Save the Dragons!. Martin Berman-Gorvine
copy of A Wrinkle in Time and felt sorry for myself for not having parents as cool as the Murrys.
Tom has to be having more fun than me. His parents must be just perfect. And his little sister too—I bet she’s wonderful. Their world sounds so cute and charming! It wouldn’t be so bad to have a king, and not to have any idea what a cell phone was.
The TV went on in the living room, tuned to Dad’s stupid bowl games, of course. Heather was cheering right along with him, where Mom always used to nag him to turn it off or at least way down. God, how I wished I was back in Gloria’s Gateway Books. What did Tom look like? Blond hair, kind brown eyes, and a soft smile, for sure. But I couldn’t quite picture his face.Eventually I got so bored I dozed off, though Heather’s stupid cheering and high-fiving Dad woke me up every now and then.
When I woke up in the morning Heather wasn’t there. Dad fed me lumpy oatmeal and we ate in silence. I didn’t want to wait around for his cheerleader girlfriend to show up and try to get me to go shopping with her, so I threw my coat on and ignored Dad when he asked where I was going. I headed straight for the “Golden Mile,” since I really did need some clothes, especially if I was going to be meeting Tom on Monday. I mean, I didn’t want his first sight of me to be a grungy girl in torn jeans. But I had only two twenty-dollar bills for spending money. Luckily I found a Goodwill, where I picked out a sort of patchwork skirt, a sequin-spangled lavender blouse and moccasin boots. Maybe I would seem like a mysterious gypsy to Tom. He’d have to fall in love with me at first sight! But first, he’d have to show up.
I spent the rest of the weekend mooching around the stores, trying to ignore the guilt gnawing at my guts over the way I’d treated Dad. But I didn’t know how to make it up to him, and I was still mad at him anyway, so I avoided him and especially Heather, that snake in the grass. If not for her I would still have been mad at Dad for running out on Mom and me, but we could have talked about it. Maybe. And the weird thing was it was true what I had told Mom: I really had wanted to be with him for Thanksgiving. But now that I was here I couldn’t wait to get away, although as soon as I got back home I would want to get away from Mom too. Would all of this get less confusing when I met Tom? I sure hoped so.
* * * *
On Sunday morning I was wandering through a park with a duck pond, aimlessly throwing potato chip crumbs to a flock of Canada geese that were paddling around in the grimy water, when a voice called my name. I stiffened.
“There you are,” said Heather, less cheerfully than before.
Good, she’s afraid of me. She was dressed in a fake white fur of some kind, with little black gloves that didn’t look very warm. She was shivering, hunching into her coat against the bitter wind.
I was none too warm myself, but I stood there with my chin thrust out and asked her what she wanted.
“You know your father’s very upset we’ve hardly seen you all weekend,” she began.
I said nothing.
“Listen, nothing says you have to like me, but Frank, well, he’s your father.”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but he hasn’t been much of a father to me for the past two years.”
“Now about that—he doesn’t like to talk about it much, not even to me, but you know he was terribly ashamed when he lost his job.”
I shut my eyes but that only made my memories of that terrible day burn brighter behind my eyelids.
“Things were already bad with Celine—”
“Leave my mom out of this!”
“—and he was too ashamed to face you, when he couldn’t even bring home a paycheck anymore. So he moved out so he could find a job and start sending your mom money. And the only job he could find at first was down here, driving a truck to construction sites. That’s how he met me—I’m the office manager at Sardinian Brothers, and I got him the job there. But he was sending your mom money all along, and writing you all those letters you never answered.”
I froze. “What letters?”
“Every week a letter. Don’t tell me you never got them!”
I opened my mouth but nothing came out but little squeaky noises. Dumb Heather didn’t even seem to notice, just kept babbling about how Dad didn’t even try to see me at first because he figured I didn’t want to see him, and that she, Heather, was some kind of big hero for making him go to court so that Mom would have to let me see him.
“I have to go now,” I finally said. “I have to pack.”
“Oh! Well, I’m parked right over there,” she said.
“No! No thank you. I’ll walk,” I said.
And I did walk all the way back, my head spinning.
Luckily my train was coming soon, so I didn’t have to talk to my dad much. I did give him a quick hug goodbye before going down to the platform.
* * * *
All the way back home I sat and stared out the window into the darkness. My eyes kept tearing up although I tried to think of Tom. When Mom picked me up and started questioning me, I stuck to yes and no as much as possible.
“Did Dad do something to upset you?” she asked finally, as the Grand Mal pulled up in front of our rowhouse. “Or that woman?”
“No, Mom. I just don’t feel well. I might have to stay home from school tomorrow.”
She leaned over and put the back of her hand on my forehead, like she used to do when I was little. Her skin was cold and I could feel her bones. She had just come off the late shift at the Hilton, where she works at the front desk, on her feet eight hours a day, before she even goes to her waitressing job.
“You don’t have a temperature,” she said. “Let’s see how you are in the morning.”
* * * *
When morning came I said I still didn’t feel well—stomach cramps and nausea, which was even sort of true.
I waited till Mom headed off to her other job, waiting tables at Dino’s Diner, then I slipped out of bed and went up to her bedroom. It was a mess, as usual. Mom hadn’t even made the bed, so I pushed aside the rumpled sheets and blankets to find what I wanted—some banker’s boxes of papers she keeps lined up under the bed, with the dust bunnies.
At first I just found a bunch of legal papers. Maybe Heather was lying. She was just trying to make Mom look bad! And checks, from Dad? He never sent money till the judge made him, Mom told me so a thousand times!
Still I kept searching, and then I found them, all those letters Dad wrote me, mixed in with old unpaid bills and threats to cut off our electricity and repossess our car. Those stopped when Mom got the hotel job—I had offered to get a babysitting job to bring in some extra money, but Mom always said no, I had to concentrate on school. But the letters from Dad had kept coming all along! A bunch of them were held together with a thick red rubber band, the kind that holds together broccoli stalks at the supermarket.
None of them had been opened. Did I want to read them now? I stared at Dad’s handwriting on the envelopes. No. I grabbed the ones I could find and took them to my room, where I hid them under my pillow.
Then I got together my gypsy-lady outfit from Frederick and took a shower.
You’ll be meeting Tom in just a few hours. In fact, why not head off to Gloria’s Gateway Books right now?
It was tempting, but I decided to confront Mom first.
I still had a few hours to kill before she got home to change for the Hilton, time I spent reading The Race to Mars and daydreaming. Wouldn’t it be neat if Tom lived in that world and I got to go to Mars!
Right now I wanted only to get as far away from everybody as possible, and life in a Martian colony sounded cool. When this book was published, fifteen years or so ago, they had domed hydroponic