Every Other Weekend

by Zulema Renee Summerfield

Genres: Coming of Age; Family Life; Humor & Satire

Synopsis

A debut novel about an imaginative girl in the year following her parents' divorce, and what happens when her creeping premonition that something terrible will happen comes true in the most unexpected of ways.

The year is 1988, and America is full of broken homes. Every Other Weekend drops us into the sun-scorched suburbs of southern California, amid Bret Michaels mania and Cold War hysteria, with Nenny, a wildly precocious, nervous nelly of an eight-year-old, as our guide to the newly rearranged life she finds herself leading after her parents split.

Nenny and her mother and two brothers have just moved in with her new stepfather and his two kids. Her old life replaced by this new configuration, Nenny's natural anxieties intensify, and both real and imagined dangers entwine: earthquakes and home invasions, ghosts of her stepfather's days in Vietnam, Gorbachev knocking down the door of her third grade class and recruiting them all into the Red Army. Knock-kneed and a little stormy-eyed, she is far too small for the thoughts that haunt her, yet her fears are not entirely unfounded. Indeed, tragedy does come, but it comes at her sideways, in a way she never had imagined.

With an irresistible voice, Summerfield has managed to tap the very truth of what it is to have been a child of her generation, bottle it, and serve it up in devastating, hilarious, heartfelt doses. Every Other Weekend beautifully and unsettlingly captures the terrible wisdom that children often possess, as well as the surprising ways in which families fracture and reform.

Release date: September 3, 2019

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 288

Sample

How to Stand in
Front of a
Broken Home

NOTE, FIRST, the crepe myrtle. How lovely and silken its wrinkled petals, you might shovel them up like taffeta snow. In spring, scoop fistfuls of petals into sturdy leaf boats, and at dusk, when the neighbors water their lawns and the gutters river up, sail your little crafts downstream, to other cities and children unknown. Have your fun while you can, though, because those petals don’t last very long. Soon the myrtle’s limbs will be ragged and bare.

It is 1988 and America is full of broken homes. America’s time is measured in every-other-weekend-and-sometimes-once-a-week. Her drawers are filled with court papers and photos no one looks at anymore. Her children have bags that’re always packed and waiting by the door.

In the driveway, note the brand-new Chevy van. On family trips, scuttle like a bug to get a swivel seat. Yell “Shotgun,” punch someone in the arm, cry to Mom if you have to—whatever it takes. If you’re not swivelin’, you’re snivelin’, ’cause the back seat reeks of sweat and swarms with ants when summer rolls around. They sneak up the tailpipe and find their way in, a little button of black squirm where someone spilt Hi-C from a can.

*  *  *

At Sacred Heart school one day, during Family History Week (which, it turns out, is completely made up), Katie Marion stands at the front of the third-grade classroom, beaming and proud, her family tree clutched to her chest. Something’s not right with her drawing. There isn’t a single broken branch anywhere. No bandaged grafts, no bark haloed by disease—just two clean branches starting at the top, a grandma branch and a grandpa branch, and then neat smiling non-fissures the whole way down.

“My grandpa met my grandma in 1949,” she begins. It’s so obvious she’s reading off a card taped to the drawing’s back. Katie Marion has a stupid mouth. She’s happy and nice and her mom brings her hot lunch every day. It’s a sin to hate her, which is unfortunate, because Nenny kind of does.

“He was a captain in the air force and she was a secretary on the base. They got married and had three kids: my dad, Uncle Roger, and Aunt Lisa, who died when I was three.”

This is said in the same emotional register of everything Katie Marion does or says, except for the time she got stung by a bee. Nenny wants to pencil out her own eye.

“My dad met my mom when he was the principal at this school. He’s not the principal anymore. They got married and had my sisters and then me. Mom says don’t be surprised if there’s another on the way—”

Wait just a pancakin’ minute. Hold the ever-lovin’ phone. Nenny knows she’s not supposed to blurt stuff out, because Sister Timothy will write on her report card “She blurts stuff out,” but blurting’s what Nenny does.

“Your parents are still married?” she blurts. Sister Timothy shoots her a warning glance.

And Katie Marion, stupid Katie Marion, she just blinks her big no-sin eyes.

“Well, sure,” she says. “Aren’t yours?”

(Pencil stab.)

“Yeah,” Nenny finally says, offering a dramatic pause. “But not to each other.”

It only takes a second before everyone figures out that this is the funniest thing they’ve ever heard. The whole room erupts in laughter, and everyone’s clapping and slapping their knees—everyone except Sister Timothy, who yells “Go to the office!” as she thrusts the hall pass into Nenny’s hands.

A bright wave of laughter follows her, hot sizzling relief that someone said what they were all thinking. Katie Marion stands dumbstruck still, as surprised as if someone’s told her that God doesn’t exist or wishes don’t actually come true. Katie Marion’s an idiot, that’s for sure, but it isn’t her fault. Idiocy is genetic—just look at her stupid family tree. Besides, there’s grace inside Nenny somewhere. She could probably trace its source, if someone would only show her how. Grace to forgive, grace to excuse, grace to turn a thousand blind eyes. A grace simple enough to flash Katie Marion a quiet look as Nenny leaves.

Come on over to Kensington Drive. Stand outside of my house anytime.

A Brief History of
Why Everything Sucks

EARLY LAST year Nenny’s parents called the kids in for dinner, served them each a plate of macaroni and cheese, turned the TV off, and announced that they were getting a divorce. Tiny didn’t know what that meant, so Dad took a deep breath and explained. “Your mom and I aren’t going to live together anymore,” and to Nenny that made sense, because it was clear they were miserable, and Bubbles seemed fine with it too, because he was the oldest and could roll with anything—but Tiny? Poor Tiny? He just collapsed in a ball on the floor and cried. When he did that, Mom couldn’t help it: she started crying too. Bubbles slid off his chair and started to go somewhere but then stopped, standing by the table looking terribly confused. Finally Dad said, “All right, let’s clean up,” in a voice so sad and distant that Nenny knew for the first time what forever meant, and knew that it wasn’t good.

*  *  *

Within a matter of weeks, it seemed, everything changed. They sold the house in Yucaipa and Dad went to live in an apartment while Mom moved into a two-bedroom house with a woman named Corinne, who was another nurse at the hospital. Sometimes, when Mom was gone at work, Corinne took them to the orange grove at the end of the street. Someone had hung a tire swing. The grove was mysterious in a prehistoric kind of way. Shadows turned bluish and soft once you stepped in, and likely there were dead things there.

A strange mechanical ritual emerged: Mom went to work, the three of them ducked into the grove with Corinne, and then Tiny would swing, and then Nenny, and then Bubbles, and then Tiny again. While you waited for your turn you sat in the dirt and picked at your shoes, pushing sticks through the eyelets, unraveling the laces, until it was your turn again, and then Corinne would push you, quiet and gentle and slow. It was like slipping into a dream no one’d had before.

Corinne never tried to console them about the divorce and the change in their lives. For this, Nenny loved her.

And then Dad would show up, every other weekend and one night a week, looking like someone had blown him up and had left a weird, featureless man in his place. On Wednesdays he’d take them to McDonald’s and they’d eat in silence, and every other Friday he’d pick them up for weekends at his house. They were long weekends, dull and quiet in a sad, sort of lonely way.

*  *  *

Soon Rick came along. He worked at the hospital with Mom too. He was bald as a cue and was very no-nonsense. Rick had been in Vietnam.

Rick had two kids, Charles and Kat. Charles was skinny as a bean and, like Nenny, was about to enter third grade. Kat was sixteen. It didn’t matter what you said to her, she’d just snort and roll her eyes. Mom took Nenny and the boys to Rick’s every couple of days, where they watched Charles run around with sticks while Kat ignored them all, reading Seventeen in the shade. On the upside, Rick did have a pool—though more often than not swimming was just Charles doing cannonballs while Nenny and the boys stuck timidly to the sides.

Eventually Mom and Rick would emerge from the dark of the house looking rumpled and unkempt, and then they’d all eat pizza or Chinese food around a table that was far too small for seven people, while Rick’s cat eyed everyone suspiciously from the corner of the room. One day in June, Mom made an announcement: “Kids, we’re moving in!” Like this was somehow good news, like it made a whole ton of sense. What about the tire swing? Does Dad even know his way here?

So that’s how it is: Mom and Rick got married and Nenny’s got a new family and they’ve all got adjustments to make. That’s what Rick keeps saying, as if the fact that this sucks for everyone should make them all feel better.

Turns out, Dad does know his way here. Except that when he shows up now, he doesn’t even come to the door. He just sits in the car, staring straight ahead, honking.

Diminishing the Power

LITTLE NENNY has always been a nervous nelly. She was born with a natural predilection for alarm. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. This simple irrationality governs her whole life—top to bottom, inside and out.

Knock-kneed and a little stormy-eyed, she is far too small for the thoughts that haunt her. Do they contain her or does she contain them? If the heart is a receptacle, a little bin where all your troubles go, then Nenny’s overflows to the point of being overwhelmed.

Someone will leave the stove on and the house will burn to the ground. She’ll trip and break her neck on the stairs. She’ll go swimming and her foot will get caught in the drain at the bottom of the pool (she saw this once on TV). The house will fill with gas and no one will smell it and they’ll all just go about their business, la dee da, and then some idiot will come over and light a match and blow them all to smithereens. It’s going to happen because it’s happened before, to one of Kat’s friends who moved away to Michigan. Cross her heart and hope to die—except that’s the problem. She doesn’t want to die. Nenny doesn’t want to die at all.

You could make a catalog of these fears and sell it for a pretty penny. Give it a nice shiny cover with a drawing of a girl trembling and sweating and with her fingers crammed in her mouth. Call it something like When a Child Suffers the Inevitability of Doom.

Every Thursday night, Mom puts Nenny to bed. It can only be once a week because Mom works late, and also there are so many people in this stupid house and not enough Mom to go around. She sits on the edge of Nenny’s bed and takes Nenny’s hand in her own, pets it like it’s a dying hamster, and she takes a deep breath and tells Nenny to take a deep breath too, and they breathe in all the breath they’ve got and their chests expand like too-full balloons, and they exhale—whoooooooo—and Mom tilts her head and half smiles, half frowns with a look that means it’s time to get real, and she stops petting but still holds Nenny’s hand and says, “What’s been on your mind?”

“Everything,” Nenny says, because it’s true. It’s always true.

“Everything is on your mind?” she asks, and Nenny nods. “Everything is on your mind.” Mom makes this simple reaffirmation, then lets a quiet pause fill the room. She’s good at this, at stopping just long enough to let whatever you said float around, long enough to collect meaning but not long enough to gather dust. She is a nurse, after all.

“And how does that feel? To have everything on your mind?”

Part of Nenny hates stupid questions, wishes she could swipe all stupid questions off the face of the earth. But the other part of her, the more important, lasting part, would give everything to spend the rest of eternity in a half-dark room with Mom’s soft voice swirling around. Sister Timothy would send her to hell just for thinking it, but Nenny doesn’t care: she’d give her very soul.

“It feels bad,” Nenny says. “Really bad.”

“Okay. Where does it feel bad? Does it feel bad in your head? In your stomach? Can you point to where it feels bad?”

This whole thing—the breathing, the check-ins, locating the bad—they recently learned from Uncle Max, who is Rick’s brother and a counselor at a school for troubled boys. When you’re feeling something, find the place where you’re feeling it the most. It’s sometimes in your chest, sometimes in your head, often in your stomach, rarely in your toes. Once you’ve found it, close your eyes and imagine it gone. It’s called “diminishing the power.” It sounds easier than it is. They’ve been diminishing the power for months now, since the earthquake in July and Nenny’s freak-out: crying, puking, pulling out her hair.

“Is it here?” Mom says and points to her own head. “Here?” Her stomach. “Here?” Her heart. But Nenny doesn’t say anything now, and Nenny doesn’t point.

There aren’t enough fingers to point with.

Before

WHO KNOWS why things fall apart, or why some things happen and others don’t, or why two people who loved each other once don’t love each other anymore. Nenny could speculate all night about Mom and Dad’s marriage or Mom and Dad’s divorce, and sometimes she does. She doesn’t exactly want to or intend to, but her brain does funny things when she cannot sleep—and often she cannot sleep.

The break wasn’t all that long ago but seems far away in time. They lived in Yucaipa then, which is a rock-strewn and lonely place, and the family across the street were hunchbacks—mama hunchback, papa hunchback, two hunchback boys. The yard next door was littered with trash, and their own yard was all rocks and no grass. There was hardly any furniture in that Yucaipa house. Everyone had a bed and there was a table with chairs, but when they watched TV, they sat on the floor. Mom worked the night shift at the hospital, gone from dusk until dawn, and at night Nenny stood in bed, her face at the window, waiting for Mom to come home, and some nights—most nights—she cried. Thinking about that house now—late on a Saturday, in her sleeping bag on Dad’s floor—even all these months later, it still makes her stomach ache.

Maybe in other houses divorce comes banging loud like drums, but not at the house in Yucaipa. It just seemed like after a while Mom and Dad didn’t talk anymore; they’d pass by each other in the house, wordlessly, the way people who don’t know each other do. Some days Mom wasn’t around at all, and Dad said she was working, but Nenny knew that probably wasn’t true.

Once they walked down to Taco Bell for lunch, on one of those days Mom should have been at home but wasn’t. It was too hot to be walking, but Mom had the car. Dad ordered four burritos, the kind that cost only thirty-five cents, and they ate in a booth near the back. They were the only people there. Halfway home, Nenny realized she’d forgotten her doll, back on the bench in the corner booth. It was a floppy little thing, a sack of loose limbs with a plastic face, nothing like a real baby. Still, she didn’t want to be without it.

“What do you mean you forgot? Where is it?” They were at the stoplight, cars whizzing past, Dad’s hair wild in the sweltering wind.

“I guess back at the booth,” Nenny said weakly. She had to stare at the sidewalk, at her shoes, otherwise she’d cry.

“Dammit, Nenny.” Dad’s face was splotched with rage. “I told you to leave it at home.” Which was true, he did, but she’d begged. “Dammit,” he said again. Dad had cursed before but never at Nenny or the boys. He started to march back, Nenny and the boys trailing behind, silent in the way when one of you is in trouble so all of you are but really no one is. Even then, young as they were, they knew it wasn’t about the heat or the walk back to Taco Bell. They knew it wasn’t about them at all.
. . .