Читать книгу Not Quite A Mom - Kirsten Sawyer - Страница 13

Sitting in the cracked brown vinyl booth at Mug’s, Tiffany can’t help but think about how her stepfather, Chuck, loves (loved) the crummy coffee shop. Normally, whenever he suggested it, Tiffany put up a fight to go to Denny’s instead. Denny’s benefited from the power of the parent company and undoubtedly has better food. Mug’s, so named because of the owners’, sisters Mildred and Wilma Appleby, mismatched collection of mugs in which they serve everything from coffee to clam chowder, is substandard on a good day. Today, though, Tiffany didn’t have the strength or the will to argue. She doubted she’d be able to eat anything anyway—which she was proving true as she shoved the runny scrambled eggs around her plate and took tiny sips of watery hot chocolate from a Shepherd and Moore Insurance Agency mug with a smiling yellow sunshine on it.

Buck had laid out a plan: breakfast, going home to collect her belongings, and then, in the morning, going to L.A. to deliver her to her aunt Lizzie. She could tell that Buck had tried hard to sound convincing when he told her about her aunt Lizzie’s concern for her and about how happy she would be to see them when they arrived. She had quelled her normal teenage defiance and let him believe that she believed it.

“Eggs okay?” Buck asks with a look of true concern.

“They’re a little runny,” Tiffany admits, taking a bite of overly buttered wheat toast midway through her answer. “Toast’s good, though.”

“Yep, they make good toast here,” Buck agrees, taking a bite of his underbuttered raisin toast and thinking that his eggs seem runny enough to be a salmonella risk.

They finish what they can manage to stomach of the putrid breakfast before Buck puts a single twenty-dollar bill on the table and doesn’t wait for change.

“Ready?” he asks politely, signaling to Tiffany that it’s time to get up and go.

As she stands up, her flannel pants stick to the sweat the vinyl booth created on the backs of her legs. She looks down as she peels them loose and realizes for the first time—or maybe just caring for the first time—how stupid she looks out in public in the same pajama pants she has had on since she went to bed two nights before. Tiffany stares at the green-and-navy plaid as she makes her way out of Mug’s. She also notices that as she passes by the booths and tables and walks toward the door that people are whispering. Victory is a small town, and in small towns word travels fast.

“They all know about my mother,” she thinks as she pushes the restaurant door open and hears Wilma Appleby mutter “Poor thing” from behind the old register.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Buck nod at the beehived restaurateur as he holds the door and follows Tiffany out. In silence, they climb into his truck and the engine starts with a roar. Chuck’s truck is (was) an older (much older) version of the same Ford. Tiffany takes notice of all the improvements the manufacturer has made—most noticeably the difference in the starting sound. Buck gives his key a slight turn and the truck eagerly turns over. Chuck would have to hold his key for seconds while the old engine begged for mercy before accepting defeat and grumbling to attention. The blue oval with Ford in script in the middle of the steering wheel is identical, though. Tiffany finds herself wishing that Buck’s truck was a piece of shit like her own family’s simply so that she could find some comfort in something familiar. For as long as she could remember, Tiffany had complained about her boring life. Now, her life had suddenly become much more exciting, and she wished with all her might that it was back to the mundane existence she had formerly despised.

A few seconds go by before Tiffany realizes that they are still sitting in the parking space in Mug’s cracked-asphalt parking lot. She looks over at Buck, who is watching her, looking afraid to speak—like she is counting something important and one word could cause her to completely lose her place. When they make eye contact he uncomfortably asks, “Where is your house?”

“Oh,” says Tiffany, feeling stupid for not realizing that of course he doesn’t know where she lives (lived). She gives him simple directions to her house, which is only a few miles away, and then settles back in the passenger seat, her wish for familiarity coming true as they travel the well-known route.

In a few minutes, Buck’s truck is in her driveway, perfectly centered over the oil stain Chuck’s truck had left behind. He puts the car in park and then turns the engine off, but he doesn’t make a move to get out.

“Do you want me to come in with you?” he asks, clearly unsure of what he should do.

“No, that’s okay,” Tiffany says, trying to sound nonchalant…the way she would have this time last week. Of course, this time last week, Buck Platner wouldn’t have been driving her home from breakfast, and if he had, her mother would have been running outside, bursting with excitement, to greet him and invite him in for a cold Coke.

Buck nods, giving the key a half turn in order to lower the power windows. He then leans his head against the back of the seat and instructs Tiffany to take her time.

She hops out of the truck and makes the same walk up the driveway that she has made thousands of times. When she gets to the front porch and stoops to retrieve the emergency key—which is actually the only one they ever use—from under the doormat, she realizes that her legs are shaking.

With uneasy hands, Tiffany puts the key in the lock, turns it, and then puts it back beneath the mat. She opens the door and steps inside, and can hear her mother hollering, “Tiffany Debbie Dearbourne, I pray to God you’ve wiped your feet!” That was how her mother always greeted her. Charla wasn’t a religious woman; in fact, the only thing she ever prayed for was for Tiffany to wipe her feet. Nine times out of ten, Tiffany lied about having used the key-hiding mat to clean her feet.

Today, she steps back outside and wipes her fake-Ugg clogs on the mat. It’s a mat she has always despised. It says, “Never mind the dog; beware of the owner!” Chuck thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. Tiffany hates it passionately, especially since they don’t even have a dog. Once her feet feel sufficiently clean, she steps back in the house and takes a deep breath.

The house reeks of its normal stale cigarette and beer smell. It’s a scent that’s both sickening and comforting to Tiffany, but today it’s a bit different. Oddly, it seems that being left empty just overnight has added a musty stuffiness to the small house. As Tiffany walks through the living room, she finds the silence deafening. She looks into the galley kitchen on her way through and sees Charla’s coffee cup from the morning she left still sitting on the counter.

It’s a stained and chipped mug that says “World’s Best Mom.” Tiffany had bought it for $4.98 and given it to her mother for Mother’s Day approximately five years ago. Tiffany and Charla both knew that Charla was not the world’s best mom, but Charla loved the mug and used it every single day. Tiffany walks the five paces it takes to cross their kitchen, which is really just a strip of linoleum surrounded by counters and cupboards at the edge of the living room. She peers into the mug and sees an inch of coffee sitting in the bottom. Her mother always drank her coffee black with four teaspoons of sugar. Occasionally Tiffany would take a sip and always regretted it because the normally bitter liquid was sweet enough to rot your teeth on contact.

Tiffany pours the remaining coffee down the drain and carefully washes the mug, then sets it upside down on the drying rack under the window. Looking at the silly mug causes tears to well up in Tiffany’s eyes, so she quickly exits the kitchen and hurries down the carpeted hall to her own bedroom. Once inside with the door closed behind her, she falls face forward on her unmade bed and cries.

After just a few minutes, she stands up, wipes her eyes, and retrieves a large overnight bag from beneath her lumpy twin bed. In it she packs all her favorite designer knockoff clothes. She knows that her aunt Lizzie is a successful career woman in Los Angeles and she wants to fit in as much as she can. Once her clothes are packed, Tiffany places a ratty stuffed frog, Mr. Ribbit, into the bag. She has slept with Mr. Ribbit since before she can remember, and while she would be mortified if anyone knew about it, she would also be devastated to leave home without him. Tiffany lugs the bag across the hall to the bathroom, careful to avoid looking toward her mother’s bedroom.

Inside the grimy bathroom, Tiffany packs her toiletries in a clean, gallon-size Ziploc bag. Like any teenage girl, she owns gobs of products—Noxzema cleanser, Stridex pads, Maybelline cosmetics. She takes them all and stuffs them into her bag. She takes one last look around the bathroom, which smells of Chuck’s Old Spice and her mother’s Aqua Net, and then glances in the mirror. For a second, she doesn’t recognize her own reflection.

Tiffany is a pretty girl and she knows it. She knows that she is one of the prettiest girls at Victory High. Her hair is L’Oréal Preference “Extra Light Natural Blonde,” and her eyes are turquoise blue, like her mother’s. She is skilled at applying makeup and almost never leaves the house without a generous application of Maybelline Great Lash mascara in “Very Black.” Her clothes are always fashionable and too tight in the right places. Today, none of this is evident.

Her hair is a greasy mess, piled on top of her head in a lumpy bun, and her mascara is hanging in dark circles under her eyes; there is also a red pimple blemishing her heart-shaped chin. For a second she is mortified and considers getting into the soap scum–encrusted shower but decides that when Buck said to take her time, he probably didn’t mean that much. She makes a guttural sound of disgust before walking out of the bathroom. She starts down the hall toward the front door, then drops her bag and turns around.

Tiffany walks briskly to the end of the hallway and into her mother’s bedroom without breaking stride until she stands in front of her mother’s worn oak dresser. She opens the top drawer, which contains her mother’s faded cotton underwear and torn underwire bras. In the back of the drawer is a small black velvet jewelry box. Tiffany knows that there isn’t anything of any value in it, but these are the pieces that her mother cherished. Inside are the tiny diamond earrings that Chuck gave her as an anniversary gift, the gold cross that her grandparents gave her as a high school graduation gift, and a tarnished sterling silver heart on a matching chain that Tiffany had given her for her thirtieth birthday. Chuck had actually purchased the necklace, but the gift card hadn’t given him any credit. Tiffany acknowledges that her stepfather was a good man as she tucks the little box under her arm and walks out of the room toward the front door.

The house is basically a long hallway leading to her parents’ room, with her room, the bathroom and the living room/dining room/kitchen branching off. Tiffany walks straight to the front door, hardly stopping as she stoops to pick up her bag. Once outside on the front porch, which is cluttered with dying potted plants, Tiffany removes the key from beneath the stupid mat. She locks the door and bends halfway down to put it back before she changes her mind. She stops mid-bend and instead palms the key, squeezing her hand tightly so that she can feel the metal cuts digging into her palm as she walks back toward Buck’s truck. She can hear Green Day playing quietly on the stereo, but Buck looks like he’s fallen asleep with his head tilted back.

The sound of the door opening makes him jump slightly, and he opens his eyes and turns the stereo even lower in one movement.

“Everything okay?” he asks, looking like he feels guilty for having dozed off while Tiffany collected her things.

“Yep,” she answers, but they both know it’s not the truth.