Girl Unmoored (14 page)

“What?” he said throwing his hands up. “She
is
, to me. Haven’t spoken to the woman in twelve years. That’s pretty dead.”

“Nice,” Mike mumbled, shaking his head.

I focused on figuring out the tallest daisy, then snipping it.

“Tell you what, Apron,” Chad said. “I’ll write the poem for you.” He lifted himself up on his elbows again. “I’m a hopeless romantic-type, right Mikey?”

“You can’t do that, Chad. Apron could get in trouble. Teachers have a way of knowing stuff like that. You’re not
actually
a seventh grader, remember?”

Chad pouted. “Well, then, can I
help
write it? Please? I’ll take you to Dairy Queen?” He blinked at me, then Mike. “Fine.
Mike
will take us to Dairy Queen.”

Mike gave a quick nod.

“Great!” Chad smiled, even though I still hadn’t agreed to anything. He stood and shuffled over to the kitchen for a pen and some paper, then shuffled back to the couch. “What Love Means to Me,” Chad said, writing. “By Apron Bramhall, the loveliest noun I know. Get over here, noun.”

So I did. And while Mike drove off to deliver the flowers, Chad and I wrote my free verse poem together.

And later, when Chad slid the poem into my backpack he said, “You’re gonna get an A. You wait.”

If you thought M looked bad before, you had to see her now.
She had black circles under her eyes the size of a football player’s and her mouth hung so low she probably couldn’t lift it up into a smile if she tried. Even though she didn’t look as bad as Chad did, she looked like she could check into the hospital for a nap at least. And if
she
looked this bad, you could only imagine what that little whatever in there looked like. Which is why, when I saw her carrying a load of laundry up the stairs, I heard myself say, “I’ll do it.”

She looked up at me like she was too tired to play games.

So I stepped down and took the pile out of her hands just to prove it.

“What do you want?” she scowled.

“Nothing,” I said. “It’s just that you seem kind of tired this morning.”

Turns out I did want something, though.

In the bathroom, I pulled the green curtain back. The other side was the laundry room, and the hamper against the wall already had a few arms and legs hanging out of it. I dropped M’s pile, dumped the hamper out on top of it, and started sorting. When I was done, I plucked my dad’s bright red shirt, which always bleeds, out of the darks and dropped it in with the whites, which had his favorite summer pants and white button-down shirt. Sadly, I was going to have to sacrifice my white
Portland Pottery
T-shirt to make things look real.

I was putting in the load when I noticed M through the space between the curtain studying herself in the mirror. She pulled both cheeks back with her palms and opened her mouth as wide as she could. Then she dropped her eyes to her bump and turned sideways, smoothing my dad’s plaid shirt over it. She tried to suck in her stomach, but it wasn’t going anywhere. That little whatever was going to have to come out one way or the other now. M let the bump go and put her hands over her face and started crying; silent and quick with shaking shoulders.

Even though she wasn’t hitting her bump this time, that same tidal wave of sadness crashed into me. When Mrs. Christianson was pregnant, she rubbed her stomach so nicely you practically wanted to climb in there yourself. But M just hated it, you could tell.

Maybe I needed to cut back on the messes I was making. At least for a few days. My dad had started clenching his jaw again, what he always did when he had a low-grade problem, and M had started stepping away from him. I pulled my dad’s red shirt out of the load and threw it back down with the darks. Then I opened the curtain. But when M saw my face, her eyes hardened. “This laundry should be your job anyway, Aprons. You American girls are all so spoiled,” she hissed, walking out.

So I picked up the red shirt again, dropped it back in with the white load, and started the laundry machine.

By the time I got downstairs, M was standing in front of the stove cooking runny eggs. “Morning, Apron,” my dad said sitting at his lobster. Last night after Mike dropped me off, he had yelled out from his office, “Is that you, Margie?” I had made it home before M, who was still out with her nurse friends. I poked my head in through his doorway. “Oh. Apron. How’d the flowers go?” he asked. So I told him. And he told me to make sure the front door was unlocked and to go on up to bed, it was late.

Now, I got down my cereal, but something was too thick around here and it turned out to be their moods. M put some eggs in front of my dad and asked me if I wanted any. My dad was watching so I looked her straight in the eye and smiled when I said, “No, thank you.” She looked away and sat down. My dad took a few bites of the glop, but M stared at hers, not eating a thing.

“Better eat,” my dad said nodding to her plate.

M shook her head and said, “I cannot.”

“Serves you right then,” my dad said, pushing his eggs away and cracking open his paper. “It wasn’t a bachelorette party.”

M cleared her plate and left. I poured some cereal into my bowl and read the
Do You Know
s on the back of the box. Just like the good old bad days.

Grandma Bramhall’s brown car jiggled down our dirt road right on time.

“Hi, dearie,” she said screeching her car into the driveway and waving her hand out the window. “Don’t you look pretty.”

You have to wear a dress to Handy’s so I was wearing the yellow one she gave me for Easter. Already it was so humid out that winter was starting to sound good again.

I waved back and ran into the garage to put my pogo stick away. When I came out, my dad was standing at the top of the stairs.

“Hi, Mom,” he said, one hand in his pocket and the other one lifted, palm out, in a wave. He looked tired, and tired of it, the way he always did now.

“Hi,” Grandma Bramhall said, poking her head out the window. “How’s the girl?”

“A little under the weather,” he shrugged. My lips made a U-turn. I kept my smile low when I walked to the passenger side of her brown square car.

“Well, dearie, if you’re going to make your own bed,” Grandma Bramhall sighed, throwing her hands off the steering wheel.

I knew the rest: if you’re going to make your own bed,
you better be willing to lie in it, too.
Grandma Bramhall said it a lot. But what it really meant was: who’s sorry now?

My dad started down the stairs, both hands in his khaki pants. “When do you think you’ll bring Apron home?”

“Oh, well, that depends,” Grandma Bramhall said, turning her head to shake it at me, sliding into the passenger seat. “On whether we decide to have dessert or not, doesn’t it, Apron? Did I tell you we are making
three
stops on the cruise, two in the Caribbean?”

I bugged my eyes out for her and rolled down my window. My dad said, “Sounds a lot more fun than fly-fishing.” Last summer she went to fly-fishing school and left notes all over the kitchen that said,
Dear little people, I’ve gone fishing. Make yourselves at home
.

Grandma Bramhall jerked the car into reverse before my dad could lean into the window. “Call me if she gets to be too much for you, Mom. I’ll come pick her up,” he said.

“Oh for God’s sake, Dennis. She’s more of an adult than you are.”

My dad tipped his head towards the stairs. “Yes. But it’d be a great way for me to get out of this shindig.”

“A man at a baby shower. Honestly,” Grandma Bramhall grumbled, turning around to see where she was backing out. Her head shook even cranked to the side like that, just a little slower, like it was up against something.

We couldn’t hear what my dad said next because of the dirt crunching under the tires. But when I looked up again, he was climbing the stairs, his hands still in his pockets.

After that, we were on our way. I punched around on her radio until I heard, “We Are the World
”
with Cyndi Lauper and her friends.

“Oh, I love this one,” Grandma Bramhall said, putting the petal to the metal and gunning it out onto Route 88, cutting off a
#1
Maine Movers
truck behind us. The driver let out a huge long beep, but Grandma Bramhall just threw her hands off the steering wheel and said, “Turn this up, dearie, will you?”

The driveway into Handy’s Boat Yard was so full of potholes that if you closed your eyes, you might think you were on a ride at Funtown Splashtown instead. Halfway down, there was a parking lot full of boats with every kind of sailboat and speedboat you could think of just waiting to be fixed or painted. There were long boats that could fit my entire class in them, and tiny boats that could only fit two people. But all of them had names like
Sunrise Surprise
or
Sailendipity
. I thought about what I’d name mine; nothing with an M in it.

Grandma Bramhall got going so fast down the driveway it looked like she was trying to launch
us
off the docks. Then at the last second she turned into the parking lot, tires screeching. Seagulls cawed all over the sky and the air smelled like God just burped after eating fish for lunch. White poop was drizzled on everything, including Grandma Bramhall’s brown hood already.

“Damn birds,” she said, shutting her door. Then we started up the walkway with old wooden piles roped together. I held the door for her, which had a knob like a helm.

“Thank you, dearie,” she smiled at me.

In the restaurant, the air conditioner was practically below zero and the fish smell from the outside turned into a fish smell sprayed with Pledge on the inside. Grandma Bramhall told a lady who looked too old to have bangs our names. Then we followed her into the dining room with dark wood everywhere and old people eating piles of fried clams.

Out the window, you could see the launching slope, where a medium-sized sailboat named
The Portland Polly
with a green hull was halfway into the water, waiting to go.

“I don’t think so,” Grandma Bramhall said when the bang lady stopped at a tiny table in the middle of the dining room. “I asked for a window. So my granddaughter can watch the boats.”

The bang lady pinched her face into too many wrinkles, just like I thought, and seated us at a new one.

“Isn’t this lovely,” Grandma Bramhall sighed bringing some ice water to her shaking lips. Even though her head moved a thousand miles an hour, she knew exactly how to sip without spilling a drop.

“Thanks for bringing me here, Grandma Bramhall,” I said putting my napkin on my lap and slipping my flip-flops off my feet, against the law but who was going to see.

“Nonsense,” she said opening her menu. “Anything you want. The world is your oyster.” She laughed at that. Then she leaned into her bag and pulled out three brochures, each of them with a big white ship on the front. “Did I show you these, Apron? Look where Mr. John is taking me,” she said holding them up like a fan.

I plucked out the middle one and unfolded it. There were pictures of happy people eating in fancy dining rooms or dancing under big chandeliers. And pictures of tan ladies sitting around the pool with one knee up reading, and pictures of people with their arms wrapped around each other smiling big while the sun set behind them. Not a person with a freckle anywhere. When I was done, I smiled up at Grandma Bramhall, who was looking down at another brochure now, studying it really, bending it this way and that, trying to find something. It wasn’t people with freckles though, because Grandma Bramhall didn’t have any. Just like me, my dad caught them from his dad.

I put the brochure back down and opened the huge book of a menu with so many adjectives Ms. Frane would have had a field day.
Succulent
,
ripe
, and
perfectly roasted
were all over the place. Plain tuna salad is my favorite, but at Handy’s the tuna is so
fresh
and
chunky
you can’t even eat it. Which is why I usually got the fried clams, except now it reminded me of the seals I needed to save. Yesterday, I took the pamphlet out of my drawer and checked off the
Yes,
please send me flyers
to distribute
box. You didn’t even need a stamp to mail it, that’s how desperate they were for help.

A waitress with tall hair and bright lipstick came over and said, “Mornin’ to yuh, ladies.”