Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls(38)

Harley is kicking her legs, annoyed.

It’s just a tat, she says. Big fucking whoop.

Efraim shows up in his new Phantom Rolls-Royce—a birthday present. He stands in the doorway of Craig’s bedroom and spins the keys around his pointer finger. Anyone wanna go for a ride? Mink interior.

How big’s your exhaust pipe? Or stick shift? Harley asks him.

Big.

Harley squeezes my hand, presses her lips to my ear—Watch this.

That stick, she says. Want to watch us pull our skirts up and fuck it?



My father doesn’t live out west, Harley tells me one day. He lives in Miami.

The Bolivian? I ask. He’s fifteen minutes away?

Yeah, she says. But that doesn’t mean I see any of him.

What’s his name?

Doesn’t matter.

This confession comes the same week Harley’s mom and boyfriend argue in her living room all night. Harley’s mom began lighting matches, flicking them onto furniture, cushions, trying to burn the house down—fry, motherfucker—before the boyfriend dragged the hose inside. The fight was over which television show they would watch.

We called the police and left in our pajamas before anybody got there.



The girls don’t typically come to my house, but today, after school, I need to stop by and pick up more clothes. It’s my turn to contribute to our shared collection. We’ve all dropped down a couple of sizes since we met, since we don’t eat, and what I do eat are clenbuterol hydrochloride horse respiratory pills, the kind Calorie Valerie, a girl at my school, gets from her mother. We order the pills on the Internet using my parents’ credit cards.

Inside, my own mother is sitting at the dining room table with all the lights off. She’s spilling candle wax onto a sheet of paper, and onto the surface of the table, and onto her hands.

Look, she says, holding her palms out to us.

She did dry out in North Carolina, years ago. She shook it out, let the fever take over. On the worst days, her body let out a slime that I wiped from her skin in a circular motion. I changed the sheets. Massaged her limbs. After that, we had a good span of time together, the three of us—Mom, Dad, and Child.

But last summer, before school one morning, my mother slipped in the shower and shattered her teeth, her jaw. The doctor prescribed pills for the pain, for the surgeries and wires and caps. Soon after, more doctors. More scripts. When I think about my parents, these are still the days that ache most: Internet prescription mills calling our house. My father screaming into the phone, One more pill and I’ll fucking end you, slamming the receiver into the wall. Just last year, there had been so much hope. But then the scripts, the phone calls. The clicks of those locked bathroom doors.

My uncle got caught soon after—that Wolf of Wall Street business. So did my father’s friends. My father didn’t go to prison—he went to New York instead. My mother stayed here, with me.

Let’s go, I say.

I collect my clothes in a plastic Walgreens bag and slam the door on our way out.

In the driver’s seat, I pull the top down. Harley has taught me enough about driving to get us around, though she still has to help me with directions sometimes. There’s no greater thrill than taking I-95 in my father’s car, speeding, hoping for the scream of sirens.

Before I pull out of the horseshoe driveway, another car pulls in behind us. A black, cubic car. Spinning rims of chrome on the tires—tinted windows.

A man in a gray suit gets out of the car and begins walking toward us. He walks with a slight limp. I recognize him immediately, from years ago; he was in my living room with Cousin Cindy. She always called him Boca Brad, the richest dealer in the south. Nelle is sitting behind me in the car and lowers her sunglasses down her nose.

What’s up, hot stuff?

Don’t, I say.

Boca Brad smacks his gum between his teeth. His cologne carries on the humidity and nips in my throat. He bends down to see Nelle a little bit closer.

Here to see her mom, he says, pointing at me. But maybe I’m really here to see you.

He reaches out his hand and cups her under the chin, his fingers digging into her cheeks. I have seen men touch Nelle for all the months I have known her, and I will see them do it again, and again, in the months after this moment, but I have never seen Nelle truly scared or frightened of anything like she is right now, still as an animal in crosshairs, like she’s just seen something too grown-up for us to understand yet. Was it his smell? The dig of his nails? The way he held her gaze? Later, she’ll tell me she couldn’t be sure, but there was something, she said, that kind of woman-intuition one hears about. It came ringing in.

Drive, she says, swatting the man’s hand away.



My father is flying my mother up to New York for a visit.

I begged him on the phone—Daddy, she needs you. She needs this. She needs help. I want my mother back, I want her grilled ham and cheese sandwiches and her watercolor paints and her half-remembered, half-imagined stories. I want the smell of her, like gardenias. I want everything about her. I want her to live. But I also know that sobriety will mean I’ll have to go to school again; I’ll have to give the credit cards back. I’ll have to stay home and put my dishes away, and I won’t get to drive my father’s car. I won’t wake up under a highway overpass anymore, or beside a motel pool, or on the beach with horseshoe crab shells in my hair and men I don’t know. Most of all, I know if I have a mother, I can’t keep the girls.