All I wanted was five goddamn minutes to feel something about LaReigne not being dead in Nebraska, but I couldn’t get them. Instead, I got a free lecture from the ER doctor about how it wasn’t too late for me to lose weight, and some dick in the waiting room asking me to watch my language. Then Mom had to sign a bunch of discharge paperwork for things I was going to spend the rest of my life paying for. Medicaid would cover some of it, but not all of it, and Mom didn’t have a dime. Just one more boulder on top of my mountain of debt.
When we got Mom home, the police van was still parked in the drive, and Mansur and Smith were on the front porch talking to the cop in the paper jumpsuit. Pure rage was pretty much the only thing that got Mom out of the van under her own power. While she went shuffling across the lawn, I turned to Charlene, feeling that old desperate itch. The need to get rid of people once they’ve witnessed my mother and her house.
“Thank you so much for all your help,” I said. I was ashamed of myself for being ashamed.
“Do you need anything else?”
“No, we’re fine. I don’t want to keep you any longer. I doubt this was how you planned to spend your afternoon. But thank you.”
Thank-yous were a superpower. They moved people along with the sheer force of gratitude. While I was getting Charlene back into her van, I could hear Mom shouting at the cops.
“Are you done tearing up my house and breaking my things and piling them out on the lawn for the whole world to look at?” She bent over to dig through one of the boxes, somewhere between crying and cursing. With all my heart, I wanted to beg Charlene to take me with her. Just get in her van like a stray dog, and leave my mother behind. I made myself say one last thank you, and then I walked over to where Mom was. Gentry stood a few feet away from her with his arms crossed, standing guard over the whole mess.
“My lady,” he said, when I got there.
Mansur and Smith came down the front steps as Charlene pulled away. For a couple minutes, they watched Mom and talked to each other. Then they put on their sunglasses and walked toward us.
“Everything okay, Mrs. Trego?” Mansur said.
“Does it look like everything is okay?” Mom said.
“I meant healthwise. Are you okay?”
“Don’t act as though you care. Now you’re going to go off and leave me to deal with this giant mess you made.”
“Mom, it’s okay,” I said. “We’ll get it put back.” I had no idea if that was even possible.
“Will you be staying here tonight?” Mansur said.
“Of course, I’ll be staying here. It’s my home,” Mom said.
“Mrs. Trego, if you think of anything.” Mansur held out another business card, but this time, Mom grabbed it out of his hand, crumpled it up, and threw it on the ground.
“You go to hell,” she said.
Mansur nodded at me, and then he and Smith left. Mom grabbed a box, trying to pick it up, but the whole side ripped out. A bunch of books and little Snowbabies figurines spilled out onto the grass. She started gathering them up into her arms, already panting like she couldn’t catch her breath. The police van pulled away. A couple of the figurines slid out of Mom’s arms. She tried to pile them back on, but others fell off as soon as she did.
“If you’ll sit down and rest, I’ll go find you some better boxes to put this stuff in,” I said.
“I’m fine!” she snapped.
“My lady, I shall bear her throne within that she might rest,” Gentry said. Her throne.
“Yeah, let’s do that. Mom, we’re going to take your recliner inside, okay?”
She ignored us, and went on trying to gather up knickknacks. I was grateful for Gentry, because he did the hard work, lifting the heaviest part of the recliner. I carried the head and guided us up the stairs and into the front room. Seeing the house in full afternoon light, when I wasn’t in a panic, I felt sick. The hardwood floors were ruined. Stained and gouged and, worse than that, saggy and bouncy from having so much stuff piled on them for so long. We were lucky the cops hadn’t called out the fire marshal or the city inspector. The house probably would have been condemned.
“My lady, how might I help?” Gentry said.
“Is there any way you think the two of us can get the bigger pieces of furniture back inside?”
“Certs, it can be done. I shall go and think on it.” In the middle of that mess, he bowed to me.
“Okay. I’m going to find a broom and try to sweep up a little bit.”
I looked for a broom but didn’t find one, and ended up back in the front room feeling helpless. The biggest of the china hutches had been blocking off the phone nook that was between the living area and the dining area. It was a weird little alcove that had shelves and a built-in seat. A long time ago, Mom had filled the alcove up with books, and then once it got full, she put the china hutch in front of it. The cops had emptied it out, and for a minute of calm, I stepped inside. It was like a coffin.
When I was a kid, Mom had hung up a sheet of poster board on the wall over the bench. She was so vain she hated to wear glasses, so she’d made these huge signs instead of using an address book. A newer one hung on the wall next to her recliner, but the original was still in the phone nook. It was so old my grandparents’ address and phone number was there. And Uncle Alva and Aunt Tess’. That’s how old the posters were. Aunt Tess was still alive and Uncle Alva was anybody Mom would have called.
I pulled out my cellphone and punched in the number. Three rings later, someone answered.
“Yep.” That was all he said. Older and raspier, but I still recognized his voice. He sounded how I remembered my father.
“Uncle Alva? It’s me, Zhorzha,” I said.
“Girl, what kind of fool are you? Don’t call me again.”
He hung up before I could say anything. The timer on my phone showed the call had lasted seventeen seconds. So fast it was like it hadn’t happened. I put my phone back in my pocket and went outside to see what Gentry had figured out about the china hutches.
The answer was nothing. He was standing in the middle of the yard, holding a cardboard box. My mother was picking through another box and putting things in the one Gentry held.
“Mom, why don’t you go inside and sit down? Gentry and I are going to try to bring in the china hutches and—”
“I don’t need to sit down,” she said. “Stop nagging at me.”
“Okay, fine. You do whatever. We’re going to try to move the hutches back inside.”
The cops had carried them out with everything in them, but they’d had a dolly and half a dozen men. Gentry and I were going to have to empty the hutches to move them. As soon as we opened the doors on the biggest hutch, Mom started going through everything in it.
“Oh, look, this is the champagne glass your father won for me at the state fair. I think it was the ring toss. He won two, but the other one got broken.
“Your grandmother liked to collect all these little blown-glass animals. She’d get them on all our family vacations. Oh, the little elephant’s trunk is broken! I knew it. I knew the police would break things. They have no respect for anything.”
Just like that we weren’t emptying the hutch. We were taking a stroll down memory lane with occasional side trips to saying really harsh things about the cops. After fifteen minutes of that, I reached past Mom and started taking things out of the cabinet.
“Mom, we need to get this stuff moved inside,” I said. “Anything you want to keep.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Me and my big mouth. Of course, she wasn’t going to get rid of anything. It was all going back in the house.
“Fine, but it needs to go inside. Can we do that without looking at every single thing?”
“There’s no need to get snippy with me,” Mom said. “You’re welcome to go and do whatever you like. I’ll have this all cleaned up by the time you get back.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, because Mom was delusional. It was going to take weeks to deal with what the cops had done.
She put something else into the cardboard box that Gentry had been holding. The bottom was about to give out, and she’d jammed it full of a bunch of random crap including those chipped and stained Snowbabies. The whole thing was so pathetic, I couldn’t stand to watch.
“Oh, here are LaReigne’s baby dishes. Look at how cute they are. It’s the whole set: a plate, a bowl, and the little cup.”
“Mom, I can’t spend all day at this. I need to pick Marcus up from school and find a place for us to stay tonight.”
“Well, you can stay here now.”
“We can’t stay here,” I said.
“Why in the world not? You can sleep in your old bedroom and Marcus can sleep in LaReigne’s room. There’s plenty of space.”
“Just because the police emptied those rooms doesn’t mean we can stay in them. The mouse shit in my room is ankle deep.”
“Well, whose fault is that? You were always leaving food in your room,” Mom said.
“Oh my god. How is it my fault? I haven’t lived here in ten years. I had to leave home, because I couldn’t get to my bed. I was sixteen years old and you buried my bed under all your fucking crap.”
“Don’t you swear at me! You’re responsible for the condition of this house, too. You never help—”
“You won’t even let me take the trash out without checking it, because you think I’m throwing away your treasures!” I hated myself for getting sucked into the same old argument. I knew better.
“You’re always breaking things,” Mom said. “You’re as bad as the police. You’re just a big hoyden, always stomping around and breaking things. You broke that whole box of good crystal, and that can’t be—”
“I was twelve! And you had it stacked on the edge of the fucking bathtub! I was trying to take a bath, and I accidentally knocked it off, which I wouldn’t have done if you hadn’t set a fucking box of fucking dishes on the edge of the fucking bathtub. I cut my foot open, and you’re still blaming me for—”
“Because you don’t have any respect for anything!”
“For this shit?” I grabbed the nearest thing: the box of figurines Gentry was holding. “I don’t respect this because it’s shit. And you care more about this than you do about your family. You’d rather pile this shit up than have Marcus come stay with you. So fuck all of this shit.”
I dumped the box on the sidewalk, but that wasn’t enough, so I stomped on it, too. Right while I was in the middle of trying to annihilate all those little Snowbabies, I realized it was the wrong box. It wasn’t the box of chipped thrift-store figurines. It was Mom’s treasures. The champagne glass Dad won for her. The little animals she’d inherited from her mother. LaReigne’s baby dishes. I bent over, meaning to salvage something, but Mom laid into me. Slapped my head, pulled my hair, the whole time screaming. I didn’t even put up my hands to defend myself, because I deserved it.
Gentry stepped in between us, which I hated for him to do. I honestly would rather have taken my beating than have Mom smack him. From where I was bent over, I heard the sound of her open palm on his back and shoulders.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Please stop. I’m sorry.”
“You hateful, selfish girl! All you care about is yourself.”
At least she wore herself out pretty fast. She stopped hitting Gentry, and trying to hit me, because she couldn’t catch her breath. For a minute or so, I stayed where I was, crouched down with Gentry bent over me protectively. When he straightened up, I stood up and tried to apologize again.
“I didn’t mean to, Mom. I thought that box was something else.”
“Get away from me. I don’t want you here.” She was rocking back and forth, taking big shaky breaths, and then in this soft voice, she said, “I want LaReigne.”
I wanted LaReigne, too. I wanted the LaReigne who had held my hand when I was eight years old. The LaReigne who could make Mom listen to her. I wanted her to come and help me figure out what to do, and that wasn’t going to happen. LaReigne wasn’t going to come save me. Maybe I was going to have to go save her.
“You don’t want to be here, and now you don’t ever have to come here again,” Mom said.
It was true that I didn’t want to be there, and I wished the other part was true, too.
Gentry stood between my mother and me, scratching the back of his neck. I could tell he was upset, but after a minute, he put his hands down and said, “Thy nephew, my lady?”
If it hadn’t been for Gentry, I don’t know what I would have done, because I staggered toward the street kind of in shock, and followed him to his truck.
“I’m sorry about my mother hitting you. I’m sorry about all of this. You probably need to sleep before you go to work,” I said, as Gentry opened the passenger door for me.
“Nay. I labor not on Friday even.”
“Oh, I forgot it was Friday. But you’ve been up since last night, haven’t you?”
“Nay, I slept this morn,” he said. By my math, maybe he’d gotten three hours of sleep before he showed up to rescue me again. That was all he said, and I couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t another apology, so we didn’t talk on the drive.
At the school, I was late enough that the buses had already left. There were a couple of kids waiting to be picked up out front, but Marcus wasn’t one of them.
In the main office, nobody was at the front desk, so I rang the bell.
“I’m here to pick up Marcus Gill,” I said, when the secretary came out of the back room. “Is he still in his classroom?”
“No, I think he got picked up before lunch.”
“You let somebody else pick him up?”
I didn’t feel calm, and I must not have sounded very calm, because the secretary got the logbook and brought it to the front counter.
“It’s okay. We wouldn’t let anyone who wasn’t authorized pick him up.” She flipped through the logbook until she got to a form with Marcus’ name on it. “See, his grandmother picked him up before lunch. Oh, it says a family emergency. I hope everything’s okay. Is everything okay?”
I stared at the form that Winnie Gill had signed and knew everything was not okay. There was an envelope clipped to the bottom of the form. Zorza Trego, it said. Probably misspelled on purpose.
I tore it open as I walked out of the front office and read it while I waited at the curb for Gentry. The letter from the Gills’ lawyer was only a paragraph long, basically telling me to read the other thing in the envelope, which was a court order from a judge granting them “temporary emergency custody” due to “parental abandonment.”