The Animators(56)

Shauna makes a move to join, but doesn’t. She folds her arms across her chest, hangs back.

“You know,” I say over our mother’s shoulder, “the PT Cruiser is reported to fall out of alignment faster than any other car on the market. It’s really poorly proportioned.”

“So?”

“Just saying. You drive your kids to school in that thing. Thought you’d want to know.”

“I’m surprised you know so much about cars. Living in New York, where y’all don’t even need cars.”

I feel Mom sigh. “Girls, will you all shut the hell up.”

“Mommy’s going through the change,” Shauna whispers.

“I mean it,” she yells.

We stand like that for a minute.

The Mazda creaks open. I unlatch myself and turn to find Mel crawling ass-end first out of the front seat. She thumbs over her shoulder, grinning uneasily. “Just putting the parking brake on.”

I wave her over. “This is my business partner, Mel,” I tell them. “She’s the one I do the cartoons with.”

Hands are shaken. Shauna takes a hard look at the smudged Docs on Mel’s feet, her horn-rims. Mel takes a gander at the teddy bear print on Shauna’s scrubs. Shauna’s boobs are bigger than I remember. They look pendulous, middle-aged. This is hard information to process. Mom stands in the middle, sniffling.

“Nice to meet both of you,” Mel says.

“Same to you.” Shauna shifts, props her hands on her lower back. “How long y’all been working together?”

“About ten years? Little longer. Are you sure the car’s okay there?”

“Ain’t nothing gonna happen to the car,” Mom says. She pulls a wadded pink Kleenex from her back pocket and swipes her nose. “You’re fine.”

The wind blows. There’s a dark green smell, something sweetly mineral and fresh, coming from the dip in the land separating Mom’s yard from where Shauna lives, her new house on the old Caudill property. It’s the pines, and soil, and grass, the last fresh growth before the winter. Something else I’ve forgotten I know—the scent up here, the hills so much themselves you can smell it all the way back to your spine. The sun warms my head, close to bald; the wind cools it. I close my eyes.

My mother grabs me. “Sharon Kay. What’s wrong.”

“I’m fine. Just feels good to get out of the car.”

Mel pokes me. Whispers, “Sharon Kay.”

Shauna smiles wide at her. An outsider. She wants to see what she can get out of Mel. “You went to college with Sharon, right?”

“Yeah.”

“In New York.”

“Upstate.”

Shauna nods, noncommittal. She’s waiting to see whether Mel’s going to make a big deal about having gone to Ballister, will judge accordingly. But Mel refuses to elaborate. She’s making it her job to scale herself down for this visit—being, as she is, on business.

“Always meant to visit Sharon,” Shauna continues. “But I never made it up there.”

“That’s a shame.”

“What was it like?”

Mel shrugs. “Bunch of rich weirdos. I could take it or leave it.”

Shauna lifts her eyebrows. “Are you a rich weirdo?”

“No. Just a regular weirdo.”

“Uh huh.”

“But not as weird as them.”

Shauna crosses her arms over her chest. Family genetics mean spreading out is inevitable; we are an insistently lardy people. This is me in five years. Shauna’s thighs are crying out for release from her pants. She squeezes them together, waiting for Mel to say something.

Mel looks over her shoulder to make sure my mother, checking the mailbox, is out of earshot. “We went to school with this one kid whose dad ran GM,” she says low.

“Is that right.”

“He used to have to start fires before he could come,” she whispers. “Used to set little fires in the wastebasket in his dorm room, and then time himself when he was doing it with his girlfriend.”

“No woman would put up with that,” Shauna says.

“She would. He was rich.”

This shuts Shauna up.

“He almost burned down this fifteen-million-dollar dorm on campus. He was in the bushes whacking it when the fire department came to hose it all down.”

Shauna purses her lips. Mel has impressed her. “Well, I thought that place was real conservative, to hear Sharon tell it.”

“I never said that.” I turn to Mel as we go inside. “Have I ever said that?”

Mel shrugs. She’s peering around the living room now, taking notes: fingers a pink doily on an end table, crouches in front of an old red-washed Sears studio portrait of the three of us as kids. I’ve been shoved into Jared’s arms. A diaper shows below the ruffle of my dress. Shauna poses beside him, pudgy hands slapped onto his knee, told stay just like that. In a nearby photo, Jared’s a toddler circa the Carter administration, haloed by crimson light; he stares, stunned, to the right. Behind his head, a transparency of his face gazes in the opposite direction.

“I can’t believe I’m really here,” Mel mutters.

“You cain’t,” Shauna says, sounding very much like Mom—half question, half demonstrated exclamation: a what in the world is she saying? to an invisible audience.