Girl Unmoored (5 page)

Still, he could have dyed his hair at least.

Mrs. Weller walked back out with the sunglasses.

“Here, Apron,” she said handing me eleven one-dollar bills soft as cotton. I reached into the wagon for our coffee can full of change and shook the coins until a penny popped up. “Thank you, Mrs. Weller,” I said handing her the penny, which was so bright and shiny you would think I was the first person to use it.

“Bye now,” she ordered us. Then she spun on her slippers and walked back into her house.

“Sha
bam
!” Rennie said. “That was scary.”

Mike laughed. “That was
Millie
.”

“Let’s go,” I said.

Rennie blew on her braid, picked up the wagon handle and said, “It was nice to meet you. You were really great.” Then she walked past me toward my house. I waved once, then followed Rennie.

“Hey, Apron,” Mike called after me. “Your dad’s the professor. And the expert on Maine, all things about Maine.
The History of Maine
, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. I thought of telling him the real title of the book, but ran to catch up with Rennie instead.

On the way to the Meaningless Bowl, it looked like rain.
Rennie kept asking M over and over again about the chocolate in Brazil. Through the window, I watched those dark clouds sail in. There were only three seasons in Maine: July, August, and winter.

It had started raining lightly by the time we got to the soccer field. Most of us kept our hoods up, so no one did much talking while the moms unloaded the cars and the dads got ready to tackle each other in their sweat pants and tunics, either blue or green, which I had remembered to get at school after all. My dad was the blue captain. Mr. Perry and my dad used to be on the same team, but this year Mr. Perry was a green.

Rennie had run straight over to her mom and Eeebs when we pulled into the Falmouth Middle School parking lot. M followed her and hugged Mrs. Perry like they were long-lost friends. Then the two of them stood next to each other until Mrs. Perry walked away and went to go talk to another mother instead. I stayed two mothers away from M and watched Rennie walk over to Seth Chambers’s mother and start talking to her.

Seth Chambers and some other eighth grade boys were biking around the field, but Eeebs kept standing there, holding a green tunic in his hand, waiting for someone to get hurt so he could go in. Mrs. Perry was never going to let him play touch football, though, and everyone knew it except him. “They’re like animals out there,” Mrs. Perry complained last year, closing her eyes and shaking her tight curl. “I’m just not going to let Ebert play until he’s at least fifteen.”

“Good idea,” another mother had said.

Eeebs never put his tunic down, though, which was blue last year too.

Finally the rain stopped and the birds started singing. Some people, like M and Mrs. Perry, unfolded their blankets and lay them on the wet grass, and Rennie and I passed around the football cookies. I knew almost everyone, but I kept my big hood up so I didn’t have to talk much. Right before halftime, it started raining hard enough again for one of the dads on the green team to make a big T with his muddy hands, and for my dad and the others to make a huddle.

After that, my dad came over and told all of us that it was a tie and that we could go home. My dad went over to M and helped her pick up our blanket and put it in the bag. I heard him say, “I’ll meet you in the car. Where’s Apron?” even though I was standing right there. M didn’t answer him, though, or maybe I just didn’t hear her with that rain beating down on my hood. Everyone started walking fast to their cars, except me, who took my time. Rennie didn’t even say good-bye.

Before I reached the parking lot, I heard some loud voices behind me. When I turned around, I saw two men, one blue and one green, standing across from each other in the middle of the field. They were moving their hands around fast. Then the blue man punched the green one in the stomach. When the green man crumpled over, his hood slid off and I saw that it was Mr. Perry. The blue man turned around and started walking off the field.

And when he got up to me, still standing there watching, he said, “Let’s go, Apron.”

I thought my dad would save it.
It looked like he might, his hand extended out like that. But he didn’t.

“Sorry,” I whispered.

He shook his head and leaned down for my tray.

I should have seen it then—all the other things about to come crashing down. But instead I watched
Juan
Busboy
—it said so on his tag—walk up to me with a mop. “It’s okay,” he nodded. “I take care of it, no problem.”

My dad slapped his hands on his pants and stood. “I’ll get you another one. We’re not paying twice.”

Since the Meaningless Bowl, my dad had been in his office grading papers. He didn’t tell me what happened with Mr. Perry, and I didn’t ask. Rennie and I made enough money for a combination lock, but now I needed to get to the store to buy it. When I told my dad I needed a new lock for my bike, he looked at me crooked and said he just bought me one. “I know,” I answered. “But tornado season is coming up. My bike could get blown away.” He told me Maine hadn’t had a tornado since 1972, the year I was born. But then he told me he’d try to get me there by the end of the week.

Which meant seven more days of M trying to kill The Boss.

I stepped back and watched how quickly
Juan
Busboy
wiped up the spaghetti with just a few twists of his mop. After he dropped an orange danger cone with
Maine Med Cafe
onto the wet spot, he winked at me and left. I sighed. At least M wasn’t there yet.

Carlos
Manager
must have told
Barbara
Cashier
not to charge him again because she brushed my dad away without tapping on her register. I could see meatballs all over the place when he handed me my tray and said, “Try to watch it this time,” before walking his red head over to the water fountain. I hadn’t had a sip of water since last week when we studied amoebas in Science. After watching those hairy little cells banging into each other under the microscope, I decided I was never drinking water again.

I went to go save our seats inside the handicapped section, which was the last place I wanted to sit, but it’s quieter in there. Grandma Bramhall says my dad has been agoraphobic since he was a boy, but when he hears that he just shakes his head. “Your grandmother’s starting to lose some of her marbles, Apron.” Which might be true. Lately she’d been forgetting things. And the little people were back, too. They were there when she went down to get some juice in the middle of the night, sitting at her kitchen table, or standing there doing nothing at all. The little people had started coming last year, but then stopped all of a sudden during Christmas. “It might be a busy time of year for them,” Grandma Bramhall said, her head shaking back and forth. “Who knows?” But my dad just rubbed his hands. “Dennis,” she said, still shaking, “You can put me away if you want, but I swear on your father’s grave, those little people are nice as pie.”

Grandma Bramhall’s head never stops shaking. Ever. If you didn’t know about her, you might think she was saying no every second or trying to get a mosquito off her head, but she wasn’t. It was just her neck plugged in wrong. “The head’s nothing to worry about,” my dad promised. “It’s been shaking like that since before you were born. This little people thing could be the beginning of the end, though.”

Now, my dad sat across from me and cracked open his paper.

President Reagan Promises to Keep AIDS out of America
was the headline. There was a picture of President Reagan under his promise too, looking as handsome as ever. Grandma Bramhall kept a picture of him in her bedroom, right next to Grandpa Hub. “He was in the movies, you know,” she’d wink and shake.

“What
is
AIDS?” I asked. I knew it killed you, but only gay people.

A corner crinkled down and he studied me for a moment. “A very bad disease.”

I nodded at the front page. “But only for um,
some
men right?” I wished President Reagan was talking about nurses
’ aides
though, then M would be long gone.

“No. Not only for
some
men, Apron. There’s an entire continent of people dying from it. Men
and
women.
Kids
. What do they teach you in that school?”

“Everything,” I shrugged, leaning down to get my Latin dictionary.

“Doesn’t sound like it
.
Maybe I should come in and talk to Miss Frame.”

“
Frane
,” I corrected him.

“Frane,” he repeated to himself. Then he flicked his paper back up.

I put the book on my lap and looked at those meat-balls. None of them were getting any closer to these lips, so I started squeezing my peanut butter muffin into a ball. Across the room, a girl was reading. She didn’t look anymore handicapped than I did. There were no crutches anywhere and her long blond hair came down past one shoulder.
University of So Maine
it said on her sweatshirt.

I waited to see if she noticed my dad, maybe she’d taken Latin with him or knew about, “Maine Matters,” the column he wrote about Maine. We were going to be rich beyond belief and buy a new house as soon as he published the book
, Maine Matters
. She didn’t even look up, though.

A nurse walked into the handicapped section, but it wasn’t M so my stomach sat down again.

At the beginning, I liked M. She used to come into my mom’s room and say, “Can I get you somethings, Mrs. Bramhall?” And my mom would smile like nothing hurt and say, “How’s the search going?” Then M would sigh, “Not so good yet,” and my mom would say, “You’ll find Mr. Right someday.” But M would shrug and say, “He’s having to come in eight more months,” which was when she had to go back to Brazil. It used to be funny. But that was before she decided to make Mr. Right my dad.

A loud siren made me jump. The emergency room was right next to us—all those people bleeding or dying while just one wall away we were eating meatballs. When the siren blared again, M walked through the door.

She put her hand on my dad’s shoulder. He smiled and said, “Hey there,” and stood to kiss her.

“Hi, Aprons.”

“Hi.” I thumbed through the dictionary until I found it:
Blandae mendacia linguae
; the lies of a smooth tongue.

My dad pulled out a chair for her and they both sat. “So what did they say?” I sucked in my smile and tapped my foot and waited for the good news: hardly anyone gets asked to stay another year as a nurse’s aide, she had told me that herself, all wrong in English, and now her year was up next month.

Instead of answering out loud, M put her hand up to my dad’s ear and whispered something, which even if you’re from
Brazil
is the rudest thing you can do.

My dad’s face turned weird. He stared over my head and M looked down at my muffin ball. Sneering. Like Jenny Pratt.

Before he said anything, my dad glanced at me and that’s when I saw it—a flash, a tiny tick of sad crossing his face.

He turned to M with a half smile. “Welp,” he said. “Whadda ya know.”

She blinked at him. I’d never seen her look so nervous.

“What
do
you know,” he whispered to himself.

Bad news pulled down on me like a shade. I looked at my dad’s newspaper and saw a picture of a skinny African girl wearing a pot on her head and a baby on her back. Nobody ever smiled in newspaper pictures.

“Apron,” my dad turned to me clearing his throat. “Margie’s
gravitas
.”

“What?”

He nodded toward my dictionary. “
Gravitas
,” he said. “Look it up.”

M lay her head on his shoulder and squeezed his arm.

I flipped through the pages and moved my finger down slowly. I wanted it to mean sorry. Sorry that she had ruined everything for so long; sorry she hated American girls; and sorry, but she wouldn’t even write to us.
Gravitas
.

But it didn’t. Pregnant. That’s what it meant.

I looked at my dad. He waited for me to say something, but I couldn’t get my throat working. So he blinked his eyes off mine and started sliding his newspaper back and forth with one finger making it look like that African girl was trying to walk off the page. When his finger stopped, you could see that girl was still there, though. Stuck like me.

The church smelled like leftover tears.
Sadness was tucked into corners and hidden under beams and pasted so thick on the walls that it was hard to breathe.

My dad and M were getting married during dodge ball. I know, because we were still waiting for M to walk down the aisle when the bells rang eleven times, exactly when we had gym class. My dad and M had to get married on a Friday because the church was booked up solid from now all the way through summer, and Grandma Bramhall said they were just lucky that Reverend Hunter would marry them in the first place. Grandma Bramhall didn’t like M any more than I did, you could tell by the way she called her “the girl.”

We were supposed to be done by noon because a real wedding was in the church tomorrow and they needed to start setting up for it. My neck kept itching and my butt was digging into the pew. On the other side of the aisle, Nurse Silvia was sitting with a lady I didn’t know, but who was probably a nurse because they stuck together like glue. Nurse Silvia worked in the kid’s department, but she was from Brazil too, and even though she was the one who brought M to America in the first place, I kind of liked her. She was short but pretty and she always had brown lip gloss on. She waved to me when she sat down, so I waved back.