The water shut off in my bathroom, and Abe peeked around the door into my room. “Are they in bed yet?”
I strained my ears, listening for the rise and fall of their voices, but instead only heard the low hum of conversation drifting down the hall. “It sounds like they’re just talking, now.” Osa slept on my lap, her whiskers tickling my thighs.
He stepped around the door and stood in my room, shifting from foot to foot. “Can I hang out in here until they go to sleep?” Redness inched up his cheeks.
My chest squeezed tight. “Of course you can.”
A door slammed down the hall, and he jumped. Osa woke up and darted under my bed. Dad shouted something, but it was so slurred, I couldn’t discern the words.
Abe sat down on the extra bed in my room. The sound of Mom’s crying echoed through the house now. I leaned back against my headboard and tried to get my mind back on Native Son, the book I was reading for English.
“You’re doing homework on a Saturday night?”
I looked at him over the top of my book. “You’re hiding out in your sister’s bedroom, not doing anything at all. How is that any better?”
He looked at me with those big brown eyes, and I sighed.
“I’m sorry, Abe. You’re right, I’m a total loser. Esta has a date with Bennie, can you believe that?”
“Finally.”
I smiled. “Yeah.”
The sound of breaking glass propelled me to my feet. It wasn’t a heavy enough sound to be a window—I knew what that sounded like. It was probably the water glass Mom kept by her bed. I stood still for a second, frozen in indecision and waiting for my body to take over for my brain. When the spinning haziness engulfed me, I snatched Abe up off the bed by his upper arm. “Are your shoes by the back door?”
“No, they’re in my room.”
“Dang. Okay.” I pulled him to the doorway of my room, and peered out. Mom and Dad’s door was still shut. I slipped my toes into my tennis shoes, smashing down the heels as I walked on them.
Abe jerked his arm out of my grasp. “Don’t grab me like that anymore,” he whispered fiercely. “And I don’t want to leave Mom.”
“We’ve talked this to death, Abe. You, mom, and I all agreed that you and I shouldn’t be here when he’s out of control. And you know she won’t leave with us. It’s just the way it is.”
He sighed, and after another shout from their bedroom, he nodded. My shoulders dropped, and I was relieved he wasn’t going to argue with me. Mom had made me promise that if there was ever another bad fight, I’d take Abe and get out.
We crept down the hall and out the back door. It was a cold night, and I looked down at Abe’s bare feet in the grass. “Do you want my shoes?”
“No, you keep them. They’re too small for me anyway. I’ll be fine.”
“Where should we go?” I asked him.
“Fay’s.”
“They’re not home. They went over to Malcolm’s for that party.”
“Let’s go there, then. That’s where we should have been anyway,” he said.
“We’re not going to the Dearings’.” Truth be told, I wished I could move right in with Malcolm’s mom. But I’d never belong in a family like that. And anyway, I would not be able to face Paul without being upset. He was not going to work at the factory with Dad. I didn’t know how to convince him of that yet, and until I could do it without being so emotional, I needed to avoid him.
“We go there all the time.”
“Not tonight.”
“Aunt Olive gave us that spare key. We could just go sit in their house.”
“Abe. There’s no way I’m doing that. I don’t want to be sitting there using their stuff when they walk in.”
“They’d want to know why we were there,” he realized.
“Exactly.” We walked around the house and stood on the sidewalk, and I stopped, looking this way and that, rubbing my arms for warmth and weighing my options. “Heidi’s is still open for another hour. We could go there and hang out.”
“But the sign on the door says No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service.” He looked down at his bare feet.
“It doesn’t matter, Abe. We’ll go in the back door. Heidi won’t care. And before you ask, don’t go begging her or Dan to give you some fries. They’ve given you a truckload lately.”
“I’m not hungry.”
I wasn’t either. Both of us lost our appetites when our parents fought. We walked down the sidewalks, quickly so Abe’s feet wouldn’t freeze off. We took the long way so we wouldn’t walk past Malcolm’s party. Even two streets over, we could hear the music.
Abe stared in that direction. “I bet Mrs. Dearing made a big old cake.”
“Yeah, but it’s probably coconut. And anyway, we’re not hungry.”
When we reached the restaurant, I pulled open the grungy back door, and let Abe walk in first. The hot kitchen air washed over my face, smelling of grease and sugar. Dan was at the fryer, pulling a fresh basket of fries. He didn’t glance over, but grunted a faint representation of a hello.
Heidi was at the counter, squeezing frosting onto some cupcakes using a plastic baggie. Frosting lay across one cupcake like a fat worm, drooping all the way down to the plate. The others were covered in messy swirls, some piled too high and some nearly bare. I had to laugh. “Good grief, Heidi. Nobody is going to buy those ugly things.”
She looked at me over her shoulder, and a blob of icing plopped onto the floor. “These would go like hotcakes. Like my hotcakes, in fact. Everybody knows my baking is ugly but delicious. These aren’t for sale, though. They’re for Loretta’s party tomorrow afternoon.”
Loretta was Heidi’s granddaughter. “Poor girl.” I tried to smother my laugh, but then Abe got to laughing, and even Heidi had to join in.
“You think you could do better?”
“I know I could.”
“Do the rest of them, then.” She pulled out another tray of naked cupcakes from the fridge, and then two more from the cabinet under the counter. There had to be at least fifty cupcakes.
“How many people are coming to a five-year-old’s party?”
“You know my daughter. She goes overboard.”
I took the baggie of pink frosting from Heidi, and held it pinched between two fingers. It was covered in sticky frosting. “Do you have any more frosting and a clean bag? You cut your hole too big.”
Heidi took out a gigantic bowl of pink frosting from the pantry. She patted me on the back of my shoulder, leaving a sticky handprint, I was sure. “It’s a good thing you’re here, doll. I’ll pay you time and a half if you take this mess off my hands. And make sure Abe gets to eat one of those ugly ones.” She winked at Abe and disappeared down the hallway and into her office.
“See, Abe? You still got cake.” I dropped a cupcake into his hand and smiled. I was content here. This kitchen felt like home. Abe sat on Heidi’s stool, propping his bare, dirty feet on the rung. My hands itched to get busy, and I let purposeful work drive me as I spooned icing into a large baggie and cut a hole, just the right size. Perfect, smooth swirls of bubblegum pink frosting topped the cupcake, a skill I learned from my mother. Calm stole over my body as I worked, my mind numbing out and the steady repetition muting my anxiety.
The cupcakes finished and wrapped up for Heidi to take to her granddaughter’s party tomorrow, I washed my hands in the scalding hot water. Dan left for the night and Heidi went to turn the closed sign on the door.
I didn’t have any belongings to gather, and Heidi didn’t require pleasantries such as good-byes, so I pulled the back door open and motioned Abe through.
I pulled the door shut behind us, and nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw Paul leaning against the wall by the door, a grin on his face. “You startled me,” I said, breathless.
He chuckled and slipped his hands in his pockets, walking in that springy, carefree way he had. “Sorry. I went in for some tea a little bit ago, and I saw you through the kitchen door, so I thought I’d wait outside for you.”
I glanced at him over the top of Abe’s head. His hair was growing longer, and I liked it. The front of it rested on his cheekbones. I wanted to reach over and push it back.
“Where are your shoes, dude?” he asked, looking at Abe’s feet.
“Where are your manners, dude?” I shot back.
He laughed loudly, throwing his head back. “Point taken. Where are you headed? Home?”
Paul looked to me for the answer, but it was Abe who spoke. “Not home. Not yet.”
Paul’s jaw tensed and his eyes hardened. He knew what that meant. “Alright, no big deal. We need to kill some time; we’ll just go for a walk.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I want to.”
“What were you doing at Heidi’s, anyway?” I asked. “You were the one trying to get me to go to Malcolm’s party and now you’re not even there.”
“I needed to get out of there for a little bit.”
I knew exactly why. I could see it plain as day. “It was supposed to be your party too, Paul. I bet the cake even had your name on it right beside Malcolm’s. So I imagine people kept telling you congratulations, and then you had to tell them you weren’t going to college after all, and their faces went blank, not knowing what to say, so you filled the silence with some joke.”
“Jeez, Celia,” Abe said.
But Paul smiled, so I continued, “And that scene repeated about fifty times, until you ran out of jokes.”
He laughed. “You got a crystal ball tucked in your pocket?”
I let my eyes rest on his for a second. “You had another joke in you, after all.”
We reached the sidewalk, and Abe reached down to wipe the pebbles off the soles of his feet. When he straightened, he had a scowl on his face. “Why are you mad at Paul?”
“I’ll tell you why, Abe. He got into college for next fall, but he’s not going because his mom lost her job. So his big plan is to work at the plastics factory after he graduates.”
Abe stood quietly for a minute, then looked over at Paul. “You should go to college. You shouldn’t stay here because of someone else.” He let his eyes slide slowly over to me.
I blinked, and meandered down the sidewalk, needing to move. Abe didn’t like that I was always trying to babysit him. He told me so on a regular basis—until he was scared, and then he needed me and I knew I was doing the right thing.
“Not you, too, man?” Paul said.
Abe was thoughtful for a moment. “Aren’t you sad that you don’t get to do what you want?”
It was Paul’s turn to look over at me, and he kept his eyes on mine as he spoke. “I’ve learned to take things as they come, and I’ve never been let down by finding the good in each day as it stands.”
I had to smile in spite of the knot of worry in my belly. Paul was good for Abe. His natural ability to focus on finding the good within the bad encouraged Abe to keep doing the same. I was thankful for these two boys—both so good at something I was so bad at.