Hand Me Down (18 page)

I move his guitar and open the top drawer. Most of what is left I put in a Goodwill pile. I have a whole closet full of nice, first hand, and hole-less outfits at Tammy’s. I no longer need these hand me downs, flood jeans, and stretch pants. There are a few nice dresses in the closet, a few pairs of summer shoes worth keeping, and sleep shorts I can wear if Terrance moves out. I stick them in another box along with stuffed animals I don’t want to take but can’t bring myself to throw away. I move Terrance’s guitar back in front of my dresser but I turn all the tuning pegs in different directions, one so tight the string snaps. I stand there picturing all the parts of him that could snap like that with the right pressure: bones, tendons, windpipe.

Jaime comes in and sees me staring. She says, “Let’s break it.”

“Mom would know.”

“So?” Jaime picks up the wooden neck and lets the body dangle. “How else can she punish us?”

“What if we can actually come back?” I say.

Jaime rolls her eyes but puts the guitar back on its metal stand. “Did you hear them on the phone this morning? It was like déjà vu.”

“Tammy was the same before Sam came to visit,” I say. “He called every Sunday at five
A.M
.”

“Dad calls Crystal a psycho bitch,” Jaime says. “And then they make up and have really loud sex.”

“Mom and the idiot, too.”

“It’s nasty.”

“I try not to think about it,” I say and she nods. We stand there quietly for a minute, the sun shining through the blinds on the window, making shadow stripes across our feet and the brown carpet. Jaime plucks the thickest strings on the guitar and they vibrate like footsteps in the empty apartment. She puts her thumb in her mouth and sighs, and I wish I could offer her more than this instability, something better than our parents. All the things in my head sound like Hallmark cards, but I want her to know that I will never let her down. I decide on,
You can always talk to me
, as a starting point, but before I get it out she pulls her thumb from between her lips and says, “You’ve French-kissed a guy before, right?”

Our talk is better than shredding Terrance’s Forty-Niners cap or scratching his CDs would have been, and by the time Mom comes home I know that if Jaime and Dad actually get an apartment and she asks me to, I will move in with them.

I let Dad hug me before Jaime gets in his pickup. His dark orange beard is rough against my cheek but he doesn’t smell like beer. “You look weird,” he says to me.

I say, “You look unemployed.”

He smiles and wags a finger at me. “You got that cleverness from me.”

“I was being serious.”

“A serious pain.” He laughs.

Jaime says, “Dad.”

“I know, I know,” he says. “She’s always serious.”

“You’re so clever,” I say. “Why don’t you go into advertising?”

“Good night, Liz,” Jaime says, tossing her backpack into the
black bed of his pickup. “Thanks,” she says and gets in the cab. We smile at each other.

“You could come have fun with us, Liz,” he says.

“You mean drink too much?” I stand on tiptoe and check in the truck bed for alcohol.

“Just as frigid as your mom,” Dad says, shaking his head. “Where are you spending the night?”

I put my hands on my hips. “Why do you care?”

“You could still come back to our place,” he says. “We’ve got a couch with your name on it.”

“No, thanks,” I say. “I’d like to sleep without shoes on.”

“Fine, hoity-toity.” He gets back in the cab. “But you better not be staying at your mom’s if Terrance is there,” he says. “You know the rules.”

Suddenly all the signs click in my head. Dad inviting Jaime to live at Crystal’s. The call to Terrance’s parole officer. Dad and Jaime encouraging me to move in with them. I stare at him, taking in his freckles and blue eyes, thinking back to all his little comments. “Why didn’t I figure it out before?” I say.

“What?” he says, mocking. “That us
real
Reids like to enjoy ourselves?”

“It was you,” I say. Trying to collect child support money was not him taking advantage of the situation. It was the reason the situation was created. “You called Terrance’s P.O.” My hands form fists at my side. “This whole thing started because of you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, looking away from me and slamming the door shut.

“I can’t believe you would rip our lives apart like that for money,”
I say. My nostrils flare and I think of all the times he forgot to pick us up, or spent our dinner cash on booze, or made us sleep on the floor of some passed-out friend’s house. “You selfish prick.”

“Liz!” Jaime says.

“He set this in motion, Jaime,” I say. “You can’t trust him.”

“Things are in motion,” Dad says, his voice harsh. He looks directly at me through his open window and lifts his eyebrows. “Maybe you should think about which direction you want them to move.”

I bite the inside of my lip until I taste blood. “Is that some kind of threat?” I say, leaning forward so Jaime can’t hear.

“I’m simply suggesting you carefully consider your options here, Liz,” he says, his lips turning up at the corners. He glances at Jaime. “Make family a priority.”

My jaw tenses enough to make my ears ring. “I will never forgive you for this,” I say through gritted teeth.

“Well,” he says. “No one can live up to your high-and-mighty expectations.” He turns the key and the engine roars to life. He sticks his head out the rolled-down window and smiles with an air of victory. “Not even you.”

“Please don’t kill my sister,” I say.

“I’ll do my best,” he says. “But accidents do happen.”

“You’re mad at me, not her,” I say.

“Call us when you lighten up,” he says. He puts the truck in gear. “Or if you decide to put someone’s needs before your own for once.”

It takes all my muscle control to keep my feet on the asphalt, to not pull Jaime out of her seat, to not run after the truck bed where we spent more than one night half-asleep on the hard plastic
parked behind Dad’s bar of choice. My body is screaming for me to give in and say yes, okay, I’ll come live with you, you win, I’ll do what you want. But I just stand there, watching Jaime drive away with one of the two most terrifying people I’ve ever met, and feel ashamed.

“Be safe, Jaime,” I say to the parking lot.

Back inside, Mom says if we’re discreet, both Terrance and I can spend the week here. I can’t tell Jaime or Dad, but lying is better than sleeping at Tabatha’s, a woman who lives on the other end of the apartment complex with two teenage sons over six feet tall with no exposed skin un tattooed. Mom met her in the prison visiting room, “How convenient!” she’d said, and they often carpooled to Vacaville until Terrance got out. Tabatha’s husband has ten years left on his sentence.

“She’s supposed to be gone,” Terrance says when he gets back from drinking with his cousins and I’m still here. “I could get arrested.”

“So what else is new?” I say and Mom snaps, “Elizabeth.” Then she says to Terrance, “No one will know.”

He points at me, glowering. “She wants me to go back,” he says. “She’ll call my P.O.”

“I thought you two were getting along?” Mom says. She eyes Terrance. “Why would she do that?”

Yeah, Terrance
, I think, remembering the stickiness of that dive bar booth, him smelling my hair, threatening to torment Jaime.
Why would I do that?

A cloud of fury bursts in his eyes, but he transforms it to desire
faster than should be possible. “Babe,” he says, running his hands up her torso. “I need to lay next to you tonight.” He caresses her cheek. “I missed you.” He lowers his mouth and kisses her neck, still glaring at me.

Mom closes her eyes and says, “I missed you, too.” The anger in Terrance’s eyes fades to triumph as he nibbles at her skin. I am wondering how many layers I would need to sleep outside when Mom says, “But it’s Liz’s turn.”

I’m shocked and grateful, and while Terrance also looks surprised, his face hardens and his eyes narrow into slits. He jerks away from her so fast it’s almost like a slap, and no matter what she’s done to me, the second he hurts her I am free to claw out his eyes and scratch off his skin. “She ruins everything,” he says.

“I told her she could,” Mom says. “I promised.”

“You could sleep at Tabatha’s,” I say, shrugging.

“Go to bed, Elizabeth,” Mom says. “Now, before I change my mind.”

Terrance doesn’t leave, but I think I ruined their mojo. Terrance isn’t as magic as he thought, I guess. Their bedroom stays quiet all night and while I appreciate the silence, I still can’t sleep. I think of Dad’s plan to get Jaime and me to live with him, his self-serving obliviousness to what that one phone call would do to his daughters. More cash means more booze without more work, and I have no doubt that Dad would be like a frat kid with a fake ID if he succeeded. Of course, he was banking on Mom’s faulty parenting to back him up, and he won that bet. Jaime and I just keep losing.

I wanted to hate the
baby. I’d planned on it all those months as Mom’s belly grew, tried to ignore the instinctual response to coo and cuddle the tiny crying bundle wrapped in soft white blankets, reminded myself he was half enemy blood, and as long as I wasn’t alone with the little guy, it worked.

At four months old, Noah was still crying all night but Mom never yelled at him. She screamed at Terrance for leaving the bathroom light on, for leaving his boots in the hallway for her to trip on, for not putting the toilet seat down. She yelled at us if our rooms were messy, yelled at me if dishes were piled in the sink or if the carpet looked dirty. The woman who normally waited until telemarketers finished talking to politely say, “No, thanks,” was now saying things like, “I don’t have time for this crap.” Her eyes were hardly open at dinner but she still got up for church each Sunday, she managed to drive safely, and she never yelled at Noah.

It was summer. Noah could hold his head up and grabbed at plastic toys, dolls, faces, and our hair. His little hands were surprisingly strong. In the mornings while Mom got ready for work, Jaime and I watched him along with
Saved by the Bell
and
Sweet Valley High
on TV. During commercials for games like Crossfire and Mouse Trap, we pushed the skin of Noah’s forehead into his eyes so he looked like a shar-pei puppy. We sang along with the Tootsie Roll and Mentos jingles during commercials, made Noah’s chubby legs dance, molded his baby hand into a fist, and then pulled up his middle finger.

“Look at his big ears,” Jaime said. Sometimes we called him Dumbo.

“He’ll probably get Terrance’s buck teeth,” I said.

“He doesn’t look like Mom,” she said and poked Noah in the belly. He made more sounds now than just screams. Giggles and nothing words poured out of his mouth. Jaime said, “What if he’s not really our brother?” He stared at us with the same wide brown eyes he absorbed everything with, darker coffee colored in the center and muddy brown at the edges, and always alert, examining. I pulled the skin from Noah’s cheeks and watched his lips stretch into a twisted clown smile.

“Half-brother,” I said. “And we saw him come out.” He bounced and waved his chubby arms, and I thought if someone replaced his eyes with blue and lightened his complexion, he looked a bit like Jaime. Same round face, pudgy cheeks, soft chin.

After Mom left for work with Noah to drop off at day care, Jaime and I were free until five
P.M
. We lazed in front of the TV for more than the allotted three hours and sometimes didn’t get dressed until four thirty. We did our hair and makeup like the Glamour Shots photos some of our friends had done at the mall, and pranced around the living room in our pajamas, making up dance moves and singing as loud as we could along with the blaring radio. We lounged at the pool in ninety-degree sun, listened to tapes I’d ordered from Columbia House for free: Ace of Base, Stone Temple Pilots, and Boyz II Men. We applied tanning oil and remembered to turn frequently. Sometimes we put lemon juice in our hair for highlights, or cucumber slices over our eyes to “banish bags,” practices I’d read about in the
Cosmo
magazines I bought with babysitting money and hid under my bed.

A few weeks before school started Jaime and I walked home from the pool with our towels wrapped around our waists, rubber flip-flops wet from our dripping bodies and squeaking with each step. We were arguing about whose turn it was to make lunch as I unlocked the door.

“I made sandwiches yesterday,” I said.

Jaime shrugged. “You’re older.” She smiled and pushed me and then we both saw Mom’s purse on the kitchen table. At two thirty, it should not have been there.

We knocked on her closed bedroom door. “Mom?” She didn’t answer but I heard sniffs so I turned the knob.

Mom sat on the mattress with her back to the door. “Mom?” An overturned plastic hamper spilled clothes onto the floor, pants and collared shirts were on the bed, something like a dark T shirt hung from the lamp, cutting the light in half.

She said, “I’m okay.” Her fingers twisted a white cloth in her lap but she didn’t lift her head. “It’ll be okay,” she said. “Please shut the door.”

I made tuna sandwiches and fruit punch Kool-Aid and by the time we were fed and in dry shorts and T shirts Mom said she needed to talk to us. Her eyes were red rimmed and bloodshot, but her face was dry.

She took a deep breath. “Terrance was arrested this morning.”

“For what?” I said.

“He’s in jail again?” Jaime said.

“He didn’t mean any harm,” Mom said.

I said, “What did he do?”

“He was just flirting,” Mom said. “What do women expect when their butt cheeks hang out of their shorts?” She pressed her fingertips to her eyebrows and covered her face.

“When’s he getting out?” I said.

She released a huge sigh. “I don’t know,” she said and started crying in big heaving sobs. Jaime looked at me with wide eyes, but I didn’t know what to say. Mom said, “They don’t believe him. He wouldn’t do what she said he did, but with his record.” She wiped at her eyes. “He could do time.”

Mom looked down at her blouse, at the daisy-size wet spots mushrooming out from her breasts. “Damn, I’m leaking.” She went into her bathroom, dripping all over, tears adding moisture to her shirt.