He yawned loudly. “So I should probably go. The pain meds are kicking in, and you never know what I’m gonna say on those. I might profess my deep abiding love for your toe lint, no joke.” I could hear the smile in his voice, but I couldn’t match it. It seemed like the hurt would never stop coming. I felt shaken, frail.
“Okay,” I said. “Let me know when you get out of the hospital. Take care of yourself. I mean it.”
“You keep being bossy like that, and I’ll be forced to touch you with my butt-arm.” He yawned again.
“I’m being serious, Kolby,” I said, though I couldn’t help smiling a little. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“Aw, Jers, if I didn’t know any better, I’d think you miss me a little.”
I closed my eyes. “More than you could ever know,” I said.
After hanging up, I stood in the middle of my grandparents’ backyard, barefoot and shivering. The phone dropped from my hand and landed in the grass, but I made no move to pick it up. I was shaking so hard my fingers couldn’t hold the telephone. Maybe Dani’s mom was right—maybe I was losing it and I was too far gone to even know. Maybe this was what losing it felt like.
“Jersey?” my grandmother’s voice sounded from the sliding glass door.
I turned slowly. “Huh?” Speaking, without even meaning to.
“We’re headed to the grocery store. Why don’t you come along?”
I nodded. Despite myself, I freaking nodded. Sure, the grocery store, why not? My whole stupid world is falling apart, so why not the freaking grocery store, right? Because grocery stores, those are normal and those are sane and those might make me normal and sane.
Half an hour later, I found myself trudging down the cereal aisle, the bread aisle, passing the canned goods and the pasta. My grandparents chattered as if this were the most exciting day of their lives, reading labels and pointing at sale tags and asking, asking, asking me so many questions, until I felt like my brain might explode.
“Jersey, do you eat biscuits and gravy? Your grandfather makes wonderful biscuits and gravy, Jersey.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Jersey, what kind of deodorant do you wear, honey? What kind of shampoo, Jersey? Do you need a razor, Jersey, a hairbrush, Jersey, do you like these protein bars, do you drink a lot of milk, do you like oranges, Jersey, Jersey, Jersey?”
“Yeah. Okay. That’s fine. No. I don’t know.”
My grandmother stopped and talked to no less than ten other people, gave them all the same spieclass="underline" This is our granddaughter, Jersey. I’m sure you heard about the tornado up in Elizabeth. Such a sad, sad thing. Yes, we lost our only daughter. It’s very traumatic for all of us, but we’re muddling through, aren’t we, Jersey?
And then would come the introductions, as if we were at some stupid cocktail party: Jersey, this is Anna, this is Mary, this is Mrs. Donohue. Her son is a marine, her daughter teaches English at the community college, she used to babysit your mother, can you believe it?
To all observers, we were a reunited family on the mend. My grandparents, the saints, had taken in a sullen, sunken-eyed, purple-haired granddaughter they didn’t even know and were helping her rebuild her life. We shopped together. It was so cute.
I wanted to vomit.
I wanted to scream and run out into the parking lot and hurl cans of green beans through the windows. I wanted to bash the headlights out of Anna the marine-mother’s car. I wanted to lie down on the cool tile and press my cheek against it, fall asleep, cry, rage, rampage, hurt things, hurt myself.
But instead, I nodded. I answered questions.
Because I had no other choice.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
The Waverly mall could hardly be called a mall. It was mostly two department stores, with a couple food stands placed here and there, and almost no people. My grandmother led me around the clothing racks, asking questions about sizes and taste, herding me into fitting rooms with armloads of shirts and shorts and bras. I tried them all on dutifully, but within moments of leaving the fitting room I couldn’t even be sure if I’d been in there at all. I didn’t remember what anything looked like on me, and I didn’t care.
I stuffed my feet into shoes and picked up shiny, glinting earrings and carried around shopping bags, while my grandmother ran a never-ending monologue about clothes and the changing nature of fashion. She asked me questions, so many questions it made my ears throb. Do you like to wear shorts, Jersey? Oh, Jersey, what do you think of this shirt, aren’t the hearts cute? Jersey, try this one on. I think that’ll look great on you, Jersey. What kinds of things did you wear at home, Jersey? I wanted to plug my ears, to slap my palms over them and start chanting la-la-la to drown her out.
At my other grandparents’ house, I’d been able to shut myself down, bit by solitary bit. But here it was impossible. I felt under a microscope, heated by a spotlight, poked and prodded and analyzed. Day after mind-numbingly normal day, my grandparents dragged me places, talked to me, showed me things, introduced me to people, made me participate, even though doing so meant I felt like an open sore, too roughed over to ever develop a protective scab. I began to feel like an exposed nerve.
“You hungry for lunch, Jersey?” she asked.
“Okay,” I said, that same mechanical response I’d been giving her all day long.
“You like nachos?”
“Okay.”
I sat at a food court table, surrounded by shopping bags full of things I couldn’t remember choosing, much less caring about, while my grandmother ordered a plate of nachos to share. She came back and we ate mostly in silence.
Finally, as I picked up the last nacho, she said, “How would you like to go to church with me on Sunday, Jersey?”
I paused, the nacho dripping most of its ingredients back onto the tray. “No.”
She tipped her head sideways. “But there are so many kids there your age. I thought you might like to get to know some of them before school starts in the fall.”
I felt a headache begin to pang on the side of my head. I didn’t even want to think about school—about starting senior year as a new kid.
“No,” I said, dropping the nacho and wiping my hands on a napkin.
“Why not?”
“Because…” Because I’m tired of everything being new. Because I just want something familiar. Because making new friends might mean getting rid of old ones. Because I can’t think when you keep saying my name like that. “Because I’ve never been to church.”
She frowned. “You mean Christine didn’t ever take you?”
I shook my head, trying to look self-righteous about it, as if my mom had a great reason not to take me to church and how dare she, my grandmother, the woman who hadn’t even known my mom for over a decade, question it.
She pressed her lips into a tight line. “Well, that surprises me. She loved church. She came to church every Sunday before she got mixed up with that Clay Cameron. I’d have thought once he left her, she’d go back to her church home.”
“Her home was with me,” I said. “She didn’t need church.”
We ate in silence for a few moments, me trying to picture Mom in a church. It was getting so hard to remember her with all these new versions coming at me every time I turned around. Clay’s version, my grandparents’ version, my version—they were getting muddy, competing, blurring her memory. It felt like trying to recall someone I’d never met.