Julia leaned her big head in and grinned at Cody. “Hey!” she said in her Southern drawl. “You’re coming home with me today, you little goober.”
I winced, right in her face. Julia called all children “goober,” which she claimed meant “peanut.” “Trust me,” Julia would say, “I’m from Georgia and I know my peanuts.” But it reminded me of something in your nose. Privately, Cody and I called Julia “booger,” which always sent Cody into a fit of giggles.
Beside us loomed Julia’s car, also big, and brand-new, with airbags waiting to get Cody.
Julia opened the back door and I jumped out. She was already adjusting Cody’s backpack, tightening the straps even though he liked them so loose that the pack bounced against him. Miles and his older sister Suki were waiting patiently at the front door of school, frozen in place like kids in a J. Crew catalogue. I stood next to my mother and watched as Cody let himself be led away by Julia. His backpack was my old one from kindergarten, purple with hot pink trim. He wore my old rain slicker, too, a yellow one with a hood made like a duck’s face, the bill an orange visor, two eyes peering above it. The combination made him look small and vulnerable, like a kid that anything could happen to. Mom must have been thinking the same thing because she called out to him.
“Cody!” she called. “You’ll be in the back. Don’t worry.”
Julia and Cody turned. “What’s that?”
“The airbags,” Mom shouted, “are only in the front!”
Julia looked at her, confused, but Cody nodded.
“Have a good day!” our mother shouted to him.
“You, too!” he said, his voice tiny and high.
I thought maybe Mom should have walked him inside, but she was already upset so I didn’t point that out to her.
Cody’s voice drifted across the parking lot to us.
“What?” Mom shouted.
“I said,” he screamed, “in a plane crash do the kids die, too? Or just the grown-ups?”
“The plane won’t crash, Cody!” Mom called to him. “It’s going to be great! You’ll see!” But Cody didn’t wait for her to answer. He just kept walking fast with his head down.
Se?or Valdez, my Spanish teacher, stopped to stare at us from under his umbrella. I pretended not to notice. Finally, right before I died from embarrassment, he started walking again. I jumped out of the car, fast.
“Oh, yeah,” I said, hurrying away from my mother, “we’re all just fine.”
One of my favorite things to do was listen in on my parents’ telephone conversations. Even before they got divorced I liked doing it. Back then it was stuff like “Can you pick up Madeline at ballet?” or “Can you call Alexis to babysit?” Stuff that made me feel like warm toast inside. Family stuff. We don’t have a family now. It’s more like an unraveled sweater, pieces of it everywhere, the whole thing coming apart. The whole thing ugly. More irony: My mother worked for Family magazine. Ha!
I used to pick up the phone and listen and not even care if they knew. “Hang up, Madeline,” Mom might say. Or Dad would say, “What are we going to do about Mad? Send her to spy school?” in a really deep fake voice and then I would laugh. And then we would all three laugh. But once they got divorced I had to be more careful because chances were they would be fighting when I picked up the phone. If my mother was downstairs on the kitchen phone, I had to slip into her office and switch the phone on to speaker. They never knew I was sitting there listening.
After the trip of a lifetime got announced, they had a lot of long-distance arguments.
“I think it would have been good, appropriate even, if you had asked me before deciding to take my kids halfway around the world,” my father said.
“Really?” my mother said. “Well, I think it would have been good, appropriate even, if you’d asked before you decided to leave our family.”
My mother spent that first year crying and angry. Angry that he’d left her, angrier that he’d married someone else. That tart, she used to say. That was my mother’s idea of a joke; he had married a woman who made tarts for a living, the woman gourmet magazines called The Tart Lady, Ava Pomme. My mother did not even believe that her real name was Ava Pomme, that someone who would grow up to make tarts for a living would be named the equivalent of apple, and that her most famous tart was in fact her apple tart. “It’s all a little too convenient, isn’t it?” my mother wondered out loud all too often.
“Actually,” my father continued, “I don’t think you can even take them without my permission.”