you’d think I was going off to college. I was so glad they don’t allow non-passengers down onto the platform anymore. I didn’t want Mom to make a scene and embarrass both of us.
The train was super crowded, of course. I sat next to an old lady who reminded me of Nana. She was so nice I had to bite my tongue so I didn’t start crying.
No wonder the other girls always make fun of me, being such a sap. I pressed my forehead against the cold window. What was Tom doing? I hoped he had some kind of holiday weekend. Would he get to see his family? If he was in a boarding school in Philadelphia, they must live far away. And if he’d never heard of cell phones, who knows, maybe they were still using horses and buggies and he wouldn’t get to see them at all for, like, months. Could he be even lonelier than me? It didn’t seem possible.
Outside, darkness was falling on the bare trees and empty fields south of Wilmington. A silvery gleam shimmered off the water as the train crossed a bridge high over the Susquehanna River, just north of where it broadens into Chesapeake Bay.
Tom’s family probably came from somewhere down the bay. I’d looked up Gingo Teag on the Internet and came up empty, but the Nanticokes were an Indian tribe who used to live in Delaware and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Maybe his family were crab catchers. What did they call them? Watermen.
We took a trip there once when I was little, when Dad was still working for that big architecture firm downtown. We used to joke that he was Mr. Brady from the Brady Bunch, and I had to be all six Brady kids by myself. It seemed like forever ago, watching the wild horses of Assateague Island, the “Chincoteague ponies,” who were potbellied from their marsh grass diet. I thought they were pretty anyway…
Chincoteague. Gingo Teag.
“Why are you giggling, dear?” the old lady asked. Then she peered closer. “Why are you crying?”
None of your business. But I’m a good girl, or a goody two-shoes, more like. “I’m all right.”
I didn’t want to answer any more questions, so I sneaked off to the café car and spent the rest of the trip gloomily staring out the window. I exaggerated a bit when I told Tom that Dad lives in Washington. Actually, he lives with his girlfriend in Frederick, Maryland, which is at least an hour away.
Was I trying to impress Tom when I told him my dad lived in the capital? Well, he wouldn’t have been so impressed if I’d told him that my father not only lived in that Hicksville—the old-timers there actually call themselves Fred-necks—but that he had found himself a young, pretty girlfriend. I mean, way to be original, Dad!
Heather is twenty-eight, but she looks a lot younger. People who see us together always say we could be sisters. Yeah, if I had a big sister who was as gorgeous and skinny as I’m fat and ugly.
* * * *
My stomach tightened as I stepped off the escalator from the platform and Dad reached for my suitcase.
Heather said hello—no, sorry, she said, “Hiiiiiii!” with that big shiny grin of hers—and I glared back.
She’s so dumb she probably didn’t even notice. She reached over and touched my greasy hair—her own short black hair was perfect, of course—and said, “Your father and I have a surprise for you. We’re getting married!”
I was about to tell her to get her hands off me, but then what she said sank in and I tripped over my bookbag and landed flat on my face.
“Heather, dammit, I thought we agreed I was going to break the news to her when we got home!” Dad said, helping me to my feet. “Your nose isn’t broken, is it, sweetheart?” he said, handing me a tissue.
I dabbed at the trickle of blood running down my lip.
“I dow’d thing doe,” I said, shooting Heather a look that should have turned her into a steaming puddle. She blinked and twisted her face up, trying to look sorry. God, I hate her!
“We want you to be the flower girl,” she said.
I said nothing, just picked up my bookbag and let Dad lead us out to his car. He has a used green ’96 Honda Civic that is still better than the old red Pontiac Grand Am Mom and I are stuck with. The Grand Mal, we call it, after its habit of stalling in busy intersections.
But Dad’s Honda wasn’t our family car. It didn’t have the tear in the back-seat upholstery where I used to hide coins and pebbles, or the familiar stains on the floor mats that looked like a map of Alaska, or at least I thought it did.
I held it in till Dad had shut the doors because I didn’t want to make a scene in public. See, I can control myself! Then I yelled, “You’re getting married?”
“Yes, Heather and I are getting married.”
“So soon?”
“Honey, it’s been two years since—”
“Since you walked out on us, yes, I know.” Mom says they’re still married in the eyes of the Church and God and everything, so Dad and Heather are living in sin—and even in the eyes of the law, they were dating before the divorce was done. Ugh, couldn’t that woman have kept her paws off him at least till then?
She had to put her two cents’ worth in. “Teresa, that’s not exactly what your father—”
“Shut up, Heather. This is none of your business! You are not my mom!”
“I never said I was,” she said in a small voice.
Not good enough! “You are not part of this family!” I snapped.
“Teresa, that’s enough. I’m marrying her, and she is going to be part of my family.”
“Well, she’s not going to be part of mine!” The weekend sort of went downhill from there.
* * * *
Dad made a big deal of cooking Thanksgiving dinner himself, and Mom was right: I missed Aunt Maria’s cooking.
If Heather hadn’t been there I wouldn’t have minded so much that the turkey was dried out and the homemade cranberry sauce had so much sugar in it that it made me gag (and I prefer the jellied stuff out of a can anyway), and as for the roast sweet potatoes, the less said the better. Honestly the only edible thing was the salad, but since Heather had made it I didn’t want to eat that either.
Also we ate in a freezing silence, which I suppose was mostly my fault.
“So how’s school been?” Dad asked.
I grunted.
“What’s that?”
“What the hell do you care?”
“Teresa, that’s not very nice,” Heather said.
“Wasn’t very nice of him not to be around at all for tenth and eleventh grade.”
Dad put his fork down and looked at his plate.
“So, I thought we could hit the stores early tomorrow for Black Friday!” Heather said cheerily. “I need some new boots for winter, for sure! Frederick’s got a great ‘Golden Mile’ along Patrick Street. Wanna come?”
“I need some new boots for winter, ferrrr sherrrr,” I mimicked. “Seeing that you’re such a fashion charity case, Teresa, why don’t you come too? That way I get more brownie points with your Dad!”
“Teresa, that’s quite enough,” Dad said, as Heather shriveled in her seat.
“Quite enough? I haven’t even gotten started yet!”
“Well, you can go to your room if that’s how you’re going to be,” Dad said.
That was all the permission I needed to put down my fork and stalk off to the overgrown closet Dad had said was my room. But the walls were bare and there was none of my clutter anywhere, so how could it be my room? Even the bed felt strange, with its crisp new sheets and light green blanket