Hand Me Down (6 page)

If not for her, I would run away. But instead, I’m sitting in between her and our father in the front seat of his pickup, with the gearshift digging into my thigh, and dreaming about my own little cottage in the woods. I’d have a fireplace and floor to ceiling bookshelves, big comfy chairs, and a skylight. A dog like Rambo for protection.

“You know we need to go through Vallejo, right?” I say and Dad swerves to make the turnoff. Someone honks.

“I was testing you,” he says. “You think you know everything.”

“I was the one who wanted to bring a map,” I say.

“We’ll find it,” he says and puts his arm around my shoulder. The fake ocean scent of his Old Spice deodorant is sharp. “Deborah gives good directions,” he says. “She’s related to me.”

I roll my eyes. “You didn’t write them down.”

“Don’t need to,” he says and nudges my shoulder with his hand. He pokes my temple. “I have an excellent sense of direction.”

“
I
have an excellent sense of direction,” I say.

“Exactly,” he says. “I also have a perfect memory.”

“Me, too,” Jaime says.

“That’s my girl,” Dad says.

Jaime smiles. “I remember being born.”

“You do not,” I say.

Jaime turns to me and crosses her arms. “Yes, I do.”

I say, “I don’t even remember.” Mom says I took one look at baby Jaime, pink and wrinkly, squirming and wailing in her arms, and I ran out of the room screaming. Mom had to get a nurse to chase me down because Dad didn’t show up at the hospital until Jaime was seven hours old, but of course, she doesn’t know that.

“So?” Jaime says. “I remember things you don’t.”

I think you have that backward.
“Whatever,” I say, crossing my arms over my chest like a shield near Dad’s dangling hand. “We should have brought a map.”

He says, “Don’t forget, Liz,” and lifts his freckled arm off me. “‘We’re smarter than the average bear,’” he says in his best Yogi voice. A few years ago it would have been enough to make us laugh.

I say, “That won’t help us read road signs in the dark.”

“Lighten up,” he says to me and even though he’s not holding a beer, in my head I hear the sound of the can opening, the swift hiss
of pressurized air escaping, because it’s what usually happens after he tells me that.

Jaime says, “Don’t you know how to get there?”

Dad and I say in unison, “Of course.”

I stare out the front window, the low winter sun setting behind the hills ahead, the light fractured orange, blue, purple, and pink atop the silver glassiness of the water’s surface on either side of this bridge. Jaime and I made this drive with Mom every Thanksgiving I can remember until Terrance showed up. On our way to Aunt Deborah’s, Dad’s sister and Mom’s best friend, through Vallejo and over the Mare Island Causeway, past the giant boats with rows of twinkling lights, circular portholes, and metal fixtures. We pass the marshes full of tall white cranes and egrets standing still as statues in the grass-encircled pools. Pitted and water-beaten wooden poles left over from forsaken piers pierce the water’s surface. Little birds perch on top, some tucked in for the night, their feet invisible, their beaks buried under their feathered necks.

Dad clears his throat the way singers do before a performance, and I wait for his version of an apology. “Hey a, Boo-Boo,” he says and pats my thigh. “How about some Xmas tunes?” He pushes a button above my knee and the happy jingle of bells fills the cab.

We usually spend this holiday at home with Mom, enjoying our personal Christmas Eve traditions of eating a fork-optional appetizer dinner, each opening one small gift, reading from the Advent calendar we’ve mostly memorized, drinking eggnog sprinkled with paprika, and falling asleep under twinkling strands of colored lights to Mom singing “O Holy Night” in her soothing soprano.
But not this year. Deborah won’t even have a tree since it was born out of a pagan ritual.

The radio starts a nonstop round of Christmas carols and “Frosty the Snowman” is first. Dad turns up the volume. “Frosty the Crusty,” he sings, “had a big yanker up his nose.”

Jaime giggles. “Dad,” she says. I roll my eyes even though a few years ago I’d been proud to help him come up with new lyrics, especially if they made Jaime laugh.

“You know the words,” he says and sings louder. “It was oversize and it made girls cry, so he flushed it with a hose.” He elbows me and smiles. “Everybody!”

I look at Jaime and she smiles. When the chorus comes on, the three of us belt out, “Frosty the Crusty, was a fairy tale they say, but his big ol’ sneeze will live in memories. He sure made that booger pay,” and by the end of the song I’m smiling, too. I think of burping contests and basketball games, pitching a tent in the living room, lighting real campfires in metal buckets on the carpet when Mom was at work. I think of how before I’d understood that fathers were supposed to do more than play and make voices and be funny, my dad had been great.

We sing, “Rudolph the Fat-Assed Reindeer,” and “Silent Fart.” Our breaths fog up the windows and now it’s black enough outside that I expect to still be able to see the stark white cranes that live here in these marshes; dark enough that it seems like they should glow.

We finally make it through Petaluma into Rohnert Park and after forty minutes of driving around random neighborhoods
looking for Aunt Deborah’s street I say, “Why don’t we call her from a pay phone?” Crystal left with Brianna when she got off work, two hours after we left, but with the actual directions I bet she’s already there. We should have just waited to go with Crystal, despite Dad’s claims of road trip delights. I should have known better.

Jaime is asleep, her face pressed into the glass, her thumb in her mouth. Dad pulls into a gas station and tosses me a quarter. “I’ll be right back.” I glare at him. “It’s none of your business,” he says.

I kiss Jaime’s soft forehead. “Come on, Dad. It’s Christmas,” I say, scooting under the steering wheel and jumping out onto the asphalt. The wind is warmer here, smells faintly briny like the beach. I unzip my jacket.

He says, “And I’m celebrating.”

“Not here,” I say.

His features are shadowed in the yellow light from the store, his freckles black spots on his face and arms, but I can see he’s pouting. He says, “I’ll let you have one.”

“Like I want a beer.”

He wags his finger at me. “You’re more like me than you think, Liz.”

“I’ll tell Crystal.”

This is a standoff we’ve had many times before. Jaime sleeps or watches TV, and Dad and I decide what compromises we are willing to make, timelines and ounces, offers and counteroffers: five blocks, one beer; five miles, half a beer. Even the cracked asphalt and gasoline perfuming the air are familiar. If Jaime was awake, we would just walk.

“Fine,” he says and kicks at a Twinkies wrapper floating across the parking lot. “Not here,” he says in a high-pitched mocking voice.

“Promise,” I say.

“I swear on Santa Claus,” he says. He taps his nose with his short pale index finger and winks. “Go get directions and stop worrying about your dad.”

It’s not you I worry about.
“Fine,” I say, my fake Converse sneakers swiveling on the pavement toward the phone booth. I don’t need to watch him walk to the coolers at the back of the mini-mart, pick the cheapest beer, and take it to the counter. He’ll make some joke to the cashier with under-eye circles and bad skin, who will laugh obligingly at the red-haired man who looks older than his almost forty, whose freckled fingers tremble just a little as he pulls small bills out of his wallet one by one by one.

Before Terrance, Mom was my
hero. She saved us from bad dreams, left the light on in our room, let us snuggle into her bed. She rescued us from the neighbors’ fighting, sang songs loud enough to drown out the woman across the landing screaming with her head out the window until her husband jerked her back inside. Mom protected us from our drunken father, stood her ground in the face of hurled beer cans and TV remotes, steered us through broken dishes on the kitchen floor and shattered windows in the carpet. She carried us past his sleeping body in bloody slippers, pulled us out of range of his raised fists more than once, and her bruises proved her loyalty. We didn’t need anyone else.

Then my mom met Terrance at Friday Night Singles, a weekly, church-sponsored mixer designed to “yoke two Christians together.” The metaphor said that relationships were like oxen yoked to a cart. If both beasts pulled in different directions, eventually one would give. “More often than not, it is easier for the righteous to be sucked into a secular lifestyle, simply because it is all around us,” Pastor Ron said. “It becomes a daily battle with temptation.” For my mom, meeting Terrance at church was like getting a thumbs up from God.

We started picking Terrance up for church on Sunday mornings and Friday nights. He held Mom’s hand during prayer. He came over for dinner and Mom cooked meals that required more than adding ground beef. Jaime liked him because he made fart jokes at the table and told stories about the three little boogers. He showed me his new shoes, his new baseball cap, his new haircut. “Liz, look at this!” he’d say, displaying a slap bracelet, a T shirt that looked like the Coke logo but said
CACA
, a commercial for hemorrhoids. “Ain’t it cool?” Mom sometimes cringed at his jokes or his word choice, but she always covered it quickly with her practiced smile.

On Saturdays Mom made me and Jaime clean the whole house before we could watch cartoons. Terrance came over with his laundry, and we washed his formerly white socks that were full of holes, his grimy T shirts, and his boxers,
eww
, with the rest of our clothes while he sat on our couch, ate our food, and watched TV. Jaime dusted and I vacuumed, and together we cleaned the bathroom on our hands and knees, scrubbed the toilet, bathtub, sink,
and countertops with Comet and pink sponges no longer good enough for dishes.

Sometimes we sang songs from
Cinderella
and pretended we were princesses disguised in these stained T shirts and shorts too small to wear outside, waiting for liberation from this toil, perhaps to come in the form of cute prince brothers. Our voices blended well as we performed the harmonies we knew by heart, and Mom always said we sounded like our own choir. Until Terrance complained he couldn’t hear the TV, she let us sing as loud as we wanted.

One Saturday during a commercial break in
Singled Out
on MTV—a channel that was part of the cable package Mom bought for Terrance that we were not allowed to watch—he handed his empty glass to Jaime and said, “Go be black and get me some more drink.” He laughed. She looked at me and I shook my head so she just stood there, dusting rag in one hand, lemon furniture polish in the other. He said, “C’mon, now, I told you to do something.”

“Are your legs broken?” I asked. Mom was at the grocery store.

“Your mom told you girls to respect me,” he said, sitting up and leaning forward, narrowing his dark eyes at me.

I shot bullets from my eyes at his tiny heart. “That doesn’t mean you can tell us what to do.”

“Yes it does,” Terrance said and shook the glass in Jaime’s direction.

“No,” I said and stepped toward him. “It doesn’t.”

He smeared his potato chip–greased finger across the freshly polished glass in the coffee table and looked at me, his nostrils
flaring. “You want to be a good girl, right, Jaime?” he said and turned to her. “Only the good slaves don’t got to be whooped.”

Jaime hesitated, her blue eyes wide and asking me for an answer. “You don’t have to,” I said.

Terrance said, “I’ll tell your mother.” He lounged into the couch, put his feet up on the coffee table, and brushed crumbs from his tank top onto the floor we’d just vacuumed. “You’ll be sorry.” His tan lips curled up in a sneer.

“I don’t want Mom to get mad,” Jaime said and took a step forward.

Terrance stared at me as Jaime took the glass from him, his eyes gleaming with satisfaction. “That’s exactly what I wanted to hear,” he said and let his slimy fingers linger on Jaime’s soft, pale hand, his eyebrows lifted in a silent dare. Just as Jaime started to squirm and my muscles prepared to spring, he released her with a squeeze. Inside my chest a little piece of me ignited and burned hot, seared my lungs, and crumbled like ash as he watched Jaime walk away. Someday I would find something to use against him, someday he would pay, but for now I’d have to contain the boiling urge to smash the vacuum pole into his balls and then swing it like a bat toward his thick black eyebrows and break his fucking nose.

Terrance said, “Good little servant,” and patted Jaime on the head when she came back with his orange soda. His crooked teeth poked out from under his smirk.

“You look so mad,” Jaime said when Terrance was in the bathroom we’d just cleaned, probably peeing on the seat. “It was okay,” she said. “It only took two seconds.” She sighed and wiped at the
opaque smudge Terrance’s dirty finger had left on the glass. “It was just soda.”

I stretched my fingers and felt where they hurt from clenching the plastic vacuum attachment. I said, “It wasn’t just soda.”

Christmas at home usually starts
with Jaime waking me up at six
A.M.
by pulling up my eyelids. Then we take the homemade stockings Mom cross-stitched our names onto off their ceramic angel mantel hangers and dump the contents all over the living room floor. We compare our flavored Lip Smackers, our different colored toothbrushes, sift through the pens and notepads and batteries, and pull out the traditional orange at the bottom of the sock as filler and a quick breakfast if we wanted.

Today I wake up next to Jaime on the floor of Deborah’s daughter Ashley’s room. I huddle under the sleeping bag and think about pulling up Jaime’s eyelids, but there are no stockings hanging from the Cranleys’ mantel. Nothing Santa-related, no mistletoe, limited Jesus-friendly carols, and a rule that each person gives each person one gift, though Crystal brought twelve for Brianna. We won’t even see Mom this Christmas.

Jaime’s hand flops out of her bag and onto my head. I swat at her pudgy fingers and at least this feels familiar. Ashley sleeps in her twin bed a few feet past Jaime, her nightgown’s lacy collar rising with each inhalation. A few months younger than Jaime, Ashley still has stuffed bears and plush frogs surrounding her like pillows and they shift slightly as she breathes.