“You don’t do that,” I said, and I realized that I wasn’t sure if I was talking about my grandparents or about Mom or about Ronnie himself. “You don’t give up on your family. You don’t just… leave… when your child… needs you.” My breath hitched every few words as tears and dread fell over me.
“I’m sorry, Jersey,” Ronnie said, letting his hands rest limply in his lap. “I called them this morning. They’re willing to take you in.”
“No,” I said. My nose dripped and soaked into my jeans. I clutched at his elbow. “Please, Ronnie. I want to go home. I’ll be good, I promise. I won’t cause any problems. Ever. I don’t know them, and Mom hated them. This isn’t fair. Why do you hate me so much? Why do you think it’s so bad to have me around?”
He shook his head and put the truck into drive. My hand slipped off his arm and landed in my lap in defeat. “I don’t hate you,” he said. “But I can’t take care of you. Every time I look at you, I see her. Every time I hear you talk, I think about how I let everyone down. I think about how I couldn’t save any of you. Not one.” He glanced at me as he turned down a side road, the street sign reading FLORA. The houses were tidy, landscaped, painted. Not big, but bigger than our old house. “What good am I to anyone if I can’t be there when it most matters?”
“But I’m still alive. You can still save me. It matters now.”
He pulled into a driveway. My tears slowed as I took in the white-and-brown Tudor-style house, flowers blooming in orderly raised beds surrounding the swept sidewalk. More flowers blooming in quaint window boxes. A saintly-looking statue on the front porch. The door opened slowly. I wiped my face with my palms.
“I know you don’t understand,” Ronnie said. “But you’ve got to make this work, Jersey. I’m selling the property, anyway. Going back east. I’ve already got the transfer okayed at work. You can’t come home. There’s not going to be one.”
I tore my eyes away from the pale hand that still clutched the door. The hand must have belonged to one of my grandparents, but the shadows kept me from seeing who.
“You’re not going to stay where they’re buried?”
“Every time I look at that neighborhood, at the house, at every business and building I pass, I’m reminded of how I failed them. I can’t live a life that way. I’ve got to go.”
“So you’re abandoning all of us,” I said, not a question, but a statement.
“I’m saving myself,” he said very quietly.
It dawned on me that on some level I had expected Ronnie to change his mind. To get a little distance, heal, see his mistake, want me back. In some ways, I was more aghast at the realization that he would never change his mind than I was at seeing Mom’s lipstick smeared across Meg’s and Lexi’s faces. I was more insulted by this than I’d been by Clay and Tonette insulting me and saying I didn’t belong. I was more shocked by Ronnie’s selfishness than I had been by the tornado itself. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Life wasn’t supposed to work this way. He wasn’t supposed to choose himself over us.
“You’re a coward.” But before I could say any more, a gray-haired man wearing a plaid shirt and a baseball cap knocked on Ronnie’s window. My mouth snapped shut. The man had a large, bulbous nose and huge eyebrows. But he also had wet, pouty lips that sort of reminded me of Marin’s, and out from his cap, several curly strands of hair snaked around his ears.
Ronnie rolled down the window.
“Thank you for this,” he said to the old man, and the anger returned. I wanted to punch Ronnie. For casting me out, for abandoning Mom and Marin, for being so dry-eyed and cavalier about the whole thing.
The old man nodded. “Not a problem. She got any bags?”
“Not really. Just a couple up here she can carry. We lost everything, as you saw.”
My jaw tensed. Ronnie had taken them to my house? To Mom’s house? How could he? Mom would have been furious. She’d kept them away on purpose.
“You get any word from FEMA yet?” the old man asked, and as Ronnie answered, I tuned him out, turning my gaze to the woman standing in the front doorway, wringing her hands, a melon-colored sweater hanging over a lighter melon-colored tunic. Even from the truck, I could see that she shared my knock knees, my rounded shoulders, my thick waist. All this time I’d been wondering who exactly I looked like, when the person I resembled most was right here in Waverly.
“Ready?” the old man said, and I realized he had been peering past Ronnie over to where I sat.
“Huh?”
“You ready?” Ronnie said.
I glared at him. “No. But I guess I don’t have a choice,” I said.
“No,” he said, “you don’t. You’ve got to make it work this time.”
He went back to his picking on the steering wheel, and the old man slowly maneuvered his way around to my side of the truck. I clutched the top handle of my backpack and pushed Marin’s purse tightly up my shoulder. My grandfather opened my door and I slid out.
“Have a nice life,” I said to my stepdad.
I knew I would never see him again.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
My grandmother said my name in pretty much every sentence. “Jersey,” she kept repeating. “Jersey, would you like some coffee cake? Jersey, let’s put your things away. What time do you like to wake up in the morning, Jersey?” It was like she couldn’t get enough of it. It was driving me crazy already.
I followed behind her in my burr-covered socks, my shoes left by the front door next to theirs. She showed me to my room, a lavender-and-white monstrosity of ruffles and gingham and scented soaps and fabric flowers, so different from the porch at my other grandparents’ house it made my brain ache. A plate of cookies sat on the nightstand. I could smell them from the doorway. My stomach rumbled.
“This used to be Christine’s room,” she said, stepping aside to let me pass. I shuffled in, trying to imagine my mom in such a space. Trying to see her stretched out across the cloud of bedding, her feet kicked up in the air behind her as she talked on the phone. Trying to imagine her pushing out the window screen and shimmying through to meet Clay, kissing him on his boozy mouth.
It was getting harder and harder to call up mental images of Mom. Especially any version of Mom that might have lived here—this was so different from the Mom I’d known.
There was a framed photo on the dresser. A little girl on a man’s shoulders, his hair a mess, the little girl holding a baseball cap proudly in the air.
“That’s Christine and Barry,” the woman said, and when I continued to stare at her blankly, she added, “Barry’s your grandpa. I’m Patty. Did you know that already? I don’t know what Christine shared with you.”
I said nothing. She didn’t want to know what Mom had shared with us about them. And even if she did, I wasn’t in the mood to tell her. The eight-year-old inside me was afraid to breathe in this house, afraid of catching the oppression Mom had always talked about. Afraid of being judged. How did I know who this woman really was? How did I know she wouldn’t turn on me the way Dani’s mom had, or give up on me the way Clay had, or lie to me the way Mom had, or cast me out the way Ronnie had? If I’d learned anything from the tornado, it was that I couldn’t trust anyone but myself. My new grandmother might want to pretend that we were all one big happy family, but I knew the truth. One framed photo of a little girl mugging on her dad’s shoulders a decade before being kicked out of the family does not make up for a lifetime of being cast out.
In that regard, Mom was the same as me, I realized. We were both motherless. The realization flooded my heart, made me feel closer to her somehow.