Hand Me Down (12 page)

“Did you make your crab and angel hair pasta dish back then?”

“No, I couldn’t afford crab,” she says. “I’d cook whatever was on sale: zucchini and tomatoes, almost expired sausage with peppers and mushrooms, or sometimes just garlic, olive oil, and basil,” she says. “I grew fresh basil on the tiny kitchen windowsill in an empty garbanzo bean can.” She laughs and takes another muffin from the cooling rack. “I reused everything I could.”

“And now you have all this,” I say, gesturing to the big, light-filled kitchen. “Lots more than two pots,” I say and she smiles. She hands me another fluffy blueberry treat and this half I eat in pieces, like Tammy, savoring each small crumble. We sit as trees sway outside the windows and shadows inch across the rosewood floor. The muffins cool and the bakery smell fades from the room. “I want a house like this someday,” I say.

“There’s no reason you can’t have what you want if you work hard,” she says, getting up from the table and opening a Ziploc bag she’d rinsed out and let air-dry on the dish rack.

“Is this what you wanted?” I say.

Tammy drops blue-speckled mushroom shapes into the Ziploc bag one by one until all the muffins are encased in plastic and ready to be frozen. She nods as she seals the zipper. “Some days it is, little girl.” She nods again and smiles at me, showing all her teeth. Eyes crinkling at the corners, lips upturned as far as they will reach, this is Tammy’s genuine grin. “Some days, like today,” she says, “it’s exactly what I hoped for.”

Tammy thrives on taking care of the things on her to do list.
We pick up dry-cleaning, visit antique stores, drop Tammy’s car off to get an oil change while we go to yoga classes. We pick up fresh bagels from Einstein’s and go to REI to buy bike parts in preparation for spring. It snows occasionally as we drive around the numbered streets of Salt Lake City’s grid running errands, and I relax into the furry gray seat cover in the warm car and watch tiny spots of bright white swirl in the air. I think about home a lot, with its wide grassy fields and long freeways, lazy green rivers and level structures. There are no mountains at home, the flatness stretches for miles so the valley tempers the climate and we don’t get this kind of cold. But there is more to see here.

“When it gets warmer,” Tammy says one day, “we can go to the farmers’ market. They have delicious fresh fruit. Do you like kiwis?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I’ve never had one.”

“And we can go hiking Sunday mornings,” she says. “When the snow melts, the streams run full and we can watch the sunrise from that mountaintop right there. I promise it’s better than any Sunday service you’ve been to.”

I say, “You really hiked all the way up that mountain?” Outside the car window, snow-tipped rocky peaks surround us and it doesn’t matter which one she’s talking about, they are all huge.

“It’s not that far,” she says. “You could do it if you wanted.”

Sometimes we walk down a block to the Eighth Avenue corner market to get milk or an onion, past snow stacked on the edge of the sidewalks, trees iced with layers of crystal lace. She tells me about winters in Connecticut with snowdrifts taller than me, when electricity is out for weeks, roads closed off, schools shut down. Now when I can’t sleep, I wish for a storm that immense.
A blizzard so big and extensive, all of outside just fades into a gentle white void. I picture it in my mind: a whole world of blank and clean, like starting over, like this chance I’ve been given here with Tammy.

I balance my cereal bowl
and carry the breakfast tray from the wood floor out over the carpet. I’m allowed to eat in the living room if I am careful and so far, so good. I dropped an egg on Tammy’s kitchen rug last week, and when the yolk splattered against the blue weave on the twelve-foot floor runner I wondered what she’d be like angry, if she would simmer for days like Mom and then boil over. But I cleaned it up before she got home, and I don’t think she knew.

I turn on the TV and punch in the cable buttons I’ve memorized.
Animaniacs
starts at three thirty, and I think of me and Jaime at home before Mom on weekdays after school, watching TV too loud and eating popcorn or Pringles on the couch, singing cartoon theme songs together and imitating voices during the commercials.

“What are you doing?” I look up and see Sam standing on the stairs, wearing blue jeans and a big gray sweater under a vest that looks like a life jacket. His tan is darker than Tammy’s, his face has more wrinkles than in the photos, and large glasses rest on his crooked nose. We met once when I was eight, but I recognize him more from the pictures in Tammy’s bedroom.

“Eating,” I say through a mouthful of seven whole grains. “What are you doing?”

He cocks his hip and puts his hand over his faded brown leather belt, his elbow making a sharp
V
angle against his body. He smiles at me like I’m amusing. “I live here,” he says.

Sam has spent most of the last six years in Sydney, designing a secure computer system for Australia’s national health care programs. He works for their government, and makes a lot of money. He’s not married to Tammy but they’ve been together since high school. Sam was eighteen and the manager of a diner in L.A., Tammy was sixteen and a waitress, and twentysomething years later they’ve lived on a ranch in New Mexico, spent two years in a flat in London, owned a house together in Connecticut, and now own a condo in Salt Lake.

His nostrils flare like I’m garbage he can’t stand the smell of. He says, “I didn’t expect to be bothered while working in my own home.”

I don’t tell him it’s only his house because Tammy wants it to be. She picked the condo out by herself. “I didn’t know you were here,” I say. “Sorry.”

“Why is the heater on?” His brown socks come down the steps and he rotates the thermostat.

“It’s cold.”

“It’s plenty warm in this house. No reason to waste energy.”

“Is Aunt Tammy here?”

“You lose most of your body heat through your head,” he says. “Put a hat on.”

“Inside?”

“A hat will keep you warm in most places, Elizabeth,” he says. “Please turn off the television,” he says when he’s halfway up the
stairs, his vest rustling like tent flaps or parachute pants. I push the power button and watch my reflection on the screen put spoonfuls of cereal in my mouth.

The next day in algebra,
Dean tugs lightly on my ponytail and whispers two inches from my ear, “Why would a girl like you leave sunny Califor ni a for bloody snow-pissed Mormon central?” His voice is deep, thick, and combined with the accent that makes me feel like I’m slipping into a warm and silky bubble bath, he sounds older than his sixteen.
I could listen to him all day
, I write to Rachel.

“A girl like me?” I say. He smiles wide, showing the gap between his front teeth. He has a round pale moon face, spotted with deep brown freckles and blue eyes. His hair is long, straight, and pulled back into a ponytail at the base of his neck. I shrug. “I got kicked out.”

“Whoa, tough girl,” he says, circulating his fingers through the strands of hair in my ponytail. “What’d you do?”

“Nothing,” I say. “It’s a long story.” He nods as if he knows, and I wonder about his family.

I call Jaime when I get to Tammy’s after school. “What’s it like living in the house that looks like nobody actually lives in it?” Jaime asks.

When Jaime and I visited during summers past, we were warned not to touch the walls. Tammy had just moved in and everything was brand new: the walls, the white carpet, the rosewood kitchen floor, the pale stone tile of the bathrooms.
Every surface was perfect, spotless. We tried hard not to touch anything—“Careful,” I whispered to Jaime going up the stairs—but we would still see Tammy sometimes scrubbing our dirty little fingerprints off the otherwise unblemished white.

“Tammy’s really nice,” I say.

“Does she let you touch stuff?”

I say, “She makes my lunch every day.”

“Crystal’s taking me to school now,” Jaime says.

I say, “That’s great” at the same time she says, “It sucks.” I chew on my fingernail. I can’t tell if she’s sucking her thumb or not.

“Kids here can’t say things suck,” I say. “They think it’s cussing.”

“That’s stricter than Mom.”

“I know.” I try to think of ways to phrase all the things I want to say:
How much
is Dad drinking? Are you staying attentive? Please tell me you’ve stopped smoking.
“I love you.”

Jaime’s thumb is definitely in her mouth when she says, “I miss you, too.”

At dinner Tammy says, “How
did your algebra test go?” while busying her hands with her napkin and the arrangement of the plates and glasses on the table. She hasn’t eaten much since Sam arrived, and she’s been jittery, which is not like her.

I smile. “I got an A minus.”

She says, “Not an A?”

“An A minus is still pretty good,” I say, my smile fading. “Isn’t it?” My shoulders hunch.

“There’s no reason we can’t do better,” she says. I gape at her
with glassy eyes but she doesn’t notice. She says, “Let’s just try for the full A next time.” She pours herself another glass of wine and refills Sam’s as well.

I slump in my chair and pick up my fork to have something in my hand. “I did better than most of the class,” I mutter, poking at my meat with the silver tines. Little squirts of pork juice escape the holes and mix with the applesauce.

“Was it your best effort?” Sam says and I’m forced to acknowledge his presence. His arrival had surprised Tammy, and she apologized for not telling me about his plans for a visit sooner. He was a week early, she told me, but was only staying six weeks instead of nine. “I hate when he does this,” she’d said. “As if my schedule is less important.” But she didn’t say a word about her irritation to Sam.

Sam has been here four days and Tammy has spent all of her free time with him. They go for walks down to the mall to buy action movies on DVD that can only be watched by the two of them on Sam’s laptop. Sam says DVDs will replace videos someday, so the discs are a better investment, but I think it has more to do with his desire to separate me from them. I don’t complain. I don’t really want to watch
Tombstone
or
Braveheart
anyway. Tammy took yesterday off work and they went skiing so early that she couldn’t drive me to school, and I had to wait outside in the frozen air for the giant yellow school bus. She apologized the night before and she still made my lunch in the morning, so I haven’t abandoned hope even though this whole scenario is alarmingly familiar.

Sam cuts his pork chop and asks me what I learned at school over the squeal of his knife scratching his plate.

I cringe and say, “Nothing.” I push applesauce around with my fork. I don’t like pork, but tonight Tammy didn’t ask me what I wanted.

“Nothing at all?” he says, putting the chunk of white meat onto his tongue.

“Nothing new,” I say, putting down my fork again and pushing my plate away.

“Ah ha,” he says and swallows. “That can’t be true,” he says and I look at Tammy. She stares at him with her chin in her palm, her pork chop barely touched, her wine gone, watching him sneer at me. His square shoulders move under the poofy orange vest he always wears, today over a brown T shirt. His big head in its wide-brimmed Australian outback Crocodile Dundee hat casts a shadow over the table. I’m already looking forward to when he leaves.

“Can I call Jaime?” I say.

Sam says, “It’s actually impossible to avoid learning anything, Elizabeth.”

“Tammy?” I say. “Can I?”

Tammy sits up and clears her throat. “Of course,” she says.

“It happens all the time,” Sam says. “Whether you like it or not.”

Tammy smiles at Sam. “After you finish your homework,” she says.

“So,” Sam says, turning to me. “What did you learn today?”

“I relearned how cold it is here without the heater,” I say. I am wearing two of the sweaters I wore to school and still when I take
my hands out of my pockets it hurts to move my fingers. Sam sets the thermostat at sixty-three degrees and won’t let me turn it up.

“Where’s your hat?” he says and my hands clench in the front pouch pockets of my sweater.

“Thank you for dinner,” I say to Tammy and stand up.

She says, “You hardly ate.”

“I’m not that hungry.” I rinse my plate and wash my hands, the warm water stinging like tiny bites. “I have homework to do,” I say.

“See, you might learn something yet,” Sam says and turns to Tammy. She beams back at him, and I am careful not to touch the railing as I walk up the stairs.

The summer my mom and
Terrance dated, she forced me and Jaime to go with them on singles group outings to beaches and carnivals and concerts in the park. We spent a weekend camping near a dried up river where I was climbing rocks and stumbled upon Mom and Terrance, making out, his hand up her turquoise T shirt and her hand in the butt pocket of his sandblasted jean shorts. I froze, feet unable to move and eyes glued open in horror like victims in slasher movies. Terrance noticed me over Mom’s shoulder and watched me while his lips and tongue hungrily worked at my mom’s mouth. His hands moved to the waist of her shorts and he winked at me as he slipped his fingers under the cloth-wrapped elastic.

I covered my eyes then my mouth as bile rushed up my throat. I spun around and sprinted as fast as I could through the dry pine needles and scratchy underbrush until my chest heaved. A dead
tree had fallen across the path where I stopped and I kicked it. I kicked and bugs came out, ants, beetles, millipedes, and spiders. I kicked the tan termite tunnels and crumbling bark until my tennis shoes were brown and smothered in wood chips. I stomped and crushed and let the cracking wood and my own heavy breathing fill my ears until the log was almost sawdust. I puked into a mound of earth until my stomach was as ravaged as the tree.

“How was your walk?” Mom said when I got back to camp sweaty and coated with forest. A fine dust on my legs stuck to the soft white-blond hairs she wouldn’t let me shave. She had a yellow daisy tucked behind her ear.