our tiny prefabricated home, painting our toes candy-apple red while Lily slept the afternoon away. I was eight years old. Momma told me about the chapel, about her walking down the aisle in a strapless, tea-length vintage wedding dress the color of snow; she told me about her veil, a birdcage veil she called it, and I imagined canaries perched on the top of her head. She told me about the man who did their wedding, some man named Reverend Love, and even at that age, at eight years old, I had a hard time believing that was his real name. Reverend Love. I remember the way Momma said his name, that very day we sat on the front step of our prefab home, staring down the boring old street at some boys playing kickball on their lawn, the way she elongated the word love until we both about died laughing.
But she said that Daddy was handsome as all get out, dressed up in a shirt and tie, a sport coat he’d borrowed from a friend. I tried hard to imagine that, ’cause I didn’t think I’d ever seen my daddy in a shirt and tie before in my whole entire life. There were no photos from their wedding, ’cause Momma and Daddy didn’t own a camera back then, but they had a piece of paper that said they were married, and that was even more important to them than some picture. Momma showed it to me, that paper. Certificate of Marriage, it said, and there, at the bottom, the words Reverend Love.
And then, some six months later, I was born. Momma told me about that day, the day I arrived. She told me how I took my sweet time coming out of her, how I was in no rush. She told me how Daddy held on tight to me, there at the hospital, as if he thought I was gonna break. I didn’t meet my grandparents when I was born, not then, not ever. Momma’s momma and daddy didn’t want a thing to do with us, and Daddy’s, well, Daddy’s were dead. We visited them every now and then, over at the cemetery on Fifth Street, leaving browning dandelions beside the headstones that read Ernest and Evelyn Dalloway.
My momma was convinced by her own momma that she was Audrey Hepburn, the reason she was named Holly, as in Holly Golightly. She’d pull her long black hair back into a beehive hairdo and prance around our home with a Breakfast at Tiffany’s style cigarette holder though Momma didn’t smoke. She’d walk around our home in old polka-dot shift dresses on any old day of the week and plagiarize Audrey Hepburn quotes, as if they were her own, and I’d sit there, on the couch, and just stare.
It never surprised me one bit that Daddy wanted to marry her. I’d never seen anyone as beautiful as Momma was.
I asked Momma more than once to tell me how she met my daddy. It was a story she never tired of telling. She told me how she met Daddy in town, at some saloon where he was tending bar, about how some oaf of a man was trying to get friendly with her and how Daddy didn’t like it one bit, how he didn’t like the way that man talked to her, didn’t like the way he kept holding her hand after Momma had told him to quit. Her knight in shining armor, she said. Momma always said that marrying Daddy was the best decision of her life, though as it was, her marrying Daddy made her own parents all but disappear. Poof, she said, holding her hands up in the air like some kind of magician, like magic.
Daddy, being a truck driver, was gone more than he wasn’t. Daddy was an OTR driver, which meant “over the road.” He spent his days traveling from sea to shining sea, hauling some sort of freight or hazmat across the country. We missed him more than anything when he was gone, Momma especially, but when he came home, he made up for it, as he showered Momma with slobbering kisses and touched her in places that made her blush. She would get all dressed up for his return, curling her hair, and painting her lips berry bliss. He always had something for Lily and me, something he’d picked up from Vermont or Georgia or wherever it was he was traveling—a key chain or a postcard, a mini Statue of Liberty. It was like Christmas morning when Daddy was home, like summer vacation. And he brought stuff for Momma, too, but that stuff he wouldn’t show her, not until Lily and I had gone to bed, but I could hear them at night when they thought I was asleep; I could hear them in their bedroom, laughing.
We didn’t have a whole lot of money, there in that prefab home just outside Ogallala, but Momma, she sure loved to shop. Of course we didn’t have the money for the kind of stuff she wanted to buy, so instead she took Lily and me to the fancy stores just so she could try on dresses and stare at herself in the mirror. This was one of those things we did when Daddy was away, though Momma said, “don’t ever tell Daddy,” ’cause she didn’t want him to feel bad. But Momma talked a lot about one day. One day she was gonna have that salon of her own instead of cutting hair in that bathroom that belonged to Lily and me. One day we were going to get a bigger house that hadn’t been premade. One day she was going to take us to some place called the Magnificent Mile in a city known as Chicago. Momma told me about it, about this Magnificent Mile. She talked about it as if it was a fairy tale, and I wasn’t really sure if it was real or not. But Momma was sure. She talked about stores with names like Gucci and Prada, and what she would buy in those stores if she could. One day. She had a list of those things, what she wanted to see before she died. The Eiffel Tower, Audrey Hepburn’s gravesite in some small town in Switzerland, the Magnificent Mile. We didn’t have a lot. Even at eight years old, I knew that, though there wasn’t ever a time I wished for more. I was happy there in that prefab home near Ogallala, and even though Momma talked all the time about her one days, I didn’t ever want a thing to change. Momma used to say, “We don’t have much, but at least we have each other.”
And then one day, we didn’t even have that much.
Heidi has this need to make everything right. She recycles to a fault. Cans and bottles, the newspaper, batteries, remnants of aluminum foil. She returns hangers to the dry cleaner; rips me a new one when I come home with a plastic shopping bag instead of remembering to bring a reusable one from home. I hear her words, haunting me in my dreams, her metallic tone parroting: That’s recyclable, in the off moments I attempt to slip an envelope or a scrap of paper into the garbage can of all things. Our milk comes in glass bottles which are reusable and insanely expensive.
In our home, trespassing spiders are never killed but rather, relocated to the balcony or, in the case of inclement weather, to the basement storage units where they can reproduce among cardboard boxes and unused bikes. Smashing them with a shoe or flushing them down the toilet would be simply inhumane.
It’s the reason we have two cats. Because she found them as kittens under the Dumpster behind the building. What was left of their mother lay nearby in a bloody tangle, the rest of her serving as fodder for a stray dog. One day Heidi carried them into our condo, each one of them only a pound or two, dirty, covered in shit and garbage, their bones showing through sporadic fur, and declared, “We’re keeping them.” And as is the case with most things in our marriage, she didn’t ask. She told me. We’re keeping them.
I named them One and Two because Odette and Sabine (yes, both girls; I am indeed the only Tom in this household of Queens), as Heidi suggested, sounded plain dumb. Feral cats don’t deserve human names, I told her. Especially not fancy French ones. One is a calico, chatte d’Espagne, as Heidi says. Two is all black with longish hair and neon eyes. Bad luck. Evil. The thing hates me.
And so it came as no surprise to me on Saturday morning when I rolled out of bed that there she was, standing in the middle of our living room, displaying her saddest “orphaned kitten” eyes. She’d just finished up a phone call and was going on and on about the poor girl at the Fullerton Station. It was nearly ten in the morning, but from the darkness out the window, you might have guessed it was five, maybe six o’clock What I had in mind for the day, after an exhausting trip to San Francisco, was sitting in the leather recliner, watching endless hours of professional basketball. But there was Heidi, clearly up at the crack of dawn, clearly having digested too much caffeine. She was in her robe and slippers, clutching her cell phone in the palm of a hand, and I knew there was more to this story than she was letting on. This wasn’t just about a homeless girl she’d seen. There must be a hundred thousand homeless people in Chicago. Heidi notices them, don’t get me wrong. She notices each and every one of them. But they don’t keep her awake at night.
“That’s