A Little Friendly Advice (8 page)

Just as my eyes roll along the inky script of my dad’s signature, three rapid-fire knocks drum on the dressing room door.

“Hey!” Beth calls out all friendly and sweet. “Can I come in and change?”

I haven’t seen his handwriting in forever. Something about the small, scratchy, impatient penmanship looks similar to my own, but there’s no time to study the similarities. I tear my eyes away, and the floor undulates beneath my feet.

My dad did not go back to Oregon. He’s here, in Akron. He’s waiting for me. I wasn’t dreaming after all. Those were his tires I heard crunching the driveway gravel this morning. He must have left the letter for me on the front stoop. And that’s where Beth found it this morning, and that’s why she acted all weird and upset. It all makes perfect sense.

Except for the part where Beth doesn’t show me the letter and hides it from me instead. That makes absolutely no sense to me at all.

The metal hook wiggles inside its eyehole as Beth tugs on the handle from the other side. Her shadowy outline is visible through the white slatted door. She cups her hands and tries to peek through. “C’mon, Ruby,” she says insistently. “I’ve seen you in your underwear a million times.”

The last thing I want is to be caught red-handed. The paper sticks to my clammy hands like it doesn’t want me to let go. I fold it up and tuck it quietly back inside the envelope. Beth’s stuff lies in a tangle at my feet. I crouch down, shove the envelope deep into the back pocket of her jeans, and kick everything aside. Beth’s bag overturns in the process and her party-planning notebook and pen slide out. I quickly scribble his room number on the inside of my wrist in the smallest writing possible. Then I unhook the latch, open the dressing room door, and stuff my finger into my mouth.

Beth’s brow furrows as her hazel eyes take me in. She steps forward and locks the door quickly behind her. “Katherine really upset you, huh?” Her hand wafts around the general area of my face. “Ruby, I know it wasn’t funny, but she really was just joking with you.”

I unbutton the Girl Scout shirt and twist to face the mirror. Blotches of angry redness creep up my neck to my ears. I unwind the hair band from the base of my ponytail and let my thick dark hair cloak me. It feels cool and safe behind the curtain. “No. I’m fine. It’s just a little stuffy in here or something.” My voice sounds strange and disembodied.

We change in silence, back-to-back, while blood vessels continue to pop open all over my body. I concentrate on taking deep breaths, but infuriating questions keep trying to choke me. Why is he so hell-bent on seeing me now? Couldn’t he tell from the way things went down on my birthday that I don’t want anything to do with him? And why hasn’t Beth said anything to me yet? Because every minute she doesn’t mention it, she’s basically lying to me.

Beth’s silk slip rustles as it slides over her head. A few sparks of static electricity crackle through her auburn waves. “Listen, I didn’t mean to snap at you about the whole costume thing.” She steps into her beyond-skinny pencil-leg jeans and jumps a few times as she pulls them up to her waist. “As stupid as it sounds, I didn’t want Katherine to win. I wanted to be the one who knew you best.”

I don’t say anything. I just wait and wait and wait for her to tell me already. I can hear her breathing. Each inhale sounds deep, like the kind you take at the start of a sentence. But she doesn’t say anything. She just keeps breathing and I keep waiting. “Beth. I —” I force myself to look at her straight on, but my eyes quickly return to the dirty carpet. When? When is she going to say something?

“Don’t even say it, because I know I’m acting crazy. You’ll be a super cute Girl Scout. I’d buy, like, a million boxes of cookies from you.”

I am so confused I can’t think straight. I step into my dirty gray New Balances and tie them up. Beth, already dressed, bends down to give each of my shoes a precautionary double knot. My eyes ride the curve of her spine to the back pockets of her jeans. I can’t see the letter, or even make out its general shape through the denim.

Beth smiles at me, hopeful. “So we’re cool?”

I nod. It’s all I can manage at the moment.

Beth unlatches the door and holds it open for me. As soon as I step into the store, Katherine bolts out from behind a shelf of tattered and yellowed paperback novels. She positions herself directly in front of me and pulls the tip of her long ponytail out of her mouth. The blond hair is dark and wet with saliva.

“Ruby, hey,” Katherine says. “Listen, I want to apologize.”

I walk straight past her and make my way to the cashier with my costume wadded up in one hand and a few dollar bills in the other. My dad probably wants to apologize too. Use my forgiveness to ease his own guilt or something like what Beth had said that night at the park. Unfortunately, I’m not feeling particularly merciful. I’m even tired of feeling sorry for myself.

Katherine sulks the whole ride home in the Period Seat. I sit next to her and ignore her funk, in favor of watching the passing cars and analyzing and breaking down the entire situation to help me understand what’s going on. I decide that Beth hasn’t said anything because the other girls are here. She’s waiting to tell me once we’re alone. That would make sense. She’s probably sitting in the front seat, trying to figure out exactly how she should break the news.

When Maria drives up Magnolia Hill, I can see the big sign of the Holiday Inn in the distance. It has to be about five miles away from my house, tops. I imagine Jim waiting there, wondering if I got his letter. Waiting to see if I’ll show up. Beth fiddles with the radio in the passenger seat. She doesn’t see the hotel. She’s not even looking.

Maria drops me and Beth off at my house. We walk up the stone path together, our feet moving at the same gait, but the space between us is as wide as my street. I’m holding my breath in anticipation. It’s going to happen now. It’s got to happen right now.

“I wish I wasn’t going to Suzy’s tonight,” she laments. “If it weren’t for the liquor, I’d tell my mom to go without me. I’m already paranoid enough about getting caught, but I think it’ll be worth it, don’t you? I mean, parties at our age are a little babyish if you don’t have any alcohol.” Beth’s green ten-speed is still up on its kickstand near the front door, and the afternoon breeze has netted a few fallen leaves in the spokes. She drops her plastic bag of clothes in the wire bike basket and stoops over to pick the leaves out.

I kneel down next to Beth and run my hands lightly over the tips of the grass. The cold seeps through my jeans and ices my knees. Maybe in her own weird way, Beth is trying to protect me. She’s always telling me to forget things, to let them go and move on. And the thing is, if I had been the one to find the letter, I would have shown it to Beth first thing and asked her what she thought of it, what I should do. Maybe Beth is trying to save me from some emotional stress. If I hadn’t freaked out in the kitchen this morning, she might have shown me Jim’s letter. She still might. She might just be waiting for the perfect time.

Why isn’t this the perfect time?

Beth stands up and extends her hand. She grips mine, firm and sure, and pulls me to my feet. “I’ll have my cell on me the whole night. Call if you need anything. Seriously, anything at all.” She straddles her bike. “And remember — you have nothing to worry about.”

“Okay.” I stuff my hands into the pockets of my ski vest.

She takes off, pedaling down the walkway and jumping the curb into the street. I watch her weave around potholes and parked cars until she gets to the end of the block. There, she rings her bell and waves a last good-bye over her shoulder before disappearing around the corner.

I stand on my front lawn, completely stunned, for I don’t know how long. Beth’s taken one day away from my potential reunion. Seven days are left for her to come clean about the letter, seven days for me to figure out how to act normal and pretend like everything’s okay until she does.

Mom is definitely up to something. She keeps coming upstairs to stick her head in my room and make a weird face and utter a completely non-scary Halloween sound. Imagine a kindergarten teacher channeling the ghost of a kitten. Then she cracks herself up and bounds back down the steps.

It’s too corny not to laugh. But somehow I manage to keep it together. Whenever my mom acts all silly, I get automatically serious. It’s like a reflex. And tonight, of all nights, I’m just not in the mood to joke around. I don’t know why she’d be either, unless it’s to convince me that things around here are officially Back to Normal. Or maybe she’s seen Jim again herself, or she knows about the letter he left for me and hopes I’ll bring it up. Sorry, but that’s not going to happen.

My room vibrates in sync with her footsteps. She’s coming to haunt my bedroom again. I grab my camera and snap her picture as she cranes her head around the door, so I can show her how dumb she’s acting. For some reason the Polaroid develops all weird and smoky, which only eggs her on.

“You can’t photograph a ghost!” she cries, dancing around me in a circle.

That’s what they say about vampires. Not ghosts. But I am more concerned about my camera possibly being messed up than about correcting her mistake. So I sit down at my desk, inspect the rollers, and ignore her.

We don’t eat together all that often and especially not on the weekends, when she picks up extra shifts at the hospital. Usually I’m out with Beth and the girls by the time she gets home from work. Sometimes I offer to stay home and hang out with her, if there’s nothing else really going on, but she says she likes the quiet time. She watches whatever old movies are on television, tries a new flavor of fancy tea that she buys from the hospital gift shop, or gives her hair a hot oil treatment.

When we do have dinner together, she likes to make it a big production. She’ll use a meticulously snipped recipe from a magazine, featuring some crazy ingredient that we have to ask someone at the grocery store courtesy desk to help us find. The table gets set with the fancy porcelain plates that we keep stacked in the back of the linen closet. She’ll pull her brown hair up in little twists and folds and sit across from me in a shirt that’s too pretty for the hospital. Occasionally, she’ll even light a candle. I always blow it out before I sit down. I don’t mean to be a jerk, but there’s something creepy about having a dinner date with your mom.

It’s pretty obvious why she does it. She doesn’t have much of a life. Which sucks. Dating would be good for her, and me too, I think. Not that I want her to act like Maria or anything. I see a montage of bed-and-breakfasts, wine tastings, watching the trees change colors, and other grown-up date activities. With one nice guy she could settle down with.

It wouldn’t be hard for her to meet someone. She’s young and pretty, in an honest, wholesome, Ohio-ish divorced mom way. Shiny hair and apple cheeks and toned limbs. Which makes it all the more sad that she shuts herself down every time a man’s eyes linger over her a few seconds longer than she thinks they should.

One time a man hit on her while we were waiting for his parking spot at the post office. It was completely embarrassing, and I would have crawled into the glove compartment, had it been possible. He cooed that he’d seen her around town and had always wanted to introduce himself. You could tell by the way he leaned his arm up on the top of our car roof that he liked her.

He wasn’t sleazy. He was a professional, wearing a tie and flat-front navy-blue pants that rippled in the spring breeze. He seemed nice enough, and handsome too. Definitely taller than Jim. And stronger. His teeth were white and straight and friendly, not yellowed from cheap cigars.

Mom wasn’t having it. As soon as he started talking, her top lip curled up, like she’d just popped a sour candy into her mouth. “Not in front of my daughter,” she hissed, before rolling up her window and peeling out. We bought our stamps at the 7-Eleven down the road that day, and rode home in complete silence.

We’re like old war buddies. We have history and love and camaraderie, but neither of us wants to relive the battles we’ve been through or compare how the pink, tough skin of our scars hasn’t softened over time. We’re content to let our past hang heavy between us without comment, and breathe shallowly around it. Neither of us wants to trigger a painful flashback.

Mom finally calls me for dinner. Before I go downstairs, I reset the camera and hold it up to my face. The flash blinds and stings, but the film develops okay. It captures my eyes a second before I squint. My pupils look bigger than usual, like they are desperate to drink in the light. Like I am empty.

The kitchen microwave dings and announces my arrival.

“Hope you don’t mind leftovers,” Mom says as she pulls two steaming plates of my birthday ziti out of the microwave. She turns first to the kitchen table and, forgetting for a second that she covered it in old newspaper for whatever reason, sets them down on a tiny spread of countertop instead.

I don’t mind leftovers at all. Ziti is always better after a day of sitting in the fridge. But tonight’s dinner is a lot more casual than I was expecting. I drop into a seat and glance down at a spread of grocery store coupons, feeling a bit suspicious. “What’s all this for?”

Mom whips around from the kitchen sink wielding a huge knife and an evil grin. She looks like a patient escaped from a mental ward in her green nursing scrubs and with all the flyaway pieces poking out of her ponytail. She stalks over to where I’m sitting, hoists a heavy brown paper bag onto the table, and stabs at it with serial-killer intensity.

I push my chair back until I’m butted up against the cabinets.

Mom pauses to admire her reflection in the blade. “Did I scare you?”

I roll my eyes and ignore the beads of sweat bubbling up on the back of my neck.

She cackles and raises the knife high over her head again. This time, she slices the bag into four wide petals and peels them back to reveal two dirty pumpkins. Then she waits for my big reaction, with raised, expectant, perfectly plucked eyebrows.

“Yay.” It comes out even more unenthusiastic than I mean it to. But carving pumpkins seems like a weird, sentimental thing for us to be doing together.

“What? What’s wrong with pumpkin carving? Halloween is only a week away!” Her voice sheds its playfulness in favor of annoyance.

She won’t take her eyes off me, so I lean over, pull open the junk drawer, and paw through until I find a Magic Marker. “Nothing’s wrong with pumpkin carving.”

Her face eases back into a smile when she sees I’ll play along. “I think we missed out on lots of trick-or-treaters the last few years because the house wasn’t properly decorated.” She pats her amazingly flat stomach. “And I can’t handle another year of having to eat all those leftover Kit Kats from Giant Eagle.”

I don’t buy that as her real reason, exactly. But I don’t think she knows anything about the letter, either. This activity seems more about me and her than us and him.

Mom lays out a selection of knives, finds a baking sheet for the seeds, and pulls over the trash can. “I got inspired today when I saw this idea on television in a patient’s room,” she says, easing into the seat across from me and reaching out for the smaller of the two pumpkins. She lays it on its side and lets the gnarled green stem jut outward. “You make the stem into a nose and carve a face around it. Isn’t this one just perfect for that?”

“It might be hard to light a candle in there, though.” I reach out and give her pumpkin a little tap. It spins across the table.

“Hmm.” She picks up her pumpkin and cradles it in her hands. A few flecks of dirt fall onto her lap. The corners of her mouth sink.

“You can still do it that way, Mom. I didn’t mean to say —”

“No, I think you have a point.” She takes out her ponytail holder and puts her hair back up, smoothing it neater than before.

I shouldn’t ruin her fun. She has so little of it. I try to shake off my bad mood and have a good time for her sake. “Okay. Well, if you do a grin, I’ll do a frown. Then we can sit them on opposite sides of our stairs.”

She nods at me, reaches for one of the smaller knives, and starts sawing in a circle.

We scrape out the guts and free the seeds from the slimy tentacles. Mom manages to stay remarkably clean, while the front of my white tee gets splattered in wet orange pulp. Neither of us is really talking. Every time I look at her, she’s already staring at me, wearing a sort of sad-looking smile, like the kind people wear at funerals when someone’s telling them a nice story about the person who died.

“What costume are you wearing to Beth’s party?” Mom asks as she leans over to turn on the stove for her kettle.

I’ve drawn a pretty awesome-looking frown on my pumpkin. It stretches all the way across the front, and it’s made up of long, skinny rectangles, like the grate of a scary basement furnace. I just need the right knife to start carving. Something small and delicate. “I found an old Girl Scout uniform at the thrift store today.”

Mom gasps and closes her eyes for a few seconds, like she’s dreaming. “You always wanted to be a Girl Scout! Will you try it on for me?”

“Maybe later.” I push the knife in all the way, and apply slow and steady pressure down on the handle, trying my best to slice in a straight line.

“You were too shy, back then, for such a big group.” She takes the saltshaker and gives the seeds a good coating before popping them in the oven.

Too shy
is how my mom likes to describe what happened to me after Jim left. Which I find equal parts irritating and hilarious. I mean, I’m all about not dealing with reality, but come on. “It wasn’t that I was shy, Mom.” I raise my eyes the littlest bit from my pumpkin and watch her face for a reaction. “You know that. I went crazy.”

She hums to herself as she draws a big smiley face, like she didn’t even hear me. “You could join the Girl Scouts now, if you wanted to.”

“Umm. I don’t think so.” My hands are still slimy and I’m having some trouble holding on to my pumpkin, so I cradle it in between my legs, using them as a vise.

“Oh, but you can! They have it for older girls. It’s like the Eagle Scouts. Except not that, exactly. I don’t know what they call it for the girls. Maybe the Eaglettes?”

“Mom, I don’t want to be a teenage Girl Scout. It’s just a Halloween costume.”

She rests her marker on the table and looks at me, like I’ve done something wrong. “You can do anything you want to do, Ruby. That’s all I’m trying to say.”

I know she means well by orchestrating this mother-daughter time, and pumpkin carving is kind of a fun thing to do after all, I guess. I don’t mean to be edgy or impatient with her. It’s just that I find her motivational speeches pretty meaningless. It’s obvious that Jim’s presence is as tangible as if he were sitting right between us, yet she tries to pretend like everything’s just peachy keen in our happy home. She thinks she’s protecting me, though the truth is Mom’s as messed up as I am — and even worse at hiding it. Before I know it, my hands are shaking and I’m afraid I’m going to screw up my pumpkin. So I drop my knife on the table and walk over to the countertop.

I decide that two can play at this game.

“I went to a party at Teddy Baker’s house yesterday,” I say, waving a steaming fork full of noodles around.

“Oh, you did? How was it?”

“His mother ran off with Teddy’s orthodonist. Did you know that?”

“Yes,” she says, glancing at my empty chair instead of where I’m standing. “I think I heard that.”

I make some
mmMMmm
ing sounds as I chew and swallow. And then I drop my fork into the sink, letting it clank against some dirty dishes. “Can I ask you something?”

She presses the tip of her knife blade into the flesh of the pumpkin and holds it steady. “Fine.”

That isn’t the most inviting way to change a conversational topic, but I’ll take what I can get. “Do you think you’ll ever date someone again?”

The skin on her forehead gets all wrinkly. “I hope you don’t think for a second that I would ever date Mr. Baker.”

“Eww! No.” I return to my seat and take up the knife and the pumpkin again. “I’m just saying that you’re divorced. So you can do whatever
you
want to do too. You know, like you said before. To me.” The moment the last word drips off my lips, I tense up. I wish I could reach out and take it all back. But I can’t. I’ve said it, for better or worse.

She takes a deep breath and slides her knife into the pumpkin. “Ruby — I’m your mother, not your girlfriend. My personal life is none of your business, and I’d appreciate it if you’d respect my privacy.”

“Why are you getting all defensive?” I don’t want to hurt her. I want to help her.

“Why are you purposefully trying to upset me?” she says, like I’m a traitor, the worst daughter in history.

“I’m not! I just want to talk about the way things really are.” I don’t get why everyone’s trying so hard to shield me from living my own life. I’m about to throw down my knife and storm out of the room when I feel a pop. A pinch on the tip of my finger. Then something warm and wet. A trickle of blood rolls down the side of my pumpkin.

“Ruby!” My mom jumps up and wraps her hand tight around my finger. She hoists my hand over my head like I’m a wounded Statue of Liberty and tugs me over to the sink. “Look at what you’ve done.” She’s fumbling to open the first-aid kit with her one free hand and cursing under her breath. She says, “I shouldn’t have to explain myself to you,” as she swabs at the cut with a moist cotton ball.

It doesn’t sting, but I can feel tears welling up in my eyes anyway. “Then stop expecting me to fill up your pathetic Saturday nights, because I have a life.”

That finally does it. Mom drops the first-aid kit on the floor and takes off for her bedroom, leaving me to bandage up my finger myself.