Tin Lily (17 page)

“Okay, kiddo. Time to use that thing.” She points to the phone in front of me.

I don’t feel nervous picking up the phone. I don’t feel much of anything, but I do remember Nick’s hands, the way they made my skin feel alive where he touched me. I find where he’s programmed his number, dial him up. He answers on the second ring.

“Hi, Nick, this is Lily Berkenshire. From Pike’s.”

“Lily! You were supposed to call me yesterday when you got home.”

“Oh yeah. Sorry, I forgot.”

“Figures. Glad you called now, though.” Nick’s voice tells me he
is
glad.

“My Aunt Margie’s having a dinner party tonight. We were wondering if you’d like to come. I understand if it’s short notice.”

“What are you having?”

“You get so many offers you have to decide where to go based on what’s for dinner?”

Margie’s hands are frozen, her mouth hanging open, eyes wide.

“That and who else is coming,” Nick’s saying, his voice all smiles. “Saturdays are usually reserved for fresh seafood. First choice lobster, second choice salmon. There should be at least one member of the Seahawks in attendance. Mascots don’t count, just so we’re clear.”

“We’re having manicotti and I have a kitten named Binka. Will that be good enough, your highness?”

Nick sighs.

“Five,” I say. “Four. Three–”

“What are you doing?” he says.

“Counting down. This offer’s good for another 1.8 seconds.”

He laughs. “Oh all right, I guess I can make an exception. Can I bring something?”

I cover the mouthpiece, whisper to Margie, who’s still shocked into frozenness. “Can Nick bring something?”

She shakes her head without closing her mouth.

“Just your sarcastic self, I guess.”

“I can do that. Where do you live?”

I give him the address and directions, then grin at Margie’s mouth opening even wider. When I hang up she just stands there looking at me.

“See, I told you Nick was nice,” I say. I grin a little wider because I know Aunt Margie is happy I joked around with Nick, that I remembered the address to her apartment.

She finally closes her mouth. “He, um… that’s great, Lilybeans. Really, really great.” She goes back to her manicotti, a little smile on her lips.

“What do I say?” I ask because it occurs to me it’s easy to talk to Nick and Dr. Pratchett and especially Binka, but sometimes I have a hard time with Margie. Maybe I’ll have a hard time with her friends too.

She looks up from her work, squinting. I haven’t used enough words again.

“To your friends.” I roll my eyes, pretending I’m normal. “They’ll think I’m a dork.”

“No they won’t. And they’ll do most of the talking, believe me,” she says. “Especially Sam. He’s chatty.”

“Is he your boyfriend?”

Margie snorts. “No. Sam’s not into girls so much.”

I think about this for a minute. “He’s gay?”

She nods.

“Mel and Bobby lived next door to me and Mom. We loved them. Also, Nick has two dads and two moms. Well, one mom now.”

Margie looks surprised. “Really?” She thinks on this a minute, then goes back to stuffing shells. I think she’s planning to feed the neighborhood with all the shells she’s stuffing. “Well, you’ll love Sam too. He’s a hoot.”

“I didn’t say good-bye.”

“To Mel and Bobby?”

“Yes.”

“I have no doubt they understand.”

I think about Mel and Bobby for a little while. I wonder if they have new neighbors, if there are people in the dog food house again. I wonder if the new people have pictures on the walls and if they’re watering the flowers Mom planted out front. I wonder if they use our old grill and if they taste cedar smoke in their burgers, if they’ve found the pot of gold and the splintered glass, if the plaster is still a crater or if it’s plaster again. I wonder if they’ll slice pineapple, if they’ve found Tiananmen Square.

In the dog food house. Where we were happy for a little while.

Margie wants to do my hair for the party. Binka follows me into the bathroom and curls herself up in the sink while I shower, then sits on the vanity and watches me comb out my hair after. Her whiskers twitch and I can see she wants to go full spaz in some impressive way. She hops off the vanity, goes over to the bathroom door and stares daggers at the handle. It’s one of those lever types that goes up and down instead of twisty. She squishes her whole body to the floor, wiggles her butt, then springs with everything she’s got. She wraps her front paws around the handle, hangs, swings. I can see she’s trying to open the door, that with a few more pounds she’ll be able to. Margie knocks and she drops back to the floor. She looks up at me, her whiskers twitchy, proud of her spaz achievement.

“What’s that little beast up to?” Margie says out in the hall.

I hit the lever and let Margie in. “Trying to open the door by herself.”

The kitten’s taking a bath now, acting casual.

“You know I found her kibble in my best shoes the other day?” Margie says.

“Doesn’t surprise me.” I find Binka’s food in my shoes all the time—on my pillow, under my covers too, on Margie’s boxes, behind the bookcases. Little presents.

Margie looks at Binka. Binka looks at Margie. Staring contest. Margie looks away first. Binka goes back to cleaning her face, her ears a little taller. She won. She knows it.

“And that she meows at my door around midnight? Every night?” Margie says like she didn’t just lose a staring contest to a spastic kitten.

“Nope.”

“You know she’s the craziest little beast I’ve ever met?”

“Yup.”

She laughs, then makes me sit down on the closed toilet. My hair’s got a natural wave, so Margie uses a big round brush and a hair dryer to straighten it.

“So tell me more about Nick,” Margie says. She’s got one of those fancy quiet hairdryers, so it’s easy not to yell to make yourself heard.

“He’s nice,” I say.

Margie clucks her tongue. “Well that I already knew, Lilybeans. Tell me more. He’s very handsome. And apparently very smart.”

Nick’s face swims up in my mind. “I like his eyes. I think that picture you saw is old. His hair sticks up all over now, like he’s always running his fingers through it, petting himself or something.”

This tickles Margie. “What else?” she says. “Is he a bookworm like you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know another thing about him?”

I think about our walk through Pike’s, his goofy words. “He’s funny. He keeps the bees away. A good tether.” I don’t mean to speak these words out loud.

Margie pauses with my hair straight out from my head. “A tether? That’s a neat way of looking at it. Have you told Dr. Pratchett about your tethers?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, I bet he’d like to hear about them. Have you figured out what makes the bees come?”

“Han—I’m not sure, Aunt Margie.” I barely resist the urge to smack myself. It’s getting harder, keeping it all straight—the stuffing and the lying and the watching. I wonder how much longer I can do it without slipping up.

“You were going to say Hank?”

“Yes, you know, memories about him.”

“You can tell me that, Lilybeans. You don’t have to stop yourself.”

“Okay.”

“Do you want to talk about your dad?”

I shrug. “He never told me about when he was a kid. What was it like growing up with Grandpa Henry?”

“Well, he was consistent, I’ll give him that. Overbearing, controlling, cruel, but consistent. I remember this one time…” Margie leans around and looks me in the eyes. “You sure about this?”

In my mind I see Hank on the bus, think how he sat next to me in public where anyone could see him, about the picture he left that says there are no safe places, not even Mom’s hidden meadow. He’s coming for me and a little part of me is starting to not want to go. I think it’s time to know more about Hank. “I’m sure.”

Margie nods and goes back to doing my hair. “I was seven, Hank five. My mother left us with him for a couple weeks when her mother died. She had to go back East to take care of the arrangements. We had never been alone with my father for more than an hour or two at a time, but we were old enough to understand it wouldn’t be a picnic. We begged Mom to take us with her.” Margie’s hands still, but she keeps the hairdryer going. “I remember Mama saying she wouldn’t be gone long and that we should be good kids and everything would be just fine. I’ll never forget the dull look of grief in her eyes, the slow way she packed her suitcases, like her body weighed twice as much as it did the day before.”

I know what Margie means. Sadness is a big thing to carry around, like Margie’s little silver box that looks light but isn’t.

“After she left, my father did too. He came home early the next morning reeking of alcohol and screaming for Mom. Hank and I climbed to the attic and hid there until that afternoon. When the house had been silent for a long time and I couldn’t hold my pee anymore, we went downstairs.”

Margie turns off the hairdryer and leans against the vanity. Her mind is back in time, there with Grandpa Henry and his meanness.

“My father was sitting at the kitchen table, his hands clasped in front of him. He wasn’t eating or drinking or reading. He was just sitting there, still, like he’d been waiting for us the whole time. When I saw him, I peed myself right there in the kitchen. He made me clean it up, gave us both brutal whippings with his favorite belt and put us to bed for two days. We were allowed to get up to use the bathroom and to eat one meal a day. The routine over the next two weeks was school, home, bed, start all over again the next day. And still only one meal. Our clothes were falling off by the time our mother got home.”

I’m staring hard at Margie’s face, seeing the hungry little girl in her, the scared daughter of a tyrant. But I’m thinking about Hank, how he controlled everything we did after he went to work for Grandpa Henry. Except for the food thing. He let us eat, but he drove away all our friends and he pressed our world into a tiny box. “That’s what Hank did to us.”

Margie’s eyes come back, the hurt from her past making them bright and dull at the same time. “Your mom told me. I tried to talk her into leaving earlier, but she’d promised your dad a year?”

Nod. A year. One year to ruin everything.

“I’m surprised he let you go.”

“Mom didn’t give him a choice. She told him before he got to his whiskey. He yelled a lot, but I think he knew even before Mom told him. His year was up. We left that night before he started drinking. Drove all the way here.”

Margie brushes my cheek with her fingertips. “I loved your mom like she was my own sister.”

“She loved you too,” I say because I’m sure it’s true even though Mom didn’t talk about Margie a lot. I think she kept Margie for herself.

We don’t say anything more because the memories, the pain, they’re like the kitchen window at the dog food house after Hank’s bullet shattered it. Fragments that used to be whole, but aren’t anymore. We don’t say anything because sometimes silence is better than the pain.

When Margie’s finished shining me up, she says I should wear some of the new clothes she’s bought for me. Mom’s sweater is on a hanger in the closet and I want to wear it like I sometimes want to use people as tethers. My touchstone, Mom’s sweater.

“I’ll try,” I say.

“Now, how about some makeup?”

“Nah. I don’t mind going as myself to this thing. Okay?”

Margie gets this amazed look on her face. “That’s more than okay, Lilybeans.” There’s quiet between us and in Margie’s half-smile, in the silence of this small bathroom, I realize something I didn’t before. There’s hope and love when people stop talking, when stillness takes over. It’s a whole different kind of quiet place I didn’t know about.

Binka’s closed off in my room so she doesn’t use Margie’s friends as trees. The kitten’s manners aren’t the best and I don’t have the heart to tell her different. Margie says we’ll let her out when we’re finished eating.

I’m sitting on the couch, waiting and not waiting for the doorbell to ring. Everything inside me is leaping and thumping and rushing to the surface. Margie’s shining me up, making me look pretty on the outside, doesn’t change what Hank did, what he’s doing now. It doesn’t change Hank’s picture inside the workbook. Doesn’t change that I have a last letter from Mom, who loved me better than anyone and died anyway. Making my hair pretty, buying me new clothes, trying to fit me into this life—these things don’t change the hollow, the bees, the not-Hanks and the Hanks. New quiet places don’t change a thing.

I get up to tell Margie I can’t do this, can’t be with whole people, when the doorbell rings. She runs right for it and sweeps the door open before I can get a word out.

“Lily, this is Sam,” Margie says, inviting him into the living room.

The thumping, the leaping, the rushing in me all slows down when Sam walks in. Right off it’s easy to see why Margie wants him here. His eyes are so full of light it’s like he’s got his own personal fireflies right there behind the blue irises, flitting back and forth, shining everything inside up so it dances out to the person looking at him. He’s big—height-wise and width-wise, blond and super goofy. His hair goes twenty different ways at once and I see it’s intentional, not like how Nick pets himself. I don’t think Sam would dare touch his hair. It’s hard to imagine how long he spends in front of the mirror.

“Miss Lily Berkenshire,” he says. “I’ve heard so much about you. Come, sit with me, tell me your story.” Sam holds out his hands, whisks me to the couch. Margie’s grinning and I’m mesmerized. We sit down and he folds an ankle under one leg, curling into himself a little. “I hear you like to write, Lilykins. Tell me more.”

Everything in me settles and I find myself talking with Sam like I’ve known him my whole life, like I’m a regular person with plenty to share. It’s easy to tell him about my journals, about how I haven’t written in awhile. He doesn’t demand anything and he doesn’t ask about stuff that makes the bees come around. A perfect tether—Sam.