Mom didn’t ask any more questions. She was so quiet I wanted to cry. We drank a cup of tea together in the dim kitchen, waiting for Jimmy without saying.
Marlena and I were very different, but sometimes, when we were together, we could erase our separate histories just by talking, sharing a joke or a look. But in the kitchen with Mom, the kitchen that was always clean, where there was always something to eat, where the water flowed predictably from the tap and behind every cabinet door were dishes, only dishes, I saw how wrong I was to feel like Marlena and I had so much in common, and how lucky. Because here was the difference that mattered. My skinny mom with her Chardonnay smell and her forgetting to unplug the flat iron, with her corny jokes about broccoli farts and her teeth bared in anger and her cleaning gloves in the backseat of the car, my mom who refused to stop loving me, who made dumb mistakes and drank too much and was my twin in laughter, my mom who would never, ever, leave, who I trusted so profoundly that a world without her in it exceeded the limits of my imagination. That was the difference, and it was huge, and my never seeing it before is something that I still regret.
I slept with Mom that night, in her big bed with her good, sinking pillows, listening as she woke herself up every couple of hours with a single snore that made her turn over, and I loved her, as my mom and as a person, for everything, for being the one who stayed.
*
The cops picked up Marlena’s dad at the Shell station in Grayling. He was hiding in the bathroom, sitting on the back of the toilet, his shoes on the seat, hoping they’d look for feet and nothing more; that’s what he told her when she visited him in the jail below the courthouse.
“You know where the park kind of like mounds up,” Marlena told me. “That’s where the cells are. They’re underground, right there in the middle of town.”
Drunks drying out under the gazebo, the decorative railroad ties, the sunflower garden. All those men pacing their tiny rooms, waiting for their transfer to whatever crappy place was next.
In the Kewaunee News story about Randall Joyner’s arrest, Ann Simons wrote that he stood on top of a toilet in an attempt to evade police, yelling that he had a gun, right hand tenting his T-shirt, trying to fool four officers with their weapons drawn.
“We knew that was no gun,” said Officer Dalkey, in the article’s only quote. “No gun’s that skinny.”
A few weeks after his arrest, he was moved to a penitentiary in the Upper Peninsula. As far as I know, Marlena never visited him there.
*
Candice got Marlena a job behind the counter at Mulvie’s Pies, downtown, next to the post office. She picked her up every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning and drove Marlena back to our house at the end of her shift. One weekend morning, Candice had breakfast with us, and she talked to Marlena about how to apply for custody of a minor, the steps she’d have to take to get Sal back. To be his in loco parentis, Marlena said. Loco, like crazy, which made sense to me, because I couldn’t really imagine her taking care of a kid. I watched them scheming, Marlena’s hair butter-yellow in the sunlight coming through the window. I don’t want your charity, Marlena must have told me a dozen times. If you don’t want me in your space, if it gets too much for you, I’m okay, I’ll sleep in the barn. But I never didn’t want her in my space. And she did want our charity, didn’t she? Maybe that’s why Candice was working so hard—helping Marlena navigate the system, her missing mom who had no death certificate and couldn’t be tracked down to sign a custody form, barrier after barrier after barrier.
After that horrible day, after Marlena woke and after she spent two hours throwing up, she thanked my mom with tears streaking her face, and since then she’d seemed, to me at least, completely and one hundred percent sober. Jimmy thought so too—he said that was why she was so quiet and sick to her stomach. She paid attention to how I rinsed my dishes after using them and did so too. She never took food from the fridge without asking, though before she’d helped herself. I walked in on her once in the bathroom, pulling a clump of blond hair from the shower drain. Most nights she sat at the table with my mom and talked to her for a little while, asking her stories about her life, listening with a genuine interest that I just didn’t have. Even when Marlena sang in those weeks, she sang under her breath. We had to tell her that it was okay, that she could sing as loud as she wanted here.
We three, supposedly a family, were easier with each other when she was around. Or maybe it was just math—the three of us, for balance, required four.
“That you have the house is good,” said Candice. “But you have to make it livable. You need an income. We need evidence of sobriety, or I do.”
And so, once a week, she stuck around downtown after her shift at Mulvie’s and went to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting at St. Patrick’s. Or at least, that’s what she said.
*
Just before we were supposed to start school, I asked her, offhand, what she was going to wear.
“I’m not going back,” she said. “But you should definitely wear that.”
I stared at my reflection in the mirror, at her reflection behind mine, flipping through a magazine on my bed. The jeans were too tight, but Marlena always said I shouldn’t deprive the world of my body just because I was insecure. I said not everyone was blessed with a thigh gap wider than a baseball.
“Yeah, me neither.”
“No, really. I’m not going back. I’ve talked to Candice about it. My grades are shit, Cat. I got an E last year. Do you even know what an E is?”
“That’s not a grade.”
“I think I’m the first person who ever got one. They made a grade up for me, that’s how crap my grades are. I’m not going to be able to take care of Sal if I’m a high school student with no money. What’s the point? I’m not going to go to college anyway. Candice agrees with me, we’ve already, like, talked and talked about it.”
“You’re going to be a dropout, you realize that, right? A high school dropout.”
“Hey! Both my parents were dropouts.”
“My point exactly.”
“I can get my GED—I can do that while I’m working.”
“What does Jimmy say?” Since she started living with us, I found myself asking her what Jimmy said, like Jimmy was the dad and she was the kid, and Jimmy and I were her parents, or something.
“He says I can get my GED and take classes at NCC, if I want. He also said I’m too smart for that place.” She was bragging, in her way. Hadn’t he said the precise opposite to me, or at least implied it, all those months ago, when I’d thrown a fit about going to KHS?