In fact, the evening is more than a few notches above painless, which makes it about a hundred times better than any other one of these. Finally, this isn’t another asshole with a nice car, another crying jag and sauvignon blanc bender, another time Dawn got her hopes up for nothing. And maybe a couple of times I did too.
I sit on the couch and watch them sear some chicken breasts together, Brian occasionally throwing me a question about school.
“Let me save you time,” I say from the sofa, where I am sprawled channel surfing. “Eleventh grade, two point nine GPA, hate it.”
“Scarlett, turn off the TV and be helpful, please,” says Dawn. I do not listen.
“You ever see Shawshank Redemption?” asks Brian.
“Yep.”
“Have you considered tunneling yourself out over a period of twenty years or so?”
“Oh,” I laugh dryly. “I thought you were gonna ask if I’ve considered hanging myself.”
They both stop and look at me. The only noise is sizzling chicken and the dense buzz of awkwardness.
“You know, the guy who gets out? He hangs himself? Never mind.”
“I do remember. And, nah, I’d just stick with tunneling.”
“Noted.”
“Okay, so . . .” Brian pretends to jot something down. “Caustic stepdaughter. I can deal with that.”
Dawn laughs and nudges him playfully with her hip, looking happier than I’ve seen her in a long time. (Stepdaughter!!! I know she’s thinking, with multiple exclamation points, in that brain of hers that probably looks like a Buzzfeed list of the best kitten GIFs.) It’s funny. This whole time I thought I hated Dawn’s boyfriends because she seemed to spend more time dating them than she did with me, but now I realize I just hated them because I never saw them make her look like that.
Chapter 18
I FIND RUTH SITTING IN THE DIRTY WHITE LAWN CHAIR ON her patio, smoking her customary joint, totally engrossed in a book. Even in the nice weather, she’s still in her uniform of a crisp white dress shirt and wool trousers, with the small addition of cat-eye sunglasses. She lowers them down her nose and stares at me.
“You look bummed, lady,” she says.
“I’m a little bummed.”
“You want a beer?”
“I’m okay, thanks.”
“I’m gonna get a beer.”
She goes in, then comes back out with a giant forty-ounce, one of those brands you see being swigged from a brown bag mostly by burnout kids whose social lives revolve around parking lots.
She cracks it open.
“What happened?”
“Nothing. I don’t know. Gideon’s been ignoring me.”
“Yeah.” She pauses thoughtfully and kicks out her thin legs. “He didn’t talk to you at school when other people were around?”
Mildly surprised, I reply, “Yeah.”
She nods and twists her mouth sympathetically, saying nothing.
“Well?” I prompt.
“Well, what?”
“Don’t you have some kind of, like”—I am about to say wisdom, but I remember just in time that it’s her least favorite word—“crazy story about how you once slept with Francis Ford Coppola and learned something? I could use some levity.”
“Nope,” she says simply.
“Wow. The one time I actually ask for TMI.”
“A story! Okay. I can give you a story. So. I know this is a pretty big bomb to drop on you, but . . . I was your age once.”
“Really? This whole time I thought you sprang from Zeus’s head as an AARP member.”
“Well. I grew up in a really small town in rural Pennsylvania. My father died when I was six. He had a heart attack in bed one night, and my mother woke up and found him next to her cold. Did I ever tell you this?”
I shake my head. She sighs.
“Anyway. After that, my mom got real religious, thought God had punished her for not being a better Christian. I stopped going to church around fifteen. She would get royally pissed at me, take out her belt, the whole thing.”
I wince.
“Around this time, a new family moved to town. They were the first, and the only, black family in our neighborhood. They became the subject of a lot of gossip, especially in my momma’s church. The funny thing was, they were Christians too—they were Baptists and went to a church that seemed much more fun. And if you’re having fun, Catholics pretty much assume you’re a bad Christian.
“Anyway, they had a son my age, and unfortunately for him he got sent to my high school, which was religious Catholic. So he got a lot of shit from the other kids, obviously, about looking different, and cracks about how much the tax was on his folks, dumb stuff like that. I was getting some shit too at the time from kids at school, mostly for showing up drunk and running with what they thought was a bad crowd. I was considered . . . you know. I don’t know what they’d call it.”
“A bad influence?” I ask, and sigh quietly.