The People We Keep(101)

“You’re too good to me, Margo,” I say, wiping my face with the napkin.

“I don’t think I’ve been good enough,” she says, and I realize she’s crying too.





— Chapter 63 —


Margo is gone before I wake up. She told me last night she was headed out early to make egg casseroles and crumb cake for anyone who stops by the diner after the funeral. Said she didn’t want “that poor Irene” to feel like she had to feed people on top of everything else.

I call to her anyway, wishing for an answer, hearing only the rattle of the heater. I have a crying hangover. Puffy face. My nose feels like it’s filled with cement. It’s strange to be in Margo’s apartment alone. When I walk into the living room her cat jumps off the coffee table to hide under the couch.

In the kitchen there’s a note, a strawberry Danish, and a glass of orange juice on the counter. The kitchen smells like coffee, but she didn’t leave me any. I’m sure it was on purpose. There’s a navy blue maternity dress hanging over the back of one of the kitchen chairs. The note says: Thought you might need this. Love, M. I wonder if it was one of Irene’s maternity dresses. It has a drop waist, a pleated skirt, and a square flappy collar with white trim like a sailor’s uniform. You know, because of all the pregnant ladies in the Navy.

I think about cutting the collar off and trying to make it something else, the way Carly would, but my father never cared what I looked like when he was alive I don’t think it’ll start to matter now. My long skirt with the stretchy waist is good enough.

On the back of the note she’s written the calling hours and the funeral time. There’s a viewing this morning. Like I’m supposed to go down to the church and have people stare at me while I look at his dead body so they can spend the next three years talking about how I didn’t react the right way. So they can pretend they know more about me than they really do.

I take the note with me so I'll remember what time the service is. I know enough to know it won’t feel good to see the motorhome, but I can’t stop myself.





— Chapter 64 —


Mrs. Varnick’s place is abandoned now. Margo says they had to put her in a home last year. Her son wanted her to live with them, but after years of Mrs. Varnick calling her daughter-in-law “the fat cow,” she was what Margo called “persona not gratas.”

Weeds grow up fast. There are sumac saplings where Mrs. Varnick used to park her car. Virginia creeper curling into a broken window.

And then, at the end of the road, there’s the motorhome. It’s not a clubhouse. It’s a closet. A tomb. It’s where he left me so he could forget I existed, the way Margo sends her fake Christmas tree to storage after New Year’s.

The white metal sides have rusty stains at every bolt, and one of the windows is broken. I feel like I should go in and search for some kind of understanding. Or maybe to clean everything, because whatever mess is in there shouldn’t be all that’s left of someone. But I can’t make my feet take me to the door. I don’t want to see what he left behind. I don’t want to remember what it felt like to live there. The whole motorhome leans like it might tip over, and I’m not exactly light on my feet.

The thing of it is, the motorhome doesn’t look much worse than it did when I lived in it. It hasn’t changed enough. I feel like if I look hard, I could still find splinters from my guitar in the dirt. I can almost feel the sting of my father’s hand on my cheek.

I walk out to the flooded house foundation. It’s so overgrown that I have to step around roots and bushwhack my way through. Something thorny scratches me and leaves a thin line of blood across the back of my hand. I sit on the edge of the foundation and rest my feet on the first step of what would have been the stairs to our basement. The water comes up to the step below, a film of leaves across the surface. It smells like rot.

It’s November again. Everything is dead or sleeping. I feel like it’s always November here. There’s never enough warmth or light or any of the things a person really needs. I poke at the leaves with a stick and think about who my parents weren’t until the cold seeps in through my skirt and I start to worry it might not be good for Max. My jacket won’t close over my belly anymore. I wonder if he can get cold in there.





— Chapter 65 —


I get to the church early. It’s this stone building with stained-glass windows and steps that look like they were designed just for wedding pictures. It’s probably the fanciest building in Little River. I’ve never been inside the chapel, just the basement for rummage sales. It’s weird to think about my dad walking through that arched doorway with Irene on Sundays. He didn’t even believe in God until she made him. And it’s not the kind of church that’s like, Jesus was nice so you should be too and feeds homeless people and all that stuff. It’s more like Here’s a bunch of ways you can judge people and feel better about yourself for it—the kind of church that would tell Ethan he was going to hell.

I sit in my car. I’m waiting to sneak in right before the service starts, so I can sit at the back without having to deal with all the people walking past me. But while I’m sitting there watching everyone go in, I start getting mad. The whole town shows up: Mrs. Hunter, Ida Winton, Molly Walker, Gary and his whore of a girlfriend, the Spencers. None of these people even liked my father. And all of them knew about me. They knew where I lived. They knew that he left me. They left me too. Instead of thinking that maybe a kid who lives in a motorhome in the woods might want to come over for cookies and milk after school, they told their kids not to play with me. They looked at me like I should be ashamed for existing, because my parents were divorced and my shoes were ratty and my hair was stringy and I always had dirt under my fingernails. I was something they could catch if they got too close, like my shame would rub off on them. They were happy to forget me, same as my dad. And now they’re all here in their Sunday best like they’re going to get God points for showing up to mourn a man who wasn’t even worth it.