Turn Left at the Cow (13 page)

We were having a great time shooting at each other when the air changed and I looked up. Iz had walked into the room.

“Gotcha!” said Kenny. I'd lost the game.

Iz had her arms folded tightly across her chest, and she had this kind of crazy-eyed look I'd seen once on Jason Kalooky's dog when it had gotten hit by a car. The dog turned out okay—the vet had fixed him right up and he got along great with just three legs.

I wasn't so convinced that Iz was going to survive her own personal car wreck.

But Kenny didn't seem to notice how she looked. “The boss is here,” he said to me. “Fun's over. We gotta get back to work and find that money.”

Iz turned those crazy eyes on him. “You made it clear enough last night that hanging out with me isn't your first choice. You don't need to tell me again that I'm no fun.”

“Chill—it was just a joke. And what are you even talking about? What'd I do last night?” he asked.

“I'm talking about the fact that Cody Svengrud treats me like crap but you couldn't move fast enough to go sit at his table. And I'm talking about the fact that you're constantly complaining because I asked you to spend just a little of your precious time helping me out. Well, you'll be superglad to know that I don't care about the money anymore. So go play with your brain-dead football friends all you want. Knock yourself out. Kill whatever brain cells you have left.”

I had always thought that phrases like “his jaw dropped” or “his eyes narrowed” were just expressions, but I swear, Kenny's jaw about hit the carpet and his eyes turned into slits.

“Whaddya mean you don't care about the money?”

“I mean that I. Don't. Care. I don't care about finding the stupid money and I don't care who's out there spending it and I especially don't care what you do with your stupid self the rest of the stupid summer. I don't care!”

Kenny hulked to his feet. It was easy to forget how big he was because he was usually so laid-back, but I could suddenly see why the other team had something to fear when he strapped on the shoulder pads.

“You don't care?” he yelled. “You don't care that you blackmailed me into following you around for the entire month of June? You don't care that I've wasted a whole month of summer football trying to help you out? You don't care?”

This was turning out to be a bloodier battle than the game I'd just lost. Apparently, the fact that they were cousins forced to fight over the same bathroom had turned them into something like über-siblings. I gotta admit, it was freaking me out a little bit. It was one of those things about being an only child: I'd never really gotten used to the way brothers and sisters go for the jugular when they fight, even though I'd seen it in action more than once at Kalooky's house. I mean, pit bulls or Mean Girls ain't got nothing on that kind of death match.

And neither Iz nor Kenny seemed to even remember I was in the room. I looked down at myself to make sure that Jesus hadn't delivered on that invisibility thing half a day too late.

“I knew it!” said Iz. “I knew that the only reason you were willing to spend any time with the freak girl is that I bribed you to do it. So you should be happy that I'm setting you free. You can quit worrying your poor little brain over freaky Isabella and her sad freaky family mess and go back to living your perfect little life with your perfect little family and your perfect idiot friends.”

“Say, Self-Absorbed, maybe you wouldn't get called a freak so often if you got your head out of your butt long enough to notice you aren't the only one with problems!” If his voice ratcheted any louder, it was going to go beyond the level where human ears could hear it.

“What's that supposed to mean?” asked Iz. Her voice was low and deadly; right then, I wasn't sure which of them was more dangerous.

“It means that I get that your life stinks. It stinks like
Snakes on a Plane
stank. But that doesn't mean that you get to ignore that everybody else has crap too. I mean, I may be dumb, but I'm not so stupid that I didn't catch on to how you've called me an idiot in one way or another five times in the last five minutes,” said Kenny.

I couldn't sit still any longer; I got up and walked over to stare out the window. There seemed to be fewer white-topped waves on the lake, and the rain had stopped.

Kenny kept going. “You think I like being reminded I'm too dumb to pass a test without cheating off my cousin? You think my life feels easy when the only thing I do really good is throw a football, and then they threaten to take that away because my loser brain can't read right? You think my life's so perfect? You try living it for five minutes. Maybe if you thought about somebody besides yourself for one second, you'd find out it's just as hard to be stupid Kenny as it is to be freaky Iz.”

Iz's voice suddenly fell to a whisper. I had to turn back around to really hear her. “Oh, touché, Kenny. You got me good with that one. And just so you know,
that's
what
touché
really means.” And then she dropped onto the couch as if she'd been sliced in half by a shotgun blast. She collapsed in on herself and started crying like I'd never seen anybody cry. As soon as she let loose with the bawling, Kenny got this look on his face as if he'd been kicked where it counts.

Suddenly Jen stormed into the room and let fly with the ultimate mother weapon: she middle-named him. “Kenneth James Nelson, Jr., what on earth is going on in here? We could hear you yelling from outside!” She swooped over to the couch and scooped up Iz, settling back down with Iz cradled in her lap as if she were no bigger than Linnea.

Jen looked at us over the top of Iz's head, and now her voice just sounded tired. “Why don't you boys go outside and look at the new bike.”

See, there was another reason life stinks when you're thirteen: you can still remember the once- upon-a-time when a new bike could fix almost anything, but by thirteen you've been kicked where it counts enough times to know there just isn't going to be any happily-ever-after.

We hurried outside like it was a school fire drill during a math test; I had to admit, I was secretly relieved a grownup had gotten home in time to clean up the carnage.

I wasn't sure if Kenny even remembered I was there until we hit the front porch and he turned to me.

“Yo,” he said. “Awkward. Sorry.”

“'S'all right,” I answered. “But I gotta ask you something. You don't have to answer if you don't want to, but I gotta ask.”

He nodded.

“What's with Iz's family? I mean, it's clear her dad's got issues, but nobody even talks about her mom. What's up with that?”

Kenny shrugged. “Aunt Deb is just . . . away. Somewhere. She needed a time-out or something. She turned up here about three months ago with the girls, and she talked to Mom for a while, and then she just left—without Iz and Linnea. Mom had to tell them she was gone.”

For just a moment I got this guilty feeling about my ma; I mean, I had pretty much taken off on her with no warning too.

Kenny kept going. “And their dad, he's been kind of in and out for a while—more out, really—and it's pretty clear he can't take care of them. I mean, showing up every few weeks to play the town drunk won't win him any father-of-the-year medals, you know? So they're, like, borrowing my parents for a while. It stinks for them—I mean, I really do get that it's worse than anything I have going on. It's just that once in a while Iz makes me crazy mad, and I say things I don't really mean . . . You know, Aunt Deb sends her these post cards. They always say she'll come home soon. But there's no address where Iz can go see her. And even if she came back today . . . I mean, will Iz ever be able to forget she left in the first place? What could she even say to her mom after she took off like that?”

He was asking the wrong guy. I was piling up those same questions about my father, and instead of finding any answers, I just seemed to think of more questions.

It was like having to take a multiple-choice test you know you can't ever pass; as much as I kept turning it over in my head, I couldn't come up with an answer I liked.

Q:   Which dad did I want most?

A:   Dead Dad?

B:   Never-Even-Wanted-to-Meet-Me Dad?

C:   Selfishly-Letting-Me-Take-the-Rap-for-Spending-the-Bank-Money Dad?

I wanted a test with one more option:

D:   None of the above.

Just then Linnea came running up. “Look! Look what I got!” She shot us a missing-toothed, jack-o'-lantern grin, waving and pointing at the new bike. It was purple, of course. Big Ken was tightening some screws on it, and then he stood up and handed the bike over to her. When he saw Kenny, he gave him this look and hooked him with his finger over to the other side of the driveway. I decided I had probably long overstayed my welcome, but just as I was turning to head back to Gram's, Linnea pedaled over and skidded to a stop in front of me.

“Watch!” she commanded. “See how fast I can go!” The bossy attitude she pulled out just then kind of reminded me of her sister, so I sat down in the wet grass and watched.

Krissy was riding around too, on her pink bike, and both girls' ponytails were streaming out from under their helmets as they rode through the puddles the rain had left behind. And Kenny and Big Ken were having this obvious man-to-man, with lots of hand gesturing and guilty looks on Kenny's part and lots of nodding and earnest concern and back slapping from Big Ken.

I guess they got it all worked out, because Kenny ducked into the garage and came out with a football. The two of them started throwing it back and forth to each other in the yard, just a father and son tossing the old pigskin around on a now-perfect summer day—I swear, the sun came out at that exact moment and shone down on the whole picture.

Watching it from the sidelines was like watching one of those old movies from back when they had first invented color film, where everything looks a little too blue or a little too pink or a little too yellow. My brain just couldn't buy into this world; its colors were too far off from the colors I was used to.

Then Iz came outside and sat down next to me, raising her arm to wave as Linnea flashed by on her bike.

“Thank you for giving her the winning ticket,” Iz said, looking straight ahead. “It's the best thing that's happened to her in a really long time.”

Part of me wanted her to go on thinking I was the sort of guy who was naturally kind to children and small animals, but there was this other part of me that felt as if I had to tell her the truth, even though I didn't always see the need to do that with anybody else. Turns out that part of me also had a really big mouth, because it blurted out, “I didn't need it. I mean, I'm glad she got the bike, but I've already got one. So I didn't need the ticket.”

“That's okay. Still,” she said, and then she let her hand kind of slip down so it rested right next to mine, barely touching, but touching enough so that everything suddenly shifted for me, like when you're looking through a kaleidoscope and you give it one small turn and suddenly the colors fall into a whole new pattern you've never seen before.

We sat like that for a while, not talking or anything. I think I was pretty much not even breathing. Finally Iz turned and looked at me. I could tell she'd been crying again.

But mostly what I noticed was that the evil fairy was gone. Totally AWOL.

And when she had the evil fairy on tap, I was a little bit afraid of Iz. But without the evil fairy there to guard her, I was a little bit afraid
for
Iz.

“So,” she said, “you just came over to play video games with Kenny, and instead you ended up in the middle of my family's mess . . .”

“That's okay.” I decided I needed to make her smile. “I'm tough. I can handle the rough stuff. You saw how I faced down that butter head without flinching.”

She did smile a little but it faded fast. “I want you to understand. Money—that was such a big problem around my house. My parents were always fighting about it, and I guess I figured if I could come up with enough somehow, maybe then . . . But after last night, I finally just get it. Money can't fix what's wrong with my family.”

She watched Linnea zoom by again. “I remember feeling like that. Like I owned the summer. When I was little, back when my dad . . .” She gulped. “I still called him ‘Daddy' then. He used to put me up on his shoulders and polka the two of us through the flower gardens. My mom would yell, ‘Don't you go trampling those asters, Henry David,' and he'd just laugh and say, ‘I'm looking for a place to plant this sweet pea of mine.'”

She got quiet and I thought about her dad bulldozing over all the chicken-poop cheerleaders the night before. Somehow I couldn't picture that same guy dancing through flowers, holding his own little girl safely up high.

“And then he just . . . changed?” I asked. I was thinking about when Ma had first met my stepfather. How it seemed as if I blinked once and then everything was totally different from the way it had always been. How suddenly there was all this new stuff in place: new Ma, new boyfriend and then stepfather, new place to live, but with the same old me, who didn't fit anymore.

Iz shook her head. “Things didn't change all at once. More like bad things kept happening, until they piled up so high that they blocked out all the good. First my grandpa and then my grandma died. It was their farm we'd been living on. Mom and Aunt Jen grew up there too. Mom used to talk about how we were eating rhubarb jam from a plant that her grandma had planted. And then when my grandparents died, somehow my parents couldn't make the farm work anymore. The fights about money started. And then the drinking. Daddy didn't come home some nights. Then he'd stay away for longer and longer. Then he hardly came home at all. Finally the bank took the farm away.”