Chapter 1
Dust motes drifted lazily through the afternoon sun as I carefully closed the cardboard packing box.
I wanted to slam it shut and then pound on it.
Really? Sixteen cartons full of old books, and not a single one of them worth anything more than the value for the pulp. It had been the same with my uncle’s old stamp collection. Pretty, some of them, but worthless. The boxes in the attic marked “Christmas” in my Nana’s shaky handwriting were all strings of tree lights that flickered then died when I plugged them in. Not the vintage, expensive ornaments I had imagined.
The guy at the baseball card shop in Traverse City had laughed after going through the last shoebox out of my stack on the counter. “Really, you’d think out of all these cards, you’d have at least one good one!” Then he saw my face and added, “I can give you five bucks for the Chet Lemon rookie card. Ok?”
The most worthwhile venture had been selling my Nana’s purse collection, from back when the Brennan family was slightly better-heeled. I sold the whole kit and caboodle for $100, although the clerk at the resale shop had advised me that I’d do better selling them individually on eBay. But I needed the cash, in hand, immediately.
None of the boxes in the attic (carefully packed with trinketswrapped in dirty newspaper) or the bulging closets (stuffed with old clothes in duffel bags so full they stretched the seams) or the musty basement (with shelves of dusty canning jars and crates of broken tools) or the garage (greasy motorcycle parts and pieces of fishing gear) had held one damn thing worth anything. The house had been my grandma’s when my sister and her husband and toddler son had moved in, and my sister hadn’t done a lot of clean-up since Nana died. And my sister wasn’t exactly neat, herself. She certainly wasn’t a hoarder, although that’s what her ex, Mike, had yelled as he tried to find an empty suitcase to pack up his clothes and leave for good. “And another thing! You’re a goddamn hoarder, Cassie! You can’t throw—” and that’s when the trapdoor to the attic had finally budged, snapping open and slamming him on his balding head. I had watched him stomp down the gravel drive, rubbing his head and cursing. I hoped he got a concussion. He deserved it, the jerk.
Because who leaves a wife with cancer? And a young son, who sort of looked up to him? Even though Mike wasn’t a very good husband or father—really, he sucked—at least he was apresence.He had a routine, and a steady paycheck. And health insurance of some form. But the routine and the paycheck and the health insurance were gone when he quit his job at the lumberyard and headed downstate. And Cassie didn’t have the desire to divorce him, because she still loved him. In spite of everything. And I couldn’t leave the situation here at home long enough to root around the Detroit metro area to find him, put sugar in his gas tank, and then beat the living crud out him with a baseball bat for what he had done to my sister and nephew.
I glanced at my watch, then sighed, and coughed on the dust. Cassie was still asleep, and didn’t need another dose of medication until after practice. The NGS had been closed due to a sewer line leak in the employee bathroom (you really didn’twant to be grocery shopping with that going on) so I’d had the day off, but school was still in session. It was time for me to ride down to Whitaker Elementary to pick up Charlie.
∞
“Hi, pal,” I said as he slid into the back seat.
“Hi, Em. You know, I heard that it’s Michigan law that if you’re seven you can ride in the front seat.”
“Oh, yeah? Where’d you hear that? How was your day?” I asked, as I carefully steered out of the school parking lot. Every time I drove in that overcrowded lot I was positive that a kid would dart in front of my car. Much as Charlie had done two weeks ago when he saw me driving in and jumped off the sidewalk, taking ten years from my lifespan and from that of the poor mom behind the wheel of the car that nearly plowed him down.
“Rocco told me. His dad told him. They looked it up. Is there a snack?”
“Yep.” I passed back the soft-sided cooler that held his usual: a peanut butter, banana, and honey sandwich, and a cheese stick which he also dipped into the peanut butter and honey. It was disgusting. “We have to hurry so you have time to change in the locker room. Or you can do it in the back seat. I won’t peek.”
I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw him eyeing me, considering. “Promise not to look?” he asked.
“Promise. But, by the way, Mr. Modest, wasn’t that you doing a naked shimmy at me when I told you to put on your pjs last night?”
“Aunt Emily!” He was seriously mortified if he was calling me by my real name.
I laughed. “I think that was you. I’m pretty sure because when you turned around and ran to your room I saw this big freckle that you have right on your—”
“AUNT EMILY!”
I laughed again, as he begrudgingly pulled his tiny suit out of his swim bag. For a kid who didn’t mind a performing a let-it-all-hang-out shimmy in the privacy of his own home, he was awfully touchy about changing in the car. I heard the shuffling and rustling as he kicked off his grungy tennis shoes and pulled off his shorts (the minute the snow had melted, he had put on shorts and they hadn’t come off). This had been a much tougher change in the winter, with boots and snow pants. And a really tough run from the car to the George Whitaker Athletic Complex in the snow in a Speedo.
Charlie always made me feel better about everything. How could I ever regret coming back home, when it meant getting to know him again, being close him? To him, I had always been the aunt who sent good birthday and Christmas presents (well, as good as my restricted student budget would allow). And we had skyped once a week, but a kid doesn’t want to sit in front of a screen and make small talk with an aunt. I’d visited as much as I could, and as much as Cassie and Mike would have me, but I hadn’t seen him much in person since he’d been a baby.
“You good?” I asked, glancing back again. He was shoving the sandwich down. “Don’t choke on it, pal. Drink some water, too.”
“Why do you always call me that? Pal?”
I smiled. “When you were little, until you were about eighteen months old, you and your mom lived in Ann Arbor. We had an apartment, the three of us.”
“Where was my dad?”
I sighed. How to put this? We were a few months into the Absence of Mike, and Charlie hardly ever asked about his dad. I didn’t want to poison whatever good memories he had left. “Your dad was…working in Taylor. Near Detroit.” Working on screwing another woman while his pre-eclampsiac wife waited to give birth, and then while I raised his son. “Anyway, your mom didn’t feel so good after she had you, so you were my best little pal, coming everywhere with me.”
“Did you take me to the school? Did everyone think I was really cute?”
“I did take you to the lab with me sometimes. And everyone fought over holding you.” Even the meanest, most anti-social lab rat there had loved baby Charlie. He had been easy to love, all chubby cheeks and smiles. Mike finally slunk back into the picture and my Nana offered to let him, Cassie, and Charlie move in with her up north if they would help her keep up the house. My studio apartment, which had been full to bursting with me, Cassie, Charlie, a stroller, diaper pail, crib, piles of clothes and books, and all the gear that tiny people need, was again silent and empty.
Admittedly, parts of their exit had been slightly wonderful. Taking care of Charlie and a depressed and angry Cassie while working in the lab and plowing through my classes had left me overwhelmed, to say the least. Cassie was no peach in the best of times. She was seven years older than I was, and we had never had much in common, except our dad. Cassie, pre- and post-partum with an absentee husband, was a roilingball of rage and filthy insults. Not so fun.
