Hand Me Down (21 page)

“I miss that mom,” I whisper.

Tammy says, “One day when Terrance stops being such a novelty, she’ll realize the mistake she made.”

“You think?” I say.

“I know,” she says. “Linda is too good a person not to.” Tammy scoots to the edge of my bed and stands up. She looks down at me, her body outlined in shadow from the hall light behind her. “In the meantime, remember that your mom’s issues are her own. Don’t use her stupid choices as an excuse to give up.” She bends over and kisses my forehead. “Just like I’ve said since you first came out from behind Linda’s leg and shook my hand when we met. You are only going to get stronger.”

Tammy and I continue to keep busy during our last few weekends together. We hike, we garden, we shop. She buys me a pair of Birkenstocks like hers. She makes salads with homemade vinaigrette dressings and fruits like pears and strawberries. She puts fresh berries in Saturday morning whole-wheat pancakes and serves them with powdered sugar and turkey sausage. She grills salmon on a barbeque on her back patio and we peel the pink meat
from the silver skin with our fingers under the stars, accompanied by a cricket orchestra. It could be romantic, and I bet Tammy wishes Sam were here, and I wonder if loving someone means you are never happy unless they’re around and sometimes not even then.

Dean and I keep flirting in class and after school. Our hands find each other’s forearms, knees, and waists with increasing frequency, and my skin tingles every time. We take walks at lunch under Utah’s blazing sun, sit shoulder to shoulder on shady benches after school to do homework, and laugh a lot. When I imagine him kissing me, which I do often, in great detail, his voice doesn’t have to stop just because his lips are occupied. Tammy and even my teachers have caught me with a dreamy smile on my face more than once. It’s embarrassing, but not enough that I won’t indulge the fantasy.

“Those geraniums we planted are coming in nicely,” Tammy says, and I shift my thoughts from Dean to the two-foot clay pots we hauled from the nursery, filled with dirt and roots, watered, and fertilized. We brought life to this cement patio with tall, deep urns of hanging vines and trailing flowers and wide shallow pots of bushy silver-tinted leaves and spiky blue-green shrubbery.

I smile at our blooming garden. “The parsley seeds finally sprouted,” I say. At the edges of the pavement, we dug holes, picked weeds, tilled the soil, formed evenly spaced rows. We sowed seeds and fluffed compacted roots, estimated sizes and distances, transferred ferns into the shady corners, planted a rosebush in the sunny corner, and placed the five-herb garden on the side near the sliding glass door: basil, dill, cilantro, mint, and parsley.

“Next year we can do peppers and tomatoes,” she’d said as we worked together, backs bent and knees bruised. I felt my hands swell and expand in the dirt. I rolled mud and worms and soil through my fingers and smelled the earth before it bloomed, the deep, moist scent that fades when summer dries the ground. I watered our garden each day when I got back from school, weeded the beds and pinched off dried leaves. I’ve spent hours out here with the mix of warm sun and cool air on my bared skin, the soft dirt in my hands.

“We make a good team,” she says. “I’ll miss your help.”

For a minute I wonder why she thinks I’d stop gardening and then I realize that she means I won’t be here. She will stay when I fly back to Sacramento. My eyes burn and my throat swells and Tammy’s eyes look wet, too, and we make eye contact and smile and exhale air in that self-conscious half-laugh, half-sob release. We don’t say anything, but we cry together. We sit on her cushioned patio furniture, under stars brighter than they ever are at home, inhaling damp earth and smoky fish on this thin mountain air, and we cry.

I go to the last
day of school mainly so Dean can sign my yearbook and we can say good-bye. I find him leaning on a small birch tree near our lunch spot, smoking a clove cigarette. “You smoke now?” I say, waving at the gray wisps he exhales.

“My first one in months.” He puts the cigarette out on the tree trunk. “But I’ll quit if you stay.”

“You’re not even addicted,” I say.

“Utah needs you.”

“I blend in too easily.”

“You can infiltrate their system,” he says.

“I’ll miss you, too,” I say.

He grumbles, “Whatever,” and snatches at my yearbook tucked under my arm. He tugs hard and it comes loose but I jerk forward and am almost standing on his Doc Martens.

He smiles down at me from a few inches up, his blue eyes and pale skin washed out in the June sun. I lift my heels and press my lips to his chin, which feels a tiny bit scratchy. My eyes are still closed as he drops my yearbook in the grass and wraps his arms around my waist. He leans me against the tree and kisses me slow and deep, one hand in my hair, one hand on my hip, his tongue kneading my mouth like the best massage ever. He tastes sweet like chocolate and mint, and slightly spicy like burnt cloves. He pulls back so he can look me in the eye and smiles. His hand slides out of my hair and lingers against my cheek. He says, “I’ve been wanting to do that since you turned around your first day and smiled at me.”

I find my breath and say, “Really?”

He nods and slides a finger down my jawline. “I really wish you weren’t leaving.”

“I’m not leaving right now,” I say and Dean’s smile spreads wide enough to show all his teeth and the gap in front. He wraps his fingers in my hair and pulls. He lifts my chin and brings my face to his, his fingers curled in my blond strands. I inhale his air, his smoky scent, and let myself forget everything else.

When I get to Tammy’s later I flip through pages of people I
half-recognize but don’t really know, sports teams, academic clubs, row upon row of smiling white faces. On the big two-page aerial photo spread of the senior class lined up to spell
YOUNG
with their bodies, Dean drew speech bubbles from some of them saying things like,
I’ve got a bug up my ass and I love it
, or,
God help me, I’ve been asked to think!

To me, he’d written,
For my sunny CA girl
,
My life was a bowl of shit with Mormons in it before you. Please come back and save me from drowning.
He signed,
Dean, The English Guy
and wrote his address.
P.S. Maybe you’ll take pity on a Utah man and send him a photo of a beautiful woman wearing a bikini? He promises to return the favor.

“He kissed me,” I say to Tammy at the airport. “Dean, the British guy.”

She raises her eyebrows. “How was it?”

“You can’t ask that.” I’m sure my cheeks are pink and the silly grin keeps breaking loose so I look out the window. Outside sits the red, white, and blue plane that will carry me home, the swaying green grass fields beyond the runways, the still-white-capped mountains at the horizon, the blue sky background. Dean is out there, too, I think, and realize I’ve been smiling.

“Wow.” Tammy chuckles. “Is your heart pitter-pattering?”

I say, “Forget I told you.”

She pats her hand against her chest. “Ba bum, ba bum, ba bum.”

I roll my eyes, but we both laugh. I say, “You’re still going to come visit, right?”

She nods. “When we get back from Africa.”

“What about after that?”

“Well, I think I’m going to Mexico and a little bird told me there’s a lounge chair reserved for you, too.”

I jump up and hug her. “Mexico!” I hug her again. “Thank you, Tammy, for everything.” My eyes start to water and Tammy pulls me close. I rest my cheek on her shoulder, her clavicle sharp under my cheek. I hold my tears in, but let out a small whine with the effort.

She squeezes her arms around my shoulders and whispers, “I know.” She lets go of me and tousles my hair. “It was my pleasure, kiddo.” She sniffs.

“Sorry I caused problems with Sam.”

“Oh, stop.”

“You were a great mom,” I say and the speakers announce that I can board now. Tammy squeezes me so hard I can’t breathe so I don’t until she lets go. I fill my lungs with her clean lavender and herbal scent, which lingers in my nose even after I’ve found my seat and buckled myself in for the turbulence that’s sure to come.

By the time we land
I’ve blown my nose into a whole pack of tissues, and I can’t smell anything. My eyes hurt. As we roll up to the ramp, the woman next to me who asked about a dozen times if I wanted to talk about what was wrong hands me a card.
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Troubled Teen Center
. “We have some excellent resources,” she says as the seat belt light flicks off.

A female flight attendant asks me if there is anything she can do and I realize I’m alone on the aircraft. I miss Tammy already. I wonder what it would be like to own a plane. Go anywhere, anytime. “Does this plane go back to Salt Lake?”

“No, this is our last stop,” she says and glances back at the other women standing near the cockpit. “Do you live here?” she asks. Out the tiny windows tall green-and-yellow grass stalks stand tall in the lack of wind.

I’m not sure
. “I’m fine,” I say. “My mom lives here.” I pick up my backpack and walk up the ramp to the gate.

Terrance’s bald head is the first thing I see, and then his bald lip. Mom is holding Noah and they are both waving. She sets Noah down and he runs in tiny steps over to me saying, “Liz, Liz.” I pick him up and swing him over my head and then down onto my hip. Two years ago my hip wouldn’t have supported him. “God, you’re getting heavy, little man.”

“Gosh,” Mom says.

Noah curls his arms around my neck and wedges his face under my chin. I lean my cheek to his still-baby-soft black hair and rock him on my hip, his legs around my waist.

“It hasn’t been
that
long,” Terrance says and steps closer. “But we’re all glad you’re back.”

“What happened to your hair?” I say. “You look like a Nazi.” I set Noah down. “Or a serial killer.”

“Good to see you, too,” Terrance says and tries to hug me.

I raise my duffel bag to chest level as a buffer. “Please don’t,” I say, my eyes pleading with Mom, but she pinches the tender flesh above my elbow and pulls me aside. “What is wrong with you?” she hisses, crushing my skin between her fingers.

“Can’t you go anywhere without him?” I jerk my arm away and rub the red thumbprint with my left hand. “Did they deny the appeal?”

“Let’s not make a scene,” she says and tries to put her arm around my shoulders. I sidestep her reach.

I say, “He’s not leaving, is he?”

She sighs, drops the hand she’d raised to touch me, and presses it to her forehead. “I thought we’d at least make it to the car,” she mumbles.

“Why did you let me come here?”

“It’s just a small problem,” she says.

“I hoped you wouldn’t really do this.”

“You may not have to leave. There are options—”

“Stop it.”

“You’re right. We should discuss this at home.”

“I want to go back.”

“To Tammy’s?” She almost laughs. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she says. “Let’s get out of the airport and we’ll figure something out.” A new flight number is up on the screen and people are arriving for check in. The flight attendant lied. This plane is going to Houston.

“I’m not sleeping at Tabatha’s,” I say, but where can I go?

Mom says, “You will sleep wherever I tell you to.”

“No.” This is my fault really, for believing her, for having faith.

“Move it. Now, Elizabeth.” She extends her arm again, but I swat at her wrist and turn away.

“No,” I say, louder, my back to her, my feet moving forward.

“Elizabeth,” she warns, but I keep walking. “Elizabeth!”

A few people are staring. A tornado swells in my chest and roars in my ears but I keep walking through the bright lights of the terminal. It’s like I’m seven and Dad has passed out in a gas station parking lot four blocks from our apartment and it’s getting dark
but I hold Jaime’s hand and just keep walking. It’s like last fall and I’m wrapped in a towel, headed from shower to bedroom while Terrance watches from the hall, his mouth slack, his eyes sliding all over my skin, but I keep moving forward.

Mom doesn’t follow me. She says, “You’ll be back.” She snort laughs and calls out, “You have nowhere else to go.”

She’s right. But I square my shoulders and keep walking.

Mom and Terrance’s new house
has a front yard with bright green grass, rosebushes along the walkway, and a six-foot tree sapling ringed by rocks in the middle of the yard, wilting in the sun. They live in a housing tract on the north side of town where all the street names are trees, Birch, Willow, Cedar, which makes it sound like a lush green area full of mature vegetation and thick canopies of foliage, but the sun bakes the tiny plants that stand in the middle of all the other yards, too. Each house stands against a leafless sky and looks the same except for its color. Mom’s is a pale gray.

Their garage door opens and Noah says, “Angel!”

Mom says, “Oh, yeah, we got a dog.”

“You’ll love her, Liz. Everyone does,” Terrance says. “Worth every penny, right, babe?”

“How much was it?” I say.

“She,” Terrance says proudly, “was two hundred bucks.”

My jaw drops. “Does she lay golden eggs or find truffles or something?”

“Purebred boxer,” Terrance says. “She’s going to be a show dog. She’ll pull her weight.”
Unlike you
, I think, but Mom’s priorities are clear.

Mom unbuckles Noah and he and Terrance go into the house. I get my new duffel bags—matching, blue, water-resistant nylon from Eddie Bauer—out of Mom’s trunk and set them on the ground next to a pile of boxes with my and Jaime’s names written in black ink. I stare at the pile, arranged neatly in a corner of the garage. Jaime wrote
NERD STUFF
on one of my boxes. I smile, but not so Mom can see. Mom says, “Let me give you the tour.”

It seems like torture to be shown a home where Mom has a happy new family, and in which Jaime and I will probably never live, but I follow her into the house. Three small bedrooms, two bathrooms, a family and living room and lots of windows later, and we’re standing in the backyard watching Terrance prance around a little boxer puppy that looks like a miniature Rambo without clipped ears. She chases a tennis ball too big for her mouth and licks Noah’s entire face with her bright pink tongue.