Promises to Keep - Ann Tatlock [25]
Wally didn’t say anything but went on holding the bill in my direction. Finally he muttered, “Go on. Buy yourself something pretty.” The joint moved up and down as he spoke.
I stepped forward slowly and took the money.
“What a waste,” the other Delaney boy said. “You know what you can get for ten bucks on the street?”
“Shut up, Delaney,” Wally said. “It’s my money, and I’ll do what I want with it.”
I looked at Wally, then at the twins. My stomach turned at the sickly sweet smell hanging over them. I looked back at Wally, hoping somehow to connect with him, but he was gazing up at the night sky like he was looking for a star to fly away to. Had he succeeded in flying off, he wouldn’t have been any more lost to me than he was now. A stranger had taken over my brother’s body; the Wally I knew had been pushed out, sent into exile, expelled from the world I’d always known before tonight.
I turned and ran across the lawn and in through the kitchen door. Barely glancing at Mom and her helpers, I ran through the kitchen, down the hall, and up the stairs. I didn’t stop running until I reached my bedroom. I flipped on the light and laid my hand on the jewelry box on my dresser. The box, a birthday gift from Daddy, was the keeper of my few treasures. When I lifted the padded pink lid, a tiny plastic ballerina inside popped up and started turning pirouettes to the tinny plucked tune of “You Are My Sunshine.” How I loved that little ballerina in her pink plastic tutu, whirling and twirling till the music slowed to a stop and I had to turn the little knob on the bottom to wind it up again.
I sat on the edge of my bed, listening to the music, watching the ballerina go around and around. I picked up my treasures one by one and looked at them: a four-leaf clover pressed and ironed between two small squares of waxed paper; a whistle from a box of Cracker Jack; a string of plastic rosary beads from my best friend, June, in Minnesota; a 1923 silver dollar from Gramps; an envelope with my baby teeth (Mom said the tooth fairy gave them all back to her); and a fistful of candy wrappers. These, neatly folded, sticky-side in, were the wrappers from some of the Sugar Daddy lollipops my father had given me over the years.
That was Daddy for you. He’d be pulling candy out of his shirt pocket one minute and the next pulling threats out of some dark place in his mind. Sometimes I’d be sucking on a Sugar Daddy even as Daddy decided to race down another open road, intent on his game of chicken, intent on scaring us all to death even if we didn’t hit a tree.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Wally said. He was just like Jekyll and Hyde, and you were never sure which one would show up.
I sometimes wondered if Dr. Jekyll drank a potion to become the evil Mr. Hyde, wasn’t there a potion we could give Daddy to make him always be the good Daddy? The kind and gentle Daddy? The Daddy who kissed me and gave me candy and said he loved me?
I tucked the ten dollars among my treasures and lowered the lid of the music box. I turned off the light and stepped to the window that overlooked the front yard.
What a strange, strange night it was. Wally was out back smoking pot, Mom was in the kitchen flirting with a circle of admirers, and Tillie – merciful heavens! Tillie was with the crowd on the front lawn, dancing the Virginia reel with Grandpa! I could see them by the light of the streetlamp, the music from the three-piece band drifting up to me through the open windows. I gazed in curiosity at the sea of bobbing heads, clapping hands, dark figures milling about. Laughter hovered above it all, a cap on the night of Tillie’s welcome home party.
I was just about to go down and join everyone when I glimpsed a figure standing on the rim of the streetlamp’s circle of light. Leaning my palms against the windowsill, I peered harder and drew in a sharp breath. In another moment I was stumbling down the stairs and out the front door, pushing my way through the crowd