“What’s she doing with it, then?”
He shrugs.
“You don’t have any idea?”
“Presents I don’t need. Clothes and shit for her and Frankie. I think she gave money to one of your cousins to get rid of a baby, but she won’t talk about it.”
I let that sink in.
“She’s going out to see your grandma once a week.”
He doesn’t mean Mom’s mom, who used to live in California but is dead now. He means Dad’s mom.
He means a decade-old rift between my mom and my dad’s family has been quietly repaired, and she didn’t tell me. That my money’s paying for stuff Dad’s people need—or stuff they want—because that’s the way Mom is with money. If she’s got it, she’ll give it to anybody, for anything.
If I’ve got it, she figures that’s the same as if it’s hers.
“Has he been back here?”
I don’t have to tell Bo I mean my dad. We both know what this conversation is about, and it’s a relief to talk around the undercurrents beneath the words, dig up the buried wires without having to name them.
The longer I stay here, the more obvious it becomes that, underneath, things are deeply fucked up.
Five miles away, living in a piece-of-shit trailer in the kind of trailer park nobody lives in if they have a better option, there’s a man with my eyes. My mouth. Fucking things up just by drawing breath.
“Once,” Bo says. “I drove him off with a shotgun.”
“What’s he want?”
Bo gives me a pitying look, and I take another drag on the cigarette and stare at my feet.
Stupid question. He wants what he always wants. Whatever my mom’s got. Her heart. Her cunt. Her money. Her pride.
He wants Frankie’s loyalty.
He wants to win everybody over, bring them around to his side, get them feeling sorry for him, looking at the world through his eyes, thinking, Man, he’s had some tough breaks, but he’s a good guy. I’m glad it’s all working for him this time. I’m glad he’s pulled it together.
He wants to make my mom fall in love with him, and then when she’s so far gone she can’t even remember what happened before, he wants to punch her in the gut.
The last time I saw my father, he kicked me like a dog. Spat on me. Left me there, my lip split, curled around the pain.
I don’t know why my mom can’t understand. That’s what he wants.
“Has she seen him?”
Bo doesn’t answer for so long, I think he’s not going to. He moves down the bench, swipes at an untidy spill of potting soil, rubs the dried brown leaves of a plant between his thumb and forefinger. “While I was down in California selling the crop.”
“She tell you?”
His expression darkens. “You think I’d fucking let her live here if she told me? I heard it off a guy I know. She says it’s bullshit.”
“You don’t believe her.”
“I haven’t made my mind up yet. But you know what happens if I find out she’s seeing him behind my back.”
Fuck. Yes. I know what happens.
He’ll toss her out on her ass, and she’ll deserve it.
Frankie, too. Bo’s not going to be raising a nine-year-old kid who doesn’t belong to him. Not without my mom in his bed.
He turns toward me. Walks close, clamps his hand over my shoulder. “I wish it wasn’t like this,” he says.
I can’t look at him. I look out at the stars and finish the cigarette.
It’s the weight of the past, suspended over our heads by a frayed rope.
It’s a woman holding a knife in her hand, one cut that could ruin everything for me. Ruin Frankie. Ruin Bo. Ruin her.
It’s like this, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Frankie flings herself over the back of the couch, her forearm pressing against my windpipe. “Do you really have to go?”
I tilt my head back and grab her by the waist to flip her over onto my lap.
In the air, she feels so insubstantial, her bones hollow like a bird’s. I tickle her until she’s shrieking.
“Quit it, West! Swear to God, quit, stop, please! West!”
I let up, and she scrambles away from me, skinny legs in skinny jeans, thick socks, a shirt with short little zippers at the shoulders that isn’t warm enough for winter or young enough for her.
Mom and Bo are both at work. This morning it’s just Franks and me and a bus I’ve got to catch if I’m going to make my flight back to school.
I’m leaving, but I don’t think I’ll be away for long.
Since that night out in the greenhouse with Bo, I can hear the clock ticking. The hands are flying around the dial like in some movie, blurring, blending, until time is tissue-paper thin.
My mother’s eyes never light on anything for long. Her hands are nervous, her replies evasive.
Weeks from now, months if I’m lucky, I’m going to get a call that makes me drop everything and fly home. And the truth is, I don’t have to go to Putnam at all.
I never had to.
I told myself when I left for school that I was doing it for Frankie and Mom, but I could have taken better care of them if I’d stayed here. Enrolled at the community college. Kept an eye on Frankie, kept my dad out of that trailer.
I went to Putnam because I wanted to.
I wanted to know who I could be if I wasn’t tethered to this place. What I could accomplish on my own.
Anything, Caroline would tell me. You can do anything.
She believes it, too.
Caroline could never understand how selfish a thought like that can be. How selfish I am for having left and for being about to leave again when I know how things are here.
Frankie’s smiling at me, breathing hard, her collarbones peeking out of the neckline of her shirt, her bottom lip chapped, her teeth a little too big for her face.
She’s got black crap all around her eyes, long earrings dangling almost to her shoulders.
She’s nine years old.
She needs somebody who will set limits, send her to bed, tell her to get off the phone and wash her face.
She needs me to make her do her homework and to manage Mom, who can only pass as a decent parent if there’s somebody around to make her work at it.
She needs me.
Resentment spikes in me, dark and poisonous.
I wish I knew some way to give her back. If I knew how to stop caring—to become as faithless as my father—then I could go to Putnam and stay there. Send Frankie a card on her birthday.
I could make myself over into Caroline’s West, with wide horizons and endless options.
“I’ll miss you,” my sister says.
Fists clenched, I have to close my eyes.
I would leave you behind if I could.
I wish I could. I want to.
But I open my eyes, open my mouth, and tell her, “I’ll miss you, too. I’ll be home in a few months. Then I’ll take you somewhere cool. Portland, maybe.”
“Really? What about San Francisco? Keisha says they have sea lions there, and there’s this store that’s all kinds of chocolate. That’s where we should go.”
“Yeah, I guess we could go to San Francisco. Maybe go camping on the way. See the redwoods.”
“Camping? No way. Camping sucks.”
“When have you ever been camping?”
“I know about it! You sleep in a tent and don’t shower, and spiders fall on your head. No thanks.”
I’ve never been camping, either. But who’s going to take her if not me?
“We could have a fire. Make s’mores. We’ll find a place to stay with a shower.”
“A fire would be good,” she says. “As long as there’s a shower. And you would have to kill all the spiders.”
“I can handle that.”
Whatever has to be handled—spiders, nightmares, homework, fathers—I can handle it.
What choice have I got?
I stand. “Hug me goodbye.”
She gets up and wraps her arms around me.
I kiss the top of her head. Her hair is soft. It smells like pink chemicals, and all the resentment in me is gone, washed away as if it had never been.
We walk down the driveway together. She chatters about San Francisco.
She watches me from the road. Waves whenever I turn around.
She belongs to me. I can’t do anything about it.
It’s five miles into town, but I get lucky and hitch a ride with one of Bo’s neighbors.
I look out the passenger window at the landscape, white and wheat, beige and brown, the sky wide open and relentlessly blue.
It doesn’t look like Iowa. It looks like me. Those colors the colors I’m made of, the dirt of this place in my bones, silted up around my heart.
I can’t keep being two people. The clock’s running down, my time almost up, and I won’t let myself string Caroline along, let her think I’m some other guy, some Iowa version of myself, when I’m not. I don’t get to be.
I’m Frankie’s.
I can’t be Frankie’s and keep Caroline. I wish I could, but there’s no point in wishing.
Every time I kissed Caroline, I pulled her deeper in. Deep and then deeper, until I couldn’t come home again without bringing her along.
“Here’s my girl,” I told my mother. “The pretty one.”
I sat on Bo’s couch in the dark and told Caroline, “I want inside you. I want you here.”
But I was pretending. There’s no world that has Frankie and my mom and Caroline in it, all of them belonging to me.
I’ve made a mess of things. That’s what it all boils down to. A heinous fucking mess.
Caroline is in me, and now I’ve got to cut her out.
JANUARY
Caroline
Winter break was endless. I slept in late and padded around the house in my slippers. The rest of the world was working, productive, but I had nothing to do.
I played six million games of Minesweeper, which—yeah, I don’t even know. Obviously there are better games. I couldn’t bring myself to commit to anything that involved more than one level or any sort of complex strategy.
It was draining, being home. Christmas in the Caribbean wore me out. Having to smile so much. Having to talk about my classes, my friends, my interests, and never mention West or the bakery, Nate or the pictures, any of it.
Keeping secrets is exhausting. When your whole life turns into a secret, what then?
I told my dad about rugby. He didn’t like the idea of me playing a tackle sport.
“You should play golf,” he said.
“Dad, I hate golf.”
“What’s wrong with golf?”
Golf made me think of West. How he caddies, so he must know when to hand somebody a nine iron or a sand wedge. How he must have opinions about drivers and wear some kind of a uniform—a crisp polo shirt, khaki shorts. He must look so different.
I pored over Google maps, searching for golf courses in Oregon, trying to guess which was his.
My grades came. Two A’s, two A-minuses. Dad put them on the fridge.
He asked if I was going to see Nate, and when I reminded him we broke up, he said, “You were friends before you were going out. Maybe it’s better not to burn that bridge.”
Obviously, I didn’t call Nate. I took a four-hour nap instead.
For New Year’s, Dad took me out to dinner and made a big thing out of letting me drink a glass of champagne. The next morning he gave me his credit card to buy myself “something nice.” Because I got good grades. Because he was so proud of me.
When I showed him the cashmere sweater I’d bought at the mall—the exact shade of West’s eyes—he kissed my temple, rubbed my shoulder, left me alone to watch bad movies in the den.
At night, long after Dad was asleep, I lay in the glow of the TV and waited for West to call.
I dozed off sometimes. I was so tired.