The Center of Everything (3 page)

“My father and I haven’t talked for a while. Evelyn? Are you listening?”

I look at her and nod.

She talks quickly. She says her father is a lot older than Eileen, and that he grew up on a farm in Nebraska. He was in the Korean War before he met Eileen, when Eileen was still just a teenager, and he has a Bronze Star because when he was in the war another man got shot, and my grandfather carried him seven miles to a hospital. On the way there, he got shot too, but he didn’t put the other man down.

“He’s a hard worker,” she says, only one hand on the steering wheel now. The other one is up by her mouth, her thumbnail between her teeth.

She keeps talking. She has six younger brothers and sisters, but only four of them will be there today because one of them, Stephen, is in the army in Virginia and another one, Theresa, is married in Texas with babies of her own. But I’ll meet four of them today. She counts them off on her fingers—Daniel, Joe, Stephanie, and Beth—my aunts and uncles, she says. I won’t need to call them that, and probably shouldn’t. Beth is younger than I am, so that would be a little weird. They live in a nice house. Her father works at Boeing now. He helps make airplanes.

“Where did the bullet go?”

“In the arm,” she says, looking in the rearview mirror. She has it tilted at an angle where she can see her eyes, not the cars behind her. “And he’s missing a finger. He lost it working in the winter. Frostbite.”

“Which finger?” I look down at my hands.

“His pinkie.” She wiggles her own pinkie at me. “Don’t stare at it when you see him.”

I try to imagine it, what he will look like, a four-fingered hand over his arm where the bullet went in, nice enough to carry another man when he himself was bleeding, mean enough to do what he did to Eileen’s mouth. But I know I can’t really imagine him, the way he will look. It’s like trying to imagine my own father, always someone to make up, knowing that whatever way I try to imagine him I am probably wrong, at least about something.

“Why doesn’t he come over to visit like Eileen does?”

She smiles, tilting her head back and forth. “He doesn’t like me very much.”

I watch her face. “Why not?”

“Next question, please.” She glances up at the mirror.

“Is he nice?”

She rubs her lips together. “He has a temper.”

“You have a temper.”

She looks at me. “No. No I don’t.”

“Is he going to talk about Jesus all the time like Eileen?”

She smiles. “Yes. But he likes to talk about God more. Eileen loves Jesus, and he loves God. That’s why they get along.”

I hang my arm out the window, waving it in the wind. “Who do you love?”

She laughs, putting her sunglasses back on. “I love you, Evaloo. I do I do.”

Eileen and my nine-fingered grandfather have a real house and a real yard. The house is green with white trim, on the turnaround of a dead-end street. An American flag hangs in the front, and a tiny gold eagle is perched on the front of their mailbox. One side of the house is two stories with a brown front door, and the other side is a two-car garage. The other houses on their street have this same shape, but they are painted different colors, some brown, some white, some light yellow with brick. Shade trees rise over the backs of the houses, one with a tire swing hanging down. There are kids riding on bikes and skateboards, none of them wearing pink dresses. Two women sit on chairs on the lawn next to Eileen’s. They look up from their magazines when our Volkswagen pulls into Eileen’s driveway, Frank Sinatra floating out the windows.

“It’ll be fine,” my mother says, even though I haven’t said anything. She holds my hand when we walk up the driveway, her hand tight around mine.

The doormat is a picture of Jesus holding out his arms and smiling,
WELCOME
stamped in cursive over his smiling face. It looks like I am standing on Jesus, my white shoes on his neck, and this seems like it could bring bad luck. I step off.

A boy opens the door. He is tall and thin, all throat and elbows, wearing a mesh football shirt and shorts. The visor of his baseball hat knocks into my mother’s forehead when he hugs her.

“Daniel! Oh my God! Oh my God!” She holds him away from her, squeezing his shoulders. “You’ve gotten so big! You’re taller than I am.”

“Well shit, Tina, I’m about seventeen.” He bends down and looks at me. He has Eileen’s nose, and a retainer. “Hey, is this my niece?” He looks up at my mother. “She looks like you. Weird.”

We follow him inside. There is baby blue carpeting everywhere, two girls stretched out on it, playing Chinese checkers. They look up at us, saying nothing. They also have Eileen’s bony nose, my mother’s dark red curls pulled back from their faces with plastic bands.

“This is Stephanie,” he says, pointing at the older one. “And this is Beth.”

Aunt Beth. She could be eight. Daniel makes hand signals for them to stand up, like a policeman waving traffic through a stoplight. They do not stand up, but they smile, and when they do, they look like small, flat-chested versions of my mother. They look more like her than I do.

“Hi,” the older one says. The younger one, Beth, says nothing. She’s just a watcher.

“Hi,” my mother says. “It’s okay if you don’t remember us. I came by once when you were still just a baby, Beth. Evelyn was just a toddler, maybe three.” She nods at Stephanie. “You two played together, out in the yard. But there’s no way you could remember.”

They say nothing. Daniel comes back, handing each of us a glass of ice water. My mother is smiling in a way that looks like it would hurt if you did it for a long time. “I used to baby-sit him,” she says, pointing at Daniel. “How do you like that?”

Another boy walks in the front door, this one younger than Daniel, and he has a dog on a leash. He has the same red hair, and the same nose. The dog is a German shepherd with a pink collar, and when it sees me and my mother it starts barking, its teeth sharp and yellowy white. My mother puts both hands on my shoulders, and pulls me behind her.

The boy has to hold the pink leash with both hands. “No, Rita! No! Stop barking!”

Daniel takes the leash, dragging the dog away. He uses his foot to push the dog behind a door, shutting it quickly. “Guess Rita doesn’t know you’re family,” he says, leaning against the door. He smiles, and again there is the metal retainer. But Rita is still barking, throwing her weight against the door, so it sounds like someone kicking. “Dad’s new dog,” he says.

My mother looks at the door. “Where’s Marilyn?”

“He had to put her down. Hip problems.”

“Oh.” She looks at the other boy. “Well, God, I guess you’re Joe.”

The other boy nods, says hi, and my mother laughs. And then they all four just stand there, staring at us like we have just come down from Mars, like we have green heads and noses where our eyes should be. Rita is still barking, growling, trying to sniff us through the small opening under the door. The water that Daniel gave me smells and tastes like soap.

My mother clears her throat, her hand on the back of her neck. “This is a little strange, isn’t it? I know it feels strange for me.”

Only Daniel smiles back. She turns to him, lowering her voice. “Is he here?”

“No, he’s still at work,” Daniel says. “Man, this is going to be
in
-tense, isn’t it?”

I hear Eileen’s voice from a different room. “Is that them? Are they here?” She walks into the entryway, carrying a wooden spoon with mashed potatoes on the end of it. When she sees me, she looks down at the dress and makes a squealing sound, leaning down to give me a tight hug. “Did you all meet Evelyn? Isn’t she just beautiful?”

All four of them look at me carefully, but say nothing.

“Well, she is, stupids,” she says, kissing the top of my head. She hands the spoon to Daniel and tells him to go in the kitchen and make sure the potatoes stay warm but don’t burn. She tells Beth and Stephanie to set the table.

“You two come with me,” she says, and leads us into another room. It’s not a kitchen, and there isn’t a TV in it, so I’m not sure what it’s for. A piano sits in one corner, a gold sofa and two matching chairs in another. Someone has spilled something on the baby blue carpet that stained, something brown or dark green in the shape of a boot. I sit next to my mother on the gold sofa, little pillows on each side of us. Eileen sits in one of the chairs.

“I’m just so glad you two are here,” she says. “So glad.” She claps her hands and bounces a little, like she is riding in a car on a bumpy road.

My mother smiles with her lips together. She looks around the room, at the oil painting of the ocean crashing onto rocks above the piano, the gauzy gold curtains in the windows. She picks up one of the pillows, fingering its baby blue fringe.

“This room is exactly the same,” she says. “Time warp.”

“Some things are different.”

“Let’s hope so.”

Eileen reaches over to my mother’s face, smoothing down her hair. “Just be nice, Tina. Just be nice and everything will be okay.”

“I’ll be nice if he’ll be nice.”

Eileen frowns and looks away.

My grandfather is a very big man, broad shouldered and so tall that he has to duck when he first comes through the door. My eyes go right to where his pinkie should be, and it’s true: there’s just a little white stub there, the end smoothed over with pink, dimpled flesh. He sees me looking and wiggles it at me before he even says hello.

“Hi,” I say, still looking at the stub.

“Hi yourself.”

He looks much older than Eileen; a flap of skin hangs between his chin and his neck, and one of his eyes has a red vein zigzagging across the white part. His hair is dark red, cut short like a soldier’s, and he’s wearing a white shirt with a blue striped tie. Rita stands behind him, watching us, no longer barking.

“This is Evelyn,” my mother says.

He nods at me, smiling, and then looks back at my mother. “It’s good to see you again, dear, so grown up.” His voice is very low. I can hear the ticking of my mother’s watch, her wrist just below my ear, her hands still on my shoulders.

He starts to pull on his tie, loosening it, unbuttoning his sleeves and rolling them up. Eileen bulges her eyes at him.

“I’m glad you’ve come here today, Tina,” he says, very slowly. “Your mother has missed you.”

My mother nods, rolling her lips between her teeth. If the whole night goes like this, people speaking so slowly and with such long spaces in between, it will seem like forever. I wish my mother and I were already back at home right now, sitting in front of the television, eating grilled cheese.

He clears his throat. “You’ve been missed.”

“Thanks, Dad.” She’s still standing behind me, her hands heavy on my shoulders. Eileen catches my eye and winks.

Beth and Stephanie appear in the doorway. “Table’s set,” Stephanie says. Neither of them looks at me. They are both watching my grandfather’s face.

“You girls get a chance to talk to your sister?” he asks. “And little Evelyn here?”

They nod, and then it’s quiet again. We are all just standing around. If I could think of anything to say, anything at all, I would say it. I can tell by looking at Beth and Stephanie that they are trying to think of something to say too.

Beth looks at my mother. “Where’s the horse?”

“What?” my mother asks.

My grandfather laughs, then stops quickly. “What are you talking about?”

Beth squints up at him. “You said the horse was coming tonight. The little horse.”

Eileen begins to move toward the kitchen, waving for us to follow. But my mother stays still, her fingers drumming on my shoulders. “The little horse?” she asks. “A little horse was coming?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Beth. But that’s enough of that.”

My mother turns her head out the window so she is no longer looking at her father or Eileen, and now I can’t see her face.

“Okay, okay,” Eileen says, clapping her hands, a teacher at the end of recess. “No more talking about horses. Let’s go eat.”

We go into the other room and sit down around the table. It’s a table for six people, but someone has pulled the piano bench up to the table to make room for two more people, and my mother and I sit there.

Nobody talks. Eileen uses silver tongs to give everyone some salad, and there is sound only when they tap against a plate.

But then my grandfather starts laughing about something. When I look up, he winks at me and wrinkles his nose. “Well aren’t you just a little pumpkin?” he asks.

I am not certain how to answer this. Am I a little pumpkin? I turn to my mother, but her head is bent down as if she were praying with her eyes open, staring at her reflection on her shiny white plate.

After a while, he answers for me, still grinning. “You are. You’re just a little pumpkin.”

Eileen leaves and comes back with the ham. My grandfather smiles at my mother, but she’s still looking down at her plate, so she doesn’t see. Eileen puts two thick pieces of ham on everyone’s plate, so there is ham on one side, salad on the other. I pick up my fork, but my mother pokes my knee under the table, shaking her head no.

“I’d like to say the grace tonight,” my grandfather says. He waits until we have all closed our eyes and bowed our heads, just like Ronald Reagan. But instead of a moment of silence, he talks. He thanks God for getting me and my mother to Wichita safely, and for putting food on the table, and for the roof over our heads, and he says thank you for blessed reunions, and blessed returns. When he says amen, Eileen looks up at us, her crooked mouth in a wide smile, and she says amen too.

Everyone else starts to eat, but my mother is still just looking at her plate, her hands pressed against the piano bench. She taps her foot against one of the legs of the table, hard enough so the ice cubes in my glass clink together.

My grandfather’s temples move as he chews, his eyes wide. He looks at my mother, then glances at Eileen. “Well I saw that German car out there,” he says. “We can look into fixing it, but it might be better to try to just get you-all a new one altogether. Get something a little more reliable.”