I received two calls on my voice mail while I was at work on Tuesday. Andie’s counselor wanted to discuss a strategy to help her make a smoother adjustment. That translated into “We want to avoid any further outbursts in the classroom.” Deja’s principal called because in only two days Deja had managed to break every dress code and report late to every class. Mr. McNulty wanted to set up a plan to help Deja have a more productive year, which translated into “We’re not going to put up with another year like the last one.”
On Wednesday morning I dropped Andie and Winnie in front of the school, circled the block, and slipped into a visitor’s parking space. I hoped neither one would have a reason to report to the office and see me with the counselor.
Mr. Lopez listened to the next chapter in our family saga. He was fully aware of what had gone on the past few years, after doing battle with reporters who wanted pictures of Winnie. His pen rested on a pad of paper the entire time without making a mark, and when I finished he just looked stunned.
“Sounds like Jerry Springer material, doesn’t it?” I said sheepishly.
“No, no. Of course not.” He rocked back in his chair and exhaled. “Do you have any suggestions that would make her transition easier?”
“I thought that was your job.”
“Well.” He sat up straighter and cleared his throat. “We like to partner with the family in situations like this.”
I bristled. “You’ve had situations like this before?”
“No, we haven’t, Mrs. Winslow.” He grimaced. “And frankly, this isn’t textbook.”
“Look, I’m sorry. But you have no idea what my family has gone through in the past few years, and continues to deal with every day. Any help you can offer would be appreciated.”
He looked at his hands and pursed his lips. “I guess the immediate plan of action would be to advise Andie’s teachers of her situation in its entirety. If that’s agreeable to you, of course.”
“Whatever helps.”
I left him, promising to keep in touch. My next stop was to the principal’s office at Deja’s high school. I hate to admit it, but all I heard from him was “blah-blah-blah.” I’d been in his office so many times in the past year that I suspected he blamed me personally for Deja’s behavior.
“Should I call Deja in for a conference?” he asked.
I looked him in the eye and said, “If you think it’s best.”
He reached for the intercom and hesitated. Then he put his hands back in his lap. “I don’t really think it’s necessary.”
Over the next twenty minutes I promised to deal with her at home and support the school’s authority, as always.
I clocked in at work an hour late. The store manager looked at his watch as I hurried to report to my register, tying my apron.
“Sorry, Robert,” I called. “I’ll make up the time.”
Jo pooh-poohed him behind his back. “So, how’s it goin’?” she asked over her shoulder.
If the main office had any idea how conversation-inducing it was to have checkers stationed back-to-back, they’d remodel the store in a heartbeat.
I forced a smile to my customer, saying, “Good morning.” Over my shoulder I asked Jo, “What did I ever do to deserve all this?”
“Honey, some of us have bigger shoulders than others, but yours should have a weight limit.”
Jo and I had grown up together at Elko High, and each moved to the Sacramento area separately. As fate would have it, I wandered into her checkout line a few months after Ginger passed away, and she talked me into applying for a checker’s position. I’d wavered. Even though I badly needed the job to pay medical bills, I didn’t yet feel even close to rejoining the human race. Maybe it was just so good to see an old friend, or I’d been out of touch for so long, that I applied. Actually, the real clincher was the 20 percent discount I got on everything in the store. I figured it could at least help to finance my baking habit.
Jo and I took our ten-minute break together in one-hundred-degree heat outside at the employees’ picnic area, the only place where smoking was allowed. I put up with the bad air quality in exchange for sympathy.
Russell was the topic of conversation, since his child support check was late again.
“Tsk, tsk.” She shook her hennaed head, taking a long draw and exhaling. “I warned you about Russell our freshman year, you remember? He’s what my Jimmy calls a poser.”
“Gigolo is closer to the truth.”
She snorted. “Thought he was Clint Eastwood. Anyway …” She took another drag on her cigarette and blew it over her shoulder. “I’d like five minutes alone with him and my riding mower with a sharpened blade. I’d cut him down to size.”
The air hung like an old blanket on the backside of the building near the dumpsters, and I got a dose of secondhand smoke. She dropped her cigarette and smashed it with the toe of her shoe. “I don’t know what you ever saw in him.”
“Jo, you were just as gaga over him as I was.”
She chuckled. “You won the booby prize, I guess.”
We went back through the employee entrance to our lockers. The gray metal stacks and combination locks sent us back to high school again.
“My mama always said, ‘Pretty is as pretty does.’” She pulled out a huge makeup bag and dug around for lipstick. “I had more sense than to fall for a barrel racer. Bull riders were more my style.”
I took out my cosmetic bag. “So you married an insurance salesman.”
“Honey, there are advantages. I’ve got coverage for every major catastrophe, except in the event that I don’t get to heaven. There’s no kinda insurance for that.”
“That’s not what I hear.” I smeared on some frosty gloss and pressed my lips together.
She studied me with her lip liner poised. “What do you mean? You going to church or somethin’?”
I tightened the scrunchie on my ponytail. “Maybe. Sometimes.”
She turned back to her locker mirror and lip liner, and spoke without moving her lips. “You be careful. You don’t want to go getting mixed up with a cult or something.”
“Yes, Mom.” I tossed my purse into my locker and slammed it.
At the end of my shift, I picked up a rotisserie chicken and some instant mashed potatoes for dinner, and tossed in a bag of chocolate chips to make chocolate-chunk brownies. Firing up the oven would heat the house to the level of a kiln. But the evening still loomed ahead when I’d have to deal with Deja, and I needed a shot of courage.
Later that evening, we ate dinner and sweated while the brownies baked. Winnie talked nonstop about school. Andie never made eye contact with anyone. She wasn’t rude or disrespectful, just gave the facts and never offered more than anyone asked. She ate one small helping and excused herself as soon as possible, rinsing her plate in the sink. I could see her from the kitchen window reading a book under a tree.
I guess her books were an acceptable means of escape. I could think of worse ways.
The phone rang as I cleaned up the dishes. I ran back to pick it up in my bedroom because the cordless had disappeared. I should have let the answering machine get it. The client court specialist was calling to find out when I would be home so she could stop by for her initial visit with Andie. I told her to come sometime between dinner and dusk, when I’d need to help at the drive-in. When I hung up, I noticed how messy the house was. I called for the girls to get their shoes and backpacks so I could vacuum, feeling one more weight draped across my shoulders. I could only hope that Deja would be at Summer’s when the worker showed up.
After I cleaned up the dinner dishes and the living room, I called Deja back out to the kitchen table. Dense brownies shouldered one another on a plate dusted with sifted confectioner’s sugar. I knew she was at the volatile time of the month when chocolate could only help.
“Great,” she said when she saw me at the table. “What did I do now?”
“Sit down, Deja,” I said. “Have a brownie.”
She sat down and tipped the chair back away from me as far as possible, cradling a brownie in her palm. “Did The Nut call you?”
The nickname had occurred to me too, but that wasn’t the point. “It’s Mr. McNulty. Don’t be disrespectful.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Deja, you know what’s expected at school—”
“That dress code is so lame!” she exploded. “Who cares if I wear black or pierce my nose?”
“You know black is a gang color. It’s for your own safety.” I did a visual scan. “What do you mean, pierce your nose?”
She balanced the chair on its two back legs and looked off to the side.
“Deja?”
“I don’t have any piercings. Not yet. It was a fake one, and you should have seen McNulty. He looked like he was going to totally flatline.”
“What do you hope to accomplish by making him angry? It’ll only get you suspended. Or worse.”
She flashed her eyes at me. “What could be worse than two more years at Gale Langford High School?”
“Continuation school, with all the druggies and the pregnant girls comparing morning sickness.” I paused for emphasis. “Or homeschool. Just you and me. Every day. Sitting at this table doing algebra and history. Together.”
The chair legs settled heavily onto the floor. “But kids do worse stuff than that at school, and they don’t get kicked out. Justin Swartz brought a can of spray paint to school, and it fell out of his backpack and rolled to Mrs. Snider’s feet in biology. And Lupe Alvarado started a fight in the girls’ locker room and they had to lock down the gym for fourth period.”
I ignored this tactic.
“Deja, you barely made it through last year. They know you’ve had some tough things to overcome, and they bent over backward to allow you time to get a handle on them. But like it or not, they expect you to at least try to cooperate. They’re not going to tolerate another year like the last one.”
She sat hunched and folded in on herself, sullenly picking her black nail polish.
I cleared my throat. “If you want to try counseling again, I could—”
“No. Way.”
I folded my arms. “Well, Deja, since I haven’t seen much improvement in your attitude, I’m postponing your driver’s training again until you show some maturity and prove that you can handle the responsibility.”
She bolted upright. “But Summer’s already signed up, and she said they only have three spots left. If I don’t get in now, I can’t get in until spring.”
“You’ll have plenty of time to develop some maturity and save up money for the class.”
“But all my friends will have their licenses by then. I’ll be the only one!”
“It’s up to you, Deja. When your grades improve and I see a change in your attitude, I’ll reconsider.”
I softened, remembering the disappointment at being the only one of my friends who had to wait to get my license until the insurance rates dropped when I turned eighteen.
“Honey, we don’t even have a car for you to drive.”
She looked up at me with her face set in stone.
“We would if Dad was here.”
I blinked. “What?”
“If Dad was here, he’d buy me a car.” She smirked. “He got Starr a Mustang convertible. A red one.”
I collected myself before I let slip that the Mustang was part of his midlife crisis, and we weren’t.
“Don’t count on it, Deja. It’s not that he wouldn’t like to buy you a car,” I lied, “he’s just not very good at keeping track of his money. He thinks he has more than he really does.”
“Well, I’m gonna ask him. He’ll let me get my license.”
She pushed out of the chair and marched back to her room. The door slammed, and pictures rattled in the hall. The brownie turned leaden in my stomach. I imagined her calling Russell and trying to get past Starr on the phone, and the rejection that would only add to her pain.
More and more she reminded me of my brother, Charles, in the months before he left the family. He’d checked out emotionally long before he took those first strides down the dusty road away from our little ranch in Elko.
I went out to where Dad was tinkering with the truck and asked if he would see that the girls got ready for bed. It was early, but I had a headache. He said he could open the drive-in alone and not to mind Deja. I guess he’d heard most of it, even out in the yard. I warned him about the lady from social services who could be dropping by any day unannounced.
I changed into a light camisole, crawled into bed without removing my mascara, and curled into a fetal position. I pulled the sheet up to my neck and lay there listening to the noises in the house, fighting the urge to get up and bake snickerdoodles.
Sometimes my life hung poorly, like a suit of borrowed clothes. It sagged and bagged and cinched up on me in the worst places. In the important places. If my life was really my own, wouldn’t things work out better? Wouldn’t it fit? Sometimes I felt like I was the one who got switched.
My mother’s Bible sat on the nightstand, and I pulled it to me. It fell naturally open to Psalms. The words were carefully underlined with a straight edge in blue ballpoint. They promised restoration, and in the margin Mom had written Charles.
My family restored—that’s what I wanted. Maybe then my life would fall into place.
As Mom’s heart had ached for Charles, mine ached for Deja, for the day when she’d realize that her father didn’t leave me; he left us.