“It’s not a real table.”
“Tetanus is for nails, not beer bottles,” Jo says. She seems vaguely annoyed I’m there. But she always seems vaguely annoyed at my general existence. Of course she’s not grateful.
“Why were you ditching school?” my mother says.
“Senior ditch day,” I lie.
“Were you drinking?”
“No. We cut through a construction site to get to Michael’s house.”
She can tell I’m lying, but she’s too mad at Jo to have any anger left for me.
“Let me see.” Harrison takes his big bear hands and places them around my foot. “Once when I was a kid, I was on the roof helping my dad with this project he was working on. Anyway, I stepped on this nail, and it went clean through my Chucks. Ripped right through my foot.”
For a few seconds, my mother and sister forget to antagonize each other. Both stare at Harrison, enthralled.
“Did you have to go to the emergency room?” my sister says.
“Nah, my dad said it was too expensive.” He laughs.
My mother and sister look on, horrified. Mouths agape, they look like the exact same person. Two people who belong to each other.
“Got a bit of a fever and the area was kinda swollen for a month, but it healed up. No lockjaw!” He laughs again. “Dessert?”
* * *
Jo and the construction worker have started a band together. After dessert, they sit down with their guitars and sing for us. Jo’s voice is raw, and Harrison’s guitar is tender. Together, they’re magic. They don’t have a name for themselves, not yet. When they’re done, Jo looks at my mother, expectant.
“That was nice.”
“That’s it?” Jo says.
“What? It was.”
The two of them stare each other down across the room.
“Alright, whatever,” Jo says. She bites her lower lip and fixes her gaze on some random spot in the corner.
“You guys are really good,” I say.
She softens. “Thank you.”
“Anyway, we should get going. Ashley has homework to do,” my mother says.
* * *
As we head out the door, out of my mother it finally bubbles up and pops.
“Come home,” she says. “Being poor isn’t romantic. Not for us.”
Jo looks off into the distance, then back. She bites her lip again as if she’s going to cry.
“You’ve been very rude to my husband. In his home,” Jo says quietly. From the front door, you can hear Harrison washing the dishes, humming their shared song to himself.
“Your husband?” my mother scoffs. “You’re a child playing house.”
Jo starts to shut the door on my mother.
“Don’t you dare.” My mother pushes back against her, and back and forth the door goes, Jo’s bare foot versus my mother’s heels. Finally, the door snags my mother’s stockings and the tear runs in a ladder up and up and up. My mother stops what she’s doing to look down and inspect it. Jo uses the distraction to slam the door in her face.
* * *
Honestly, I don’t know why Jo just can’t get it together. But also, why can’t my mother just tell Jo she’s good?
Sometimes I feel like I’m the door being pushed back and forth between the two of them. Why is it that they can never say the right words to each other? Why do they leave so much space between them for all the wrong ones to fall in?
“This is not what we sent you to college for!” my mother yells at the closed door.
Over the buckled sidewalks on our way back to the car, we see three black boys in a row against the white brick of the 7-Eleven, arms spread like stars, a mini constellation. Or starfish stuck to a rock.
The policemen are shorter than the boys are but thicker, two ruddy bricks in uniform. The guns at their sides are terrifying, and I’m not even being patted down.
Earlier, Officer Bradford didn’t pat Courtney or Kimberly or Heather or Trevor or Michael down. Me neither, even if he did look at me longer than he did the rest.
“I ain’t done nothing,” the littlest black boy yells. He doesn’t look much past twelve or thirteen, but maybe he’s scrawny.
“We can’t walk?” the middle one says. “You gon’ arrest us for walking?”
The police officer presses his knee into the little boy’s back, hard, and he begins to cry.
“This is what she chooses to live in,” my mother says, “after everything your father and I sacrificed to make sure she didn’t.”
“You don’t gotta do that to him,” the oldest boy says. “We been doin’ exactly what you say.”
He turns back to talk to the officer, and the officer pushes his head into the wall.
“Should we do something?” I ask my mother. I think of the man in the video, beaten until his brain doesn’t even work right. Her mind’s too fixed on Jo for her to hear me. Or, rather, to actually listen.
“Like what, Ashley?” she says. “She doesn’t want to come home. She wants to be a grown-up, let her be a fucking grown-up.”
I think back to what my dad said that time Jo barricaded herself in her room to cry: “We aren’t living the blues. Not here. Not us.”
The three boys look like each other—cousins, or brothers maybe. The littlest one cries louder and louder still.
“Shut up,” the cop says.
“It’ll be alright, lil man,” the boy’s brother says.
The distance between them is just a few fingertips.
* * *
“God, did you see his pimples?” my mother says.
CHAPTER 3
IT’S A WINDY night, one that makes you fear downed power lines and rotted roots. The kind of night that makes you feel as though the world itself is lifting you up and out of your skin. Every so often, the wind pushes our car gently off course, and my mother corrects it. In the distance, the ocean shimmers and seals bark.
“Ashley, I’m really proud of you.”
“For what?”
“You’re a good kid.” She laughs. “Mostly.”
“Um. Thank you.”
If I’m the good kid, then Jo is the bad one. But why does it feel so shitty to be the good one? I feel like I have to be good so they don’t worry about me, ’cause they’ve got enough to worry about. It would be nice if they worried about me, too, though. At least I’d know they cared.
Plus, Jo’s not that bad. Not really.
And I’m not that good.
“So am I in trouble?” I say.
“What?”
Be here. With me. I’m here. Not her, I want to say. But it seems whiny, like a tantrum, and in several weeks I’ll be a grown-ass woman.
“Are you cold?” my mother says.
Before I can even answer, she leans forward and cranks up the heat so it blows at our faces and toes in warm gusts.
“Your sister was a very difficult child, even as a baby; she’d cry and cry, and I could never figure out why she was crying or how to get her to stop. I used to drive her all around the city, talking to her in the early morning when it was just the two of us and the rest of the world was quiet. It’s both very hard and very easy to talk to a baby for hours. Talking to her now… it’s just hard.”