I gesture at the pack of cigarettes in Bo’s shirt pocket. “Can I have one of those?”
He lifts an eyebrow. I don’t smoke, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know how. I need the rush right now—the way the nicotine will sharpen up the edges of everything, make me wary, make me smart.
I need to get smart.
He hands me a cigarette, and when I put it in my mouth and cup my hands around the tip, he gives me a light off his Zippo.
“What’s he got over you?” Bo asks.
“I knocked him down a fire escape. Might’ve cracked his ribs. Assault, I guess. Especially if he went to the hospital afterward.”
“Was there a witness?”
“His friend. And Caroline.”
He nods.
“I’ve sold to the friend,” I add.
“More than once?”
“Yeah.”
“So he tipped off the cops.”
“Probably. I mean, anybody could have, but probably. You think they’ll be back?”
“Yeah.”
I purse my lips and inhale, grateful for the small, rustling sound of the paper igniting. Grateful to have this tiny curling spark to look at, this tight fullness in my chest as I hold the smoke in my lungs.
It’s good to have somebody to talk to.
“You think I should just stop selling? Lay low for a semester?”
“If you can get by without the money.”
I hesitate. Take another drag. Grow some balls and admit, “I end up sending most of it to Mom.”
He makes this sound—I’m not sure what it means. Kind of a laugh, except with pain in it. He’s not surprised, though. There’s resignation in that laugh.
He doesn’t say anything for a long time. Smokes his cigarette down to the filter, drops it onto the dirt floor, grinds it out.
“She don’t need it,” he says.
“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.