Don't Fail Me Now (13 page)

“Hey, I'm sorry about this morning,” Tim says. “That was really embarrassing.”

“Don't worry about it.”

“I was serious when I said I'll pay you back.”

“I said don't worry about it.”

“Don't make me come back to Taco Bell and put it in the tip jar,” he says.

“There is no tip jar, and please don't ever come back,” I groan. I think of what Yvonne would have to say about Tim if she met him. I think of what she probably has to say about me right about now. “Plus, I probably don't work there anymore.”

“You quit?” He says this kind of breezily, like hocking nachos was just a hobby of mine I did for fun.

“No,” I say. “But this isn't exactly approved vacation time.”

“Wait—you didn't tell them?”

“That I was going on a vision quest to find my sperm donor? No thanks.”

“Isn't it more than that?” he asks.

“Maybe for her,” I say. “Not for me.”

“But didn't he live with you when you were a kid?”

“I was six when he left.”

“So you must remember him.”

“Of course I remember him, but that doesn't mean he deserves my sympathy.”

“Michelle,” Tim says, really serious all of a sudden. “He's
dying
.”

“I
know
,” I say, mocking his tone. “Everybody dies.”

“Come on, you can't be that cynical.”

“It's a biological certainty,” I say. “You can't argue with science.”

“But he's your biological father.”

“You keep saying that like it means something,” I say. “Like that makes him important. But just because
your
dad shits rainbows in between monitoring his gold card statements doesn't mean all dads are inherently awesome.”

“I guess I just don't understand why you're still so angry,” he says.

“You don't understand why I'm
angry
? Do you need a bulleted list?”

“No, no,” he says. “That came out wrong. I meant . . . if you were really ambivalent, he couldn't make you so angry. I know he deserves it, I'm just saying you don't have to pretend you don't care. Not with me, anyway.”

“You sound like a shrink,” I say.

“Sorry. I guess five years of therapy rubs off on you.”

I bite my tongue, literally and figuratively. I'm not sure what to say to that. The first thing I feel is more anger—it seems so bougie and frivolous to dump your problems in some doctor's lap instead of handling them on your own. But maybe that's just my jealously showing. Because I also can't help but think about what might have happened if Mom had been able to afford real, extended care instead of the quickie court-ordered one-offs that judges threw at her almost as an afterthought:
Here, this will look good on your record. Talk to someone for an hour. You're fine now.
What if we could pay someone to figure out what's wrong with Cass or Denny? What if I had someone to talk to who would really be listening? I look at the silhouette of Tim's profile, eyes open and glinting in the moonlight. I feel an anxious wave rising deep in my chest, but instead of letting it flatten me I decide, for once, to jump in.

“You know what I think about?” I say. “The fact that every single day for the last eleven years, he's woken up in the morning with a choice. And that every single day for eleven years, he's chosen to not be my dad. That seems even worse than how he left my mom with two little kids and a drug habit he gave her.” I blink back tears and keep going. “I mean, he could have picked up the phone anytime. Or written a letter, or even shown up out of nowhere just to say . . . I don't know,
something
. He could have sent money so he'd know we'd be eating, and that Cass would have her medicine. But he never did. Not once.”

“What about now?” Tim asks. “He's trying now. He could have just died without telling anyone.”

“Are you kidding? I
wish
that's what he did!” I say, the tears
finally spilling over my lower lashes, running messily down the sides of my face into my ears. “He doesn't love us. This isn't an epiphany about all the mistakes he's made. This is the Hail Mary of a sick man afraid of going to hell.” I wipe my eyes with the heels of my hands. “I hope Leah understands that.”

“I don't know,” he says.

“Seeing him won't do anything for us, except make the mental image we have of him even more depressing.”

“Then why did you decide to go?”

“Whatever Buck has for us, we need the money,” I say flatly. “I'm just hoping it's actually worth something. This is
my
Hail Mary. I've got no other options. I just hope whatever it is, it's enough to keep us afloat for a while.”

Tim swallows hard. “What about your mom? Doesn't she have a job?”

“She used to. She was a housekeeper at the Embassy Suites out near the airport. But then a few months ago, some earrings went missing. They weren't even expensive, not diamonds or anything. She told me they were little gold starfish owned by some tacky woman who didn't tip.” I remember this detail specifically because my mom
hates
starfish—every time she sees one in the ocean she screams—and I remember being so relieved, because I wanted so badly to believe she wasn't stealing again. But in the end it didn't matter.

“That sucks,” Tim says.

“Yeah, well. It is what it is.” That's something Mom says when she can't fix a problem. That, or she tells me that if we all threw our worries in the air and saw everyone else's, I'd want to grab mine back. But I don't think so. I'm pretty confident I could find better ones.

We lie in silence for a few minutes. The talking in the tent is slowly dying down, making me think of all those nights Cass and I spent lying in our beds giggling and telling stories while we waited to fall asleep, how our voices would soften and the intervals between words would stretch and stretch until finally I would say, “Cass, are you still there?” and hear only breathing.

“My mom used to be a nurse,” Tim says. “She worked really long hours, and sometimes I wouldn't see her for a day or two, and when she was off she was always sleeping or just kind of out of it. Dad said it was just exhaustion. But then the summer I was eight they caught her stealing prescription meds, really high-dose painkillers.”

“Oh.” I don't know what else to say. I know from experience all the
I'm sorry
s in the world aren't going to change anything.

“She went to rehab for a while, and things were okay, but then she started feeling sick all the time, going to a ton of doctors who couldn't diagnose anything. Then she got beat up in a mugging.”

“Jesus,” I say.

“That's not the worst part,” Tim says, closing his eyes. “It didn't actually happen. There was a camera in the lot where she said she was, and Dad tracked down the tape, and it just showed her getting into the car and driving away. But she had all these bruises . . .” I watch his Adam's apple bob as he tenses his jaw. “Anyway, by the time he caught on, it was too late—she already had the meds she wanted.”

“Did she get arrested?”

“No, you can't get arrested for kicking the shit out of
yourself, apparently, as long as you don't file a false police report. But she got divorced.”

“Where is she now?”

“She lives in Annapolis. My dad has full custody, but I see her every couple of weeks. She makes a lot of excuses, though. She always has some reason she has to cancel. And I worry all the time. I don't know if she's taking care of herself or what she's capable of. I guess I just don't . . .”

“Trust her?” I finish.

“No.” He closes his eyes. “Not at all.”

“I know what that's like,” I say, and without even thinking about it I grab on to his hand and squeeze three times. He squeezes back three times. And then we just let them stay, as Cass's voice rises up over the crickets, thin and uncertain and sweet, singing Denny his lullaby.

Friday

Bristow, OK
Oklahoma City, OK
Amarillo, TX

The next morning brings sunshine, chirping birds, and Leah and Tim knee-deep in water, holding Denny by the wrists and ankles as they swing him out over the lake. I change clothes in the backseat and watch as my brother communes with nature, his soaking SpongeBob SquarePants briefs swinging a few inches below his actual butt.

“One . . . two . . . THREE!” they chant, and Denny lets out a Tarzan yell before he splashes down.

The tent flap is open, and I spot Cass sitting just inside, a cracker held between her teeth, giving herself a shot. I wait till she puts her shirt back down and then drop into the sand next to her.

“What's your problem?” I joke. “Too early to cannonball?”

“Haha,” she says. “And it's not early. You just slept forever.” I was uncharacteristically the last one up and probably would have slept even later if Denny hadn't clambered into the car dripping wet and asked me if I wanted to join him for a “lake bath.”

“Yeah, I don't know what happened.” I stretch my arms over my head and yawn. “I must have just crashed.”

“Mmm hmmm.” Cass gives me a look.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She zips up her backpack and crawls out of the tent.

“
What?
” I prod.

“
Nothinnnng
.” She skulks off toward Goldie, and I take out my frustration over her constant moodiness on the tent, ripping it out of the ground like the Hulk.

“Hey, can I help?” Tim comes jogging over, his khakis rolled up over his knees, damp hair sticking up in what I hope is an unintentional mohawk.

“Yeah, can you fold this monster?” I brush my hair out of my eyes self-consciously, realizing I must look like one of Lil Wayne's mug shots by now. First order of the day will definitely be stopping somewhere to clean up.

“It's a beautiful morning, huh?” He smiles up at me as he wrestles the poles into submission.

“Yeah, not bad.” I feel a little awkward talking to Tim after last night. It's not like anything really happened, but I'm not sure how I'm supposed to act. Are we friends now that we know each other's secrets? Is it incredibly pathetic
that holding his hand gave me more butterflies than kissing Ernest Hudson?

“I think it's going to be a beautiful day,” he says, wrapping up the now-cylindrical tent in a Velcro strap. “In fact, I've got a wonderful feeling that everything's going my way.” Tim shoots me a big, goofy grin. “Get it?” he laughs. “
Oklahoma!
The musical!”

“Nerd,” Leah says with a smile, walking up behind him, her arm draped around a still-damp Denny. I guess a night in the tent was all they needed to get past the Chocolate Frosting Incident.

“Is he like this all the time?” I laugh, and Leah nods.

“He serenaded me in the cafeteria on my birthday last year. It was
soooo
embarrassing.”

“It was not!” Tim says, feigning offense. “I was totally on-key!”

“That's not what I meant,” she groans, following him to the car. “It was the dancing. The
dancing
! Why did you have to choreograph it?”

“I thought you loved
Glee
!” Tim says playfully. He lifts up the trunk door and starts moving stuff around to fit the tent poles in. Alongside our bags of clothes and food, there are piles of old magazines wrapped in twine and plastic shopping bags filled with stuff Mom stores in the car for unknown reasons. I've never looked in them because I'm too afraid I'll find something illegal, so when Tim goes to open one, I freeze.

“What
is
this stuff?” he says, reaching in. Then he sees something, stops, and says, “Oh my God.”

“Just leave it!” I lunge over to grab the bag, but Tim's faster
than me and is already pulling out a silver cylinder attached to a long, clear tube. I snatch it from his hands and toss it onto the grass. “That's none of your business!” I shout, and he and Leah look at me like I'm crazy.

“Michelle,” he says. “It's a siphon pump.”

“What?”

“A siphon pump,” he says, breaking into a smile, grabbing my shoulders. “For gasoline. And I saw an empty can in there, too.”

“Oh!” I start laughing, I'm so relieved.

“What's so funny?” Denny asks.

“We're gonna make it,” I say, lifting him up and kissing him on the cheek. “We're actually gonna make it to California.”

“We weren't before?” Leah asks, stricken, and Tim and I exchange a guilty look. “Whatever, you guys are so weird,” she says, climbing into the backseat.

• • •

To work the siphon pump to our advantage, we have to stage a breakdown on the side of the road. Goldie's jacked-up exterior is for once a plus; the only potential snag is that we're a bunch of kids without a chaperone, and it's a good half hour past when even the crunchiest hippie schools would start. This, I tell myself, is why four cars pass me without so much as slowing down, even though I'm doing my best down-on-my-luck half smile and Miss America wave (Devereaux rule #5: Work what you've got. As Mom likes to remind me, “You won't be this cute forever.”)

“Maybe you should have Denny get out with you,” Cass calls through the open window.

“Nah,” I yell as a freight truck screams past, making me
jump back even farther on the shoulder. “If anyone's going to die trying to steal gas, it should be me. Besides”—I lean out tentatively, squinting at the flat, wheat-colored horizon shimmering like a desert oasis—“I'm sure somebody will stop.”

But five minutes and as many cars later, no one has. My cheeks hurt, and I can feel my hairline starting to sweat. Aren't Midwesterners supposed to be really nice and trusting? Did I just pick the wrong spot, some stretch of state highway only traversed by dicks and the legally blind? I know there's a third possibility, but I really don't want to believe it's that. So when Tim offers to take over, I say no, both out of stubborn pride and because I don't want to see a car stop for him that wouldn't have stopped for me.

“Let me stand with you, at least,” he says and steps out into the blinding sun before I can stop him. Before we left the campsite, he changed into one of Denny's clean(ish) oversize T-shirts, a silkscreen of Obama's face with
BARACK THE VOTE!
in big red block letters. With the khakis and the loafers, it makes him look like an overeager canvasser who doesn't realize his guy already won.

“I'm really okay,” I say, shielding my eyes from the glare.

“I need some air,” he says. “And besides, I want to learn from the master. In case I ever need to do this someday.”

“Yeah, I can really picture you with a Tommy Hilfiger hobo bindle.”

“You know,” Tim says, bending slightly to whisper in my ear, “I'm not as clean-cut as you think I am.”

“Is that right?” I put my hands on my hips and look at him expectantly.

“I'll have you know that after junior semiformal I drank
three rum and Cokes and ended up sleeping in a stranger's hammock.”

I grin in spite of myself. “Hey!” I yell to a passing pickup truck, pointing at Tim. “Public enemy number one right here!” The driver, an elderly man wearing a baseball cap, frowns in confusion.

“Is that your sales pitch?” Tim laughs. “No wonder you can't get anyone to stop.”

“Shut up.”

“Maybe you should show a little leg, like in
It Happened One Night
.”

“What happened one night?”

“It's just this movie,” he says, smiling. “It's old. This reporter and this socialite end up traveling together and—”

“He's a raging misogynist?”

“What? No! He's Clark Gable.”

“But he makes her pimp herself out to stop a car?”

“He doesn't
make
her. It's her idea.”

“Yeah.” I shake my head, looking back out at the empty highway. “That's not my style.”

“I know! I was kidding. It was stupid. I'm sorry.”

I cross my arms and level my eyes at him. The sweat's slowly crawling down the back of my neck now. “Why don't
you
show some skin?”

Tim raises his eyebrows.
“What?”

“Show off that a cappella body. And get some color so you look less like end-of-life MJ.”

“MJ?” he asks.

“Michael Jackson,” I clarify. “Please tell me you've heard of him.”

Tim puts his hand in his pockets and looks down at the ground, and I'm about to really lay into him when he executes a perfect moonwalk, his face suddenly all kinds of smug. In response, I launch into the “Thriller” dance, which Cass and I taught ourselves the summer MJ died, when Denny was a newborn and all Mom wanted to do was sit on the couch and watch tribute concerts on TV.

Neither of us notice the white SUV pulling up alongside Goldie until it stops a few feet away and a short-haired, middle-aged woman with wraparound sunglasses and aggressive highlights peers out from her window.

“Car trouble, or y'all having a dance-off?” she asks with a friendly smile.

“Oh!” I wipe the damp hair off my face and try to smile through my humiliation. “A little of both.”

“We were driving our brother and sisters to school when we ran out of gas,” Tim jumps in, his dimple in full effect. “My mom told me it was low, but I thought we could make it. We've been stalled here for over an hour now, and we're really late.” He could have more conviction in the delivery, but I have to hand it to him: His body language is great. He's leaning a little against her car, like he's so exhausted he can barely stand, even though he's wisely keeping a nonthreatening distance at the same time. I try to look pained, like the thought of missing school is unspeakably awful, when the truth is that I haven't thought twice about it since I made that U-turn Wednesday morning.

“Oh, honey, nobody's stopped?” the woman asks. Her voice has a slight drawl to it, which for some reason makes me think of pie. It's probably all those cooking shows. “Did you call your mom?”

“Uh . . .” Tim looks at me, and I feel a pang of shame at not having talked to my real mom yet. “We left her a few messages,” I improvise, “but she had a big meeting this morning, so she probably hasn't checked. Anyway, I called school, and they know and we're all fine but . . .” I give Tim a look, and he picks up right where I left off, like we've been practicing this grift for years.

“If you could let us siphon some of your gas, we have our own pump, and we'd be happy to pay you for it,” he says. “We only need a gallon or two to get us there, and then we can figure it out, call a tow or something.”

I look hopefully into our reflection in her sunglasses, holding my breath.

“Well, no,” the woman says. “I will
not
take your money.” I feel Tim exhale at the same time I do. “And I will not give you a gallon and then just leave y'all to fend for yourselves. I just filled up, so you take what you need.”

“Are you sure we can't give you a few dollars?” I ask.

“Please,” she says. “If you were my kids I'd want someone to do this for them, so consider it a gift.” She raises an eyebrow. “And listen to your mother next time!”

“Yes, ma'am,” Tim says and jogs over to Goldie to get the pump. He's the only one who knows how to work it, so I fall back and watch as he makes charming chitchat with the woman while he fills up our two-and-a-half-gallon container. When it's full, I see her gesticulate out the window, and he comes back over with a shocked smile on his face.

“She says she won't leave until I fill up at least two more times,” he says, pouring the gas into Goldie's tank. I grin into my fists in the shadow of the rear bumper.

Our success puts me in such a good mood that on the way to Oklahoma City I try to make surviving for the next few days into a fun game, more like
Extreme Cheapskates
than
Lord of the Flies
. “Each of us has to come up with our own way to score free food or goods,” I say, shouting a little over Goldie's now constant clanging. “The only ground rules are no stealing—if it has value, it has to be given to you willingly—and no straight-up begging for money.” I have nothing against panhandlers—hey, you do what you gotta do—but I want to save that as a last resort.