I was thirteen then, maybe twelve. He saw me across the room and smiled. That’s how I knew he’d risk getting fired for Ruby; lots of boys in town would.
“You up for some cheesecake, Chloe?” he asked me then, because if a guy wanted a solid shot at Ruby, he had to make an effort with her little sister. And I said yeah sure I wanted some cheesecake, and with cherries, and before you knew it he was heading south for the Mid-Hudson Bridge, trying to beat the 1:00 a.m. weekend closing at Veniero’s, some bakery in Manhattan that he assured us made the best cheesecake in the whole state. We didn’t even give him gas money, though Ruby donated a nickel for the tolls.
And I honestly don’t know—didn’t care—if he got fired the next day or not.
How easy it had been to convince him. He could have said no; he’d made a valiant effort. But in the end he didn’t. He physically couldn’t. And I don’t think he even liked cheesecake.
My dad, though, he seemed to have a strength that boy couldn’t muster. Or else Ruby had lost a touch of her magic in the years we’d been apart. My dad came out of his office all beard and big head, like he held all the power, like no one could tell him what to do, and I hated him a little bit then, hated him a lot, for thinking he could deny Ruby what she wanted.
“So it’s all settled,” my dad said. “I assume Ruby’s staying for dinner?”
“Oh no,” Ruby said. “I’m staying, but not for dinner. I’m on a liquid diet, you know, a cleanse. Shakes only, the fruit kind or the milk, and I don’t want you to go to any trouble with the blender.”
She nodded politely at the man who was my father, though he’d skipped out on me before I could walk, and then she nodded politely at the woman who was married to the man who was my father, and pulled me by the sleeve up out of the basement to get the hell away from them both.
I should have known she’d come for me at some point. I should have been waiting. Ruby was impetuous. She did things like head down the driveway to check the mailbox, wearing only rain boots, a hoodie, and a summer slip with a jam stain on the lace hem, and end up across state lines, hours from home, telling my dad she’d come for custody.
I don’t know what happened during her walk down the driveway that made her decide she had to have me back immediately—she didn’t say. It must have been really important to leave right then, though, because otherwise she totally would have put a dress on over that slip.
Once Ruby decided on a thing, it was like, in her mind, it grew legs and turned real. She could write on a piece of paper the color underwear I’d have on tomorrow and fold it up a dozen times and hide it down deep in the toe of her boot, and even if I searched through my dresser drawers blindfolded, picking out a pair I hadn’t worn in weeks, she’d have known, somehow, that I’d pick red. Almost as if she’d willed the color on my body by writing down its name.
“What did my dad say?” I asked. We’d convened in my camper, climbed up to the bed compartment wedged over the wheel, even though it was pretty humid up there, to discuss in private.
“He said you have school,” she said, wrinkling her nose.
She pressed her palm to the screen of the porthole window that looked out over my stepmom’s garden and, outside, a bumblebee flew up close to it, then flitted away. She tapped the screen, but it didn’t come back, not even to be near her.
“I do have school,” I said. “For three more weeks.”
“He said you have finals and if you don’t take them you’ll fail out or whatever and have to repeat the tenth grade.” She flipped over to study me. “You lost your bangs.”
“They grew out like a year ago,” I said, but softly, because I wasn’t mad. I was thinking that this was the moment she was seeing me after all this time without bangs, and I’d always been thinking about this moment, wondering if she’d like me this way.