I’d ask them what they’re doing up, but I already know the answer. They almost never sleep, not for more than a couple of hours a night anyway. They’ll probably be in this same spot when I get up in the morning, only they’ll have swapped the sodas for cups of coffee, and the pie for donuts covered in powdered sugar.
I pick up the pie, kiss each of them on the cheek, and go upstairs. My room is on the third floor, which is actually the attic, and which I have to myself. My father mostly lives in an old Airstream trailer parked behind the house. He comes inside to eat, but he says sleeping in a house with too many people makes him dream their dreams, so he prefers to be in the trailer.
I go inside, shut the door, and set the pie on top of the stack of books on my bedside table. I get undressed and sit on the edge of the bed, eating the pie. It’s super sweet, and I wonder if I’ll regret having so much sugar before I try to sleep, but it’s so good that I actually think about going downstairs for another piece.
Instead, I lie on my bed. On the floor beside it is a telephone, the old-fashioned kind with an actual dial. I pick it up and place it on my stomach, then turn off the light so that the room is dark except for the little bit of moonlight that comes in through the window.
I run my fingers over the dial until one of the holes feels right, then I turn it. I do this nine more times, press the receiver to my ear, and wait. When the ringing starts, I hold my breath. After four rings, a man’s voice says, “Hello?”
“Tell me a story,” I say.
“Who is this?”
“Tell me a story.”
There’s a pause, then the man says, “Asshole,” and the line goes dead.
I put the receiver back in the cradle and set the phone on the floor. I’m disappointed, but not surprised. Most people don’t respond. I guess they don’t have stories to tell.
Two
“How many toads in Millard Fillmore’s water dish today?” Starletta asks.
I open the kitchen door and glance at the bowl sitting in the grass beside the steps.
“Five,” I report.
Starletta looks at Clodine, who is pulling the chocolate sprinkles off of a cruller. “What’s five mean, Ma?” she asks.
Clodine shrugs. “Hank is better at prognostication,” she says, pinching the sprinkles between her thumb and forefinger and dropping them into her coffee mug. “I always forget what the numbers signify.”
“Five is good,” Hank says. “Six would mean a lot of money coming in, but five means something interesting will happen. Four would mean rain.”
“Something interesting,” Clodine repeats. “That’s right. I remember now. And what would seven mean?”
“That we have a toad problem,” says Hank.
“Sometimes I think you all just make this stuff up,” I say as I open the refrigerator door and take out the milk.
“And why would we do that?” asks my grandmother.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “But honestly, do you think the number of toads sitting in the dog bowl really means anything?”
“We’ll see,” Clodine says. “Something interesting happens today, then it does.”
“And what does interesting mean, anyway?” I ask. “To some people, that could be finding a penny on the sidewalk.”
“What’s gotten into you?” Starletta says, fixing me with a stare. She makes me nervous, and I spill Froot Loops on the counter.
“Nothing,” I mutter, sweeping the cereal into a bowl and sloshing milk over it.
Reluctantly, I sit down at the kitchen table. I can feel the three of them watching me, so I concentrate on the calendar that hangs on the wall beside the door. At the top of the page is printed COMPLIMENTS OF TOONEY’S FEED & FARM. WE APPRECIATE YOUR BUSINESS! Below that is a painting of a tractor moving through a field of corn. The farmer driving it is waving and smiling, as if harvesting corn is the most exciting thing anyone could ever do. The month is August. The date of the seventeenth is circled in red, and in the box is written: ILONA’S BABY.
Ilona is my mother. The baby is me. The calendar hung on the wall the summer she was pregnant with me. And the reason the calendar is still on the wall is because of the curse. I was born on a Monday, and seventeen years later the seventeenth of August also falls on a Monday. So the calendar not only marks my birthday, it marks the day I have to make it to without the curse coming true. We’ve done this for every baby born into the family since we became unlucky, starting with my great-great-grandmother Clodine back in 1930. The idea is that the calendar acts as a kind of good luck charm. Or maybe a warning. When you see it every single day of your life, it’s hard not to pay attention.
So far, though, it hasn’t worked.
Nine more weeks. If I can make it nine more weeks, I’ll be the first to escape. It sounds easy enough. But we’ve come close in the past. Hank made it to three days. Clodine and Starletta were so sure she was going to do it that they planned a big celebration for her birthday, which is on January 3. But then she went to Ruby Ginnison’s New Year’s Eve party and got caught unawares. Starletta says it’s because they got too cocky, so now we don’t celebrate birthdays at all. Not until number eighteen.
I can practically feel the three of them doing the math in their heads, so I finish my cereal and get up. “I’m going to be late,” I say. I rinse my bowl in the sink, then head out before anyone can say anything else.
The Eezy-Freezy is a ten-minute drive from the house, but I drive extra slowly so it takes almost twice that long. My father has probably been there for a couple of hours already. Even though we don’t open until eleven, there’s a lot to do to get ready. Also, he just likes being there.
This is my sixth summer working with him. He opens on Memorial Day and closes the day after Labor Day. In the fall and winter, there aren’t enough people wanting hot dogs and soft-serve ice cream cones to make it worth staying open. Those months, he works at the garage in town as a mechanic. He’s not as happy then.
If we just counted on the people who live around here for business, we wouldn’t be open at all. But in the summer we get tons of people who have camps on the lake. The Eezy-Freezy is right on the road to the cabins, so every car passes by it coming and going. It’s kind of a tradition for a lot of people to stop there, especially if they have kids. My father painted a sign that says SCREAM UNTIL DADDY STOPS THE CAR and put it on the side of the road, and sometimes when I’m working the order window I can see and hear them do exactly that. It’s pretty funny, actually, even though I’ve seen it a million times.
When I pull into the crushed-gravel parking lot, my father’s black 1970 Chevy Chevelle SS 454 is the only other car there. I can tell he’s already been here awhile because all the trash is picked up and the eating area looks great. We repainted the seven wooden picnic tables just a few weeks ago. We choose a different color every year. Starletta says the color affects how well we do. My father wanted to prove her wrong, so last year he painted them yellow, even though she said that was a bad choice. Business was slow, so this year they’re red, which according to Starletta is lucky. We’ll see.
The Closed sign is hanging in the order window, but the window itself is open. Through it I can hear the radio playing and my dad singing along. “Here I am!” he shouts. “Rock you like a hurricane!”