Rules of the Road (5 page)

I had just thrown out the plan.

“Absolutely not,” she continued. “You haven’t been driving long enough, honey. It takes time to become a mature driver.”

I tossed back my hair with total maturity and looked at the Rand McNally Road Atlas on the kitchen table that I had opened to Texas. My finger followed the wavy border separating Texas and Oklahoma.

“I think I’m being reasonable, Jenna. Six weeks is a long time.”

I studied the map. Dallas, Houston, San Antonio.

“Just tell her you’re terribly flattered, you wish you could help, but your protective, yet enlightened mother said no.” Mom held her head like she was getting a migraine and let the window fan blow her short black curls back. “It’s not,” she added, “that I don’t trust you.”

I looked at the map and sighed.

Trusted Teen Takes Texas by Storm.

“It’s the other people on the road,” Mom said. “The maniac drivers, the idiots, the—”

“Rest-stop serial killers.”

“It’s been known to happen, Jenna.”

“I’ve never been to Texas, Mom.” I watched her face for signs of guilt. Her black eyebrows furrowed. Not good.

“Dad’s back.” I had to tell her.

The paring knife crashed on the cutting board.

“
What?
” I saw the shadow cross her face.

“He came to the store,” I added.

“Drunk?” Her voice was thick with anger.

“I’ve seen him worse.”

“How comforting.” Mom slapped an angry fist on the counter. “What did he do this time?”

I threw up my hands. How do you explain it?

“
What did he do?
”

“He was yelling my name, he kept falling over, he embarrassed me in front of the world! Just the usual, Mother!
Okay?
”

Mom closed her green eyes that exactly matched Faith’s. “I’m sorry, Jenna.”

“Mom, I want to get out of town. It gets so weird when Dad—”

“You don’t have to see him!”

“
He’s my father! What do you want me to do when he comes around? Walk away? Leave him lying in the gutter! I can’t do that! I’ve got to
know he’s okay! I’ve got to make sure he gets some place safe! I don’t hate him like you do!
”

“
That’s not fair!
”

“
None of this is fair!
” I slammed the atlas shut. “Every time Dad comes back in town we all get crazy! He makes things so hard!” I picked up the atlas, hugged it to my chest.

Mom gripped the sink, steadied herself. “I need to think,” she said quietly.

“I do, too. Mrs. Gladstone’s offering me a lot of money.”

“Yes,” Mom said guardedly. “She is.”

I kept thinking about Mrs. Gladstone’s job offer, mostly with my calculator to get the full monetary impact. We were talking big bucks. Enough bucks with what I already had in the bank to buy a significant used car in the fall.

A car.

Freedom.

But then, as Opal said when I talked to her about it, there was the amount of money I would spend on psychiatric care because Mrs. Gladstone would drive me over the edge.

“Two weeks tops,” Opal warned. “You’ll be whimpering on the Interstate, pleading to come home.”

“She’s not that bad.”

“She’s a bonafide Hansel and Gretel–eating witch! We’re talking here, Jenna, about the ultimate summer from hell!” Opal leaned closer, her blue eyes dulled by confinement. “And I know from
hell.
”

Mom was thinking about it, too. Collecting facts, actually—that’s how she thought about things. She talked to Mrs. Gladstone. She talked to Murray. She took me out on the Kennedy Expressway in the Honda during rush hour and barked orders at me from the backseat. She gave me wrong directions and made me find my way home. She even pretended to have a heart attack when we were getting gas and I had to lay her out flat on the backseat and tell the woman in the Plymouth Voyager not to call 911 because my mother was a real kidder.

The phone calls started Thursday night, three
A.M.

Dad was at a bar—drunk, sappy. “Now, Jenna girl, I want you to say a big hello to Sueann, the woman who’s changed my life.”

Friday night, two-thirty.

“Now, Jenna girl, you got to understand that your mother makes it hard for me to come around. It’s not that I don’t want to.”

Saturday afternoon, 5:17.

“Now, Jenna girl, I’m coming over and we’re going to have a talk like we used to and I’m going to bring a pizza and we’re going to catch up.”

“No, Dad.”

He didn’t like that so I lied and told him I was sick and had to get some sleep and maybe we could get together when I was feeling better.

“Dad,” I said quietly, “are you all right?”

Never better, he said, and over the receiver I heard the sound of shattering glass.

Beer bottle, he explained.

After that, I stopped answering the phone.

“Did he ask about me?” Faith kept asking.

Mom was storming around, saying how Dad would push himself on us for a month or so every few years to make up for all the years he wasn’t around. She confronted him the next time he called. He asked for me; she wouldn’t put me on. He blew up, saying no one gave him a chance. He’s coming over to talk to his daughter!

Not when you’re drunk,
Mom shouted back. And, by the way, you have
two
daughters, and let’s not forget you haven’t sent a child support payment in months!

I came into the kitchen as she slammed down the phone. She was steeling herself like she did at the hospital when a tough case came in.

Mom, please let me go.

“I need to get out of here,” I said. “I need to go to Texas.”

Mom leaned against the wall, studied my face.

“Okay,” she said finally. “Okay.”

I had two days to pack, which was close to impossible since no one could tell me what to bring for six weeks on the road with a fussy rich person. There was so much to do, but packing wasn’t as important as seeing my grandmother.

I walked into her room at the Shady Oaks Nursing Home. She was sitting in a green vinyl chair looking out the window at nothing in particular, holding her old sewing kit in her lap that Mom brought from her shop. One side of her hair was matted like she’d been sleeping on it. She was wearing the pink sweater I gave her two Christmases ago. She never went anywhere without that sweater.

I held out the bunch of daisies I’d brought her. She smiled at the flowers. She used to have a field of them behind her house in Wisconsin; we’d pick them fresh every day when I visited. Before she got Alzheimer’s, her eyes had been a crackling blue. Now they were like looking into muddy water.

“I’m going on an adventure, Grandma. I’m driving to Texas.”

“Texas.” She said the word like it was a person she was trying to remember.

“I’m going to eat barbecue and learn the two-step and wear a cowboy hat and touch an oil rig.”

“Oh,” said Gladys, her roommate, “I been to Texas. Never seen such a place—sky so big, land so wide. You tell Texas hello for old Gladys.”

“I will. I’ll bring you back a piece of the sky.”

Gladys laughed and jiggled the plastic blue bracelets I gave her at Christmas.

“Texas,” my grandmother said flatly, but she took my hand when she said it. I sat there with her for the longest time not saying anything. I opened the quilted top of her sewing kit that had been the beginning of so many projects. Grandma touched the antique thimbles, the threads in every color, the fine scissors from France.

“Do you remember that rainbow skirt you made for me, Grandma? It had eight different fabrics, each a different color. It was my favorite thing to wear.”

I took her big scrapbook out of her dresser drawer. When she knew the disease was coming, Grandma started stockpiling memories the way people collect canned goods and batteries when a bad storm is coming. She and I went through all her pictures, got them in books. She said memories were so precious, she wasn’t going to let some infernal disorder take them from her. I opened the scrapbook to a photo of me at ten in the rainbow skirt, twirling in the park, the skirt flowing out, catching the wind.

I pointed to the photo. “That’s the one, Grandma. You used your sewing kit to make it. It was the best skirt in the world. All my friends were jealous.”

She studied the picture and held her sewing kit tight.

I walked to her memory board and put up a picture of myself with a sign I made that read, “Jenna’s gone to Texas. She’ll see you when she gets back.”

“When I come back we’re going to have that picnic,” I promised. I put the daisies in water and kept one out. I put it in her hand. “I remember how we used to pick daisies, Grandma, at your house, and Faith tried to eat them once when she was small. I loved going to your house.”

She squeezed the daisy tight like it held all her memories.

“Okay, Faith, you’re sure you know how to take the bus up to see Grandma?”

Faith was sitting on the one corner of my bed that didn’t have luggage on it. We’d been through the directions three times. She nodded. I handed her a supply of bus tokens.

“You’ve got to see her every week and go through her scrapbooks with her and put things up on her memory board and tell her about the times you remember.” I handed her a container of thumbtacks. Faith took them, unsure.

“I just feel so weird in that nursing home, Jenna. I never know what to say and I can’t wait till I leave.”

“I know. I’ll tell you my secret. I remember that Grandma can’t help it. I remember how she never left us. And I tell myself that for one hour a week, I can be strong for her.”

“I’ll try.”

“I know you will.” I didn’t say
you’d better,
even though I was thinking it. “And if Dad comes around, what do you do?”

Faith gulped hard. “If I think he’s drunk, I tell him I can’t see him now.”

“And?”

She bit her lip. “I tell myself he’s got a disease and it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

I handed her a pamphlet:
Is someone you love an alcoholic?

Faith took it and curled up in the patchwork quilt Grandma made me. I folded my yellow bathrobe carefully. Too much was swirling in my mind.

How would Faith and Mom manage without me?

Would Dad come around drunk?

Would Grandma be all right?

And what about Mrs. Gladstone and me in that car for six whole weeks?

I wondered if I was about to make the biggest mistake of my promising young life.

“Well,” Mom said, trying to be tough. We were standing at Mrs. Gladstone’s front door, having been through the goodbyes already. Mom cried a little at the house. Faith got hostile because I didn’t have time to do the dishes. She got over it, though. We gave each other a suffocating, rib-busting Boller good-bye hug. Opal called and said I could phone her anytime day or night and she promised not to say I told you so. I rammed the lion door knocker as thunder sounded in the distance—a warning sign from God.

Maria opened the door, grinning. She was going to have the house to herself for six weeks. Mrs. Gladstone stood in the hall, wearing a trench coat and a hat with a feather; she was leaning on a cane. I’d never seen her with a cane before. It was probably to whack me on the head if I did something wrong. She walked slower than usual to Mom and handed her an itinerary of our trip with phone numbers and addresses.

I put my suitcases in the hall and told Mom she should
probably go. “I’m not going to camp,” I whispered. “I’m being paid. It’s a grown-up thing.”

Mom nodded and left, her shoulders shaking. Thunder clapped as we walked to the garage.

Mrs. Gladstone stood regally by the car door and rapped her cane on the floor. “And now, young woman, how much experience have you had driving in storms?”

“Not much, ma’am.” I opened the back door for her and watched her get in; her face looked pained when she sat down. “Unless you’re talking metaphorically,” I added, “and then I’m a total ace.”