Please Don't, page 2
“You doing okay? With your folks and all?”
Exactly one time I made the mistake of telling Virgil about my dad, and now he’s constantly asking me about my “folks and all.” Not only that, he’s also part of Mom’s fan club. Like Gary, he’s crushing hard. He told me once how she needed someone who’s been there. I don’t know where exactly “there” is, but I’m guessing it’s not a beach resort.
I give him a nod. “Yeah, it’s good.”
He starts in with the whole, “if you ever need to talk,” thing. But talking to Virg is like pulling the lever on a random cliché generator. Life sucks. Nothing comes easy. Can’t choose family. Oh, and who can forget his favorite, Suck it up, kiddo. I like Virg and all, he means well, but the guy should stick to cleaning carburetors.
The afternoon drags. It’s bad enough with a three-man crew, being how Virgil is too cheap to hire a fourth guy, but with two it’s brutal. We get through the day, and after I finish unloading the trailer I figure, screw it, I’m going to go check on Molly.
I used to tell myself it was her fault, my predicament. But it’s not. Even if I’d never walked into the chem lab that afternoon and saw what I saw, I probably would have ended up punching Mr. Meyers in the face anyway. Then again, if I’d never rolled Meyers, I’d be playing AAU ball right now, not cutting grass with Virgil for eight bucks an hour.
In the sun visor lies my mom’s antique compact disc collection. I shove in the Al Green CD, and soon I’m singing along with Tired of Being Alone, ignoring the roil in my stomach whenever I think about what I was doing last summer compared to what I’m doing now.
I pass the vacant car lots with the sales event banners still taped to the windows, then the bread factory, where the grass is reclaiming the pavement. Just before the expressway I find Lafayette Estates—a trailer park that moonlights as a trash dump.
It’s funny but not funny, our respective estates. Because I live at Fenwick Estates, a subdivision with three-car garages. It’s all relative, I guess.
I’ve been to Lafayette Estates once or twice, but as I pull in the entrance, the car dips into a pothole with a scrape, and it’s like a warning I’ve entered a warzone. I creep past the rows of crooked mailboxes, the tattered FOR RENT signs and FREE KITTENS flyers tagged to the posts, paint buckets, overturned couches, broken coffee tables, and too many splotchy mattresses to count. Then, around the turn, across from the rust-eaten trailer with the sun-bleached confederate flag hanging in the front window, I stop in front of Molly Martinez’s trailer.
Two little girls play chase in the front yard. Molly stands guard on the porch, watching over them until she sees my car and bolts to attention. The taller of the two little girls stops and shields her eyes from the evening sun.
The sudden attention throws me off my game. I leave the car running, climb out, jamming my hands in my pockets as I try to come up with something to say. The younger girl hops in place, pointing at me. “Look, a giant.”
“Look, a little person,” I call back. The older girl giggles and runs up to me. She’s wearing a light purple dress with grass stains around the hip. The little one catches up and peeks out from behind her with wide eyes and an adorable grin.
“Giant, giant.”
Molly comes down the steps with a what-do-you-want stare in her eyes.
I look back to my car, then across the street to the confederate side, where it’s all weeds and crabgrass. A couple of metal drums line the back part of the trailer where a dented air conditioner dangles from the side window. Ladders and buckets, a dented up truck sitting on cinder blocks, maybe its engine is the one dangling from a sagging swing set.
I suddenly feel the need to explain myself. “Hey, I was in the neighborhood.”
It’s a dumb joke, and an even dumber chuckle that comes with it. Behind Molly, the torn screen hangs from the door. Along the bottom of the trailer, litter is caught in the mud-stained lattice. The siding is broken and peeling off at the corner. Behind the sunflowers, the streaky windows are empty and dark. Next door sit three older-style sedans, all shiny with crazy paint jobs and big tires with rims. A faint thumping throbs from inside the trailer.
The whole place has me uneasy. Even as the little girls laugh and dance and call me giant. “Oh, um…” Molly turns and calls over to the girls. “Ash, can you and Ana go inside for a minute?”
The littlest drops her shoulders and pouts. “I don’t want to.”
I shake my head, wishing I hadn’t come. Wishing a lot of things. “No, it’s fine. I’ll take off. I just…wanted to make sure everything was okay.”
Molly folds her arms over her chest, gripping at her elbows, walking towards me but staring at her feet. “My mom had to work today. She took the phone.” She sighs, blowing the hair from her face. “Can you tell Virgil I’ll be in tomorrow, I mean, if…”
Some rumbling up the street. “No, yeah, he’s fine. I spoke with him earlier.”
Molly’s eyes widen with what I mistake for gratitude until I realize she’s looking past me, over my shoulder. I turn to find a primer-gray monster truck idling roughly behind my car, which reminds me I’ve left it running in the road.
“Hey, move your damn car.”
The guy leans over a miserable looking woman to yell at me. Then he revs the engine, which roars then hiccups then nearly stalls. Across the windshield of the truck it reads, BAD HABIT in neon stickers. I start to laugh, which I realize is my own bad habit, before he revs the engine again. “Now.”
I can’t get a good look at the guy, but the woman’s face is fried with wrinkles. She sucks on a cigarette so hard it looks like her cheeks are going to collapse.
Molly gathers the girls. She points to the door and orders them to get them moving. I run my hand through my hair, shoot her a look, then turn back to the guy in the truck.
“Um, yeah sure,” I say to the redneck, only now noticing the rifle on the gun rack across the back window. I look back to Molly. “Well, see you tomorrow, right?”
She doesn’t wave or seem to hear me at all. She stares down the guy in the truck as she backs the girls into the trailer. The lovely passenger hocks a lung and spits out the passenger window. I live in a subdivision where people are ticketed for not trimming the hedges. Can’t say I’m used to this sort of thing.
“Okay, okay.” I start around the car when the dude lays on the horn. I shake my head, trying to keep it together when he leans all the way out of his window. The brim of his hat is smeared with grease and has one of those hook things clipped to the visor. Judging from what I can see, he’s a little guy with something to prove. “You got something to say?”
“Nope,” I say, determined not to get into a fight every time I’m with Molly. But the guy can’t drop it, he turns to the woman sitting in the middle, whose eyes scrape across my car like fingernails, like it’s somehow to blame for all the crap that has ever happened to her—which, judging by her face is a lot. The driver points at me.
“Just as bad as these Mexicans.”
I stop, fists clenching, a tight rage taking hold in my chest. I cock my head at him and he starts with the revving again. Only this time he puts the truck into gear. The engine sputters then catches and lurches ahead. I jump back as he misses my car by inches, swinging the truck over a rotted railroad tie and into the yard of the trailer across the street.
I stand at my car, dumbstruck, wondering what in the hell, when the guy leaps from his truck and makes a line for me. Fine, we can do this. I step forward, just as Molly’s door slams shut and one of the girls starts crying. I stop myself and take a breath as this little redneck comes at me from the yard, jabbing a finger and muttering about gangbanger spics.
My car door is still open when he bends down and comes up with a rock about the size of a brick. He stops at the street, cocked. I put my arms up and start for my car, still determined to settle this rationally. “Look, I’m leaving. What’s your problem, anyway?”
It’s a big question. One that, from where I’m standing, would take a while to sufficiently address. The woman slides out of the truck and waddles over to the man. She’s wearing one of those moo-moo things and glares at me. “We’re sick of it,” she says to me.
I get in the car and shut the door. I know I should leave, shouldn’t even be here to begin with, especially when she flicks her cigarette and it lands in the road near my car. “Go somewhere else and get your drugs now.”
“No, it’s not—” I glance back to the trailer with the shiny cars. “No,” I say, for some reason. “I work with Molly.”
The lady is heaving for breath as she turns slowly and starts for her yard, hiking through the weeds and around the obstacles to the door framed with Christmas lights. I can only stare, thinking how at least one time they’d attempted to decorate. At least once they chose to try to be happy or celebrate something. Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe it was left on the trailer when they moved in. She nudges the man back, and they start for the trailer, leaving me out there between those two hopeless rectangles. The man gives me a long, hard stare and reluctantly follows behind.
I let off the brake, slowly, smirking at the dude as I wipe back my hair. I glance over at Molly’s trailer, hoping things are okay, when out of the corner of my eye I catch some movement to my left. Then something explodes in my car. More specifically, the glass just behind my head.
My foot mashes the gas to the floor. The tires spin and spit gravel before the car lunges forward and I bang into the first left and gun it. Mind racing, hands shaking, the last thing I see is that bald guy raging. He screams after me, arms out, daring me to come back.
He hurls a bottle next, but I’m gone, peeling out and flying out of the trailer park. The window is smashed, wind flying. I only turn to look back once I’m a few miles up the road. Then I’m eyeing the rearview, gasping for breath as my hands flop around on the steering wheel, mumbling about crazy rednecks. I keep turning back to the puddle of blue glass covering the backseat. The wind streams through the gaping hole in the back window. I run the next three red lights. Stop signs, too. I don’t take my foot off the gas until I’m tucked away at Fenwick Estates.
3
In the driveway, I discover it wasn’t a bullet that took out the window but a rock. More like a jagged ball of gravel and concrete. A trailer park meteorite.
Deep breaths. That just happened.
Now at home, far removed from Lafayette Estates, I’m pissed. I mean, yeah, I’m glad it was the window and not my head, but I want something to happen. He shouldn’t get away with hurling rocks through people’s windows. But I can’t call the cops. I have a feeling things would be worse if I did.
And now I have my own problems. Because I only have collision insurance, so a rear window is going to cost me a paycheck. While the Honda used to be Mom’s car, back when it was shiny and new and matched all the other shiny new cars in the neighborhood, now it’s nearly twelve years old. Yeah, it’s dented, unmaintained, and temperamental as hell, but it’s mine. I’m the one who keeps it running. A good thing, too. There are way too many steep hills in Woodberry to bike.
By the time I get myself together and walk into the house, I’m still shaken and not prepared for problem number two: Mom, sprawled out on the floor, in tears, a ripped opened envelope at her side. Great, more mail.
“Where are we going to go, Nat?”
Just that quickly, the car window slides into second place on the worry list. Mom thrusts a fistful of papers at me. I recognize the letterhead from the city of Woodberry, and for a second I think it’s the school board letter. Then I see the words Delinquent. Foreclosure. Auction. All sorts of reminders and threats. Basically, if we don’t come up with some cash soon, we need to vacate the premises. I mean, I knew it was getting bad, it’s all I can do to keep the lights on around here. I just didn’t know it had gotten take-the-house bad.
I scratch the back of my head. I still have glass in my hair and now this is happening. I drop the notice, wondering if anything good will ever arrive in our mailbox again. “Did you call Herndon?”
Herndon is Dad’s lawyer. Was Dad’s lawyer, three years ago. He’s not keen on taking calls from me or Mom, who sits up, knees beneath her, shoulders slumped, a mess of a woman in the middle of the floor.
Old Herndon would only lecture us about how Dan Reams let us have the house. That’s how he put it to my mom one time: He left you a house. Only we can’t afford to pay taxes on the house, much less maintain it. That’s okay, good old Dan even left us some furnishings, the gracious prick. Let’s see, there’s one overstuffed leather couch, scratched and split in the lower corner, and two end tables, the surface of which hold an almost Olympic pattern of wineglass rings. On the mantel are a few pictures—mostly of me, one of Mom and me at the lake. Otherwise the room is a ramshackle of books, dishes, and remnants of my mother’s crackpot projects.
Don’t get married, ever, is what I’ve learned. Because once upon a time I opened Christmas presents in this same room. My dad watched with joy, or so I thought. But somewhere in the back of his mind, he was plotting his escape. It makes me think, back when Mom used to take my picture in here every year on the first day of school, was she only a hair strand away from losing it then? Because now we’re doing this.
Her nose is leaking snot. It’s gross. She swipes a hand over the horror show that is her face. “I left him three messages.” She snatches the notice off the floor. “They can’t do this, can they, Nat?”
I’m seventeen, and she needs my reassurance. Thoughts spin around in my head, my random Virgil quotable generator suggests, Suck it up, kiddo.
I’d like some reassuring, too. But that’s going to have to wait. And I’d be interested in finding out if anyone else has ever tried to console their mom while Deee-Lite’s Groove is in the Heart thumps throughout the living room.
“I don’t know, Mom.”
It’s little help, but damn, I can’t think. I can’t do this right now. It hurts just to look at her. She used to have it all together. She was the one I looked to for comfort after a bad day at school. My mom used to take care of people. I saw it with my own eyes. She worked days/nights/swing shifts in the emergency room. She’s seen all the awful things people can do to each other: gunshots, stab wounds, broken bones, overdoses, head trauma. I’ve been there plenty of times myself, visiting, watching her work, seeing her scoop up the chaos and trauma and knead it into something manageable. I’ve watched her comfort kids and adults, all hysterical and needing her guidance. Now she’s drinking box wine from a pickle jar.
I lean down and give her a hug. “Look, I need to take a shower. Then maybe we can try to sort this out.”
“Maybe you should call your father.”
“What?” I freeze, wondering how she could drop this weight on my shoulders. How delusional is she, anyway? I haven’t spoken to my dad in over a year, at least.
She wipes her nose again. “You can tell him to go suck a duck.”
I turn away. “Right. That should do it.”
In the shower, the hot water helps the muscles in my shoulders and neck uncoil. I rinse the grass and some wayward glass shrapnel off my back. As much as I like working outside, I love being clean after a long day of it.
What the hell happened at the trailer park? That woman, talking about gangbangers. Molly and those little girls. I can still hear the door slapping shut, her sister crying. I can’t believe they have to live that way.
Not that I’m doing much better. Downstairs, Mom has re-upped on the wine and swapped out Deee-Lite for Cat Stevens. It kills me the way she chooses the most depressing songs when she’s getting faced. It’s hard to be around.
I check my phone. Three messages from Cora, my sort of ex-girlfriend. It’s been a few days since a text or call. Our relationship is weird. We never broke up, technically, but I don’t think Cora Conners is thrilled about dating a potential GED grad as opposed to an all-district basketball player. And I can’t blame her for not wanting to hang, I’m not much fun to be around anymore.
She’s casually retreating and I’m not sure I want to stop her. But downstairs, after being sure Mom is still sedated, swaying around, wailing along to Morning Has Broken, I step outside, back into the heat, and call Cora back.
She dives right in. “Um, hello? I’ve been trying to call you.”
I resist the urge to tell her the world does not revolve around her calls. It might confuse her. “Yeah, been busy with work and all.”
“Well, Jackson’s parents are out of town. We’re going over around eight. You want to pick me up, or—”
This is how it works with Cora. Days of avoiding my calls, but then I’m needed urgently. I take a breath. Maybe I called her because I’m stalling. Because Mom wants me to call Dad and I’m actually considering it. Been considering it, really. It’s why I have his office number. I found it online.
“Cora, I can’t. My mom’s freaking out.”
“Come on, Nat. Puhwheezie?”
Okay, so I’ll admit it, the pouty voice used to work. Back when I was too distracted by Cora’s, uh, assets, to pay much attention. And still, sometimes it’s hard to just let it go. Like all the trophies in my room. Some in my closet. News clippings about how great I was. For three years you work and plan for your senior year. You see your name in the newspaper and you believe the hype. Yeah, sure, your mom is acting kind of crazy, but you’re able hide it from everyone else and just play basketball and party. Then you end up in the wrong place at the wrong time and—poof— it’s gone.
The person Cora knows so well was a different me. I can’t deal with her right now. Besides, whatever you wanted to call our relationship has come and gone, and I’ve got way too much to worry about to be thinking of beach week and parties. And even if I wanted to do that stuff, I can’t leave Mom alone.
But Cora Connors doesn’t want to hear that. She’s still where I was last year. It’s kind of surprising she even called. But I can’t do it, not after what just happened.
