The Rest of Us Just Live Here (4 page)

I deliver my plates, I get three more raspberry lemonades for table seven, I bring enough extra cheesy toast into the restaurant to feed the entire population that has ever lived on this planet. Grillers is high volume, fast turnover, and even if the tips are cheap, there are a lot of them. It’s a great job. It keeps gas in my car. It gets me out of the house. I work a lot of shifts with Jared. I’m lucky, too: Mel works the tills at a twenty-four-hour drugstore, fighting off meth heads who’ve lost track of what year it is, and Henna makes coffee at a drive-in Java Shack that doesn’t even have its own bathroom.

It’s a great job. I’m lucky. It’s a great job.

(But do you have any idea how dirty restaurants are?)

I start washing my hands early in the shift, and five hours later at the end, I’m washing them almost every two minutes, which by then doesn’t feel like often enough after touching one of the sponges we use to wipe the crevices of the booths after we close.

“One hundred and thirty-five.” Jared counts his money, sitting on the steps down from the storeroom. “One hundred and thirty-six dollars and … seventy-two cents.” He straightens all the bills into a neatish pile and shoves them into his polyester uniform pocket. “Not bad for a Tuesday.” He looks over to where I’m standing at the prep room sink. “What about you?”

“A hundred and seventeen even,” I say, rinsing off the soap. I leave the water running. I’ve washed my hands so many times tonight two of the fingertip pads on my right hand have cracked and started bleeding. The skin from my fingers to my wrists itches and burns because I’ve washed every bit of natural oil out of it. I grip my hands into fists, bearing the pain.

Then I squirt some more soap on them and start washing them again.

“You guys are the lucky ones,” Tina says. She’s in the closet-sized office they give to the managers. The door is open, and she’s basically sitting next to Jared, her cheek resting on her computer keyboard, volumes of blonde hair splayed out over the desk. “You’re so young. You’re so lucky and
young
.”

“You’re only twenty-eight,” Jared says.

“I
know
,” Tina moans.

Jared gives me a quizzical glance as I wash my hands again. “Tell your Uncle Jared what’s wrong this time, Tina.”

She shoots him a dirty look, her face still moulded onto the keyboard. But she answers anyway. “I think Ronald’s cheating on me.”

“With
who
?” Jared’s a little too surprised.

“Hey!” Tina says. “Ronald’s an attractive guy!” She hesitates. “A little
short
, but…”

Ronald, who stops by every Saturday afternoon for a free lunch, comes up to Tina’s shoulders. And Jared’s belt.

I’m only slightly exaggerating.

“Is it revenge for your thing with Harvey the Chef?” Jared asks.

Tina sits up, a cluster of keyboard squares embossed on her cheek. “Probably.”

I squeeze another blob of soap on my hands. I can feel my chest start to constrict, actual tears welling up in my eyes. I’m just
burning
with rage at myself.

But I rinse off the soap and start again.

“He’ll come back,” Jared says, standing. “He always does. So do you.”

“He hasn’t
gone
anywhere,” Tina says, locking the safe and picking up her purse. “That’s kind of the problem. If he left, I’d at least be able to clean up the house a little before he came back.” She flicks off the light in the office. “You know he actually once lost a whole frozen turkey? And not even in the kitchen.”

“Mm-hmm,” Jared says, his eyes on me.

“You guys done?” Tina asks, locking the office door.

“Almost,” I say, hoping she doesn’t hear the crack in my voice.

She doesn’t. “Good. I’m going to go set the alarm and then we’re outta here.” She heads out into the main restaurant where the alarm pad is, disappearing past the walk-in freezer.

In two steps, Jared is behind me, putting his bigger, longer, stronger arms around me to pin my own against my side. He turns it into a kind of imprisoning bear hug, lifting me up and away from the sink. He just holds me there for a second, a few inches off the ground, neither of us saying anything. His forehead’s against the back of my head and I can feel his breathing on my neck. I’m not exactly a small guy, but I’m thin and a bit wiry, while Jared is enormous, tall and broad and just big, big, big.

Thank God he’s not a bully or he’d terrorize the school.

“Okay?” he asks quietly, after a minute.

“Okay,” I whisper, swallowing the huge lump in my throat.

He sets me down and slowly, gently, in the way that he has, he lets me go. I don’t move. He steps around me, turns off the tap and hands me some paper towels. I wince as I grab them, leaving several drops of blood against the white.

Tina yawns her way back to us. She scratches a spot on her scalp with one long fake fingernail. “I wonder what Harvey the Chef is up to these days?” she says.

Jared keeps looking over at me as he drives us home. He’s got a ridiculously tiny (and old) car for such a big guy, but it’s just him and his dad and they aren’t overflowing with money.

They’re happy, though. His dad’s the nicest grown man I’ve ever met.

“It really
has
gotten bad again,” Jared says, a statement rather than a question, as we drive deeper into the dark woods towards our homes.

“I know,” I say. “I’ve been getting stuck in these kind of …
loops
lately and it’s getting harder and harder to get out of them.”

“Even when it’s hurting you?”

“Even when I know it’s stupid. In fact, knowing it’s stupid, knowing that I’ve already washed my hands a hundred goddamned times, actually makes it worse. Because knowing that and doing it anyway is like…”

I don’t finish. We drive in silence for a little longer.

“Your fucking parents, man,” Jared whispers. He raises his voice. “If you ever need a place, Mikey. I don’t care how mad they get or how it affects her stupid career–”

“Thanks.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

He hits the steering wheel with his fists. I feel kind of shy about how upset he is on my behalf.

But that’s Jared for you.

“Four and a half weeks,” he says.

Okay, look, I gotta get some stuff out of the way. I wish I didn’t, but it’s necessary. This doesn’t define me or any of the people I love, okay? It’s just life. And we’ve moved on.

But you gotta know.

So.

Four years ago, when I was thirteen and she was still fourteen, my sister had a heart attack. It was caused by arrhythmia, which was caused by Mel starving herself to death.

In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, she died. They were able to revive her, obviously, but the fact remains that, for three or four minutes, she was gone, we’d lost her. She says she doesn’t remember anything about it: no lights, no tunnels, no angels or old relatives or prickly-faced Labradors to help her with her journey to the other side. But weirdly, she doesn’t remember the opposite either. She doesn’t remember nothingness or emptiness or oblivion. Her memory stops before the heart attack and picks up again in the hospital.

“Don’t you wish you could remember?” I once asked her.

She looked at me as if I’d suggested murdering a duckling. “Absolutely not.”

Where were we at this point as a family? Mom was in the Washington State Senate and was running for Lieutenant Governor. I’m going to guess that your knowledge of/interest in state and local politics is as non-existent as most people’s, but it’s enough to know that this was something she considered both extremely modest and a big, big deal. She’d planned it for almost three years,
way
more than the other candidates seemed to, and we’d been photographed a lot in the run-up to the Primary to see if she’d be selected as her party’s candidate.

Because weren’t we all perfect and adorable? Weren’t the Mitchells exactly what the state needed? Look at us with our healthy and unthreateningly average smiles. Our hair that spoke of middle-class prosperity but wasn’t (too) much better than yours. The modern political husband, super-supportive and perhaps a bonus extra behind the scenes. The two older children with their polite attitudes and good grades, and beautiful little Meredith, precocious and funny as a later Disney heroine. Wouldn’t Lieutenant Governor Alice Mitchell be your friend as well as your humble public servant while hanging around in case the Governor died?

The problem was that hardly anyone had heard of her, the campaign had no money, and polls had her at a steady but distant fourth in the Primary.

It wasn’t my mom who told Mel she was looking “a little fat” in some of the press photos; it was her one-day-a-month campaign advisor, a chain-smoking beard called Malcolm. But Malcolm did say it, and my mom didn’t fire him.

Was that enough to make Mel stop eating? Maybe. But we were hardly a hotbed of mental health before then. We didn’t have nearly as much money as it looked like we had, for one thing, because my dad was still paying back the thousands he embezzled from my Uncle Rick’s car dealership, where he used to be top sales manager. My dad stole, under Rick’s nose, all the money to buy the house we still live in. He should have been arrested. He should still be in jail.

But Rick is my mother’s brother and this was even earlier in her career, when she was trying to move up from the State House of Representatives to the State Senate. A scandal would have ended her political career, so she and my dad not only stayed married, but she somehow convinced Rick to keep it secret and – if you can believe this – actually let my dad stay employed there. No access to any accounts, of course, but still selling cars until he’s paid back all the money, plus interest. Which will probably take him up to retirement. As I said, Uncle Rick doesn’t come around much any more.

So pretty much every day back then we were about an hour away from losing everything: money, careers, house, a father, all the while pretending we were the highly functioning family of an up-and-coming politician. My dad drank every day (always did, still does). My mom threw herself into politicking, and Mikey Mitchell – your humble narrator – was so tense I’d started to get trapped in compulsive loops for the first time. Counting and re-counting (and re-counting and re-counting) the contents of my sixth-grade arts cabinet. Driving our poor dog Martha crazy (pre-porcupine death) by walking her over the same length of road four dozen times because I couldn’t seem to get it exactly “right”, though I could never have told you what “right” was. I was sent to a psychiatrist called Dr Luther and was put on medication. And this was all before my mom decided to up the stakes by running for a bigger job.

So all I’m saying is that the ground was clearly fertile for craziness to grow. My sister just got stuck with one that was particularly shit.

One that killed her.

Killed my mom’s campaign, too. Malcolm tried to keep the press to a minimum (and this was at the start of the vampire romances, so there were plenty of “mysterious” deaths among the indie kids to be writing about anyway), but enough got out that my mother was forced to withdraw to support her daughter through a “crisis that could hit
any
family”.

We all started this thing called FBT, family-based treatment, where we were supposed to show ourselves as resources for Mel, instead of the cause of the problem. And for a time, we did. Mom set up a gradual eating routine that Mel, eventually, accepted. Me and Meredith were instructed on how to refer to food and Mel’s condition in non-judgemental terms, which we were happy to do. We were so freaked out by maybe losing her we would have burnt all our clothes in a bonfire if it would have helped. Dad drank a bit less.