The Music of What Happens(66)

My mom cries for eighteen hours straight. Nothing can stop her during the service, or after, and I can hear the sobs from my room even with her down the hall and my door closed. And I think that I am broken, because I have no tears. I try to push them out. I feel sad. I feel nothing too. I don’t know how to feel anything and I take out a pen and paper and write a poem that I think my dad may have liked.



I know now that it’s a terrible poem, but it was real at the moment, and I put it away and just having it in my pocket made me feel like Dad and I had a secret.

And at home, things got bad. And when Mom falls onto the bathroom floor and starts screaming and writhing, I pick her up, and when she tells me that no one will ever love her again, I tell her that someone will. That I do. That I’ll take care of her, and she’s like a little girl and her hands are bigger than mine but somehow look tiny as I take her to her bed and tuck her in.

And when she closes her eyes I go to my room and I close the door and I go to my bookcase, and I tip it over and it shatters into two pieces, the top clattering into the far wall. She never comes in to check about the commotion. She never mentions it. I leave it there for three days but Mom acts like it isn’t there, so finally I just pick up the busted bookshelf and carry its two pieces out to the shed in the backyard, where they still sit, untouched, as it was Dad’s shed, and when something goes wrong we don’t look for tools; we go to the phone and call the handyman.

And I am always sorry I tipped over the bookshelf.

And I’ll never do anything like that again.





With the truck still out of commission, we assemble the posse of six for a little Third Friday fun. We start the night out by eating as a group at one of the communal tables at Short Leash, which makes awesome gourmet hot dogs and puts them in naan bread.

I get the devil dog, which has red pepper, green chilies, sriracha, onion, cheddar, and jalape?os. It’s the perfect mix of spicy and savory. Betts of course gets the most disgusting thing on the menu. It has smoked Gouda, bacon, peanut butter, BBQ sauce, and Cracker Jacks. He eats like a caveman, and Kayla makes a big show of getting up and moving as far away from Betts as possible. Betts reacts by chewing with his mouth open.

“They have a food truck,” I say.

Jordan says, “I saw that. You ever think about doing something with hot dogs?”

“Totally. We should re-paint and re-name the truck,” I say, and Jordan cracks up. It’s day six of us being without a food truck, and we just found out yesterday that the license will be ready on Monday. The truck, though, needs some love, according to the guys at the shop my mom helped me find. It’s gonna cost about two grand, and it’s gonna take another full week before it’s ready.

“I think we can expand off chicken, though,” Jordan says.

I nod and sip my soda. “Sure. As long as we have the chicken options front and center. Yeah.”

Pam rolls her eyes and says, “Our friends have gotten weird and boring,” to Zay-Rod, and he nods.

“I know, right? You know they have a food truck? Haven’t heard that five trillion times.”

Pam laughs. Jordan curls his lip down like his feelings are hurt.

He says, “You are.”

Pam kisses him on the cheek. For effect, Zay-Rod kisses me on the cheek too, only he does it after rubbing mustard on his lips, leaving a mustard stain.

“What is wrong with you?” I say, wiping it off. “Did your momma not love you as a child?”

Zay-Rod takes his fingers and rubs mustard on my forehead. Betts slams his fist into the table, because he’s enjoying this, and because he’s an idiot.

We finish up, pay, and wander down Roosevelt. Third Friday is this thing Phoenix does on the third Friday of every month, where they open art galleries downtown, food trucks show up, and it’s like a mini-festival atmosphere. A lot of kids from school do it. It’s an opportunity to drink beers out of paper bags and the police don’t bug anyone unless you get out of hand.

“Are we really outside? Purposefully?” Kayla asks as we saunter past the church where people go in and listen to this famous choir as they practice.

“Wimp,” Betts says. “You stay inside all summer?”

“Basically,” she says. “Do you not do that? That’s like Darwin Award–level idiocy.”

“Oh good, I get to be called an idiot again by a chick.”

She swats him in the shoulder. He grabs his shoulder in mock agony. She swats him in the other shoulder, and I can actually see the slight grin she’s trying to hold in. Maybe they won’t be a couple, but I’m kinda glad they’re starting to dig each other.

Meanwhile, Pam and Zay-Rod are going the other direction. They’re quiet, just sort of walking together. Both looking at their phones. Both with serene expressions, as if they’re just minding their own business. It does not take a genius to know they are texting each other.

I nudge Jordan and watch the picture of our friends doing their collective things. He nudges me back.

“This makes me happy,” he says.

“This makes me feel sorry for your friends.”

He laughs. “This makes me feel sorrier for your friends.”

We pass a woman who is drawing a mural on the sidewalk in turquoise chalk. I turn to Jordan.

“Hooligan do-gooder?” I ask.