Читать книгу Save the Dragons! - Martin Berman-Gorvine - Страница 9

Chapter 5

Mom drove me to 30th Street Station the day before Thanksgiving, grumbling all the way about how unfair it was that Dad got me for the holiday “when we’ve always gone to Aunt Maria’s house for Thanksgiving.”

That had been our family tradition only since Nana died, but all I said was, “It’s all right, Mom. I want to go.”

This didn’t improve her mood any, and besides, she was still unhappy about me taking the train on my own. As if I was ten! But she looked so miserable I hugged her extra hard.

“Save some of Aunt Maria’s cranberry sauce for me. Make sure it has lots of orange peel in it,” I said.

She nodded, her eyes welling up. Sheesh, you’d think I was going off to college. I was so glad they don’t allow non-passengers down onto the platform anymore. I didn’t want Mom to make a scene and embarrass both of us.

The train was super crowded, of course. I sat next to an old lady who reminded me of Nana. She was so nice I had to bite my tongue so I didn’t start crying.

No wonder the other girls always make fun of me, being such a sap. I pressed my forehead against the cold window. What was Tom doing? I hoped he had some kind of holiday weekend. Would he get to see his family? If he was in a boarding school in Philadelphia, they must live far away. And if he’d never heard of cell phones, who knows, maybe they were still using horses and buggies and he wouldn’t get to see them at all for, like, months. Could he be even lonelier than me? It didn’t seem possible.

Outside, darkness was falling on the bare trees and empty fields south of Wilmington. A silvery gleam shimmered off the water as the train crossed a bridge high over the Susquehanna River, just north of where it broadens into Chesapeake Bay.

Tom’s family probably came from somewhere down the bay. I’d looked up Gingo Teag on the Internet and came up empty, but the Nanticokes were an Indian tribe who used to live in Delaware and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Maybe his family were crab catchers. What did they call them? Watermen.

We took a trip there once when I was little, when Dad was still working for that big architecture firm downtown. We used to joke that he was Mr. Brady from the Brady Bunch, and I had to be all six Brady kids by myself. It seemed like forever ago, watching the wild horses of Assateague Island, the “Chincoteague ponies,” who were potbellied from their marsh grass diet. I thought they were pretty anyway…

Chincoteague. Gingo Teag.

“Why are you giggling, dear?” the old lady asked. Then she peered closer. “Why are you crying?”

None of your business. But I’m a good girl, or a goody two-shoes, more like. “I’m all right.”

I didn’t want to answer any more questions, so I sneaked off to the café car and spent the rest of the trip gloomily staring out the window. I exaggerated a bit when I told Tom that Dad lives in Washington. Actually, he lives with his girlfriend in Frederick, Maryland, which is at least an hour away.

Was I trying to impress Tom when I told him my dad lived in the capital? Well, he wouldn’t have been so impressed if I’d told him that my father not only lived in that Hicksville—the old-timers there actually call themselves Fred-necks—but that he had found himself a young, pretty girlfriend. I mean, way to be original, Dad!

Heather is twenty-eight, but she looks a lot younger. People who see us together always say we could be sisters. Yeah, if I had a big sister who was as gorgeous and skinny as I’m fat and ugly.

* * * *

My stomach tightened as I stepped off the escalator from the platform and Dad reached for my suitcase.

Heather said hello—no, sorry, she said, “Hiiiiiii!” with that big shiny grin of hers—and I glared back.

She’s so dumb she probably didn’t even notice. She reached over and touched my greasy hair—her own short black hair was perfect, of course—and said, “Your father and I have a surprise for you. We’re getting married!”

I was about to tell her to get her hands off me, but then what she said sank in and I tripped over my bookbag and landed flat on my face.

“Heather, dammit, I thought we agreed I was going to break the news to her when we got home!” Dad said, helping me to my feet. “Your nose isn’t broken, is it, sweetheart?” he said, handing me a tissue.

I dabbed at the trickle of blood running down my lip.

“I dow’d thing doe,” I said, shooting Heather a look that should have turned her into a steaming puddle. She blinked and twisted her face up, trying to look sorry. God, I hate her!

“We want you to be the flower girl,” she said.

I said nothing, just picked up my bookbag and let Dad lead us out to his car. He has a used green ’96 Honda Civic that is still better than the old red Pontiac Grand Am Mom and I are stuck with. The Grand Mal, we call it, after its habit of stalling in busy intersections.

But Dad’s Honda wasn’t our family car. It didn’t have the tear in the back-seat upholstery where I used to hide coins and pebbles, or the familiar stains on the floor mats that looked like a map of Alaska, or at least I thought it did.

I held it in till Dad had shut the doors because I didn’t want to make a scene in public. See, I can control myself! Then I yelled, “You’re getting married?”

“Yes, Heather and I are getting married.”

“So soon?”

“Honey, it’s been two years since—”

“Since you walked out on us, yes, I know.” Mom says they’re still married in the eyes of the Church and God and everything, so Dad and Heather are living in sin—and even in the eyes of the law, they were dating before the divorce was done. Ugh, couldn’t that woman have kept her paws off him at least till then?

She had to put her two cents’ worth in. “Teresa, that’s not exactly what your father—”

“Shut up, Heather. This is none of your business! You are not my mom!”

“I never said I was,” she said in a small voice.

Not good enough! “You are not part of this family!” I snapped.

“Teresa, that’s enough. I’m marrying her, and she is going to be part of my family.”

“Well, she’s not going to be part of mine!” The weekend sort of went downhill from there.

* * * *

Dad made a big deal of cooking Thanksgiving dinner himself, and Mom was right: I missed Aunt Maria’s cooking.

If Heather hadn’t been there I wouldn’t have minded so much that the turkey was dried out and the homemade cranberry sauce had so much sugar in it that it made me gag (and I prefer the jellied stuff out of a can anyway), and as for the roast sweet potatoes, the less said the better. Honestly the only edible thing was the salad, but since Heather had made it I didn’t want to eat that either.

Also we ate in a freezing silence, which I suppose was mostly my fault.

“So how’s school been?” Dad asked.

I grunted.

“What’s that?”

“What the hell do you care?”

“Teresa, that’s not very nice,” Heather said.

“Wasn’t very nice of him not to be around at all for tenth and eleventh grade.”

Dad put his fork down and looked at his plate.

“So, I thought we could hit the stores early tomorrow for Black Friday!” Heather said cheerily. “I need some new boots for winter, for sure! Frederick’s got a great ‘Golden Mile’ along Patrick Street. Wanna come?”

“I need some new boots for winter, ferrrr sherrrr,” I mimicked. “Seeing that you’re such a fashion charity case, Teresa, why don’t you come too? That way I get more brownie points with your Dad!”

“Teresa, that’s quite enough,” Dad said, as Heather shriveled in her seat.

“Quite enough? I haven’t even gotten started yet!”

“Well, you can go to your room if that’s how you’re going to be,” Dad said.

That was all the permission I needed to put down my fork and stalk off to the overgrown closet Dad had said was my room. But the walls were bare and there was none of my clutter anywhere, so how could it be my room? Even the bed felt strange, with its crisp new sheets and light green blanket like a motel bed. Heather must’ve made it, Dad is such a slob. I threw myself on it and rumpled the covers as much as I could. There was nothing for me to do! So I reread my old battered copy of A Wrinkle in Time and felt sorry for myself for not having parents as cool as the Murrys.

Tom has to be having more fun than me. His parents must be just perfect. And his little sister too—I bet she’s wonderful. Their world sounds so cute and charming! It wouldn’t be so bad to have a king, and not to have any idea what a cell phone was.

The TV went on in the living room, tuned to Dad’s stupid bowl games, of course. Heather was cheering right along with him, where Mom always used to nag him to turn it off or at least way down. God, how I wished I was back in Gloria’s Gateway Books. What did Tom look like? Blond hair, kind brown eyes, and a soft smile, for sure. But I couldn’t quite picture his face.Eventually I got so bored I dozed off, though Heather’s stupid cheering and high-fiving Dad woke me up every now and then.

When I woke up in the morning Heather wasn’t there. Dad fed me lumpy oatmeal and we ate in silence. I didn’t want to wait around for his cheerleader girlfriend to show up and try to get me to go shopping with her, so I threw my coat on and ignored Dad when he asked where I was going. I headed straight for the “Golden Mile,” since I really did need some clothes, especially if I was going to be meeting Tom on Monday. I mean, I didn’t want his first sight of me to be a grungy girl in torn jeans. But I had only two twenty-dollar bills for spending money. Luckily I found a Goodwill, where I picked out a sort of patchwork skirt, a sequin-spangled lavender blouse and moccasin boots. Maybe I would seem like a mysterious gypsy to Tom. He’d have to fall in love with me at first sight! But first, he’d have to show up.

I spent the rest of the weekend mooching around the stores, trying to ignore the guilt gnawing at my guts over the way I’d treated Dad. But I didn’t know how to make it up to him, and I was still mad at him anyway, so I avoided him and especially Heather, that snake in the grass. If not for her I would still have been mad at Dad for running out on Mom and me, but we could have talked about it. Maybe. And the weird thing was it was true what I had told Mom: I really had wanted to be with him for Thanksgiving. But now that I was here I couldn’t wait to get away, although as soon as I got back home I would want to get away from Mom too. Would all of this get less confusing when I met Tom? I sure hoped so.

* * * *

On Sunday morning I was wandering through a park with a duck pond, aimlessly throwing potato chip crumbs to a flock of Canada geese that were paddling around in the grimy water, when a voice called my name. I stiffened.

“There you are,” said Heather, less cheerfully than before.

Good, she’s afraid of me. She was dressed in a fake white fur of some kind, with little black gloves that didn’t look very warm. She was shivering, hunching into her coat against the bitter wind.

I was none too warm myself, but I stood there with my chin thrust out and asked her what she wanted.

“You know your father’s very upset we’ve hardly seen you all weekend,” she began.

I said nothing.

“Listen, nothing says you have to like me, but Frank, well, he’s your father.”

“Not that it’s any of your business, but he hasn’t been much of a father to me for the past two years.”

“Now about that—he doesn’t like to talk about it much, not even to me, but you know he was terribly ashamed when he lost his job.”

I shut my eyes but that only made my memories of that terrible day burn brighter behind my eyelids.

“Things were already bad with Celine—”

“Leave my mom out of this!”

“—and he was too ashamed to face you, when he couldn’t even bring home a paycheck anymore. So he moved out so he could find a job and start sending your mom money. And the only job he could find at first was down here, driving a truck to construction sites. That’s how he met me—I’m the office manager at Sardinian Brothers, and I got him the job there. But he was sending your mom money all along, and writing you all those letters you never answered.”

I froze. “What letters?”

“Every week a letter. Don’t tell me you never got them!”

I opened my mouth but nothing came out but little squeaky noises. Dumb Heather didn’t even seem to notice, just kept babbling about how Dad didn’t even try to see me at first because he figured I didn’t want to see him, and that she, Heather, was some kind of big hero for making him go to court so that Mom would have to let me see him.

“I have to go now,” I finally said. “I have to pack.”

“Oh! Well, I’m parked right over there,” she said.

“No! No thank you. I’ll walk,” I said.

And I did walk all the way back, my head spinning.

Luckily my train was coming soon, so I didn’t have to talk to my dad much. I did give him a quick hug goodbye before going down to the platform.

* * * *

All the way back home I sat and stared out the window into the darkness. My eyes kept tearing up although I tried to think of Tom. When Mom picked me up and started questioning me, I stuck to yes and no as much as possible.

“Did Dad do something to upset you?” she asked finally, as the Grand Mal pulled up in front of our rowhouse. “Or that woman?”

“No, Mom. I just don’t feel well. I might have to stay home from school tomorrow.”

She leaned over and put the back of her hand on my forehead, like she used to do when I was little. Her skin was cold and I could feel her bones. She had just come off the late shift at the Hilton, where she works at the front desk, on her feet eight hours a day, before she even goes to her waitressing job.

“You don’t have a temperature,” she said. “Let’s see how you are in the morning.”

* * * *

When morning came I said I still didn’t feel well—stomach cramps and nausea, which was even sort of true.

I waited till Mom headed off to her other job, waiting tables at Dino’s Diner, then I slipped out of bed and went up to her bedroom. It was a mess, as usual. Mom hadn’t even made the bed, so I pushed aside the rumpled sheets and blankets to find what I wanted—some banker’s boxes of papers she keeps lined up under the bed, with the dust bunnies.

At first I just found a bunch of legal papers. Maybe Heather was lying. She was just trying to make Mom look bad! And checks, from Dad? He never sent money till the judge made him, Mom told me so a thousand times!

Still I kept searching, and then I found them, all those letters Dad wrote me, mixed in with old unpaid bills and threats to cut off our electricity and repossess our car. Those stopped when Mom got the hotel job—I had offered to get a babysitting job to bring in some extra money, but Mom always said no, I had to concentrate on school. But the letters from Dad had kept coming all along! A bunch of them were held together with a thick red rubber band, the kind that holds together broccoli stalks at the supermarket.

None of them had been opened. Did I want to read them now? I stared at Dad’s handwriting on the envelopes. No. I grabbed the ones I could find and took them to my room, where I hid them under my pillow.

Then I got together my gypsy-lady outfit from Frederick and took a shower.

You’ll be meeting Tom in just a few hours. In fact, why not head off to Gloria’s Gateway Books right now?

It was tempting, but I decided to confront Mom first.

I still had a few hours to kill before she got home to change for the Hilton, time I spent reading The Race to Mars and daydreaming. Wouldn’t it be neat if Tom lived in that world and I got to go to Mars!

Right now I wanted only to get as far away from everybody as possible, and life in a Martian colony sounded cool. When this book was published, fifteen years or so ago, they had domed hydroponic farms and big plans to start “terraforming” the whole planet, giving it a breathable atmosphere and surface water. I wanted to be a part of that—part of something grand, instead of dealing with all these nasty arguments and my own uncertain future.

Even if I could get enough scholarships and student loans to go to college, what was waiting for me after that? If I was lucky, some cubicle job so I could repay those loans, and if I wasn’t, the same sort of scrabbling to make ends meet that Mom did.

All the adventures had been lived, all the fights worth having were over, unless I could somehow escape from all this—and Gloria’s Gateway Books offered a way.

* * * *

At last the click of a key turning in the front door lock. I stood up, clutching the bundle of letters from Dad.

Mom didn’t see me at first—she was talking to herself as she walked in, sorting through the day’s mail. She still had on her waitress uniform, that horrible short skirt that makes her legs look fat, the blue blouse with her name tag clipped to it, and the pink hairband holding back her curly black hair.

She must have forgotten that I’d stayed home from school, because she gave a start when she looked up.

“Teresa, oh! Are you feeling better?” She reached out to check my forehead.

I stepped back.

“Teresa, what the—what are you doing dressed in those clothes? You can’t be planning to go out when you stayed home sick from school today!”

I silently held out the letters. Her eyes flicked to them, then back to me.

“What were you doing in my room?”

“How come you never gave me Dad’s letters?”

She sat down suddenly and avoided my eyes.

“I didn’t want you hurt,” she said.

“What?”

“Your father left. He left! He wasn’t coming back. He was out having his fun. All those stupid letters from him would have just confused you. They would have made you miss him all the more. It was simpler this way. I just wanted to make it easier for you.” She raised her chin and looked at me with a gleam in her eye that reminded me of Nana. “I was going to give them to you when you were old enough to understand. Why else would I have kept them?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you felt guilty about not letting me have them.”

“That is not true! I just wanted to protect you, protect what was left of your childhood.”

“Mom, I was fifteen! I think I was old enough to decide for myself. And Heather says Dad did send you money!”

“Oh, so it’s ‘Heather says’ now. Fine, yes, he sent me a little something now and then. Might as well have been nothing. And Heather didn’t have to struggle to keep the house. Heather didn’t have to take extra jobs to make enough money to keep you fed and clothed.”

“Well, maybe you’ll be able to stop worrying about that soon.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Where are you going?”

But I just slammed the door behind me.