The Best of Me(26)

“I understand that.”

“Well, good,” she said, and then we began to wrap the breakables.



In my version of the story, the problem began with the child next door, a third-grader who, according to my mother, was bad news right from the start. “Put it together,” she’d said when I first called to tell her about it. “Take a step back. Think.”

But what was there to think about? She was a nine-year-old girl.

“Oh, they’re the worst,” my mother said. “What’s her name? Brandi? Well, that’s cheap, isn’t it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but aren’t I talking to someone who named her daughter Tiffany?”

“My hands were tied!” she shouted. “The damned Greeks had me against the wall and you know it.”

“Whatever you say.”

“So this girl,” my mother continued—and I knew what she would ask before she even said it. “What does her father do?”

I told her there wasn’t a father, at least not one that I knew about, and then I waited as she lit a fresh cigarette. “Let’s see,” she said. “Nine-year-old girl named after an alcoholic beverage. Single mother in a neighborhood the police won’t even go to. What else have you got for me?” She spoke as if I’d formed these people out of clay, as if it were my fault that the girl was nine years old and her mother couldn’t keep a husband. “I don’t suppose this woman has a job, does she?”

“She’s a bartender.”

“Oh, that’s splendid,” my mother said. “Go on.”

The woman worked nights and left her daughter alone from four in the afternoon until two or three in the morning. Both were blond, their hair almost white, with invisible eyebrows and lashes. The mother darkened hers with pencil, but the girl appeared to have none at all. Her face was like the weather in one of those places with no discernible seasons. Every now and then, the circles beneath her eyes would shade to purple. She might show up with a fat lip or a scratch on her neck but her features betrayed nothing.

You had to feel sorry for a girl like that. No father, no eyebrows, and that mother. Our apartments shared a common wall, and every night I’d hear the woman stomping home from work. Most often she was with someone, but whether alone or with company she’d find some excuse to bully her daughter out of bed. Brandi had left a doughnut on the TV or Brandi had forgotten to drain her bathwater. They’re important lessons to learn, but there’s something to be said for leading by example. I never went into their apartment, but what I saw from the door was pretty rough—not simply messy or chaotic, but hopeless, the lair of a depressed person.

Given her home life, it wasn’t surprising that Brandi latched onto me. A normal mother might have wondered what was up—her nine-year-old daughter spending time with a twenty-six-year-old man—but this one didn’t seem to care. I was just free stuff to her: a free babysitter, a free cigarette machine, the whole store. I’d hear her through the wall sometimes: “Hey, go ask your friend for a roll of toilet paper.” “Go ask your friend to make you a sandwich.” If company was coming and she wanted to be alone, she’d kick the girl out. “Why don’t you go next door and see what your little playmate is up to?”

Before I moved in, Brandi’s mother had used the couple downstairs, but you could tell that the relationship had soured. Next to the grocery carts chained to their porch was a store-bought sign, the NO TRESPASSING followed by a handwritten “This meens you, Brandi!!!!”

There was a porch on the second floor as well, with one door leading to Brandi’s bedroom and another door leading to mine. Technically, the two apartments were supposed to share it, but the entire thing was taken up with their junk, and so I rarely used it.

“I can’t wait until you get out of your little slumming phase,” my mother had said on first seeing the building. She spoke as if she’d been raised in splendor, but in fact her childhood home had been much worse. The suits she wore, the delicate bridges holding her teeth in place—it was all an invention. “You live in bad neighborhoods so you can feel superior,” she’d say, the introduction, always, to a fight. “The point is to move up in the world. Even sideways will do in a pinch, but what’s the point in moving down?”

As a relative newcomer to the middle class, she worried that her children might slip back into the world of public assistance and bad teeth. The finer things were not yet in our blood, or at least that was the way she saw it. My thrift-shop clothing drove her up the wall, as did the secondhand mattress lying without benefit of box springs upon my hardwood floor. “It’s not ironic,” she’d say. “It’s not ethnic. It’s filthy.”



Bedroom suites were fine for people like my parents, but as an artist I preferred to rough it. Poverty lent my little dabblings a much-needed veneer of authenticity, and I imagined myself repaying the debt by gently lifting the lives of those around me, not en masse but one by one, the old-fashioned way. It was, I thought, the least I could do.

I told my mother that I had allowed Brandi into my apartment, and she sighed deeply into her end of the telephone. “And I bet you gave her the grand tour, didn’t you? Mr. Show-Off. Mr. Big Shot.” We had a huge fight over that one. I didn’t call her for two days. Then the phone rang. “Brother,” she said. “You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.”