I would see Dad soon—nothing else mattered. Even, for once, Marlena.
I’d never been on a date, but I felt like I was preparing for one that morning. I tried on one skirt and then another, neither of which had escaped the closet since Pontiac, before settling on something of Marlena’s—the peach dress she’d worn the day I’d watched Ryder make a drop at Cascade Drive. She’d left it at my house weeks before, a habit she picked up after noticing Mom would wash her clothes with mine. I pulled the cotton dress over my head, surprised that it fit me not unlike it fit her—it flared a little more at my hips, which were chubbier than hers, but the neckline revealed a similar valley between my breasts. My hair skimmed my collarbone, mouse brown. Nothing I could do about that. I smeared foundation across my face and brightened my cheekbones with bronzer. Marlena had taught me how to run the smudgy pencil along the inner rim of my eyelids, that the shimmery powder went in the hollow between the bridge of my nose and my tear ducts, what the word definition meant. I curled my eyelashes and coated them twice with mascara. To finish, I sprayed vanilla body mist into the air and then walked through the stinging cloud.
In the car, Mom pointedly rolled down the window, despite the chill and the whiffs of manure that blew in as we sped out of Silver Lake and past the farms along the highway. Mom, too, had dressed with care. She wore a gauzy tunic that showed off the camisole hugging her torso; the skin on her chest glittered a little in the light, from that stupid lotion she used. If it hadn’t been so obvious that she was trying to look young, I would have admitted that she looked kind of great. More and more lately, she was borrowing my clothes and shopping in the juniors section at Maurice’s. When she wore sparkly lip gloss and high-heeled boots, I wanted to shake her, hug her, and delete her existence, somehow all at once. To top it off, since her disastrous date with Bolt—which had not been repeated—I couldn’t stop noticing how, all sunny and pale-eyed, with her narrow hips and skinny arms, she looked more like Marlena’s mom than mine.
At a stoplight a few miles out of town, Mom pulled down her overhead mirror and frowned at herself, licking the pad of her finger and wiping at a smudge of brown shadow that had gone rogue below her left eye.
“It looks good, Momma,” I said, surprised by a wave of love that interrupted the cringing mortification I’d felt for her since I realized she’d spent a good hour straightening her already perfectly straight hair. “You look really pretty.”
She flipped up the mirror, threw an arm over my shoulder, and hugged me. My cheek glued itself to her chest—I worried faintly about my mascara but then I closed my eyes, taking in her essence, so familiar it was beyond sensory, a biological narcotic that I both resisted and craved. I let her hold me. The light turned green and she kept hugging me, not that it really mattered, since there wasn’t a single other car on the road.
“There’s my baby,” she said to my scalp. “I knew you were in there somewhere.”
*
“Slow book?” Mom asked, glancing at the copy of The Left Hand of Darkness sitting unopened on my lap.
“No,” I said. “Just can’t really focus.”
Twenty minutes outside of Gaylord my phone vibrated. A text from Marlena. Ma peche don’t let the devil get you down!!! A few seconds later, my phone buzzed again. Hate it when you leave, hate it when you leave.
Do you know where Jimmy is, I texted.
An instant later: Nope.
Mom drove us into the parking lot of a diner called Culver’s. Fields of half-broken corn stalks surrounded the restaurant; across the street a BP station and an Arby’s faced off. The lot was empty except for a few cars, none of which I recognized. “He’s not here yet,” Mom chirped. It was 12:14 p.m. Whenever a car whizzed by, we tensed, but none of them turned.
“I’m sorry, hon,” said Mom, at 12:32. “He’s probably just running late or bumped into traffic leaving the city or something. Want to go in and get some food?”
“At Culver’s?”
Mom laughed. “What the fuck is Culver’s, anyway?”
“I don’t want to eat anything that belongs to someone named Culver.”
“They probably don’t even serve food. It’s probably just like, some sad hick’s living room.”
“I bet it smells like a hundred million lima beans farted in there.”
We were both trying too hard to truly laugh, but still, I felt more at home with her than I had in months. “You said fuck,” I told her.
“Fuck,” she said, and then we actually did laugh. The sound of us blended together.
“You know when I really, really started to wonder if your dad was bad news?”
12:35. I texted Dad a dozen question marks.
“I was pregnant with you. I guess I had plenty of reasons for thinking that when Jimmy was a baby, but I was in new mother mode and completely obsessed with your brother and paid more attention to his bowel movements, than, like, whether or not I’d eaten more than a potato chip in days.”
“Gross.”
“With you, I got really fat. Like, really, really fat. I had these crazy cravings for fish sandwiches from McDonald’s—they were literally the only thing I wanted to eat. Nana used to joke that you’d come out swimming.”
“Gee, Mom, thanks for the brain damage.”
“Oh, you’re fine.”
One time, she said, settling into the story, when I was huge in her belly, ready to come out, she asked if Dad would go pick her up a Filet-O-Fish. Jimmy was fussy, crying about every little thing, and it was maybe seven or eight—she’d already eaten, she remembered, but she was hungry again. She said I would understand one day, when I was pregnant, what it felt like to be hungry like that, just all the time, a hunger that didn’t subside even when you were literally chewing. When Dad didn’t answer she asked him again—but still, he said nothing. “Rick,” she said once, twice more, but he kept staring at the TV. So she picked up Jimmy, who, by then, was absolutely screaming, and stood in front of the TV, blocking Dad’s view. “It wasn’t that he wasn’t jumping up to do my bidding,” she said. “It was that he wasn’t answering me.” He did that a lot, ignored even direct questions, and it got so she felt like she was crazy, like maybe she was opening her mouth to speak and nothing was coming out. When she lost it, started throwing a tantrum to match Jimmy’s, Dad stood up and banged out of the house. She assumed he was going to the drive-through, but he didn’t come back until the next morning. Later, she found two fish sandwiches in a greasy paper bag in the backseat of the car.