The Queen of Everything (14 page)

He looked over at me. We were curving around
Deception Loop. I could hear my bike scrape against the truck bed with the
turn.

"You ever just feel happy?" he
asked.

I nodded. Despite everything, I did right
then.

"That worry," he said. "About your dad? Worry
is like watching your feet while you're dancing."

That Jackson talked strangely, but I liked it.
He gave you the pieces of the puzzle; you were

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supposed to fit them together. Only you had no
top of the box to look at. You might be making a flower garden or a lighthouse
or the Cathedral of Notre Dame.

"This isn't a good dance, though," I
said.

"Still a dance," he said. "Here you
are."

Jackson turned onto Whispering Firs and stopped
in front of my house. He kept the engine running, but hopped out and slid my
bike from the back. I looked at my empty driveway.

"He's not home," I said.

Jackson looked too. "Nope," he said.

"Thanks for the ride," I said.

"Sure," he said.

We looked at each other, and for a split second
I thought we were supposed to kiss. Instead Jackson turned back to his truck. I
picked up my bike and headed up the drive. I heard the noisy clang of Jackson's
truck door as it slammed closed and then a moment later, "Hey."

I turned around. Jackson leaned out the window
of his truck.

"That Kramer guy's eyes. Vicious. A baboon's
eyes," he said.

"I've never looked that close at a baboon," I
called back to him.

Jackson rolled up his window, put the truck
into gear. He made a loop back to his house.

I might be stupid sometimes, but I knew
jealousy when I saw it.

135

Chapter Seven

I just heard the most wonderful lyric on the
radio," Laylani Waddell said as she waltzed into True You and shook free of her
coat. '"Tall from side to side,' it said. "Tall from
side to side.'
Isn't
that apt? That's something we can use with the team members, as an option. I
don't want the girls thinking of themselves as
fat."

Laylani was in a good mood. She and Buddy had
probably just had sex. You could always tell.

"Girls, some days I know just how Jesus must
have felt, helping to heal the afflicted, making the lame whole," Laylani
said.

This was not my area of expertise, but I did
know for a fact that Jesus never told his disciples to get on their stationary
bikes and ride, ride, ride.

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Melissa didn't even look at me. She sat at the
desk and stared at the phone all stony faced, as if it were her job to watch and
see if it might ring. Usually by now we'd be shooting each other glances that
said,
Next she'll want to start the Church of the Thin Thighs.
Which, if
you ask me, would probably get a pretty good following. According to my mother,
half the problems in Today's World are because, somewhere down the line, vanity
got turned into a virtue.

Melissa was making it clear she was pissed at
me, and I got the message loud and clear. At school she'd skipped Ms. Cassaday's
class and sat by Chantay West at lunch. When Laylani disappeared into her office
and shut the door, Melissa got up and stomped around True You as if she had
boots full of snow.

The square button to Laylani's phone line lit
up. You could hear waves of Laylani's voice, cooing to Buddy in a disgusting
manner. "Okay, Melissa," I said. "What's wrong?"

"Like you don't know," she said. She slammed a
file cabinet drawer shut, making the little sign on top, you can because you
think you can , shudder.

"Tell me," I said.

She whirled around at me. A real whirl--her
hair fanned out like a twirling skirt. "I saw you," she said.

"So?"

137

"With my brother?"

I wasn't really surprised. My horoscope that
day said, What
was hidden will be uncovered.

"So? He gave me a ride home."

She crossed her arms, looked at me with
eyebrows raised.

It was the look Mrs. Beene gave Boog whenever
he forgot to scratch on the door to be let out.

"It was a ride home, Melissa, jeez. It didn't
mean anything," I said. It wasn't true. It did mean something. I just wasn't
sure what.

Melissa kept on with the Bad Doggie
look.

"I got stuck out at the Hotel Delgado, and it
was getting dark," I said.

"You were out at the hotel?" she said. Her
voice gave an inch.

I nodded.

"Seeing Kale?"

I
had
seen him. I nodded.

"Why didn't you say so?"

"I mean, the way you were slamming things
around here. And you ate lunch with Chantay West, for God's sake."

"She had this meat-loaf sandwich," Melissa
said. "It was like this thick." She held out her thumb and forefinger a good two
inches apart. "With these veiny red lines of catsup. I thought the fumes would
make me heave."

"Ugh," I said.

138

"Tell me about it." She sat in the chair behind
the reception desk. "I've got phones," she said.

She seemed to know she deserved something from
me, which was fine. I'd do the measuring that day. "Okay," I said.

"I'll do phones tomorrow, too."

"Okay," I said.

She spun the desk chair back and forth with the
tip of her shoe. "I know it's a free country and all, Jordan, but if you somehow
liked my freaky brother I'd never forgive you," she said.

"Don't worry," I said.

It occurred to me that I'd been lying a lot
lately. Then the phone rang. "True You," Melissa sang. She checked out her nails
while she listened, a color we'd bought together. Peach Shimmer. "Just a
minute," she said. She clicked down one of the phone buttons, then another and
another. "Oh, shit," she said. "Shit." Four lines were blinking. She punched a
button. "Hello?" She hung up, hard. Her eyes opened up wide, she started
laughing. "Oh my God, oh my God," she said.

"What?"

"I punched the wrong one," she whispered
gleefully. "I could have
sworn
that was Buddy telling Laylani how much he
wanted her."

Melissa's eyes glimmered like the blinking
phone lines, and she spun in that stupid chair, trying to squelch her laughter
as she answered

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the other calls. I laughed too, though I knew
Melissa was wrong. It was Buddy, or the man had said something else or there was
some other explanation; I didn't know. What I did know was that I was laughing
and it wasn't funny. I was laughing, but the idea made me as sick as the thought
of Chantay West's meat-loaf sandwich.

After Laylani's second lecture on "Doing Good
Deeds For Yourself," I told Melissa we could go to Boss Donuts, my treat. But
when we got outside, Kale Kramer was there in his car waiting for me, rolling
the radio dial with his finger, causing Melissa to instantly finish up her
forgiving. Kale took us to Boss Donuts and laughed with us at all our Laylani
stories and drove us home. I actually had a good time. Melissa called me
later.

"Everything is going just perfectly," she
said.

It was the wrong thing to say; a careless thing
to say. Big Mama may know some things I don't know. But sometimes I still think
life is a big Soak 'Em game and God has the ball. The trick is, blend in with
the crowd, keep your mouth shut, and stay toward the back.

It's when you wave your arms and call attention
to yourself that,
bam!
He's sure to get you out.

For a few days, I wondered if my father had
called it quits with Gayle D'Angelo. I thought

140

maybe he had stepped to the edge of something
ugly and scared himself back. I was grateful for whatever it was.

My father was calm, and lighter somehow, as if
the recent rain had washed some of the June danger out of the air. We never
spoke of the night I found the photograph and pulled off his scarf. Instead we
just stepped around each other for a while until he was himself again. I was so
relieved he was himself again. He slept soundly, hummed along with his lame CDs
as he made dinner, read
The Vision Of Landscape In Renaissance Italy
with
his socked feet propped on the couch. He told his usual corny jokes and talked
with a pen in his mouth as he balanced his checkbook.

"You know what happened today?" my father said
one night as he stir-fried vegetables for dinner. He shook his head with
disbelief and laughed. "This woman comes in because every time she gets her
picture taken, her eyes look red."

"You've got to be kidding," I said.

"She thought something was wrong with
her."

The pan hissed, and the snug smell of frying
onions wafted up. I watched his hands, one grasping the pan's handle, one
efficiently working a wooden spoon. Capable hands.

"Oh, man," I said. "What'd you say to
her?"

"I told her she could sell her extra stupidity
by the side of the road."

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"You did not."

"I told her to look just to the left of the
flash next time and then spent a half hour looking at pictures of her and her
husband posing in front of palm trees and bad sunsets from her trip to
Hawaii."

"What a guy," I said.

"There should be a law against that bathing
suit he was wearing. It was like a slingshot."

"Oh, Dad," I said. "Lost in the hills," he
said. "Oh, gross," I said.

Getting a fix on fathers, just regular fathers
in regular situations, can be tricky. It can be like looking at Big Mama's
salmon under water. You can see those fish swimming, you know they are there,
but they're hazy and indistinct under the ripples of the stream. And my father
right then, well, he wasn't in a normal situation. He too was making his way
across a stream--rapids--really, by stepping from one small shaky stone to the
next.

Just as suddenly, things were once more not so
normal. My father started looking like hell. Wrinkled and sleepless. Dark
crescent moons under his eyes. I heard his voice drifting down the hall in the
middle of the night, sounding sometimes charming, sometimes aloof, sometimes
pleading. He was distracted, left home without his coat or breakfast or the mail
he was

142

going to take to the post office. He didn't
listen when you talked to him; conversation seemed only to agitate him and make
him lose his patience. He left the house at odd hours, came home joyful. He
jumped when I came into the room, as if he was always about to be caught. It was
like living with a CIA agent--a bad, nervous one not cut out for the job. He was
on some ride, or maybe just Jackson's ship, and from where I stood, it didn't
look like much fun. It looked like it made you seasick. If that's what love was
like, it sucked, if you ask me.

The last week of school, my father called me
from his office. Understand, the only time my father had ever called from his
office before was when Peppy Johnson at the radio station got carried away and
reported that a fire was raging on our street. This was after Mr. Lucassi's
sheepdog, Shelley, knocked over a stick of Mrs. Lucassi's lighted incense and
burned a hole in her area rug.

"You've got an activity after school on
Friday?" he asked.

"An activity? What, you mean the end-of-school
picnic?"

He was almost whispering. I could hear Janet,
his technician, talking to a patient in the background, an old man with a
fragile voice.

"That's it. What about it?"

"I want to go," he said. "I thought I'd like to
go."

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He was trying to be off-handed, cheerful. You
could hear the strain of it. My hands got sweaty. The phone was heavy to hold. I
knew why he wanted to go. I knew, that more than anything, I did not want them
to be there together, where I would have to see and pretend that I
didn't.

"You do? Why? You've never gone. It's, like,
five o'clock. You'd miss an hour of patients.
I
don't even like to
go."

"Aren't parents supposed to come?"

"Well, yeah, but it's usually just like the PTA
people. It's not like we'll be having quality time or anything. The parents just
sort of hang out together on their own. Last year I just hung out with
Melissa."

"That's fine. Where is it?"

"Where it always is."

"Come on, Jordan."

"You won't even see me," I said.

"I
understand."

I sighed. "Point Perpetua."

"All right," he breathed. "Okay. It's all set
then."

He hung up. I slammed down the phone. I felt
sick again. That sickness you feel when you remember that the people you love
can be the biggest strangers.