Get Happy (5 page)

“I don’t know. To avoid paying child support?”

“Maybe he was a bad person, but he’s had a change of heart now. Maybe he was walking to work one day and God spoke to him from a burning shrub and said, ‘Contact your daughter, dude!’ ”

“He doesn’t walk to work. He sails.”

“Okay,” Fin laughed. “God spoke to him from a burning whale.” He put his arm around me, and we sat for a few seconds, both of us cold, staring at a black
crusted pile of snow at the edge of the sidewalk. “Let’s assume his name has always been Choy, and your mom lied to you about it. Maybe she lied because he’s great and she was afraid that you’d want to live with him in Hawaii! That makes sense.” He grabbed my mitteny hands. “If you move to Hawaii, I’m going to kill you. Wait.… He works at the Shedd. So he lives here now? You have to go and meet him!”

My head was splitting open. “No. I don’t want anything to do with him. He is a horrible, selfish person. I mean, who dumps a two-year-old kid and a wife?”

“What — exactly — did his letter say?”

I took a breath and recited it.

Fin’s eyes were huge. “You memorized it.”

“I read it a hundred times last night.”

His eyes softened. “Min, he sounds nice.”

“No. You should’ve heard my mom. ‘Let him in and he will hurt you,’ she said. He’s a loser. I wish he was a drug addict. It would be better that way.”

“How would that be better?”

“Because drug addicts are sick. They’re basically ruled by the drugs. They make involuntary mistakes because their brains are addled.”

“But it’s better this way because you can get something out of him.”

I looked at my boots.

The vice principal walked out, eyeballing us and the other vagrants who didn’t want to go inside. “School is starting, people. You have thirty seconds.”

Fin stood up and pulled me off the bench. “You have no real proof that Keanu Choy is your dad, Minerva. Your mom reacted to the name Kenneth Chip. You have this hunch … so let’s go to Keanu Choy’s office at the aquarium. You can say, ‘Hi, are you my daddy?’ If he is, then get everything you can from him and dump him. Protect yourself. You want money from him. That’s it. Be practical. You don’t want love. You just want cold hard cash.”

My feet had stopped itching, but my toes were so cold they burned. “I’m not going to do that, Fin.” We walked into school.

“Then confront your mom,” he said. “Just lay it out on the table. ‘Mother dearest, why have you been trying to convince me that I am related to a potato-based snack food?’ ”

F
IN WAS RIGHT
about the fact that I needed proof, but I couldn’t get the nerve to talk to my mom that night. Instead, I barricaded myself in my room. I had all this emotion inside me that wanted to come out, and I was dying to write a song. That’s how it works with me. When I’m emotional, it’s like a song is inside me, and if I can just pull the song out, the anxiety and anger and pain flow out, too. But I was ukeless, and that made me more frustrated and angry.

I got out the uke songbook Fin had given me and decided to learn some chords, but it was hard without something physical to put my fingers on. Finally, I got a ruler, covered it with masking tape, drew lines on it with a permanent marker to look like the frets and strings on the neck of a uke, and attached it to a cookie tin with duct tape. A handy-dandy DIY practice uke.

I sat down with it and made the shapes of the chords on the neck with my left hand while I strummed against the cookie-tin part with my right hand, singing along.

Okay. Truly pathetic.

S
OMEHOW
, I
GOT
through the night, and I woke up the next morning, Saturday, to find a note on the
kitchen counter from my mom:
Getting haircut and bagels.

If you don’t have the nerve to confront, then at least you can snoop
, I said to myself.

One by one, I went through my mother’s dresser drawers. Nothing. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for — photos, official documents … anything that might help me find proof of my dad’s identity.

I scanned the photo albums in the bookshelf by my mom’s bed. She had one for every year, starting with the year of my birth. I flipped through each page of the first two books, even though I knew there weren’t any pictures of my dad in them. I’d gone through a phase, when I was eight, when I ripped a page out of an L. L. Bean catalogue, picturing a fatherly looking, black-haired guy sitting by a fireplace, and tried to convince myself it was him. I’d kept it under my pillow until, one day, I came home to find clean sheets and no trace of Mr. Bean.

I opened my mom’s closet. Pink plastic storage boxes were stacked on the shelf above the clothes rack, all labeled in her neat handwriting.
CDS. COSMETICS. DVDS. EYEGLASSES. GIFT CARDS. HAIR SUPPLIES.
OFFICE SUPPLIES
. I opened the boxes, careful to put them back exactly where I found them, not finding any surprises. Big storage containers were under the bed, one labeled
FALL/WINTER QUILTS
— empty now — and the other labeled
SPRING/SUMMER BEDSPREADS
, which had our lightweight blankets in it. Clearly, if my mother ever lost her job, she could get one as a professional closet organizer. I peeked between the stored bedspreads, just to make absolutely sure nothing was hidden there.

“What are you doing?” My mom was standing in the doorway.

Talk about shock. I tried to smile innocently. “I didn’t hear you come up. I was looking for my red sweater.” I slid the storage box back under the bed. “I wanted to wear it, but it’s not in my room.”

“I don’t store sweaters under there. Your room is a disaster, Minny. It’s no wonder you can’t find anything.”

“Did you get bagels?” I asked to change the subject.

“Yes.” She glanced at herself in the mirror.

“Yum. Thanks, Mommy. Hey, your coif looks great. Nice color.”

Her face perked up. “Thank you, honey. That was nice of you to notice.”

A horribly cheap trick — throw a compliment at your mom to make her go away.

6

“Y
OU JUST NEED
one little thing to hold on to and you can get through the day.”

That’s something my aunt Joan said. One year when she and my uncle George were visiting his family, half their ranch in Colorado got swept away in a mudslide. My mom and I went out to help with the cleanup. I remember the smell of the damaged house, damp and moldy, and how sad it was because so much of Aunt Joan’s stuff was ruined. She’s a quilter, and her bedroom and sewing room had both collapsed, with everything in those rooms just sliding down the
mountain. On our second day there, we discovered a plastic box that had somehow stayed watertight. When she opened it and saw scraps of fabric she had been saving to make a new quilt, she said that quote about needing one thing to hold on to and cried. Watsons don’t cry in front of people, so the moment was seared into my brain.

I was remembering it because that Sunday, Joy Banks called and offered me a job at Get Happy, which gave me something to hold on to. The call came while I was in the bathroom, just getting out of the shower.

“Aren’t you happy?” Joy asked.

“Absolutely. Thanks.” The relief felt sweet, all the way down to the soles of my wet, itch-free feet.

“I know this is all very quick, but the first gigs are February second. I’ll send an email with your training packet and your script attached. Print everything out. I’m hoping to have our training session next Saturday. Can you make it?”

I wiped the steam off the mirror. Minerva Watson was going to be an actual employee. Get Happy, Incorporated, was going to pay me to make parties fun. I smiled. Employment looked good on me.

“Can you make it?” she asked again.

“Yes, I’d be delighted,” I said with a new professional lilt in my voice.

“Excellent. Welcome to the Get Happy family. Look for the details in your email, okay?”

“Okay. Wait! Who else made it from the audition?”

“Actually, I’m adding all four of you to the roster. I’m calling Finnegan O’Connor next.”

I dried my hair and put together a genius outfit — employment is inspirational! — waiting to call Fin until I thought Joy would be done. Fin beat me to it.

“We got it,” he whooped. “I wasn’t even awake when she called. But then she called the home phone, and my mom woke me up and I was like, ‘Joy who?’ ” He started laughing. “This is going to be hilarious! You can’t be mad at me anymore. See, I knew you’d make it. You’re just as good as Cassie Lott.”

I laughed.

“We’re going to make us some money, sweetcakes,” he said. “I’m coming over so we can rehearse. I want to show you clips of Get Happy parties that I found on YouTube last night.”

I stopped in the bathroom and smiled at myself again in the mirror.

This might actually be fun.

Downstairs, my mom was sitting at the computer in the kitchen with a huge mug of coffee in one hand, scrolling through her Facebook posts.

“I got a job,” I announced.

She didn’t respond.

“I got a job, Mom,” I repeated.

She looked up. “What?”

“I got a job at Get Happy, doing kids’ birthday parties. I go for training on Saturday.”

“What in the world are you talking about?”

“I went to an audition with Fin for a job and I made it. We both made it.”

She turned to face me, finally listening. “Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”