All She Ever Wanted (4 page)

“Hey, hey… there’s no reason for you to feel ashamed. Your past wasn’t your fault. Maybe Joelle would cut you some slack if she knew about it.”

“I don’t want her pity—or anyone else’s.”

He sighed as he released her. “Do you want me to call the office back and cancel South Africa?”

“You would do that?”

He nodded—reluctantly—and she was stunned to realize that he loved her enough to change his plans for her. She saw how her own act of selfdenial might send a similar message to Joelle.

“Thanks. But you’d better go. One of us needs to stay employed if we want to keep a roof over our heads.”

He smiled, his hair sticking up like a punk rock star. “Will you at least consider taking Joelle with you before you call your sister and bow out?” he asked. “All those hours in the car would give you a lot of quality time together.”

“Goody. Six hours of listening to Jessica Simpson CDs. I can hardly wait.”

She woke Joelle at seven o’clock to invite her to come along, hoping that her daughter’s enthusiasm for meeting her relatives would fade when she found out that it meant getting out of bed before noon.

“I’ll go, but do we have to leave this early?” Joelle moaned.

“Yes. It’s a long drive. Believe me, I’m not happy about going there, either,” Kathleen told her. “But I want us to be—” What? The perfect family she never had? “I would really like you to come with me,” she finished.

Joelle gave a faint, mischievous smile, one that Kathleen hadn’t seen since she was a toddler. “What about my appointment with Dr. Russo?”

Kathleen felt a smile tugging at her mouth, too. “Dr. Russo can go analyze herself.”

“Yes!” Joelle pumped her fist in the air and climbed out of bed.

Kathleen poured herself another cup of coffee while she waited, then quickly dumped it down the drain. Her nerves were already jumping around like a flea circus. She made a quick tour through the house, checking to make sure that everything was turned on or off that needed to be on or off. She called Dr. Russo’s office to reschedule the appointment, studied the road map one last time, and dug out some loose change for tolls.

Joelle shook her head at the offer of breakfast, grabbing a granola bar and a cola instead. They finally climbed into the Lexus at ten minutes past eight.

“So how long is this trip gonna take?” Joelle asked when they were on the highway. All the lanes heading into the city were clogged with rushhour traffic, but the congestion wasn’t bad at all in the direction they were going, away from the city.

“I’m guessing six or seven hours,” Kathleen said. “Depends on the traffic.” They were nervous with each other, no doubt about it. In the past, Kathleen would have switched on the radio or put in a CD—anything to fill up the uncomfortable silence—but today she didn’t.

“So, am I finally going to meet my grandmother and grandfather?” Joelle asked after awhile.

“My mother died when I was eighteen, right after I left home to go to college.”

“Oh. Sorry. I forgot.” Joelle’s expression looked soft and childlike, as if imagining her own mother dying and feeling sad about it. “What about your father? Do you have any brothers and sisters besides Aunt Annie?”

Kathleen took a deep breath, letting the question about her father slide for the moment. “I have two brothers, JT and Poke, and —”

“Poke? What kind of a name is that?”

“His real name is Donald, like my father, but he was always a dawdler—a slow poke—so the nickname stuck. JT’s real name is John Thomas, which sounds much too dignified, seeing as his favorite pastime was torturing insects and small animals. And Annie is my only sister.”

“Are they older than you or younger?”

“I’m the oldest. I was four when Poke was born, six when JT was born, and eight when Annie was born.” She glanced at Joelle and saw her smiling. “What?”

“I’ll bet it was fun to have a baby sister. Like having a real-live baby doll to play with.”

“You would think so. But Annie spent every waking minute of her life crying. It’s a wonder she didn’t grow up to be all leathery and dehydrated like that awful yuppie fruit leather your dad buys. Poke and JT were like the James Brothers reincarnated.”

“Who are the James Brothers?”

“You know… Jesse James, the famous outlaw, and his brother Frank. My brothers probably drive motorcycles and are covered with tattoos and piercings by now. It’ll be a miracle if they aren’t incarcerated. They were always into some deviltry or other.”

“Like what?”

She searched her memory for one of their more harmless escapades. “Well, there was the time they got tired of watching our sister, Annie, so they hog-tied her with the belt of my mother’s bathrobe and stuffed her in a closet.” Joelle’s girlish giggles spurred Kathleen on. “And one time they got mad at the neighbor lady so they stuck the nozzle of her garden hose down her dryer vent and turned it on.”

“Oh no!” Joelle laughed. “That’s awful!”

“Yeah, they were well on the road to becoming criminals at a pretty young age, and—” She froze when she remembered Joelle’s recent brush with the law. Joelle quickly turned away, as if studying the passing scenery, but her cheeks had turned pink. She and Kathleen had been doing so well, and now it was as if a door had slammed shut, and Kathleen didn’t know how to open it again. She would welcome some help from frumpy Dr. Russo right about now, but the doctor wasn’t here. Kathleen was about to turn on the radio in self-defense when Joelle broke the silence.

“Daddy told me you had a hard childhood.”

“He did? What else did he say?” She felt as if she were sitting on a box of vipers, trying to keep the lid on and all the ugliness inside.

“He said it was up to you, not him, to tell me about it. But only if you wanted to. He said it was traumatic.”

“Yeah—well, for one thing I grew up very poor. I spent my youth hunched over with my mousy brown hair hanging in my eyes, hoping no one would notice me. And you know those run-down slum houses you see in the movies with sagging roofs and rusting cars in the driveway and little kids running around outside half-naked, covered with filth?”

Joelle stared at her as if to see if she was joking.

“It’s true. That’s how I grew up. Of course, I didn’t know we were poor when I was really young. But I clearly remember the day I first realized that we were. I was nine years old that summer. …”

Chapter
4

R
IVERSIDE
, N
EW
Y
ORK
— 1959

T
he first rumblings of a summer thunderstorm sounded in the distance as a brand-new 1959 Cadillac pulled to a stop outside our house. The car was so shiny and important-looking that I scooped up my baby sister from the tumbledown porch where we’d been sitting and raced into the house, hollering, “Mommy! Mommy, come quick!”

There was no answer. I quickly searched the bungalow’s two bedrooms, then ran outside to the backyard outhouse. The baby howled in my ear as I stood on tiptoe to peer through the crescent-moon window. “Mommy…? Are you in there?”

“What do you want now, Kathleen? Can’t you see I’m busy?” What I saw was my mother sitting on a broken kitchen chair, paging through the Montgomery Ward catalogue.

“Mommy, there’s a fancy black car stopping out in front of our house—”

“Chariots of the bourgeoisie,” she huffed in disgust. I had no idea what a “bourgeoisie” was, but from the tone of my mother’s voice, she might have been talking about a breed of rodents. “Tell whoever it is I’m not home.”

“You want me to
lie,
Mommy?”

“It’s not a lie. I’m not home—I’m out here. Does this look like my home? Now go find out what they want.”

Raindrops sprinkled my bare arms as I hurried back to the house, thunder grumbling in the distance. “Oh, shut
up,
Annie!” I told my wailing sister, “or I’ll give you something to cry about!” She had smelly pants again and a slimy face.

By the time I returned to the house, the slender, blond woman who’d driven the car had already picked her way across the littered yard and was rapping on our screen door, calling, “Hello? Is anyone home?”

My two brothers, dressed only in dingy underpants, stared back at her through the torn screen. The woman looked as though she’d walked right out of the Ward’s catalogue with her crisp, navy linen dress, high-heeled spectator pumps, and pillbox hat. I wished my mom was as pretty as she was. Mommy didn’t seem to care about her appearance at all. She dressed in baggy cotton housedresses that zipped up the front, and she pulled her dark brown hair back in a ponytail. I set Annie on the floor beside Poke and JT, then stepped hesitantly toward the door.

“My mom isn’t… here.” The words felt like a lie. I found it hard to say them. “She’s not here in the house with us, I mean.”

“I’m Cynthia Hayworth. Will your mother be back soon, dear?”

I shrugged. A shrug wasn’t a lie, was it? Besides, I really didn’t know how long my mom would stay locked in the outhouse—her
sanctuary,
as she sometimes called it. I had no idea why she spent so much time in there. I certainly would never choose to stay inside that cobweb-y, spiderfilled place one second longer than I had to—and even then only in an emergency, like when the indoor toilet was plugged.

“Well, I can just as easily leave the things with you, dear,” the woman said. “I—”

The loud clap of thunder made both of us jump. Out in the street, the car door suddenly flew open and a pudgy little girl about the same age as me bolted for the house, ran up the sagging porch steps, and clung to her mother like macaroni to cheese. She wore pink shorts and a perfectly matched pink-flowered blouse. Even the bows in her pale blond hair and the lace around her ankle socks were pink.

“Why, May Elizabeth! You needn’t be frightened,” the woman soothed. “That’s just the angels in heaven, rearranging their furniture again.”

I had never heard that explanation for thunder before, but I liked it. I couldn’t help smiling as I pictured white-robed angels with feathery wings, shoving sofas and chairs and TV sets across the bare wooden floors of heaven. Then my smile faded as the new little girl looked beyond me into the front room and said, “P-yew! What happened to your house?”

“Hush, May!” her mother chided.

“But it stinks, and the ceiling is all falling down, and—”

The woman touched her ruby-tipped fingers to May’s lips to silence her, then turned to me again with a kind smile. “I brought some clothes and things I thought your family could use. If you and your brothers would like to come out to the car and help us carry them, maybe we can get everything inside before it starts to pour.”

I couldn’t imagine who this stranger was or what she was bringing us or why, but I gave my brother Poke a nudge and pulled him to his feet. “Come on, she needs your help. JT, you stay here with Annie. Make sure she doesn’t crawl away.”

The hard-packed dirt felt hot beneath my feet as I followed Mrs. Hayworth across the yard to the Cadillac, towing a reluctant Poke behind me. The girl in pink kept pace with me, whispering in my ear so Mrs. Hayworth wouldn’t hear her.

“Did you just move into your house or something? Is that why you don’t have any curtains or rugs?”

“No,” I answered with a proud lift of my chin. “We just don’t want any, that’s all. We like our house the way it is.”

“Come on, girls. Quickly!” Mrs. Hayworth called. “Run between the drops!”

I looked at her in surprise, then glanced up into the darkening skies. “But… but how can I do that? I can’t see the raindrops coming.”

Mrs. Hayworth smiled, tilting her head to one side as if she were watching a puppy. “Of course you can’t, dear. It’s just an expression.” She opened the trunk of her car and handed me a paper grocery sack. “Here are some clothes that May Elizabeth has outgrown. You look as though you might be a size or two smaller than she is.” She reached inside for another bag and handed it to Poke. “And here are some toys that my son, Ronnie, doesn’t play with anymore. Do you think you can carry them, honey?”

Poke nodded solemnly as he accepted the bag, but I saw a sparkle of excitement in his eyes as he glimpsed a bright red fire truck sticking out of the top. He trotted across the lawn with the bag, his bare bottom peeking from his sagging underpants.

We all followed him, carrying more grocery sacks, but the car’s huge trunk held still more treasures. I saw garden produce, boys’corduroy pants, and striped T-shirts, colorful sweaters and winter jackets, and a Barbie doll in a black-and-white bathing suit, with tiny high heels to match.

“Why can’t I wait in the car?” May Elizabeth grumbled as we returned to the Cadillac for another load. “I’m getting wet!”

“No, dear. You won’t melt,” Mrs. Hayworth said.

I looked at May Elizabeth in horror, recalling the melting wicked witch in
The Wizard of Oz
. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Why would she melt?”

“What I mean,” Mrs. Hayworth explained, “is that even though she’s as sweet as sugar, she won’t melt in water the way sugar does.”

I loved the way this beautiful woman talked:
“Angels moving furniture… running between the drops… sweet enough to melt like sugar.”
I couldn’t imagine Mrs. Hayworth ever shouting things like “I’ve had about all I can take,” the way my own mother did, or spending hours at a time seeking “sanctuary” in the outhouse.