Gordo didn’t say anything at first. Then, “I think that might be the most I’ve ever heard you talk at one time.”
“I don’t say much.” Obviously.
“That right.” He sounded amused. “Here’s what we’re gonna do.”
HE GAVE my mom the money to get the mortgage caught back up. Said it would come out of the pay he’d give me under the table until I could legally work for him.
Mom cried. She said no, but then she realized she couldn’t say no. So she cried and said yes and Gordo made her promise to tell him if it got bad again. I think she thought he hung the moon and might have tried to smile a little wider at him. Might have laughed lightly. Might have cocked her hips a bit.
She didn’t know that I’d seen him once with another guy when I was six or so, holding his elbow lightly as they walked into the movies. Gordo had been laughing deeply and had stars in his eyes. I didn’t think he’d be interested in my mom. I never saw the man with Gordo ever again. And I never saw Gordo with anyone else. I wanted to ask him, but there was a tightness around his eyes that didn’t used to be there before and so I never did. People don’t like to be reminded of sad things.
The threatening letters and phone calls stopped coming from the bank.
It only took six months to pay back Gordo. Or so he said. I didn’t understand how money worked all that well, but it seemed like it should have taken longer than that. Gordo called us square and that was that.
I never really saw much of the money after that. Gordo told me he’d opened an account for me at the bank where it would accrue interest. I didn’t know what accrue interest meant, but I trusted Gordo. “For a rainy day,” he said.
I didn’t like it when it rained.
I HAD a friend, once. His name was Jeremy and he wore glasses and smiled nervously at many things. We were nine years old. He liked comic books and drawing, and one day, he gave me a picture he’d done of me as a superhero. It had a cape and everything. I thought it was the neatest thing I’d ever seen. Then Jeremy moved away to Florida, and when my mom and I looked up Florida on the map, it was on the other side of the country from where we lived in Oregon.
“People don’t stay in Green Creek,” she told me as my fingers touched roads on the map. “There’s nothing here.”
“We stayed,” I said.
She looked away.
SHE WAS wrong. People did stay. Not a lot of them, but they did. She did. I did. Gordo did. People I went to school with, though they might leave eventually. Green Creek was dying, but it wasn’t dead. We had a grocery store. The diner where she worked. A McDonald’s. A one-screen movie theater that showed movies that came out in the seventies. A liquor store with bars on the windows. A wig store with mannequin heads in the windows, draped with red and black and yellow hair. Gordo’s. A gas station. Two traffic lights. One school for all grades. All in the middle of the woods in the middle of the Cascade Mountains.
I didn’t understand why people wanted to leave. To me, it was home.
WE LIVED back off in the trees near the end of a dirt road. The house was blue. The trim was white. The paint peeled, but that didn’t matter. In the summer, it smelled like grass and lilacs and thyme and pinecones. In the fall, the leaves crunched under my feet. In the winter, the smoke would rise from the chimney, mixing with the snow. In the spring, the birds would call out in the trees, and at night, an owl would ask who, who, who until the very early morning.
There was a house down the road from us at the end of the lane that I could see through the trees. My mom said it was empty, but sometimes there was a car or a truck parked out in front and lights on inside at night. It was a big house with many windows. I tried looking inside them, but they were always covered. Sometimes it would be months before I’d see another car outside.
“Who lived there?” I asked my dad when I was ten.
He grunted and opened another beer.
“Who lived there?” I asked my mom when she got home from work.
“I don’t know,” she said, touching my ear. “It was empty when we got here.”
I never asked anyone else. I told myself it was because mystery was better than reality.
I NEVER asked why we moved to Green Creek when I was three. I never asked if I had grandparents or cousins. It was always just the three of us until it was just the two of us.
“DO YOU think he’ll come back?” I asked Gordo when I was fourteen.
“Damn fucking computers,” Gordo muttered under his breath, pushing another button on the Nexiq that was attached to the car. “Everything has to be done with computers.” He pressed another button and the machine beeped angrily at him. “Can’t just go in and figure it out myself. No. Have to use diagnostic codes because everything is automated. Grandpap could just listen to the idle of the car and tell you what was wrong.”
I took the Nexiq from his hands and tapped to the right screen. I pulled the code and handed it back to him. “Catalytic converter.”
“I knew that,” he said with a scowl.
“That’s going to cost a lot.”
“I know.”
“Mr. Fordham can’t afford it.”
“I know.”
“You’re not going to charge him full price, are you.” Because that was the kind of person Gordo was. He took care of others, even if he didn’t want anyone to know.
He said, “No, Ox. He’s not coming back. Get this up on the lift, okay?”
MOM SAT at the kitchen table, a bunch of papers spread out around her. She looked sad.
I was nervous. “More bank stuff?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No.”
“Well?”
“Ox. It’s….” She picked up her pen and started to sign her name. She stopped before she finished the first letter. Put the pen back down. She looked up at me. “I’ll do right by you.”
“I know.” Because I did.
She picked up the pen and signed her name. And then again. And again. And again.
She initialed a few times too.
When she was done, she said, “And that’s that.” She laughed and stood and took my hand and we danced in the kitchen to a song neither of us could hear. She left after a little while.
It was dark by the time I looked down at the papers on the table.
They were for a divorce.
SHE WENT back to her maiden name. Callaway.
She asked if I wanted to change mine too.
I told her no. I would make Matheson a good name.
She didn’t think I saw her tears when I said that. But I did.
I SAT in the cafeteria. It was loud. I couldn’t concentrate. My head hurt.
A guy named Clint walked by my table with his friends.
I was by myself.
He said, “Fucking retard.”
His friends laughed.
I got up and saw the look of fear in his eyes. I was bigger than him.
I turned and left, because my mom said I couldn’t get in fights anymore.
Clint said something behind me and his friends laughed again.