I shut off the burner. Get dressed quickly, pull on some shorts and a T-shirt, braid back my hair. For a moment I pause halfway through it, think of the gray wings at my temples, think of how easy they’ll be to see. Mom doesn’t like it like this. But I’m doing enough for her already.
I slide on my sneakers and head downstairs, a breeze slipping up from the open door off the street. Still, the heat, with a pulse and a cling, and my hair’s collecting sweat by the time I’m out on the street.
We live above an empty storefront tiled in a too-bright teal, the word Entrance on the door all that’s left of the signs that used to hang there. Most of Calhoun is like that, with gaps where life used to exist, where time has just stopped. Next to our building is a barbershop, open for business like always, with absolutely nobody inside, also like always. Across the street a warehouse stands empty, the windows broken, the brick striped with graffiti. I find my favorite one as I pass by—you’re already dedd, it tells me in a neon-pink scrawl—and keep going, my eyes nearly shut against the sun.
I’m heading for what passes for the center of Calhoun, one block back from where the highway cuts through. Town’s empty this time of the morning. Even Redman’s diner is quiet between meals, with just one customer propped up at the counter staring into a cup of coffee. I kill time there some evenings, if Mom looks close to the end of her rope. Watch my classmates come in and out, smoke ringing their shoulders, their eyes bored and wanting.
Most of them live north of town, where the houses are spread out, lawns sprouting between them. When we were younger, some of those kids were my friends, and I’d spend afternoons on their couches in front of their televisions, eating their food. But then they’d ask where I lived, and I’d think of my house, with its cloying smell and its empty fridge, and it would be over. Now I see those same faces in class, see their preowned cars parked outside the movie theater that’s barely holding on, showing movies from half a year ago.
The woman who owns the theater is our landlord, but we haven’t seen her in a few months and Mom’s stopped paying rent, which is just as well. The more money she keeps, the less likely it is that she’ll notice I’ve been stealing some.
Not for fun. I never spend it, never even look at it. Just tuck the cash inside the envelope I keep under my mattress and try to ignore the twist in my gut as I think of ways to leave Mom behind, as I imagine what she’d do, how she’d wake up to an empty apartment. Would she look for me? Or would she finally be able to relax, because maybe that’s what she was after all along?
It’s not like I haven’t tried to leave before. I get close. Sometimes I even get out the door, never mind that I’m only seventeen, never mind another year of school on the horizon. But then I hear it—Nobody but you and me. Like a curse we can’t shake. So I stay with Mom, because she’s all I have, because she says this is where I belong, and maybe it’s spite or maybe it’s love but I can’t really tell them apart anymore.
That doesn’t keep me from looking for another way out. If I can’t find the will to leave on my own, I’ll need someone else who wants me. Another Nielsen. Another shot at family.
I asked Mom about it once. Just once. I was ten, and a girl at school came in with a batch of cupcakes for her birthday, said her grandmother had baked them. And I’d known about grandparents, and I’d known about fathers, but she set a cupcake down in front of me and I had to throw up in the trash can by our teacher’s desk. The nurse asked me later if I was sick. I said yes because that seemed easier than explaining. Easier than telling her I’d just realized there was a part of my life left empty.
When I got home I asked Mom where our name came from. I started with my father because that seemed easier, seemed like it would matter less to her, and I was right, because that she brushed off. But my grandparents. It was the first time I couldn’t recognize her.
She didn’t say anything at first. But she got up and she locked the apartment door, and she sat down on the couch, leaned back with her arms crossed over her chest.
“We’re not moving,” she said then, her voice flat, eyes fixed on me, “until you promise to never ask that again.”
I remember I laughed, because of course she didn’t mean it. We would get up to eat dinner, to go to the bathroom, to sleep. But that laugh died in my throat as I kept watching her.
“Not an inch,” she said. “We’ll die right here, Margot. I don’t care. Unless you promise me.”
If we had that conversation now, I wouldn’t be able to let her win. We’d sit there deep into winter, until one of us gave up. But I was small and I was hungry and I said, “Yes.” I said, “I’m sorry.” I said, “I promise.”
So naturally I went looking the second I got the chance. Bought a notebook from the Safeway, wrote my last name on the first page and started pecking away at the library computers, flipping through the archived newspapers. But all I ever turned up were phone-book listings and disconnected numbers, or other confused Nielsen families who’d never heard of a Josephine or a Margot.
I gave up. There were more important things to keep track of. Me and Mom, for one. That’s what’s in the notebook now, tucked under my mattress next to the money. Fights we’ve had, word for word. Moments she looked at me like she wanted me with her. All of it evidence that things happened the way I remember. You need that with someone like Mom, someone who fights more about whether things happened than whether they hurt.
Yesterday’s not worth writing down, though. There’ll be dozens more days like it before the summer’s over. Break, and break, and bleed back together. That’s how it goes with us.
And when I can help it along, I do, which is why I’ve got a fold of that stolen money tucked in my pocket, why I’ve got my eyes fixed on the storefront across the street. Heartland Cash for Gold, where Frank’s got half of Mom’s belongings in his display cases. She goes through cycles—spends too much on groceries she won’t eat and then sells Frank a jewelry box full of fake gold earrings; saves money on rent and buys half the earrings back. It’s ridiculous. The buyback price goes up every time, and it’s not as if she has to keep them out of someone else’s hands. She could leave them in that pawnshop for half a century and nobody would touch them. But try telling her that.
I don’t know what I can afford with the bills in my pocket, but whatever it is, I’ll bring it back to her and hope it buys me a few days of quiet. A few days when it doesn’t seem like the wrong decision to stay.
I cross the road, asphalt burning through my sneakers, and hurry into the pawnshop. The bells on the door jingle softly as I ease it shut behind me. It’s dark in here, cool from the fan working overtime in the corner, and for a second I think about just sitting down on this grimy gray carpet and never moving again. But then there’s a noise from the back of the shop, and I hear Frank’s low, tuneless humming.