Back at Trailertopia, I killed the Monster Carlo’s engine and I practically ran into my trailer. I slammed the door behind me, my heart hammering.
It was him. It was definitely him.
I put my hands over my ears and paced my small trailer. What the heck what the heck what the heck? What was happening?
I stopped in mid-stride and scrubbed my face in my hands. I had to get a grip. What was I freaking out about? Nothing was happening. I was just freaking out for no good reason. Yes, it was him. What did I think, that he would be gone from the face of the earth?
I thought about that leer on his face and my blood turned cold.
I groaned and began to pace again, then let out a yelp when someone knocked on my door.
I checked the window. It was Frank. Why was Frank knocking on my door? He always just walked right in.
I grasped the knob, but it didn’t turn, and I realized I’d locked it behind me when I came in. I hardly ever locked my door. I took comfort, in that regard, in knowing I didn’t have anything worth stealing. But my first instinct today had been to lock it.
Get a grip, I told myself again. You’re getting yourself worked up over nothing.
“What’s up?” Frank asked as he came inside and fell into the recliner. He was already reaching for the remote.
“Nothing,” I said. I didn’t even come close to pulling it off, though.
He froze before he hit the power button. “Where’s Stump?”
I looked around, then gasped as I realized I’d left Stump at Tony’s house. I’d forgotten all about her! My own baby!
What kind of horrible person was I, forgetting her own child? I groaned as I realized I would have to go back over to Tony’s to get her.
What if he asked me to spend the night? What if he wanted to talk about the ‘work situation’ with Joanna? What if that turned out to be awful, too?
I dropped to the sofa and looked at Frank. “Frank, would you mind doing me a huge, huge favor?”
“Sure,” he said. Frank was the most uncomplicated guy I knew. Feed him, let him watch your cable TV, and he would do pretty much anything.
“Will you go over to Tony’s and get Stump for me?”
He studied me then. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing. It’s nothing, I just…I left her over there while Viv and I were meeting with a potential client–” I wasn’t really going to do this job with Viv, was I? How could I possibly? “Anyway, I left Stump there and I forgot to pick her up, but I don’t think I can go back over there right now.” Why? Would he ask why? What would I tell him?
Frank didn’t ask why, though. He just studied me. Then he sniffed.
He was smelling for alcohol, I realized. Frank was well aware of my history. Not long after he moved into the trailer beside mine, I’d come home drunk one night and made it only as far as my front deck. I threw up over the railing, then sat down to wait, in case I wasn’t done yet, and passed out. He called 911 when he came out the next morning and saw what he thought was a dead next-door neighbor on her front deck.
Waking to ambulance sirens had not convinced me to stop drinking. It had taken getting my third DUI, and Les showing up to preach to me in the jail, to do that. Frank had decided we were friends that first day, though, after he found out I wasn’t dead and I invited him to come inside for coffee. He’d been there when I first got sober, been there when I found Stump on the side of the road and brought her home, and been there all through almost two years of sobriety.
I guess you never get over that initial impression, though, because his first thought when I acted weird was that I must be drinking.
Here’s what my own brain said as I watched Frank’s wheels turn: why didn’t I think of that? I could be drinking right now! This whole situation could be wrestled down to a manageable size once I had the perspective of a glass or two of wine. Or a bottle. I could get completely plastered, so blitzed that I didn’t know my own name, much less a runaway teenager’s name, or the name of the pedophile at her ninth birthday party.
It had been a long time since the craving had hit me so hard.
“I’m not drinking,” I said to Frank, but I was also kind of saying it to me. The voice in my head said, You could be. When it comes right down to it, there’s nothing to stop you.
While Frank was getting Stump, I could run down to the convenience store on the corner and grab a six pack. I would be back before he knew it. I could hide the beer in my bedroom and drink it—he would never know. No one would ever know.
Frank was still looking at me suspiciously. I have been told that my face can’t keep a secret.
“I’m not drinking,” I said again. I sounded defensive.
“How about we go together, and you wait in the car while I go in and get her.”
I shook my head. “Tony might come out and want to talk to me.”
“Y’all had a fight?”
“No. I just…”
“I can call Les,” he said.
I didn’t want to see Les. Les would ask questions. I had no answers—I only had more questions. Everything felt so huge and dark, and I had no idea how to put it into words. I didn’t know what I thought, I didn’t know what I felt aside from abject terror. And I didn’t understand why I felt that.
But Frank wasn’t going to let this go, and I needed Stump. I sighed and slumped against the back of the sofa. “I’ll text him,” I said.
Frank waited until I pulled out my phone.
I’m having a moment, I texted to Les. I don’t want to talk about it, but Frank won’t leave until someone else is here with me.
Three dancing dots…
We’ll be over in fifteen minutes.
I showed the screen to Frank. He nodded.
We’ll be over in fifteen minutes meant Les’s wife Bonnie was coming, too. Ordinarily that wouldn’t bother me. I liked Bonnie, and she’d certainly been generous enough to not complain all the times Les answered my calls or sat with me on the hard nights.
But right now, the thought of more people around me made me want to scream. I needed to be alone. I would have preferred to be alone with Stump, but I would have taken fifteen minutes of just being alone. Alone to gather my thoughts, to release some of the tears that kept threatening to spill out, to just breathe without being watched.
“You don’t need to wait for them,” I said. “I’ll be okay for fifteen minutes.”
Frank blinked but didn’t move. Was he also calculating how long it would take for me to run down to the convenience store?
“I’ll wait until he gets here,” he said.
I launched myself off the sofa, too antsy and irritable to sit still. I went into my bedroom and stood there staring at the wall and wishing I could just run away.
I had to get out of there. I stalked back to the living room and pointed a finger at Frank. “I’m just going to walk around Trailertopia until Les gets here!”
He looked at me, wide-eyed, but let me go without an argument.
I slammed out the front door. Good grief. I hated being watched! I hated being treated like I was a bomb about to go off. What made it worse was that I felt very much like a bomb about to go off.
“You’re making too big a deal of this,” I muttered under my breath. I wasn’t sure if I was talking about me or Frank, but I figured it applied to both of us.
But Frank was taking his cues from me, I realized. I had to get my head on straight or I was going to drag him down with me.
“God,” I whispered as I stomped down the winding streets of Trailertopia. “What? I need…something. Peace. Comfort.”
It suddenly hit me that an omnipotent God would know I was going to see that picture today.
“You could have given me a little heads up,” I muttered. I felt blindsided, and that made me angry.
Maybe God had tried to prepare me, though. I tried to recall my Bible verse from that morning. We were doing a church study of the Psalms, and so far, it seemed that it was mostly David swinging wildly back and forth between, “I will sing the praises of God, the powerful who vanquishes my enemies!” and “God, why won’t you vanquish my enemies?” Apparently, David had a lot of enemies.
I’d read Psalm 9 that morning, and the main thing I remembered was that it was, once again, David talking about the blood of his enemies and nations falling into pits. There was something in there about how the Lord is the refuge of the oppressed.
I wasn’t oppressed, though. I was freaking completely out and acting irrationally, and I really wanted a drink. Did that still count?
“Anyway, I think I need some refuge,” I muttered.
“But God will never forget the needy!” I cried out loud as I remembered one particular verse. It had caught my eye that morning because I’d spent so much of my life feeling both needy and forgotten, and I was feeling particularly thankful because I had a stable life and people who cared about me now.
The Lovely Joanna’s face popped back into my head. Tony’s smile. Shawn’s leering grin. Things suddenly felt much less stable.
“…huh?”
I looked up to see Naomi, who lived in the trailer at the end of my row, giving me a confused look as I marched past her house.
“Psalm 9,” I explained. “God will never forget the needy.”
“Oh, yeah, right.” She wheezed out a laugh. “Well…have a good day!”
By the time I made the circuit of the park and reached my trailer again, Les and Bonnie were making their way up my front deck, Frank was pulling out of his driveway to go get Stump, and the howler monkeys had stopped screeching in my brain.
Yes, that had been Shawn in the house with a girl who had later run away and hadn’t been seen in a year.
Yes, Tony had a beautiful woman in his home, and it didn’t make sense to me.
These were facts. They weren’t good facts. Actually, they were very bad facts—I didn’t like any of them. I would need to face them both, and decide what, if anything, I was going to do about those facts. Just acknowledging that had me feeling a heavy rock in the pit of my stomach.
But in my head, the crisis had shifted from there’s-a-fire-tornado-with-me-inside-my-trailer-right-now to there’s-a-Category-5-hurricane-two-days-offshore-and-we-have-to-react-or-we’re-all-going-to-die. Both situations were very bad. But one allowed me a moment to think about how I was going to deal.
“What’s going on?” Les asked.
I shook my head. “Nothing. Well, something. I just…I saw someone that I knew a long time ago, and…I wasn’t expecting it. That’s all. It freaked me out. I got freaked out.” I wasn’t going to even bring up The Lovely Joanna. That felt like a betrayal of Tony.
“Who was it?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. “I mean, I will talk about it. But not right now.”
Les studied me for a long moment. I knew his philosophy. Get it out, fast. Don’t sit on things, because they fester.
But finally, he nodded and said, “Okay, then. Do you want us to stick around?”
Now that I was calmed down a bit, I took a deep breath. My throat closed and I had to swallow before I could say, “Yes. If you don’t mind.”
“We don’t mind,” Bonnie said.
“I’ll order dinner,” I said. So what if I was one day closer to weigh-in day? I was having a major crisis. “Cluckers? Do you like Cluckers?” Crises called for fried chicken strips and extra Cluckers sauce.
“Of course,” Les said. “Nobody doesn’t like Cluckers.”
Les and Bonnie made themselves comfortable, Les turned on the television, and I ordered Cluckers’ family-size dinner with extra sauce and four fried apple pies to be delivered.
Frank and Stump made it back just after the Cluckers van pulled away, and Stump followed her sniffing nose up the front steps.
“Where’ve you been?” Les asked Stump.
Stump didn’t answer, of course. The question was meant for me.
I ignored it. I didn’t want to talk about why I was uncomfortable going over to Tony’s. I crouched to greet Stump. I tried to cuddle her, but she was way more interested in the chicken strips, so I decided to give her some room. I didn’t like it when people got between me and my dinner, either.
“Did Tony say anything about me not picking her up?”
Frank shook his head. “Nah. No big deal, man.”
I’d reassured Tony often enough that Frank was nothing to worry about. Frank wasn’t interested in me, and I wasn’t interested in him, not romantically. It was good, I reminded myself, that Tony wasn’t the jealous type, because I relied on Frank a lot to help me with Stump. So, it was a good thing that sending Frank to pick up my dog instead of coming myself didn’t raise any red flags.
A good thing.
Was he alone? I wanted to ask Frank, but didn’t. If the answer was no, what would I do?
I cut the breading off a strip and chopped up the chicken part for Stump. I had no idea if this was any healthier for her than just giving her a whole chicken strip, but I was in a place where I needed to give her a treat and that eased my guilt a little bit.
“Frank, let’s watch one of your telenovelas,” I suggested gaily. We watched those dramas together sometimes, and Frank always had to explain what was going on because it was all in Spanish, but that was even better. I could focus on what he was saying and forget, for a few minutes, about the hurricane bearing down on me.
I grabbed plates and plunked them on the coffee table, made sure everyone had a drink, napkins, salt, sauce, and settled in. I was acting a bit manic, and I could feel it—could feel the other three going along with it. On one hand, I hated it and wanted to tell them to get over it. On the other, I really kind of appreciated it. I was only feeling a bit less like a bomb about to go off. I could still get knocked over and explode.
I munched my chicken strips without tasting them and nodded along as Frank explained the drama playing out on my television. But corralling my mind wasn’t going as well as I’d hoped.
That was him. Really him. He was back in my life, somehow. No matter how much I’d grown, how much I’d worked to convince myself all of that business was in the past and I was no longer that same person…here we both were.
It was bizarre, thinking about that time again. I’d confronted my mom about that night, months ago, so it had been months instead of years that I’d thought of him. Thought about that night.
He’d groomed me, I realized as I pretended to listen to Frank’s translation. And of course, I’d been easy prey. Mom dragged me around when she went to her friends’ houses because she had to. I was still too young to be left alone, even by her lax parenting standards. She didn’t like me getting a lot of attention or being ‘all up in her business,’ so I was usually parked in the corner with something to ‘keep me out of her hair.’ At least this time there was TV. It was the middle of the day, so The Price is Right was on. I liked that show, because I liked pretending what would happen if I won the prizes. Obviously, the best prizes were the cars or the trips, but I even got excited thinking about winning the boring ones like a washer and dryer. No more laundromat.
Some of the games I didn’t understand—they required being good at math and at seven, I wasn’t there yet. My favorite was Plinko, because it looked like there wasn’t much involved besides luck. The players stood on a platform at the top of a giant pegboard the size of a wall. They dropped big chips, about the size of paper plates, into the top of the peg board and the chip fell, bouncing off pegs on its way down. When the chip landed in a slot at the bottom marked with a prize, the player won that prize. When it landed in a slot marked with nothing, the player won nothing.
Shawn came in while I was watching Plinko and mentally willing the woman playing the game where to put her chip.
“Hey, Plinko,” he said. “My favorite.” He dropped onto the sofa beside me. “Where’s she going to put it?”
The woman was moving the chip back and forth between a few of the slots, listening to the crowd shout instructions at her.
“Not there,” Shawn sneered to the woman on TV. “You’re going home with nothing.”
I giggled, excited that someone was taking the time to sit with me, to include me in something.
“You’re going home with a big fat zero,” I said to the woman on the TV.
The woman let her chip fall and it bounced, bounced, bounced its way down the board, landing in a slot marked with a zero.
“Told ya,” Shawn said.
“We told ya!” I echoed.
“Which one should she try next?” he asked me.
I grinned and jumped up, pointing to a slot on the board.
“Good choice. She could win either the $5000 or the $1000 on that.”
I felt very smart.
I remembered a lot of details about that day. I remembered feeling special, feeling happy that I was getting the attention of a grownup. I realized now that he wasn’t a grownup yet. He was probably 17 or 18. But to a seven-year-old, he was an adult, and he wanted to hang out with me. He took me to get dinner at Dairy Queen, and I remember looking out the passenger side window and wondering what the kids at school would think if they could see me now. I was obviously very cool if I was hanging out with adults who weren’t my parents. I was practically an adult.
He didn’t treat me like a kid. He treated me, I thought, like he would treat someone his own age. Like we were the same.
“Hey, wasn’t she dying last time I was here?” Les asked Frank, pointing to a woman dressed in a handkerchief hem dress and chunky heels.
I blinked and tried to focus on the television.
“No, she—oh wait. Yeah. She was dying, but then the new doctor came to town and she got a shot. So now she’s entered this salsa dancing contest.”
Les looked at me with a ‘how do you like that?’ face.
I tried to smile. I turned back to the television as if I couldn’t wait to see what happened next. I could see from the corner of my eye that Les was still watching me. I widened my eyes and whispered, “Whoa!” He went back to watching the TV.
Mom and Susan were happy to have me out of their hair. They left for a while and then came back, drunk and giggling, but we were fine because Shawn and I had our Dairy Queen tacos and were watching Liar Liar, that movie with Jim Carrey where he had lost the ability to lie. I laughed so hard I gave myself the hiccups, then Shawn laughed at my hiccups, which made me both laugh harder and get more hiccups.
It had probably been the best day of my life, up until that point. Which was what we call irony, I supposed.
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