IT’S CREEPY, the way Mom and Dad always make their moves at the same time, as if they were connected by telepathy.
The day after I get the card from Mom, which I don’t show around, Brogan gets a letter from Dad, which he does. Dad says he might be in the vicinity in the near future, that he might stop by to look in on his “must be nearly grown by now” daughter.
I can’t figure out this sudden interest on their parts. It’s been six years since I even set eyes on either one of them. What do they want with me now?
Brogan and Glenna tell me not to worry; that I am absolutely lead-pipe safe from Mom and Dad. Brogan says that he and Glenna got a quit-claim to me—and then he stops and explains that’s a term used in the oil business about leases on the back forty but that he means Mom and Dad don’t have any more right to come sniffing around me like hound dogs. Besides, he says, the statute of limitations has run out. Imagine, he jokes, if parents could come back forty years down the road and yank you back.
To which Glenna asks, And what does he think his are doing?
But I don’t wholly believe what he says, because I’ve got fear running up and down my backbone with those two letters popping up out of the blue, and I don’t have the confidence that he does that Mom and Dad aren’t up to their old tricks again. Sometimes when you’ve been feeling more or less safe and then something comes along and pulls that feeling out from under your feet, it’s almost worse than it was before. I mean in the old days, when I was a kid, I sort of got used to it. It became almost a game: hightailing it out of this place; hunkering down out of sight in that one. But now I don’t think I could start all that up again. Or, rather, starting it all up again is too truly awful to think about.
But it isn’t until I get up in the middle of the night, not sleeping too well, to get a drink of water, that I get some idea of what might be behind my sudden popularity. Behind Mom and Dad suddenly deciding that I’m up for grabs again.
• • •
“I think this model business is okay,” Brogan says, in a worried hoarse whisper, “but there are a bunch of consequences.”
“Like what?” Glenna sounds half asleep.
“It upsets the applecart, taxwise.”
“How’s that?” She doesn’t sound as sleepy.
“You can’t claim a dependent who’s nineteen unless she’s in school full time and making peanuts a year. You follow? Her being a kid and in school and not working we had every angle covered. Now, I don’t know. There goes nineteen hundred bucks for a dependent.”
“You think that’s why that lunk got in touch? He needs the extra cash? Would he go through all that again to get nineteen hundred off his taxes?”
“Would Turk Jackson sell his mother for five dollars? Besides, times are tough. With the whole state claiming Chapter Eleven, how many folks are buying drilling-rig parts for wells they’ve closed?”
“I see what you mean.”
“Plus having her back would give him Head of Household. And if he doesn’t earn any more than my sister, he can also get Earned Income Credit.”
“You think Midge will show up, too?”
“How many people are shelling out these days for piano lessons do you imagine?”
“Oh, hon.”
“I’m not meaning to worry you. That’s a swell girl in there. I’m not giving her up. I just had this thought in the back of my head, when she said she’d got this modeling job.”
“How would the feds know?”
“They got eyes. They got eyes with computers.”
“Then she can just enroll and take something. How do you know that she’s making money anyway? Maybe she’s doing tearoom modeling for department stores. Maybe she gets minimum wage. What’s that, about a dollar seventy-five?”
“Dating yourself, baby. How about three thirty-five.”
“No kidding? Is it? Let’s ask her.”
“Ask her what?”
“That’s her business.”
“She could pay us rent.”
“Forget that idea. I only mentioned it. I got dollars on the brain these days.”
“I bet that’s why he wrote. That big lout gives me the creeps.”
Silence. Then, “Brogan?”
“What?”
“Do you think maybe we’ve protected her too much?”
“Protected her? Too much?”
“You know, sort of kept her close to home, put a wall around her, trying to make sure that nobody could come take her away.”
“There’s no such thing as protecting girls too much, so put that idea out of your mind. It’s a contradiction.”
Everything is quiet, and then Glenna says, “Brogan?”
“No more tonight. Come on. Forget it for now. We got enough on our minds.”
“Brogan?”
“All right, what?”
“Should I wear my coat?”
“Should you wear your coat?”
“You know, my Joie de Beavre, my genuine full-skin dyed beaver with fox shawl collar. To the customers’ party.”
“You bet. Greet them at the door. Tell them you ordered it over the cellular from your Lincoln Continental. We’ll run the air conditioning all evening.”
“You’re sweet, you know?”
“That’s me.”