What Happened to My Sister

  If it were up to me, I would ask Cricket’s computer questions all day long. We spent days looking at all kinds of things on it—my favorite stuff is about Toast and Momma and Daddy but that gets boring to Cricket after a while so yesterday when she said I couldn’t come over today after she got out of school I worried it was on account of me not being fun and not because she had a doctor’s appointment like she said. If you could see the fuss they all still make over me you’d swear Cricket’s telling the truth but that doesn’t stop me from being scared I’ll do something that’ll make her stop liking me. These past days have been the best days of my entire life. I’d do anything not to lose her.

  Momma won’t say what her job is but they sure have her working lots. On her first day they got her a new dress but if you ask me I don’t think it fits right on her. It’s real tight and kind of embarrassing to see her in on account of her bosoms showing as if she was just wearing a bra. She wears it to work every night along with more makeup than I ever saw her put on. The only thing that’s the same is her black pair of high-heel shoes I color in with Magic Marker when they get scratched up. They hurt Momma’s feet because her boss makes her stand up and walk around in them all night but since I only know whatever bits and pieces Momma lets slip, I don’t know why. All Momma said when she came in wearing her new dress was that she’s finally getting paid for what she used to give away for free but Momma doesn’t give anything away for free so I cain’t figure it out. Plus, even though she was real nervous about job interviewing, she never looks that nervous about the actual job. From day one she looked sad about it. Like she was being punished. When I asked her why she wasn’t happy about finally finding work, all she said was “This isn’t the kind of work a decent woman would be happy doing.”

  Her boss pays her in cash and once she even came home with the first grocery sack we’ve had since Hendersonville, full of chips and soda and a carton of cigarettes and ready-made biscuits and sliced “deli meat.” It felt like a feast but in a few days it was all gone and we haven’t had another grocery sack in room 217 since. The good thing about Momma’s job is she’s away more so it’s easier for me to come and go. Not first thing in the morning, though. Momma doesn’t have to go to work until she feels like it (not till I’m good and goddamn ready is how she puts it) which is usually in the afternoon but when she leaves I know I won’t see her for a long time. Once she didn’t come home until noon the next day! Lucky for me I got Mrs. Ford and Miss Chaplin pushing food on me all the time. They pack up “goody bags” for me to take home, and I can make food last. Anyway, today I’m not going over there on account of Cricket’s maybe-fake-maybe-not doctor appointment, so after Momma leaves for her secret job I decide I’m going to walk farther than I ever did before so I can make the time pass until it’s tomorrow and I can see Cricket and them again.

  I had no idea there were stores so huge you could fit five of our motels in them easy! And grocery stores with big baskets of fruit and vegetables on special right outside where anyone could walk by and steal them! Right out in plain view! And no one’s taking anything. Oh, and people buy dirt here in Hartsville. Hand to God they do. Great big plastic bags of it. Sealed tight so the dirt won’t mess up their cars. And the cars, they’re all shiny clean. All prim and proper like they pick their way around mud puddles after the rain.

  In Hart’s Corner Shopping Center every single thing you lay eyes on is humongous. It’s a clump of stores huddled together around a parking lot like they’re warming themselves by a fire. If these huge stores were alive they’d be like the Godzilla movie Cricket and me watched a couple of days ago, they’d be able to step on motels and filling stations and even some office buildings—they’d kill ever-thing in sight. Instead they sit here with their mouths opening wide to swallow up anyone looking for TVs, food, books that are 20% off. I’m walking to a store called Books Galore, passing Bedding Superstore, then Best Electronics to get there. In front of Best Electronics, out of nowhere, the doors fly open like they were expecting me, a cold blast of air comes out, and I have no earthly idea what in the world is going on. I walk back and forth a few times on account of me not ever seeing anything like what the doors are doing (how do they know to open?) until a man in a yellow collar shirt with a name tag reading billy comes out and tells me to stop tripping the sensors. I never heard of a grown-up with the name of a kid. How come he doesn’t call himself Bill? Something more his age.

  “Just what do you think you’re doing?” Billy says. “Will you please—and I’m asking nicely here—please stop messing with the sensors. You kids are driving me crazy. We’re not in the business of cooling off the whole town, you know.”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  He fixes his squinty eyes on me and says, “You got nice manners. That or you’re a smart aleck. You a smart aleck? You got friends out here waiting to cause trouble?”

  I say “no, sir” even though he’s not waiting for the answer. He’s shading his eyes. Looking to the right and left. When he sees I’m alone, his shoulders relax and he stares out into the day.

  “The parking situation is just out of hand, you ask me. It’s ridiculous—people circling twenty minutes waiting on spots to open up …” He talks himself away back into the cold store.

  The door stays open until I get a person length inside it. Someone says “Welcome to Best Electronics,” but it could have been anyone—they’re all smiling real hard and wearing matching shirts with name tags. This store is amazing with a capital A. There’s a huge wall of a million television sets every size anyone would ever want. Racks and racks of music and stereos and other kinds of music players and a zillion other machinery—I don’t even have names for some of the things they sell here. I’ll come back and take a closer look later.

  Books Galore is next door and oh my goodness this store is like a dreamland. It’s like someone said gee I wonder what Carrie Parker would like more than anything? Maybe she’d like a store with so many books to choose from she might could lose her mind being happy. That’s how great this place is. I never want to leave. I guess I ain’t the only one who feels that way because people are all over the place, some even sitting on the floor and they don’t get in trouble. And get this—you can buy drinks and food and eat it right there inside the store while you read. Most of all I love the big armchairs they got here. They’re all over the place. It looks real easy to curl up in them. I pick a purple one by a window that has sun streaming through.

  My purple chair’s upstairs near the Young Adult section which has life-size cardboard cutouts of three girls supposed to be kids but wearing makeup and grown-up clothes. I figure I’ll read later, I just want to close my eyes for a minute or two then I’ll get going. My daddy would have loved this place: the carpet goes on forever. He would’ve been a millionaire from this store alone. Daddy probably came to places like this all the time, selling carpet like he did. No wonder he always talked about us moving out of Toast.

  Daddy’d come back from his trips and ask how my day was. Calls me pea-pop, like usual. He always smelled like new carpet and fresh laundry. His hair’s wet but it’s not raining out.

  “The nurse came to school today in her truck, Daddy,” I say. He’s not paying attention. He’s looking over my head for Momma who’s pretending she hadn’t seen him come in from being gone overnight.

  “She checked all our heads with a flat wood stick,” I tell him.

  He squats down to face me and puts his hands on my shoulders. “How’d you like to live in a place they don’t have to check you for head lice, pea-pop? How about living in a house fixed up real nice with a real front walk you could plant flowers up and down? Would you like that?”

  For some reason he’s talking loud and looking to the kitchen even though he’s supposedly talking just to me.

  “We’re moving? Momma, we’re moving we’re moving we’re moving Momma!”

  I run into the kitchen to tell her the good news. She slams the lid back on the pot on
the stovetop. She goes through cabinets like she’s mad at them, and every time the cupboard door closes I want to hold my ears.

  “Well isn’t that just perfect,” she says. Daddy tries to kiss her neck while she’s at the sink but she pushes him off and crosses the kitchen to the stove.

  “Hey, pea-pop, how’d you like to live in a place with eleven stoplights? Come ’ere, button,” he says and without taking his eyes off Momma he opens his arms for me to jump into like I love to do.

  “Eleven stoplights? How many cars? How many cars, Daddy?”

  “Don’t go getting your hopes up,” Momma says to me. “We been down this road before.”

  Next thing they’re over in the corner and Daddy’s back trying to kiss Momma again, saying stuff I cain’t make out but then she whips around and says, “You can’t make this right by moving away from it.”

  “Lib, you always said you wanted to get out of this town. We’re gonna do it, Lib. It’s really happening.”

  That’s when Momma says something about Garland, and that’s not a good sign, no sirree. Garland was where Daddy promised we’d go the year before. I’m glad baby Emma’s sleeping sound in her drawer-crib in the other room and not hearing this.

  “It’s not my fault Garland fell through, Libby,” Daddy’s saying. “We been over it. This is different, I swear. This is the real McCoy.”

  I called Garland Winktown because ever-time Daddy’d say its name he’d wink at me and Emma. Even Momma got real excited about it. She smiled all the time back then. She planned ever-thing right down to the nails and the floorboards, what we’d take with us and what all we’d leave behind. She said even the trash collector’d turn down the wobbly old chair with the busted leg and Daddy laughed and said we’d get new chairs and none of them would be wobbly.

  Then one day the upstairs rattled like a stampede of elephants. Doors slammed and I scooped up Emma and went behind the couch to wait it out. Daddy stormed down the stairs with Momma at his tail yelling for him to get gone.

  “Take one last look because that’s the last you’ll see of this place, you son of a bitch,” she hollered at his back.

  He pushed through the front door and she flew to it, locking it behind him. I watched as she took the stairs two at a time and, before I could decide whether I should follow her to the second floor, I heard the upstairs window sash being forced open. I peeked out the front window in time to see Daddy’s dressy-up shoes, the ones I always helped him polish, flying out into the front yard, the first one tumbling onto the dirt not far from an old wooden peach crate Momma used to plant flowers in. The second one hit the smooth slabs of rock that made up our front walk. I cain’t remember how long it took but Momma finally cooled down enough to where Daddy came tiptoeing back in and something was decided without having to say it out loud. It was understood. We weren’t to talk about Garland no more.

  I hope that don’t happen this time because I dearly want to see a place so big it has eleven stoplights.

  Momma pushes Daddy away from her again, telling him to leave her be.

  “Lib, listen to me,” Daddy says in a voice that’d quiet Misty of Chincoteague, one of my favorite books of all time. “Just listen. Remember we always said we’d blow this popsicle joint someday? Remember? You wanted out of here just as much as I did. Hell, you used to say that’s why you married me, so I’d rescue you from rotting in the hills! Remember, Lib?”

  Momma snorts, shakes her head, and says, “Lotta good that did me,” and Daddy throws up his hands like I give up. No more Misty of Chincoteague voice.

  “Then tell me!” he says. “Here I am telling you we just might be able to do it after all and you push me away. So tell me what you want, Libby. Tell me what I can possibly do to make you happy ’cause I sure ain’t doing it this way.”

  “You know what would make me happy?” Momma raises her voice to match his. “It’d make me happy if you didn’t tomcat around. Coming home smelling like tacky perfume from some second-rate whore—”

  “You got some nerve saying I tomcat around,” he says, back to hollering. “If that isn’t the pot calling the kettle black.”

  “Don’t you start,” she says. “Don’t you even start.”

  “Well? You think I’m blind, do you? You think I can’t see with my own eyes the uncanny resemblance she has to a certain druggist? Why’d you go off to stay with your mother who treats you like shit, by the way, the whole time you were pregnant then? Why’d you keep the whole thing a secret, huh? No one even knows about her!”

  “Don’t be a damn fool,” she says. “That child’s yours and you know it. You’re just trying to change focus from your cheating, and you know what? This time I ain’t—this time I’m not—taking the bait. Unlike some people, I’m going to take the high road.”

  “Well, la-di-da aren’t you just Miss High and Mighty. Pretending you and him haven’t had a thing for each other ever since high school. Y’all mooning over each other like Romeo and goddamn Juliet.”

  “Oh, please,” Momma says. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The room is so quiet it’s easy to hear the flick of the lighter she uses for her cigarettes.

  “Oh really? So it’s normal to spray on perfume and fix yourself up real nice just to go to the drugstore?”

  “Stop it,” Momma says, blowing smoke out the side of her mouth.

  “Acting all surprised to see him—like he doesn’t own the damn place! He’s there every day and you put on the big fancy-meeting-you-here show like you had no idea you’d run into him, all gussied up like a tramp.”

  I want so bad to giggle out loud watching Daddy playact like a lady, fanning his hand in front of his face like he did when he said fancy meeting you here. And wiggling his hips.

  “You’re acting like a fool,” Momma says.

  “If I’m a fool then so is Rick Bulkeley who said he saw you and White driving down Riverbend Road in White’s car. Which, as I recall, was a couple of months before you got up the courage to tell me you were knocked up again. And how long ago was that? A little over a year ago. And how old’s the baby? Why, golly gee, she’s a little over a year old. What an amazing coincidence!”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ, how many times do we have to go over this?”

  “You’re saying Rick Bulkeley didn’t see you two? You’re saying—”

  “I’m saying Rick Bulkeley’s a washed-up drunk who would swear a UFO landed in the center of town if he thought you’d buy him a drink for telling you so,” Momma says. “Rick Bulkeley, ha! Since when does anyone place any kind of stock in what that buffoon says?”

  “And then the baby’s born with that mark—the same mark he has. And you got the nerve to stand here and lie to my face about it. That kid is not mine and nothing you can say will ever make it so,” he says in a mean voice I only heard once before when squirrels dug up holes in the front yard and hit a pipe that ended up freezing and cracking later on in the winter. He reminds me of a rattlesnake when he uses that voice.

  “You know what?” Momma asks him.

  “What?”

  “I’ll tell you what. I wish she was his.” She spits the words at him.

  Daddy recoils his rattlesnake head back up as if she’d slapped him in the face.

  It gets real quiet.

  “That’s it,” he finally says. “I don’t need to take this in my own home that I pay for, thank you very much. I’m done.”

  “Daddy. Don’t go, Daddy.” I run to him and wrap my arms tight around his right leg. “Wait, Daddy, please!”

  Momma points at me and says to Daddy, “See? See what you did? You see what I have to deal with day in day out? While you’re out making sales calls.”

  “I’m outta here,” he says.

  He slams the door on his way out and I want to scream at Momma—she was always scaring him away, being so mean to him like that.

  Instead of hating on Momma, I go to check on my sister, figuring she has to have heard Momma and D
addy fighting. Figuring she’s probably real upset over it too. But even when she was a baby Emma knew to lay low because there she is, awake but totally still. Smiling up at me like hey, big sis, I been waiting on you to come in here!

  “Shhh.” I smooth her baby blond hair. “It’s all right, Em. Shhhh.”

  She reaches out and touches my hair like it’s made of gold.

  “You have beautiful hair. Maybe need to brush it a little but there’s no two ways about it—it’s just lovely.”

  Which is strange because Emma didn’t talk then. Definitely not in full sentences. She was still only a baby.

  “Time to wake up, honey.”

  I come out of a deep sleep to the sound of a soft voice above my head.

  “Time to wake up.”

  My neck is so stiff I cain’t move and for a second I think maybe there’s been a horrible accident and I broke my neck and this place I’m waking up in is a hospital. The person behind the voice stays stroking my hair and part of me wishes she’d keep doing it forever. The other part of me’s sad to realize I’d just been dreaming. I get hit with a wallop of missing Emma and Daddy and Momma the way she used to be.

  “Just lovely hair. We’re closing, sugar, it’s time to wake up,” a lady’s saying. “You need to go find your mom.”

  “What? Where am I?”

  “You’re at Books Galore. Don’t worry. People fall asleep in these chairs all the time. You were having some real bad dreams. Who’s Emma?”

  “Ma’am?” I can finally sit up and turn my head to the sound of the voice that belongs to a lady with a stack of books in the crook of her arm and eyeglasses dangling from a string around her neck.

  “You were calling out for Emma,” she’s saying. “I keep telling them the chairs are too comfy. Not that it’s bad you fell asleep. Just that some people take advantage. You know.”