For the first time I take note of the denim miniskirt she’s wearing. Her legs are smeared with self-tanner, and the white fur trim on her camel-colored boots is dingy and discolored. Her hair is a little greasy, and I almost feel bad that she felt so left out of Hattie’s shower that the only way she knew how to show up was drunk.
But then I don’t care. I shut my feelings for her off like a faucet. My mother crosses her veiny legs and points at Freddie. “I see you stuck around.” She turns to me. “They never do, ya know.”
I shake my head. “You’re one to talk.” I don’t want her bringing him into this.
“Excuse me?”
I shove a glass of water into her hands. “How’d you get here?” I ask again.
She rolls her eyes. “I drove, of course.”
My mother is a grown woman who showed up drunk to her oldest daughter’s baby shower. I couldn’t feel guilty for not including her in this even if I tried. I reach into the pocket of my dress and start to call my dad, but then remember he’s at work. I need someone else to be the adult in this situation.
Freddie is smart to say nothing as my mom sloppily picks at the plate of finger foods.
“Okay,” I finally say. “Once everyone clears out, we need to get her home.”
“I can help,” offers Freddie.
I hate for him to have to deal with this, especially after this morning, but I think my options are limited. I glance to him and then to my mom’s car, which is parked half in the front yard and half on the street. She’s lucky she didn’t hit the mailbox, or even worse: a human being.
“If you can drive her home, we’ll take care of her car later.”
He nods hesitantly. I can tell the idea of being alone with my mom makes him nervous, and I can’t really blame him.
After presents, Agnes asks everyone to count their clothespins. Saul steps forward with pins clipped up and down the front of his shirt and crows, “Nineteen!”
A few older ladies sigh as Agnes hands him the candle and gas station gift card she’d bought as the prize.
“Awww, yeah!” says Saul. “I owned this shower.”
After a thank-you from Hattie to Agnes and me, everyone is pretty quick to leave. The tension brought on by my mother’s presence is palpable, and I can’t fault anyone for averting their eyes.
Once everyone’s gone, I give Agnes a quick hug, and she whispers, “Your mama’s not driving home, is she?”
I shake my head. “I think Freddie was going to help me get her home.”
She nods. “That’d be best. Y’all take the Cadillac and we’ll get her car sorted when Bart comes home.”
I reach for Agnes’s hands. I wish she were my family. I wish it so badly. I wonder if God runs some kind of lottery up in heaven and that’s how he decides who’s going where and with whom. I love Hattie and my dad. And shit, even my mom, too. But I can’t help but wonder how much of life is predestined simply by the house you were born into. “You made today perfect,” I tell her. “I’ll never forget it, and I know Hattie won’t either.”
She squeezes my hands tight. “Y’all girls deserve it.” She hesitates before letting go, and I wonder about all the unsaid things between us.
“Didn’t even give me the chance to host the damn thing,” my mom slurs from the kitchen.
Agnes looks to me. “You pay her no mind while she’s in this state.”
Hattie, Ruthie, and Saul all pile into the Jeep. Agnes agrees to store most of the presents in her garage until Hattie has had a chance to sort through her bedroom. I lead my mom toward Agnes’s Cadillac, and she starts to put up a fight about leaving her car, but Agnes is quick behind me to whisper something to my mom. And whatever it is she says, it’s enough to keep my mom from making a scene.
With her in the backseat, we drive in silence to her apartment. She rides with the window down the whole way, so anything Freddie and I might even say would be drowned out regardless. We hold hands, though, and that seems to speak more than any words might.
When we arrive, Freddie offers to help me get her up the three flights of stairs, but I decline. She’s reached that sluggish stage of drunkenness where her legs are as useless as limp spaghetti. But she’s also bound to say absolutely anything, and I’ve put Freddie through enough over the last few months as it is.
I sling her arm over my shoulder and pull her along with me one slow step at a time. She helps slightly by steadying her hand on the railing.
We’re halfway up the first flight when she says, “You’re my baby. My beautiful baby. Your daddy and me, we always loved Hattie. But you were the one we planned for.” She laughs to herself. “Not that planning ever does much good anyway.”
I never knew that, but it makes no difference, really. I try to make it feel meaningful—that she really wanted me—but she doesn’t want me now, so I can’t find it in me to care. “Come on,” I say. “Keep moving.”
We make it up to the first landing, and she stops, bracing both hands on the railing. I stand there for a moment, letting her take a break. “I thought I was ready,” she says. “We had your sister and then we decided she couldn’t just be an only child.” She turns to me, her eyes squinting beneath the harsh security lights. “I thought that if we planned you, we must’ve been ready. I must’ve been ready.”
I pull her arm back over my shoulder. I don’t want to hear all the drunken excuses for why she couldn’t be there. There’s only one reason she wasn’t there for us: because she chose not to be.
Wearily, we start up the next flight. “But then that storm came and it wiped everything away. It was like Noah’s flood. Everyone had to start from scratch. And so did I.”
This is unfair for so many reasons. And I don’t even believe in fairness, but if anything were ever wholly unfair, it would be this. My mother in this state, spewing her confessions, like she somehow deserves to feel better. To feel the release of pressure that comes from sharing a horrible truth, but her not sober enough to feel the raw hurt that occurs when you finally admit out loud how wretched you truly are. Instead, I’m left with all the feelings and the memories of this moment, because she will wake up tomorrow and vaguely remember the outline of today.
She shakes her head. “You were always the responsible one. Sometimes I think you just chose being gay, because you had to figure out some kind of way to disappoint us.”
“Wow, Mom. Charming as ever,” I say through gritted teeth.
But she doesn’t even hear me. “I don’t worry about Hattie, though. Not one bit. You know why?”
“Why?” My voice comes out like a scratch against my throat. I don’t even mean to respond to her, but it’s like I can’t resist.
“Because she’s got you. You won’t ever let her fall. That’s true family,” she says. “That’s the kind of family I never was to you girls.”
Hot tears spill down my cheeks, and I yank her the rest of the way up the stairs. I don’t even bother unfolding her couch, but instead let her pass out with a pillow and a blanket on the floor.
I lock her door behind me, and I don’t look back.
THIRTY-SIX
“You okay?” Freddie asks as he clicks on his blinker to turn out of the parking lot.
I nod. “Take me home, please.” I’m exhausted by all the emotional highs and lows today.
“Sure,” he says.
I roll the window down and force myself to feel the harsh chill of this February evening. Pulling my hair loose, I let it tangle into knots that only Hattie will be able to brush out.
As we pull up in front of my house, I turn to Freddie. I force myself to say the words I’ve been forming for weeks now. “I can’t do this anymore.”
He takes my hand and squeezes, and it’s then that I realize he thinks I’m talking about my mother and life in general, which somehow makes this worse.
I wiggle my fingers out of his tight grip. “Freddie, we can’t do this anymore.”
He slides the car into park and turns to me as
he throws an arm over my seat. “What do you mean? What are you talking about?” His voice is raspy and full of ache.
“I can’t be your girlfriend.” I wipe a tear away, and I don’t know if it’s a new one or an old one. Inside, the car is dark and my now rolled-up window is cold to the touch. Light from my front porch floods the dashboard, but we remain in shadows. “I love you.”
“Ramona, I love you, too. I wasn’t kidding when I said so.”
I take his hand, and his grip squeezes so tight. “It’s not enough. Sometimes it’s just not. Not right now.”
“You’re not making any sense.” He gets louder with every word. “You’re wrong. I know you can’t see what I see right now, but we can survive this. You . . . you can’t just cut people out of your life when things get tough.”
It’s so hard not to agree with him. I don’t have to end this tonight. Freddie will hold on tight enough for the both of us. At least for now. But soon he’ll leave. He’ll leave like everyone else, and I’ll be here. Forever Peter Pan.
I take my hand back and wipe away my tears. I wish he could see the landscape of our lives from my point of view. “I don’t regret it,” I tell him. “Not a single moment. But there’s nothing about us that’s made to last.”
His expression is dark and unreadable. “You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to give in to the idea that your life is supposed to turn out a certain way.” He threads his fingers through my hair, but they get stuck in the tangles. “I get a say in this, too. And I’m not letting you go so easily.” He pulls me gently toward him.
I kiss him lightly on the lips and reach for the handle of the car door. “I need to go.”
Maybe Freddie doesn’t understand today, but I’m doing us both a favor in the long run. “Good night,” I tell him.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Inside, Hattie is sitting on the couch, telling Dad all about the shower, and I can tell that Mom showing up drunk is barely even a memory for her. That small thing gives me great satisfaction.
“There she is!” says Dad. He stands and gives me a tight hug and a kiss on the cheek. “I’m so lucky you two have each other.”
Hattie watches me carefully. I shake my head discreetly at her to let her know I don’t want to talk about it right now.
She pats the ground in front of her, and I sit down with my legs crossed. She pulls the hairbrush from her purse and gently loosens each one of my tangles. I close my eyes and listen as she rehashes the whole day for Dad.
Outside rain begins to splatter against the tin roof and the wind rattles the windows, but here in this little trailer of ours with my sister and my dad, I’m okay. We’re going to be okay.
The next morning, I call in sick for my paper route. Partly because I feel awful and partly because my bike is still at Freddie’s house. But it’s nice to finally have a day off from work, so missing one paper route is something I’m willing to pull a double for later in the week. Later that afternoon, Freddie drops my bike off and I force Hattie to answer the door while I hide inside.
I watch him through the blinds as he talks to Hattie. He makes a move to come inside, but Hattie says something and shakes her head. The bags under his eyes tell me he slept about as much as I did last night. Just twenty-four hours ago he held me in his arms in Agnes’s bathroom, and now this. I could run out there and make all of this go away, but it would only be a temporary fix.
After he’s gone, Hattie asks, “What’s the deal with you two?”
“We—it didn’t work out. I don’t really want to talk about it.”
She could say she told me so or that there will be others, but instead she only says, “Hey, let me touch up your hair today, okay?”
“Yeah,” I tell her. “That’d be good.”
On Monday, Ruth is waiting for me at the bike racks. “Hattie told us,” she says almost immediately.
I am simultaneously annoyed by how big of a gossip my sister is and grateful that she already broke the news so I don’t have to.
I nod. “There’s not much to talk about.”
Ruthie shrugs. “I don’t even like talking.”
And then I hug her. She hugs me back. Ruth is at least six or seven inches shorter than me, but she always feels bigger than me somehow. In this moment it’s easy to feel protected and safe, like I might actually survive the rest of the school year. In this moment I’m so grateful for her and how little effort is required for us to be friends.
The next night, Tommy cuts me loose a few hours early because work is so slow. At home I find Hattie sitting in my bed with piles of makeup in between her legs as she uses the mirror of an empty compact of foundation to apply a bright, wet-looking hot-pink lipstick.
I drop my backpack on the floor, and she’s startled by the clunk. “Where are you going?”
“Oh!” she says. “You’re here. Good! I need your help!”
“Okay,” I say wearily, and let my body sink down onto the one corner of the bed not covered in makeup.
“I need to take, like, a really good profile picture.”
“For what?”
“Don’t laugh,” she says. “I got a one-month free trial on OtherFishInTheSea.com.”
I feel my brow wrinkle in confusion. “What is that?”
“A dating website!”
“Hattie.” My voice reminds me of my dad’s when he would catch her coming home late during her freshman year. “You’re due in eight weeks.”
She balances herself on my bedside table as she stands. “Exactly. Which is why I’ve gotta get to steppin’.” She pats her belly. “Little baby ZoeRae is gonna need a man figure in her life.”
“ZoeRae?” I ask. Because there is so much she’s said that makes my brain hurt that I can only pick it apart one piece at a time.
“Yeah. You like it?”
I shake my head and laugh, because I have no other option. “No. Not even a little bit,” I tell her. “In fact, I don’t even think I can bring myself to call her that. It sounds like a country singer gone bad.”
She growls a little. “You know, I read online that parents oughta keep the baby name to themselves because friends and relatives have too many opinions and can be plain old hurtful.”
I inhale deeply through my nostrils. “Maybe we can talk about the name later, okay? I don’t mean to be rude, I swear. So what’s all this about a dating website?”
She perks up again. “Yes! I need you to take my picture. The member guide said selfies are discouraged and that you should ask a trusted friend for help with your profile picture.”
I look down at the little cheer shorts she’s squeezed herself into and the shiny red top that is a remnant from Hattie’s former party-girl life. “So do you want to finish getting dressed?” I ask.
She giggles. “I’m already dressed,” she explains. “The picture’s gotta be from boobs up. Remember, like how Auntie Luanne used to only take pictures? Boobs and up! It’s not like I’m going to be pregnant forever.”
“Yeah, but shouldn’t these guys at least know you’re pregnant right now?”
She puts the compact down. “I can see why you’d think that, but I feel like guys would make a bigger deal of it than it is.”
I nod despite myself. “All right. Okay. Let’s do this. It’s already dark, so we might have to take them inside.”
It takes a while and we have to fudge with the lighting some, but eventually we come up with one or two good pictures. I put a frozen pizza in the oven and we turn on a made-for-TV movie about a cheerleader with a crazy mom who decides she wants to kill the girl who is in direct competition with her daughter for captain of the cheer squad.
I help Hattie compose her profile for the dating website. I am fully aware of how foolish all of this is and know that I’m encouraging my sister’s behavior. Nothing good will come of this, I know.
But sometimes it’s easier to play along.
THIRTY-EIGHT
It’s not that Mardi Gras here is as crazy as it is i
n a place like New Orleans, but the town of Eulogy is definitively livelier than normal. The days leading up to Fat Tuesday are peppered with mini parades through downtown and raucous parties on the beach and at bars, and Boucher’s is no different.
In fact, last night, Freddie and Adam were in picking up some to-go. At first, I thought about hiding and getting Ruth to cover for me, but I knew I had to suck it up or things would never get back to normal.
“Hey,” I said to Freddie. “I saw your name come up in the order queue. Let me see if it’s ready.”
He nodded silently without ever making eye contact, which pretty much describes all of our interactions since breaking up.
When I returned from the kitchen with their bag, only Adam waited at the counter. “He, uh, went outside to get the car started.”
I took his cash and made change. “I get it.”
He stuffed the receipt and money into his pocket after dropping a few singles in my tip jar. “I miss seeing you around, by the way,” he whispered. “Am I allowed to say that? Or is that, like, crossing enemy lines?”
I tried to smile, but I couldn’t. “There are no lines, but it’s complicated.”
He shrugged. “Doesn’t have to be.”
I watched as the two of them pulled away in Agnes’s car and the din of the restaurant chased them down the street.
During this time every year, Eulogy turns into her summer self. It’s a quick and well-earned reprieve from winter, but it never seems to last long enough. Schools are always closed the Monday and Tuesday before Ash Wednesday. Even if they were open, I can’t imagine many people would go.
This Fat Tuesday is one of those rainy days where there’s no real downpour, but a constant drizzle. After school, Tommy has me downtown handing out flyers with drink specials during one of the big parades. The floats are amazing and ornate, but still nothing compared to what you’d see in NOLA.
Since we’re a smaller town, it’s pretty much revamped versions of the same floats every year, but I love it. None of it all is quite as impressive as I remember it being when I was a kid, but it feels like home. The good parts of home.