Untaken (4 page)

The phone quit ringing, then started up again, almost right away.

Had to be Grammy. The only one ever called us was Grammy.

Or the Cops.

Picking up for either of ‘em would be a bad idea, although it’d be good to speak to Grammy again. Thinking of her made me see the house through her eyes. The linoleum peeling up off the grime-scabbed floor. The heaps of clothes and boots and abandoned coffee mugs spilling out of doorways…

Ring-ring.

Ring-ring.

Stevie’s folks had a regular phone where you could see who was calling you, but ours was a cracked brown cordless, older than I was.

The phone quieted briefly, then started up again.

I could almost see her, sitting at her trim kitchen table, a cup of the great lemonade she made perched on a coaster at her elbow, Jasper, her dumb cross-eyed Siamese cat pawing at the dangling phone cord as she dialed over and over.

“You mind your manners, young man.” That’s what she’d tell him. As if a cat could understand.

Grammy was from Tennessee, originally, and I always liked the soft, careful way she spoke. Dad had some of it in his voice too, but he sure never sounded soft or careful when he spoke. To be honest, where that accent made Grammy sound eloquent, it made Dad sound like a hick. And Dad hated for people to think he was a hick.

I’d loved going to Grammy’s house, which was always very neat and peaceful, and smelled of Yankee candles instead of old socks and last night’s dinner, like our place did. You could get a drink of soda without finding dried-on crud stuck in the glass right after your first big gulp. She’d cook up huge dinners—macaroni in a big yellow bowl that she kept especially for the purpose, or hamburgers on the little grill out back of her house, served with humongous salads, which I didn’t much care for, but ate anyway because she liked to see me enjoy her food.

But then she’d say something like, “Growing boys need
real
food,” and Dad’s face would go red, the furrow between his eyebrows turning into an ominous canyon.

Grammy would start in on how Dad and I were always welcome to move in with her. Her house was “too big” now that Poppa was gone, and she could “use the company.”

Dad reckoned that asking that of him meant she didn’t like the way Dad ran things at our house. She didn’t visit us too often, but when she did, she’d remark on the dirty dishes in the sink, or the stains on my clothes, or the empty Coors bottles lying out back of the house. She didn’t see that Dad tried his best. It’s hard work raising a kid on your own, that’s what Dad always said.

Ring-ring.

Ring-ring.

“Sorry, Grammy,” I muttered, as I fished around in the nest of chip packets and dust bunnies to yank the phone cable out of the wall. The phone went dead mid-ring and a wave of relief filled my body, followed by the usual backwash of guilt. I pictured her putting the phone back in its cradle, maybe turning to Jasper to sigh over her ungrateful son.

Poppa had been around to help Grammy when Dad was little, and anyway, Dad said, women were better suited for raising kids. Dad was kind of old-fashioned with some of his opinions, and it used to make me embarrassed when we were out in public and he’d get to ranting about one thing or the other, but he meant well. Dad called the way we lived “bachelor living,” and I liked it pretty well.

Me and Dad, just two guys trying to do the best we could with what we had.

The other thing that would chew Dad’s ass was that Grammy would never give him money.

“You just smoke it or drink it anyway, Carl,” she’d tell him.

At the end of our visits, she’d slip a twenty into my hand, and I knew that she put away a little money in a bank account for me, because it used to drive Dad crazy that he couldn’t get to it.

“Here’s you with your toes busting through the ends of your sneakers, and that old bitch is putting money away for some college you don’t want to go to,” he’d say.

We hadn’t talked to her in more than a year. One time, after me and dad had had a blowup about something, I’d thought about hopping on a bus and going to see her myself, but I never got further than stuffing a few clothes in my duffel bag.

What would dad even do without me around to remind him to eat, or get up for work?

My mom’s family called every Thanksgiving to talk to me. They’d never liked Dad too well while Mom was still alive, and they cooled off a whole lot more after she died, to hear Dad tell it. They thought he didn’t take good enough care of her when she was sick, but Dad told me they’d thrown her out of the house when she was fifteen, so what did they know about caring?

I didn’t think much about my mom. I knew that Dad had a bunch of pictures of her in a box at the back of his closet where I wasn’t supposed to go prying. When I was younger, I used to look at those pictures, but when I grew older, I stopped. I didn’t know the girl in those pictures, though her long nose and blue eyes were the same as my own. One day, those pictures were gone, and although I wished I’d saved one, I didn’t get too bent out of shape about it.

“What’s done is done, what’s lost is lost and there’s no getting it back,” said Dad, when beer or weed made him thoughtful.

Gracie

atie and Zach walked up Auburn Street toward me, Katie in a short dress that showed off her long brown legs, and Zach with his shirt tied round his waist and a basketball jammed under one muscular arm.

There was no time to duck off down a side street. They’d seen me.

“Hey,” said Katie. “What’s up?”

Zach gave the ball a couple of hard bounces on the pavement instead of replying. He’d been a scrawny little boy last summer, but now he was taller than me.

“Nothing much,” I told them. Katie and Zach and I had been to the same elementary school. Katie and I had been friends once—she only lived a few streets away from us—but after Mom had seen Katie hanging out with a bunch of older kids, passing a bottle back and forth down at the park, I’d been banned from speaking to her. She hung out with a different crowd at school now.

“I haven’t seen you in forever!”

I didn’t know what to say. I still felt bad at the way I’d avoided her at school, pretended I wasn’t home when she rang the doorbell. She’d given up trying to talk to me a couple of years ago now, but it was still awkward to run into her like this.

“We’re going over to the playground,” Katie said, finally. “Want to come?”

“No, I don’t think I can—”

Katie rolled her eyes. “Whatever, Gracie. I guess your mom won’t let you?”

“It’s not that….” I said.

“What then? We used to hang out down there all the time.” She laughed. “Remember our secret clubhouse?”

It hadn’t been much of a clubhouse. Just a bare patch of pine-needley ground between a bunch of spruces that grew around the basketball court, but I remembered.

“Well, suit yourself.” Katie brushed her long blonde hair back out of her face.

My hair was long and blonde too, but instead of being sleek and shiny, it was a tangled mess no matter how much I brushed it. When we were six, we’d given each other haircuts. Katie’s mom had found us halfway through the makeover, and taken us to the salon to fix the mess.

“Don’t you girls look pretty?” she’d said afterwards as we admired our matching bobs in the salon mirror. “Like twins.” I couldn’t wait to get home to show mom my new haircut, but she’d gone crazy. She’d called Katie’s mom and yelled at her until she hung up the phone, even though I’d told her it had been my idea. That had been the beginning of the end with Katie and me, although I was too young to know it then. It pissed me off that mom was always saying I should make friends when she’d stopped me hanging out with the best friend I’d ever had. It was so unfair.

“Sure, I’ll hang out for a while,” I found myself saying.

A pair of older boys I didn’t recognize were shooting hoops down at the playground.

They nodded to Zach, who dropped his shirt on the parched grass and ran to join them. The eyes of the two older boys lingered on Katie, but it was like I was invisible.

Katie stretched herself out on Zach’s abandoned shirt and stretched out in the sun like a cat. I plopped down next to her, rubbing at my sunburn. The dry grass scratched my tender legs, and the gun-shot whack of the ball on the blazing concrete combined with the shouts from the guys started my head pounding.

“Do you think he’s cute?” Katie asked.

“Who?”

“Zach. He’s my boyfriend now, did you know that? But I don’t know. I kind of like Aaron.”

“Right,” I said, feeling like an idiot. I wondered if Katie had noticed me checking out Zach’s bare chest.

“What do you think?” she asked, plucking up a handful of dry grass and letting it float away.

“About what?”

“Zach or Aaron, duh.”

“I don’t know who Aaron is.” My face was going red again, I could feel it. The more I willed myself not to blush, the worse it happened—it was always that way. I hated my stupid skin and my stupid hair. How would I know if Aaron was “better” than Zach, when no boy had ever looked twice at me that way? It was like I’d gone so long without talking to other kids my age I’d forgotten how. Maybe Mom had been right about me being an outcast.

“That’s Aaron,” Katie said, pointing at the taller of the two boys I didn’t know. “He’s cute, isn’t he? He’s seventeen and he’s got a car.” She grinned at me like I should know what that meant.

Aaron wore a Red Sox cap jammed backwards on his head. His ears stuck out from underneath it. An earring hung from one of them, flashing in the sun. I know what Mom would have said about a boy who wore an earring. “Only trash ruins their bodies like that.”

Worse still, a black tribal tattoo snaked down the length of his back, disappearing into the waistband of his low-slung shorts.

Katie grinned, staring at me over the top of her sunglasses. “Cute butt, huh?”

“No!” I stammered.

“No?”

“I don’t know, Okay?”

“What about Callum?” asked Katie. “He’s got a girlfriend already, but she’s kind of a skank.”

I guessed that Callum was the third boy. His sunburn was almost as bad as mine, and the pooch of his belly hung low underneath the bottom of his stained T-shirt.