Love Me Tender (3 page)

Chapter 4

WHEN I got out of bed the next morning, Mel was sleeping through a noisy car chase. She hadn't moved off the recliner for seventeen hours straight, except to go to the bathroom.

How do I know?

The toilet is on the other side of the wall from my bed. I could hear it flush every hour and a half, when a movie ended. Mel never bothered to turn the sound down one bit all night long either.

I turned the TV off.

It was past two in the afternoon when she got up, looking like a bear coming out of a winter-long hibernation. I saw this out of the corners of my eyes, because I didn't look up from my book.

Kerrie was out, riding her bike around and around the block. I'd told her not to cross the street, to keep an eye on the driveways, and to stay off people's flower beds. But when Mel came out of the bathroom and asked, “Where is your sister,” I only shrugged.

Mel went to look through the screen door. “Does that mean you honestly have no idea?”

I didn't answer. While Mel slept, whether I wanted to or not, I had to feed and generally supervise my sister. Mel was not forgiven.

She stepped out on the porch and shouted Kerrie's name.

After two more yells, with a waiting pause to follow, Mel turned to me and said, “If you'd watched her like I tell you to, everything would be fine.”

“I. Don't. Think. So.” I made each word an arrow I hoped would pierce her heart.

“Tell me you know where that child is.”

How could I know? Kerrie could be on any one of four sides of the block. Or the monster under the bed could have eaten her.

That's what I wished for during the first five months of her life, when she lived in the ruffled lace bassinet. I had squirted trails of dripping formula from the bed to the bassinet, all the while saying in a coaxing voice, “This way to the tender little baby.” I did this maybe five or six times be-fore Mel caught me at it. That's when I learned the monster didn't live under the bed.

I said, “She's not my job, she's yours, and I won't do it anymore.”

Mel snatched up the telephone and punched at some numbers. “This is Melisand-silent-
e
Ruggiero, and I want to report a missing child.” She spelled her whole name, as she always has to, and told them where we live.

I kept shut. This was even better than I could have hoped for.

Mel went on to give the police a description of Kerrie. “What was she wearing?” Mel asked, turning to me.

I gave her back a blank stare.

“Shorts and a top,” Mel answered, as if she actually knew. “I'm such a wreck, I've forgotten the colors.”

This was a guess, and it was a wrong guess. Kerrie was wearing a dark blue skinny-knit dress at least one size too small and a pair of orange tights with a hole in one knee. I had nothing to do with these choices.

There were more questions, and finally some kind of finish to the conversation that I couldn't hear. “If anything's happened to her, it will be your fault,” Mel said as she hung up.

“I would agree with you if I was her mother, but I'm not,” I said. “I have a feeling the police are going to see it my way.”

“Go to your room.”

“I better wait, in case they need to question me.”

“You'd better get out of here before I give in to the urge to do you mortal damage. It would be satisfying for me, but just too painful for your daddy to come home to.”

I slouched away with a dramatic sigh, holding hidden in my heart the joy of hearing the words “for your daddy to come home to.”

Once in my room, I slammed the door hard enough to shiver the rafters. Then I lickety-split locked it, because in one second flat Mel was banging on my door to beat all saints.

I didn't wait to see if she would kick it in with her number nines but flicked on my sound system, turned the volume to high, then turned and jumped out of my window and into the flower bed.

Fat buds that would have been yellow daylilies in an-other few days rained on the ground. I crushed entire plants as I bounded through them in clumpy running shoes to escape certain death. I pictured myself as some cartoon giant flattening cities beneath my feet.

I leaped over the ridiculous twenty-four-inch picket fence in a single bound—laughing, I admit it—and cut through the neighboring backyard to complete my escape. Mel was peeved, really peeved. It might be days before she could give herself over to falling apart again.

I ran into Kerrie on my way to the candy store and told her she probably ought to go into hiding, the police were looking for her.

“What for?” she asked, straddling her bike. She looked awfully hot.

“They want you for murder. I'd hide out if I were you. The police don't listen to reason when they're after a killer.”

“I didn't kill anyone,” she said, her spiky hair standing up not only from sweat now, but from fear.

“They don't know that, that's the thing.”

“I'll go over to—”

“Don't tell me,” I yelled, putting my hands over my ears. “What if they try to wring it out of me?”

“You're right,” she said. “You better get away from me so you can't be suspected too.” And she rode away, fast.

I bought two Baby Ruth candy bars, three packages of peanut M&M's, and a bottle of iced tea to wash it all down. I felt a little bit bad about Kerrie.

Not because she is only eight years old, facing a life of hiding in back alleys and dim rooms, and certainly not be-cause I lied to her. But because even in her darkest hour, she thought of protecting me.

I just hate people like that.

Chapter 5

I DIDN'T go home for two hours after Mel called the police.

When I did, Mel pretended she didn't know me. She got to the door before I opened it and told me she wasn't buying anything today and to go on now, don't bother her.

I was not in the mood for her to be funny.

I tried to push my way in. She used the Belly to keep me out. “Get that away from me,” I yelled. “It's likely to blow like the
Hindenburg.”
With a shocked intake of breath, Mel stood back from the doorway. I squeezed past her.

She slammed the door behind me and yelled, “You're grounded till you die and grow moldy. Don't think you can just go out the window again, because I nailed it shut.”

I went to my room and saw Mel had been going through my stuff.

The whole room was tossed. She'd gone through Kerrie's stuff too. My sister was sitting on the edge of her bed, wearing her look of injured dignity. She had changed into shorts and a loose top.

I said, “You didn't get arrested.”

“It was a case of mistaken identity,” she said.

“I didn't mean to scare you,” I said. “Not really.”

“You got it all wrong,” she said, flipping back to perky and brave. “It was Mel who called the police. I read them my alibi.”

“Your alibi?”

“Want to see it?”

It read: “I went out right after breakfast, about 9:30 only our kitchen clock is a little fast. I rode my bike the whole time.” Miss Nelda and Mr. Entwhistle had even signed for her.

“I never would have thought of an alibi.”

Kerrie bobbed her head, like,
Thanks.
“It was Miss Nelda's idea.”

“Remind me to go to her the next time I need a note to get out of gym.”

“When I got home, Mel greeted me like I was carrying the last box of Popsicles in the whole world.” All this attention had clearly made Kerrie's day; I was forgiven. “She told the policemen it was all a big misunderstanding. They said they'd let the matter drop.”

I went over to open the window. I figured Mel was just talking, of course. Ranting, I mean. But she had really done it. She'd nailed my window shut. How could she do that? How was a person supposed to get any fresh air?

I said, “What's going on here?”

Kerrie said, “She's packing.”

I turned around. “Where am I going?”

Mel came into the room, lugging a big suitcase. “I'm selling you to an Arab prince,” she said to me.

“He isn't going to just roll me up in a carpet?”

“I'll get a better price for you with a wardrobe.”

She made a threat that included the words “drive off and leave you by the side of the road” as she stuffed Kerrie's clothes into that suitcase. So I figured either she was selling Kerrie too, or I didn't have too much to worry about. Unless—

We were all going to follow Daddy to Las Vegas.

No.

That would be too pathetically desperate.

“Desperate” could be Mel's middle name, but she would never let Daddy see her pathetic. She might, on the other hand, want him to come home and find us gone. Not that she had ever done such a thing before, but she thought up revenges of this sort all the time. Usually they were revenges against me, but even then all she did was talk.

Until she nailed my window shut.

I tried thinking everything through from another angle. “You're getting back at Daddy for going off and leaving us behind. Possibly we're running off to someplace even more fun than Las Vegas.”

“Something like that,” Mel said.

“Disney World! Something for everyone in the family to enjoy,” I said. “And a walloping big bill for Daddy to pay off.”

When she stepped across my legs to get to the bed table, she said, “Frog Slime,” under her breath.

Under stress, say, in heavy traffic, Mel tends to be a name-caller. We were not driving at just this moment. Of course, we
were
both trying to occupy the narrow space between the beds. It's the only real floor space in the whole room. And the Belly appeared to have grown some in only two hours.

“You are telling Daddy we're going, right?”

“Buzzard Breath.”

Lately Mel holds back on name-calling because Kerrie is a repeater. Mel doesn't want any teacher sending notes home to her about her cute little daughter's bad language. I gave her a raised-eyebrow look.

“Flea Bait.” She stepped on my foot too, mostly by accident. No apology. This was clearly a stressful move we were making.

I got out a smaller version of Daddy's duffel bag and started to put some of my stuff into it, just to show how co-operative I could be. But there's only two things a person really needs on a trip: a toothbrush and money.

I only had eight dollars and change in my underwear drawer, less than five dollars in my pocket. I hunted around for my diary. All I ever kept in the diary were my savings and a wish list—the pages were otherwise blank. Except for that list of phone numbers of kids I don't really call. I'm usually working for Daddy on weekends.

Oh, and that list of books I've read, because it makes me feel smart.

I found the diary and the twenty-dollar bill I hid between the center pages. I'd been saving it for my next trip to Blue Moody's, our local music store. I decided to take the diary too, in case I needed a piece of notepaper to put in a bottle. I like to be prepared.

Kerrie followed Mel out when she left the room, but came back in only a couple of minutes. “She's writing Daddy a letter,” Kerrie whispered.

That was a plain relief to me. “Go back and see what it says,” I told her.

“I know what it says. We have to go see somebody's time. They left a message on the answering machine while Mel was out in the front yard, waving to the policemen.”

“
Waving
to the policemen?”

“As they drove off.”

“Who left the message?”

Kerrie shrugged.

Mel was sitting at the table, scribbling fast. I went straight to the machine and pushed PLAY.

“Mother's time has come. You ought to come on home right away.”

That was it. No hello or good-bye. I'd never heard this woman's voice before, but it was so like Mel's it gave me goose bumps.

“Is that your sister?”

Mel didn't answer.

Chapter 6

SUNDAY STARTED out like a school morning, with a scramble to get out the door. Overnight, Kerrie forgot how to tie her sneakers. I tied them while she ate her cereal.

She asked, “It's summer, why are we in such a hurry?”

“Somebody's dying,” I said. “That's what it means, that ‘Mother's time has come.’”

Kerrie looked more awake immediately. “Whose mother?”

“Mel's, I guess.”

“Mel's mother,” Kerrie said to herself, the way she mutters over a tough math problem. Daddy's mother had died right before she was born, so grandmothers were something Kerrie knew only from storybooks.

Mel had forgotten about our appointment with the Arab prince and acted nearly human. “Is the toast burning?” she yelled from the bathroom. “Do I smell burning toast?”

“It's rye bread,” I shouted back. Our toaster always scorched the bottom edge of rye bread. I slathered peanut butter over the smoking part and ate it anyway.

“Next time, put it in upside down,” Mel said, coming into the kitchen. “I need you to help me get this bag into the trunk.”

Daddy's pickup is our family car. In a pinch, Mel can always call on Miss Nelda, who doesn't drive her own car but waits for a neighbor to drive it for her.

This was more than a pinch. Mel unlocked the garage and rolled out Daddy's baby blue ‘57 DeSoto Fireflite. Wide as two Toyotas, the Fireflite has tail fins better suited to a rocket ship than to the interstate—and, on the front, a grille like an evil grin.

The license plate reads ELVIS LVS.

We covered the seats, and we were on the road by nine o'clock, heading for Memphis. Picture three of us in the front seat, windows wide open, this whale of a car swimming among a school of Toyota guppies.

In the first twenty minutes, Kerrie moved to the back-seat, then into the front seat again. This move included five stuffed animals and a heavy plastic bag filled with markers and Dover coloring books and a party favor, a flat magnetic doll with two changes of clothing.

This didn't seem to trouble Mel. Her mood was good.

Maybe too good. She sang “On the Road Again” from start to finish. Loudly. Her best singing effort is curiously flat, even though the rhythm is right. It's as if Mel can hear the music well enough but can't make her voice copy it.

She yelled, “On the road again,” as a kind of chorus between other stupid songs. After about the third time, I told her to quit it. Only cuckoo clocks are set to go off every quarter hour.

Kerrie made it her business to be Kerrie, asking how far was it, would there be any kids to play with, would she get to stay up late? The usual magpie questions. She fell asleep over a coloring book around eleven-thirty. I leaned over the seat and put the cap back on her marker.

“Let me know if you get tired,” I said to Mel after a while, although she only lets me drive at night. She's afraid we'll get stopped and I'll get arrested.

Actually, she's afraid that if I get caught driving, she'll be the one to get arrested. I'm a good driver. I've been driving since I was twelve. I'm five foot eight now, but Mel says I still look awful young to anyone over twenty-five.

I said, “How old do I look these days?”

She said, “Thirteen,” which is of course my age. This question led her to sing about Clementine... shoes number nine.

Ha ha. Very funny.

The truth was, I didn't half mind the flatness of her voice when she sang songs like this. I joined her for a few rounds of “The Old Gray Mare” and “The Bear Went over the Mountain.” It was fun for a little while.

But then I wondered if Daddy was having a good time where
he
was. I said, “Have you called Daddy?” and shut the whole road buddies episode down. “I mean, what if he calls? He won't know where we are till he gets home to read your note.”

“I don't know where your daddy is staying,” Mel said, like her voice was coming from a deep freeze frosted with ice.

“We should have a cell phone,” I said.

“Brain cancer,” Mel said. Kitchen appliances were not the only technologies that made her nervous.

“We ought to at least have one of those answering machines that let you call in for your messages,” I said. “We could leave him a message to pick up.”

Mel didn't answer right away, but took on a thoughtful look. “You know, I think we do have that kind of ma-chine.” But then she waved the idea away. “Not that it matters. I never bothered to learn how to do that.”

Kerrie piped up and said, “Are we worried about Daddy?”

“Not in the least,” Mel said. She gave me a sidelong look that meant I brought this up, not her. Meant
she
thought Kerrie was asleep, not listening in on something that might worry her.

Well, me too.

We made a stop for the bathroom, cheap toys, magazines, food, and gas, in that order. Kerrie got so much loot, she didn't even ask to sit up front. It took us an hour and ten minutes to get back on the road.

We'd gotten used to air-conditioned comfort. We left the windows rolled up and turned on the air. “Just be glad this old crate has it,” Mel said. “It wasn't exactly a standard item when these cars were made.”

“Old crate?” I said. “Still mad at Daddy, are we?”

“Silènzio,”
Mel said, using what is pretty much her only Italian word.

I read through a magazine article on how to do French braids. For something that looks so complex, it happens they're very easy to do.

I practiced French-braiding my hair until I thought my aching arms would fall off. “How come it's so hard to hold your arms up for, like, an hour?” I asked Mel. She didn't appear to have heard me.

“Why is the sky blue?” I asked in my whiniest voice. “Why do clouds float? Why do some caterpillars have fuzz and some don't? Why does the highway look all wet and shimmery ahead of us but when we get there it's dry? Why—”

“Shut up, Elvira.”

“So why do my arms give out when I hold them up a long time?”

“All your blood runs to your feet, okay?”

“Not by me, it isn't. If biology was really adaptable, the blood would go where we need strength.”

She rolled her eyes and made a little sound with her tongue.

“It's weird,” I said. “Daddy is at an Elvis competition you didn't want him to go to. And we're all of a sudden headed for Graceland.”

“We're not going to Graceland,” Mel said. “My mother and sister live in Memphis.”

“Same thing.”

“Hardly. Elvira, don't look for ways to bother me. It's a long enough drive without you making it feel a whole lot longer.”

I looked into the backseat and watched Kerrie breathe. Only after I was sure she was really sleeping did I lean against Mel and whisper, “Are you sure Daddy will come home?”

“Elvira, don't be ridiculous.”

“Are you sure?”

“I'm very sure.”

I thought this over for a minute. “Miss Lasky, my English teacher last year, said adding words like 'very’ to a sentence does not make the statement stronger. It denotes an underlying weakness.”

“Miss Lasky was a prat.”

“Miss Lasky would tell me to look that up.”

“I'm not Miss Lasky,” Mel said. “But I do like to think I can improve your vocabulary now and again.”

“Was it fun traveling with Daddy in the old days?”

“Can we avoid phrases like ‘the old days’? At least until you're old enough to vote?”

“Was it fun?”

“At first,” Mel said.

Mel and Daddy used to travel almost constantly. We all three did. We went from one show to another, from county fairs to seedy little bars. One Elvis party to another.

I said, “I don't remember it.”

“It's all in the albums.”

“Just a lot of the same pictures over and over. Daddy singing. Daddy holding me up to the camera in some motel room or over a restaurant breakfast. Daddy singing. You giving me a bath in some dingy bathtub. Da—”

“Elvira!”

“I just mean, if you hadn't written things down in the album, we wouldn't know the difference.”

“Life as one long road trip is not as glamorous as it's made out to be,” Mel said. “We all got tired of it. Even your daddy got tired of it. And then Kerrie was on the way.”

For some reason I felt a kind of twisted satisfaction, knowing Kerrie had been a big part of the reason Mel and Daddy got off the road. Twisted because I wanted to be the reason they changed their lives. My stomach hurt.

Mel added, “Certainly the novelty of traveling with a baby had worn off.”

I said, “I can hardly remember any of it. Imagine how traumatic it must have been for me, to have wiped years of my childhood from my memory.”

“Look at the upside,” Mel said. “It's given you a deep well to draw from when you have a drama queen moment, like right now.”

I laughed in a weak, sick way and leaned against the car door. My stomach still hurt. “What if we'd stayed on the road? What if Daddy got fat on restaurant food and used drugs to stay happy no matter how tired of it he was, like all those stories you hear?”

“Likelier I would get fat,” Mel said.

Maybe. But years of sitting around waiting for his turn to get onstage would've taken their toll. He'd changed some since getting
off
the road. He'd gotten really lean and stayed tanned all the time, putting in people's fancy gardens.

He looked too good to be Elvis now, that's what Mel said when she tried to talk him out of going to Las Vegas to be judged as the best and truest Elvis.

“He looked so different,” I said. “Not like when he does a party. A change came over him. He was spooky.”

The truth was, I was half afraid of him the day he left, pretty much the way I would feel about anybody who looked like a dead person resurrected. I don't mean Elvis; I mean an earlier version of Daddy. In the furthest dark corners of my mind, where I was holding the doors shut, this didn't feel like a happy memory.

“Nothing inside your daddy is changed,” Mel said. “These contests show off a lot of other good singers, and he has to get a mood going. It's mental.”

“
He's
mental.”

“It's just a costume, the hair and all.”

“The hair doesn't bother me,” I said. Lie.

Mel said, “Try to sleep. In case I need you to drive later.”

I closed my eyes and thought about a friend whose dad bleached his ponytail, then cut it off when he got tired of it. Before that, he grew a mustache, then shaved it off; grew a beard and shaved it off too. He called this “finding him-self.”

My friend called this scary—every year she had to get used to a dad who looked entirely different. I never got it before, but on Friday, looking at Daddy, I knew just what she meant.

My friend's dad ended up mustacheless, beardless, and bald. “I sure hope black dye doesn't have a bad effect on hair follicles,” I said.

After a moment, Mel laughed. We both laughed. Not a mean laugh—just a laugh of, well, being together. On the road again.

Because, after the first stop, Mel tried to keep the next ones under twenty minutes, we adopted a brisk walk that felt like being in fast-forward. Kerrie acted like each restroom was a tourist attraction and prowled the aisles like she was afraid of missing a good place to shop.

Once we were settled in the car again, the fast-forward feeling changed to slow motion. The highway looked the same the same the same.

After the fourth stop, we hadn't even reached Asheville.

I asked, “Do we have any cousins we don't know about?”

Mel glanced at me, then back at the road. “What does that mean?”

“Does Aunt Clare have any children?” I should point out right now that the woman's name is pronounced
Clareree.
Same accent on both syllables.

“Why, no, do you think I would keep that a secret?”

“You might forget to tell us, given we didn't expect to make this trip in our lifetimes.”

“So far as I know, Clare is content to raise puppies.” After a moment, Mel added, “Wish I'd thought of that.”

I said, “Can we turn on the radio?” She'd put a ban on music to remind me I was still being punished. She even made me leave my iPod behind.

“If you want music, sing.”

“When are we stopping by to see that Arab prince? I bet he'd let me listen to music.”

“Don't push your luck.”

Mel can be strangely lacking in the sense-of-humor department.

Like a groan, I said, “Talk radio, okay?”