Plus there have been a few rape-murders on the outskirts of town lately and the cops haven’t caught the bad guy yet, which has lots of people freaked out and for good reason.
Madman nearby—beware!
Finally, I cannot take it and completely blow any chance I have of surviving an encounter with the local psychopath, mostly because I am only seventeen, and a chick, even if I am a junior now. “Mom?” I say.
“Amber? Did I wake you up?”
Whew. It’s Mom. “No. Some crazy lumberjack train conductor was just about to abduct me and make me his slave, but you scared him off. Thanks.”
“That’s not even remotely funny.”
“How was fishin’ fo’ men, any bites?”
“Nope. Nothing.”
“A good man is hard to find.”
“Damn skippy,” my mother says, like a used-up chippie who will never find her Prince Charming, but you can tell—by the tone of her voice—that Mom is faking something, trying to sound hopeful enough to make her daughter feel as though she will not be sleeping on a school bus forever, so I give her a little credit. She’s had a harrowing life.
“Always tomorrow,” I say through the darkness, as my mom pats my forehead like I am Bobby Big Boy. I like dogs, so I do not take offense.
“Does your puppy need to go out before I hit the hay?”
“Bob probably could squirt a few drops.”
“Please don’t call him Bob.”
“That’s his name.”
“Your father was—best to forget him, and—”
“Well, Bob here has to take a squirt, and I have school tomorrow, so can we skip the broken-record talk and get doggie duty over with, please? I can’t sleep without my pup.”
“Come on, little dog,” Mom says, clapping her hands. And Bob bursts forth from my pre-woman chest, widening the neck holes of—like—four shirts, and scratching the hell out of my neck. He loves to piss. It’s his favorite.
“Use his leash!” I yell, because I don’t want 3B to get lost in the dark.
“Okay,” Mom says, but I know she doesn’t use the leash, because I’m on it—it’s under my butt.
My mom lies to me all the time. She sorta has a problem. She is a fabricator of falsehoods. Or maybe she is just drunk again, which is no excuse.
Sometimes when I am losing faith in Mom—which is, like, all the time lately—I like to think about one of the top-seven all-time Amber-and-her-mom moments. These are little videos I have stored in my brain—all documenting the mom I knew before she sorta gave up on life, before Oliver broke Mom’s spirit and got her drinking so heavily. Here’s the number-seven all-time Amber-and-her-mom moment:
Back in the 80s—when Mom was in high school—she was a big-time softball player who helped her team win a state championship, which was the highlight of her entire life. She used to talk about softball all the time, and even used to play on a local bar team in a beer league. I used to go and watch Mom play softball against fat men with huge beer bellies and foul mouths. There were only a few other women who played in the league, and Mom was a million times better than all of them. Mom was better than most of the men too, for the record. She couldn’t hit the ball that far, but she knew how to hit through the holes in the infield, and she was one hell of a second-base woman—never making any errors.
Anyway, when I was a little girl, Mom got it in her head that she would train me and make me into a killer softball player just like her, so she took me to the sports store and bought me a glove and a bat and a ball and a hat and cleats and even a pair of batting gloves, even though I hadn’t asked for any of these things. This was well after my dad took off on us, and we never had all that much money, so this purchase was sorta a big deal, which I understood even as a little girl, so I just went along with the idea, even though I really didn’t want to play softball.
The next day, Mom took me and all of my new gear to the park. She showed me how to swing a bat and throw and catch a ball, but—even though she was a really good coach—I just couldn’t get the hang of any of it, and trying made me feel like a complete idiot. For weeks I swung the bat and never hit any of the balls Mom threw me; all of the balls she hit went over my head, through my legs, and occasionally nailed me in the face or stomach, and all of my throws went to the right or left of Mom or hit her feet. Mom never yelled at me or anything like that, but after a few weeks of steady failure, after swinging the bat and missing for the bazillionth time, standing at home plate, I burst into tears.
Mom ran off the mound and toward me. She picked me up and kissed me on the cheek. “Amber, this doesn’t happen overnight—you have to work at it if you want to be a good softball player. It takes lots of practice. It took me years!”
“But I don’t want to be a good softball player. I hate softball. I really do.”
Mom looked me in the eye, and I could tell that she was surprised by this news—I could tell she had never even once thought that maybe I wouldn’t want to play softball.
“I never want to play softball ever again!” I yelled. “Never again. I hate this! All of it!”
“Okay,” Mom said.
“What?” I said, shocked, because I thought that Mom would make me keep trying, because that’s what adults usually do.
“Amber, it’s just a game. I thought you might like it, but if you don’t want to play, well then, you don’t have to play softball.”
“You won’t be mad at me?”
“Why would I be mad at you?” Mom said, and then laughed.
“Because you spent all that money on equipment, and now I don’t want to play softball.”
“If you don’t want to play, you don’t want to play. It’s okay.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
We left the field, got some Italian hoagies at the local deli, and ate by the lake sitting on a park bench. We fed parts of our rolls to ducks, and it was really nice to just sit with my mom after telling her how I felt. It was good to know that I could tell my mom what I truly felt inside and still be able to feed ducks with her afterward. I really love ducks. I like watching them waddle around on land, and their quacking noises crack me up. True.
I remember the sun reflected in the lake so brightly, it hurt to look at the orange water.
“Thanks for not forcing me to keep playing softball,” I said.
Mom put her arm around me.
She never ever again tried to make me play sports, although we ate many more hoagies on that bench and fed flocks of ducks for years to come—and the feeding-ducks memories are something I truly treasure.
Quack, quack.
Ducks.
Pretty killer.
Back in the present moment, when Mom and BBB don’t return to Hello Yellow right away, I’m just about to get up and take care of business myself, making sure my best friend doesn’t get eaten by a rogue coyote or some other dastardly carnivorous mammal, but then Bobby Big Boy is tearing through Hello Yellow, jumping up into my shirts again, warming my belly and chest, and all is well under the comforter Mom had thrown over me before she left the bus, even though I had left it out on the adjacent seat for her, because we have only one comforter.
Bobby Big Boy’s pretty warm from running around and a little lighter without a bladder full of pee. I hear my mom lock up Hello Yellow and then walk toward me.
“This is only temporary, Amber,” Mom says.
“I like it. It’s like camping, only on a school bus, and without fattening marshmallows, a cancer-causing campfire, or the pesky Kum-Ba-Yah singing.”
“Did you get enough food today?”
This question pisses me off, especially since she probably blew what little dough she makes on cigarettes and vodka tonight, providing no dinner whatsoever for me or B Thrice. Mom only works four hours a day at nine dollars an hour, and she’d happily buy you a drink at some crappy bar before she’d buy a meal for herself or me. So depressing.
“Watching my figure,” I say, stealing Franks’ joke, “but Bobby Big Boy had a steak I swiped from Donna’s dinner table.”
“Ms. Roberts,” Mom corrects me, because the drunk has some sardonic notion of proper etiquette when it comes to surnames.
“Right,” I say, like a total bitch, because I can be a cat.
My mother kisses me on the forehead real nice, says, “Sweet dreams, my love,” and so I let go of the day’s frustrations, push my palms together into prayer position, and I silently hold up all the people and dogs in this world who I absolutely positively know need me to pray for them: Mom, 3B, Ricky, Donna, Franks, Chad, Jared, Ty, Door Woman Lucy, Old Man Linder (my manager), Old Man Thompson, Joan of Old and all of the old people down in the Methodist home, Father Chee, The Korean Divas for Christ, Mr. Doolin, Private Jackson, Ms. Jenny, Prince Tony, the Childress Public High School faculty, and the whole damn town of Childress, even the football team, even Lex Pinkston, EVEN my absentee biological father, Bob, who may or may not even be alive for all I know—I hold them all up to JC in my prayers, asking God to help everyone be who they need to be, and then I simply listen to Mom breathe across the aisle until Triple B and I find sleepy land together, and I dream of the real bed on which Bobby Big Boy and I will rest one day. My future bed’s going to be an ocean of mattress, maybe even a queen-size, sucka! Word.
CHAPTER 2
Waking up at a normal time in Hello Yellow isn’t all that bad, because of the many windows—warm sunlight cubes reach everywhere. This happens on the weekends. True. But on school days, we have to rise before the sun comes up so that none of the other early-rising bus drivers will catch us sleeping on Hello Yellow, which would surely cost Mom her job. So we get up super early—way before dawn. I’ve been doing this for a while; I usually wake up automatically sometime between four thirty and five. But no matter how much she drinks, Mom is always up before Triple B and me.
Today, Mom’s inhaling a Newport just outside of Hello Yellow, her dyed blond hair full of fading moonlight. (I keep my hair naturally black and I do dig the way it sometimes shines iridescent like crow feathers. True. I’m an inch or two shorter than Mom when she stands up tall, which is like never. While my skin is freakishly white, her skin is sort of yellow from smoking so much.) Mom’s orange cherry glows brighter with each pull.
Like always, she’s shivering mentholated smoke out of her nose and mouth.
BBB runs right past her, off the leash in the morning newness where there are no coyotes, local rapist-killers, or other unnamed monsters. He lifts his tiny leg and merrily pisses on the front driver’s side tire of school bus 260, marking his all-time favorite wheel.
“Hey, Mom,” I say.
“Good morning, sweetheart,” she says from within her dark smoky shadow.
Mom looks really thin.
Skeletal.
True?
True.
When did you last eat? I think but do not ask, because I don’t really want to know the answer, nor do I want to hear another one of Mom’s stupid lies.
She won’t even eat the food I bring her from Donna’s house.