“Well, at the very least, it’ll be a short-lived ego boost for me.”
I smile halfheartedly. “What about Viv?” I ask. “Have you guys talked since that fight?” A few days after school started, the two of them got into a fight because she hadn’t called him back in three days.
He sighs. “We FaceTimed last night.”
“Ooh, FaceTime sex?” I joke.
He doesn’t say anything.
“What is it?”
Freddie shakes his head. “I need to go see her, ya know? She needs toseeme.” He finishes the rest of the shaved ice and sets the cup down on the gravel. “You call Grace?”
“Texting is easier. Talking on the phone requires privacy and, well, actually talking on the phone. Who even talks on the phone anymore?” I ask, trying to goad him.
“Excuses,” he says. “And you know my feelings on that.”
Freddie and I have different ideas of how to maintain a long-distance relationship. I’m scared to push too hard, and he’s scared he’s not pushing hard enough. I stand up and take the empty cup. “I’m supposed to go to my mom’s with Hattie.”
He reaches out a hand for me to pull him up. “Tomorrow. YMCA. Right after your route. Cool?”
I swing one leg over my bike and toss the cup in the Dumpster behind him. “What if my hair turns the water blue?” Hattie touched me up right before school started.
“Ramona Blue,” he says. “Everything she touched turned a hue.”
Tyler drops Hattie and me off at the Ocean Springs apartment complex in Biloxi. It’s not a far drive from Eulogy, but our mom lives farther inland than we do. According to her, she’s lived through too many hurricanes to plant herself right on the coast like the rest of us fools. But Harrah’s, the casino where she works, is right there on the water.
“Do we have to do this?” I ask Hattie as Tyler pulls away. “And why doesn’t he have to stay?”
She takes my hand. “You’re here forme, remember?”
I nod. “Fine. But he’s the one who got you into this situation in the first place. Don’t forget that.”
Hattie has yet to tell my mom she’s pregnant. Her reaction shouldn’t matter. We see the woman once or maybe twice a month. But it does to Hattie. She had more time than I did with Mom and Dad together as a unit, and I think she still holds on to the memory of it. The memory of what it felt like to have a mother. Especially now.
According to the court mandate from when we were kids, we’re supposed to stay with Mom every other weekend, but once we got to middle school, the weekends sort of fizzled out, and now we’re down to a dinner or two a month. Our weekends here were always miserable anyway.Being this far from Eulogy, we were nowhere near any of our friends, and Mom has been working the noon-to-midnight Saturday shift since she took the job at Harrah’s.
Hattie knocks on the door of the third-story apartment twice before my mom swings the door open. “Hey, girls. Come on in.”
We’re greeted by the faint scent of cat piss courtesy of Wilson, Mom’s blind orange tabby.
Our mom wears the same clothes she wore twenty years ago, and seeing as she had Hattie at the age of fifteen, that can’t mean anything good. She’s too thin. Her hair is stringy. Short shorts show off her purple varicose veins and soft, lumpy thighs. She should wear a bra, but there’s not much room for one beneath her tiny tank top.
She hugs Hattie first and then me. Neither of our limbs knows where to go, and it’s like this every time. Two strangers embracing.
“Y’all kick off your shoes. I got the news on, but change it if you want. Making some cheesy noodles with hamburger meat.”
My eyes meet Hattie’s the second Mom turns her back. I nudge her on with my chin to get it over with, but she shakes me off.
“Have you talked to Aunt Peggy lately?” asks Hattie.
Mom responds from the kitchen. “Oh yeah. We talked the other day. She went on and on about that blood clot she had in her leg and her new compression socks.”
The two of us sit on the couch, which also pulls out to be Mom’s bed. The apartment is an efficiency, so it’s all oneroom basically. When we were little girls, we’d all sleep on the foldout with Mom, but as we got older, she’d set up sleeping bags on the floor. That was around the time our weekend visits petered out.
Hattie and Mom trade small bits of information from each of their lives while I flip through channels on the TV.
As we sit down to eat, Mom turns her attention toward me. “Well, Ramona, it’s your senior year. Soon enough you’ll be on your own.”
