All the Roads That Lead From Home by Parrish Anne Leigh

Author:Parrish, Anne Leigh [Parrish, Anne Leigh]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2013-02-22T04:00:00+00:00

***

August came, and with it my mother’s birthday. Mary baked a cake and decorated it with sloppy pink hearts. My mother stared at it a while before saying, “Thank you,” and then asked me to give her just a tiny slice. Mary and I were both on our second piece when the phone rang.

“Hey, kiddo,” he said, when I picked up. “Thought I oughtta call and wish You Know Who a happy birthday. She there?”

“It’s Dad,” I said, my hand over the receiver.

I could see her thinking she might just refuse to speak to him, then she took the phone into her room. They didn’t talk long. I was sure she told him it was time to come to his senses and to stop all this nonsense, and from how bummed she was afterwards—so much that she lay down on the couch with a cold rag on her head—I knew he wasn’t coming to anything, and certainly not home.

I put the dishes away, then found Mary in her room, reading a fashion magazine. She’d rearranged the furniture a few days before. The bed wasn’t in front of the window any more, but facing it, so she could see outside the minute she opened her eyes.

“She down again?” she asked.

I nodded and sat in the rocking chair we’d gotten from the attic. I thought about my dad. I’d seen him only twice since school ended. He’d driven by a couple of times with his girlfriend. They’d bought a house a few blocks away, a short walk, if an invitation ever came. As for Mary, she hadn’t had a single phone call from her mother in all the weeks she’d been there, which bugged her, I think, but also made her glad, because then they couldn’t talk about her going back home.

“That’s a nice dress,” Mary said, showing me the picture she meant.

“It’s OK, I guess.”

“You don’t like clothes, much, do you?”

I shrugged. I usually wore T-shirts and blue jeans.

“I love ‘em,” said Mary. “I should learn how to sew, make up some of my own.” Her own clothes looked like shit, the kind of stuff you found in thrift stores, lots of polyester and puffed sleeves.

“Be nice to have something new for the first day of school,” she said.

“Don’t remind me about school.”

“Only a couple weeks off, now.” She looked at me suddenly.

“What?” I said.

“Bet you she didn’t sign me up.”

“Who?”

“Your mom. That weird friend of hers said if I was still living here in August, then I’d have to go to your school, on account of the one I went to last year’s about twenty miles off, and the bus probably won’t come all that way just for me.”

“Shit!”

“I got an idea. Call the school, pretend to be her, and say you want me to go there. Say we’ve become real good friends, and that you don’t want to split us up.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Because I don’t talk fancy enough.”

I’d have said no except that the flame in her eye had gone all wobbly when she asked me.

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