The Center of Everything

  From the bathroom, I hear him say no.

  “Why not?” she asks.

  “I don’t want to bother you.”

  “Oh, honey,” she says, laughing now. “It’s a little late for that.”

  “Is Evelyn awake?”

  “She is. Come inside. I’ll make you some breakfast. Whatever it is, it’s not the end of the world.”

  I come out of the bathroom just as he walks in, his hair wet with rain. He doesn’t look at me. My mother makes him take off his wet shirt, and she wraps one of Sam’s blankets around his shoulders. He sits down on the couch, looking straight ahead, and with the blanket wrapped around his shoulders he looks like a man from the Bible, or a war refugee. The cats move around him cautiously, sniffing his toes.

  I sit down next to him, tap him on the knee. “What? What happened?”

  “Deena’s pregnant.”

  I hear the pancake batter sizzle on the skillet. My mother shakes her head slowly, her eyes closed.

  “What?” I laugh the way Ray Watley did.

  He turns, looks right at me. He’s breathing hard, rain still dripping off his nose. “She’s pregnant.”

  I am angry, maybe at him. I try to remember Deena the last time I saw her, just on Friday, sitting in English class. She did not look any different. She could have made this up, told her grandmother a lie. “I thought you-all were being careful.”

  He closes his eyes, and now he laughs. “I thought so too.”

  “I thought…” I stammer. I don’t know what I want to say, what it was I thought.

  Through the window, I can see that Mrs. Rowley has come back outside. She stands on their balcony, looking around the way she did the night Travis threw pebbles on her roof, Jackie O licking the rain off her neck.

  “Travis?” she says, her voice wavering. “Travis, honey? Where’d you go?”

  My mother opens the door and tells her he’s with us, and that she can come over too.

  “Oh great,” Travis says. “Great.”

  By the time Mrs. Rowley gets to our door, she is crying, her skin a blotchy red, her eyes a brilliant shade of aqua green, bright with tears. The cats notice Jackie O, shivering from the rain in Mrs. Rowley’s skinny arms, and they form a circle, hissing, their hackles raised. Samuel makes a quick shrieking sound.

  “Did he tell you?” she asks, looking at my mother. “About Deena?”

  My mother nods, and new tears come to Mrs. Rowley’s eyes. She turns to Travis. “I’m sorry I yelled, honey,” she says. “I’m sorry. I’m just so damn sad for you.”

  Travis looks down at his muddy feet, at the tracks he made on our carpet when he walked inside. My mother tells Mrs. Rowley to sit down and asks her if she wants some coffee. Mrs. Rowley strokes Jackie O’s head and keeps crying. “She tricked you, didn’t she? Tricked and trapped. That’s what it looks like to me.”

  My mother’s face changes slightly, a weariness in her eyes as she pours the coffee, but Travis says nothing. If he would just look up at me, just once, I would nod. I agree with Mrs. Rowley. Tricked and trapped. She’s right. I shouldn’t have told Deena anything. Now it’s too late.

  “Are you sure it’s yours?” she asks. “Can you even be sure of that?”

  He winces and turns his whole body away from her. “I’m sure it’s mine, Mom. Don’t start that.”

  My mother hands Mrs. Rowley the mug I gave her for Mother’s Day the year before. #1 MOM it says. “Cream?” she asks. “Sugar?”

  Mrs. Rowley shakes her head no and takes a sip. She does not say thank you.

  “Look,” my mother says, pouring herself a cup. “Does Deena even know what she wants to do?”

  There is a pause before anyone understands what she means.

  “Oh, she’ll have it,” Mrs. Rowley says quickly, her hand shaking when she brings the coffee up to her mouth. “They’ve made up their little minds, her and that old German bitch. We’ve no say in the matter. No say at all.”

  Samuel wheels himself over to where Mrs. Rowley is sitting, trying to touch Jackie O. She growls, her eyes hazy and unseeing. My mother pulls Samuel’s chair away.

  “You don’t have to marry her, honey,” Mrs. Rowley says. “I know I said you did, but I was just mad. You don’t have to. I don’t care what she says about lawyers. We’ll move. You can go live with your dad for a while.”

  My mother taps her fingers against her coffee cup. I know what she’s thinking. Still, I’m with Mrs. Rowley on this one. Deena did this on purpose, because she cares only about what she wants. She didn’t think about anyone else, what they might have wanted.

  Travis does not even answer his mother when she says this. His face is still wet from the rain, so it is difficult to tell whether or not he is crying.

  Again, Travis sits on the bumper of Mr. Goldman’s little gray car. I suspect Mr. Goldman has come out here to try to convince Travis that it would be better for everyone, in the long run, if he stayed in school just one more year.

  But it won’t work, I know. Travis is going to marry Deena, and he has already told me what he would say to Mr. Goldman, to anyone, if they tried to talk him out of it. The baby is a sign, he said, his destiny, making him do what he’s supposed to do.

  “It’s called Deena,” I told him. “Not Destiny. She’s making you do what she wants you to do. There’s a difference.”

  He got mad when I said this, acted like I was being dumb. “You’re not paying attention to the big picture, Evelyn,” he said, looking at his hands and not at me.

  I don’t see this big picture. And if there really is a big picture, I guess I’m not in it. I don’t see what any of this has to do with destiny. If Travis could have been sitting in my room the night I told Deena he might leave her, he would know that destiny really was the moment she looked out my window and started making up her mind.

  I think of Travis now as a silver ball in a pinball machine, rolling in whatever direction he’s pushed.

  I have not seen Deena since we found out. She has not been to school. I am certain she is hiding from me, but I am watching for her, waiting for her to come outside. For days, I have been planning what I will say when I see her. I have made up long, sharp-worded speeches, and I imagine her face flinching when she hears them.

  My mother says she feels sorry for both Deena and Travis. She thinks it’s a bad idea for them to get married right now. She told me she doesn’t think it’s right to tether people together before they’re ready. That was her word, “tether.” She feels sorry for Deena because she doesn’t know that Deena wanted to be tethered all along, whether Travis wanted to or not.

  I move through my days, stunned, wide-eyed, as if someone has slapped me hard. I have dreams at night about different things being stolen—my favorite shirt, a ten-dollar bill. I set them down, turn away for just a moment, and they’re gone.

  Deena stands outside our door, her face pale in the sunlight. “Why haven’t you come over?” She is already crying, her nose running. She wipes her face with her hand. I can’t help but look down at her belly, as if I would be able to see it already, the pregnancy. But except for the crying, she still just looks like a normal fifteen-year-old girl, wearing cut-offs and a T-shirt on a nice day in April.

  Behind me, my mother pushes Samuel’s wheelchair by, bell ringing. When she sees Deena, she smiles. “Hi, honey,” she says, reaching forward to squeeze her hand. “It’s good to see you.”

  “I’ll be outside,” I say. I step outside, shutting the door behind me. A wasp has built a nest in the crack between our door and the stairs. It emerges quickly, hovering over our heads.

  “You know?” she asks. She has the look of someone who has not just started crying recently, but for a long time, days maybe, the skin around her eyes puckered and pink.

  I nod. “Mrs. Rowley came over here when she found out. I thought you were on the pill, Deena.”

  She looks confused for a moment, not saying anything. “I was. It just doesn’t work sometimes.”

/>   I kick at the dirt on the concrete step. “When doesn’t it work?”

  She waits until I look up. “Sometimes.” Her bottom lip is quivering, but I don’t care.

  “You guys are getting married?”

  She nods. “I think so. His mom is saying no, but that’s what everybody else wants.”

  “Everybody?”

  She grimaces, blinks, and then, unbelievably, there are even more tears. It is amazing, the amount she can produce. “Why are you so worried about what Travis wants?” She presses one hand to her chest. “What about me, Evelyn? How long have you known, and you haven’t come over to see me?”

  I say nothing, watching her.

  “You act like I did this all by myself. Well guess what? That’s impossible. Okay? You should know that.” She looks mad when she says this part, but then she just starts crying again, her shoulders shaking. “You’re supposed to be my friend.”

  “I’m Travis’s friend too.” I look at her evenly. “You got pregnant on purpose, Deena. I told you he was going to end it. I’m the one who told you.”

  She makes a whimpering sound and pulls her hair so it covers her face, and even crying, she is pretty, her dark eyes looking darker now that her skin is so pale. If this were a made-for-TV movie, Deena would be the star, especially now that she is tragic as well as beautiful, pregnant at fifteen.

  I know I am supposed to hug her. I am the supporting actress, the supportive friend. But instead I go back inside, shutting the door behind me, leaving her out there with just the wasp.

  On the last day of school, we make cards for Libby. She is out of the hospital now, but Mrs. Geldof says she is still in a world of hurt. She is trying to walk without a walker now, and this summer, for her, will be long and hard.

  I make myself think of Libby trying to walk when I feel sorry for myself now, which is pretty much all the time. I imagine her holding onto two side railings in a hospital hallway, stumbling, having to get back up again. I’m lucky, I know. I can at least put one foot in front of the other. And at least I’m not dead in the ground like Adele and Traci.

  But I feel like I’m dead sometimes, underground. And it doesn’t matter that I can put one foot in front of the other, because I have nowhere to go. When summer comes, I sit in my room in front of the fan, trying to read. I usually end up just sitting there, looking out the window.

  Travis leaves for work early, seven-thirty, wearing a khaki jumpsuit with TRAVIS stitched in red letters on a white patch, carrying coffee in a blue mug that he brings home with him at night to be rinsed out and refilled with coffee again the next morning. His mother bought him a blue Datsun so he could get to work in the morning. It needs a new muffler, and the engine is so loud that the crows fly up from the corn across the highway when he starts it in the morning. My mother asked Mrs. Rowley when she thinks Travis will fix this, and Mrs. Rowley said Travis had enough things to fix right now, and maybe everyone should just leave him alone.

  He gets home a little after six, the khaki jumpsuit stained with splotches of oil, walking quickly from the car. He does not look up at my window. Deena goes over around seven, knocking on his window, never the door. He comes out, and the two of them go for long walks together, up and down the highway. They don’t talk, or maybe they wait until no one can see them before they begin. But they walk side by side, sometimes holding hands, sometimes not. She’s cut her hair off, all the way up to her ears. Her neck looks even longer and thinner, like the stem of a flower. Sometimes she looks up at my window quickly, but I don’t know if she sees me or not.

  Travis says good-bye to her every night in the parking lot. Sometimes they kiss, and sometimes he just leans forward, bending his knees so that his forehead touches hers.

  When Eileen hears about Deena, she says she thinks it’s sad the way young people are going downhill today. She says if this country really wanted to put a stop to teen pregnancy, drug use, AIDS, and rap music, they’d put prayer back in schools and then wonder why we ever took it out.

  “Case in point,” she tells my mother, pointing at me. “Two girls, living right next door to each other. They’re the same age. They’re friends. One goes to church, at least when her grandmother can get her there, and the other one doesn’t. One doesn’t get pregnant at fifteen, and the other one does.”

  I watch Eileen talk, her crooked mouth forming the words. I would like to believe what she is saying now, that I am not pregnant because I am good. But I know that some of the reason I am not pregnant and Deena is is that she was born with large, dark eyes and a neck like the stem of a flower, and I wasn’t.

  “At least they’re getting married,” she says, unwinding her yellow measuring tape. She’s knitting Samuel a sweater, a blue one, she says, to match his eyes. He reaches up for the tape, making his shrieking sound.

  “Oh come on,” my mother says. She is sitting on the counter, eating a grape Popsicle, wearing a denim skirt she has had since I was little. “They’re both so young.”

  “Come on nothing, Tina. They created a child together. Now they can raise one. Or they can go through the nine months and give it up for adoption. Anyway, they’re not so young. I was seventeen when I married your father. My own grandmother was sixteen on her wedding day, and she and my grandfather went on to have thirteen children.”

  Eileen looks proud about this, but my mother makes a face, reeling back in her chair. “Thirteen?” She looks at me. “Your grandmother had thirteen children? That’s insane.”

  It’s true, I think. My mother is right—thirteen is too many. Even their own parents would forget their names sometimes.

  Eileen shrugs. “They were Catholic.”

  My mother rolls her eyes, chewing the end of her Popsicle stick. “Someone needs to give the pope thirteen babies. Just for a week or so. See how he likes no birth control then.”

  “People who have self-control don’t need birth control, Tina.”

  “Well, apparently your grandmother did.” She laughs, but Eileen doesn’t.

  “People need to learn to reap what they sow.”

  Reap what you sow. Eileen likes this phrase, this quote. She thinks people with AIDS are reaping what they sow too, getting what they deserve. She has said this to me before. She says, “Do you really think it’s just a coincidence that homosexuals and drug users are getting it? Don’t you see the lesson there?”

  But I’m starting to think maybe this isn’t true. In health class, Miss Yant showed us a videotape of people dying of AIDS in hospitals, too sick to eat, shaking under their blankets. Little babies have it now too, and they haven’t even lived long enough to sow anything. So maybe Eileen is wrong. Maybe nobody is getting AIDS for a lesson. Maybe people are just getting it, and it’s sad.

  It won’t really be like a wedding, Travis told me. It’ll be more like an appointment, fifteen minutes from start to finish, four o’clock to four-fifteen. Just at the courthouse, not at a church. But I think Mrs. Rowley got a new dress for it—blue with white flowers, with a sash in the back that she has left untied. She uses her hand to fan herself as she walks down the stairs to the parking lot.

  Deena gets out of the car and waves up at Travis, turning in a little half circle to show him her dress. It’s the dress she got for the prom. I remember when she bought it last year, on sale, seventy-two dollars with the shoes. She just happened to get a white one. Or maybe she knew, even then. Her stomach is still flat under the satin bodice. Spaghetti straps, tight against her tan shoulders, hold it up.

  I duck below my window when she looks.

  Travis is wearing a navy blue jacket, a gray shirt, a white tie, and dark gray pants that look like they have maybe been hemmed with safety pins. Deena’s grandmother stays in the car, the engine running, but Mrs. Rowley has a small camera, and she motions for Travis and Deena to stand together. Travis puts his arm around Deena, and she leans her head on his shoulder.

  I know that this moment, what I am seeing before me, will become a picture in a photo albu
m. Their child, the one on its way, will look at this picture years from now, showing friends, and say, This is a picture of my parents the day they got married, touching Travis’s and Deena’s stilled faces with his or her fingers, seeing only how beautiful they both look, Deena’s dress lifting in the breeze. They will think the picture is more important than it really is; they will think he or she exists because of the picture, instead of the other way around.

  eighteen

  WHEN SUMMER COMES, TRAVIS AND Deena get approved for a Section 8, a two bedroom in Kerrville, just across the street from the garage where Travis works. It shouldn’t be any different when they finally move—Deena and I don’t talk, and Travis just works all the time anyway. But when they are actually gone, when I can no longer see them going on their long walks in the evening, I feel it. It’s just me now.

  But at least I’m finally old enough to work this summer, and that takes up some of the time. I turned in my application to the McDonald’s in early June, but the manager, Franklin DuPaul, wouldn’t even interview me at first. I had to bug him about it, by phone and in person, every day for a week before he dug my application up and waved me over behind the counter.

  DuPaul is in his early fifties, tall and lean, the only black man I’ve ever seen in Kerrville, with a close-cropped beard that he rubs when he is thinking something over. When he interviewed me, he looked down at my application and not at my face while I explained that I needed to start saving money for college, and that I was a hard worker. He would not be sorry, I promised. Not sorry at all.

  “Okay,” he said, rubbing his beard. “We’ll start you out, see how it goes.”

  He put me on fries, so this is what I do now, over and over for four-hour stretches at a time: I open a bag of frozen fries, pour them into the wire basket, lower the basket into the grease, and set the timer. While the fries are cooking, I sweep the floor, or I spray and wipe the stainless-steel counter behind me. When the timer for the fries rings, I lift the basket up out of the oil and dump the fries onto the warmer, add salt, and then shuffle them into different containers: small, medium, and large.