The Thing About Leftovers (14 page)

On Friday,
I was
finally
going to meet my baby brother. Thankfully, nobody—like Keene—was home after school, so I was able to pack for the weekend at Dad's without feeling nervous and rushed.

A car horn honked outside, announcing Dad's arrival.

“Oh, good,” Dad said when I opened the back door and hung my church dress on the little hook inside.

“Oh, good, what?” I said irritably, because I was still mad at him.

“Suzanne was hoping you'd bring that dress,” Dad said.

I got into the car and pulled the seat belt over me.

“We're having a photographer come to the house this weekend to take pictures of the family.”

I didn't respond.

“Ready?” Dad said.

I nodded.

As he steered the car away from the curb, Dad said quietly, “Your necklace looks nice on you.”

“Thanks. Thank you. For the necklace . . . and stuff,” I said. Then I turned to look out the window: The whole city was in bloom for Derby Day tomorrow.

“How've you been?” Dad tried.

“Fine,” I mumbled.

“How's school?”

“Fine.”

“Excited about meeting your new baby brother?”

“Yes, sir.”

Dad nodded. “He's healthy, whole, and . . .
perfect
.”

Perfect,
I thought.
Unlike me. That explains a lot.

It was almost six o'clock when Dad and I arrived home—because of all the extra Derby-weekend traffic—but Suzanne was still wearing her nightgown. She sat rocking the sleeping baby in front of the TV. I couldn't help noticing that she didn't look too happy.

“Colic,” Dad whispered to me.

I nodded like I knew what that meant and stayed back.

“What's for dinner?” Dad asked.

For a split second, Suzanne looked like she wanted to kill Dad and eat
him
for dinner. But then she smiled sweetly and said, “You can make anything you want.”

“Pizza it is,” Dad said, removing his jacket and folding it over the arm of the couch.

Dad went to Suzanne, kissed her cheek, and then carefully lifted the baby out of her arms.

Suzanne stood and stretched. “I'm going to take a shower.”

Dad nodded. “Come here, Fizzy,” he said. “Sit down.”

When I was settled in the rocking chair, Dad bent and placed the baby in my arms. “Make sure you support his head,” he instructed.

“I will.”

Dad stepped back and smiled at the two of us. Then he said, “I'm going to order the pizza. Stay right there while I'm on the phone—don't move.”

I nodded.

Baby Robert was wrapped in a soft blue blanket. He was smaller than I expected, but heavier, too. He had lots of dark hair and a nose as cute as a cupcake! Also, he smelled really good—sweet, but not like cupcakes or cookies. I stared at him and breathed his milky sweet scent.

Baby Robert's blue eyes popped open. Somehow, I felt like I'd been caught doing something I wasn't supposed to be doing. For a minute, we just stared at each other. Then a deep, grapefruit-pink color appeared on his forehead, spread to his ears, and moved downward as he opened his mouth and started to cry. Really loud.

“Oh no . . . no, no, don't do that,” I said. I tried rocking him, but he kept right on crying.

When Baby Robert's sweet smell was replaced by some other—hideous—smell, I nearly started crying myself. “Help! Help!” I shrieked.

Dad came rushing over.

“Take him! Take him!” I said, gagging.

“Shhhh, it's okay,” Dad said, gathering the baby in his arms.

I didn't know if he was talking to me or Baby Robert; we were both pretty shaken up.

That night, I learned what
colic
means. It means the baby cries whenever it's awake. I wished we'd gotten a puppy instead.

• • •

It was still dark when Dad came into my room and woke me up. “The photographer will be here in an hour,” he said.

I sat up and tried to make sense of what Dad was saying. Then I remembered the family portraits. “We're having our pictures made in the middle of the night?”

“It's morning,” Dad said.

I looked at my still-dark window; it didn't
look
like morning.

“Sunrise and sunset provide the best natural light for pictures,” Dad explained.

“Well, why didn't you pick sun
set
?” I asked. I mean, this was ridiculous.

“The baby does better in the mornings,” Dad said.

“Well,
I
do better in the evenings,” I muttered under my breath.

“Yes, but you're not a baby,” Dad said, shooting me a warning look. “So get dressed.”

Dad does better in the evenings, too.

• • •

The photographer, Raul, was a bossy man with a ponytail. He arrived at our house and set up his camera near the big sycamore tree in our backyard, which was surrounded by red coralbells that Mom and I had planted together when I was six. “Perfect!” he announced. “Come! Come!” He motioned to us with one hand.

Suzanne was put into position beneath the tree first. She held Baby Robert, who was still sleeping, in her arms.

When that was done, Raul said, “Now the father,” and Dad
stepped forward. When the three of them looked absolutely perfect, Raul said, “And the daughter.”

“Stepdaughter,” I corrected, moving forward. I didn't know why I'd said it; I guessed I was still mad and it was still too early in the morning.

“Ah, I see,” Raul said seriously.

For a while, Raul took pictures of all of us. When he finished, he looked up from his camera and said, “How about mother and child?”

After that, Raul took pictures of just Suzanne and Baby Robert. “Beautiful,” Raul told Suzanne. “And now the three of you?”

“Please?” Suzanne said.

There was no question who Raul meant by “the three.” I knew who he meant and Dad did, too. In his defense, I have to say that Dad looked a little torn, a little sad-ish maybe, but still, he took his place under the sycamore with his new family.

And that is how I ended up standing alone on the back porch, watching someone else's family have their picture made, against an orange-sherbet-tinged-with-raspberry-sorbet sky, wishing I had never said “stepdaughter”—and wanting to pinch Baby Robert, just a little bitty bit, because he'd kept us all up most of the night, and now that
we
had to be up, he was sleeping like an angel.

As I stood there breathing the scent of fresh mint that we'd planted next to the porch, I couldn't help remembering all the Derby parties we'd had here. Mom had always served iced tea with sprigs of mint in them on that day—to make them special.
Then I remembered that today was Derby Day. Not that it mattered. Anymore.

After that, Suzanne asked Raul to take pictures of me alone.

Why?
I thought.
I know I'm alone. I don't need pictures of it.

Something must've registered on my face, because Suzanne hurried to explain, “I thought a nice photo of you might make a good Christmas gift for you to give to your mom.”

Right. Whatever,
I thought, but I stepped off the porch and headed for the tree.

• • •

When we were done taking pictures, I went back to my room to change clothes. Then I sat down and made a list of all the people I was mad at:

1) Suzanne

2) Dad

3) Aunt Liz

4) Mom

5) Keene

6) Mrs. Ludwig

Since it was already shaping up to be a bad day, and since I was already mad at him—so he might as well be mad at me, too—I decided to show my math quiz to Dad after lunch.

“A
D
?” Dad said, taking off his reading glasses to give me his glare of disapproval in full force.

“Yes, sir,” I said, “and I need you to sign it.”

Dad put his reading glasses back on and looked over my
paper some more. Finally, he shook his head and said, “I'm sorry, but I can't sign off on work like this, Fizzy.”

“But you
have
to,” I said, trying not to panic, trying not to think about how Keene Adams was going to have to teach me word problems when he could hardly stand to look at me.

Dad held my paper out to me. “I'll sign it when you correct it.”

“But I don't know how,” I pleaded.

“Your teacher didn't teach you how to do this?”

“Ummmmm . . . she tried, I guess.”

“And?”

“Well . . . see, she has this hole in her leg—it's
really
distracting . . .”

It turned out that Dad couldn't understand how a bullet hole in your math teacher's leg could prevent you from learning word problems. But he
could
understand word problems. Actually, he was a word-problem whiz. The trick, Dad told me, was to underline the important words—the math words—and to ignore all the other unnecessary information.

By Saturday evening, I was pretty good at word problems, too. I felt like I'd accomplished an impossible feat, like I'd mastered a foreign language in a single day—and I sort of had, because before today, to me, word problems had read something like this:
At 4:00 p.m., Sally gets on a train traveling 35 miles per hour. She has three pencils and two pens. How many waffles can she make before polar bears become extinct?
Answer: Pink. Because it doesn't rain on Mars.
But not anymore! When I brought my last practice paper downstairs for Dad to check, I found him sitting
up on the couch, sound asleep. His head had lolled forward and his chin rested on his chest.

I turned to go—back to my room.

“Fizzy,” Dad said.

“I didn't mean to wake you up,” I said,
even though
you
woke
me
up in the middle of the night,
I thought.

“You didn't—I wasn't sleeping—just resting my eyes,” Dad said, holding out his hand for my paper.

I gave it to him and waited while he looked over each problem, pen poised, ready to make Xs.

Without making a single mark, he gave the paper back. “Very good.”

“Thanks,” I said.

I was almost to the kitchen when Dad said, “By the way, Aunt Liz told me you wanted to come to the hospital when the baby was born and I appreciated that. But . . . Baby Robert was premature, so there were extra precautions and tests, and I had my hands full—with Suzanne and the baby in the hospital, Suzanne's parents flying in from Virginia at the last minute and staying here, and my practice and patients still needing me.”

I nodded my understanding:
You were too busy with your perfect new family to be bothered with your old leftovers. Yep, got it.

On Sunday,
Dad dropped me off at Mom's right after church so that I could attend Keene's family reunion with him and Mom. I didn't want to go, but since nobody had asked me, I figured I didn't have a choice.

Mom met me at the front door. “Hi, sweet pea,” she said, hugging me.

“Hi.”

“Did you have a nice weekend?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“I'm glad. Listen, we'll be leaving for the reunion in about an hour and you'll want to change clothes—it's just a backyard picnic.”

I nodded.

“Oh, and this came in the mail for you yesterday,” Mom said, grabbing a blue envelope off the table in the front hall.

I took the envelope and immediately recognized Aunt Liz's lovely, loopy handwriting on the front. I started for the stairs.

“Don't forget your suitcase,” Mom said helpfully.

“Right. Wouldn't want to leave anything out on the floor,” I muttered, “because it might remind somebody that I live here.”

“Fizzy, I don't like your tone,” Mom said.

I plodded up the stairs, thinking,
Just add it to my list.

I closed my bedroom door behind me, plopped down on my bed, and tore open the envelope. There was a card inside. On the front was a picture of a sad dog looking out the window. Inside, the card read:
I miss you. Love, Aunt Liz

Truthfully, I missed her, too. But then I imagined Aunt Liz giving me the tired look; my throat tightened and my nose stung. I decided not to think about Aunt Liz any more right now. I replaced the card in the envelope, dropped it into a drawer, and shut the drawer—quick.

• • •

Keene's sister, Hadley, lived across town in a historical house with a big backyard. The yard was swarming with picnic tables, lawn chairs, and people—people I didn't know. Oh, sure, I'd met a few of them at Mom's wedding, but I didn't really know them. I didn't really
want
to know them, which turned out to be a good thing, because they didn't seem like they wanted to know me either.

Well, except for Hadley herself, who pinched my cheeks, hugged me, and told me I should call her
Aunt
Hadley in a voice so sugary, I could practically feel a cavity coming on.

“
Aucune possibilité,
” I said, which meant “no chance” in French. Did I mention the woman actually
pinched my cheeks
? Also, she wore way too much perfume.

“Oh! She's bilingual!” Hadley gushed. “Fabulous!”

Mom shot me a warning look.

I ignored Mom and said to Hadley, “May I use your restroom?”

In the bathroom, I tried—unsuccessfully—to wash the lingering scent of Hadley's stinky perfume off me.

I spent the rest of the time hidden under the long branches of a willow tree, sitting in a woven blue-and-white lawn chair that made the backs of my legs itch, reading a cookbook I'd borrowed from the kitchen. That is, until I heard my name.

“. . . very sweet of Keene,” said a woman's voice, oozing with sympathy, “to accept a child that isn't his—he lets Fizzy live with them and everything.”