fifty-five-pound bulk up onto the swing beside me, somehow reassured by his presence. We were a team, me and Tripod. A banged-up pair of survivors who weren’t taking anybody’s crap. Not anymore.
From my perch on the swing I peered through the window into the living room. I saw an upright piano and two wing chairs with doilies on the headrests. Beyond them I saw Daniel pacing back and forth in the dining room, talking on the phone. I stilled the swing and strained to hear his end of the conversation.
“…yeah, Zoe. And she’s definitely not dead.”
She’d thought I was dead?
“But if she’s my aunt, how come you never—”
He broke off, but I filled in the empty spaces. How come she’d never mentioned me to him? No wonder he’d looked shocked. The kid, if he’d even known of my existence, thought I was dead.
Now that made me mad. It was one thing for Alice to wonder if I was dead. After all, I hadn’t talked to her since right after Mom died. And if she didn’t follow the music industry and see my occasional photo in an appearance with one of my several rocker boyfriends through the years, she might be excused for speculating that I was dead. But to not even tell her son that she’d ever had a sister?
I snorted in disgust. Obviously nothing had really changed around here except for a fresh coat of paint. Underneath, our family was as ugly and rotten as ever. Alice might want to pretend I didn’t exist, and she definitely wouldn’t want me in her house.
Problem was, it wasn’t her house. It was our house.
One thing I was certain of: my mother wasn’t the type to have written a will. Too conventional for her. Too establishment. That meant, according to Louisiana laws, which I’d checked into just last week, since Alice and I were my mother’s only children, we were her only heirs. And we shared equally in her estate.
Daniel edged out through the front door and stared uneasily at me. I raised my eyebrows expectantly.
“She’ll be here in just a minute.”
I smiled and with my toe started the swing moving. I needed to go to the bathroom in the worst way. But I wasn’t going to put this kid on the spot by asking to use the bathroom. I had to keep in mind that he wasn’t a part of my issues with Alice and this place. I remembered what it was like to be caught in the middle of warring adults, and I didn’t want to put him in that position.
“How come you’re not in school?” I asked, trying to be conversational.
“I’m homeschooled.”
“Homeschooled?” Oh, my God. Hadn’t Alice learned anything from our experience with Mom? I managed a smile. “So. What grade are you in?”
“Tenth. Sort of. Eleventh grade for English and history. Ninth for math and science. It averages out to tenth.”
“Yeah. I see. You have any brothers or sisters?”
“No.” He shook his head. “Just me.”
I nodded. “So…You like the Stones?”
He looked down at the logo on his T-shirt, a classic Steel Wheels Tour-shirt from the early nineties. It was probably older than he was. “Yeah,” he said. “They’re like real cool for such old guys.”
Okay, Aunt Zoe, here’s your chance to impress your nephew, who’s obviously never even heard of you. “You know, I’ve met Mick Jagger a couple of times. Partied with him and the rest of the Stones.”
His eyes got big. “You have?”
“Uh-huh. Keith Richards, too.”
His eyebrows lowered over his bright blue eyes. Alice’s eyes. Mom’s eyes. “My mother says Keith Richards is depraved.”
“Depraved?” I would like to have argued the fact. Anything to contradict Alice. But what was the point? So I settled for a vague response. “You know, not everyone who lives a life different from our own is depraved.”
“I didn’t say they were.” He looked at me, this earnest kid of Alice’s, and I suddenly saw him as girls his age must see him. Tall, cute, maybe a little mysterious since he didn’t go to regular high school.
Or maybe weird and nerdy, an oddball since he didn’t go to regular high school.
Damn, but I’d hated my brief fling with the local high school.
No. What I’d hated was being the girl who lived in the hippie commune. The girl whose mother never wore a bra. The girl who didn’t have a clue who her father was. At least Alice had her father’s last name. But I was just a Vidrine, like my mother, and other kids were merciless about it. Love Child, they’d called me, and sung the Diana Ross song whenever I walked by.
Tripod put his head on my knee and whined. That’s when I realized I was trembling, vibrating the swing like a lawn-mower engine. Even my dog could tell I was wound just a little too tightly.
I looked away from Daniel, wondering when Alice would get here, then wondering how I was supposed to make this plan of mine work if just talking to this kid got me so upset.
“Did it hurt?” he asked. “You know, when the car hit your dog?”
A new subject, thank God. “I guess it did. The first time I ever laid eyes on Tripod he was flying off the front fender of this giant black Hummer.” Which Dirk, my ex-ex-boyfriend had been driving. “I stopped and so did this other car.” Dirk drove off and left me on the highway. “Anyway, we got him to a vet, who said his leg was shattered and did we want to put him to sleep or amputate.”
“Wow. You saved his life and adopted him?”
I shrugged. It sounded so altruistic the way he said it. The truth was, I’d charged the vet bill to Dirk’s credit card, then kept the dog to remind me how glad I was to be rid of that SOB. Never date drummers, I’d vowed after that six-year fiasco had ended.
But at least I had Tripod. We’d been together for almost four years now. I rubbed his left ear, the one that had a ragged edge from some incident that predated the Hummer. “He may be an ugly mutt, but he’s my ugly mutt.” And the only semitrustworthy male I’d ever known.
We both looked up when a Chevy van pulled into the driveway, swung past my Jeep and pulled around the side of the house toward the garage.
For someone who hadn’t seen her only sister in over twenty years, Alice sure took her sweet time. She came in through the back door. I caught a glimpse of her in the house—much slimmer than I remembered but still pleasantly plump. She paused at a mirror and fiddled with her hair. Even then it took her another full minute to join us on the porch. I guess she had to brace herself. After all, she obviously felt like I’d risen from the dead.
As kids she and I hadn’t exactly been close. You’d think we would have clung to each other in the midst of all the chaos thrown at us. Instead we’d become each other’s primary targets, both of us competing for the meager fragments of Mom’s love and attention.
Later, when I’d begged her to leave with me, I couldn’t believe she meant to stay. As furious at her as I was at our mother, I’d left without her, scared to death but determined to go.
I’d had my revenge two years later, though, when she called me about Mom being sick. I told her point-blank that I didn’t give a damn about Mom and what she needed. Four months later Alice had tracked me down again to say Mom had died, and what did I think we should do about a funeral?
Though now I know it was illogical, my response at the time had been utter rage: at Mom for dying and at Alice for crying to me about it. And maybe at myself for feeling anything at all for either of them.
“Don’t you get it?” I said to her in this cold, unfeeling voice. “I don’t care what you do with her or anything else in that hellhole of a house. I left Louisiana a long time ago, Alice. Get over it.”
And