“Hey,” she said softly, and I thought, This is it, she’ll call me out in front of Dollie and the line crowding behind me, in front of Kimmy who has her mouth full of whoopie pie. But Mandy just put her arms around me.
“I’m so sorry about your dad,” she said against my neck.
There wasn’t a thing I could think that would be good enough to say.
“How’s life?” I said. “How’s your mom?”
“Oh, you know, school. Mom’s OK. Not great.” She pulled back to look at me, and she looked at me long and hard.
Balancing my bag on one arm, I grabbed Kimmy’s sticky hand. “Hey, meet my kid. Kimmy, say hi to Mandy.” She stared at Mandy from behind my legs and didn’t say anything or smile.
“She looks just like you,” Mandy said.
A part of me was happy because Kimmy was mine and loved me and would forget Mandy as soon as we got out of the store.
“Well, I’ll let you two go,” Mandy said. “You’re my family. You’re both my family, no matter what.”
“Bye,” said Kimmy.
I told her she was a good, polite girl. She clung to my legs as we backed out the door, so synchronized we didn’t trip.
As soon as we were outside Kimmy started crying, but she didn’t seem to know why.
I once saw a birth on television where the mom labored in a bath, and all her friends and her mom were around her. The baby was born underwater, calm, and it floated and held its breath right off. That’s how I pictured Kimmy being born, Grace and Mandy with me, even though of course it couldn’t be like that.
Kimmy was born with just Drill at the hospital. He spent the labor flipping through this Toyota engine manual to see if he couldn’t fix up that free car he’d got down in Augusta, and wouldn’t the baby like a new car. The drugs made my vision blurry, and when they put her on my chest I couldn’t focus on her face.
How I was conceived, Dad always said, was my mom got caught smuggling pills from Canada. He told me she quit her birth control soon after so the judge might pity the pregnant lady. I wanted to know her better than just this story and used to steal her photo from Dad’s drawer. It was black and white. In it she was leaning back against a tree. She wore a cropped shirt that showed her belly button. She was stabbed in prison, and she died from the wound. I wondered where on her body, and why. In the picture she had nice teeth.
Dad said he took the picture, but I don’t believe it, the way she’s looking at the camera. My guess is she hated him. My guess is she was looking at me, even if she didn’t know it. Like she knew I’d spend all night lying with my dog on the carpet that Dad’s shuffling had worn down to something hard and slippery, looking back at her.
Dad was a wormer his whole life. He was also a sternman, and between seasons lay in bed, a bowl of thawed clams on his belly for snacking, another bowl on his legs for the shells.
We lived together on the street Dad grew up on, the same street where three of his sisters lived. Two of them wouldn’t talk to Dad, and the aunt that stayed friendly told me he only saved me from foster care for the welfare checks, but anyways he stopped getting money when I was nine and didn’t send me back into care, so that couldn’t have been the whole truth. That’s how it’s always been in this town, people saying shitty things to try and turn normal people into monsters. Dad only touched me twice. Both times he was gentle and looked bewildered, like my body wasn’t the one he expected, but it was too late, too embarrassing for us both, to turn back.
The first time I ever talked to Grace she didn’t ask why I was calling so late on a school night, just said, “Hold on, sweetie,” and woke Mandy up. Mandy and me did show choir at school together. I felt like I had to say something big so I told her Dad punched out all the windows in the boathouse, which he had done, just not that night, but the field was still shiny with glass so the story seemed real enough.
Before Grace and Mandy pulled into Dad’s drive they cut their headlights. I sprinted to the car and Mandy and I sank low in the backseat and shrieked, full of the thrill of the kidnapping. We peeked at the bonfire going in Fulton’s lot, sparks hissing off a burning couch, and I recognized my cousin swaying topless by the fire.
The streets in Alma were quiet and moonlit. Their house stood all by itself at the end of a paved drive, with lawns on either side. The path to their doorstep was lined with lamps that ran off stored-up sunshine. Behind the house waves crashed on the beach. In Treelaw I’d have to walk two miles to the wharf if I wanted the water. The rooms were bright with lamps and vases of cut flowers and furniture that looked like it should be roped off, like it wasn’t safe to touch. Their two white cats rubbed against my sneakers. My bed was tucked under the slanted ceiling in Mandy’s bedroom. It was like sleeping in a boat’s cabin, and I could stay as long as I needed. Bronze and gold animal figurines lined the windowsill that looked out on the ocean. I rearranged them.
I remember Grace giving her name to the Alma pool attendant, then saying “and my daughters,” each time me thinking they’d catch her in the lie. I stood behind Mandy, with her pale hair and bikini same as Grace, in my gym shorts and T-shirt, trying to hide my face.
Mandy and I dedicated love songs over the radio to boys from school. My voice, when it played through the speakers, sounded like a stranger’s — husky and shy and older. I wanted to block my ears. We practiced slow dancing with each other.
At night, with Grace, we often walked down the wide, empty road to the lamplight at the end of the pier and watched the water for bloodworms, which Mandy and Grace thought were eels, and I didn’t tell them the difference. My dad called the worms dimes, because they sold at ten cents each, barely worth him bending down for. I pictured the worms as dimes, silver and quick, hard to tell apart from the light on the water.
It didn’t take two trips home to empty out my half of the dresser and pack my deodorant and eye makeup and slippers into a garbage bag. Dad had piled beaver hides all over my bed. He was saving up to sew himself a blanket. The beavers still had their heads.
“I’m going to find myself a nice, plump blonde once I get that blanket made,” he said. “Cuddle up for the winter.” He eyed Grace, who waited in the car with her engine idling. “She’d do,” he said. “She want to come inside?” I tried to laugh with him. I thought maybe he would ask me to stay, but he didn’t. He joked he was eating better, without someone else to feed.
When there was nothing left of mine at home I made up excuses for Grace to drive me back: a diary that didn’t exist, a favorite pillow. I found him curled up on the floor. Down the front of his shirt was a white, watery stain.
“There she is,” he said, covering the stain with his hand. “Whoops.”
He wrapped three fried pike in a napkin for me to share with Grace and Mandy. I thought of Grace eating around the eyes and tail fins and threw the fish into the brush, hiding the warm, oily napkin in my pocket.
Scotty Snotty brought lice back to school, and Mandy was the next person to get them, because he put his hat on her head during recess. We had to take baths together so Grace could shampoo our hair with medicine and set the timer for how long they took to die. After we were toweled off, but before the bathwater drained, we snuck back to look at the dead lice floating on top of the water. It was horrible but we had to see. The shampoo and combing left our hair shiny and soft, but then a week later she’d catch us scratching. Grace worked her way through all the shampoo brands. Eventually she said maybe it was me bringing them back each time I paid a visit to my dad.