Don't Fail Me Now (4 page)

“Hi, Michy, it's Mom.”
Her voice is deep and raspy, like she's been crying or puking—probably both. She'll already be in withdrawal by now.
“I miss my babies so much. So much, you don't even know. And the way things went down . . . it wasn't right. Don't be mad at me, baby. I made a mistake, but I'm gonna make it up to you, all of you—”
She pauses for a coughing fit.
“Listen, I'm at the city detention center, and they set my bond at $4,000. I know it's steep, but the sooner you can post it, the better for all of us, baby. Ask Sam to help. I know she can be a pain in the ass, but she's family.”
Mom pauses, as if, like me, she's calculating the unlikely odds that my aunt will decide to morph suddenly from Nurse Ratched into Mother Teresa. “
Tell her I'd do it for her
,” she says, her voice breaking.
“She knows it's true.”
Another pause.
“Give my meatball a big kiss from me, okay? I love my babies so much. You know that, right? Okay . . . all right. Bye.”

“I miss Mommy,” Denny says loudly before I've even hung up. I whip around, thinking he must have heard the message somehow, but he's just frowning down at his lap, his lower lip quivering.

“Hey.
Hey
,” I reach back and squeeze his leg. “Mommy will be home really soon. In just a few days, okay? I promise.” If the bail bondsman will take 10 percent, that means I only have to come up with $400, which means that if I don't spend any money for the next four days, my Taco Bell paycheck will get me there. And if there's one thing I'm good at, it's scavenging. (The potential upside of spending years of scraping by with a parent who drinks or smokes most of her disposable income is that it teaches you some slick MacGyver-style survival skills.)

Denny nods solemnly but then looks out the window and instantly brightens. “There's Cass!” he says, poking a chocolate-covered finger past my cheek. I turn to see my sister sprinting toward the car like she's gunning for an Olympic medal, her backpack—which probably weighs forty pounds, almost half her weight—bouncing behind her. A few yards beyond, a pack of girls who somehow look both menacing and prissy, the kinds who might not be able to throw a punch but who could destroy your life with a single Facebook wall post—dash out of the front doors and start to follow her, stopping only when they see the car.

Cass throws open Goldie's passenger door and jumps in, but before she manages to pull it shut, I hear one of the girls shout, “You better run,
dyke
!”

“Go,” Cass pleads. Her face is ashen, and as she tries to buckle her seatbelt her hands tremble.

I peel off as fast as I can, trying to wrap my brain around what I just saw. “What was that about?” I ask, once we're a safe distance away. I glance over at Cass, but she's just sitting there blank faced, clenching and unclenching her shaking fingers. “Wait, is it your blood sugar?” I ask. “Did you run out of insulin?”

“
No
,” she says, rolling her eyes. Only a thirteen-year-old could switch gears from mortal terror to bitchiness in two seconds flat.

“Why were those girls chasing you? And why did they call you a—”

“Were you playing tag?” Denny asks excitedly.

Cass crosses her arms. “No,” she says. “They're just assho—”

“Mean girls?”
I interject.

She nods, looking away. “Just because Erica and I don't wear skirts or care what boys think . . .” she mumbles. Unlike me, Cass has managed to find a best friend, a monosyllabic tomboy named Erica who sometimes comes to our house on her skateboard to do homework and play video games, although I haven't seen her much lately. Erica's mom is a single mom, too, and reportedly lets the girls watch R-rated movies on Netflix. She does Erica's cornrows and offered to do them on Cass, but that's where my mom drew the line. Who knew she had one?

“You should tell the principal,” I say. “That word, what they called you—you know what it means, right?”

Cass looks at me like I'm an idiot.

“Okay, well, then you know it's hate speech.”

“Whatever,” Cass sighs.

“Fine, forget it,” I say. And just like with Denny, I give up without a fight, not because I don't care but because it feels like I've spent the last twenty-four hours walking through land mines, and I don't think I can survive setting off another blast.

• • •

I don't have work Mondays, so on our way “home,” we stop at our real home to pick up clean clothes and toiletries to tide us over for the week. Amazingly, the time spent gathering our stuff is actually pretty relaxed. I think finally being somewhere comfortable for the first time since yesterday morning helps the tension of the day start to diffuse for all of us, and by the time we pile back into Goldie to drive the ten miles to meet our reluctant legal guardian, Cass is talking again, Denny has bathed and is dressed in something that almost fits, and I'm coming close to starting to feel not entirely hopeless.

When we get to the door of Aunt Sam's fourth-floor
walk-up, clutching the pillows and blankets and stuffed animals we've stripped from our beds, she's lying on her ratty chintz couch with her bare feet up on the coffee table, eating egg rolls from a greasy wax bag and watching TV.

“What's all that?” she asks. “This isn't a storage facility.”

“Oh, we just figured we'd save you some laundry,” I say, forcing a smile.

“Mmmm hmmmm.” Sam raises a skeptical eyebrow and returns to her news broadcast. “By the way, I picked up Chinese,” she says. “It's on the counter.” I was so unconvinced she would remember to feed us that I actually packed instant oatmeal and ramen noodles from our cupboard at home; the prospect of a freshly cooked take-out meal is positively exhilarating. We drop our stuff eagerly and crowd into the dark, narrow kitchen, dividing the two small containers of pork fried rice and chicken lo mein (not enough to feed a family, but I decide to take it as a nice gesture from a notorious cheapskate) onto paper plates.

As we file back into the living room, the TV's still on, but Aunt Sam is slipping into her flip-flops and digging out a crumpled pack of Pall Mall Lights from her purse.

“Michelle, come outside and talk with me a minute.” It's not posed as a question, and I feel a pang of despair, not only because whatever my aunt wants to talk to me about can't be good but also because I have to leave my plate of hot food to either slowly congeal or be picked over by my ravenous siblings—probably both.

I follow her out the door and down the stairs to the sidewalk outside her building. Above us, a red-and-white neon sign for the Hung Hing Chinese Restaurant flickers irritably.

“Listen,” Aunt Sam says, taking a long drag on her cigarette, her lipstick leaving a wet, pink ring around the paper when she takes it out to exhale. “I want to help you guys. You know I do. You're my flesh and blood. But—” She takes another long drag, blowing the smoke out her nose this time, like a dragon. “I can't have you stay here for nothing. If you're going to be living here, you're going to be contributing, understand?”

I nod. I was expecting her to be a hard-ass, and I've already prepared for this exact conversation. “I can buy all the groceries,” I say. “I already know what the kids like to eat, and I'll get whatever you need, too. I'm good at couponing. Plus, I'll do all the dishes and laundry while we're here, and on nights I don't work I can cook.”

Aunt Sam looks at me in disbelief, and for a second I wonder if I've overshot and promised too much, even more than she was expecting. I'm really not looking forward to playing Cinderella for the next four days, but at least no harm can come from getting on her good side.

“Honey,” she finally says, in a tone that strips the word of its endearment, “that's nice, but what I mean is I need some rent money. I can barely afford this place, and I'm not going to pay to give up what little privacy I have.”

Now it's
my
turn to stare in disbelief. My aunt's apartment is a tiny one-bedroom with water-stained walls and holes in the floor that are covered with duct tape. I don't know how much nurses make, but Aunt Sam is pushing forty. There's no way she can't afford the rent on this shithole.

“How much?” I ask, mentally calculating the maximum I can possibly afford and still make Mom's bail. If I have $200 in the bank and my biweekly paycheck is $279.34, like usual, I
can pay Aunt Sam $79 this week . . . if I somehow avoid stopping for gas. But there's no way she could ask me for that much a week—that would be over $300 a month, which would be insane, even for her.

“Six hundred a month,” she says flatly.

I'm too shocked to control my anger. “What?!” I shout. “That's crazy. I don't even make that much!” Mom asks me for $250 a month to split the gas and electric bills and help with groceries, which leaves me more than half of my paycheck to use however I want. I try to put money aside (for college, I tell myself on good days; for the next time she needs bail, on bad ones), but lately I've been too embarrassed to wear the ill-fitting hand-me-downs and tag-sale stuff she gets for me, so I spend most of my extra cash on clothes. I look down guiltily at my skinny jeans and Nine West boots. I should have been saving more money. I knew something like this would happen again. I wanted to believe her, but deep in my bones, I knew.

Aunt Sam takes another drag of her smoke and shrugs. “Can't you pick up more shifts?” she asks.

“I'd have to almost double my hours.” I wouldn't have time to do my homework except on the weekends. Cass and Denny would have to spend five or six nights a week loitering at Taco Bell, instead of just three.

“Hard work builds character,” she says, tapping a long, gray piece of ash onto the sidewalk, where it scatters onto my scuffed toes. I decide to try a more practical appeal.

“My mom left me a voicemail this afternoon.” That gets her attention. “If I can post her bail, she can get out, and you won't have to deal with us. I'll have enough money at the end of the week, so if you can just wait, we'll be out of your
hair and I can still pay you $75 for the four nights.” I'm not, as my mother suggested, going to ask my aunt for any of the bail money. I'm pretty sure that would end with me getting cursed out.

Aunt Sam presses her lips together and looks down at the ground. “She'll never learn,” she says.

“What?”

“Your mother,” she says, louder now, her eyes tired and angry. “Every time she gets herself in trouble, someone's there to fix it. Get knocked up in high school? Here—have a townhouse! Arrested? No problem! Three times? Still no problem!” She tosses her cigarette butt on the ground, stomping on it like a cockroach. “I know you think you're doing the right thing, but believe me, if you get her out she's just going to do it again. And again, and again, and again. She's been doing it her whole life, and she's not going to stop now.”

“
Someone
has to help her,” I say.

“Why?”

“Because . . .” I filter through potential reasons in my head, all of which boil down to unconditional love. Because you help people you care about. No matter what. You just
do
. But I know my aunt and I are at an impasse when it comes to the definition of love, so I go with my mother's suggestion from her voicemail. “Because she'd do it for you,” I say.

“If you believe that, you don't know her very well,” Aunt Sam says, lighting another cigarette. “Did you know when Grandma and Grandpa died they left a safe in the attic? Inside there was some jewelry, old stuff, from a few generations back, that Mama never wore because it was too flashy. She used to let me try it on. Just me, never Maddie, 'cause even then she had
sticky fingers. She even left it to me in the will. But when it came time to collect, guess what? It was gone.”

“The safe was gone?” I ask.

“Oh no, she's too smart for that,” Aunt Sam says. “The safe was there, lock intact, but it was empty. ‘Mama must have decided to sell it off,' Maddie said. I can't believe she kept a straight face.”

I frown into the smoke. Mom complains often about Aunt Sam's resentment, but I never once entertained the notion that it might be deserved.

“Then there was the time I asked her to take in my mail and water my plants while I went on vacation,” my aunt continues. “You know I never asked her for any money all those times I took you in. All those things I paid for. I just asked for a
one-time
favor, and when I came home my bonsai was dead and three of my packages had gone missing.”

“Oh.” I don't know what else to say.

“So, no, if I was in jail I don't believe she would bail me out,” Aunt Sam sighs, throwing her half-finished second cigarette on the pavement, still burning. “I believe she would tell me how hard she was trying to come up with the money, and then she'd disappear for days, only to come back looking like she got run over by a truck with some story about some terrible something that happened that managed to drain whatever she'd managed to save.”

Mom's bad luck is a running joke between Cass and me. She's always losing her wallet, getting duped into signing up for memberships she doesn't want, and bitching about bills for things that never seem to actually get fixed, like the light in our front hall, which has been out since the upstairs toilet
overflowed four years ago. I know I can't always believe what she says, but that doesn't change the fact that she raised me and that, unlike some people in our family, I won't give up on her.

“I still want to help,” I say.

Aunt Sam looks me straight in the eyes. “I don't care,” she snaps. “I won't let you.”

“You can't tell me what to do,” I say, regretting the next sentence before it's even out of my mouth but unable to stop myself. “You're not my mother.”