Dark Water - Laura McNeal [47]
Robby said, “That iron bridge that goes from the promenade over the creek.”
“Well, that’s kind of a dark name for it,” Hoyt said.
I had to agree that the bridge was a little strange. I remember thinking, when Hoyt took us to see it, that someone had gone to a crazy amount of trouble to make a footbridge maybe five people would ever use. The sides of the iron bridge were a cutwork pattern of reeds and herons and egrets. It didn’t lead anywhere except from the promenade to the stucco houses fenced with prickly pears, and you couldn’t see it from Main Street.
“What else?” my uncle asked. He was a little puzzled, I could tell.
“I thought she’d like number three best of all,” Robby said, “but it was the wrong time of day.”
We waited. My uncle pulled into the parking lot and I could smell the scalded sugar smell of the donut shop. Sunlight bounced off all the cars as Robby said, “Took her to see the ostrich. Unfortunately, the ostrich was asleep.”
Twenty-eight
My mother had a job interview that afternoon, so she was trying on clothes when I came home. My clothes, actually. All of her pants were too loose, she said, so she was rummaging through my closet, which used to be Lavar’s coat closet and was too packed and disorganized for easy rummaging. “Where’s the job?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s a bookstore,” she said.
“Which bookstore?”
“One of the chains,” she said.
“That sounds fun,” I said. “You like books.”
“Yeah!” she said. I could tell she didn’t think it would be fun.
“Does that pay more than subbing?” I asked.
“It will be in addition to subbing,” she said. “The opening is for evenings and weekends. That’s why my interview is on a Sunday. Besides, it’s almost summer, remember?”
“You’re going to work two jobs?”
“Until summer,” she said. “Why are these clothes so wrinkled?” she asked.
“Because we never iron them,” I said.
She found a brown skirt and a pleated white blouse that I hadn’t worn for a long time because Greenie said it made me look like a librarian, and my mother told me to turn on the iron.
“Maybe I should get a job,” I said, watching her apply the eyeliner, wipe it off, and draw another shaky line. Both of her eyes were blue, which made her homochromic. This was a word we used to toss around as a family when we were a family.
“If you were sixteen and had a license,” my mother said, going at the lips now, “it would be easier. Or if we lived in town so you could get to work without a car.”
My birthday was in November.
She stepped into a pair of black heels I’d chosen for homecoming back in the fall and hadn’t worn since. My father had pinned on my corsage and kissed both my ears, a routine he’d started when I was little, and then I got into the backseat of Eldon Barton’s mother’s car and pretended not to notice that Eldon’s hands were shaking. I still saw him at school sometimes and we ignored one another.
My mother jabbed an earring into each of her earlobes. She lifted her hair to study the effect. “Oh my God,” she said. “My ears have gotten old.”
I said this was ridiculous, and I leaned close to see that she did have wrinkles on her earlobes. “Nah,” I said. “Ears don’t age.”
She let her hair fall back over the wrinkles and sighed. “I’m off,” she said.
“You look pretty,” I said. Losing weight did make her look pretty. It just didn’t make her look happy. Maybe my uncle was right about that.
When she was gone, I had three choices: homework, moisturizing my earlobes, or a moth-to-the-flame ride down to the river. Amiel’s insistence that I go away, por favor, still stung, so I sat on the sofa and studied the room. What a mess the house was. I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes. The project I’d told my father about was half truth, half lie. We had nine days of school left, and four of them would be devoted to tests.
For a while, I did geometry, and then I began reading—cross-legged and pillow-supported—a chapter about the War of 1812 that beckoned me, ever so softly, into the early stages of sleep, blurring the sunlight