Chapter thirteen

Grandfather Harold was true to his word. After we left the diner, we didn’t stop again until we got to Caster City. Not that I asked him to. I sat in the backseat and thought about what they’d said. I was going to meet my father today. For the first time ever, really.

It was evening when we crunched up the gravel driveway, but the days had been getting longer, so dusk was just starting to fall. I peered nervously through the windshield at the tiny house we were approaching. It was white, with falling-down shutters and a front stoop covered on three sides with wooden lattice, which had holes punctured throughout. I wondered if that was going to be my bedroom. I didn’t see how I’d possibly live in such a place until winter.

Two boys who couldn’t have been any older than eight burst through the front door as we settled into park. Neither of them had shirts on, and their faces were filthy. Their voices drifted through the car’s open windows.

“Give it back! ” one of them yelled, clobbering the other on the back of his head with a fist. “Ya turdface, ya smelly fartwad! ” They fell into mutual headlocks and spewed cusswords while rolling around on the damp ground, punching and gouging at each other.

My eyes widened in surprise. I held my breath waiting to hear Grandfather Harold’s response. But if my grandparents had heard the boys, neither of them acknowledged it. At that moment, Marin seemed so very innocent to me. Like a little angel.

Grandmother Billie tugged at the hem of her shirt and the thighs of her pants, then leaned down and peered at me through her open door.

“This is it, ” she said. She shut her door and ambled up the walk.

Welcome home, Jersey, I thought. This is it.

As I opened the door and unfolded myself from the backseat, a woman stepped out on the front porch, holding a diaper-clad toddler on her hip. The baby’s hair and face were as messy as those of the two boys on the ground.

“Nathan! Kyle! Cut that out! ” she yelled. The baby pointed at the boys and babbled something loud and unintelligible. The woman shifted her attention to me. “You can come on up, ” she called.

But my body didn’t want to move. My legs trembled and my arms shook under the weight of my backpack. I wasn’t sure I could keep from throwing up the burger and fries that still churned in my stomach.

This was not my life. Cussing children and dirty babies whose gender I couldn’t even identify and scowling grandfathers and a sofa on the porch for a bedroom and no friends, no school, no Kolby standing outside watching storm clouds roll in. And somewhere in there… my father. The man who’d abandoned me. He’d ruined Mom’s relationship with her family, so that when he left, we were completely and totally alone. And without Mom, it was just me. Alone. In this place.

At that moment, I would have given anything to have Marin back, to have Marin ask me to dance with her. I would have East Coast Swung until my legs gave out. I would have hummed right along with her.

I turned my eyes upward and blinked hard, wishing I would wake up from this nightmare.

But it didn’t happen.

“Come on, she don’t bite, ” Grandfather Harold said, startling me back into reality. He tugged on one of the straps of my backpack, but I held it tight.

“I’ve got it, ” I said, and then when I felt his shadow shrivel me, added, “sir.”

He paused, then grunted. “Suit yourself.”

I followed him up the walk, which was cement crumbled to almost as much gravel as the driveway, past the boys, whose breathless exertion had finally drained the cusswords out of them. Instead, they lay mostly static on the ground, groaning in various wrestling holds.

“Hey, ” the woman said when I hit the porch, stepping back warily, as if Grandfather Harold were escorting a dangerous animal into the house. “You coulda come on up. Didn’t you hear me? ”

I met her gaze but didn’t know what to say. Was this my father’s wife? Was this the woman who’d replaced my mother? This woman in a threadbare and faded maternity top and unbrushed hair, with a bevy of foulmouthed children?

I turned my eyes to the wooden porch boards and followed my grandfather into the house, hearing the woman yell after I’d passed, “You boys, I told you to cut that out and get your butts inside the house! ” The baby echoed a garbled version of the latter end of her sentence. At once I felt sorry for the kid, while at the same time grateful that this was not how I’d grown up. Except now it was going to be part of how I grew up.

Grandmother Billie was standing in the living room when we came inside. A couple of teenage girls scowled at me from the couch. The shades were drawn and the TV was on, giving the room a dark, impenetrable aura.

“She meet Terry? ” my grandmother asked, talking about me in third person.

“We passed her on the way up, ” my grandfather answered, as if the terse, one-sided exchange could be considered an introduction.

I recalled the conversation from the diner. Grandmother Billie had mentioned my father’s sister, Terry. So that woman out there was my aunt, not my stepmother. I wasn’t sure whether this was good news or not. In a way, finding out that my stepmother was loud and foulmouthed would be better than continuing to wonder what she was like. There is relief in the known, even if the known is ugly.

“These here are Lexi and Meg, ” my grandmother said, gesturing to the two girls on the couch, who’d gone back to watching their show and didn’t even bother to look up at the mention of their names. Instantly, I was flooded with guilt. How many times had Marin felt like this, with me refusing to acknowledge her so I didn’t miss some lame crap that some lame reality star was saying? “I guess they’re your sisters.” I pushed Marin’s purse closer to my side with my elbow.

“Half, ” one of the girls intoned, giving me the most cursory nasty flick of her eyes.

“Well, yes, half sisters, I suppose, ” Grandmother Billie corrected. “Come on. I’ll show you where you can sleep.”

I followed her through a cluttered kitchen. Food-caked dishes clung to the sink, and the microwave door stood open. We walked out to an enclosed porch that looked over the backyard, letting a whoosh of fresh air into the stifling kitchen. Grandmother Billie held the screen door for me with one hip.

“We call this our family porch, ” she said. “But for right now it’s yours. You can pull the shades on those screens for privacy, I suppose, but you can’t lock the door to the house because it locks on the inside.”

She tossed an armload of bedding onto a couch that looked a hundred years old, with big orange flowers on top of a backdrop that might once have been white but was so coated with the outdoors it appeared almost beige.

“You got any clothes? ” she asked.

I shook my head. “I bought a few pairs of clean underwear at the pharmacy. I need to do some laundry.”

“Well, you’re a little thick to borrow from Lexi or Meg, but maybe Terry’s got something you can squeeze into.” She eyed me up and down, making me feel bloated and uncomfortable. “It seems to me that beggars shouldn’t be choosers, anyway, ” she said, and I had to restrain myself from asking her what the heck she was talking about, since I hadn’t said anything about not wanting to borrow Terry’s clothes. She sized me up a bit more, then added, “You can get settled, and then when you’re done, come on in and wash the dishes. Lexi’s gonna be real happy she ain’t got to double up on chores now you’re here.”

She left, and I sank down onto the couch, not sure what to do to “get settled.” I didn’t have anything to put away. I was afraid to leave everything I owned unattended, especially in this place. And the last thing I wanted to do was go back inside that kitchen and do dishes that I hadn’t dirtied.

I gazed at the screen door leading out to the backyard, wondering what would happen if I walked through it and never stopped. Just headed out, walking, walking, walking. Be my own hero. Save myself.

To where, though? That was the problem. I could walk all I wanted. What I didn’t have was a destination. I didn’t have a home. This was it. This couch tucked away on a “family porch, ” whatever that was, out in the middle of nowhere, where little boys cussed like sailors and half sisters sneered at you.

Nothing like my old home, where Marin played on the swings outside and Mom sat on a lawn chair and painted her fingernails Easter colors while humming that old Spandau Ballet song she loved so much.

“Jersey, watch this! ” Marin would call if I so much as came close to the back door when she was out there. She’d do something that she thought made her a daredevil—like tilt her head way back while swinging or stand up at the top of the slide or hang upside down from her knees on the trapeze bar.

“Monkey Marin, ” Mom would call out cheerfully, then turn to me. “Come on out, Jers. I’ve got robin’s-egg blue.” She’d hold up the bottle of fingernail polish and shake it.

“No, thanks, ” I’d say. “I’ve got homework.”

But I didn’t. Hardly ever was it really homework that was keeping me away. It was always something completely stupid.

I never once sat outside and watched Marin and listened to Mom hum and let her paint my nails. Not one time.

“This much is true, ” I whispered to myself, sitting on my grandparents’ “family porch, ” remembering the lyrics at the end of the song. I wiped a trickle of tears off my cheek, then reached into Marin’s purse.

I popped a piece of gum, unfolded the paper, and drew a picture of my sister hanging upside down from a bar, a thought bubble saying, “Watch, Jersey! ” Marin is a monkey, I wrote. And then added: Mom is robin’s-egg blue.