“Game Buckman!” the referee calls.
And the air and sound stop. For Zoe. Movement is syrup slow, stretching out thin.
Slow, while she turns.
For the first time ever, she turns and waves into the bleachers. She waves at someone who is waving back at her. A crazy, cheering, silver-haired lady with a pom-pom, a flag, and a smiling dog.
In the bleachers.
For Zoe.
Twenty-One
“I didn’t know you were coming,” Zoe says. It is awkward. She doesn’t know if she should say thank you. She doesn’t want to say thank you. It seems too…needy. She thought about it on her way home. She thought about it as she showered and changed. It pulled and it twisted until a light thought became heavy. Why would Opal want to come? For her? And now as she runs down the stairs to go to Kyle’s party, Opal and Count Basil are there bringing in the mail, and something must be said. “It’s just that I was surprised is all.”
Opal hugs her mail to her chest and tweaks her head to the side in her sparrowlike way. “Really, dear? You didn’t read it?” she asks, smiling.
Read it? Zoe skims back through her mind and days.
“My eyes, dear. I thought you read my eyes yesterday. I read the invitation in yours.”
I invited her? I have to be careful with my eyes, Zoe thinks. She might read all kinds of things there. What is she reading now? Zoe looks down and picks at her cuticle. “Sure,” she says. And then she looks back up but is still afraid, a gauzy, thin familiar feeling circles her mouth holding back words that she does and doesn’t want to say. Words that might open a wound that is just scabbing over.
“You’re welcome!” Opal says, her words breathy and soft. “And I thank you! You were amazing! The Count and I had such a time!”
Opal goes back to sifting through her mail and grimaces. “Bills!” she says. And then the smile returns like a bird that can’t be shooed from a nest. “Maybe if I change the name to Opal’s Lorelei Home for the Criminally Insane it would keep them away!” Always possibility.
Zoe smiles. “Thank you, Opal.”
And it doesn’t seem needy at all.
She leaves, letting Opal’s criminally insane possibilities entertain her as she drives and appreciating Opal’s concern over bills. No excuses. Humor, but no excuses. Mama never even looked at the mail.
Mama.
Will she be there today?
Zoe knows no one is expecting her, except maybe Kyle. Kyle will be looking for Zoe. But Grandma will have made it known that she was uninvited. Mama, Aunt Patsy, Uncle Clint—they all will know. Will they want her there?
And then an icy thought catches her, starkly, in the middle of the Indian summer heat. It’s been four days since she left home and, other than Grandma, no one has tried to see what happened to her. Hasn’t Mama even wanted to come see her? Make sure she is okay? Wondered about her suspension at school? Wondered about anything at all? Or is it still just about Mama? Mama, and how everything affects her. Never about Zoe.
Or maybe it is simply that there is no part of “Mama” left. No part that Zoe remembers. No part that held her hand in the grocery store. That smoothed her hair away from her face with spit-moistened fingers. That painted Zoe’s toenails in rainbow colors and then laughed as they wiggled. And now Zoe questions those memories, too. How real were they? As fuzzy as her memories of running through a sprinkler on a hot Texas day when it seemed that Shasta daisies were crowding for room near the porch and Popsicles filled the freezer. How much was real…and how much was wanting?
There has always been wanting. Wanting her clothes to be washed and pressed with love. Wanting someone to pack her a lunch. Wanting someone to double-check her school papers. Wanting someone to meet her at the bus. Wanting someone to care if her socks matched or her underwear were clean or her teeth brushed. Zoe did all those things for Kyle. The wanting told her to do it for him.
She stops at Barry’s Hobby Shop on Third Street and picks up the kite she ordered for Kyle two months ago. Thank God she’d already paid for it all or she’d be stuck. “Forty-nine dollars,” she sighs, thinking how much gas, food, and cigarettes that could buy. But she didn’t know then where she would be now, and two months ago when she saw the kite, she knew she had to get it for him. Kiteman, she has called him since he was four and stretched his arms to the sky trying to touch the tails with his hopeful stubby fingers. From digging holes with spoons to throwing balls for Zoe to chasing kite tails, Kyle found his own ways to pass time waiting for Daddy to return to the park to get them. The Dragonslayer 1000 is incredibly beautiful, even to Zoe—with its iridescent emerald diamonds on a shimmering blue background and its spinning tails of forest green—plus, she splurged on a rubber-gripped reel that could wind in the massive kite with ease. She can’t wait to see Kyle’s face when he opens it. Did he know about her leaving? He is only ten—no, eleven now. Would Grandma put Zoe’s leaving on his shoulders, or would she keep it among the adults and spare him the worry? Of course, when it comes to Mama, no one is spared. “He’ll know,” she whispers.
Zoe turns on the last road out of Cooper Springs into the subdivision where Uncle Clint and Aunt Patsy live. Their double-wide home is still more than a mile off, but she can already see it peeking up on a small rise in the landscape. It is a green postage stamp in the cracked bareness. A sparse sprinkling of other homes dot the area as well, but Uncle Clint has a heavy hand with watering and planting, and poplars shoot up in the distance like giant green geysers, setting his house apart from the others.
An oasis, she thinks. Uncle Clint’s Double-Wide Oasis.
&
nbsp; Her insides flutter as she gets closer, and she thinks for a moment to have another quick smoke before she gets there, but as her fingers rummage blindly through her purse on the seat next to her, she realizes there isn’t time. Shit. Shit. She takes several quick breaths instead, trying to will the tension away. She turns into the long gravel drive and counts the parked cars already there. Aunt Patsy’s, Uncle Clint’s, Grandma’s, and two others she doesn’t recognize. She wishes there were more, like at Yolanda’s party. Hundreds more so she could dissolve into other faces and conversations. But she already knows that Kyle’s party will be nothing like Yolanda’s.
Her car crunches to a stop on the loose gray gravel, and the sound of her slamming car door rattles the still air. She knows everyone is probably around on the back patio under the shade of the aluminum awning, but she walks up the short wooden porch to the front door anyway. It seems like a halfway point—a way to ease into what is to come. She taps lightly on the door. There is no answer, so she turns the knob and enters the large empty living room. From there she can see half the kitchen and hear the clunky clattering of pans but still sees no one.
“Hello?” she calls.