Got a hankerin' to read part one? Go here:
PART TWO
Debbie and I
continued our lunchtime smoke breaks under the carport. I was surprised to find
that a junior high school that beat the crap out of you with a special paddle
if you were caught chewing gum didn't seem to care if you left campus at noon.
We weren't the only ones wandering away, and the exodus was no secret. Nobody seemed to care what we did as
long as we didn't do it on school property. High school guys would pull up in
front and wait for their younger girlfriends to run down the sidewalk and jump
in the car. And speaking of cars. Debbie sometimes drove herself to school even
though she was way too young to have a license. On those days we didn't smoke
under the carport. Instead, we cruised the strip, cruised the high school, and
cruised the other junior high across town while we smoked our Marlboros and
drank whiskey from the fifth Debbie kept under the seat. I was thirteen.
Debbie must have
finally thought it was time to take our friendship to the next level because she
asked me to stay the night.
"We can ride
horses on Saturday. "
Horses? Her aunt and uncle must have
been rich, and they must have let her run wild because she wasn't their kid and
they were just giving her a place to sleep until her mother came home from
Paris. I was almost jealous.
After school
Debbie drove me to her house. Down
dusty New Mexico roads that never seemed to stop. Over flat land that stretched out
forever. After twenty miles I finally
spotted a mailbox that marked another dusty lane, this one with a house at the
end.
I immediately understood that her aunt
and uncle were poor. Really, really poor. The house was this sad bunch of
squares sitting on top of dirt. There was the main square made of plywood and
stuff that had probably come from other houses. Nothing fit, but the building
did have windows and a roof and some paint here and there. The biggest square must have been the
start of the home, and then as time went on other rooms were added, all with
salvaged wood and mismatched windows. Inside it was clean, with nothing but a
kitchen table and chairs, and off in one corner a couch and television. Debbie said hi to a woman standing at
the stove frying chicken in a cast-iron skillet.
The woman turned
and gave me a smile. She had very few teeth, her skin was like leather, and her
hair was a wild tangle around her head. Debbie's grandmother? Great
grandmother?
One of the
additions to the house turned out to be Debbie's room, and we headed straight
for it, shut the door, and settled on the bed with a scrapbook.
"There's my mom." She pointed
to an elegant woman standing next to a fancy car. She was so pretty. Like a movie star. Did she pay the aunt
and uncle to take care of Debbie? I'll bet she did.
"Is that your
grandmother out there?" I whispered.
Debbie laughed.
"It's my aunt. Isn't she
something?"
"She looks so
old."
"She's in her
forties."
A door slammed and
the aunt shouted that it was time to eat.
We sat down. Four
of us now, because Debbie's uncle had arrived from the oil refinery. He didn't look nearly as old at the
woman, and he had all his teeth.
Green Formica table. Aunt and uncle at
opposite ends. Debbie and I across from each other. Fried chicken. Baked beans.
Potato salad.
I got the feeling this
wasn't their normal meal, that they'd prepared it because of company. I felt
honored. We passed bowls of food
in silence. Ate in silence. Struggling
to come up with a topic of conversation, I finally looked across the Formica to
my friend and asked, "When's your mom coming back from Paris?"
Debbie froze.
The aunt and uncle
froze.
What had I done?
What had I said? Maybe the mom
wasn't coming back. Maybe she'd left Debbie here forever.
The uncle finally
spoke. "Your mother?" he asked Debbie.
She said nothing.
"Your mother
in Paris?"
Debbie still
wasn't talking, so I tried to smooth things over. "Debbie told me about
how her mother is living in Paris, and how she's staying here with you two for
a while."
The aunt and uncle
looked at each other, then burst out laughing. The guy tossed back his
head and roared. The woman joined in with her toothlessness.
Debbie threw her
chicken leg on her plate and ran to her room, slamming the door.
Which left the
three of us. The aunt finally stopped laughing. When the uncle could finally
talk, he said, "That's what she told you? That we're her aunt and uncle?" He burst out laughing
again.
I finally got it.
They were Debbie's parents. I felt
so stupid. None of her story had made any sense. None of it.
Later Debbie
unlocked the door and I joined her in the bedroom. She'd been crying. "I'll
bet they told you they're my parents, didn't they?" she said. "Well,
they aren't. They're a couple of liars."
This was the new
story she'd concocted while I sat at the table. I actually liked her parents. Liked the way they hadn't
gotten mad. "You are the liar," I said.
If I'd been older
I might have been more sympathetic. I would have tried to figure out why she'd
done what she'd done. Invented a mother because she was ashamed of her own.
Invented a life because she was ashamed of the one she had.
Instead, I never
talked to Debbie again. I never forgave her. Occasionally I'd spot her in the
hall, but she always looked away. And I'd wonder if she was waiting for a new
kid to come along so she could tell her about the mother who lived in Paris.
* * *
Author note: I'm fuzzy on how we got from school to her house. We might have taken the school bus, or she might have driven. In the sixties in New Mexico it wasn't unusual for kids to drive even if they didn't have a license. Especially farm kids who came to town from as far as eighty miles away.
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