Don't Fail Me Now(4)

Cass looks at me as if for permission, and I nod. Reluctantly, she follows the officers back down the hall, slouching into her big sweatshirt like it’s an invisibility cloak.

“See, she’s okay,” I whisper into the top of Denny’s head. “Everything’s okay.” I squeeze again, three times. Lie, lie, lie.

“Where’s Mom?” he whimpers. “I wanna see Mom.”

“Mom . . . has to stay here for the night,” I say. “But Aunt Sam is going to pick us up, and we’ll have a sleepover at her house.” I say “sleepover” like we’ll be sleeping on lumpy blankets on the living room floor by choice, as some kind of fun adventure that’ll end in ghost stories and s’mores.

“I hate Aunt Sam’s,” Denny says quietly.

“I know, meatball. It won’t be for long this time.”

“Max says it will.”

Of course he does. Max’s contribution to any conversation is usually pessimistic. “Well,” I sigh, “tell Max he doesn’t know what I know.” Turning over the paper where I’ve been listing the names, I write Dennis Devereux inside the heart at the center of the tree. “See?” I say. “You’re safe in there.” But Denny looks unsure; even little kids know bullshit when they smell it.

“What if Aunt Sam doesn’t come?” he asks.

“She’s coming,” I say.

“When?”

“Soon,” I whisper, raising my eyes to the ceiling, repeating it like a prayer even though it’s been years and way too many sins since I’ve seen the inside of a church. “She’s coming soon.”

? ? ?

An hour later our aunt is still AWOL, but we do have some surprise visitors: a dozen crazy drunk bachelor partiers who tried to sneak out on their tab at Scores. They’re so loud and sloppy while the officers try to deal with them that Tight Hair sourly ushers the three of us into a nearby break room so that we don’t get trampled or scarred for life hearing all the shouting about some stripper named Nico and the unusual locations of her body piercings. Cass and Denny both brighten when they see the vending machines, so I give them each $3 to buy whatever they want, and as we cluster around a small table eating our snacks and sharing a can of Sprite with a straw pushed through the tab, for a minute things start to feel okay. Normal, even.

“When’s your tree thing due, Denny?” I ask between handfuls of carefully curated Skittles combinations.

“I dunno,” he shrugs, licking Doritos dust off his thumb.

“Just tell them our family tree burned down,” Cass says with a wry smile. “Deforestation.”

“Huh?”

“She’s kidding,” I say, but Denny’s already forgotten.

“If we stay here all night, can we stay home from school tomorrow?” he asks hopefully.

“We’re not staying all night,” I say.

“Maybe we are,” Cass mumbles.

“Well, even if we do . . .” I don’t know how to explain to them that no one’s just going to drop us off at our doorstep like we’ve been on some kind of extra-credit field trip, that we might not get to live in our house or sleep in our beds again for weeks or even months. We might end up with Aunt Sam, or we might get sent to foster care (Don’t let them split you up!: the last thing Mom yelled as the potbellied cop pushed her head down into the back of the cruiser), but no matter what happens, the one thing we can depend on is that someone will make us keep going to school. I realize Cass and Denny are staring at me, waiting for me to finish, so I just shake my head. “We can’t get out of school,” I say. “I mean, who’s going to write our absence notes?”

“Mom can! She was there!” Denny says brightly, starting in on a Three Musketeers bar, and without warning tears spring to my eyes. His trust breaks my heart.

The thing is, Denny doesn’t really have a reason not to trust Mom. He forced her to get her shit together—at least as much as shit like hers can be contained (I see it like, most people trip and fall every once in a while, but Mom walked off a cliff when she met Buck and has been falling ever since without realizing it, like one of those Roadrunner cartoons where for a second the dumbass coyote thinks he’s just walking on air). The years right before Denny were some of her lowest. She had a string of failed part-time jobs that introduced Cass and me to a rotating roster of strange and wet-eyed babysitters—mostly friends Mom made at the bar—who would use up all our Hi-C making mixed drinks and then either fall asleep on the couch or yell at someone on the phone. She got on unemployment for a while and seemed more stable, but then came her back-to-back arrests for shoplifting and drunk driving, and Aunt Sam moved in with us for a few months. I wish I could say those months were better, but Sam’s basically just a mean drunk without the drunk part. As Mom likes to say, she’s got a big ol’ bug up her ass about us living in “her” house. It’s to Mom’s credit that even when she was using, she never took my aunt up on her offers to buy the house back, because I don’t even want to think about what she could have done to herself with that kind of cash.

“Michelle, you can do Mom’s writing, right?” Cass asks. Apparently the conversation’s been going on without me, and now the two of them are plotting.

“I’m not doing that,” I say flatly. The last thing I need is to be worrying about what those two are doing all day by themselves; school hours—when I can forget about my family for a while, replacing them with Spanish verb conjugations and pointless, empty conversations with the friends I never invite home—are the only times the anxious static subsides.