The Lonesome Young (11 page)

Not that a
Whitfield
would ever have a garage sale.

“You promised me no more pills,” I said, knowing I was wasting my breath but unable to stop myself. Melinda’s addiction was the carnival ride from hell; the rest of us whirled around and around, repeating our terrified reactions while never getting anywhere.

“What? You want me to take up meth, rural Kentucky’s drug of choice? That stuff ’s poison, baby sister. One straight shot to selling my skanky, unwashed, toothless body on a street corner.” Her voice was full of contempt, which struck me as unjustified.

Or perhaps there were class distinctions even among junkies.

“No,” I said, trying not to grit my teeth. “That was not a multiple-choice question: it isn’t check one for pills, two for alcohol, or three for meth. I want you to stop
all
of this stuff before you kill yourself.”

“I don’t know how to get through the day without something to make my brain shut down. I can’t quit thinking about Caleb,” she said, shivering in her oversized sweatshirt and baggy sweatpants. “It’s my fault he’s dead.”

I couldn’t figure out how to fix this for her, so I took refuge in practicalities. “Dry your hair, Melinda, you’re going to freeze. You’re dripping all over the place.

She toweled off her hair and then climbed into her bed and pulled a quilt around her shoulders, every slow, halting movement projecting misery and guilt, while I tried to think of what to say.

“Okay, first, it’s all right to be sad,” I began, but she violently shook her head.

“Not according to Mom. ‘You barely knew that boy. We’ve had enough of your moaning and whining about him.’” She captured Mom’s haughty impatience perfectly, and I had to fight back the urge to smile at the impersonation.

Instead, I tossed a stuffed dog that had been wedged in the corner of the chair at her.

“Since when do we ever use Mom as a barometer of emotional health? When Heather’s Angel had such a hard time foaling, she told me ‘horses die all the time, Victoria, deal with it.’”

Melinda shuddered. “She didn’t!”

“Yes, she totally did, and I was only around Buddy’s age,” I said, getting angry all over again just thinking about it. “But that’s not the point, here. You cared about Caleb, and now he’s gone. There’d be something wrong with you if you didn’t feel bad.”

“Especially since I killed him,” she said darkly.

“No. You didn’t. He decided to go. Nobody twisted his arm. You haven’t had time to figure out the drug scene around here, right? So it’s not like you told him to go buy pot from the scary meth dealers in their dangerously explosive meth-cooking trailer,” I pointed out.

It was hard to believe that it had only been a little more than two weeks since the night of the fire. The night I’d met Mickey. I’d spent most of that time trying to ignore him.
Two weeks
. How was that possible? I already felt like he’d been haunting my thoughts forever.

“You don’t understand,” Melinda said. She buried her head in her pillow. She wasn’t ready to listen to reason, and I didn’t have the patience or energy to try to force her to, when she just wanted to escape into sleep.

I met my mom in the hallway outside Melinda’s room.

“She’s napping.”

“Good. She can sleep it off. I’ve locked up your father’s liquor cabinet,” Mom said, grimacing with distaste.

“That’s not enough. She needs rehab, Mom. She’s not going to get better on her own, especially after Caleb—”

My mother sliced a hand through the air in dismissal, as if I were an unruly child. “Whitfields don’t go to rehab. It’s trashy. Do you really want your sister exposed to that whole celebrity rehab mentality?”

“You haven’t even been a Whitfield your whole life! How did you buy into their line of crap lock, stock, and barrel?”

“I’ve been a Whitfield long enough, Victoria,” she said, sighing and showing me a rare glimpse of the real person under her mask as she pulled her sweater tight around her shrinking body.

“Are you eating, Mom? I’m serious.” I suddenly wanted to hug her, even though part of me—the tiny, selfish corner of my soul I kept stuffed far down in the dark—wanted to run away from my family and their problems. I was so tired of playing the parts of dutiful daughter and responsible sister.

Her face stiffened and closed off, as if I’d crossed an invisible line labeled “Priscilla’s Anorexia.”

“I’m fine. There will be no rehab. We deal with our problems ourselves.”

I threw my hands up in the air and headed down the hall toward Buddy’s room, where I could hear him talking to his Xbox. I could always tell when I wasn’t going to get any further with my mom. I’d try my dad later. I lobbed a parting shot, though.

“My sister needs to go to rehab, whether you think it’s trashy or not, or you might have a Whitfield who winds up dead.”

When I walked in his room, Buddy immediately grabbed my hand and pulled me down to sit next to him on the bed, handing me a controller for the game. Finally, the
one
relationship in my life that wasn’t complicated. I settled in to fly dragons and defend the palace from evil trolls, wishing that I could identify the bad guys so easily in real life.

CHAPTER 12

Mickey

I
don’t get the ‘giggles’ part of Suds ’n Giggles,” I told my sister. “What’s funny about doing laundry?”

We sat in the tiny family room of her apartment. Caro was on the beat-up purple plaid couch, trying to hide her cigarettes between the worn cushions, probably so I didn’t get on her case again about smoking in front of the girls. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor while my nieces brushed my hair, jumped on my lap, and told me the kind of long, rambling, incomprehensible stories that only four- and six-year-old girls could tell.

The apartment, like the Laundromat itself, had seen better days. The walls were painted a particularly nasty color of institutional green, the mud-brown dining table and chairs had probably come with the place, and the only splashes of color came from the secondhand red, white, and blue toy box and giant pink dollhouse that Caro had picked up at a garage sale.

Autumn, Caro’s black-haired, blue-eyed eldest, had once spent an hour and a half at a barbecue telling me about the thirty-minute TV show she’d watched that morning. I’d walked around the rest of the day with my eyes glazed over and my brain stuffed full of pink sparkly unicorns. Summer, the brown-eyed, brown-haired youngest, was a little quieter until she got revved up. She was the budding hair stylist, who was clutching a fistful of my hair in a death grip while she whacked away at my head with the brush.

“I have no idea what’s funny about it,” Caroline said wearily. “It’s a Laundromat. The sign should just say Laundromat. The owner thinks she’s clever, I guess.”

The place didn’t close until nine, but Caro’s part-time help ran the place during the afternoon and early evening while my sister took care of her kids. Then she’d put the girls in bed and run down to handle the closing, she’d told me. She looked tired, but I couldn’t remember a time since she’d gotten pregnant with Autumn that she hadn’t looked tired.

Autumn’s loser of a father had hit the road as soon as he’d learned he was going to be a parent, and Caro had only been sixteen at the time. I remembered all the drama and shouting matches when she’d announced she was keeping the baby, and then two years later she’d turned around and done it all over again with a different loser. At least that had been my perspective as a smart-assed thirteen-year-old kid. Now I was old enough to understand how hard it was to be alone—and how far a person might go to be with someone he wanted, no matter the consequences.

Summer stood on the couch behind me and leaned over until she was staring at me upside down. “Would you like ponytails?”

I pretended to consider the question. “Only if you have purple ribbons,” I said, spying the purple ribbons on the floor by the toy box.

She shrieked so loudly that my skull reverberated. “I do! And more in my room!”

She ran to get them, and Autumn tore off after her to find her latest doll to show me. Caroline smiled at me.

“You’re always so good with them. I wish you could come around more often,” she said.

Guilt washed over me. I hadn’t even realized she’d moved in here, because it had been August since I’d seen her. The attack had lain between us, festering with guilt and shame, because I think Caro felt like it had been her fault I’d been sent to juvie. I’d been ashamed she’d seen me turn so violent—so Ethan-like. Instead of bringing us together, it had nearly driven us apart forever. But she was my sister—the only one I’d ever have—and she hadn’t wanted to leave things between us like that, so she’d tried to reach out.

I hadn’t been able to bring myself to respond at the time, but that she’d even tried had meant something, and here I was.

“I’m really sorry, Caro. School started, and—”

She waved a hand. “No, no. I wasn’t trying to give you a guilt trip. God knows I understand being busy. Speaking of which, I need to feed the girls. Lucky for them that Ma sent food. It was going to be macaroni and cheese again.”

“Hey, nothing beats a good mac and cheese,” I said. “Can I help you set the table?”

Caro grinned as the girls shrieked their way back into the room. “I think you’re going to be too busy getting beautiful, Uncle Mickey.”

Twenty minutes later, I was beautiful, all right. I was wearing five or six tiny, purple-ribboned ponytails and eating Anna Mae’s cooking for the first time, ever.

“She’s a good cook,” I had to admit.

“Her single maternal skill,” Caro said dryly. “Speaking of cooking, did you hear anything else from Pa about Ethan’s . . . kitchen fire?”

Autumn looked up, her eyes wide. “Uncle Ethan set fire to the kitchen?”

“We’re not really sure, sweetheart,” I told her. “We think it might actually have been an accident.”

I didn’t really think that at all, but that’s what Ethan had convinced my Dad to believe, and I didn’t want to worry Caro when I had no proof of my suspicions.

“I had an accident at daycare once,” Summer confided, her tiny face solemn. “But that was back when I was little, and I had extra pants in my cubby. Did Uncle Ethan have extra pants?”

Autumn cracked up. “Not that kind of accident, dummy. Grown-ups don’t wet their pants.”

“My friend Nina’s grandma does,” Summer shouted. “They had to put her in a
home
. And don’t you call me a dummy! I’m four!”

“Okay, bath time for overtired, overexcited little girls,” Caro said. “Mickey, do you want to bring Summer?”

“Sure. Come with Uncle Mickey?” I didn’t wait for her to answer before I scooped her up off her chair and into a hug.

Autumn promptly burst into tears. “I wanted to go with Uncle Mickey,” she wailed, and then she ran off down the hall.

“I’m sorry, Caro. I’m not much help,” I said, patting Summer’s back when her little face crumpled and hoping she wouldn’t melt down, too.

“It’s not your fault, Mickey. They’re kids, and sometimes kids get overstimulated this time of day.”

“I’d better go,” I said, feeling uncomfortably like my visit had made my sister’s life more difficult. “Homework, and stuff. But could I maybe come back on a weekend and take them out for ice cream or a movie or something? Give you a break?”

For the first time that evening, Caro flashed a real smile as she took her sleepy daughter out of my arms. “That would be great. There’s a new Pixar film coming up they’re dying to see. I’ll let you know when it releases, and maybe we can figure something out.”

Impulsively, I leaned over and gave both of them a hug, and then I walked down to the bathroom and hugged Autumn, too. She’d been busy dumping all of the bath toys in the tub, apparently having forgotten her earlier tears.

“Have a nice bath, punkin.”

“Bye, Uncle Mickey.”

When I stood up, I caught sight of myself in the mirror and started laughing. “Maybe Uncle Mickey will leave these purple ribbons here at your house, for next time.”

• • •

It was just getting dark when I made it home, but I noticed that Pa’s car was nowhere in sight. The house was all lit up, though, which meant that Mom was home. I gave myself a mental smack for forgetting to call her and tell her I’d be late, but when I walked in she looked up from her papers and smiled.

“Is it dinner time already? I had a long chat after school with the neighbor about whether or not we should cut down that elm tree, and since then I’ve been sitting here daydreaming, I must confess,” she said.

She did that a lot. Daydreamed. I wondered sometimes whether she was imagining a life lived in a different direction, one in which she hadn’t moved to Clark, Kentucky, to take a job and wound up marrying my dad and taking on all of his problems when she’d said “I do.” Ironically enough, they’d met when he, then Deputy Rhodale, had visited the elementary school to talk about Stranger Danger.

Should have paid attention, Mom.

“I already ate.” I sat down at the table across from her and looked around, trying to see our house with new eyes.

Victoria’s eyes.

Our whole house would probably fit inside the Whitfield guest bathroom. My folks had called this their “starter house,” but I’d been the only baby that ever came along, and we’d wound up staying right here. It was a comfortable place, filled with warm colors and the Kentucky folk art Mom liked to collect. I wouldn’t trade it for all the mansions in Kentucky.

“Victoria Whitfield is in my history class,” I said abruptly, not sure why I was telling her.

“Her brother, Buddy, is in my class,” she said, and we both sat and stared at each other for a while.

“I never understood why your father hates the family so much,” she finally said. “It was a Rhodale who burned down the barn, after all.”

She was right. Meredith Rhodale’s husband had set the fire that had killed his wife and Larry Whitfield sixty years ago. Nobody had ever known whether he’d set it on purpose or not, just that he’d been carrying a lantern when he’d gone to the barn to check on his horse, and he’d found his wife in the act with a Whitfield.