“Don’t treat me like an idiot, Marlena. This is my mother.”
“What are you two doing?” Mom asked, standing in the foyer entrance, looking like something cut from a better universe and shoddily pasted into this scene. She was about to drive off with a dealer who was willing to exchange baggies of pills for ten minutes rounding second base with my best friend, and I said nothing. “Did you just shut the door on him?”
The door opened a few inches, and Bolt jammed his head into the crack. “Everything okay?”
“Oh, come in,” said Mom, not sounding at all nervous or weird or date-y. “Mike, these mannerless heathens are my daughter, Catherine, and her friend Marlena.”
“I’ve known Marlena since she was this big and half as pretty.” Bolt flashed a row of gray teeth and held his palm out flat, measuring an invisible child. “I been friends with her daddy since high school.” He squeezed her to him, kissing her on the top of the head with an exaggerated smack. Mom bristled. At Marlena’s funeral, there was a lot of talk about her presence, the atmosphere she carried around with her everywhere like the effervescence that hovers above the surface of a glass of Coke. When she was shy or scared or unhappy, everything that made her herself turned off and that atmosphere vanished, so that she became, there really is no better word for it, a shell. With Bolt’s touch, Marlena braced herself, and Mom noticed it, too.
Bolt wasn’t bad-looking, but his teeth were crooked. I’d never seen him this close before, in normal light. His face was handsome in a slightly menacing way—he rocked on the balls of his feet, tapping the flower against his jeans. Very different from my dad, who, with his bumbling, put-on need for help and affection, was the male version of a damsel in distress. Bolt thrust the rose at my mom. Who was going to stop this?
Within minutes they were gone.
“She’ll be fine. He’s not like, evil. They’re going to Applebee’s. Don’t freak out.” Marlena’s face always got kind of puffy after she ate a lot, and she needed to wash her hair. “If he was going to be, like, your new stepdad,” she went on, “I’d be making sure that we did something.” But it’s just a date, she kept saying, reminding me that my mom never got out of the house after dark, or put on an outfit, or even got to go eat a burger at the pub, have a beer like a normal person. “There’s not a chance in hell your mom is actually going to like him. She’s hot. And smart. He’s had like two thoughts in his life and one of them is I’m hungry.”
I let her voice turn off the alarm ringing through my body, my conviction that in choosing to protect Marlena (and from what? from Bolt? from what my mom would think of her?) I’d surrendered my own mother to whatever made me so instinctively afraid of Marlena’s dad, who hovered at the periphery of everything we did, a shadow holding something sharp.
Plus, when Bolt kissed Marlena, Mom had reared up on her hind legs, a signal only I could read. It rarely happened these days, but I knew that aura of hers from childhood—from the time I told her that Maxwell Berry hawked a loogie into my hair every day on the bus home from school, from the few tense minutes after Dad canceled a visit. Behind the closed door, before the sound of a car revving up and pulling away, I’d heard Mom’s laugh. Fake and wary, in the key of I-don’t-know-about-this.
What did all that add up to, if not that she had everything under control?
*
After Mom left, Marlena and I went to work on the wine, wrestling an unopened Franzia from way back in the cabinet, where we’d carefully aligned a few boxes to stand in for Mom’s former stockpile. We filled two water bottles and took that and three boxes of macaroni and cheese over to Marlena’s house, to hang out with Sal for a little while before putting him to bed. Marlena and Ryder weren’t talking, for some new stupid reason I couldn’t keep track of, and Greg was with Tidbit, so it was just us. I liked it better that way, though I joined Marlena in grumbling about how lame it was to spend a Saturday with a kid under twelve. I even liked Sal, how when we were with him we took a break from being daring and got goofy drunk instead of wasted, went to bed early enough to see the sunny side of Sunday morning.
Probably most teenagers think where they live is boring. But there aren’t words for the catastrophic dreariness of being fifteen in northern Michigan at the tail end of winter, when you haven’t seen the sun in weeks and the snow won’t stop coming and there’s nowhere to go and you’re always cold and everyone you know is broke and the Gaslight Cinema only gets two shitty blockbusters every few weeks and not a single place is open twenty-four hours except a gas station. We couldn’t ski because only rich kids like Chelsea and Micah could ski unless you knew someone who worked at the slopes. School was a joke. The only thing that resembled a concert venue was the Goldwater Pub after ten o’clock on Friday nights, when the high school band teacher played James Taylor covers while he got soppy drunk off rum and Coke—and they were strict about IDs. The nearest shopping mall was a ninety-minute drive downstate, a solid two hours in bad weather, and the weather was always bad. Everything outside was beautiful. Icicles as tall as toddlers, the air so clear your breath dirtied it. So everyone drank. Teachers came to class with hangovers. Parents got DUIs after gliding past stop signs. We drank, and Marlena took her pills, and Ryder sold his crap meth, and even Jimmy, the smartest person I knew, was a miserable zombie, shuffling back and forth from the house to Kewaunee Plastics to Subway to the house as if someone had wound him up and set him down. Sometimes we drove whatever car we could get our hands on way out into the country, even farther out than where we lived, and parked by one of the zillion frozen lakes in a twenty-mile radius for a profoundly unsatisfying change of scenery. Cher’s office had a UV light, and during appointments she shined it into my face, promising it would cheer me up.
What she didn’t get, and what I could never have fully explained, was that though it was truly, numbingly, oppressively, dangerously boring in Silver Lake, I was happier than I’d ever been. I felt strangely free. I had dropped the ball so completely; but the world hadn’t ended. Winter muffled everything.
The barn was messy, as usual, but at least the dishes were sort of clean. I rerinsed a huge pot and set some water to boil, lining up two boxes of mac ’n’ cheese on the counter.
“My mom always puts ketchup in it,” Sal said. We tried to ignore it when he mentioned his mom—he kept doing it lately, talking about her as if she was upstairs instead of missing for years.
“How about we just put lots of ketchup in yours?”