What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay (3 page)

I hung around outside, cruising the twenty-five-cent shelves by the sidewalk where if you want something after hours you throw a quarter through the fence. When Mom came out, she was by herself. I let her get a little way down the block and then I ran after her.

“Mom! Who is that guy?”

She jumped when I grabbed her arm, and then she glared at me. “I thought you weren’t talking to me.”

I gave her what she calls
that look
, as in
don’t give me that look
. “Who is he?”

“He’s … I met him in the history section at Bert’s. He’s just someone I have coffee with.”

“Why?”

She gave me back the look and then she sighed. “Angie, you really don’t have the right to question me like that.”

“What’s his name?” I demanded.

“Felix.”

“It’s not.”

“Why shouldn’t it be?”

I opened my mouth and closed it again. “He’s creepy,” I said.

“He’s had a rough time,” my mom said. “He has post-traumatic stress disorder, I think.”

“You mean from a war?”

“Probably. He just wants someone to talk to. And so do I. Things aren’t easy right now.”

I thought about saying that was
her
fault, and then I thought about Grandma Alice saying maybe there were things I didn’t know. Mom says you should never start a relationship with someone whose troubles are greater than your own. She should know. I just hoped she remembered that right now.

“You weren’t at Mass on Sunday,” Mom said, dodging the issue.

“Didn’t feel like it,” I muttered.

“Feeling like it isn’t the point.”

“Anyway, how do you know?” Mom goes to Our Lady of Good Counsel, the new church.

“Wuffie told me.”

Wuffie is my grandmother—Mom’s mother—but one of those grandmas that don’t want to be called Grandma and instead pick out something like Wuffie or Foofoo, so they sound like you got them at the pound. Wuffie still goes to St. Thomas’s, and I should have known she would rat me out.

“All right, I’ll go next week,” I said.

“Good. Well …” Mom hesitated, as if she expected me to say something else, but I couldn’t think of anything that didn’t sound petulant.

“Ben misses you,” I said.

Mom sighed. “Oh, honey, sometimes you can’t make things work the way you want them to.” She sounded less angry and sadder than she had in front of Ben. “Well. Well, I’d better go. I left vegetables in the car.” She raised her hand as if she was going to hug me and then turned it into a sort of wave. “See you.” She turned and walked down the block to her car. Her red hair made a wild cloud around her head, bobbing along behind her as if it were alive. I ran my fingers through my own hair and discovered I had a eucalyptus bud stuck in it.

The next day I looked for Felix and didn’t see him so I went back to St. Thomas’s. I had some idea I’d find the statue in some back room there, and the guy’s stuff all over the basement floor because it was obvious he wasn’t really St. Felix. I was right about all of it but the statue. The pedestal was still sitting there with nobody on it. I poked around in the various closets and storage rooms and found old brass altar vases and a stack of hymnbooks that mice had chewed, but that’s all. Except for the guy, who was sitting on the floor by the pedestal, mending a frayed cord on a hot plate. He jumped when I came in, and looked relieved when he saw it was me.

“They’ll catch you,” I told him. “There are shelters you can go to.”

“I like it here.”

“Why were you at Bert’s with my mom?”

“Your mom?”

“Looks like me. Lots of red hair. Don’t say you weren’t.”

“That’s your mom? I was interceding.”

“You weren’t.”

“I was working up to it. I will now, if you want.”

“I want to know where the statue went. That was
my
statue.”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t know how it happened. All of a sudden, here I was.”

“It did
not
happen like that,” I said, furious.

He looked like he was trying to remember. “It might have,” he said finally. He bent his head over the cord again.

The sun was coming through the window at the top of the stairs, leaving a little pool of light at the bottom. I sat down on the last step. “You know, that stuff I told St. Felix was private,” I said.

“Everyone has secret lives,” he said. “Everybody running around with all kinds of horrors inside.”

“Well, not horrors …”

“No, not you. Think about that and how that means you’re one of the lucky ones. Not like that kid who used to be in your mom’s class, the one she was telling me about.”

“Who?”

He bent his head over the cord. “He went to Afghanistan and got his leg blown off the first week. He got out of the hospital yesterday.”

“His leg? Who?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t tell me his name.”

“His name’s Jesse Francis,” Mom said.

I’d called Mom when I got back to Ben’s. Ben was in his study, and Grandma Alice was washing lettuce in the sink.

I remembered Jesse Francis. Ayala is a small town. “He’s barely old enough to be in the army!” I said to Mom. “What was he doing in Afghanistan?”

“His father signed for him to join when he was seventeen.” Mom knows nearly everybody whose kids she’s taught. “It’s such a hard age, seventeen,” she said quietly. “And how did you hear about it?”

“Some of the kids,” I said. I wouldn’t have to pretend—something like that would be all over town. When I looked down at the
Ayala News
on the table, it was on the front page. His truck had been blown up by an Improvised Explosive Device, which is what they call a homemade land mine. It blew his whole leg off. I could feel my stomach contracting into a knot.

Grandma Alice pottered in with the place mats. “Awful,” she said when she saw the paper. “Set the table, okay?”

I put the phone back in the kitchen and got plates. At dinner Grandma Alice lit the candles and said a blessing because it was Friday night. She and Ben are Jewish and so is Mom’s dad, my Grandpa Joe, but Mom and Wuffie both got some kind of special dispensation to marry them, and agreed to raise the kids Catholic. That’s okay with me. I figure that with a background like that, you either have to be an atheist or just pick something. And I wouldn’t be a good atheist. The idea of random chaos is too scary.

Grandma Alice made matzoh ball soup with homemade chicken broth. I would be Jewish just for matzoh ball soup, but tonight at first it felt like eating lead slugs. Or real ones. I didn’t know Jesse Francis, not really. He dropped out the year before last and he’s four years older than me. But all I could think of was what it would feel like to have your leg explode. After dinner, I went back to St. Thomas’s and slipped down the stairs.

“You were right,” I said to Felix. “How could they let a seventeen-year-old kid volunteer to go to Afghanistan?”

“Same way they always have. Wars are fought by kids. Kids are who’s expendable.” He looked really sad in the light from the one dusty bulb.

“His
father
signed so he could go!” I was indignant. “How could somebody’s father do that?”

“He thought it was the patriotic thing to do.” Felix’s face had gotten closed up, like a cupboard someone had locked.

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

I sat down on the stairs again. I hated to admit it, but it was kind of nice having him talk
back
to me. And weird. I found myself wanting to say things to him, as if he really was St. Felix. Maybe Mom felt that way about him. I didn’t like that idea much. “Mom is going to get back with Ben, you know,” I said.

He looked up at that. “Yeah, probably.”

“That hot plate will blow the fuses here,” I told him. “This place has wiring that’s really scary.”

“You know about wiring?”

“Wuffie got my Grandpa Joe to come look at it, and that’s what he said.”

“Is your grandpa an electrician?”

“He’s a history professor, but he’s retired.”

Felix smiled then. “We all want to fix stuff we don’t understand.”

I had to laugh. “Grandpa Joe exploded a toaster once.”

“I’ll try not to explode the basement. You figure God’s got his eye on it, he’ll put the fire out?”

“I hope so,” I said.

Walking back to Ben’s in the dark, I wondered how much God really keeps an eye on things like that. I got the feeling that there were layers of things I couldn’t see, floating on top of each other. Maybe it was the live oaks. They have strange gnarly branches and are mostly really big and old. They look like something might be living in them—dryads or something, not just owls. Once I saw a peacock in one. The Chumash, the people who lived here in the valley before the Spanish came, lived on the acorns. They believed their dead people went away over the Channel Islands off the coast in a blue light and you could hear the door of the Underworld banging closed behind them if you listened. I wondered if that was what the explosion had sounded like to Jesse Francis.

On Sunday I went to church because Wuffie came and picked me up. At least she hasn’t tried to get me to come live with her and Mom. She doesn’t approve of the divorce, either.

It was the Sunday before Labor Day, and Father Weatherford was dedicating the Mass to the new school year to get us off on the right foot.

“There’s someone living in the basement here,” I said to Wuffie as we settled in our usual pew.

“I know, dear,” she whispered back. “Your mother told me.”

“
She
knows? And you haven’t said anything?”

“Poor man. I think Father Weatherford may know, but the parish council won’t like it so he pretends he doesn’t. But haven’t you noticed how
clean
everything is?”

I hadn’t, but now that I looked around, I could see that someone had painstakingly cleaned all the separate panes in the stained glass windows. You have to do that with a Q-tip to get the edges. And the statues of the Virgin and St. Thomas looked brighter. The Altar Society at St. Thomas is all old ladies; their eyesight isn’t that good and they can’t reach the tops of anything. Father Weatherford won’t let them use a ladder for fear one of them will fall off and break her hip. I imagined Felix cleaning those little glass panes one by one and wondered how long it had taken.

After church, Lily and I had plans to go up to the river to swim. About twenty people were holding a peace vigil in front of the park when we drove through town. They were just standing there with anti-war signs. The hardware store across the street had a big flag banner and a bunch of yellow ribbons in the display window, and the manager was standing outside, glaring at the people with the signs.

“Did you know Jesse Francis?” I asked Lily.

“Not really.”

“Mom says he’s coming back to finish his senior year of high school. How weird is that?”

“That’s beyond weird. High school would be like living on Mars after you’d been in the army, I’d think. Didn’t he already get his GED?”

“Mom says Jesse’s mother told her he just sits in his room and draws mazes in his journal and she’s hoping that if he goes back to high school he can figure out how to be a kid again.”

“Man, I doubt it,” Lily said.

“Yeah, I don’t see how you could either. But Mom says colleges like to see a diploma and not a GED, and that’s why he decided to go back.”

“And I thought you weren’t talking to your mom.”

“We have negotiated the terms of a truce,” I said. “She doesn’t try to get me to live at Wuffie’s house and I don’t nag her about Ben.”

“If she actually gets divorced,
that’s
going to get a little bizarre.”

“Yeah. Mostly I’m hoping it means she’s not really going to go through with it.”

“Is she seeing anybody else?” Lily asked.

“She has coffee with a homeless guy who lives in the basement at St. Thomas’s. I don’t really think you can count that.”

“No,” Lily agreed. “You can’t count that.”

I hoped you couldn’t. When we got to the river, the swimming hole was full. Some kids we knew were climbing up to jump off the big tawny rocks that jut out over the water. We kind of half waved at them—one of them was Noah Michalski—and spread our towels out on the bank. Lily waded in and I followed her, pushing out into the cool water. It was too murky to see the bottom, but it’s over your head in the middle. Lily floated on her back with her pale hair spreading out around her, waving its tendrils in the current. A shower of manzanita leaves drifted down on my head and I looked up to see Noah Michalski hopping up and down and making ape noises.

“Mature,” I said, and he just laughed. Noah is really cute, but he’s an idiot. He has blond hair and green eyes and a sort of Superman curl over his forehead, and all he thinks about is sex and exploding things. He acts like he still likes me. I can’t imagine why, because I told him I wouldn’t spit on him if he was on fire. When I fall in love it will be with someone I can trust, not someone who will trash me to make himself look like a stud. And then I won’t leave him for some stupid reason like Mom keeps doing.