“Well, you were lying half-naked on the floor and you had red marks from the carpet on your face.” I touched my own nose, remembering. “And your agent said that you were ‘under the weather,’ but it was so obvious that you were drunk. You could hardly stand and he had to dress you like a baby, and then you threw up, and then your boss came in and saw everything. You had also talked about your wife’s adultery with multiple—”
“All right, I think I understand why,” he interrupted me. “It wasn’t my finest hour.”
At least he’d been spared a public airing of the video of the incident. The chaperone on the field trip who had recorded it had been persuaded to erase the evidence, after a gift of Woodsmen tickets. And we’d explained to the kids that Everett Ford had been feeling sick to his stomach, just like their friendMya had been (her case was the first time I’d been puked on last semester).
“Are you really ok now?” I asked. “You do seem a lot better, but sometimes it’s hard to know about people.”
He looked at the glass of soda water. “I don’t have rug burn on my face anymore. I must be great.”
It didn’t sound like it to me—but then we both jumped. “It’s my phone again,” I told all the started patrons and Jannie. “I’ll turn down the volume.” My mom had finally responded to my many questions, and I read what she’d written.
“Is everything ok?” Everett asked.
Just like I’d said to him before, it was hard to know about people. “I’m not sure,” I answered. “I’ll have to do some checking. And I’ll check on your stuff, too. I’m almost positive that my school’s admin will be able to tell me if our buses run on diesel, even if it isn’t reported anywhere. Anita will probably have all the other answers, too. She has files dating back years locked in a drawer in her desk.”
“Thank you,” he told me. He glanced at the glass and pulled out his wallet, but I shook my head.
“That was on the house. It was really flat, anyway.”
He nodded and left, and Jannie called me over to help with her spreadsheet and to tell me that she was going bankrupt, which was where her bookkeeping sessions usually led.
“Who was that guy?” she also asked.
“He used to play for the Woodsmen. I mean, he used to be on the team. I don’t think he ever actually got on the field.”
“I thought he seemed familiar,” she said, nodding. She had to hold her fez so it didn’t tumble off her head. “Can you figure out where I went wrong here?” She continued to clutch the fez but used her other hand to point to her laptop. “There’s no way that we lost four hundred K last month.”
“No, there’s no way,” I agreed. I did help her, but my thoughts were elsewhere so it took me some time to figure out where she’d gone wrong. It was a combination of too many zeros, decimal issues, and not keeping columns in her notebook, which was also pretty normal for her finances. She noticed how distracted I was, and she assumed it was about the man who had just been in the bar.
“He’s not bad looking,” she said, but then sniffed. “I like them a little rounder and smaller.”
“Like a doughnut hole?”
“Exactly,” she said, laughing. “I eat them right up.”
I knew that was true, because Jannie had been married four times and had multiple boyfriends. It was exactly why I never asked her for advice. I just wanted one person and I wanted it to last, but that wasn’t her MO. She was interested in many, many doughnut holes, which worked for her and for a lot of other people, too. They preferred an assortment, different flavors in a variety pack. I just wasn’t that way—well, I didn’t think I was, but I’d never gotten much of a chance to eat any.
I thought a little about Everett on the way home but mostly, I thought about what my mom had answered while I’d been at the bar. When I’d gone to the water department, I had discovered that the problem wasn’t limited to the last bill. She also hadn’t paid the one before that, or the one before that. In fact, we were now several months in arrears and I’d set up a payment plan. It had made me think about our other utilities, like electricity and trash, so I had called home again as I’d driven to the college. Mom still hadn’t been there, my sister had reported, but I’d convinced Willow to do some snooping.
“Why? Why do you need to know her bank password?” she’d asked, and I had told her the truth. I was worried that we owed money, which didn’t bother my sister. “So? Just take care of it,” she had advised. I’d told her that I couldn’t and that she had to go to the basement, to my mother’s room.
I wouldn’t have asked her to do that except this was very important. It took her a while to get down the stairs but when she had made it, she’d found the password on a note taped to the side of the old computer that only Mom used. I had typed it into the bank’s website to look at her account and I’d seen the problem: her paychecks weren’t being deposited in it anymore and the money that I had been giving her out of mine wasn’t there either. She had a total of sixteen dollars and thirty-two cents on tap, and in addition, there was no evidence that any of our bills had been paid for months. As soon as I’d seen that, I had texted her again and again to ask why.
As I’d been with Everett at the bar, I’d finally received my answer. “Calm down,” my mom had written, which didn’texplain anything and this situation was serious. Before I’d left for school that morning, I’d spotted a notice rubber-banded to our front door—I must have missed it when I’d dragged myself through the garage in the dark the night prior. It said we had ten days before the water would be turned off, and we obviously couldn’t let that happen. We also needed gas and electricity, and nonpayment of bills wasn’t something that she could ignore and expect that I would ignore it, too.
That was why I waited for her the next morning after I’d gotten a little sleep, but not much because I was very worried about this. I had called in and let Anita know that I was going to arrive late to the school. Since she was the admin who knew everything about everything, she was probably also aware that I had lied when I’d said, “Um…I guess I have car trouble.” I hadn’t planned ahead and thought up an excuse, which had been an oversight.
So now, instead of piling my gear for the day into the back seat and rushing away, I sat at the table to wait for when my mom came in. I had breakfast laid out, too, because food sometimes made difficult discussions easier. “Hi,” I said to her when the door opened.
“I thought you’d be gone.” She took off her boots and then she moved toward the basement stairs to descend to her room.
“Mom, stop. We have to talk about the utilities,” I told her, but she kept going. “Mother!”
She had disappeared and I stood to follow her. But almost as soon as I reached the top of the stairs, she was coming back up.
“Good,” I said, relieved. “We can discuss this. We can figure it out.”
“There’s nothing to say, Zoey. I’m so tired.”
