Also Known as Elvis (2 page)

The truth, Little E? The truth is, I didn't have a clue what I was going to do that summer, but I was pretty sure there were some things I
wasn't
likely to be doing:

1. go on vacation with my family

2. spend any time with my dad

3. have fun

My mom (your future grandma) had already told me that she needed me to help out even more than usual with my sisters because she'd taken on a second job, and she wanted me to get a job because my dad was behind in his payments and times were tough. How was I going to tell that to the gang? I mean, I could pretty much tell them anything, but when Bobby was sitting there going on about being best buds with his dad and everybody was talking about the fantastic vacations they
were going to take with their families, well, I hope you can appreciate—as much as it's possible for anybody to appreciate anything before they've even been born—how hard it was for me to be honest.

And that's the other part of the truth: There were things I wasn't being honest about with my friends. I'd never let them know just how bad things had gotten at home. I'd stopped inviting them over. I didn't want them to see that I wasn't the same Skeezie at home as the Skeezie they knew and loved in the outside world. I didn't want them to see my mom and me go at it, which we were doing more and more.

Like that day, when I got home from the Candy Kitchen.

So I get home after hanging out at the Candy Kitchen with my friends, and my mom is waiting, already furious at me, and I haven't even done anything yet.

“You were supposed to be home thirty-seven minutes ago,” she goes.

“It's just five,” I say.

“It's five thirty-seven. If you wore the watch I bought you, you would know that. And you would also know that I have to be at the store in twenty-three minutes. I needed to talk to you, Skeezie. You said you'd be back in time so we could talk. And I need your help with supper for the girls.”

“I'll make supper for the girls, geez. Since when
don't
I make supper for the girls?” It's true. I could have my own reality show:
Underage Chef.

“Fine. But we still need to talk.” My mom is in
the bathroom off the kitchen while she says this, tossing back a couple of drugstore-brand aspirins and sighing after she closes the medicine cabinet and catches sight of her own tired face in the mirror. “God, I look old,” she says. I have to agree, although I know enough not to say it out loud.

My mom used to look like the kind of mom your friends would meet and say they couldn't believe she was your mom. She used to be young and pretty. She used to look happy. Now she looks old, and if she is happy, I guess I don't know what that looks like anymore.

“So talk,” I say.

“Right. In the two minutes I have before I have to leave. Okay, Mr. I Won't Wear a Watch . . .”

“Because you bought it at the dollar store and it broke.”

“Whatever. In the two minutes we have together, here's what I have to say. You're not in school, we can't afford a vacation, and I need help because there's stuff around the house that needs fixing. I
need
you to get a job, Skeezie.”

“I know. You've only told me, like, a hundred times. But I'm thirteen. What kind of job am I going to get? And besides, what about my
unpaid
job as full-time nanny to your snot-nosed daughters?”

“That's just helping out. And talk nice.”

“Yeah, well, who's going to cater to Megan's every wish if you and me are both working all the time? Who's going to hear her snap her fingers?”

(I do not pause to consider that finger snapping may run in the family.)

My mom puts on her lipstick like it's the last thing she wants to do. “For god sakes, Skeezie. I'm talking about a
part-time
job to bring in a few extra dollars. You keep half, give half to me for the house. You want to keep listening to the back door banging every time we forget to latch it? You
like
having to use the plunger every other time we go to the john?”

“Okay, okay,” I say, deciding not to point out the lipstick she just got on her teeth. “But there are child labor laws. You never heard of those?”

Now she begins to cry, and I immediately feel guilty about the lipstick, even though I had nothing to do with putting it there. “What about
mom
labor laws?” she chokes out. “I never knew that when I went into labor with you I'd never get out of it!”

“If Dad hadn't left . . . ,” I start to say.

“Stop right there! If your dad hadn't left, we might have killed each other by now. It's a lose lose, Skeezie, so let's not go down that road, okay? Let's just leave it. And now
I've
got to leave. Our two minutes of quality time is up. Please. Find something, anything, just help me out here. Talk to Bobby.
He
works to help
his
family out.”

I hate it when she does that. Brings in my friends as role models. It's so stinkin' unfair.

She glances in the mirror, yanks a tissue off the top of the toilet tank from the crocheted box she made back in better times, and wipes the lipstick off her teeth. And what can I say, she looks so sad and even older than she did two minutes ago that I tell her, “Okay, Mom. I'll get a job. I'll help.”

I feel older now, too.

The back door slams. And as soon as she hears the car start up in the driveway, Megan shouts from her bedroom, “What's for supper? I'm starving!”

I hate my dad so much I want to punch the wall. I look into the bathroom mirror, half expecting to see my mom still there, but what I see is my own skinny face with its most recent acne acquisitions and an expression I don't even recognize. I don't like the me that's looking back.

“Spaghetti!” I shout.

“Again?”

Jessie, who's five and not nine-going-on-twenty-five like Megan, appears out of nowhere, grabs me around my legs, and squeezes real hard. “I
love
spaghetti!” she says, like it's “I love you!” I wish my friends could see this moment of Jessie hugging my legs, but not what went before it. I don't want them to see that. I don't want them to see the me I just saw in the mirror.

My dad left a little over two years ago, when I was in the fifth grade. Megan was in the second grade and Jessie was just three. I guess you could say I saw it coming, but it's kind of like hurricane warnings. You think, “Yeah, the rain's getting kind of heavy, but a hurricane? Not going to happen here.” And then it hits.

It had been raining pretty hard. By which I mean, they'd been fighting a lot. About my dad being a bum, because he wanted to spend more time on his Harley than with his family—or working, for that matter. And my mom wanting to go back and finish college so she could get a decent job, but she couldn't because we needed the money from whatever jobs she managed to get. She wanted to be a nurse, but what she's been doing for a few years now is work in a doctor's office, answering
phones and fighting with insurance companies. And now she's got this second job out at Stewart's, which makes me really nervous because it's one of those places people pull into to fill up with gas and she's alone there at night sometimes. When I think of her working there, I think:

1. I hate my dad for leaving us and making my mom have to work there, and

2. I hate me for even thinking I shouldn't get a job and help her out.

Anyways, I don't guess my dad was ever cut out to be a dad, even though he could be fun sometimes, like out at the lake or running around the backyard. My mom took lots of pictures at times like those, which was totally crazy because those pictures made us look like one big, happy family. And my dad looked like one happy dude. Or dad. But when he left, he didn't take one picture with him. Not one picture to remember us by. And my mom took all the pictures that had
him in them off the walls and left the nails sticking out. Nice, right? I'd get really mad at her about that and she'd say, “Don't displace your anger, Skeezie. It's your dad you're mad at, not me.”

That was her therapy talking. Yeah, she went to see a therapist for a while after he left. So did I, for about ten minutes. It was all on account of my dad's leather jacket. But that's a whole other story. And anyways, I don't think I was displacing anything, I think I was mad at my mom for leaving those ugly nails there, making our wall look as torn up as our lives.

A lot of things changed after my dad left.

1. All of a sudden, I was the only guy in the house. We had a couple of goldfish, but they looked too pretty to be guys. Addie and Joe would call me a sexist for that one, but it doesn't matter whether they were guys or not, because they died about three days
later since nobody bothered to feed them.

2. Being the only guy, I had to put up with my mom saying, “You're the man of the family now, Skeezie.” Which when you're ten years old is not something you want to hear.

3. The house became a pigsty. It was never the neatest house in the world, but my mom got so depressed she didn't have the energy to yell at us kids to pick up our stuff. She's not so depressed anymore, but now when she yells at us, I can tell that her heart really isn't in it.

4. The yard became a dump. Okay, that's an exaggeration. I still cut the grass and all, but my mom had these beautiful gardens in the front and around back that she loved. She let them go, and since nobody but her is a gardener around here, now we have weeds where there used to be roses.

5. Megan started acting tough, like she didn't care our dad had left. She'd call him bad names, which my mom would tell her not to do until Megan wore her down and then instead of saying, “Don't talk about your father that way,” she'd go, “You got
that
right, girl!”

6. Jessie started crying a lot, including in her sleep, which she didn't remember doing even when Megan would say the next morning, “How am I supposed to get my beauty sleep when my dumb sister wakes me up with her dumb crying?” Mom and me, we'd tell her not to say that about her sister, but nobody addressed the question of a seven-year-old needing beauty sleep.

7. I started wearing my dad's leather jacket that he left hanging in the closet. I nabbed it right before my mom was going to toss it in the trash. She hated that I wore that jacket, and when I say
I wore it, I mean I wore it
all the time
, didn't matter how hot it was or how ridiculous I might have looked. I still do. It's my jacket now. It's what I have left of my dad, other than a bunch of stupid nails sticking out of a stupid wall.

The next morning I ride my bike out to Carlson's Nursery to talk to Bobby. Okay, really it's to see if I can get a job. But Bobby's my go-to guy for most everything, so I figure he's a good place to start.

When I get there, I spot him right away, watering the hanging baskets out front. It's funny, I never thought of Bobby as an outdoor kind of person, maybe because he's on the heavy side and doesn't look like he gets a lot of exercise. Or maybe it's because I'm not an outdoor kind of person myself, so I figure how could any of my best friends be. But there he is, getting tan after only a few days of working here and I swear already looking thinner.
And
he's going camping with his dad next month.
Camping.

“Hey, Skeezie!” he calls out when he sees me. I drop my bike and follow after him as he goes to
turn off the hose. “What are you doing out here? Isn't it hot in that jacket?”

“Kind of,” I say. “So how's it going?”

“Great. Mrs. Carlson—Nancy—is really nice. I haven't even been here a week and she's taught me so much already. She says by the end of the summer I'll know enough to open my own nursery!”

“Is that what you want to do?”

Bobby laughs. “No, I want to go into the eighth grade and survive it. But maybe I can convince my dad to start his own business. And I could help out.”

“That would be cool.”

“A lot cooler than selling ties at Awkworth & Ames,” he says, and I think he's got that right. Bobby's last job—and his boss, Mr. Kellerman—gave me the creeps.

Just then, his dad shows up pushing a wheelbarrow full of stinky-smelling dirt.

“Skeezie!” he shouts as if the dirt is a loud noise he needs to be heard over. I don't know about that, but it sure is making my eyes water.

“Hey, Mike,” I go. “What's up with that dirt? It smells like, well . . .”

He laughs. “That's because that's what it is. It's fertilizer. So what brings you out here? I don't imagine you came all this way to smell this. Hey, you want to help out?”

I shrug. “Maybe,” I say. “Kind of.”

How do you ask for a job? I have no idea.

Bobby has been my friend for most of my life, so he's pretty good at reading my mind. “Are you looking for a summer job?” he asks.

I nod sheepishly, like his question is embarrassing, which it kind of is but I don't know why. “My mom says I have to,” I tell him.

Mike says, “Your mom works harder than anybody I know. If she says you have to, she must really need the help. Stay here. I'll see what I can do.”

And just like that, he leaves us with the wheelbarrow full of stinky dirt and goes off into the office.

Bobby turns to me with this big smile on his face. “Wouldn't it be awesome if we could work together this summer?”

“Totally,” I say.

We bump fists and start talking about what it will be like working together and what we'll bring for lunch every day and how much money we'll make. And then Mike comes back, his head down, and breaks it to me that they told him they can't afford to hire anybody else right now.