The Center of Everything (9 page)

Her eyebrow moves up. “I didn’t hear anything about a park.”

There is a knock at the door. Mr. Mitchell, wearing no baseball hat and a different shirt from before, is on the other side of the screen, holding not roses, but a box of pizza. He cups his hands against the screen to see inside. “Shakey’s Pizza,” he says.

I run to open the door for him and reach up to see inside the box, to see if it’s pepperoni. He holds it high above my head, laughing. “Uh, Miss, that’ll be eleven ninety-five with tax,” he says. “Uh, Miss, you can’t have the pizza until you pay.”

“Evelyn,” my mother says, holding the door open for him, “did you ever think to stop and say hello to him before you started grabbing? Were you raised in a barn?”

I stop jumping. “Hi.”

“Hi, squirrel.” He tousles my hair with his free hand. “If you hold on a moment, I’ll set this down on the table and let you dig in.” He looks up and smiles at my mother as she walks around the counter to get a knife, running her hands through her hair.

“I wasn’t expecting you this evening,” she says. “I’m just a mess.”

“Sorry to stop by without calling. I ended up having to come back into town, and I thought I’d see if you-all wanted to have dinner. I didn’t mean to interrupt. If you want me to come back later…”

“No no,” she says. “Don’t be silly. I just need to take a quick shower. I walked down to Pine Ridge because I heard they were hiring.”

He makes a face. “You walked that far in this heat?”

“It wasn’t bad going there, just coming back.”

“Were they hiring?”

“They took my application. They wanted to know if I had a car.”

“Oh,” Mr. Mitchell says. “Well, maybe they’ll call.”

“Maybe.” She shakes her head, looks down at her sunburned hands. Only the tops of her hands are red; the palms are still white.

“If they don’t,” he says, “we’ll work something out.”

My mother gives him a long look, smiling slowly.

He tells her if she wants to jump in the shower, he will help me make a salad so it will be ready when she comes out. She likes this idea and disappears down the hallway, humming to herself. He takes lettuce, carrots, cucumbers, and tomatoes out of the refrigerator. He gets a bowl down from the cabinet above the sink. He knows where everything is.

“Okay, squirrel,” he says, lifting me up on the counter. “Your job is to tear up the lettuce. You think you can handle that?”

“Aren’t you going to wash it first?”

“Huh? Oh yeah.” He holds the head of lettuce under the faucet and hands it back to me. He scrapes and chops the carrots, whistling “On Top of Old Smokey.” I don’t know how long he is going to wait to bring in the roses, if he is going to do it in front of me or not.

He starts to sing, making up words that are wrong.

On top of Old Smokey, all covered with cheese I ate a bad hot dog, threw up on my knees.

He laughs, and I laugh too. It would be nice if Mr. Mitchell came to live with us. I wouldn’t mind if he moved right in with us and married my mother. It wouldn’t even be so bad if we just kept going on this way, with him living somewhere else but coming by sometimes to give us pizzas and flowers, cutting up carrots while my mother takes a shower.

He asks me why I am so sunburned. I tell him they took us to the park. When lying, it is important to keep all your lies the same.

Mr. Mitchell looks up at me and smiles again. “You’re a good kid,” he says. “I like having you around.”

I hear the shower water turn on. “When are you going to give her the roses?”

He looks up. “Huh?”

I roll my eyes. “The roses you bought today. From the flower shop.”

He yells “ouch” and “dammit,” and I look down to see he has slipped with the knife and cut his thumb, the one on the same hand as the two purple fingernails. He looks away and puts his thumb in his mouth. “What do you mean?” he mumbles.

“I saw you today. I saw you buying roses.” I am surprising him by how much I know. “Where are they?”

He turns and looks at me, and when his blue eyes meet mine, they flinch. “How did you see me buying roses?”

He sounds angry, like I am in trouble, and I wonder if he knows I am lying about the teachers taking us to the park. “I was at Arby’s, after we went to the park. I saw you come out of the flower shop. You bought roses.”

He takes his thumb out of his mouth, holds it under the faucet, and asks me what I was doing at Arby’s on a school day, the cut from his thumb turning the water from the faucet pink before it rushes down the drain. He has a ring too, just a gold band though, no diamond.

“Oh. They were for your wife?”

He shuts the faucet off and rubs his eyes. He looks up at me and then down, shaking his head. I can feel my mind stretching, putting pictures together very quickly. I see Mr. Mitchell carrying the roses out of the shop, then going home and giving them to his short, small-eyed wife.
Oh Merle, thank you
. She would put them in a vase on a table in their house. She could be looking at the roses in the vase right now, this very moment, her nose against their red petals.

He must not hate Mrs. Mitchell after all. He might love her again, maybe as much as he loves my mother, but in a different way. Or maybe the same way, at different times. Or perhaps he doesn’t really love either of them at all. I feel bad for him, standing there, looking down into the sink. “Don’t worry,” I say. “I won’t tell her.”

“Aw Jesus,” he whispers, his hand over his eyes. He grabs a paper towel and wraps it tightly around his thumb, so it looks like a little finger puppet, a tiny mummy. “Evelyn, I…” His eyes move around the kitchen, like it is someplace new to him, a place he doesn’t know. “Okay,” he says. “I better go. Shit. I need to leave. I need to just leave right now. I’m sorry, honey. I’m so sorry.”

He kisses me on the forehead, picks up his keys, and walks out, gently closing the door behind him.

“Where’d he go?” my mother asks. She is wearing a tight flowered dress with no sleeves, her hair wet, slicked back, water dripping down on her sunburned shoulders. She is wearing red lipstick and perfume that smells like strawberries.

“He’s gone.” I pick at a piece of melted cheese on the side of the pizza box. “He left the pizza.”

She looks at the pizza and then at me. “What do you mean gone? Where did he go?”

“I guess he had to go home.”

She sits down on the couch, looking around the room like she thinks maybe I am lying and actually he is still here, only hiding. “Did he use the telephone?”

“No.”

“Did he say he’d forgotten something?” “No.”

She crosses her arms, looking at me. “That doesn’t make any sense, Evelyn.”

“Do you want some pizza?”

She stands up, her hands on her hips. Her hair has already started to dry in the warm breeze coming in through the screen door, red curlicues springing up around her forehead. “Evelyn, did you say something to him?”

“No.” I pick up a piece of pizza. I won’t tell her about the roses. It will just make her sad. He shouldn’t have been coming over here anyway.

“That just makes no sense to me. No sense at all.” She rubs her lips together. “What did you say to him?”

“Nothing.”

We hear a car. My mother runs to the window, but it’s only Mr. Platt from Unit D, his El Dorado slinking onto the highway. “Well that’s great,” she says. “Just great.”

“Have some pizza, Mom.”

She watches me, saying nothing. “I’m not hungry, Evelyn.” She goes back to her room and closes the door.

I am sitting on the front step when she comes out from her room an hour later, her cheeks tear-stained, her sunburn worse. She sits down next to me, holding a slice of pizza, the pepperoni picked off. “Hey there, you,” she says.

I nod, squinting into the Rowleys’ front window. They are sitting at a table, all four of them, the glow of a television flickering in the corner of the room. Mrs. Rowley turns and sees me looking in, my mother sitting next to me. She gets up and closes the curtains.

My mother is no longer crying, but she looks bad, the skin on her nose starting to peel. Her hair has dried funny, one side flat against her face, the other side still curly. She looks at my burned arms and face, frowning. She goes inside and comes back out with a jar of cold cream.

“You’re really burned, Evelyn,” she says, rubbing the cream onto my shoulders. This is what smelled like strawberries, the cream. It feels good on my skin, taking away the sting. “If you would have told me they were taking you to the park, I would have made you wear sunscreen.”

“You’re burned too,” I remind her. “I’m sorry Mr. Mitchell left.”

She stops rubbing, her fingers still on my back. “Well, if you don’t know why he left, you’ve got nothing to be sorry for.”

I don’t say anything. She rubs some cream on her own throat and the backs of her hands. “So what’s my surprise?”

“What?”

“My surprise. You said I was going to get a big surprise tonight. And now I could use one.”

I look back at the Rowleys’ window, the closed curtain. “Later,” I say, trying to think.

She gives my leg a poke. She’s trying hard to smile. “Tell me now. I want my surprise now.”

I think of the roses in Mrs. Mitchell’s vase. He is at home with his wife now, maybe sitting with her at a table. He maybe sings for her. Maybe he tells her the same jokes.

“Later,” I say. “You’ll get it later.”

My mother goes inside to watch television, but I stay out on the step, trying to figure out what to do. I consider giving her Traci Carmichael’s heart-shaped locket, but then I think about what would happen if Mrs. Carmichael ever saw her with it, maybe in the grocery store, how terrible that would be.

Mr. Rowley and Kevin come out of their apartment, both of them patting their stomachs like they have eaten too much. “Why so glum, chum?” Mr. Rowley asks, but he does not wait for an answer. They get into Mr. Rowley’s car and drive away.

The door opens again, and Travis steps outside, leaning over their balcony. Someone has cut off all his curls. Now his ears look like handles for his face.

“What’s the matter?” he asks. He is talking to me. It takes me too long to believe this, and already he is turning around, starting to go back inside.

“I screwed something up,” I yell. I wave for him to come over, the way a crossing guard tells you it’s okay to walk across the street. To my surprise, this works. He closes the door behind him and walks quickly down the wooden staircase of Unit B, his hands in the front pockets of his jeans.

At first I do not think I will even be able to stand up, but then I am standing, walking across the parking lot toward him. He looks at me, waiting, his green eyes large, far away from each other, like the eyes of a fish. “I need a surprise for my mother,” I say. “By tonight. And I don’t have one.”

He tilts his head. “Is it her birthday?”

“Kind of. Something like that.” It’s strange to actually be talking to him face-to-face, like he is just another person. He has become almost like just a story in my head now, someone I made up to make me feel better, to have something to do. There are little gold flecks in the green of his eyes, and they are looking right at me.
That little one, when he gets older, look out.

He squints across the highway. “There’s the Kwikshop. You could get her something there.”

“It needs to be something nice. I have eight dollars.”

“You can get her something nice, then. There’s stuff there girls would like.” He turns and starts walking. “Come on. I’ll go with you.”

Again, it’s difficult to move. The afternoon has gone so badly that it seems unlikely that something this good could happen at the end of it. But here it is, standing in front of me, good on the heels of bad.

He turns around, zipping up the front of his sweatshirt. “But if you want to go, we have to go now. I’ve got to be back before my dad and Kevin get home. I’m supposed to be grounded.”

“What about your mom?”

He makes a face. “
The Wizard of Oz
is on. She’ll be camped out all night.”

I smile. My mother is also watching it, lying on the couch underneath the quilt Eileen gave her for Christmas. She tried to get me to watch it with her, but I’m sick of it. It’s on every year, and I’ve seen it so many times that I can say the lines right along with the movie, from “Auntie Em, Auntie Em” to “I’ll get you, my little pretty,” down the yellow brick road and back again to the scary flying monkeys who turn out to be people and then back off to see the Wizard who is really just an old man who is very nice but not exactly dependable to “You had the answer inside you all the time, Dorothy, just click your heels three times.” My mother said, “Okay, Evelyn, you’ve seen it before. I get the picture.”

She said she knew all the lines by heart too, but she still wanted to watch it. She pulled the quilt up to her eyes, but when Dorothy started to sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” she knew I could see she was crying, and she said it was just because she liked the song.

Mrs. Rowley doesn’t like my mother, and my mother doesn’t like her; they won’t speak to each other face-to-face. But I like the idea of them watching the same movie in different houses, both of them so wrapped up in the same old story they won’t even notice we’re gone.

When we walk into the Kwikshop, the bells tied to the door handle jingle, and Carlotta, the woman who works there evenings, looks up from her magazine and frowns.

“Where are your mothers?” she asks, holding up her hand flat out to us, like
STOP
. Her fingernails are long, painted red, filed sharp like arrows. “We don’t want you kids coming in here without mothers.”

“We don’t have mothers,” Travis says, already moving down one of the aisles. “We’re orphans.”

Carlotta can’t see him, so she glares at me. “Yeah, you’re hilarious, buddy,” she says. “You steal one thing, and I call the police.”

“We’re not here to steal,” I tell her. “I have money.” I reach into my pocket and bring out the wad of bills, all that is left from the twenty dollars. She leans over the counter and eyes the money, and I can’t help but stare. Carlotta is an interesting person to look at on any day because of all the colors on her skin: pink blush streaked across her cheeks and not rubbed in, red glossed lips, and yellow teeth. But on this day, there’s even more: two large hickeys sit on her neck just over the line between her orange smock and her throat. They’re blue and bruised at the center, green around the edges. She sees me staring, and her hand goes to her throat.