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.

My grandmother interrupted my thoughts. “You can call me Grandma, though, ” she said. “I’m so happy to finally meet you, Jersey. We both are.” I stared at her, unmoving, until she finally withered back from the doorway. “I’ll let you get settled. The bathroom’s right across the hall here. Feel free to take a nap or explore or do whatever it is you want to do. We’ll have dinner at six, but if you get hungry before, you can have those cookies there.” She pointed at the plate. I refused to look at it. “Or we can get you something else. Just holler, Jersey.”

She shuffled out and closed the door.

The moment she left, I devoured the cookies, greedily, guiltily.

Once they were gone, I stood by the night table, not sure what I was feeling anymore. The room was nice. It smelled good and it was bright and cozy. My mom had a history here, so in a way it felt comforting. But she’d hated that history. I was torn. If I decided to be happy here, wouldn’t I be betraying Mom’s memory?

I finally shrugged my backpack down onto the floor and dug through it for some clean clothes. I pulled out a shirt and shorts from Terry. The shirt had a CCHS Captains logo on it, and for some reason, my old Elizabeth Barking Bulldogs sweatshirt popped into my mind.

I wasn’t ever the biggest on team spirit. My friends and I were hardly athletes. In fact, we theater geeks never understood why anyone would want to run around in a field or in circles on a track, and the athletes never understood why we performing-arts-center groupies wanted to sweat under a spotlight reciting Shakespeare sonnets in language that didn’t make sense. It was a mutual misunderstanding that neither of us had any desire to rectify.

But everyone owned spirit wear. We wore it on football Fridays, mostly. Even if we never exactly bothered to go to the game.

Marin was obsessed with my Elizabeth Barking Bulldogs sweatshirt. She loved its cartoon bulldog and bright orange lettering. She’d drag it off my bed or out of the clean laundry basket and would dance around the living room in it, on her tiptoes, total Marin-style, the sweatshirt hanging to her ankles, the sleeves flapping in the air.

I told her once that when I graduated she could have my sweatshirt. You’d have thought I’d bequeathed her a diamond mine, the way she whooped and hollered and jumped around the room. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that by the time she got into high school, the sweatshirt would be way out of style and ugly and old and she wouldn’t want it.

Sitting on my mother’s old bedroom floor, with Ronnie gone and me having no choice but to breathe in Waverly, I was glad I hadn’t told her those things. I was glad she was still looking forward to things on the day she died.

I sank to the floor and picked up Marin’s purse. Most of the lipstick had wiped off, but it was still rubbed into the cracks, the stitching. I grabbed a tissue from a box that sat on the dresser and scrubbed at the face of the purse. The lipstick was mostly gone, but if I looked hard enough, I could still see traces of pink.

I pulled the lipstick out of the purse, then rubbed across the top of it with the tissue, too. The stick was no longer sharp, the way Marin liked it, but at least it didn’t have Meg’s and Lexi’s germs on it anymore.

I dropped it back inside the purse and found a piece of gum.

I drew a sweatshirt on the foil.

Marin is a Barking Bulldog.

I hid it with the others, noticing that the collection was getting pretty big now. Which meant that the gum supply was getting low. I didn’t want to chew the last pieces. To run out of Marin’s gum would seem like an end that I hadn’t fully realized yet, and didn’t want to.

I smoothed the foils from Meg’s and Lexi’s gum.

Marin loves Minnie Mouse the most because she has a bow.

Marin has tiny toenails.

I changed into clean clothes and lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about all the things I could write on foils for Marin. All the ways I wanted to remember her. I could probably start writing and never stop.

But eventually there was a light tapping on my door and I sat up guiltily, as if I’d been doing something wrong. My grandmother poked her head in.

“Would you like a snack? ” she asked.

I thought dinner was at six, I almost answered sarcastically, but then I remembered that I wasn’t speaking to these people—at least not yet—so I just stared at her. I held my breath.

“I’ve got some strawberries, ” she said hopefully.

I let the air out through my nose, then took another silent breath in and held it again.

“Would you like a soda, Jersey? ” she tried.

Nothing. I let my mom’s hatred fill my eyes.

My grandmother chewed her lip. “We want to help you, Jersey, ” she said. “We know this is hard for you.”

I turned my gaze away from her then, pointed it straight at the photo of my mom. Did they? Did they really know how hard this was for me? To lose everything? To be bounced around to see who wanted me the least? To know that I would never have my life back again and that I was totally alone? It was like the tornado had ripped through my house and torn me away. It was impossible that they could understand the rage inside me. The confusion and guilt and surrender. The hard edges that had begun to rub open, raw sores onto my heart. Because even I didn’t understand it, and I was the one living it. And besides, if they really understood what it felt like to be inside my head, my heart, right now, they would run in fear. They would leave me alone.

She stayed, propped up by the door, for what seemed far too long, then finally sighed.

“Well, here, will this help, anyway? ”

Curiosity kicked in and despite myself, I turned to see what “this” was. She reached around the doorframe and held out a phone.

“I thought you might want to call your friends. I’m sure you’re wondering what’s happening back at home.” She waggled the phone in the air. “You can talk as long as you need to. We don’t mind.”

I did want to call my friends, actually. Even though I had already talked to everyone that morning—everyone except Kolby, that was—and even though Dani’s mom had sold me out to Ronnie, I still wanted to talk to someone familiar. But if I took that phone from my grandmother, if I made that concession, she would think I wanted to be here. So I went back to staring at the photo silently and refused to look again until she had backed out of the doorway and shut the door behind her.

I’d purposely missed dinner. Had even crawled into bed and closed my eyes when she knocked, knowing she’d leave me alone if she thought I was asleep.

But I was starving, so when I stopped hearing the voices of the TV and the strip of living room light blinked out under my doorway, I crept to the kitchen. I froze when I found my grandfather sitting at the kitchen table, with only the light fixture above the table illuminating him. I noticed a traditional solitaire game laid out in front of him. He was missing an obvious black seven, red six.

“Patty left you a plate in the refrigerator, ” he said when I walked in. “Pot roast. She makes the best in the world.”

I didn’t answer. I contemplated going back to my room. But I was so hungry, and pot roast sounded too good to be true.

I padded over to the refrigerator and found the plate, ripped off the plastic wrap, and heated the food in the microwave.

“We ask that you don’t eat outside of the kitchen, ” he said, still not looking up from his game. He’d found the red six but had gotten stuck again.

The microwave beeped and I sheepishly took my plate to the table, after first pulling open every drawer in the kitchen to find silverware. He didn’t try to help me find it, and I was oddly grateful for his lack of effort. I sat on the end opposite my grandfather, keeping my eyes straight down on the plate.

He softly cursed and I heard him gather up the cards and shuffle them.

“She’s grieving, too, ” he said, breaking the silence between us. I paused, then resumed chewing, still facing the pot roast, which was so tender it melted in my mouth. I hadn’t had anything this good to eat since the tornado. “Even though we hadn’t heard from Chrissy in sixteen years, your grandmother still hoped every day your mom would come around. So she’s grieving. She feels like it’s been sixteen years wasted.” He paused, the slapping sound of cards on the Formica telling me he was laying out a new hand of solitaire for himself. “We both do, ” he added. “We didn’t even know about your half sister.”

“Sister, ” I said, before I could stop myself. I felt my face flush with heat over having spoken.

“I stand corrected, ” he said in a very matter-of-fact voice. Slap. Slap. “Your sister.”

I scraped the last bit of mashed potatoes onto my fork and licked it off, wishing I had another plateful. I got up and took my plate to the sink, rinsed it, placed it in the dishwasher, and poked through cabinets until I found one with drinking glasses. I filled a glass with tap water and took a big swallow. Everything felt too normal, too much like home. But this house wasn’t home for me. I wouldn’t let it be. Maybe this was what Mom meant by the oppression being contagious here. Maybe I’d already caught it.

“Anyway, ” my grandfather said, as if he’d never stopped talking, though it had been several minutes since he’d last spoken, “you might find that you can help each other out, your grandma and you.”

I blinked at him, trying to convey my doubt with silence. He got stuck again and started flipping through the deck. He hadn’t moved the ace of hearts up to the top, which would have freed up a whole slot of cards. But I didn’t tell him that.

I walked to my bedroom and crawled back into bed, my stomach full, my eyes heavy.

I was asleep seconds after my head hit the pillow.