RUBY DIDN’T HESITATE
Ruby didn’t hesitate to drop me off on the Green. She kept checking her hair for white strands as she drove and looking out for red ribbons on the lawns we passed, in case anyone had happened upon that particular balloon and saw fit to leave her money.
She let me out, reminding me that London and I should stay in town, saying she’d be right back here later, and I wondered what she’d do without me, with Jonah stewing in the house, wanting whatever he wanted from her. I wondered if she’d let him upstairs when I wasn’t home. Into her room, onto our bed. I wondered and then I forcibly stopped myself from wondering.
London and her friends were nowhere in sight, so I took a perch on Ruby’s favorite stone bench—the one dead center on the Green, there for the looking and to be looked at. If you were sitting in this spot, you were near impossible to miss.
Town was filled with tourists and locals hawking their rainbow-painted garbage to tourists, and the sidewalks were crowded enough for me to miss her at first.
But the next time I looked up, there she was, my mother, across the street outside the jewelry store, a few doors down from the tavern. She called herself Sparrow now, I reminded myself; I didn’t even have to think of her as Mom.
She was pretending to look into the display window, but when I caught her there, her head turned and I had a full view of her face. Her hair wrapped down around her shoulders like a shawl made of hair and not hair itself. She never used to wear makeup—Ruby once tried, and failed, to teach her how to put it on—and I guess she still hadn’t learned, so her lips were paler than her cheeks, her eyelashes nonexistent from this distance. She made up for the washed-out face by being all color everywhere else. Her long skirt was woven in shiny, multicolored threads and the summer tank top she had on was bright pink and way too tight, like something a girl my age would wear.
It was impossible to not see her there; I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t.
She lifted a hand and gave a tight-lipped smile. She motioned to indicate something down the street. My eyes drifted, following the path, and landed on the glowing light advertising beer. She wanted me to meet her in the bar.
Then I heard, “Hey, Chlo!” And London was rescuing me by sidling up and collapsing on the bench. “What’re you looking at?”
She scratched at her lanky arms and followed my eyes to . . . the spot of sidewalk in front of the jewelry store. There was nothing blocking the glass case; no one was there.
“That place sucks,” London said. “They jack up prices for the tourists. But I bet Ruby’d get you something from there if you asked her. . . .”
“Nah,” I said.
I knew I should be feeling some kind of emotion—that flurry of color and hair retreating down the sidewalk was my mother, biological and all else. I wanted nothing to do with my dad, so if I didn’t have Ruby, she was really all I’d have.
She wanted to see me; I should want to see her.
“So everyone’s at the rec field now, c’mon,” London said.
She had me by the hand, and I realized how my hand turned colder just by being in hers, the joints in my fingers locking up. She led me away from the Green, and from my mother, who I didn’t want to talk to anyway, and we’d already reached the rec field before I got up the guts to ask who “everyone” was.
Then there was my answer: Owen, who stood huddled with his friends.