I wondered if Tommy had known this story. If he’d known how much his mother had wanted to bring him into the world. I made myself a promise to tell him when I found him.
I reached the end and set the legal pad down. “It’s good,” I said. “A little muddled in the middle, but good.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“How can I make it better?”
A piece of advice Tommy had given me when we’d taken speech together popped into my head. I think he would have liked the idea of me passing it along to his mom. “The simplest way to structure an essay like this is: Tell ’em you’re gonna tell ’em. Tell ’em. Tell ’em you told ’em.”
Mrs. Ross pursed her lips dubiously. “Say again?”
“In the first part of your essay, you state the essay topic and briefly describe your argument—tell ’em you’re gonna tell ’em. The happiest day of your life was the day you found out you were pregnant. In the second part, you dive into the details that support your argument. The happiest day of your life was the day you found out you were pregnant because . . . Tell ’em. Then in the third part of your essay, you reiterate your argument and briefly list the supporting reasons from your second part. Tell ’em you told ’em.”
Mrs. Ross pulled her pad toward her and wrote down what I’d said. “I like that.”
“Just something I learned from a guy who was on the debate team at school.”
“Anything else?” she asked.
“Your spelling’s good, and you’ve got a great vocabulary.”
Mrs. Ross blushed. “I won the spelling bee in middle school. Beat Monique Heston by spelling ‘vertigo’ correctly. My mother kept the ribbon on the fridge at home until it was frayed and falling apart.”
I wanted to know more—to ask her about her life without Tommy—but after scaring her off the last time, I thought it best not to push.
“Well, I bet you’re going to ace the GED,” I said.
“The math part’s still tripping me up.”
“I’ll be glad when I never have to take another math class again.”
“You going to college?” she asked.
The question surprised me. It was the first Mrs. Ross had asked me about myself. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
Mrs. Ross stared down her nose at me, the same way she used to when Tommy and I would show up at the trailer covered in mud from running around in the woods, playing at being superheroes. But she’d never yelled. Just laughed and made us wash up outside under the hose.
“If you have the opportunity to go, you best take it.” She paused, looking over my shoulder out the windows, before returning her focus to me.
“My dad teaches at the community college, and I was thinking about going there for a couple of years.” I shrugged. “It’s just that I don’t know what I want to do with my life.”
“Isn’t that why folks go to college in the first place?”
“Yeah, but—”
Mrs. Ross waved her hand and cut me off. “Don’t ‘but’ me. I grew up north of here, a place called Winter Garden, but these little towns are all the same. They’re parasites that’ll devour your potential. You stick around a place like this and you’ll wake up one fine morning realizing you wasted your life.”
“But what if I’m waiting for someone?” I asked. “What if I leave and he comes back, and I miss him?”
I couldn’t tell if Mrs. Ross had guessed I was referring to Tommy. “So what if you do? If he’s important, you’ll find each other again.”
“It’s more than that. Every decision I make narrows the choices I can make after. It’s like, if I decide to study literature, I close the door on becoming a lawyer or a doctor.”
Mrs. Ross snorted. “Says who?”
“Everyone?”
“Look at me,” Mrs. Ross said. “I’m thirty-three years old, getting my GED. The only thing I’ve ever known is being a wife and flipping burgers at McDonald’s, but that’s going to change. I’m going to change it. The only thing in life that’s forever is death. You can change your mind about everything else.”
“I just don’t know how to decide.”
“You ever eat at Sunrise Buffet?”
“Yeah.” I didn’t mention the only time I’d gone was when she’d taken me and Tommy to celebrate Tommy winning his first debate tournament.
“You don’t load your plate with just one thing on the first go-around, do you? You have to sample a little of everything. And if you do decide to eat a whole plate of whatever, and you get halfway through and change your mind, you simply push your plate to the side and grab a new one.”
I also didn’t mention that the food at Sunrise had given me food poisoning, or that I’d spent two days suffering from cramps and couldn’t go anywhere that was more than a few feet from a toilet. “I guess,” I said. “But life’s not really that easy.”
Mrs. Ross laughed. “You’re young, white, and male. Life doesn’t get any easier.”
Ana called me to the register to help her handle a return. Before I stood up, I said, “Thanks, Mrs. Ross.”
She smiled. “Just remember: If it isn’t too late for an old lady like me to change, it certainly isn’t too late for you.”
224,618 AU
CALVIN HADN’T SHOWN UP TO school on tuesday, and he wasn’t answering my texts. I thought about driving to his house after school to check on him, but I wasn’t sure he’d appreciate me just showing up.
Dad was walking out the door when I got home, and we narrowly avoided colliding.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. “Your mom’s working late and I probably won’t be home for dinner.”
“Whatever.”
Dad stopped in the doorway to the garage. “I know you’re mad at me, Ozzie, but what happened is between me and your mother.”
“You let me blame her,” I said. “But this whole thing is your fault.”
“Look, I’m not defending what I did—”
“Because you can’t. You cheated; end of story.”
“But,” Dad said, “our marriage would have ended whether or not I cheated on your mom.”
“Sure. Keep telling yourself that.”
Dad gritted his teeth, but his anger flickered and faded. His shoulders fell. He walked out the door and shut it behind him.