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School starts back on maybe the hottest day of the summer. It is well into the nineties and nearing in on one hundred. There is not a cloud in the sky, and all the windows are open at school, trying to air out the staleness from a closed-up summer. It was such a dry summer that the crops are dead on their stalks and unharvested. All the rain we had in the spring did little good for the crops. The corn rows are wilted and brown, the fields of beans just shriveled, dying. Dust rises from the chapped fields as farmers return to glean their livelihood, or at least turn under the sad reminder of their failed attempts.
I am now a sophomore, Dylan’s a senior. I go back to my original four hours a night three days a weeks at Billups. Dylan was voted president of the student council. Mr. Billups lets me use the computer in the office when I have papers to type, so I sometimes stay after everybody else has gone, working in the quiet store until the darkness has long settled in the streets, and then I ride my bike the five miles to our little spot in the world. I stay away from home as much as possible, a coward, but I don’t know how to help her, and it’s so overwhelming. Especially after she heard that Mitch and Teresa Calverson had gotten married in September. It isn’t he who is scared of commitment like Mom always says; it is that my mom is not a person worthy of commitment.
She’s already seeing somebody new. She never likes being alone. He is nothing like Mitch. Nothing like Ed, either. His name is Cal Robinson, and I’ve heard a lot of rumors about things he is into. I know without a doubt that he supplies pot and crack to a couple of kids at school. Donnie Barton and Eric Shores are both stoners who stand along the grassy area at the edge of the school property, along the far reaches of the circle drive, smoking and flipping off the buses when they pass. There are more of them, but those are the two I have actually seen Cal with at different times around town. He is tattooed on the sleeves of both arms, convoluted, dark tattoos, skulls and snakes. He wears his long, black hair tied in a ponytail at the base of his neck. His skin is so light it is nearly translucent, very vampire-esque. He creeps me out, like he wants to suck my blood. When he’s around, I lock my bedroom door. How she could go from a normal, working-man kind of guy like Mitch to this vertical snake is beyond comprehension.
Mom is mostly gone in the nights, and there are weeks when I don’t even see her. When she does come home, she sleeps for what seems like days on end. I don’t know even if she still has a job. If she does, I know she’s missing a ton of work. She sleeps sometimes, like she’s in a coma, and then other times I’ll find her flying through the house, in what I guess is supposed to be a fit of cleaning, a whirlwind flight to move things from one spot to another and then back again. I have never seen such intense energy from her; she is so frenetic. She has lost weight and has taken to wearing tight clothes that show off her breasts.
More than once I came home to find her in a mad search for something, which she never manages to find, and I often hear her riffling through papers and opening drawers long after I crawled into bed. She doesn’t mention Mitch, as if he had never been. She now talks about Cal. Cal this and Cal that and Cal says this or that. When she is there, he is there, a permanent fixture on the sofa. But more often than not, no one is there, except me. I know she’s drugging, but at least she isn’t always drunk. I’m not sure it is an improvement. The puffiness that filled her face before Mitch left has been replaced by dark hollows under her eyes and the sharp jutting of her cheekbones. She now likes loud music and everything young. More than once she has reminded me that she is only thirty-two years old, and way too young to be old.
Sometimes there is food in the house, and sometimes there isn’t. I keep bread and peanut butter at Billups anyway. The electricity was shut off twice through the fall, and the last time I took money from my vent to get it turned back on. It’s getting too cold to not have heat in the trailer. She says she just forgot to send the check, but I know she’s using all her money for other stuff, and it makes me angry. It just makes me hate her more.
Dylan encourages me always to turn her in, pushes me to get her into rehab, to intervene, but what he doesn’t understand is that she scares me when she is on this new thing. She gets a wildness in her eyes, and I don’t want to cross her. He offers to put together an intervention himself, but nothing ever materializes, and I assume that he realizes, like I do, that there is nobody she cares about and vice versa. I feel myself walling up. I don’t talk to him about it. I try to act like everything is okay. Even though he thinks he understands, he doesn’t, and I can’t even begin to drag him into it. He’s so busy with his big-man senior life that he doesn’t have much time to worry about it.
It begins to rain in October, and the rain the crops craved all summer long deluges us for weeks. The leaves have fallen to the ground and never had a chance to rattle in the breeze. They are soggy and sluice down the streets, making ugly, sludgy piles along the drain grates. The temperatures hover in the low forties, and the rain falls, all day on most days, and the sun never peaks from behind the clouds. It is the strangest weather, and it suits my mood perfectly.
By the time the first snow falls, I have been riding to school again with Dylan for two weeks, unwilling to ride my bike with the cold wind going against me from every direction. I hadn’t seen Mom the entire time I was riding to school with him. Those entire two weeks, she was just gone. And as suddenly as she went, she came back. One night she came home, and Cal came along, and then all his friends . . . their friends started coming, and the trailer was busting with people, and the fridge was once again filled with beer. There are always rocks, powder, and alcohol present, and the glazed stupor I sometimes find her in now has a frightening urgency to it. They always seems to be in some stage of stoned or buzzed or high. It is exhausting.