The Accidental Book Club (7 page)

“Okay?” she repeated.

“I need you to take her.”

“Take who?”

“Bailey.”

“Take her where?”

His voice grew impatient. “To your house. I need her to stay with you for a while. I can’t control her, and it’s starting to interfere with my work and just until Laura is back up on her feet and we can figure out what to do, can you take her? Can she live with you?”

Jean’s mind swam. Take Bailey? Here? She hadn’t had a child in this house in so long. She glanced across the alcove at the flower oil painting Wayne had bought at an estate sale years ago. It was all browns and deep reds and ochre, and it was lumpy and ugly. Something that screamed,
Old person lives here.

“Well . . . maybe you should take her to a therapist of some kind,” she stammered. “I’m not sure what I can . . .”

“I can take her to a therapist, but I can’t be here twenty-four-seven to make sure she’s not destroying my house. I have to work sometime or I’ll lose my job, and then where will she be? A therapist can’t help you if you’re starving.”

“Destroying your house . . . ?” Again, Jean glanced around her house, getting up from the necessary chair and walking into the kitchen, feeling like she was floating. Most things in her house hadn’t been moved in years, except to dust under. Her kitchen was country themed with gingham and rattan and dark wood. Her dining room table could seat fourteen and was flanked by perfectly placed porcelain trinkets—her Made in Occupied Japan collection. Wayne’s bar . . . She had never touched any of the aged bourbons or the crystal decanters. He’d been so proud of his bar. He’d loved playing bartender during their gatherings. They were dusty and fragile now.

Curt breathed hard into the phone. “She dumped a gallon of milk on my hardwood floor and left the house for the day. An entire gallon. Ruined the wood. She carved the words
no peace
in the bathroom door with nail clippers. She . . . She just does the most bizarre stuff, and I think it’s me. If I tell her to stay in, she sneaks out. If I tell her to leave the house, she locks herself in her bedroom. Once, I told her to do her homework, and she ate it. Balled it up and stuck it in her mouth and ate it. Then barked at me. And she wouldn’t stop. Just barked and barked and barked until I finally left the room. I can’t ground her. I can’t do anything with her. You punish her, and she either ignores you completely or just doesn’t care. She’s so willful and she hates me.” He let out a flat chuckle. “Her mother is the one putting this family through hell, and it’s me Bailey hates.”

Jean had left the bar and had gone down to the living room. She sank into the couch, her fingers automatically drifting over to Wayne’s glasses on the end table and running along the cold metal frame.

“It sounds like she needs help,” she said. “She probably has a lot of anger.”

“Yes, she does,” he said. “She does need help. And we’ll get her that help as soon as Laura gets out and everything is back to normal, I swear. Until then . . . I’m the one who needs your help, Jean. Please. I need you.”

Jean felt dizzy and confused. It seemed there were so many questions that weren’t being answered here. So many questions that weren’t even being asked. She was certain there were more, but her mind kept coming up blank. “Laura’s getting out soon? You’ve heard from her?”

“Well, there’s not a definite date yet, no. But she’ll want out of there as quickly as possible. She’s smart. And she’ll be motivated.”

“But she doesn’t know about Bailey.”

“She’s actually the one who suggested I call you. She definitely would rather Bailey be with you than my parents.”

“Wouldn’t she prefer Bailey stay with you than go anywhere?”

He paused. “Jean. I need you.
We
need you. All of us. Please.”

Jean took one last glance around the room, then squinched her eyes shut. This house didn’t know chaos. She didn’t know this child at all—this problem child.

But Bailey was her granddaughter.

Her only granddaughter.

And Wayne would have done it. He wouldn’t have hesitated for a second.

“Okay,” she said. “When are you bringing her?”

Dear Beverly Cleary,

Hi. I am Bailey. I like to read. My mom gav me one of your books one day when she was cleening out the groj. I don’t rember wich one it was but I think it was ramona the pest. I thot it was going to be boring becos it was wrote a long time ago. But I loved it and I started reading all of your books. I am sometimes a pesk like ramona. I am going to ask for mor books for Crismas. Do you have any sujeshions?

Bailey Butler
Age 7

B
ailey had been in Kansas City exactly twice in her life. Both times were to visit her grandparents at their house. They kept Lysol on the tops of their toilet tanks. Her mom and dad had made fun of it. Lysol, as decor. Nice.

Now she was going to be living there? Had the man lost his mind?

She’d tried screaming, raging. It didn’t work. He’d only continued cramming her things into suitcases—putting his dad hands all over her underwear. Gross. Like he knew what items were important to her. He packed about a thousand pairs of socks, as if she could care, but not one of her books. Left her bookshelf completely alone. Did he really not ever notice that she always had a book in her hand? Did he really think she’d need her snow boots in June, but not one paperback?

She threw things. She broke the few items in his depressing apartment that looked like they could maybe be considered important. He didn’t care.

You won’t listen to my rules; maybe you’ll listen to your grandmother’s,
he’d said.

Why? Why would she listen to anyone? Nobody ever listened to her. Not ever.

Here’s a rule for you: Don’t drink and drive.

Here’s another: Don’t abandon your daughter and leave her to live with someone who doesn’t have the first clue about rule #1.

Oh, and here’s a good one: If you do, don’t expect her to think you’re the World’s Greatest Dad or anything.

Eventually, she gave up. He was shipping her off, and if nothing else, at least now she didn’t have to keep pretending she was “doing something productive”—her dad’s newest catchphrase. And it wasn’t like her grandmother was going to be too hard to fool. The woman sat in the same room with her for, like, thirty minutes before she ever looked up.

Although. She was the only one who ever did look up. There was at least that.

But she didn’t say anything about seeing her. Bailey was still trying to figure that one out.

He left. Said he was just running out real quick to get some supplies for the road trip to Kansas City. But it was good for him to be gone, even for that amount of time. She wanted him away from her. She was so angry with him, her eyeballs hurt.

She lay back on his bed, as she’d done many afternoons when she’d skipped school to come home and nap. He’d spared no expense in buying his new bachelor pad duds, and the bed was ten times fluffier and more comfortable than the one she had at home, or the garage sale furniture he had for her here.

She clutched her rescued, but beat-up,
Anne of Green Gables
to her chest, flipping one corner of the pages over and over again for the satisfying
brrr
sound, and stared at the ceiling fan until she could swear it began to move on its own accord under her watery gaze. What did it matter, anyway? What was there for her here? What was left of her life? Where had those days gone, the ones where her mom would make peppermint cookies and play music on the stereo, and they would dance around, laughing, maybe dusting or vacuuming, making the house smell good and fresh? Where were those nights snuggled up to her mom’s chest, listening to that story about the bunny who needed a home? God, she had made her mom read that book so many times. She was in love with the story, but she was more in love with the moment. The tenor of her mom’s voice, the smell of her perfume, the way her toes looked smushed up in her work panty hose—the memories hurt so much, but she couldn’t stop thinking about them. She hadn’t been able to stop thinking about them since her mom started being too drunk at night to take off her panty hose at all.

She dropped the paperback on the floor beside the bed, brought her hand up to her mouth, and poked a cigarette—filched from the gym teacher’s desk drawer on the last day of school—between her lips. Then with a shaky hand, realizing that she was now embarking on a whole new level of messing with the system, she brought a lighter—stolen from the same desk—to the cigarette and thumbed it on.

The smoke burned a thousand times worse than she thought it would. She thought it would be like the wood smoke that drifted off her mom’s fire pit on Sangria Sundays, but instead it felt like hot liquid pouring down into her lungs, and she coughed and wretched until she felt like her eyes would pop out, curling up onto one side and pressing her cheek against her dad’s superfirm pillow, clutching her stomach with her free arm.

This. This was good. Physical pain to blot out the emotional pain. Bailey knew that was a dangerous game to play, but she couldn’t help it. The pain made her feel alive, made her feel
there
. It had been so long since she’d been present, she sometimes wondered whether maybe she wasn’t a figment of someone’s imagination.

But the pain passed and then came the light-headedness; it felt so good to be weightless and out of contact with the world, so she pulled on the cigarette again and coughed again, but less. So she took another drag and another, perfecting various holds on it—perched between the first knuckles of her index and middle fingers, squeezing it between her thumb and index finger—and flipping ashes on the comforter, enjoying watching embers shrivel away the fabric into little holes. She tried to imagine herself as the smoking antagonist from one of her books, but, frustratingly, found that she couldn’t think of any. Why didn’t bad guys ever smoke? Finally, the butt was nearly down to the filter, and she wished more than anything that she’d taken the whole pack.

But there were always cigarettes to be found. Anything was easy to steal. For now, she’d just have to be happy with the relaxed dizziness that this one had given her.

There was a sound of metal clicking against the lock on the front door, and she knew her peaceful weightlessness was over. It was time to head out west. She needed to take some of those stupid socks out of her suitcase. She needed to find her bunny book. If she wasn’t going to have a home, at least she’d have an old friend who’d been there, done that to help her along.

But first, she had a reputation to protect. She had to make the man feel justified in yet another abandonment. She was Bailey Butler, Pain in the Ass. Bailey Butler, Problem Child. Bailey Butler, Worthless Kid. She couldn’t go without leaving him a little reminder that she had once been here. She sat up, giving her father’s pillow one last appreciative pat, then drew back the comforter and snuffed out the cigarette right onto the pillow.

The scent of burned fabric was intoxicating.

J
ean wasn’t sure who was more nervous—she or her granddaughter.

Her
granddaughter
. It was so weird to say that word. Not that she didn’t know she had one; of course she did. She just had always thought of the girl in generic terms. As “the Granddaughter,” not as Bailey, the girl who would be showing up at her house any moment.

Cookies. In the end, she’d baked cookies. Not because she loved cookies, nor because she knew Bailey liked them, but because cookie baking seemed to her an undeniably grandmotherly thing to do.

So she’d baked them. Thick chocolate chip cookies, made with real butter and mixed by hand rather than by mixer, because she’d read that hand mixing them made them softer coming out of the oven. If nothing else, the house smelled like Christmas when Bailey arrived.

Jean put on her best smile when she opened the door. “Hello!” she’d cried out, probably far too loudly, far too welcomingly. Kids could sense fear—she knew this!—and if that was true, surely Bailey could sense terror coming off Jean. “Come in, come in!” She shuffled backward and gestured with her whole arm, realizing that she looked a bit like one of those game show models while she was doing it.
Show Bailey what’s behind door number three, Jeanie! A new house!

“Sorry we’re late,” Curt said, pushing past her, lugging a big, heavy-looking suitcase in each hand. “Someone decided to set fire to my bed right before we left.”

“Fire?” Jean repeated, reaching out to help him with the luggage. He just kept walking, and again she was left with her arms waving around. “Is everything okay?”

Bailey stood on the front porch, clutching a pillow and blanket to her stomach. She rolled her eyes, which were ringed with massive amounts of makeup, and it was smudged and running, as if she’d been crying. She stood as if she’d grown roots, looking at the ground at Jean’s feet.

“Come on in,” Jean said again, brightly, but still the girl didn’t move.

“Yes, everything’s fine. Luckily,” Curt said angrily. “Where do I put this?”

Jean jumped. “Oh, right. The guest bedroom is upstairs, first room on the right. You can just set your things in there and put it away in your own time.” She directed the last sentence to Bailey, who still wasn’t moving. “The comforter is a black bear pattern. I hope that’s okay with you.”

At the same time, Curt, who was trudging up the stairs, yelled over his shoulder. “Get in the goddamn house. You’re letting the air-conditioning out.”

Jean laughed uncomfortably. “I don’t mind. It’s okay, really. Take however long you nee—”

Slowly, hesitantly, Bailey entered the house, her hands still buried under cloth and pillow. Jean moved out of her way, and then shut the door behind her. Once Bailey was in, the atmosphere seemed very, very awkward, and Jean wasn’t sure what to say.

Jean had never been particularly at ease around children, not even her own. When Kenneth and Laura were little, it had seemed that all of Jean’s friends simply adored being mothers, that their lives were finally complete. But Jean had always felt clumsy and unsure. She loved her children with everything she had; she was just never sure how to turn that feeling into action. She felt continually judged—sized up other mothers, sized up by her children, especially Laura. She feared that she never quite hit the mark. Now, with Laura in rehab and Bailey standing ill at ease in her foyer, she wondered if she never did hit it. If she never would. She certainly had never predicted that she would be questioning her parenting skills in her sixties.

“I made cookies,” she said, glad that she’d done it now, glad for the talking point.

Bailey swiveled her head slowly toward Jean and gave her a nonplussed look. “You do that for all your guests?” she asked, and Jean was taken aback by how flat and cold and deep her granddaughter’s voice sounded.

Jean blinked a few times. “I—I have some friends I cook for sometimes,” she said. “And I suppose I’ve made cookies once or twice . . .”

Bailey made a sniffing noise and once again rolled her eyes. Jean had never seen someone roll her eyes so much, as if life itself were such a disappointment, such a lame attempt at everything, there was almost no point dealing with it.

“Would you like one?” Jean asked, heading for the kitchen and hoping Bailey would follow her there.

There was a long pause, and Jean noticed she was walking alone. But she kept going, kept moving forward, because that was what she did best ever since Wayne died, wasn’t it? Kept going, never looking back, because what she might find back there might be even more frightening than what she saw ahead.

“She asked you a question,” she heard Curt growl. There was a muffled thumping as he came down the carpeted stairs. Then he was in the kitchen, the opposite of his daughter: all pumping limbs and whipping, hard energy.

“No,” Jean heard from the entryway.

“No, what?” Curt boomed, making Jean jump. He plucked a cookie off the cooling rack.

Bailey’s voice came back, only this time sarcastic and squeaky-high. “No, thank you, dear Granny,” she said, and Jean could feel her face flush, as if she were being made fun of, though she was pretty sure Bailey was actually mocking her father.

Curt shook his head. “You see?” he said around a mouthful of cookie. “You see what I’m dealing with? She didn’t say one pleasant word the entire four hours it took to get here. She cussed me out for the first hour and a half. She locked herself in a gas station bathroom and took a nap. She ground candy into my floorboard with her feet. How her mother didn’t see what was happening with this child . . .” He shook his head, shoved more cookie into his mouth, his jaw working around the bite angrily. Jean wondered if he could even taste what he was chewing. “Anyway, thank you for letting her stay here. It will do us all good, I think, to get away from one another for a while.”

“Fly away, fly away, little ghostie,” Jean heard muttered from the entryway. She leaned forward and craned her neck to see Bailey, still holding the pillow and blanket, turning in slow circles on the tile and gazing up at the chandelier as she did so. “It’s what ghosts do best,” Bailey continued, so softly Jean almost couldn’t make out what she was saying.

“Is she . . . Does she . . . ?”

He held up one hand. “She’s weird, but she’s not as weird as she wants everyone to believe she is. It’s an act. An attention tactic.”

Maybe she needs some attention, then,
Jean thought, though she didn’t say it aloud. The truth was, she had no idea what this strange child needed. No idea at all.

“Okay. So she’s got her laptop and her cell phone. She knows how to get ahold of me if she needs me. And you can call if you need anything. But hopefully you won’t have any problems.” He raised his voice for this last part, aiming it toward Bailey.

“Boo!” came the echoey return from the entryway.

He ignored the noise completely and dug his wallet out of his back pocket. “Here’s her insurance card,” he said, and handed a white card over to Jean. “And here’s a couple hundred bucks to get us through the first few weeks. I can get you more next Tuesday if you need it.”

Jean held the money in her palm as if she didn’t know what to do with it, and realized that she really didn’t. You couldn’t take away the generic feel of a grandchild you didn’t know by baking cookies, for God’s sake. What did Bailey need? Did she need razor cartridges and shampoo and tampons? Did she like to eat Pizza Rolls? What did she want for breakfast, and did she remember to bring socks? Would she need a swimsuit? Jean almost felt dizzy under all the questions she’d forgotten to ask before agreeing to take Bailey in.

“And you have my phone number,” Curt was saying, pressing along with his instructions, even though Jean feared she wasn’t absorbing them. “She doesn’t have her driver’s license, so don’t let her drive your car. She can’t be trusted with a vehicle, anyway. I’ll check in later this week, see if you need anything else, and . . .”

Jean closed her eyes and envisioned Wayne standing next to her. The young, healthy Wayne. The Wayne whose blood cells were still marching along just fine in there, eating up the bad stuff. The Wayne who raised their two kids and who built the log fence around their backyard and who never put up with anybody’s crap. She tried to channel him, to adopt his force of energy.
Please, Wayne,
she beseeched in her mind,
please help me deal with her. Please help me know how.

Eventually, Curt finished talking, thanked her again, and announced that he had to get back to St. Louis, back to work. Jean bagged him up a couple of cookies to eat on the road and followed him to the door.

He stopped when he pulled up parallel to Bailey, but didn’t make a move to reach out to her, though he looked like he wanted to, looked like he thought he should. “I’ll call,” he said, and Jean wondered if that was the best he could do, the closest he could get to being sentimental about leaving his only daughter behind. Again she was struck with a wonder, a fear, that this was exactly how she’d handled sentimentality with Laura, exactly how she’d handled it with Wayne and Kenneth too. Was it possible that Laura had grown up so accustomed to a lack of hearts and flowers that she attracted a man just like her? Was it possible that nobody ever told Bailey that they loved her?

“I’ll be on pins and needles,” Bailey responded, trying to sound tough, but coming off as only flat and hurt. Jean thought she saw the girl clutch the pillow and blanket closer to her stomach.

“Don’t give your grandmother any trouble,” he said. “Got that?”

At first it looked like Bailey wouldn’t answer at all. She rocked herself side to side so minimally it was almost not there—Jean almost felt like she was the one who was swaying rather than her granddaughter. But then finally, “Sir, yes, sir,” she said, in that same odd, flat voice.

And that was when things got really awkward. Jean almost felt as if she needed to leave them alone, but she was at the door—one hand on the doorknob—and Curt stood between her and the kitchen, Bailey between her and the stairs. She was trapped in their uncomfortable moment, unable to get out.

Curt raised his hand just a few inches, as if he thought he might put it on Bailey’s shoulder, or maybe the top of her head, but then he changed his mind. But feeling the change in movement, Bailey immediately stopped rocking and stood still and tense, dipping her chin down into the pillow and blanket she held. And after a few moments that seemed to stretch into eternity, he finally just stepped forward and through the front door.

“I’ll call,” he said once again, and then jogged off the front porch steps and to his car.

After Jean shut the door, it was as if the uncomfortable moment had been transferred from Curt to her as he whisked past. Suddenly she didn’t know what to do—whether she should talk or reach out or just leave well enough alone. Whether she should just go about her business and risk Bailey standing in the same spot in the entryway for hours, or maybe even weeks, until Curt eventually came back to collect her. Or whether she should grab the child by the elbow and lead her to the cookies, which now seemed like the dumbest idea ever. Who bakes cookies for an event such as this?

“Do you need me to show you where the guest bedroom is?” she asked.

Bailey shook her head no.

“It has its own bathroom,” Jean offered, “so you’ll have all the privacy you need.”

Bailey continued pressing her chin into the pillow.

“Are you hungry at all?”

Another head shake.

“Your room also has a TV. There’s no satellite on that one. But you can watch satellite on the big TV anytime you want. I hardly ever use it. That’s downstairs. Through the kitchen and dining room.”

Nothing. Maybe no matter what she did, Bailey would just stand here. Maybe that was how it was going to end up regardless. The blanket that was looped over Bailey’s arm shifted, and Jean saw what looked like the corner of a child’s book peek out from underneath it. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have thought it was a Little Golden Book, the kind she used to read to Laura and Kenny when they were small. Bailey followed Jean’s eyes and tucked the book back into the blanket sheepishly.

“Okay, well . . .” Jean paused, wracked her brain for something interesting or fantastic or profound or . . . anything that would make this child move, and found nothing. “Just let me know if you need something,” she said.

She began walking back toward the kitchen, though admittedly she had no idea what she was going to do with herself once she got there. But just as she reached the doorway, she heard that low, melodic voice again.

“It wasn’t a fire.”

Jean turned. “I’m sorry?”

Bailey lowered the blanket, but still didn’t raise her eyes. “I didn’t set his bed on fire.”

“Oh. I . . .”

“I put a cigarette out on his pillow. There’s a difference.”

“Okay,” Jean said. “I see.” Though she really didn’t. “I don’t smoke,” she finally offered, and then felt stupid for not saying something more . . . soothing . . . more comforting. She wanted to say,
I believe you
, or,
What’s between you and your father won’t follow you here
, or,
I’m not worried
, or any number of things that might have expressed to Bailey that she’d come to a safe place, a place where she would be cared for and loved. But Jean couldn’t decide which of those things to say, and the longer the silence stretched between them, the more absurd any of them would have felt coming out of her mouth. In the end, she didn’t say anything. Just left it with
I don’t smoke.

Time seemed interminable as the two stood opposite each other. Jean’s mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, and it wasn’t until finally the phone rang—it was Kenneth, wondering if Bailey had arrived, wanting to know how things were going, wanting to know if Jean needed help—that Jean could finally come up with a good segue to leave. By the time she got off the phone—mumbling cryptic answers to his questions as if she were FBI—Bailey had gone up to her room and shut the door. For a time, Jean stood outside the door, her hand splayed open on it as if she were reaching inside and touching Bailey, comforting her the way she couldn’t do when they were face-to-face, her ears perked for any sign of movement, any sign of foul play.