“Don’t tell her what it says. I’m serious.”
Like she could keep anything from Mom. She just didn’t want me to tell because she wanted to be the one to do it, not because she was actually going to keep Dad’s secret.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Nowhere.”
The time Mom kicked Dad out for good, Uncle Ivan, Mom’s little brother, came to Seattle to help make sure it happened. Ivan’s friend Greg was there, too, in case Dad didn’t want to cooperate and they needed more muscle. They packed up Dad’s clothes and things while Dixie and I were at school, and when we got home everything was in one big pile. Greg’s back was to us while he filled a water glass from the kitchen tap. All I remember about him is the back of his head in that moment, bushy red hair around a tiny bald spot that maybe he didn’t know about.
“Take Dixie into your room and do your homework,” Mom said.
I looked at the pile, the edges of jeans and the corners of Tshirts and the small wooden box that I knew was full of guitar picks and ticket stubs from all the shows he’d been to. The corner of it showed from under his beat-up leather jacket.
Dixie also spotted it. “That’s Dad’s special box,” she said, as if only then realizing that the whole pile was Dad’s, and what it meant—that after all the warnings, this was really happening.
Mom nodded and wiped at her face like there were tears there, and Dixie went and put her arms around Mom’s waist. Mom said, “Gem, I asked you to take her, okay?” She pushed Ringo Starr away with her foot, not gently. Uncle Ivan leaned against the wall with the tips of his fingers in his pockets, watching.
In our room I sat on my bed and got out my homework, and Dixie lay on hers and cried. At first I tried comforting her. I said it would be okay.
“No it won’t,” she said.
I tried once more, and she wouldn’t answer. I went to her bed and patted her back. That had worked when she was little. She would feel sad, or upset, and I would try to make her feel better. Like when she didn’t get invited to a certain birthday party in second grade, or the time she lost her favorite doll on the bus. This time, she shoved me away, and I stood up, finally angry, and said, “She told him this would happen.”
“You don’t even care.”
“He’s the one who doesn’t care. If he did, he’d stop.”
I didn’t have to explain what I meant by “stop.” Just: stop.
Dixie sat up. Even with her face red and streaky and with mashed-down hair, she looked like a girl crying on TV. You wanted to put your arm around her. I wanted to. “She can’t kick him out,” Dixie said. “It’s his apartment, too.”
“Then he should come home at night. Then he shouldn’t have a girlfriend. He should have a job and help pay the rent.”
She pulled a pillow over her face and rocked.
“You can cry if you want,” I said. “I have to do my homework.” I turned my back on her.
“I hate you.”
Those words, coming from Dixie, should have stopped meaning much to me, but they always hurt. I sat on my bed and worked on a math problem.
Eventually Dixie fell asleep and I went out into the hall to watch Ivan and Greg and Mom sit around the table, waiting, one or the other of them occasionally whispering something into the smoky room. They’d put Dad’s stuff into boxes that someone must have gone down to the liquor store to get, and the boxes stood in a tower by the door. I scooted closer to the edge of the light and pulled my big sweatshirt over my knees.
Mostly I watched Uncle Ivan. He looked a lot like Mom only with dark hair, almost black, and hazel eyes instead of blue. He got more of the Greek-looking genes than Mom did. There was something about the way he brought his cigarette to his lips, a kind of confident and definite way, the tendons of his hands flexing, that made me wish he was there all the time.
He sensed me in the hall, glanced over, then pushed his chair away from the table. He came and stood over me, his half-smoked cigarette between his fingers. “You should probably go to bed.”
I squashed myself into the carpet harder and shook my head.
He crouched down with his back against the wall. “Gem. You know what? I think this is something you shouldn’t see. I think— How old are you?”
“Fourteen.”
“Fourteen?” he said, incredulous. “Shit. That happened fast.” He took a drag from his cigarette and looked toward where Mom sat. “I think this is something you don’t want to have in your head for the rest of your life.”
Already I had the tower of boxes, Dixie’s crying face, all the fights and everything else that had come before. I didn’t move. “What if it’s the last time I see him?” I whispered.
He put his hand on the back of my head and smoothed my hair. “Yeah? What if it is? You’ll be all right.”
I looked at his profile to see if he meant it, or if he was saying it to me just like I had said to Dixie that it would be okay, because how could either of us know?
A little of his ash had fallen on the carpet. He rubbed it in with his thumb until it disappeared. “If it is the last time, you don’t want this to be how you remember him, okay? You’re going to have enough shit to shovel your way out of down the line. Trust me, I know.”
“Ivan.” Mom had gone to stand by the window; now she turned and gestured. “I think that’s him down on the street.”
Uncle Ivan squeezed my neck, and when he stood, I did, too, and went to our room; I made kissing noises so Ringo would follow me, and closed the door. But still I listened, with my ear pressed to it. In the end, Dad went quietly. He must have seen Greg and Ivan and all his stuff piled up and known there’d be no point in pushing back.
I listened for my name. For him to say my name, or Dixie’s. For him to ask to say good-bye to us, demand it. I listened even as I went back to my bed, listened until I fell asleep, and when I got up in the morning, the tower of boxes, and my dad, were gone. Uncle Ivan was gone, too, back to his job and his life in Idaho.
Mom and Ivan hadn’t found all Dad’s things, though. A few days later I was looking for food and saw, up on a high shelf in the kitchen, a box marked “Wedding Stuff.” I wanted to see what kind of wedding stuff my parents had, but the box was full of cigarettes. Cartons of them, a brand from Mexico called Hacienda, with a man in a red serape, under a yellow sun, on each pack. I took the box to my room and put it under my bed.