The From-Aways (18 page)

Rosie sets the ice cream drum on its side and begins rolling. I stand in the walk-in, not wanting to follow her. My sweater is in the other room and all I have on is a red baseball tee with a peeling #9 decal on the chest.

I cave. I grab my sweater and jog to the porch and see Rosie rolling the drum across the parking lot. The condensation on its sides picks up grit and ice-melt salt as she rolls. “Rosie,” I shout after her. “That isn’t going to work, come on.”

“This is my part,” she says, or something like it. It’s hard to tell, because she doesn’t turn around. All I see is her ass bumping up and down as she spins the drum forward.

I get the car and drive up beside her. “Get in the car,” I tell her.

Rosie stands up and catches her breath. “It’s heavy,” she says. She hoists it into the way back. She takes a seat in the passenger side and buckles up. As her buckle clicks I realize she knew it was only a matter of time before I came after her. I feel like laughing. I imagine if Sam, if any of my exes, saw me now, they would laugh too. Because I didn’t used to be this kind of lady. I used to be the one who went off to sulk when things didn’t go my way.

Marta used to watch the horse races. She loved the Derby, always bet a few dollars on some hopeless long shot. For fun, and because Marta was the patron saint of lost causes. She never won a thing but once. The 2009 Derby, she bet ten bucks on a fifty-to-one horse no one had ever heard of called Mine That Bird. You should have seen us screaming our heads off and jumping up and down in our living room, knocking over bags of chips and bottles of beer, making a terrible mess as that horse streaked up and won the whole damn thing. We laughed hard and celebrated Marta’s win the rest of the afternoon. We couldn’t believe it. No one on TV could believe it either, and when they interviewed the jockey all anyone could say was
How? How had he done it?
The jockey said,
I rode him like a
good
horse.

Rosie’s settled in the seat now and peeks over her shoulder to make sure the ice cream is still back there. Her arms are goose-bumped. I toss her my sweater.

T
HERE ARE TRUCKS
and cars in Carter’s driveway, which reeks of exhaust. Probably dockworkers inside, the kind of men who think emissions testing is a government conspiracy. Rosie leads the way to the door and I follow, carrying the ice cream, my back threatening to give out the whole way.

Sara Riley from the bar is the only other woman there. Her silvery hair is brushed neatly and her sleeves are rolled up. The rest are men: Joseph Deep, Jethro Newkirk, Cliff Frame, Mikey Eubanks, Billy, and three more boys his age. There aren’t enough chairs, so some of them are sitting on the floor. They’ve tracked dead leaves, crushed up, onto the rug. Should’ve taken off their shoes, but what do I care.

“We have ice cream!” Rosie says. She gestures at me, like I too am a surprise.

“Nosing around trouble, Winters?” Riley says. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“We have ice cream, Riley,” I say. I set the tub down in the middle of the circle. “You got a spoon?”

“Carter!” she says. “No journalists.”

Billy produces a plastic spoon from nowhere and starts in on the ice cream. “Strawberry is the worst flavor,” he says. The other boys root through the kitchen for spoons.

Carter comes in, wearing boots and a worn gray T-shirt. He has not shaved. He appraises us and the ice cream. The copper pots hanging behind him sway.

“We might need a journalist,” he says. “Pull up some rug.”

“I don’t know, Carter,” Jethro says.

“Seriously, Jethro?” I say. This is ridiculous.

“We’re wasting time,” Carter says. “Some of the boys have school tomorrow. Let’s talk.” Two of the boys, mouths full, look embarrassed, swallow.

“The fences have started going up already,” Riley says. And I swear to God she’s brought fucking snapshots. She spreads them on the rug. I snort. Rosie gives me the fisheye.

“Have they done the whole perimeter?” Carter asks.

“That’s a ways off,” pipes one of Billy’s friends.

“Who asked you?” says Jethro.

“He’s working construction on the job,” Billy says. He looks extra pale tonight.

“Don’t say that in front of Quinn,” Jethro says.

“What the fuck, Jethro?” I say.

“You might weasel,” says Riley.

“I’ve never blown a secret in my life and don’t act like you know me well enough to say different,” I say, standing up.

Riley sets her jaw. “I might know you better if you’d lived here more than a minute,” Riley says.

And I’m so sick of this. I feel like I’ve been living here for ages and forget it doesn’t look that way to other people. How long before my dues are paid? “It always comes back to the credit with you, doesn’t it, Riley?” I say.

“Quinn won’t tell,” Rosie says. “I know she won’t.”

“Thanks a fucking lot, Rosie,” I say.

Rosie twirls an earring around in its hole. Everyone is quiet.

“Can I talk to you a minute?” Carter says.

No fucking way,
I want to say. But he walks into the other room and I guess I’m supposed to follow him because everyone is looking at me, though maybe just because I’ve embarrassed myself. Rosie isn’t looking at me. Her face is bright red and her hands are still. Her position here, I see now, is tenuous. Everyone watches as I try to meet her eyes, but she’s fixed on the rug pattern.

I have no choice but to agree, so I follow Carter down the hallway, his boot steps too loud in the wood-planked hall. “I need your help with something,” Carter says over his shoulder. He opens the door to a roomful of taxidermied animals. My grandfather’s studio. It smells odd. There’s something too warm and chemical about the air. Wires, drills, a sewing kit are all strewn over a large worktable. Molding clay sits in damp, plastic-shrouded lumps. There are more boxes like the one he showed me with the eyes. Big crates stamped
WASCO
. We are watched by yellow molds of deer heads and fox bodies that have the blank expressiveness of Greek masks. In the corner is a stack of old tapes:
Advanced Squirrel Mounting Techniques
and
Carcass Casting a Bobcat
.

On various mounts the animals are posed in creepy tableaux. A raccoon is reared up on his weird feet, tail defensively slung to the side. He’s poised for battle with a copperhead snake who is coiled at the base, his scales more visible for being shellacked. The plaque has the date and, in quotes,
Raccoon vs. Copperhead.

Carter lets me look around. “Quietest place in the house,” he says. “I’m taking you aside because I think you should go, but I don’t want to tell you what you have to do, and I didn’t want them to hear me say so.”

“Why the hell should
I
go?” I say. “I didn’t start yelling like crazy Riley.” I can’t believe he actually thinks he’s going to kick me out of his house right now. That he can get away with this.

Carter shuffles and moves some nose-shaped and wet-looking glass pieces around the table. “I’m saying you can do what you want, but that I think you should go because they’re just starting to let Rosie be a part of things,” he says. “And I know you care about her. And I know you know she wants to be part of this.”

Behind Carter I spot a barred owl. It looks just like the one Mom called down. I wonder if they all look like this, being the same species, or whether these two are actually more kin than others. She looks pissed off, this owl. Her feathers don’t lie straight, they’re ruffled, and one of her wings is crooked.

“Your father made these?” I say.

Carter nods. “Jethro’s done a few, but mostly they’re my father’s, yes.”

“Your father, my grandfather,” I say slowly.

Carter looks like he wants to say something. He opens his mouth and his eyes get big and panicked. It’s not that he’s speechless, I think, he just doesn’t know which thing of many bullshit things to say first.

“Quinn,” he says.

“You tell me you think I should go, because you’re looking out for
Rosie
? I didn’t even want to come today, okay? I
never
wanted to come here at all, except she asked me to. Fucking Marta asked me.”

“You don’t have to go,” he says. “I’m sorry. Just—”

“Don’t say sorry. She’s dead,” I say. “Marta is. And don’t tell me she lived a full life because you don’t even fucking know. You missed it. The whole long excruciating thing.”

He stands there hopelessly, his body open like he’ll take whatever it is I’ve got. “I read about it in the paper,” he says.

“The obituary?” I say, before I can stop myself. Then he moves likes he’s going to say something, and before he tries to fucking explain everything or show me a boxful of never-posted birthday cards, or explain why he never could love my mother at all, I get the hell out of there, angry at how stupid I was to think that scrap of
please
was the first step in a scavenger hunt. That Marta was just waiting for me somewhere, wondering why it was taking me so damn long to piece together the clues.

I stomp out past the dead animals, past Rosie calling after me, past the seven fucking rebels eating ice cream.

I
WAIT UP
for her, back at the apartment. I lie in the bed, with its pink sheets, and look at the postcards on the walls from Rosie’s parents, pictures of oranges and alligators and big greasy women in bikinis. Two hours later I hear her thumping around the Stationhouse. I creep down in sock feet.

Billy’s at a table drinking ginger beer. His nose twitches from the bubbles. “Heya,” he says. “Hungry?” I don’t say a thing, just push through the swinging kitchen door.

Rosie is at the griddle. She’s got her black pocket apron on, the tie in the back catching her T-shirt, hiking it up in a bunch. Her hips spill over her jeans in the back. On the griddle there is one giant sunny-side-up egg puddle with six orange eyes. She speckles it with pepper.

“How was the rest of the meeting?” I ask.

“Good,” she says. She flips the giant egg over. One of the yolks breaks and dribbles.

“Just good?” I say, because if she’s not regurgitating details it means she’s still mad at me. And I don’t blame her. “Rosie, I’m sorry,” I say. “About earlier.”

“I’m probably never going to be a singer,” Rosie says. She pokes at the eggs.

“What? What are you talking about?” I say. “Of course you are. Someday you’re going to be so famous I’ll need to buy tickets just to see you.”

“Don’t tease me, Quinn,” she says. Her cheeks are pink and the hair around her forehead is damp from hovering over the grill. She sighs and leans against the counter, arms crossed. “I’m young but I’m not stupid. I’m not leaving this place anytime soon or probably ever. I’m never going to live in a big house like that. So I might as well do one thing that actually matters. The park? The carousel? That’s something I can do.”

“Hey,” I say. “That’s not true. You can do whatever you want. You just have to work at it. You and me, we’re going to practice more. You’ll see.” The truth is that I feel like I’m trying to convince a kid that Santa’s real. Like I know he’s not real, and the kid knows he’s not real, and really it’s
me
that needs the kid to keep believing.

“I know what’s possible,” Rosie says. “Stopping things with the park is possible and I can do it. Don’t try to tell me the rest of it is. You don’t even believe it yourself.”

She’s right, of course. People love to tell you that in America everything is possible and all you have to do is want it enough. Work hard. Keep trying. But those people never knew Marta. Never saw how whole long stretches of your young life can just disappear into sick-smelling bedrooms and hospital lounges. How one day you’re suddenly twenty-four, hard in the heart and utterly alone with no idea of what to do with yourself, much less ready to work hard for your fucking dreams. Those people don’t know what they’re talking about.

Still, it’s a lie I wish I believed. It’s nothing I want Rosie to know. “You’re so young, Rosie,” I say. “You can do anything you want.”

“I just don’t think that’s true,” Rosie says.

“Rosie, what happened at that meeting tonight? I’m sorry I left like that. What are you guys up to?”

“Nothing,” she says. “I mean a lot.” And there’s a look on her face I don’t like. Like part of her mind is all wrapped up in this spinning thing inside her I can’t get to. I feel her slipping out of my family portrait, leaving me alone. Just the tip of Rosie’s sneaker visible as she runs from my perfect frame, ruining everything.

“You don’t owe Carter anything,” I say. “He doesn’t know shit, Rosie.”

“Don’t talk to me like a child,” she says. “I take care of myself.”

And it’s not that I don’t think she can; it’s that I don’t want her to. I want to do it, the caretaking. I did it for my mom, after all. I know no one would believe this but it’s something I’m good at, really.
Let me
.

21

Leah

I
n April, the Dorians decide to come see how the construction and landscaping plans are going. Henry tells me and then reminds me every day for a week. When he’s not reminding me, he’s asking me about nasturtiums. He hates nasturtiums, he says, will they really want nasturtiums? This is the only request the Dorians have made throughout the entire project.