“Well you can’t go like that.”
“Why not?” I looked down at myself. “I’m always like this.”
“Lowell,” she said, still pointing. “Talk to her.”
Lowell’s jacket was too starched and too big, like the cardboard box was trying to swallow him whole.
“It’s a great dress,” he said, “really on-trend,” as if his opinion mattered, like that would swing it. He talked like one of the girls at my old high school. I thought he’d fit right in there, simpering over labels in the hallways, bitching in the lunch queue about boys.
“So you wear it,” I told him with my mouth full. “Help yourself.”
“Just once,” Hannah said through gritted teeth.
“Just once what?” I asked her, but I knew the answer. She wanted me to slot seamlessly into the picture-perfect lifestyle she had filling the space in her head, to stop being difficult and strange, to dress up and shut up and play along. We stared at each other. She looked away first. I always win that game.
Lowell had already given up and gone back to his magazine. There were lots of people in it he’d stood quite close to over the years. Things were happening. Men more successful than him were starting to lose their hair.
“Let her wear what she likes, Hannah,” he said. “A dying man is going to have other things on his mind.”
My mother put her hands together in prayer at the word ‘dying’ and looked up past the burst radiator stains on the ceiling.
“God knows,” she said, “we could all do with a bit of good luck right now.”
I asked her where she thought God filed that kind of prayer, the please-harm-others-for-my-benefit kind, and she ignored me. “In a box marked DAMNED probably,” I said, “in a whole archive called Be Careful What You Wish For.”
“What do you care?” she asked me. “You’re an atheist, aren’t you? You don’t believe in God.”
“Humanist,” I said. “There’s a world of difference.”
Hannah lit a new cigarette off the old one so she was holding two. She said, all deadpan, like it was the last thing in the world she was really thinking, “You must explain it to me sometime.”
Thurston made a God box once. It was like a mailbox, with a slot, and he wrote on it PRAYERS ANSWERED. You were supposed to write your prayer and post it. That was the idea. He left it for four days on the corner of Westwood and La Conte, near the University. When he went back there was some trash in it, a couple of crushed cans, a banana peel and half a bagel. There was some angry stuff about blasphemers and the wrath of the Lord. And mostly there were wish lists, money troubles, exam results, job opportunities, and a couple of lonely hearts. My favourite one was written in pencil on a square of pink paper – THAT THIS BOX IS FOR REAL.
My cornflakes were stale and chewy. The milk was on the turn. New outfits aside, it hadn’t been a good month money-wise, again. I knew that’s why we were doing this. Hannah had slot-machine eyes, especially now she knew Ernest was on his way out. She was desperate to get there and clean up. Beneath the surface she trembled with it, like a greyhound on the starting blocks, like a size zero bull at a gate.
“When did you last see him?” I asked.
“When did he abandon us? I don’t know. Thirteen years? Fourteen? Maybe twelve. When was it, Lowell?”
Lowell shrugged. “Beats me.”
I pushed my bowl away. “And why are you all dressed up, exactly? What’s with that?”
“We’ve got to look like we’re doing well,” she said, pinching a strand of tobacco from the surface of her tongue without smudging her lipstick, the same smashed cherry colour as her nails. “I don’t want him thinking we need his money.”
As if a new outfit could do that. As if a throw-up dress or a stomach-bug brown suit would hide our flock of overdrafts, a good silk blouse erase the sly and bottomless need from our eyes.
“Why do you care what he knows?” I said.
“We’re going in there with our heads held high,” said Lowell.
“And coming out with our hands full, right? To the victor the spoils?”
I didn’t want a thing from Ernest. I didn’t want to know him. I thought they should go without me. I had my eye on a clean conscience and the place to myself. I’d exercise control, build a fire in the grate and feed it kindling so it stayed small but never went out. I’d write letters to Thurston at all the addresses I could think of – the bar where Uncle Mac drank, the record store he liked in Echo Park, everyone at my old apartment building. I’d track him down so I could tell him what had happened, where on Planet Earth I was. I’d leave the lights off and the blinds down, be nothing but a glowing, empty house. I wasn’t interested in helping Ernest feel better about himself. I didn’t have room to play suck-up to my sick old stranger of a father for what he might be leaving me in his will.
“Do I have to come with you?” I said.
Hannah smashed out her dead cigarette on a plate like it had done something to offend her. She pulled on the other one so hard her cheeks caved in and I thought she’d smoke the whole thing down in one breath. She saw me, and I knew what she was thinking. Gone were the days when Little Miss Arson could be left alone in the house. There wasn’t enough insurance money in the world that would pay for that.
“Yes, you have to come,” she said. “It’s you he’s interested in.”
“Oh yeah?” I said. “Since when?”
Her fingers drummed hard on the worktop and she declined, as usual, to answer the question. “It’s not optional. We’re not negotiating.”
“I’m a cone in your parking space,” I said. “That’s it, isn’t it? I’m a marker on your property.”
“Think of it as a holiday,” Lowell suggested, the shoulders of his suit rising up for no good reason to meet his ears, his right cuff already streaked with butter. “You can explore the garden. You can bring your bike.”
I looked at him. “What am I? Eight?”
“God forbid we’re there long enough for a bike ride,” Hannah said.
Lowell stuck with it. “You can walk, or swim in the river. Maybe he’s got a boat.”
“An outward-bound holiday in a dying man’s house?” I said. “Nice. Sensitive.”
Hannah smiled coldly at me.
“Let’s be honest,” I told her. “You’re going fishing and I’m the bait.”
“It’s remote,” she said. “It’s isolated. He’s got acres of land, and woodland. It’s a great place for a fire. You could light ten of the damn things out there and nobody would even notice. You’re coming and you’re going to like it.”
I didn’t look up. I kept my eyes on my cereal bowl. “Who else is going to be there?”
“Just us,” Hannah said. “Ernest’s been on his own for years.”
“How do you know?” I said.
She bent towards her reflection in the side of the toaster. It was warped and squat and gauzy. “I just do,” she said, baring her teeth to check for stains. “Trust me.”
My chair legs scraped loudly against the floor as I got up. “Why the hell would I start doing that?”
I rinsed my bowl in the sink. Through the window, I could see next-door’s cat lurking on the fence by the bird feeder, waiting to take one out mid-flight with a swipe of its paw.
It was the start of the summer. I had plans.