Page 26 of Gone Tonight
Still, I’m a little relieved I don’t have to face more of her questions tonight. I want to soak my tired feet and try to clear my head.
I finish my shift and slip out the door without saying goodbye to Melanie, just in case she’s planning to intercept me with words of sympathy or support.
The Bonneville sputters when I start it. I say a little prayer until the engine catches. We’ve got nearly 150,000 miles on the car, and I’m hoping to eke out a lot more.
I sit in the parking lot, letting the engine warm up, and watch as a guy driving a red Trans Am rounds the corner and slides into the space next to me. He’s a good-looking man, about my age. But it isn’t him I’m checking out. It’s his car.
I used to love flashy muscle cars. Mustangs, Camaros, Chevelles—and my favorite, the Corvette.
That’s the kind of car James drove. He’d gotten it from a guy who’d crashed into a guardrail and whose wife was making him sell it. James knocked out the worst of the dents and touched up the black paint and added a little horsepower.
He drove it to meet me for our first date.
I ease my gearshift into drive and pull out. I plan to swing by the library first to do my checking again, even though I did it only yesterday. Now more than ever, I must remain vigilant.
Only when I’m certain the barriers I’ve erected around me and Catherine aren’t in danger of being breached will I head home.
It almost feels like James is waiting for me there. In a way, I guess he is since I need to sink deeply into another memory of him and write more in my journal.
On the night of my first date with James, my father had to work late.
He said Timmy and I should stop for burgers on the way home from Poms practice, so we did. We spread out our books in the booth and Timmy chewed his pencil eraser as he worked his way through a page of pre-algebra equations. I was of no help since I’d already forgotten everything I’d learned on the subject. I drafted my English essay. The topic was foreshadowing in Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet. Usually I dreaded school reading, but something about this slim play spoke to me: teenagers in love destroying their lives.
Trust me, I get the irony.
I expected my dad to be home by the time Timmy and I arrived. But he wasn’t.
My dad worked for my mother’s family business. It’s how they met. My grandparents owned a bunch of houses close to the local college, which they rented out at obscene rates to students who needed to live close to campus and had few other options. Timmy and I sometimes tagged along with my dad when he worked on the places, and I couldn’t believe the scam my mother’s family ran. They partitioned off rooms to rent what should have been a four-bedroom home as an eight- or nine-bedroom one. The spaces were barely big enough for twin beds and dressers, and the kitchens and bathrooms were a mess, with patched linoleum floors, cracks in the walls, and iffy appliances.
College kids and their parents put up with it because they knew the leases were temporary—those houses were just stepping-stones as they moved toward a better life—plus no one cared if they threw wild parties or let trash bags pile up in the living room. It wasn’t like they could do a ton of damage to the places, and if they did, my mother’s family simply kept their security deposit. I’m pretty sure they kept most of the deposits even when there wasn’t any new damage.
My mother—your grandmother—had a thick streak of evil running through her, as you’ve probably gleaned by now. She inherited it from her mother, who was a cold, prejudiced, greedy jerk. And that’s putting it mildly.
I heard my grandmother refer to my dad as a spic once. I didn’t understand what it meant, and I couldn’t find the word in the dictionary. From the way the word twisted her lipsticked mouth into an ugly shape, I knew it was an awful one.
Whenever I worry I’ve got half of my mother’s side in me, I remind myself I also have half of my dad’s.
A lot of the time when he worked late, he did it off the clock. Like when there was a serial rapist in the area and some of the college girls were getting scared, my father installed locks on each of their bedroomdoors. He paid for those bolts himself, which I knew because I was with him at the hardware store when he bought them.
His name is Mateo. If you’d turned out to be a boy, that would have been your middle name.
The first night James and I planned to go out, my dad was helping some students deal with a plumbing crisis.
After we finished our burgers and homework and drove home, Timmy and I sat in the driveway for a few minutes, but we couldn’t put off going inside for long. Dusk was settling, and I only had thirty minutes before I had to meet James.
The house was dead quiet when I opened the kitchen door, which was unusual. My mother typically fell asleep on the living room couch in front of the TV.
I waited a minute, but couldn’t hear a thing, so I motioned for Timmy to get out of the car. We had our routine choreographed as intricately as any of those I’d practiced for Poms. Timmy closed the car door as quietly as possible. I stepped into the kitchen first and looked around quickly. (I’d learned to do that the hard way because my mom once threw her empty wine glass at me when I came in. Luckily, her aim was terrible.) Then I motioned for Timmy to join me.
I couldn’t see the living room from my vantage point. But I was pretty sure my mother was splayed out in her usual spot.
Most of the lights were off. I left them that way, even though the house was draped in shadows, as Timmy and I crept upstairs.
The upper level seemed completely still.
I didn’t let down my guard, though. I checked Timmy’s bedroom and waited until he slipped through his door and closed it behind him.
Across the hall, my parents’ bedroom door was ajar. The slice of the room I could see was dark and empty.
