndi said. “I can tell by your voice that Crunch is right there in the room. We'll be there in three days.”

“Three days?” I rocked my chair back down with a thud, which startled Junior, who was sprawled out in front of the screen door.

“Give him our love, will you?” Cyndi said. “Tell him we're on our way.”