Honey, Baby, Sweetheart (8 page)

“Wow. Anger issues,” Sydney said.

“Hooray for Sydney, champion bimbo chaser,” Chip Jr. said. He stuck his Popsicle in his mouth and started to clap. My mother joined in, hitting her free hand against the fist that clutched her Popsicle. Sydney took a bow. It was a joyful second until Mom’s Popsicle split and the chunk of orange ice fell to the ground. A sticky rivulet rolled down her arm. She looked down at it as if it was a mere representation of all that was wrong in the world. I thought she might cry. I thought I might cry for her.

Poe trotted over and began licking what was quickly turning into a pool of sweet liquid. His beard would be stiff and sticky the rest of the afternoon. It was his lucky day. Which only goes to show that often enough, we owe our good fortune to someone else’s loss.

By evening my mother had forgiven my father. It made me wonder how many times we forgive just because we don’t want to lose someone, even if they don’t deserve our forgiveness. The next day we all went to Marcy Lake and swam. It was a near perfect day, and the air smelled
like both the sweetness of sun and of the coolness of deep lake water at the same time. We jumped off the dock, and Chip Jr. did cannonballs, and Mom sat on Dad’s shoulders and he tossed her in. We ate a picnic lunch sitting on our beach towels, and you could feel the warm wood of the dock through the terry cloth. Dad’s hair dried funny, and Mom got sunburned near the elastic of her bathing suit where it had shifted around, showing white skin. We went home with that satisfied exhaustion a day of swimming and sun brings. Mom was really happy. Later that night, before my father left again, the sky suddenly got dark, as it will in a Northwest summer, and there was a rumble of thunder and a burst of rainfall. The rain is bratty here. It can’t stay away too long without coming back and throwing a tantrum.

Chip Jr. and I said our good-byes to Dad as pellets of water bounced hard on the ground. I went to my room with a weird feeling in my stomach. It was hollow, with a knot of something that felt like sadness and guilt, though I have no idea what I felt guilty about. My mother had walked my father out to the car. They stood out there for a long time. I listened to the rain falling on the roof and the tree branches and the garbage can lids. We should blame the neighbor, Mr. Baxter, for the rain—he was the one that washed his car the day before.

Mom was out there so long that I was getting worried. I turned off my bedroom light and peeked out my curtains; the window was open in spite of the rain, as it had been a hot day. The rain had that smell of steamy, damp
earth and wet asphalt, and I breathed it in. I crouched way down and peered over the windowsill. I could see them in the driveway. My father had my mother’s chin in his hand, and then he leaned in to kiss her. I looked away, and when I looked back, he was smoothing her wet hair from her forehead. That hollow feeling, loss, I guess, was gutting my insides, same as a spoon clearing the inside of a pumpkin before it is carved.

It wasn’t until he had gotten inside the van, until the headlights shone into my window and cast their glow onto my wall, that he rolled down the window and called to her. The car was in reverse and his foot was on the brake when he told her that the baby seat in the back of the van was his after all. His and his girlfriend’s and their new baby’s. A few minutes after that he was gone.

For the last three summers I’ve worked at Johnson’s Nursery. Libby Wilson, who bought the nursery from the retired Johnson couple about five years ago, was an old friend of my mom’s. Libby’s father and Mom’s father both worked at the same accounting firm when they were growing up, and Libby was one of the few people around who could contribute her own memories of my mother’s parents, one of whom died when I was a baby, the other when I was two. Libby wore leather sandals and dresses with beads sewn on and had those kind of eyes that looked at you long and hard and made you feel like she knew things. She was one of my favorite people. If you saw the way she examined the underside of a leaf
with her strong, kindly hands, you would understand why.

I really liked working at Johnson’s Nursery. I liked transporting the seedlings from the steamy greenhouse to the big world. There were the flowers with their tender shoots, newly brave, as well as the vegetable starts, which seemed small and hardy and sure as little kids showing you their muscles. I liked unloading the shipments of phlox and impatiens, stinky geraniums and Chinese lanterns. I liked the heavy, floppy bags of peat moss and the sneezy smell of bark; losing myself in the rows of fruit trees and garden trellises; and turning the squeaky faucet handles of the overhead sprinklers, a complicated maze of thin iron pipe. I liked the customers with dirt under their fingernails and serious, satisfied expressions and humble questions of where to find the bonsai, the prickly pear cacti, the gourd seeds, the cure for an ailing magnolia.

That summer when school finally let out, I also liked being a two-minute walk from Travis Becker’s house.

The next time I saw him after our first motorcycle ride, he was there on the lawn in the same place, as if he were waiting for me, as if he knew I would be coming back to him.

“Hello again,” he said

“Hey. My favorite pathetic rich boy.” I didn’t even know who was talking. I was like one of those annoying kid toys that spoke when you pulled a string.

“I’ve been thinking about you,” he said.

A feeling rose up, beginning from my toes. Thrill. “I
haven’t thought of you at all,” I said. Then I pulled the necklace out from my shirt and showed him. God, I felt powerful. I never felt that kind of power before. I understood why people liked it so much.

Travis stepped toward me. He combed his fingers through my hair, stopped his hand at the back of my neck and pulled me to him. He kissed me, hard. He sure was good at that.

“Let’s ride,” he said. His mouth was shiny from the kiss.

I got on behind him. When he accelerated this time, I put my cheek to his back and closed my eyes. I breathed deeply, imagined waves going in and out. The roar of the ocean was what I heard, I told myself. It was not wind that could send me flying, my body scraping to pieces along the asphalt, not the mechanical ugliness of an engine recklessly pushed to its limits. When we slowed, Travis reached behind him, rubbed his hand up and down my leg. It was a gentle touch. It felt like care and tenderness. But I might have been wrong.

I saw him every day after that, when I walked home from my job at Johnson’s Nursery. He was usually outside, waiting for me—
waiting for me!
—or working on his motorcycle. We would just go for a ride, lie on that long, rolling grass, and talk. The first time I saw his friends there I started to walk on, but Travis yelled my way.

“What, are you ignoring me now?” he said. When I joined them, Travis whispered into my hair, “You should at least know my friends.” He introduced me to Seth, a
guy with gaunt smoker’s cheeks who was trying to pretend that he didn’t care about anything, and a girl named Courtney, blond, big hoop earrings and a shirt so small it could have fit a Barbie.

“Speaking of ignore,” Courtney said. She put her hands on her hips.

“Oh, man,” Seth muttered.

“Lover’s quarrel coming,” Travis said to me.

“He’s been giving me the cold shoulder ever since I wouldn’t kiss him because I had just put my
lip gloss
on.”

“Am not,” Seth said.

“He has. He’s been barely speaking to me. I mean, I just put my
lip gloss
on.” She looked at me and rolled her eyes. “God. Can you believe it?” She ran her hand down the length of her hair, fussed at the ends of it with her fingers.

“Uh uh,” Seth said. Seth was a real conversationalist.

I shook my head as if Seth, the ghost figure, had just committed first-degree murder.

“I wouldn’t have wanted to kiss her with that slimy shit on,” Travis Becker said. “Might as well kiss a slab of raw fish.”

“Tastes like candle wax,” Seth said. To his credit, it was almost a full sentence.

“Right. And then what happens when we don’t look good.” Courtney gathered up her hair and let it fall again. Then she tucked a bit behind one ear.

“These two never stop fighting,” Travis said.

“We do too,” Courtney said. “We didn’t argue at all
last night. We were trying to decide on
our song.
I was looking on
MusicMadness.com
. I really wanted ‘She’s Everything,’ but Seth wanted ‘Love Doesn’t Die.’”

“Like hell,” Seth said.

“Or ‘Billy Doesn’t Walk Here Anymore,’ which is just stupid. It’s not even a love song. It’s about a guy who gets shot, for God’s sake.”

“Good song,” Seth said.

Courtney rolled her eyes. “Do you guys have your song? Go look on
MusicMadness.com
.” I knew this was stupid, looking for a song in the same way you might look for the best buy on car insurance. But I had another feeling, too. A little jolt of happiness that Courtney had assumed we were a couple. A little jolt of happiness that Travis Becker did not correct her.

There was a musical beeping. “My cell,” Courtney said. She reached around to her hip pocket, where a little pink holder was attached. She took out this tiny phone, popped it to her ear. “Courtney,” she sang. She held her hand over the mouthpiece. “It’s Brandon for you,” she said to Seth. “Call him on his own line,” she said back into the phone. She hung up on Brandon, whoever he was, tucked the phone back into the pink holder on her hip. It had the unintended effect of reminding me of a law enforcement officer finishing up his job at the scene of a crime; notebook back in pocket.

“What did you do that for?” Seth said. Another phone started ringing. This time from the direction of a convertible sports car in the driveway. The license plate said
MOMZ TOY.

“Let him call your cell. I hate everyone always calling on my cell.”

Seth jogged to the car, swearing. Courtney followed him. “We gotta go meet Brandon anyway,” she said.

I was glad they were leaving. I suddenly felt exhausted. When the people I knew spoke of cells, they usually were referring to the microscopic beings.

Travis walked them to the car. Seth started the engine, but I could still hear Courtney, even from where I stood. “Your friend sure is quiet,” she said.

Here was the strange thing. I didn’t desperately want to disintegrate on the spot, to disappear instantly from the shamed bucket of water thrown over the top of me. For some reason, this time I didn’t feel any of those things. Instead I remembered my mother and Fowler talking one night, ranting, really, about a class full of Courtneys that came into the library that day. The lights of the library were dimmed, the doors locked for the night. Mom’s purse sat on one chair, looking as if it were patiently waiting to leave. The surrounding quiet made me want to raise my fingers to my lips and shush their raised voices.

“Media monsters with junior platinum credit cards,” my mother said.

“With parents who say yes to it all so they don’t have to be bothered. Or trying to hang on to their own fleeting coolness through the kid. I saw this guy the other day with a BMW whose cell phone tinkled Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
We don’t need no ed-u-cation
played in goddamn tinkly bells. It’s
over,
man.”

“Anyone who spends a lot of time in a shopping mall is out to get someone, that’s all I know,” Mom said.

“Shallowness,” Fowler said, “is a
disease.”

I watched Courtney in the passenger’s seat of Momz Toy. She was a cotton-candy person, wearing a cell phone in a pink case on her butt, and earrings a small kid could hula hoop in, and she believed that even love was something you could manufacture and purchase with no money down and no interest for a year. Travis walked back toward me. I started to turn away. I wanted to go home. Too much cotton candy made me sick, and I was hit with the fact that these were not my people, and this was not my place. I didn’t belong with a person who could afford gold-plated Jockeys. I like science cells. I had so much wanted to be behind those gates, but now it was like the time we went to Disneyland when I was small and the boat had gotten stuck on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. They had to turn on the lights.
Zap,
magic gone. If shallowness was a disease, then it was probably contagious and Travis had it too.

Travis came toward me, put his arms around my waist. I pulled back from him. And then Travis Becker said the one thing that could make a difference. “I’m glad you’re not like her,” he said.

With that, I would have done anything for him. I did do anything for him.

“I’ve got a special place to take you to today,” he said not long after.

I got on the back of his bike and we rode through town, got on the highway until we reached the exit for
Snoqualmie Falls. It was a beautiful day to see the falls, one of those days that shows off the Northwest in the best light, when the greens are so bright they hurt your eyes and everything looks clean and new. The falls, higher than Niagra, thunder down into a pool of misty white, and a lodge sits at their very edge, surrounded by firs and sheer rock. But we weren’t going to see the falls themselves. Travis passed by the parking lot for the lookout, took a back road that curved to the other side of the Snoqualmie River. A pair of railroad tracks snaked alongside the riverbank. When Travis shut off his motorcycle you could hear the thunder of the falls, and just see their frothy white top.