I adjusted my ponytail. “You’re sweet, Andrew, but I’m really trying not to be that stereotypical divorcée.”
He grinned. “So you won’t go out with me because of your reputation, but you still think I’m a fox?” He flashed that dimple at me. “Okay, how about this? I promise I won’t tell anyone.”
“Yeah, Gray,” Marcy chimed in, clearly amused. “Just give him a chance.”
I shot her a warning look.
“Fine. One drink. Next week. But you may not take me anywhere even decently nice where I would know a single person.”
He laughed. “Oh, believe me, I know just the place.”
When he was out of earshot, Marcy clapped approvingly.“Why would you throw all that hotness at some eighteen-year-old who’s too drunk to even appreciate those sexy diagonal ab lines peeking over his shorts?”
“He had his shirt on, Marcy.”
She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “Yeah, but you know they’re there.” She sighed. “Just think, Gray. You two can date for a couple of years, get married, have another baby with those dimples and your eyes. It’s all so dreamy.”
“I’m having one drink with him and that’s it,” I said unconvincingly. Weren’t you practically required to have a few inappropriate flings in the midst of a divorce? “But get serious. It’s not like I’m going to marry the guy, Marce.”
She pulled her sunglasses down the bridge of her nose and peered at me from underneath her hat. “Famous. Last. Words.”
diana: some kind of home
I’ve had the same nightmare since I was eleven years old. It doesn’t matter that I’m forty now. Every time I’m too stressed or worried, that nightmare sneaks up on me. And the worst part is that, yeah, it’s a dream. But it also happened. I had to live that mess.
The nightmare always starts with Charles talking. Charles, he’s the oldest, bless his sweet soul. Charles, then Elizabeth, then me, then Phillip. He was only fourteen when it happened. Elizabeth was thirteen. I was eleven. Phillip was ten. Irish twins. That’s what they called Phillip and me.
We were used to being alone. Damn used to it.
Momma had had Charles when she was sixteen. Her parents had thrown her out on the street when they found out she was pregnant, and, as you could probably guess, she didn’t make real good choices after that either. Not a one of us knew who our daddy was. Poor Charles, when she was out gallivanting around town doing God only knows what with God only knows who, he’d be trying to figure out something to feed us for dinner, usually cereal. He was just a kid, so young, so handsome, living in the projects and trying to take care of his brother and sisters.
Now, Elizabeth, tiny little thing, she didn’t look a day over ten even though she was thirteen, but, thank the good Lord, she couldn’t stand a mess. She was always trying to get the house straight when Momma was gone or laid up on the couch. Even once Momma left, she washed up all our clothes every day and made me take a bath so we’d look clean for school.
“That’s the most important thing,” Charles would say. “None of our teachers can know that Momma’s gone.”
Pretending didn’t seem real hard to me since it’d taken us a good week to figure that Momma wasgonegone. She was in the habit of disappearing now and then, leaving us alone for a couple days.
“Should we call the police or something?” Elizabeth had asked.
Now, Phillip, he was just sitting over in the corner, real quiet and scrunched up, while me and Elizabeth and Charles got this stuff straight. We knew Phillip wasn’t quite like the rest of us, but we didn’t have a name for it yet.
“Yeah,” I’d said. I missed my momma so bad. Oh, I’ll never forget that emptiness way down deep in my soul. She was kind of crazy and she had a habit of running off, but she loved us kids. When she was around she took the best care of us in the whole world. She’d pile us all up in her bed and read library books. She’d try to pull together some sort of dinner for us to all sit around the table together and eat. She always told us how much she loved us. She really was a good momma—except the leaving us, that is. I was trying hard not to cry, but I couldn’t help it. I needed my momma. I needed her to brush my hair and hug me and tell me it would be okay.
So I nuzzled up to Elizabeth instead. Some days she would’ve been real annoyed by that, but not that day. That day she hugged me tight to her side like she would take care of me now.
“No,” Charles said, “because if we call the police and they know Momma is gone, they’ll take us away and put us in some kind of home or something.”
I looked over in the corner. Phillip was rocking back and forth now. It was hard to tell how much he understood, but he knew something was wrong. It made you want to hug him, but you couldn’t hug him on account of he’d get real mad and start hitting you.
“Yeah,” Elizabeth chimed in, changing her tune on a dime. “And don’t say nothing at school. If anybody asks about Momma, you say, ‘Oh, she fixed us the best supper last night,’ or something like that.”
Charles nodded. “Yeah.”
Looking back, this was obviously a plan made by a bunchof kids. We had some cans and some cereal in the house, but that was about it. We scrounged up all our money, and Charles walked down to the 7-Eleven to buy some food. Even though it seemed like all the money in the world at the time, it couldn’t have been more than ten bucks.
It seemed like we lived that way forever without Momma. We’d get up and Elizabeth made sure we looked tidy and our clothes were clean, and Charles would put Momma’s signature on our papers and everything since he had pretty good cursive. Then we’d get on the bus, and we’d come home and we’d lock the door and, when somebody knocked, we wouldn’t answer it.
Phillip cried a lot, and Elizabeth and I would try to calm him down. Sometimes we’d put him in front of the TV, but then the TV quit working. And then one day, it must have been a week or two later, we got home and a couple of grown-up ladies were sitting on our couch.
