Brittany Bends (5 page)

I’m shaking my head at the tears, trying to convince them to go away.

“She does,” Eric says.

He must think I’m disagreeing about Mom loving me. I never doubted that. She just doesn’t understand me.

“When she had to go to Greece every summer,” he says, “she was so nervous. She always wanted you here at home, but she told us that you were better off there, and when we asked to meet you, she said the whole family thing was too hard, and then she’d be excited and thrilled to go, and when she got home…”

His voice trailed off. He shrugged one shoulder, then leaned toward the driver’s door and fished more napkins out of the pocket that Karl told him to use for maps.

I swallow hard. “When she got home,” I prompt.

“She’d go to her room for a day or two and cry,” he says to the floor.

That stops me cold. Mom
cries
? I’ve never seen it. She’s always so strong. And she cried over me? Really?

“You’re making that up,” I say before I can stop myself.

He shakes his head. “I’m not.”

Then he sits up and glares at me. “If you tell her I said anything, I’ll call you a dirty stupid liar.”

He sounds nervous and childish. Eric never sounds childish either. His whole tone actually makes me want to smile, but I don’t because that might make him mad.

“I won’t say anything,” I promise.

He hands me more napkins. “Good,” he says.

“How do you know she loves me?” I ask, because I can’t just leave it there. I mean,
I’m
a drama queen. (Megan told me to own that, and then change it. I’m still getting used to the owning part.) For all I know, being a drama queen is something you inherit like blue eyes and hair so blonde it’s almost white. So, Mom might be a drama queen, only with years more experience in controlling her drama queenness.

Eric closes his eyes for a minute, and I recognize the expression. He doesn’t want to say anything, but I’ve backed him into a corner, and what can he say? He’s going to answer me because he’s just that kind of guy.

“Before you moved here, she talked about you all the time, and she’d say she wished we could meet you.” He shrugs again. “She hated that you weren’t allowed to come here. You weren’t, right?”

I didn’t know that, but it makes sense. So I’m not going to contradict her without asking her, and I’m not going to tell Eric that I don’t know.

I nod, and wipe at my left cheek. It’s really wet.

“She’d tell stories about you,” he says, “and how pretty you are and how smart, and how she wished you could come home.”

I was home, but I don’t say that.

“She didn’t even have pictures of you, and I thought that was pretty weird, I’ve
always
thought that was pretty weird, but she’d say she forgot to take some, which I never believed, and…” his voice trails off. Then he sighs. “I’d ask about the pictures or someone else would and she’d leave the room or she’d tell us all to be really careful with, y’know, the kissing stuff, because you could end up in a tough situation.”

“Yeah,” I say softly. “With a baby you don’t want.”

He actually bounces on the seat. “She wanted you. Don’t you get it? She really wanted you. She still does. She was so excited you were coming home, finally. Jeez, give her credit.”

I sniff, then blow my nose with one of the napkins. I have nowhere to put it, so I crumple it up and set it on the seat beside me.

Then he peers at me. “Why couldn’t she take pictures?”

Because cameras usually don’t work on Mount Olympus. That whole magic-technology thing.

“What does Mom say?” I ask, hoping she had a lie at the ready.

“She never said. Not ever.”

I sigh. It sounds a little watery, but at least the tears aren’t pouring down my face any more.

I guess lies will calm you down, at least a little bit.

“My dad and his relatives,”
my relatives
, “they’re all pretty famous, and taking pictures of them would be like this revolutionary coup or something.”

Eric’s eyebrows go up. “He’s a political leader or something? And taking a picture would cause a revolution?”

“No, no,” I say, because that’s not what I meant. “It would be—like getting naked pictures of Beyoncé online. You know, everyone would be talking about them and some people would want to know if the pictures are fake, and stuff like that.”

I’ve already said too much. Mom’s going to be mad.

“Who
is
your dad?” Eric asks.

I shake my head. How do I answer that?

I’d say,
Zeus
. Eric would say,
Some guy named Zeus?
And I would say,
No, the
real
Zeus
, and he would say,
There is no real Zeus,
and then he’d get mad at me.

“He’s like...” I sigh. “Where I’m from, he’s like one of the most important people ever. But it’s hard to explain.”

“And Mom knows this?” Eric asks. Apparently my answer was good enough for him.

“Not when she met him,” I say. “My dad is weird-looking, but women seem to find him really attractive.”

Understatement of the century. Maybe the understatement of a thousand centuries. I have no idea how my dad, who looks like a bull in human form, became catnip for women, but there you have it. And I also know for a fact that he thinks using magic to make someone have sex with you is just wrong.

(Don’t ask me how I know that. It’s not right that a daughter should know that about her dad, but I do, because of this case that came up when me and Crystal and Tiff were Interim Fates and, yuck!)

“And…” I bite my lower lip, then realize I’m doing it, and stop, and finish, “Mom’s not supposed to talk about it. None of us are, because, y’know. Daddy’s married.”

“So’s Mom,” Eric says, clearly not understanding what I mean.

“No,” I say. “Daddy was married when he met Mom. And he’s still married.”

To the same jealous, nasty woman. Sometimes I thought Daddy deserved Hera, and sometimes I wonder if Hera would be nicer if Daddy were nicer, and sometimes I wonder if they would’ve been two different people (and the world a different place) if they hadn’t met.

Eric has gone pale. He looks really and truly shocked, like he never heard of anyone having babies “out of wedlock” before.

“Oh,” he says. “Wow. So when your dad took you, how did he explain it to his wife?”

I shrug. I don’t like to think about the details of Daddy’s and Hera’s relationship.

“She’s come to expect stuff like that over the years,” I say.

“Oh, wow,” Eric says again. He has, like, a million ways to say “oh, wow,” each one different. This one is quiet and full of shock. I think everything I’ve told him today shocks him.

I wipe at my face with yet another napkin. The car is shuddering, but I can’t tell if it’s the wind or because a car this old and rusty doesn’t like having someone mash his foot on the brake for so long.

“God, that’s so messed up,” Eric says, which is major swearing for him. “I had no idea. So when Mom is saying stuff like, ‘be careful, you could end up in a bad place,’ she’s speaking from experience.”

I nod.

He pats my hand—the one without a crumpled napkin. “I’m so sorry, Brit. I had no idea.”

“It’s okay,” I say, even though it isn’t. “I’m not supposed to say anything. Please don’t tell Mom I mentioned Daddy.”

Eric nods, then he takes his thumb and forefinger and moves them across his lips. Took me almost a month after I moved here to realize that means
my lips are sealed
, and even longer to understand that the gesture is supposed to replicate sealing. (To me, it looks like zipping, but what do I know?)

He puts the car back into gear, then looks at me again. “You okay to go home?”

“Yeah,” I say quietly.

“All righty, then,” he says. “But while I drive you, you practice.”

“Practice what?”

“Being happy,” he says. “You got a job. And I know it’s weird for you, but everyone will think it’s weirder if you’re not happy about it.”

I’m biting my lip again. I look at him, then nod. He’s helping me. That’s so sweet.

And it’s so strange to practice being happy.

But you know what? I never have. And I haven’t been happy a lot, even when I was living with my sisters on Mount Olympus.

So that seems like pretty good advice in general.

If only I knew how to do it.

FOUR

THE JOHNSON FAMILY Manse sits on a narrow road a few blocks and an large busy highway away from Lake Superior. The Manse is not a manse at all. (I had to look up the word. Tiff would’ve been so proud of me. [Or she would’ve rolled her eyes and said,
About time, Brit.]
.)

Manse means vicarage (which I also had to look up) and the Johnson Family Manse certainly isn’t a minister’s house. That definition made me hoot with laughter when I saw it.

That leaves the other definition: mansion. And the Johnson Family Manse isn’t a mansion. It isn’t even an aspiring one. I think, maybe, the name of the house is some kind of joke, but I’m not sure.

I think about that every time I arrive at the Johnson Family Manse. It’s half-hidden in a grove of really large pine trees that Karl says need to be cut down, and Mom says are necessary for shade in the summer to keep the house cool, and Lise says just keep the neighbors from seeing how crummy the house actually looks.

I’m not sure I’d call it crummy. But it’s definitely a work in progress.

The Johnson Family Manse is a two-story sprawling building that retains none of its original shape. I’ve paced it. I’ve tried to see the original bones, and I can’t.

The Manse has a huge yard, which takes up most of the block. The yard slopes downhill to what Mom calls a stream and everyone else calls a puddle. (I think everyone else is right, because there’s a beginning and ending to that “stream” and the beginning is on the north side of that slope and the ending is on the south side—not very big at all. But apparently, everyone understands that Mom needs her delusions.)

Most of the yard’s behind the house, and Karl has used some of that space to expand the driveway. Right now, the Johnson Family owns four cars. Mom has one, Karl leases one (whatever that means), and Lise has one that she bought with her own money (and Ingrid says that was a big fight; Ingrid’s good for gossip). Eric has the rust bucket, of course.

Which he parks, right now, in the space just behind the two-car garage, next to three rusted Weber grills, a rusted kid’s wagon that was probably red once, and a whole collection of shovels. The rust bucket fits right in next to all of that, like it’s part of stuff about to be thrown out.

He puts the shift in
park
and the entire car rocks, then groans. The groan is new. Eric frowns.

“I’ve really got to fix that,” he says to himself.

But he’s been saying that about shutting down the car ever since he became responsible for driving me around, so I don’t wait for the next sentence, which is usually,
Did that sound different to you, Brit?

The wind isn’t quite as cold back here, because the garage blocks it. Most of the winds in this town come off Lake Superior, and even though we can’t see the lake from our house (or from the street for that matter), the lake’s still this huge presence in our lives.

It controls the weather, and sometimes I think it controls the entire town’s mood.

I wrap my purse strap around my right hand and use my left to shove the car door closed. It slams with a bang and the car groans again. I wince. About two weeks after I moved in, I slammed the car door, and the muffler clattered onto the driveway. Eric yelled at me, and everyone else told me to ignore him, because up to that point, he’d attached the muffler with a metal coat hanger, which I guess is not the way mufflers are usually attached to cars.

I square my shoulders and take a deep breath. The air smells faintly of fish from the lake. My heart starts to pound as I approach the small flight of stairs leading up to the back door. The metal railing on those stairs isn’t rusted; Karl keeps it in tip-top shape, because if someone trips going up (or down), they’ll fall and “do a header” onto the driveway, meaning they’ll have to go to the hospital.

I guess it happened to some friend of theirs shortly after they moved in.

No matter why he does it, I’m grateful now, because I need that railing to stay upright. My right foot throbs, but it’s not really the problem. The problem is that these shoes are so tight, the bottoms of both of my feet have gone numb.

I pull open the screen door, then slowly push open the solid wood interior door because if you open it too fast from the outside, you might slam it into someone who is standing by the kitchen table.

We don’t eat at the kitchen table—it only sits four—but whoever is cooking that night often uses it to chop things or roll out bread or something. If it’s not being used for cooking, groceries are sprawled on top of it, waiting for someone (whoever is assigned) to put them all away.