Brittany Bends (6 page)

We’re all assigned some chore or another. There’s a big long list written in multiple colors on the whiteboard beside the back door. The list separates out our regular duties (all the time) from our weekly duties.

That whiteboard is the one reason some of the younger kids loved it that I moved in, even though I caused bedroom, bathroom, and space issues. I ended up with chores too, and many of mine were the simple ones that the little kids do because Mom wasn’t sure I knew enough about the way the Greater World works to do stuff like cook dinner on a real stove. (I didn’t, not when I moved in. Lise, Anna, Eric, and Mom are teaching me now, along with Ingrid.)

I step inside. It’s hot, like it always is in the kitchen, and Beauregard, the gigantic brown dog, gets up from his bed next to the stove and runs toward me. I’ve never liked dogs much, but Beauregard and I have come to an understanding.

Mostly, I have to understand that he loves me, and will shove his cold nose in my crotch as a greeting whenever he sees me.

His tail wags, and I deflect the nose, and as I do, Ivan steps into the kitchen from the refrigerator room, clutching a gigantic package of hamburger. It’s almost as long as his forearm.

“Hey,” he says, which is his way of saying hello. Ivan is shorter than me. (He’s also shorter than Ingrid, and that makes him mad). He has hair as blond as mine, and it always needs a trim except for a few strands near his crown that stick straight up. They look like a little hand waving hello.

My eye always goes to those strands first, and then to the birthmark along his left nostril that can, in the right light, look unfortunately like a booger that’s been unattended for much too long.

“How’d it go?” he asks.

Everyone in the family knows about my job interview. It became this big production:

•Help Brit figure out what jobs to apply for

•Help Brit fill out applications on paper

•Help Brit fill out applications online

•Help Brit manage her expectations

•Help Brit prepare for her first interview

•Help Brit dress for her first interview

•Help Brit cope with the idea that she might never get a job, despite all that work

I felt like a dumb little kid who couldn’t do anything, and that feeling comes back up now. I’m about to tell Ivan, in a rather gloating tone, that I got the job, when Eric barrels into the door behind me, nearly making me stumble.

“Brit’s going to talk to everyone at dinner,” Eric says, glaring at me.

He doesn’t want me to dole this information out to one person at a time. He believes that in the Johnson Family, no one should ever tell one person something because “gossip can spread like wildfire since the family’s so big.”

He has no idea what a big family really is, and he doesn’t know anything about gossip. Gossip about my family (Okay, my dad’s family) has turned into myth and legend and just straight-up lies.

Plus, most of those stories leave out how painful gossip can be. Sometimes the gossip’s painful because you’re the center of it, and sometimes the gossip’s painful because you’re not being discussed at all.

Ivan sets the hamburger on the counter, and Beauregard ambles over there. He can almost put his nose on the countertop, so Ivan has to fight him off.

There’s a super large pot on the stove. The burner beneath it is glowing red, and as Ivan stirs that, the smell of olive oil and garlic rises. Anna comes into the kitchen from the basement door and she’s carrying a gigantic unopened package of brown sugar, a bottle of Worcestershire sauce, and one of the super-size bottles of Heinz Ketchup.

Anna’s as tall as I am and thinner. She has an angular face and sky blue eyes. She wears her wheat-blonde hair feathered, but that’s the only difference between us. It’s so obvious that we’re sisters, it seems like we should be as close as me and Tiff and Crystal.

But we only just met a few months ago, and every time I see Anna’s face, I feel like I’ve been magicked to a place filled with strange mirrors because I’ve never been in a place where everyone looks like me. Usually I’m the person who stands out, rather than the one who blends in.

“Brit!” she says as if she hasn’t seen me for days. “How’d it go?”

“I just asked her.” Ivan has his back to me as he does something on the counter. “But Eric says she can’t say until dinner.”

“Hey, you can’t do that.” Anna piles everything she carried on the table. For a minute, I think she’s talking to me, but she’s not. She goes to the counter and takes a huge serrated knife out of Ivan’s hands. “I said you could help if you didn’t touch the knives.”

Ivan is knife-crazy. And sword-crazy. And blade-crazy. He loves online gaming, and thinks someday he can be a superhero/warrior if he just learns the tools of the trade.

Which means he wants sword-fighting lessons. Mom says he can take fencing next summer as his summer class, but I have no idea why she tries to placate him by telling him he can build a fence when he really wants to learn how to swing a broadsword.

“You need help?” Eric says to Anna, using a tone that clearly states he’ll help her if there’s trouble, but he won’t help for any other reason.

“No, go read about integers or whatever you do.” Anna shoves Ivan to one side. “I told you get the burger. I didn’t say you could cut up the onions and green peppers. For one thing, you have to peel the onion first.”

They’re busy, and Eric has already left the room.

If you can call the kitchen a room. It took me a long time to do that. Because the kitchen doesn’t have a lot of walls, or maybe it has too many, only they’re not really walls, they’re more like strips of wall that might someday grow up to be pillars.

The kitchen was once closed in, or at least that’s what Eric says. Karl got “a bee up his butt” (Eric again) and decided to make the kitchen “open concept” but never really finished. So Karl took out the walls that didn’t carry the weight of the second story, making sure that the parts that remained could handle the weight so the house wouldn’t collapse in on itself.

Now the kitchen has more entrances than solid walls. I just came in the back door, which, as far as I can tell, was always in that spot. The basement door (which closes) is kitty-corner from the back door, and directly across from the back door is the missing wall/hallway that leads to the dining room.

The entrance to my left opens to the refrigerator room, because Mom got some kind of coupon or prize or something and won this stainless steel restaurant-size refrigerator with matching freezer, and of course none of that fits into the real kitchen. But the refrigerator does let the food stay organized. (The little labels that Mom glued to the shelves [like
Milk only!
] help.)

There’s a second freezer in there for the deer meat from hunting season, and a third freezer for the fish that some family members catch on weekends, and behind all of it is a door that I can’t touch, built into the wall, and locked with a combination padlock and one of those touch security locks. That’s the gun cabinet, which I’ve only seen inside of once. Filled with long guns (rifles?) and two smaller guns on a shelf.

Karl won’t let anyone who’s not certified near the gun cabinet, and he changes the combinations every three days, only telling the trusted three (Mom, Lise, and Anna—the only ones qualified) what the combination actually is.

When you stand, like I am, right in front of the back door, you face the table and the stove, where some cabinets remain. The sink is to the right, and it’s a huge sink. (They call it a “farm sink,” for reasons I’ll never understand.) Next to the basement door is another door that leads to the garage. (You have to go down some steps to get there.)

If I come in the house through the back door, it always takes me a minute to get my bearings. When I first moved in, I’d always take the wrong door, usually ending up in the refrigerator room, facing the gun cabinet. Everyone thought I was obsessed with the guns, when really, I was just lost.

The smell of sweet onions hits me, and I blink. Anna is scraping a cutting board into the gigantic pot. I see onions and green peppers.

Ivan grins at me as he grabs the brown sugar off the table. “Sloppy Joes,” he says happily. It’s his favorite meal and he asks for it all the time, so apparently, Mom decided he needs to learn how to cook it.

I nod. I know Ivan. He’s going to ask more questions about my job interview.

“Where are the buns?” I ask before he can open his mouth again.

“Oh, dang!” he says.

“Ivan,” Anna says, sounding just like Mom. “Language.”

“Sorry.” He heads to dry storage, which is a cabinet near the double doors to the basement and garage.

I use that moment to make my escape.

Only Beauregard notices. He watches and whines just a little. I get a sense he would follow me if he could.

The animals in the household—and there are always a bunch of animals—love me. I have no idea why. If I didn’t keep my door closed, they’d join me on the bed, like they did when I first moved in. In fact, the animals were one reason why I got my own space in the first place. (It’s not fair to call what I have a “room.”)

I head there now. I walk into the dining room, past the faded redwood picnic table that serves as the formal dining table, and go into the living room, which is huge and sprawling and filled with traps for the feet like ottomans that move depending on who is sitting where, and old toy cars or toy trains or dolls on the floor next to super balls or fake mice for the cats or chew toys for the dogs.

A flight of stairs blocks the view of the front door. Once upon a time, the stairs were on a wall near the front door, but like other walls in this place, that wall got moved.

It took me forever to find my way around this place, and I still can’t do it in the dark.

Fortunately, my sleeping area is down the main hallway—the
original
main hallway—which dead-ends into one of the house’s three full bathrooms. My sleeping area was the linen closet until last month. Now it’s been converted to a “bedroom,” which is just big enough to squeeze in a twin bed. And when I say squeeze, I mean squeeze. The bed was shoved against the back wall, and it touches the side wall. Karl had to adjust the sliding doors just a little so they’d still work, but when I lay in bed, I’m surrounded on three sides by something solid.

There’s a little room at the end of the bed. Karl shoved a dresser there so I could keep my underwear private. Above the dresser, he left a hanger, so I can sort-of hang up my clothes. The dresses pool on top of the dresser. I could switch them so that they hang in front of the dresser, but then I wouldn’t have any space at all.

I have to sit on the foot of the bed and lean forward to open the dresser drawers. Making the bed (or taking the sheets off) make me wish I had magic still. (Okay, most things make me wish I had magic still, but this
really
does.) I have to make the bottom part of the bed from the hallway, then climb on the bottom part, straddle the bed, and pull the sheets up—oh, never mind. It’s hard, it’s complicated, and the sheets never really stay in place. Plus, the closet gets hot some nights, so I have to leave the doors open.

The doors are really the sliding doors from the original closet. They’re thin, made of some kind of fake wood, and don’t block any sound at all. So if someone walks down the hall in the middle of the night and needs the restroom, well, I get the full benefit of the creaks and moans of the floor, the opening and closing of the bathroom door, the sound of running water, not to mention the sound of everything else.

Karl has promised me a better room by spring, but I have no idea what that means. I’m just glad I have a little bit of privacy. I know Anna and Lise are glad I no longer share their room. I suspect they asked Karl to come up with something because (I’ll be honest) I was probably hard to sleep near. I did cry myself to sleep that entire first week and part of the second (even after the drama queen comment).

Now, I slide back the door to my room and sit on the edge of the bed. Even though the bedroom is ridiculous, it’s
mine
, and I’m glad for it. I don’t close the door because I’m not going to stay here long.

I pull off my right shoe, but I don’t look at the injured foot. Not yet. I try to pull off the left shoe but I have to twist it a little. It’s really embedded into my skin. Finally, the shoe comes off with a loud
Pop!
I half expect someone magical to show up after that sound, but no, it’s just me, the shoe-pressure, and the silly closet without shelves.

My left foot feels like it’s being stabbed with a thousand knives. I wiggle my toes, then flex them. I can see the movement, but I can’t really feel it. And through the panty hose, I can see deep red indents in the skin. I’m never wearing those heels again for any reason.

Then I look at my right foot. It’s scraped. It’s turning black and blue near the ankle. I’ve learned, after three months with the Johnson Family that you have to take care of scrapes right away or you get some kind of infection.

The difference between here and home is that if you don’t take care of an infection right away, you can’t magic it away. You need some little pills that Mom calls “horse pills” and Karl says cost a fortune, and if I’ve learned anything about the Johnson Family, it’s that they don’t have a fortune. They “make do.”