“Would you be willing to try it once?” my grandmother asked. “If you hate it, you’ll never have to go back. But it was very important to your mother at one time. You can see where she grew up.”
I rolled my eyes, but my resolve was weakening. I imagined walking into a stuffy church and hating it, feeling looked down upon by everyone inside. I imagined myself tipping my head back and railing at God—How could you? How could you do this to me?
But I could also see me walking in there and feeling enveloped by Mom, by Mom’s past, a past I didn’t know about. I could see me learning about her there.
“Will I be going to the same high school she did?” I asked, trying to buy myself time to think.
“Yes.” My grandmother wiped her mouth, letting me change the subject. “Waverly Senior. You guys are the Tigers.”
“We used to be the Bulldogs,” I said, as if that mattered. Barking Bulldogs, I heard Marin’s voice sing out in my head. Barking Bulldogs, Barking Bulldogs.
“Yes, I heard you had quite the football team. Did you know any of the kids on the team?”
Of course I did. I knew them all. We’d grown up together. I wondered how many of them would be playing next season. How many of them wouldn’t be playing at all? “I was in theater,” I said.
“Oh! Fun! What plays were you in, Jersey?”
I couldn’t blame her for asking. I actually got asked that a lot. People never assumed someone who loved the theater would love being behind the lights the most. But still, her asking irritated me. It wasn’t the fact that she didn’t know, it was the fact that… she was my grandmother and she didn’t know. I gritted my teeth against the irritation, but it was useless. This was all too much. Too fast, and too much. I pushed my chair away from the table, and it made a loud squeak that echoed through the food court and made people turn and look.
“I need a new cell phone,” I said, abruptly changing the subject. “Mine got cut off.”
“Oh.” She thought it over. “Okay. But we can just pay the bill on your old one, get it transferred over to our names. That way your number won’t change.”
“That’s fine. Then I’m ready to go home,” I said, suddenly too pissed at all the changes in my life to feel the relief I wanted to feel over not having to get rid of my old phone and the precious photos on it.
My grandmother didn’t say anything. She followed as I huffed it to the parking lot, my legs fueled by the weird anger that had begun following me around like a ghost.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
Two weeks had passed since my grandmother’s church invitation, and I’d been hoping she’d forgotten. But on the third Sunday after our trip to the mall, she stood in my doorway, having swapped her trademark khakis and pastel sweater-and-tunic combo for a dress and stockings, the lined toes peeking out through a pair of rattan sandals. Her knees were knobby and her calves were covered in varicose veins that the hose did nothing to hide.
I sat cross-legged on my bed, playing cards, and pretended I didn’t notice my grandmother standing there. They seemed to have introduced me to everyone and taken me everywhere and were finally, blissfully, leaving me alone. I’d become an expert at being invisible; now if I could just become an expert at making them invisible.
She knocked lightly on my doorframe. “Jersey?” I squinched my eyes shut to keep from yelling at her for once again saying my name in a question. “Are you sure you don’t want to go to church?”
I didn’t look up. “Nope.”
But instead of getting her to go away, my short answer only seemed to move her to try again. She stepped into the room and sat gingerly on the edge of my bed, making the cards slide. I scooted back and scooped them up into a deck again.
“It could help,” she said, and if I hadn’t hated her so much, I might have been touched by the soothing tone of her voice. She acted as if she really cared. The same as when she left plates of home-baked cookies on my dresser or bought me a new set of headbands or a shirt or a little trinket to help me build my life back up again.
I felt sorry for her in those moments, because she didn’t know that Mom had raised us to see her as the enemy, that it would be a betrayal for me to love her. She didn’t know how broken I was on the inside, that I couldn’t have let her in even if I’d wanted to, because the part of me that had once loved was now gone. She didn’t know that while I found her house a somewhat acceptable place to hang for the time being, I was only waiting for the time to come when I could leave it. And that when I left her house, I would also leave her forever.
“I don’t need help,” I mumbled. I shuffled the cards, bridging them expertly.
“Jersey, eventually you’re going to need help. You know that, don’t you? You’ve lost a lot, Jersey, and this could be your first step.”
Two cards slipped out and I pounded my fist—the one holding the deck—against my leg. “Please,” I said, closing my eyes and trying to sound civil but knowing I was skating on the edge of not sounding civil at all. “Please stop saying my name so much. It’s driving me up the wall. It sounds stupid.”
She opened her mouth like she wanted to say something but seemed to think better of it and closed it with a curt nod. She got up and left my room, not another word about church, and not another utterance of my name. Thank God.
I stayed right where I was until I heard the front door close and saw through the curtains my grandmother’s car backing down the driveway.
I got up and headed for the living room, hoping to get some TV in before they came back.
But my grandfather hadn’t gone with her. Instead, he sat, baseball cap and plaid shirt in place, at the kitchen table, with a deck of cards.
I walked past like I didn’t see him and got a soda out of the refrigerator, planning to drink it out in the living room while I watched something mindless.
But when I headed for the living room, I couldn’t help noticing he was once again neglecting to move the ace.
“You do know you can move that to the top, right?” I asked, pointing to the ace.
He looked up, like he hadn’t noticed me, and I had a moment of wondering which one of us was the better actor. Probably neither of us. “Huh?”
I moved around to his side and picked up the ace, making a new row above his cards. “You can move this up and start building that pile. Same suit, the ace is a one. That way you can flip here.” I flipped over the card that the ace had been on. It was a ten of spades that he could play.
“Well, I’ll be,” he said. “I’ve been playing it wrong my whole life?”
“If you’ve been playing it this way, then yeah, it looks like it,” I said. I popped the lid on my soda.
He moved around a few more cards, then got stuck again. I helped him by placing a queen on a king, but then we were both stuck and he had to sweep the cards back into a pile. He glanced up at me.
“You play cards?” he asked.
I shrugged, taking a sip of my soda. He might have thought he was being all TV-shrink-clever, but I wasn’t about to let him trick me into opening up for some Tell-Me-About-Yourself-Jersey boo-hoo-fest. “Your mother played cards,” he continued, as if he hadn’t even noticed that I had ignored him. “She was smart as a whip with a game of Go Fish. Did you know that?”
I stared at him over my soda. My mom hardly ever played cards, even when we begged. She said she hated it. Something else I didn’t know about her.
“Of course, she got the gene from me.” He shuffled, bridged, smirked. “I’m unbeatable.”
I couldn’t help myself. I made a tch noise and rolled my eyes.