Aunt Patsy lifts her head from under the counter and then, like she has just comprehended who the voice belongs to, stands. Her lips are half-parted, and her brows lift into the blue kerchief that covers her baldness. She has been done with chemo for three weeks now. Zoe wonders how long before the hair grows back, but she can’t ask. She can’t even notice. She pretends that Aunt Patsy’s eyes aren’t hollow, that her wrists aren’t thin. Like she is still just the same old Aunt Patsy she always was. Maybe she is. They are all good at pretending.
Aunt Patsy wipes her hands over and over again on her apron when there is nothing on them. “Zoe?” she says. “Zoe.” She smiles and comes around the counter with her arms outstretched. “I didn’t know—”
Zoe kisses her cheek. “Grandma said I wasn’t coming?”
Aunt Patsy nods and glances out the kitchen window that looks out on the back patio. “Oh, yes,” she hushes.
“Is it okay? With you?”
Aunt Patsy frowns and blows air out the sides of her mouth, as she draws Zoe into the kitchen. “Everyone is welcome in my house, and anyone who gets their knickers in a knot over that will just have to go plant them elsewhere! You hear?”
“I hear,” Zoe says. But she doesn’t really. She is fond of Aunt Patsy, but a welcome from her isn’t enough.
“Now let’s go outside and say hello.”
Zoe is still not ready, and she steps away from the door. She asks to borrow some gift wrap for Kyle’s present first. Aunt Patsy leads her down the narrow hall, pulls some wrap from a shelf in the closet, and leaves the supplies spread out on a lower bunk in Wain and Kyle’s room so Zoe can complete the job. “Hurry now,” she says. “Kyle will be happy to see you.”
“And Mama? Is she here?”
Aunt Patsy nods but doesn’t say anything about Mama being happy to see Zoe. Just a silent nod and she leaves, maybe afraid to get started on any talk of Mama at all on a day that is supposed to be happy for Kyle. Aunt Patsy has priorities, Zoe thinks, and she is glad Kyle lives here.
The room is tiny but neat. Every square foot is filled with the orderly storage of boy things. She wonders at the space Wain had to give up in order to squeeze in Kyle—the space in his room, and the space in his life. Some people are able to squeeze, to mold around another life like it has always been there.
Wain is just a year older than Kyle, so their interests are similar. It is a good match, she thinks. Kyle belongs here. She knows Kyle’s underwear is always clean. He goes for checkups to the dentist. He has to be in bed by nine on a weeknight. He is missed if he is home late from school and scolded if he causes needless worry. A world revolves with an orderly rhythm and he helps make it happen. A rhythm that she has never known, but surely Grandma thinks otherwise. Grandma imagines it in her mind. They all do. Appearances can be deceiving. A new dress from Kmart for Christmas day can make it all seem so together and right. Appearances. If Mama is here today, will it be a new dress, or easy laughter, or long pants to cover her withering legs that will make it seem that everything is right and Zoe is all wrong? Will her shaking hands or faulty steps be shrugged off with an explanation of little sleep, or a touch of the flu, or whatever else that will make Mama seem right?
Zoe finishes wrapping the awkwardly shaped package, and with nothing else to delay her, she walks down the hallway to the sliding glass door and steps out to the patio to get it over with. She is suddenly overwhelmed with the need to see Kyle. She needs to see his eyes and make sure they haven’t changed. She needs to hold him, to rub his head, to soak in the love he is full up with.
She needs some of that before she sees Mama.
Twenty-Two
She stares out at the green. It rolls like eternity, an area too big for her voice to penetrate. Too big to whisper, Come here. Too big to reach out and gather him to her. Just to her, without the world scrambling in the way. And would he come? Would he be afraid because he knows she loves him and she hates him? She hates him for leaving her. Alone. After everything she did. How could he leave her? She wants to look into his clear, blue, watery eyes that are just like Mama’s and ask…why? And then she wants to slap him. Slap him a hundred times across his beautiful face, and then kiss his tears away and beg forgiveness. Because she loves him. She mostly loves him.
He plays in the five-foot Doughboy pool Uncle Clint set up at the beginning of summer. Wain, too. Their laughter and hoots jump across the hot afternoon air. And the hooligans. The five hooligans Grandma is surely frowning over. But Zoe can’t see her face. She is far out in the green expanse, planted at a round table in the shade of an orange-striped umbrella. Her eyes move from Grandma’s stiff gray hair to the head next to her. Blond, freshly curled hair is pulled back into a clip.
Mama.
Mama wears a long navy cotton skirt and a blousy red and white top that makes her look cheerful and patriotic. It lifts Zoe. The effort. But she knows about appearances. It settles her, whispers to her, Don’t be fooled, not again. But it wouldn’t take much, she knows, perhaps just a hand cupped tenderly under her chin. The wanting is still there.
Kyle spots her. Silhouetted against a hot, silky-white sky, he waves. His arm cuts across the blinding backdrop, back and forth, back and forth, filled with wet, splashing, eleven-year-old freedom.
“Zoe…,” his voice calls, but it rolls through the air like a fog, slowly fingering its way to her ears in a blurry echo because, with the waving of his arms, heads turn, and across the distance of grass and betrayal, she is looking eye to eye with Grandma—Grandma turning heavy shoulders, a stiff neck, her jaw cutting the air. Looking. Looking just long enough so Zoe knows. She saw her. And then she turns back, as big and unmoving as the Doughboy pool.
And then Mama, last of all, because sound and movement are curdled for her, and she finally awakens with the knowledge who the turned heads are for, and she turns, too. She stands, her hand balancing a glass that even Aunt Patsy and Uncle Clint can’t seem to deny. She lifts her hand, but Grandma grabs her arm and pulls her back into her seat with something urgent that must be said right at that moment. Was it a wave? Was Mama going to wave? But just as quickly, Mama has forgotten her, tucked Zoe back into her sleepy dark memory, and Zoe is staring once again at the back of her head. She wonders, a slow uncurling thought…Did Grandma lie about Mama crying for me? Was that only what Grandma hoped for?
The knowing crawls up her back, stiffens her. Mama didn’t cry.
“Zoe! You came!” And Kyle is upon her, his hair wet, pressing upon her breast, and she doesn’t care that he is soaking her crisp ironed clothes she wanted Grandma to see. She holds him, letting the wet glue them together, pressing her lips against dripping cords of hair. Closing her eyes and drinking in the cool and the touch of arms wrapped around her waist.
“Of course, Kiteman. Where else would I be on
your birthday?” she says. He pulls away, glancing over his shoulder to his friends, who are calling him back to the pool.
“It’s just that…” He hesitates. She sees a too-old crease surround his eyes, and the light blue grows dark. “Is it true you left? You left Mama…alone?”
And then she wants to slap him. Shake him. She wants to clutch her stomach and squeeze away the hollow his worried eyes have carved in her.
“I had to, Kiteman” is all she can say.