Cornerstone (9 page)

I’ve never heard the name Alo, although I’ve heard stories about my grandfather’s dedication to his church community a few hundred times. My mom and Grandpa belonged to some church my mom never names, although she likes to tell me how much everyone loved my grandfather. She always says that the kids thought of my grandfather as theirs too, because he’d slip polished quarters into their pockets whenever he saw them. The way my mom tells it, she and Grandpa were an island, as far as blood relatives go, so they considered the community their family. But after my grandfather was murdered in a robbery that went bad, I guess my mom was too scared to stay, being on her own and pregnant with me, so she moved us away.

I’ve asked why we don’t go back to her old community now, because it sure seems like it would be nice to have people who are like family, but my mom has always given me cornball answers like, ‘we go there in our hearts’ and ‘we’re there all the time, in spirit’. When I really keep up with the questions, she just sighs and says, “It’s complicated, Nali. It’s very, very complicated.”

I don’t push it anymore because I don’t really want to end up crammed into some pew, belting out ancient karaoke to musty organ music every Sunday. That’s been enough to keep me from asking until now, but the Reese’s connection makes me rethink how much I might enjoy sitting for hours on a hard wood bench, listening to heated Bible stories, beside Garrett.

“I thought we didn’t live near any of them.” I say. “How did you know Garrett’s family is part of Grandpa’s church? It’s not like we ever go.”

“In our hearts, we do.” my mom says, like usual. “I’ve always known the Reese’s were part of Grandpa’s church. I just hadn’t met them formally.”

My mom says this last part out loud as we step into the Reese’s dining room. It is a long, wide, rectangle, filled almost to the edges with a huge, oval table and oak chairs. My mom smiles at Iris and The Copy as we scoot around the table and she stands at the end of the kitchen counter, lined with barstools.

I move off to the side, feeling heavy and hidden in the corner, at the opposite end of the counter. Garrett is a part of a church, a family, that my mom never bothered to connect with. She never even mentioned it after she met him. We’ve lived in the same area and I’ve been alienated in the same school where I might have started out with at least one family friend to lean on. Anyone would’ve been better than Jen. Or, maybe it is the same problem as always: the paper. My mom probably stays away, trying to hide the hoarding from them like she does from everybody, or maybe they already know and have decided not to mingle with people who stuff their house full of combustive kindling.

The Copy, or Sean—if his little sister is correct—is in the enormous kitchen, already on a wall phone that he has wedged between his cheek and shoulder. He comes back around to our side of the counter, stretching the mile long cord, so he can plop Iris onto a stool. He reaches toward me, opening a cookie jar shaped like the Sesame Street Monster, and retrieves a chocolate chip for his sister. It’s the real kind, I think, too dark and misshapen to be made by machine.

“Yes, I wanted to report an incident.” he says into the phone. He smiles briefly in my direction and then his eyes find something distant through the door that leads off to the living room. He walks out of the kitchen, around the corner and his voice drops to a muted rumble.

I lean a shoulder on Garrett’s kitchen wall, taking in the place where he has probably stood in pajama bottoms, rustling through cabinets for a box of cereal. The kitchen is the size of our entire living room at the apartment, with a wrap-around counter. The only things on the counter are a bowl of fruit, a roll-top bread box and four decorative jars nestled together. No stacks of paper. The cabinets are dark wood, the appliances are almond color and there’s a wooden spoon cradled in a spoon rest on top of the stove. They don’t store cardboard boxes full of paper in their oven.

The fridge is taped with Iris’s drawings of her family playing soccer together and another of their crayoned bodies running together under a yellow muffin cup sun and a cotton ball cloud. The rest of the gleaming surface is papered with announcements for upcoming marathons and swim competitions, rosters for whirly ball leagues, baseball teams and soccer clinics.

The only thing, besides Iris’s artwork that isn’t a notice of some athletic event, is a college course schedule. It sticks out like a tongue from a magnetic clip and it has Sean’s name on it. I scan the list of eclectic courses: Advanced Philosophy, Religion in Literature, Criminal Psychology, Human Anatomy and World Politics. There’s not a blow off class in the bunch. No wonder he looks so serious.

“How did you know they’re part of Grandpa’s church?” I whisper to my mom. Sean’s still mumbling far off in the living room and Iris is too busy working over her cookie to care about us. “You never told me you knew them.”

“Ugh, Nali. I can’t tell you every single little thing I know...” My mom smiles at Iris and reaches over to tap the Cookie Monster’s head. “Do you think we could have some?”

Iris nods and my mom gets out three cookies, slipping another to the little girl.

“Just for being so generous.” my mom tells her. Iris nods again, her hair floating over her head. My mom winks at her and hands me a cookie, but I shake my head at it.

“I don’t get why no one else seems...” I begin, but Sean interrupts by walking back into the kitchen and tossing the receiver onto the cradle.

“They’re going to send a car over to the school.” he announces.

“Good.” my mom says and she winks again at Iris, who takes another bite of her cookie and giggles as she tries to make her own right eye wink back. I can see that Iris is already in love with my mom. Sean leans on the counter with one arm, looking at me.

“I’m Sean, by the way.” he says. “Garrett’s older brother.”

“What are all of your ages?” my mom asks. It’s a goofy question to start with and the way she says ‘ages’, it’s like the Reese’s individual birthdates are something exotic and intriguing. As if she wants to recount the years we’ve lost together.

“I’m twenty three. Just in college.” he says, like it’s an apology. It’s probably pity, assuming that people like us could never get to college. Garrett must have told him about our house and how one stray match spark would terrify us. My mom seems perfectly at ease.

“Nothing wrong with that. We all have to find our way up the ladder.” Her voice is all cheery and encouraging as if we’re not standing on the very bottom rung ourselves. She tips her head at me. “Nali is probably going to start off at community college in a couple years.”

“I thought I didn’t have a choice.” I say. My mom just chuckles and starts in on the second cookie that would’ve been mine.

Iris coughs and when she has all of our attention, she announces, “Brandon and Mark got impreshdun’d...”

But the little girl stops abruptly when my mom leans over, with the same grin she used to give me when I spilled my milk, and places the tip of her index finger over the center of the little girl’s lip. My mom leaves it there for a split second before brushing off whatever crumb she’d seen. Iris blushes and ducks her head, wiping her own mouth with the back of her hand. Sean fills up the silence with a laugh as he pulls Iris’s stool away from the counter.

“Iris here just turned six last month. And that’s enough cookies for you, munchkin.” He tickles her as he puts her down on her feet. “Those Legos you left all over your room aren’t going to build themselves into a princess castle.”

“Aww...” Iris moans, but slouches off with less of a fight than I would’ve given. Sean replaces the stool beneath the lip of the counter when she’s gone.

“Mark’s thirteen, Brandon is fourteen, and Garrett is eighteen.” he says to my mom, like there was never a lapse in their conversation.

“Oh? When did he turn eighteen?” my mom asks. I would tell her not to be so nosy, except that I want to know too.

“December third, officially.” Sean says. I make a mental note that Garrett is about nine months older than me and a tingle explodes inside me like a tiny firecracker. I am jerked back to attention when the phone rings. Sean lifts the receiver and drops it to his shoulder with a cheerful, “Yello?”

We stay silent. Sean stares at the floor as he listens and then adds a couple ‘uh huhs’ and ‘oh reallys’ and then he looks up at my mom and says into the receiver, “Yeah, they’re still here.”

Then he switches to me and his eyes sink into mine as he says, “Sure, I’ll tell them.” He replaces the phone on the wall cradle.

“They found him?” my mom asks.

“Garrett. They found Garrett.” Sean clarifies. “They didn’t catch up with the guy though. My mom asked if you wanted to stick around for a while. ”

“Of course.” my mom says and I want to fall over. She is being all nonchalant, like waiting around and taking hours off from her writing is no big deal. This
never
happens. Not for birthdays or Christmas, teacher conferences or recitals. She’s always jokes that it’s a good thing I’m a low maintenance kid because she never takes time off. Even when other people want to talk to my mom, they have to come to our house and stand on the front steps because she doesn’t have time for long conversations and there is no place to sit inside. She even pulled an all-nighter that had slopped over into most of today, to catch up on whatever she hadn’t finished while she had to wait for my cast to be put on.

“What did the police say?” I ask. Sean glances from me to my mom and back to me again.

“Oh, uh...” he says with a shrug. “My mom didn’t say.”

“Well, thank God that Garrett is fine.” my mom says. “That’s all that matters.”

As if it smoothes everything over, Sean pulls a pizza ad from a kitchen drawer.

“I’ll order pizza since you’re staying.” he says.

I wait for my mom to say we won’t be staying that long, but instead, she puts her thumb to her mouth and just nibbles at the edge of her nail, the way she does when she gets antsy about not being able to write. I decide right then to just shut up and stop asking questions, because as much as I want to know why we’re here, I want to still be here when Garrett comes home.

The food comes at the same time the rest of the Reese’s do, filling up the house with the smell of warm pizza and the riotous sound of the people who live here.

“So what happened?” Sean asks. His head is turned to see behind him as he carries a ridiculously high stack of pizza boxes into the dining room. Mr. and Mrs. Reese come in right behind Sean, followed by the two younger Reese’s and finally, Garrett appears. He shuts the front door and I hear him kick his shoes off in the family pile before entering the dining room.

I search him, from head to toe, before his eyes have even had the chance to sift through the room and find me. His pant legs are muddy at the bottoms, his dark shirt is spattered with dirt and his hair is glossy with sweat. Otherwise, he looks fine. His eyes find me, standing in the corner of his dining room, and he breaks into a smile that makes my cheeks warm enough that I need to look away. My insides are bouncing and at the same time, I’m suddenly embarrassed to be standing in Garrett’s kitchen, as if I’ve intruded on his family and house without being invited. He’s obviously fine and I feel like a complete tube for having freaked out for no good reason.

“That was boring!” the youngest brother complains. The other brother, a sandy-haired kid that towers by a couple inches over his littler brother, gives him a you-win-some-you-lose-some shrug.

“Garrett almost caught up with him.” Mrs. Reese tells my mother as she pulls bottles of water and a pitcher of iced tea from the fridge. Garrett shakes his head at Sean.

“By ‘almost’, she means I lost him almost immediately and spent an hour backtracking to be sure of it.”

Sean dumps a stack of plastic cups and some paper plates on the table. “Hey, it happens.”

“Was it the same guy?” I ask, fighting down the urge to point out exactly how dangerous catching that guy would be.

“I’m pretty sure it was.” Garrett says. “But he was gone before I could even get a look at him.”

A shiver fuses itself to my spine. His dad just flips open the lids of the pizza boxes.

“Everybody dig in.” he says, clapping a hand on my mom’s shoulder. “Don’t worry over this, Evangeline. It’s been reported and everyone is on the look out.”

My mom nods with a nervous smile and the conversation is dropped immediately as Garrett’s family jumps in to grab plates and slices and cups for their drinks.

I’m so used to my mom’s perpetual silence, as she transcribes ream after ream for our paper mausoleum, that at first it feels like my ears are being pushed backward by the Reese’s constant roar of voices and boisterous laughter. I watch as my mom stands away from the table with a twitching smile, startled every time one of the boys grabs for another slice or someone breaks into a booming guffaw. But I want to be part of all this fun the Reese’s seem to have together. When Garrett frisbees a plate to me from across the table, I catch it.

“Eat.” He mouths the word to me like he knows I won’t be able to hear him over his family anyway. He adds a grin that makes my stomach feel hollow and full all at the same time. I think I could survive for months, drinking nothing but the pure blue of his eyes.