The People We Keep(100)
It’s funny to think of Mrs. Spencer as a bitch. I always just thought of her as a grown-up.
“I saw him,” I tell Margo, “Matty. This spring. I think they did his teeth.”
“Like they aren’t real?”
“Exactly. They don’t look like they used to.”
“Amazing.” Margo shakes her head. “What will they think of next? They nip things that don’t need tucking. Give fake teeth to someone with perfectly decent ones. That boy had fine teeth to begin with. He never had any problems chewing.”
I yawn. I can’t help myself.
“Well,” Margo says. “What’s say we close up here and turn in for the night. You must be exhausted.”
I think of the motorhome, the way it used to smell like mildew and rust. I think about driving down the dirt road to get there. I worry I’ll end up puking on the side of the road again. “I don’t think I can do it, Margo. Go to the motorhome. I don’t think—”
“Don’t be silly. I have my couch all pulled out and made up for me to sleep on so you can have my bed.”
“You do?”
“Of course,” she says. “Your father can’t very well yell at me for overstepping my bounds now, can he?” She claps her hand over her mouth. Her face goes pale. “I’m sorry. I just—I always felt bad taking you back to that motorhome. I didn’t mean to…”
I’m ready to cry, to know that Margo might have actually wanted me. To know that she really would have taken me home with her if she could. But I think if I cry she will and if she cries I’ll cry harder and between us, we might have too many tears to ever stop. So instead, I say, “I can sleep on the couch. Really, it’s okay,” because I can’t let any of it sink in. I could drown, so easily, I could drown.
“April,” she says, grabbing my arm and shaking it, “use that delicate condition to your advantage. Take the bed.”
* * *
Margo’s apartment looks pretty much the same as it always has, except she has a cat now. “I’m one of those ladies,” she tells me when a dark blur darts across the living room as we kick our shoes off. “That’s Stuart.” She points to the chair he’s taken refuge under. Yellow eyes stare back at us.
Later, when we’re gabbing in her kitchen over a piece of chocolate cake I just know will give me indigestion, Stuart emerges and rubs his skinny little body against my leg. I can feel his ribs ripple along my calf. He’s inky black except for a white muzzle and three out of four white feet. He has too many toes on each paw and a cauliflower ear. He’s not pretty.
“I didn’t take you for a cat person.”
“I’m not,” she says, reaching down and swishing her fingers together. He runs to her and rubs his face into the side of her hand. “I’m getting lonely in my old age, I guess.” She smiles this sad, tired smile.
And something about all of it just makes me fall apart—Margo being so lonely that she has to get an ugly little cat, and my father dying, and the fact that all I can picture is some bones on a hospital bed in the shape of him, hooked up to machines like the ones that flashed and beeped while Matty was in a coma on All My Days. Something about the whole thing makes me so sad that I can’t even stand it. “What kind of a person am I that I wasn’t even here?” I say. “I should have driven faster.”
“Sweetie,” Margo says, handing me a napkin, “you know I’ve done my best to never say a bad thing about your father. You search back and think on what I’ve said and you’ll be hard-pressed to find many ill-meaning words.” She sighs. “I did that for you and I thought I was doing the best I could. But not now when you’re beating yourself up. He made this choice. He chose not to get treatment and push everyone away. He made the choice to not go after you when you left.”
“Gary told him not to,” I say. “I begged you, so you got Gary to tell him to let me go. It was me. He was just doing what I wanted.”
Margo takes a deep breath and presses her lips together, like she’s holding back her words until they get in line. “When Gary went to talk to him that time, it wasn’t so he’d give you the car. It was to make him come get you. Gary told him that no man lets a little girl go out on her own like that. No man lets his responsibilities pass him by. That’s what really happened.”
I feel the same drop in my stomach and flush in my veins that I get when I’m driving away and realize I’ve left something behind. Margo pulls another napkin from the holder on the table and gives it to me. Mine is soaked already.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I thought I was protecting you. I tricked myself into thinking you wouldn’t notice what a bad father he was if I didn’t point it out too much. I thought it was better for you to think he was letting you go because he thought it was best than for you to know that he wasn’t even thinking. Don’t you go feeling responsible for his failings. They aren’t yours, April.”
“When both parents crap out on you—I’m the common denominator, you know.”
Margo grabs my hand and squeezes. “You’re the gift that came from two broken people. They were weak, and hurt, and cowardly, and somehow managed to make this miracle girl who is so full of piss and vinegar that she survived it all. Maybe you need to mourn who they weren’t. Maybe that’s what you’re here for now.”