CAKE STARES INTO MY closet. My sister’s in the front room, watching House Hunters and enjoying a close, personal relationship with a bag of potato chips.
Cake says, “I can’t believe you never even looked in here. You weren’t the least bit curious?”
I hold my pillow against my chest, trying to sniff the air subtly. My mourning dress is taking on a kind of salty, deep smell. It might be time for another wash.
“No. You knew Mom. There didn’t seem to be a point in snooping around. She was…” I search for the right word. “Intractable.” Another word from Hoffmeister’s class.
“True,” Cake agrees, gently pushing some of my mother’s clothes to the side of the closet. “But maybe there are clues in here. She must have kept something.”
Cake has spent considerable time Googling my mom’s full name and birth date. She’d called, on a whim, the University of New Mexico archive, where my mom used to work, and talked a woman named Laura into telling her a little about my mother.
“She cried when I told her your mom was de—” Cake stops talking, glancing back at me, her face frozen.
We stare at each other. “You can say it,” I tell her. “It’s not like it’s not real if you don’t say it. You know?”
“It’s hard to say,” she says, biting her lip. “I don’t want to make you…” She stops.
“Sad?” I say. “Too late.”
Cake says, very softly, “Okay.”
We stare at each other again.
“Dead,” Cake says firmly. “She cried when I told her your mom was dead.”
“There,” I say, trying to joke, even though hearing the word coming from her mouth hurts. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
We both know it is, but it’s like a hurdle we have to jump, I guess.
She turns back to the closet. “She was her supervisor and said your mom was really nice, and a hard worker.”
Her voice is muffled from inside the closet. “She said your mom had a boyfriend. That must have been your dad, and that they fought, and your mom left without notice and she never saw her again.”
“But,” Cake says, emerging with a bag and inspecting the contents, “she also said your mom said she grew up in Phoenix. Did you know that?”
I shake my head. I guess I always thought she was from Albuquerque.
Cake looks up from the bag. “I mean, do you think she had a will?”
I look at my Boxes of Mom, as if to ask her, Did you?
Of course, she doesn’t answer.
“Does a will cost money?” I ask Cake.
“I think so.”
“Then I don’t think my mom had one.”
We smile at each other. “Good point,” Cake says.
Cake pulls out paper bags labeled Christmas lights and Halloween and then crawls so far into the closet I can only see the soles of her Mary Janes.
She backs out on her knees, the bottoms of my mother’s dresses falling over her face. “Here,” she says breathlessly. “Look through here.”
“Those are just me,” I say, eyeing the brown shoeboxes she pushes toward me. “I’ve seen those boxes before. It’s just old school photos of me and stuff.”
Cake does a quick run-through to make sure. She holds up my kindergarten picture. Missing teeth, puffy pigtails, that awful desert vista backdrop with the jackalope. Then she brings out a photograph of our class in the third grade, the year she moved here.
“Mrs. Hervey.” Cake nods gravely. “She was the worst.”
Mrs. Hervey was always telling Cake to sit down, but Cake was already sitting. She was tall, even when we were eight. And Mrs. Hervey refused to call her “Cake,” only “Katerina,” and so Cake refused to call Mrs. Hervey “Mrs. Hervey” and called her “Mrs. Mean” instead and it was not a good year, except for the fact that Cake became my friend.
Cake stacks the shoeboxes and reaches deeper into the closet. Her voice is muffled by clothes and darkness. “I can’t believe you never snooped around. You’re, like, the most incurious person I know.”
“That’s not true! I read,” I say defensively.
“Incurious about real life, then.”
I shake my head. “Again, not true. I just didn’t have a lot of chances.”
Cake looks back at me.
“You know how Mom was.”
Was. It burns my mouth that I said that, that I made her past-tense.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
She comes all the way back out and swipes some hair from her face. “I would have been all over this, though, looking for some clue.”
Here is what I want to say to Cake, but I don’t have the courage: Maybe I don’t want to unravel this mystery just yet. I’ve been through the biggest thing you can go through, losing a parent, and I’m not sure I can handle knowing more than I ever thought possible about my mother, especially if some of it turns out to not be so, well, good, like the possibility that she’d wantonly and knowingly stolen a married man from his family.
It’s very hard to think of your parents as people. Full of bad checks and bad decisions, fistfights and broken hearts, all of it.
Because if they can’t goddamn take care of themselves, how will they take care of you?
And I’ve already met enough kids with parents who can’t take care of them. Or don’t want to. And if my mother’s only problem was that she wanted to take too much care of me, well, then I was lucky.
There it is again. Was.
I feel really tired all of a sudden. Like I want to be alone in my room, and not talking, and not treating my mom’s life like she’s an episode of Forensic Files or something.
“Cake,” I say. “When are your parents coming back?” They dropped her off to go shopping in Sierra Vista.
She grunts from deep in the closet. “I don’t know.”
The ends of her purple hair are tangled against her shirt. Suddenly I remember the first time her mom let her dye her hair, when she was twelve. Cake had been having a tough year. Some kids were bullying her pretty hard that fall because of her weight gain, and she was starting to get angry, talking back. Rhonda brought home the dye and did it herself: bright pink with chunks of lime green. For some reason, having that unusual hair gave Cake some sort of strength. Kids looked at her differently, with a kind of awe. Some kids still tried to harass her, but she felt different, that was the thing. Kind of like what LaLa said, that people can get braver when they have on armor, like different clothes. Or dyed hair, in Cake’s case.
My mom kind of disapproved of letting her have dyed hair so young, but Rhonda said, “Sometimes you need to let them make their own decision, June. They need to find a safe way to rebel or to feel special. I’d rather she start dyeing her hair than smoking weed or hurting herself because she feels hated.”
In all my life, I’ve never gotten to choose my clothes or even my hair.
I sink down farther in the bed.
Cake emerges from the closet, a dust bunny stuck to her cheek. “Here,” she says. “This looks promising.” She hands me a wide blue box.
I slide the lid off the box. On top, in round childish writing, someone has written, Property of June Tolliver. Open This Box Under Penalty of Death.
Inside are photographs in plastic baggies, a manila envelope, and a folded square of newspaper. I shake open the envelope. Gold and silver medals fall out, along with some brightly colored competition ribbons. I smooth them out and read the cardboard tags on the back.
1st Place, Dressage, June Tolliver
1st Place, Beginner Novice, Eventing, June Tolliver
There are so many awards. Some of the ribbons are huge, with big satin rosettes at the top. I run my fingers over the raised horse and rider on the front of one. In the baggies, there are photographs of a girl, sweet-faced and smiling, wearing a velvet hat with a roundish peak and a chin strap, and a cute businessy-looking shirt and jacket. She’s hugging the neck of a beautiful horse. She looks insanely happy. I peer closer at the smiling girl in one photo. My hands start shaking.
The loopy handwriting on the back of the photograph says, June, age 9. Phoenix Invitational.
I touch the girl’s face, my mother’s face, with my finger.
I’ve never seen my mother as a child.
She has a giant, shit-eating, I-just-won-this-whole-thing grin on her face. My mother, a happy little girl who rode horses. No wonder she loved the horses at Randy Gonzalez’s ranch. She’d grown up with horses. She’d loved them since she was a little girl.
My heart hurts, and my eyes burn with tears. I look at the Boxes of Mom and think, Why couldn’t you have just told me this, this one memory? Why?
Cake’s breath is warm on my cheek. “Whoa,” she says, taking the photograph from me. “Your mom was adorable. You have the same cheeks.”
As I rifle through the shoebox, my mother’s childhood reveals itself: horses, and a red-brick, ranch-style house with a pool, and a curvy slide, and two nice-looking people named Ed and Crystal. My grandparents. The ones who died when she was in college.
Ed wears glasses and has two pens in the pocket of his shirt, always, and Crystal has blond hair, like my mom’s, and she’s always holding a cake with candles, or handing my mother a Christmas present, or standing next to a big piece of meat on a grill outside.
Grandparents mail you ironed dollar bills inside birthday cards, one for each year you’ve been alive. Grandparents give you butterscotch candies and soda when your parents aren’t looking. They raise you, at least as far I’ve seen in Mesa Luna, when your parents die, or one disappears, or maybe one drinks too much or gets hooked on drugs. There were always a lot of grandparents on parent-teacher conference day at Davidson Middle School, shuffling into the building in fuzzy slippers and too-big checkered shirts, squeezing awkwardly into those seats that attach to the desk.
Ed and Crystal seem like nice people, from the photographs, and I feel a longing for them that I’ve never felt before.
My grandparents. People who kept pens in their pockets, liked barbecue, and bought my mother a horse named Charlotte.
Which I learn because there’s a newspaper article folded into a tiny square, about one of my mother’s wins, that she and Charlotte were on their way to some sort of championship in Texas. When the reporter asked about the name of her horse, my mother said, “Well, I named her after a character in my favorite book, Charlotte’s Web. You know, the spider? The spider and the pig are great friends, just like me and my horse.”
“Whoa,” Cake breathes. “This is intense.” She paws through the box, but there isn’t anything else to see. We’ve looked through all of it. I stare at the photos of my equestrian mother, and my grandparents, while Cake crawls back into the closet and shuffles things around. She comes out, sweaty and satisfied.
“That’s it,” she says. “The rest of the shoeboxes are just shoes. Who knew your mom liked shoes so much? Also, now we know the names of your grandparents, which is going to help. We can Google them.”
I carefully refold the newspaper article. Area Girl Canters Her Way to Great Things. My mother went from a chubby, wet-cheeked baby to a slim girl with medals and ribbons and a horse, and then her life…stopped. Until me.
There are no middle school photos. No more ribbons after a certain year. No high school photo. Prom. Graduation.
I ask the dragon boxes, “Who are you? What happened from the time you were ten until…me?”
Cake holds up her hands. “Wait, who are you talking to?”
I point to my mom’s boxes on top of the dresser. “June. She’s over there.”
Cake breathes in deeply, considering.
Then she says, “Not that I’m criticizing, but I just want to clarify: First, the dress, and now…talking to your mom’s ashes? Do I have everything clear?”
I feel weird inside, not as empty as I could, or as sad, but not happy, either. I give Cake a half smile. She’s a good friend, to do all this for me.
“Yes, I talk to my dead mom now.”
Cake grimaces at the word and brushes the dust off her knees. “Good to know. But, like, if you decide to do weird experiments with electricity and, like, other people’s body parts or something, to bring her back? I’m not sure I can be the supportive best friend. I just want to state that up front.”
“Noted,” I say.
“I’m gonna go wash my hands.” She closes the bathroom door.
I hear a car pull up outside and the slams of two car doors. Then angry whispering. I put the photographs down.
“It’s ridiculous.” A man’s voice. Cake’s dad. “She’s going to go.”
“She’s sixteen. She can make her own choices, good or bad, and then live with them. She doesn’t want to leave her friend.” Rhonda sounds pleading, like they’ve been talking about this too long.
Talking about Cake, I think. About the camp.
“We have done everything we could for this girl. We have helped with money, we’ve helped with food, we’ve helped with car repairs, we’re paying for her phone, and I love her, I do, but at some point, she is holding our daughter back. Our very, very talented daughter. She cannot turn down this camp again. She was lucky enough to get another chance to apply after turning them down last year.”
Rhonda murmurs, “Tiger had mono. They’ve always been so close. Frankly, I think it’s nice our daughter has the heart she does.”
Cake was accepted to the music camp in Massachusetts? I didn’t know that. I didn’t know she got in last summer, too.
I was so sick for a month. Cake stayed with me as much as she could, wearing a mask and rubber gloves, so my mom could do the Bookmobile and Jellymobile. She joked about her hazmat fashion. We watched oodles of television and listened to records and took naps and I held her while she cried about Troy, the guy from Sierra Vista.
And what are they talking about, money and car repairs?
Did they give my mom money and I didn’t know?
“I mean, Rhonda, come on. I’m sorry June died, and I miss her, I do, but our daughter is going places. What, is she not going to go to college because her friend can’t afford to? We need to start pushing her to think of herself first. It’s time.”
That is something Cake would do. The college thing. I haven’t really thought about it, not in the real sense, only abstract. But she would. She would stay behind for me.
The toilet flushes in the bathroom. Cake comes out.
“What?” she says. “You have a funny look on your face.”
“Your parents are here.”
“Oh, cool.” She puts her earbuds and phone in her backpack.
“Hey, what happened with your music camp?” I ask, keeping my voice mild. “You get in?”
She doesn’t look at me. “I haven’t heard back, and I’m sure I won’t get in, but it’s no big deal.”
My friend is lying to me about something that she should be happy about.
She’s lying because I’m unhappy, and have a dead mom, and she thinks she shouldn’t be happy.
“Cake,” I start to say, but Shayna breezes into the room.
“I’m gonna hop in the shower and then head out to Tucson, okay? Not sure when I’ll be back.”
She shuts the bathroom door. The shower starts running. There’s a knock at the front door.
“Cake!” her mom calls. “Let’s go! We’re meeting Connor for dinner in fifteen minutes.”
Cake hoists her backpack on her shoulders and we walk out to the front room.
Her mom is picking up stray bras from the back of the couch. “How’s it going, honey? Things seem a little…messy around here.” She dangles two purple bras in front of me. Cake’s dad sighs heavily.
I try to ignore the fact that he was just bitching about saving my mom and me from, well, everything, and concentrate on Rhonda.
“My sister is making herself at home,” I say lightly.
It’s true. The house is starting to get Shayna-fied: bras on the bathroom door handle, the couch, eyeliner pencils on the vanity in the bathroom. Lipsticked coffee mugs and dirty plates on the kitchen counter. Copies of Cosmo all over the floor.
She even shoves her own clothes in my hamper. If I didn’t do laundry, or the dishes, or straighten up, I don’t think they’d get done.
Rhonda folds the bras and puts them on the couch. “You doing okay? Staying brave?”
I look at her. What does bravery have to do with anything? My mom is dead and I’m supposed to be brave? It’s like I’m not allowed to even cry now that the funeral is done and my sister is here and, well, this is life now.
Because crying would make people uncomfortable, I guess.
“Sure,” I say flatly.
Rhonda frowns and hesitates, like she wants to say something, but she’s not sure what.
“Why don’t you come stay with me tonight?” Cake says, watching me and her mom. She uses her extra-cheerful voice. “Your sister’s going out anyway.”
“Cake,” Gabe says impatiently. “Let’s go. I’m hungry.”
That would be nice, to be at Cake’s comfortable Earthship, with its ferns everywhere and low lights and music always playing in the background.
But now I would feel weird. Like I was just taking something else from them. Keeping Cake from being Cake.
“No,” I say. “That’s cool. I’ll be fine.”
Rhonda hugs me. I let her for a few seconds, but then I gently disentangle myself and step away. Gabe claps his hands. “Well, kid, let’s get a move on, okay? Maybe we can give that new piece a whirl when we get home, all right, Cake?”
Inside the bathroom, Shayna’s humming a song softly. I hear the whir of her electric toothbrush.
I can’t always run to a better life, like Cake’s, and hide. This is my life now. Bras on the couch. Cleaning up spilled coffee grounds on the floor.
Cake nods. “I’ll text you,” she calls on her way out.
I go back into my room, slide onto the bed, draw the lid back over the photos and medals.
My mom’s whole life, small enough to fit in a blue hatbox.