Replacing Dad. Shelley Fraser Mickle
car window and said to me, “I think it’s going to be fine. But we ought to exchange names and phone numbers and who our insurance companies are. Your car doesn’t look much better.”
I turned around and saw that, as far as a trunk was concerned, my car had just been relieved of one. In fact, the whole back end was just about gone. Good, I thought. George the First had bought that car right before he moved out, and it’d been part of my settlement. I’d always even wondered if he’d driven that tart somewhere in it and they might have even. . . in it. And now it was just one less thing between me and him.
Then, just as though to add the final topping to publicly knocking the hell out of the new Palm Key doctor, George the Second got loose from Drew and circled the Mercedes. “Boy, we sure knocked this fart, didn’t we? It’s an old fart, too, in’t it?”
I had to stand there and watch that: the Palm Key firemen and this new doctor, listening to my child call everything and everybody farts, right after my other son had caused the only wreck in Palm Key in three years.
When I got back in the car, I dug around in the bottom of my purse for loose change. It was clear: We were going to have to drive through some place for some fast food, quick. I was too shot to eat, much less to cook. But, as usual, George the Second wouldn’t be.
And I probably don’t need to add, I guess, that when I got home, I didn’t really sleep much that night, or even for the next few weeks.
3.
Drew
I knew my mother hated her job at the county dump. She didn’t piss and moan about it, but still, I knew. Sometimes I’d hear her cussing out her boss while she was putting stuff in the washing machine, thinking the sound of the water swishing and all that would cover up what she said. So I guess it really was a good thing that happened the day I was baby-sitting George, except that for a while, it sure looked like a tragedy in the making.
It was one of those school holidays—teacher conference day—which always made things hard for us. Because Dad was at the school, couldn’t watch George or Mandy, and Mom had to be at The Dump. So between her and me, we worked it out. If I stayed home and watched George and Mandy, she’d save a little on day care. Mandy was too old for it anyway,but not old enough to stay home alone. So Mom would go to work, and we’d both forget that my teachers needed conferencing. “Your dad ought to take care of that, anyway,” she said. It was my first year in high school; I’d only been in the ninth grade for nine weeks, so how bad could it be?
She taught me how to make grilled cheese sandwiches, balance it off with a can of pears and a sliced apple and a heated-up can of baked beans. That way Mandy and George, as well as me, would have one of the meals she believed in. She always said we had to have something raw, yellow or green; something white like potatoes or rice; and a lot of milk. My mother fixed meals with a color wheel, and she never gave in.
It was about two o’clock. I’d already cleaned up the kitchen after our lunch. And I’d just about had it taking care of Mandy and George. The summer before, when Dad had driven us down to a white-sand beach for a long weekend, Mandy had sat up in the hotel room while the rest of us went out for a swim. And when Poltergeist came on a cable channel, Mandy didn’t do a damn thing about turning it off. (At home, Mom wouldn’t let us have cable, so when we got in a hotel room, we went nuts.) So there Mandy sat, getting the wits scared out of her, so that ever since last summer, I’d had to escort her to the bathroom and just about everywhere else in the house where she had to go alone. (And neither of us wanted to tell Mom why either, so we snuck around in front of her when she was home.) Already that day I’d gone into the bathroom ahead of Mandy twice to check behind the john, in the cabinets, behind the shower curtain. And all the while, she had just stood in the doorway watching me, and when I complained that the poltergeist thing was not really real, she yelled at me: “It happened in a house, Drew, don’t you understand! It could happen in a house like this.”
“It was just a movie, Mandy.”
“Yeah, but did you check in the hamper?”
And then I’d have to go through all the dirty clothes.
Now she and George had obviously seen that my patience was just about shot, and she had offered to take George to ride bikes out front, maybe walk the shoreline and hunt for stuff that had gotten washed up. I went out to sit on the porch, listen to my Walkman. The tide was out, making the shoreline look like the world was being sucked dry. The edge of the water was a long way away now on the other side of the road, and the oyster bars were sticking up like the scaly backs of some kinds of monsters. Palm trees dot the edge of our front lawn, their bark wrinkled like elephant skins, and their big leaves were rustling.
Beside me, our old car was parked in the drive, the crushedin back now like the nose of a Pekingese. Mom had collected the money for it that the insurance company had given her, but she said she didn’t want to fix the old, silly, ugly car—which I knew meant fix the car Dad had left her. Instead, whatever money the company gave her she put into a little foreign job, a lime green Toyota station wagon. It was already nearly ten years old, but Mr. Duffy said he’d work on it for her and help keep it running. He was a good mechanic. It’d had a FOR SALE sign on it parked out on the highway for three months. It was sort of okay. Not radical or anything I’d want for myself; Mom called it the Granny Apple. But most of all, it was hers, the first and only she’d ever bought.
That meant we were now a two-car family, except that the second one, which was really the first, was not exactly what I had in mind for myself. Didn’t even have a back end. And riding around in the reminder of your first wreck sort of sucks.
I plugged in the earphones to my Walkman, mainly out of respect to the bird who lives in front of our house: an osprey, with a nest on a light pole. And the bird was up there, every once in a while getting up and stretching, pushing out her wings. She had been up there every time I’d looked to check on her over the last few days. Big as an eagle. Just not colored like one. Instead plain brown. And the nest looked like my room: big twigs and stuff woven all together, messy, but really real organized. That exact nest had made it through the last hurricane, while half the stuff on the street hadn’t. So out of respect for her, I had my earplugs in and was deep into KISS 105 and didn’t hear Mandy call me. She rode her bike up into the yard and stopped, then punched my knee. (The only part of Mandy that looks like me, as far as I can see, is her chin. It has a little dip in it, dimple, I guess, that makes it look like that’s where the two halves of our faces come together. Otherwise, she’s blond. Looks like Dad and George the Second.) I took the earplugs out of my ears. “Yeah, what?”
“George put a rock up his nose. Says he can’t breathe.”
“What in the hell did he do that for?”
“I don’t know. George doesn’t know. But it’s not my fault.”
I walked down the road, Mandy riding on ahead of me. I saw George sitting on this little sand beach a short way away, his trike mired in the sand. How bad could a rock be? Probably wasn’t anything.
Mandy laid down her bike. “Show him, George.”
George was wiggling his nose and snorting.
“Did you put something up there?” I knelt in the sand and tipped George’s head back.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Don’t know.”
“What?”
“Rock.”
“Why?”
“Don’t know.”
We sounded like two Indians in a Wild West movie. I mashed down on his nose for a while, trying to work the skin like you would a hose. Nothing came out. I wasn’t sure if I believed something really was up there. George has a wild imagination; makes up explanations for things all the time, sometimes even when he had the real answers, like when he believed barrettes held people up in water so they could swim. He’d insisted on wearing some of Mandy’s