After a second, Dad nodded. “Oh yeah, sure, hey.”
“That’s all you got for me? ‘Hey’?” He glanced at us, and Dad turned and said, “Gimme a minute here.” They walked down to the corner together.
“Have you told Mom he’s here?” I asked Dixie while keeping one eye on Dad.
“No.”
“You should. You should text her right now.”
Her hand went to her pocket, where she kept her phone. “That’d only mess everything up.”
“Mess what up? You seriously think his stupid plan is going to work? You know what’s going to happen when she sees him in our house.”
We leaned against a building, watching Dad. I checked Dixie’s face. She was still trying to be happy, staring at Dad like he was some kind of rock star. But she couldn’t hide her feelings, not from me. I saw the doubt already forming—about how Mom was going to take it, maybe about other things.
“That guy he’s talking to,” I said. “He looks like some weed dealer or something.” Or maybe Dad owed him money; Bongo wasn’t grinning anymore.
“Not everything is terrible, Gem. Some things are good.” Dixie folded her arms and moved away from me. “Why can’t you give this one little chance to be a good thing?”
“Because I can’t.”
Dad came back; Bongo went the other way.
“Sorry,” Dad said. “Just some loser I used to know. I wanted to make sure he knew to stay away from me and my girls.”
Dixie looked at me like, See?
It started to drizzle. Dad laughed and looked at the sky. “Fucking Seattle, man. This is the place.”
He put his arm around Dixie again; I kept myself separate for the rest of the walk home. I needed my Hacienda, and time to think. I heard Mr. Bergstrom’s voice in my head. You don’t have to. No one had a gun at my back as we walked down the street. The only gun at my back was me—not just how I’d promised to keep my eye on Dixie when it came to Dad, but also how there was a piece of me tired of trying not to be a regular girl.
So I kept walking. Dad pointed out this or that place where he used to go, asked what happened to his old favorite pizza shop, what happened to the guitar store. When we got to the front of our building, Dad looked up at it, the ugly beige, the way it was streaked with dirt. Pigeons perched on the roof and fire escapes and anywhere else they could find a square inch of space. Garbage filled the gutter and was scattered around the front gate.
“Shit,” he said, letting his arm fall away from Dixie. “Did it always look like this?” The question came quiet, like he was asking himself.
“Yeah,” I said. “It did.”
“It’s not that bad on the inside,” Dixie told Dad.
He shifted his backpack to the front of him and held it close. For once the gate was locked like it was supposed to be. I opened it with my key and we went up the three flights of stairs to our unit.
“Did it always smell like this, too?” Dad asked. With each flight, his steps slowed. He stopped on the second-floor landing. Dixie stopped, too, and so did I after a couple more stairs. “What?” I asked, looking back down at them. He was as fit and wiry as he’d ever been. The stairs couldn’t have been a problem.
“I don’t know.” He rubbed his goatee. His eyes were rimmed in red. “I didn’t expect it to . . .” He could only finish that sentence with a shrug.
Dixie gave me that look again, like she was right and I was wrong, and Dad was this sensitive hero, come back to save us. For the briefest seconds of seeing him from my place on the stairs and knowing red eyes can’t be faked, I wondered if she could be right. Then a door slammed somewhere above us, and we heard footsteps coming down. Dad seemed to shake whatever he felt off, and we continued up. Dad greeted the neighbor we passed on the stairs cheerily, fake.
When we walked through the door to our apartment, he said, “Yep,” nodding as he looked around, touched the wall. “I remember this.” He pointed to the couch. “That’s new.”
The old one had been covered in tiny spots, where ash or cigarette butts had scorched the fabric before the building manager gave Mom a final warning about smoking inside.
“Used,” I said.
“Used from . . .” Dixie started. “Used.”
Len, she didn’t say. Len, who Mom dated for a month, worked in a furniture warehouse and got us this before they broke up. We never actually saw Len himself, only heard about him from Mom. Two delivery guys from his work brought it over.
“The place doesn’t actually need much cleaning,” Dad decided. I don’t know what he expected. That we’d been living in squalor or something? “Let’s call a cab and go to the store.”
7.
SHOPPING WAS just like Dad promised it would be—everything we needed, anything we wanted. We stocked up on bread and apples and peanut butter, eggs and cereal, cheese, milk. Bags of chips, boxes of crackers, cans and cans of stuff—chili and soup and tuna. Also tampons and pads, and pills for cramps and headaches. Dixie slipped some makeup into the cart. I did the same with shampoo and conditioner and a serum that said it would give my limp hair more body.
Dixie smiled at me once while adding a big package of cookies to our mountain of stuff, the first of her smiles aimed at me in a week. She was practically skipping alongside the cart, skipping like she’d do when she was little, while Dad walked behind us making suggestions. “Get that cheddar popcorn, Gem, you like that.”
At first I tried to let myself be happy like her. I did savor the idea of opening up the cupboard for weeks to come and always finding something to eat, and I liked it that Dad remembered my favorite foods. But the more stuff we piled into the cart, the sadder I felt. Because it wasn’t how things were supposed to be. We weren’t in some game show where the prize was all the groceries you wanted. Our dad buying us food shouldn’t have been a special treat, it shouldn’t feel like Christmas or a trip to Disneyland; we should have had it all along. There should have been child support, there should have been someone making sure we had what we needed at school. There should have been regular bedtimes and no one working nights, leaving us home all alone. We should have been getting advice—better advice than “Don’t ever go to Texas.”
I trailed farther and farther behind the cart and hung back while the cashier rang it all up. The total came close to four hundred dollars, and I thought Dad would freak out and tell us we had to choose stuff to put back. But he didn’t. He paid in cash, and how he had that much money I didn’t want to know.
We took another cab back to the apartment, with the trunk full of bags. Dixie sat between me and Dad, snuggling up to him, her hand slipped through the crook of his elbow while I leaned against the door.