By the time I get out of Mattoon and head toward Charleston, the afternoon is fading to dusk, as it does during the short, cold days of winter. I am drained and exhilarated at the same time. Seeing Faye turned out to be something quite different from what I expected. I wish I had given her a chance, back then. The longer my mom is gone, the more I feel like I had wronged her, and not the other way around. Life is complicated.
My mind spins, and in no time at all, I am pulling into the familiar drive of the McGill house.
It feels like coming home as I walk up to the door, carrying my overnight bag and picking my way along the salted sidewalk. I raise my hand to knock, and the door opens, startling me and causing me to nearly tumble off the stoop. Jay stands in his socked feet, his wide face split with a smile.
“No more braces,” I say, and he shifts his head, standing even straighter, beaming an even larger smile in my direction. I laugh, and just like that, it’s as if I’d never left. I step into the fragrant living room, where Tommy and Keith are wrestling. Keith has the upper hand and is about to scrub his knuckles over Tommy’s skull when he catches sight of me and stops, letting Tommy go.
I lean in and give him a side-armed hug, then Tommy, then I round on Jay and give him my best hug now that I am inside and safe off the icy concrete. Jay and Tommy had been my best friends the summer after my mother died, and it feels like I’ve just come in from working up at the hardware store. Keith was his own kind of friend; when I started doing my GED work, he was right there, encouraging me and telling me what I needed to focus on and what I could let slide. I gained a lot of respect for Keith, because he hadn’t had an easy run either, and when he’d dropped out of school, people just wrote him off as dumb, but he isn’t. He doesn’t read well because sometimes his letters move and get turned around. There’s a word for it, but I don’t remember. I had thought he was dumb, too, or just lazy, but really he just learns a different way, and once I figured that out, I saw him in a whole new light.
Then Leslie is there, her large eyes glowing from the ruddy skin of her face, and she folds me in. I would melt entirely into her if I could. She is warm and smells like cinnamon. There are just no words, and she offers none; we just hold each other. She doesn’t say any of the things I thought she would. She doesn’t ask me why I ran off like I did; she doesn’t ask me where I went. She just holds me, and I breathe. I breathe in and I breathe out until I feel my heart slowing, and I feel the blood flowing in my veins the way I used to with the baby.
“Well, let somebody else see her.” Mr. McGill’s voice breaks the silence, shattering that spell, and I laugh as Leslie lets me go, only to be taken up in his arms for a quick, but solid hug. “I’m glad you came home,” he says, and a lump rises in my throat when I hear home. It is such a complex set of feelings conjured by that word.
Then the room is alive with words—questions are asked and answers given. When I tell them about the classes I am taking and how much I enjoy my job, Leslie just beams. She, more than anyone, had set me on a path to doing something better. The night she met me I had been a complete broken mess, and she had welcomed me into her home, not knowing if I would steal from her or if I would be disruptive in her life. She opened her home and gave me the rose-exploded room and said that I could eat anything I could find. Of everybody in my life, she is the one that I want to make proud.
When I mention the modeling, Mr. McGill goes to the kitchen. He comes back holding the familiar, glossy sheets of the Dillard’s Winter Look Book.
“Is that you?” He flips the pages, and I laugh, covering my face.
“When did you get that?”
“Today.” He hands the ad to Leslie, who stand gape-mouthed while Jay, Keith, and Tommy squeeze around.
“I told you it was her,” Keith says, and I’m surprised by the ownership in his voice. Tommy strikes a pose, imitating one of the images, kicking his hip out and puckering his lips.
I tell all of my stories, about the girls I live with, about wild and crazy Cici, about John who discovered me. They are so intent on my words, focused, that I feel important and loved. I tell them about Trey, about his family, about his wonderful little sister. I tell them about him being at Stanford studying poli-sci. His achievements reflect on me, and I see in their eyes how they think my life is glamorous. I talk on and on, about the life I am living.
It is long after we have gone to bed that I realize I never took a moment to ask about anybody else. I just talked about me. I talked about my big life and never even thought to ask them about theirs. I am embarrassed and almost climb out of bed to step across the hall to at least ask Leslie how things are. My feet are nearly to the floor when I hear the creak of their bed, and I know that the lights have been turned off and they have settled for the night. I shift back under the covers and stare up at the ceiling, feeling embarrassed at how self-absorbed I must have seemed to all of them.
