Back Roads Read online

  I changed into the black pants and blue polo shirt I had to wear at Shop Rite, put my dad’s coat back on, yanked off the light, and started bounding up the stairs two at a time. Then I turned around and went back for Skip’s letter and stuffed it in my pocket.

  Misty was already eating. Jody had a full plate, but she was busy writing in her red notebook covered with stickers. About twenty dinosaurs were lined up on her side of the table. Sparkle Three-Horn sat in a place of honor in the very middle with the fortune cookie. Elvis whined and scratched from outside the back door.

  I reached for the loaf of Town Talk.

  “No buns?” I asked.

  “We’re out,” Misty said.

  “Why aren’t you eating?” I asked Jody.

  I slapped three slices of bread on my plate, put a hot dog in the middle of each, squirted mustard and ketchup on them, rolled them up, and was done eating two before Jody answered me.

  “I’m making my list of things to do. I don’t like hot dogs anyway.”

  “Since when?” Misty asked.

  “Since always.”

  “You always eat hot dogs.”

  “Not like that.”

  We all looked at her Lion King plate and her hot dog cut into pennies and the puddle of ketchup she dunked them in.

  “I like them long now,” she said. “Esme says cut-up hot dogs are the number one cause of choking deaths among children in the United States. She wasn’t sure about the world. She told me on the bus today.”

  “Live dangerously,” Misty replied.

  “I won’t eat it.”

  “You have to.”

  “I do not.”

  “Harley,” Misty commanded me. “Tell her she’s got to eat it.”

  “I don’t care if she eats it,” I said, and emptied the pan of macaroni and cheese onto my plate.

  “I’ll eat it if you fix it.”

  “How am I going to fix it?” Misty asked, narrowing her eyes until they became two purple slits in her speckled face.

  “With glue,” Jody stated in all seriousness.

  I smiled across the table at her. She cracked me up sometimes.

  Misty looked back and forth between the two of us. “Eating glue will kill you,” she instructed us.

  “Then make me another one,” Jody asked.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Make me another one.”

  “Eat Harley’s last one.”

  “No way. I want it,” I said.

  “Trade with her,” Misty said.

  Jody looked at my hot dog skeptically. “There’s mustard on it,” she said. “Wipe it off.”

  Misty’s hand suddenly shot out. She grabbed my last hot dog, scraped off the bread and mustard with her blue fingernails, and plunked it down in front of Jody. Then she picked up Jody’s plate and dumped the sliced hot dog onto mine.

  Jody studied the situation for a moment, then gave Misty a shit-eating grin and asked her for a juice box. Misty stared back at her blankly, the lack of expression on her face betraying a storm of emotion underneath.

  “We don’t have any,” she said slowly.

  “Then I want milk.”

  “Get it yourself.”

  “I can’t pour the big jug. I always spill.”

  I closed my eyes and imagined picking up the empty pan and swinging it with all my might, catching Jody in the head first, knocking her off her chair, and then hitting Misty and watching her spit up bloody macaroni and cheese.

  Instead I went and poured Jody a glass of milk and brought it to her. As I sat it down, her list caught my eye.

  FEED DINUSORS

  CULOR PISHUR FOR MOMMY

  GO TO SCOOL

  GO TO PRISUN

  WACH TEEVEE

  PRAY FOR DADDYS SOWL

  GO TO BED

  I hadn’t told her yet that I wasn’t going to take her to see Mom tomorrow. Our last visit had been three months before, but I still wasn’t ready to brave another drive home. They were always the same: all four of us crammed into the cab of my truck; Jody crying; Misty telling her to shut up; and Amber swearing at me because I wouldn’t go in and see Mom.

  Jody’s handwriting reminded me of a map Mom had drawn as a kid to help her find her way back home to Illinois after an ancient great-aunt and -uncle she had never met before drove her to Pennsylvania where she was going to live from then on because her mom and dad and infant brother had been killed in a car accident.

  Mom only showed me her map once. I was having problems with a map of my own I had found in a school library book, traced, and brought home. The book claimed the map would work starting from any kid’s bedroom, and I spent days trying to figure out how to get to the amazing dragon-shaped island crowded with volcanoes spewing rainbow-colored lava.

  Finally I gave up and went to Mom with it. She took me to her room and let me crawl up on her bed while she went and got her Bible out of her top dresser drawer. Mom read the Bible a lot, but she never went to church. She said she didn’t like Christians.

  She brought it over and held it out to me, holding it closed, and let me run my thumb along the scarlet-edged pages the way I always did. Squeezed together, the pages looked and felt like a red satin ribbon, but apart they sliced like razors. She turned to the back and took out a folded piece of paper.

  “This is what you call an antique,” she said, smiling. “I drew it when I was about the age you are now. That’s about eighteen years ago.”

  She opened it up. It was a crayon drawing beginning at a yellow house detailed with a pink roof and ruffled curtains and a flower garden and a tree with a smiling squirrel. Then a stark straight black line cut across the paper until it suddenly broke off into a downward angle and ended at nothing. On top of the line was written HI WAY 80.

  “Maps,” she explained while I studied it, “only work if the place you are trying to get to exists.”

  I felt Jody’s grip on my wrist. She tugged on my arm, and I saw Mom’s quiet insistence in her face, a look that used to make me want to do my best or act my worst depending on how strong I felt at the moment. She asked me if I wanted to hear her fortune.

  “I’ve got to go to work,” I told her. “Tell me tomorrow.”

  “No,” she said.

  She let go of me, cracked open the cookie, and gently pulled out the strip of paper.

  “ ‘Worry is the interest you pay on trouble before it’s due,’ ” she said, smiling up at me.

  “Great,” I said.

  Elvis almost knocked me over when I stepped outside. I kicked him out of the way and got in the truck, turned on the radio good and loud, and locked both doors. I wasn’t afraid of the dark; I was respectful of it. Out here it was so thick, it swallowed headlight beams.

  I tried to make my mind a blank during the drive, but Jody’s list kept popping into it, and Skip’s letter, and Amber fucking some guy in the back of a pickup truck.

  By the time I swung my truck into the Shop Rite lot, I had worked myself into a fairly foul mood. Fortunately, weeknights were dead ever since the 24-hour Super Wal-Mart had gone up. I knew people who did their grocery shopping there at 3A .M. just because they could.

  I parked and put my keys inside Dad’s coat pocket and found Skip’s letter. Against my better judgment, I took it out and read it again and right in the middle of Skip’s description of his fraternity I suddenly realized our entire friendship had only happened because we were two boys who lived within walking distance of each other and nobody else.

  Funny how something like that only occurred to a person during his lowest moments. I couldn’t have figured it out when I was happy.

  chapter ( 3 )

  Like I said, I was in a bad mood. Fortunately, Shop Rite was empty by nine o’clock. No more mumbling “Have a nice night” to customers who didn’t care what I wished for them anyway. Usually, I snuck off the first chance I got and went and stocked shelves so I didn’t have to listen to the cashiers talk about every unemployed husband and ovaria
n cyst in the tristate area.

  When I first took the job, me and my family were a hot topic of discussion. Especially around Mom’s trial. Sometimes I thought that was the only reason I was finally able to get someone to hire me.

  Most employers looked at me as coming from an unstable family environment and didn’t want me around which cracked me up because the only difference between my environment and everyone else’s around here was that mine had been revealed on the eleven o’clock news.

  I think Rick, the manager here, saw me as a way to get his fat face on TV—he had visions of reporters in short skirts and high heels saying, “I’m standing here with Rick Rogers, manager of the Shop Rite where convicted husband-killer Bonnie Altmyer’s son works”—and he saw me as a drawing card for new customers. People would come by to get a look at me and then have to buy something so they didn’t seem like jerks. I didn’t know what they thought they were going to see. A slobbering mental case? A guy who broke down and cried every couple minutes?

  Either way I was a freak show, but it was better to be a freak with a paycheck than one on welfare so I jumped at the Shop Rite job. A couple months later I got a job at Barclay’s Appliances too.

  It was tough knowing everybody was staring at me and whispering behind my back, but I preferred the gossip over direct confrontation. The worst was when people tried to talk to me about it, and they were always women. Some were well-intentioned but most were looking for a phone conversation to have with their girlfriends that night.

  I never knew what to say to them. Sometimes I was tempted to tell them what really happened.

  One day you’re a guy who’s happy he managed to survive high school and get that almighty piece of paper, and you’re thinking you might try and get a job at Redi-Mix Concrete where your dad’s worked since the beginning of time or maybe Sharp Pavement. Good pay and good bennies, your dad’s always telling you. Blue Cross Blue Shield: none of that HMO crap. Good pension plan. Good workman’s comp: he knew a guy who threw out his back moving his brother-in-law’s pool table and blamed it on a job pouring a 7-Eleven and got full pay for three months of couch time.

  In the meantime, it’s summer and the hills are every shade of green and you can take your dog and walk for miles and not see another living soul and if it gets too late, you can sleep on the ground and wake up covered in dew, surrounded by sparkling grass and the smell of wet dirt and wet dog.

  On those mornings you try not to think about the rest of the world. You try not to think about the fascinating lives people lead on TV and how even bad shit seems exciting on TV and better than what you’re doing.

  You try not to think about the models in your sister’s Victoria’s Secret catalogs and how you will never have a woman who even remotely resembles one of them. You try not to think about how you will probably never have any woman and how the one shot you had, you messed up so bad you don’t even want to think about trying again yet all you can think about is trying again.

  You try not to think about how you’re about to lose your only friend to college, and how you’ve already lost a sister to puberty.

  You try not to think about the fact that you’re eighteen years old and people are always telling you you’ve got your whole life ahead of you, but you already feel like you’ve done all the living there is to do around here and you’re too much of a chickenshit to go somewhere else.

  But at least you’ve got a family you can stand, even if they are all sisters. And at least you’ve got two parents, two married parents living in the same house with you. One day you’re that guy, and the next day you’re assigned a social worker and a therapist and given the choice of either being a LEGAL ADULT with three DEPENDENTS or an ORPHAN with NOBODY.

  Sometimes I felt like telling them this, but I knew they would think it was boring.

  Only three baggers worked weeknights, and we were two too many. Rick knew this and always scheduled me with Bud and Church because they couldn’t handle busy hours. They were agonizingly slow: Bud because he was old and never shut up; and Church because he was retarded. A lot of people didn’t like that word, but it was the word Church preferred so I used it too. He hated terms like “handicapped” and “challenged” and “special” because he wasn’t any of those things in his opinion.

  He had looked up the word “retard” in a dictionary once and was pleasantly surprised to find out it was a verb and not a noun. The definition said, “To delay the progress of,” and he felt this described him perfectly.

  “Like when cars slow down for a PennDOT crew,” he had carefully explained to me, using a can of Green Giant baby peas as a visual aid.

  I understood. He didn’t think of himself as a complete stop.

  Church had a difficult time stocking shelves—he questioned the placement of every product—and Bud had arthritis in his knees, but I loved a straightforward task I couldn’t possibly screw up. I loved wheeling out a stack of boxes into a quiet, deserted aisle and filling up empty space. And I never thought twice about why the bouillon cubes were with the condiments and not the soups; and if the CheezIts were more snack than cracker or more cracker than snack. I told Church he was going to drive himself crazy dwelling on other people’s biases.

  I slipped away from the registers and left Bud talking to the cashiers and Church sitting on his bench picking at a scab on one of his knobby elbows.

  On my way to the storeroom, I counted three shoppers. None of them were near the pet food aisle so I loaded my dolly with eight-pound bags of Meow Mix and set off.

  I was heading past Canned Vegetables and Ethnic Foods when I saw a woman in jeans and a short gray sweater pushing her cart slowly along the shelves. At first, I thought she might have been more of a girl. I hoped she was because then I might have been able to get up the nerve to talk to her. She was perfect from behind.

  I stopped and watched. She was swaying her head back and forth, sort of keeping time with the sway in her walk. I couldn’t tell if she was grooving to the song on the Lite FM station Rick made us play. I hoped not. It was “Muskrat Love.”

  She stopped in front of the Chinese food and reached for a soy sauce on the top shelf and while I was staring at the section of exposed skin right above her jeans where her sweater had pulled up, I realized she was Esme’s mom. I felt my face flush and checked around to make sure no one had seen me. Then I remembered no one could see my thoughts.

  The Mercers lived about two miles east from where Potshot met Black Lick Road, making them our second-closest neighbors next to Skip’s family. There were four of them: Esme; her little brother, Zack; her dad; and her mom, Callie.

  This wasn’t the first time I had noticed Callie Mercer’s body. I saw her here at the store now and then, and whenever Jody played with Esme and I had to pick her up afterward. She had brought us a lasagna the day of Dad’s funeral and a stuffed chicken the day of Mom’s sentencing, and she used to come by the house to check up on us but eventually Amber’s hostility and my total lack of conversation skills put an end to that.

  I even discussed her with Skip once. The summer of our senior year we were out walking the railroad tracks and decided to cut across her property, and we saw her splashing in the creek with her kids in a pair of soaked cutoffs and a pink bikini top and I breathed out, “Look at that.”

  Skip thought I was joking. He said I was sick. He said wanting to nail someone’s mother was like wanting to nail your cousin.

  And I told him if she walked over and pressed her wet shorts against him and whispered in his ear that she wanted to fuck him, he would shoot off in his pants before he could say anything back.

  He gave me a strange look and said I was really sick.

  “Hi, Harley.”

  She had spotted me. Not that I minded. But I never knew what to say to her. I wasn’t sure if I should talk to her like she was Esme’s mom, or Mrs. Mercer with a lasagna, or a chick in a pink bikini top.

  “Hi,” I said back.

  “How have you been?�
� she asked in a softly urgent voice that made me feel like she had been looking for the answer to this question for days.

  “Okay.”

  “The girls?”

  “Okay.”

  She smiled a little. “Jody told Esme that you won’t let Amber get her driver’s permit.”

  Just the mention of Amber driving made me want to kick something, but I tried to stay reasonable.

  “I told her she can get it once she gets a job and can pay for her own insurance,” I explained, angrily. “The insurance company’s going to put her on my policy the minute she gets her license whether I let her drive my truck or not. Just because we live in the same house. It’s like a thousand bucks.”

  “Harley.” She laughed and touched my shoulder. “You’re great,” she said.

  I didn’t know what that meant, but it made the anger melt away and my mouth feel dry.

  “You have definitely become a full-fledged Head of the Household,” she said, still smiling. “Esme’s been bugging me to invite Jody over for dinner again. I was thinking about Monday. Would that be okay with you?”

  Monday was Jody’s night to cook, but I guessed we could all pour our own bowls of cereal.

  “Sure,” I said.

  She added a can of bamboo shoots and a packet of dried mushrooms to her cart. I must have been looking at her funny because she smiled again and explained that she was going to make hot and sour soup.

  “Do you like Chinese food?” she asked, her voice full of a stirring sincerity again.

  I pictured her writing down my responses to all her questions so she could pull them out later and remember them fondly.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Well, the recipe makes a ton. I’ll send some home with Jody for you.”

  She tucked a few stray brown curls behind one ear. She had most of her hair pulled back in a clip, but it was thick and wild and always looked messed up no matter how she wore it.

  “I’m having the best time shopping tonight,” she said, sounding astonished by her own words.