My prospects of finding a job in a small town are a little dismal, but if we live here with Dad, our overhead will be minimal. Greg pays healthy child support for Elle, enough to cover anything she needs. But my mother will roll over in her not-yet-grave if I take a job at McDonald’s or some other fast-food establishment.
“You can do better, Maisey.” This has been her response to any job I’ve ever held. She’s right, of course. A gig taking Santa photos at the mall during the holiday season isn’t exactly a resume builder. It was fun, though. I loved every minute. Every job I’ve ever embarked upon was a learning experience or an adventure or just plain fun. Even the newspaper reporter job that took me to Kansas City in the first place was fun, until my editor retired and was replaced by a soul-sucking asshat who wanted to leap the corporate ladder in a single bound.
About two weeks into his tenure, I quit and took a job with a temp agency, which has landed me stints doing everything from answering phones in a veterinary office to writing community articles for small newspapers. I love the variety, even though I know this is a phase I should probably have grown out of about twenty years ago. I keep waiting for some great life purpose to rise up in front of me and declare itself, but I don’t seem to be wired for greatness.
Elle is staring at me, tapping the pen on the table.
“What?”
“You were daydreaming. Are you really going to just let the church ladies plan Grandma’s funeral?”
“I am. What’s next?”
She grins. “Tony.”
“I don’t think I follow you.”
“We’ve got safety and basic needs and shelter taken care of. Love and belonging come next.”
“Could we skip that and get straight to self-actualization? Besides, I have you and Grandpa. All the love I could possibly need.”
Elle makes a scoffing noise. “Not the same. Tony’s cute. Don’t you think?”
Cute isn’t the word I would use for Tony. At all. Too masculine. Too much muscle. Too much shadow hidden beneath his grin and his gentleness. I’m not about to share any of these thoughts with my daughter.
“Can we get back to work?” I ask her. “I don’t have time for boys right now.”
This doesn’t get me off the hook.
“Oh, fine,” she says. “Aunt Marley, then. She definitely fits under love and belonging. Don’t you miss her? We can go to the concert, right?”
Marley.
I don’t remember her as anything more than an imaginary friend, and yet her name is at the center of everything—all this mystery. It is also the heart of the breach between my mother and me. My desire to find my sister is equally balanced by a desire to stay as far away from her as possible.
I take a breath, curl my toes, tap my fingers on my thighs. One of my counselors taught me this trick for staying grounded—one of the counselors who reinforced my mother’s continued statements that Marley was made up of my imagination, that I needed to make real friends and live in the real world.
Elle is waiting for an answer. I give her an evasion.
“So she’s Aunt Marley now? Just like that?”
“Well, she is my aunt, right? So what else would I call her?”
I drop my head into my hands and rub my temples. “Elle, this isn’t going to be some exuberant family reunion. She might not even want to know us. Maybe she’s a terrible person, and we don’t want to know her. If we go to that concert. If.”
“She’s family,” Elle says, as if that is the answer to everything. “It doesn’t matter what kind of person she is; she’s still family.”
Leah’s Journal
I married Boots when I was sixteen, a bona fide shotgun wedding. My father sobered up long enough to be outraged and make some empty threats. Boots didn’t need threatening. He was into me and loved the idea of himself as a father, that he was recreating in his own image. He wanted me by his side all the time, everywhere. I loved the way he wanted me all to himself.
“We don’t need anybody else,” he would say. I agreed. My few friendships fell away, one by one.
Mom was just too beaten down and tired to raise a fuss.
She tried. I’ll credit her with that.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said to me. “Being pregnant isn’t the end of everything. Have the baby. Give it up for adoption. You’re a smart girl. You should finish school.”
I thought this to be stupid advice. She hadn’t done that. Why should I?
Logic, with a sixteen-year-old girl, doesn’t always exist. I ought to have seen it then, where her own shotgun marriage landed her. With me and an alcoholic husband and no real life whatsoever. But I was madly in love.
At that point, I had no clue I was carrying twins. The idea of a baby (let alone two!) was sort of nebulous and unreal. My body hadn’t changed much. Apart from a little nausea in the mornings, I wasn’t even sick. Boots looked like an escape. Like salvation and a dream. He was going to be a rock star. And he’d chosen me—me! We were going to live in a mansion and have a castle in France. Travel all over the country, where he would perform before adoring fans.
And me? I would travel with him, of course. Me and a baby. One happy family.
It wasn’t a church wedding. The pastor of our church refused to perform the ceremony. I thought at the time he was judging us because I was pregnant. I wonder now if it was his attempt to save me, or at least his refusal to be part of the devil’s deal I was making.
So we were married at the courthouse, by a justice of the peace. I couldn’t afford a wedding dress, and God knows Boots couldn’t afford to buy one for me. He told me not to worry about it.
“We are not the dress-up sort of people, you and me,” he said. So I wore my usual blue jeans, with a long shirt to conceal the snap I could no longer close.
I didn’t have a friend to be my witness. For one, they were all too young to be legal. And I’d been so completely absorbed in Boots since that very first night that I really had no friends left who were interested.
My mother signed for me.
Boots brought two of his band members to bear witness. One was his buddy, Irv somebody. I never did know his last name. The other was a girl, Jolene Avery. Her name I knew too well. Boots talked about her a lot. What a fantastic singer she was. Her accommodating nature (this to highlight my own stubborn willfulness). How thin, how active, how sexy.
On our wedding day, Boots bought me flowers. A bouquet of genuine red roses. Nobody had ever done that before. He told me I was the most beautiful girl in the world and that we were going to be ecstatically happy. He didn’t even look at Jolene on that day, his eyes only for me.
Chapter Seventeen
Of course we go to Marley’s concert on Friday night, even though Mom’s funeral is scheduled for Saturday. How can I not take advantage of an opportunity to talk to my sister? To finally find out what happened? To see if she’s anything like the Marley my imagination conjured up for me as a child?
But it seems so wrong to go out to a brewpub for a concert, no matter what the reasons are. I worry about what people will think. I feel guilt and anticipation in equal measure.
As for Elle, she just keeps on arranging everything, and I keep on letting her. One of the things she’s arranged, unbeknownst to me, is for Tony and Mia to go with us.
“Good for you,” Mia says, engulfing me in a warm hug when they swing by to pick us up. “So many people get all stuffy about grief. Life doesn’t end when somebody dies. I think it’s fantastic that you’re trying to go do something fun.”
Even Tony’s mother, who volunteered to stay with Dad while we are out, is totally on board with the program. She bustles in, radiating competence, kindness, and goodwill, another casserole in hand. This one gives off a heavenly aroma of tomato and cheese that makes my mouth water. She introduces herself as Hannah, but I can’t bring myself to call her anything but Mrs. Medina.
The first thing she does after introductions is dish up a plate of food for Dad. He tries to tell her he isn’t hungry, but she won’t hear it. It only takes her about five minutes to cajole him into his chair at the table, a plate full of food in front of him.