The Center of Everything

by Laura Moriarty

Genres: Romance

Synopsis

A remarkable debut that has been called a hybrid of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season, The Center of Everything is the fictional story of 10-year-old math prodigy Evelyn Bucknow. Living in Kansas with her single mother and deeply religious grandmother, Evelyn believes she is destined to marry Travis, the boy next door. But as she grows up, she experiences the heartbreak of a love not meant to be. Author Laura Moriarty was a recipient of the George Bennet Fellowship for Creative Writing at Phillips Exeter Academy.

Release date: June 23, 2009

Publisher: Hachette Books

Print pages: 300

Sample

RONALD REAGAN IS ON TELEVISION, giving a speech because he wants to be president. He has the voice of a nice person, and something in his hair that makes it shiny under the lights. I change the channel, but it’s still him, just from a different angle.

The people in the audience wear cowboy hats with REAGAN printed on the front, and they clap and blow horns every time he stops talking, so much that sometimes he has to put his hands up so they’ll be quiet and hear what he’s going to say next. Nancy Reagan sits behind him, smiling and wearing a peach-colored dress with a bow on one of the shoulders, no cowboy hat. She claps too, but only after everyone else has started, so it looks like while he is talking, she is maybe thinking about something else.

“She’s a mannequin,” my mother says, pointing a spatula at the television. “She freaks me out.”

My mother is maybe the opposite of Nancy Reagan. I could never imagine her wearing the peach dress with the bow on it because she wears blue jeans and usually her gray sweatshirt. And she always listens to what everyone says, even people sitting in the next booth in restaurants who probably don’t want her to listen. Right now, she’s supposed to be in the kitchen, making us grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner, but she came out to the front room when she heard Ronald Reagan’s voice, and now she’s just standing there with the spatula, looking at the television and shaking her head until I can smell smoke coming from the kitchen, the bread starting to burn.

She smells it too, runs back. “Zing!” she says. When she kisses me sometimes she says “Smack!”

The people listening to Ronald Reagan in the audience yell “Hip hip, hooray! Hip hip, hooray!” and wave their cowboy hats at the camera as it moves around the room. Finally Ronald Reagan laughs and says, “I think you’re playing our song.” And this just makes people yell more.

My grandmother Eileen was here last week, and she said she remembered back when Ronald Reagan was an actor in movies, so handsome you’d faint if you ever got the chance to see him up close. She’s worried about him being president, though, because his middle name is Wilson, which means he has six letters in each of his three names, and if you’ve read Revelations, that alone is enough to give you the shivers. But she’s going to vote for him anyway, because she says he’s the one person who can maybe make everything right again and he’s not afraid of the Communists. Really, she says, the grand finale is coming one way or another, through him or through somebody else. The important thing is to be ready.

My mother says not to listen to Eileen about things like this. Six is just a number, she says, bigger than five, smaller than seven, and there are enough real reasons to worry about Ronald Reagan without bringing in imaginary ones.

“What’s he saying now?” she yells. She’s standing on top of a chair, waving a dishtowel in front of the smoke detector.

But I can’t talk and listen at the same time, so I just listen, and Ronald Reagan says God put America between two oceans on purpose, to help the freedom fighters in Afghanistan and the Christians and Jews behind the Iron Curtain. I don’t understand this, how a curtain can be iron. There was a metal fold-out wall between our classrooms last year at school; usually it was shut, but when Mrs. West or Mrs. Blackmore was sick, the one who wasn’t sick could unhook the latch and push it back so it folded up and we would all just be in one big room together.

No, my mother says, “Iron Curtain” is a figure of speech. There’s not really a curtain anywhere.

She brings the grilled cheese sandwiches out on a plate, burned on the edges but still okay to eat, one of her long red hairs in the melted cheese of mine. “Sorry, sorry,” she says, picking it out. “It won’t kill you.”

Ronald Reagan says he wants everyone to begin this crusade joined together in a moment of silence, and really you know he means praying to God. The people in cowboy hats take them off and bow their heads, but my mother keeps eating her sandwich. She doesn’t like Ronald Reagan because she thinks he’ll get us all blown up with nuclear bombs. She says all somebody has to do is get mad and push a button and we’ll all be dead within half an hour, all the houses melted, the whales cooked in the sea, and Eileen can think she’ll hear angels singing all she wants, but really she won’t be able to hear a damn thing because she’ll be just as dead as everybody else. She says she used to not worry so much about things like this, but now she has me, and the idea of somebody pushing this button makes her crazy, makes her scared when she hears even an airplane in the sky.

I tell her if we had half an hour, we could go downstairs the way we do when the tornado sirens go off. We don’t have our own basement, but there’s a storage space underneath our apartment building, and my mother has a key. There would even be enough time to go outside and wave people down on the highway, tell them they better get inside. I would stay outside until I could see the missiles, and then I would run back and have my mother shut the door behind me.

My mother says no, Evelyn, it wouldn’t work like that. A nuclear bomb would blow up the basement too. Just one bomb in Wichita or even Kansas City would be enough to get us, even all the way out here. If the bombs start going off, they’ll get everyone, she says. It’ll be curtains for us all.

 

But the next time Eileen is here she says yes, Evelyn, sometimes it does work like that. Whenever a lot of people get killed, there are always a few people who don’t.

We are sitting at the kitchen table, Eileen and I, eating the barbecued ribs she brought with her from Wichita. She says when she was a little girl in Alabama, a tornado came, and her family lived while other families died. She’d been standing outside looking up at the sky as it got darker, feeling the raindrops turn into tiny balls of hail that stung when they landed on the backs of her arms, and then she looked up and saw a cloud turning over on itself and filling up the sky, like smoke coming out the windows of a burning building. And then a man not wearing any shoes blew right past her, his feet not touching the ground, his legs moving like he was riding a bicycle.

“He looked at me,” Eileen says. “He looked right into my eyes.”

She turned and saw the funnel then, dark and thin like a snake. Her father grabbed her around the waist and carried her down to the cellar, and he kept his arms tight around her and her mother while the house rattled and shook over their heads.

“It sounded like a train,” Eileen says. “Just like a train going right over us.”

My mother rolls her eyes and says that’s what everyone always says about tornados. She’s standing behind Eileen, doing dishes. She won’t eat the ribs with us. She doesn’t eat meat since she started working at Peterson’s.

Eileen says maybe because that’s exactly what tornados sound like, and when it was over, she and her father and mother came out to nothing but quiet, and already the sun was shining through the clouds. The air was pale green, she says, the color of the ocean, and she could see the flying man’s shoeless feet sticking straight up out of the ground, as if he had dived into the earth.

Eileen’s neighbors died too. They had two daughters. Before the tornado, Eileen played with one of the daughters, but not the other one because she was special and couldn’t walk. When the tornado came, they went down to their basement too, carried the special daughter with them, but even so the whole family, even the chickens they kept in the yard if you want to count them, ended up dead, sucked up into the funnel or crushed under the ceiling of their cellar with their hands on top of their heads.

Eileen cries when she gets to this part of the story.

“The Gates were on the right,” she says, her small hands pressed together, pointing to her right. “And the Braggs were on the left.” She points to her left. “But when we came out, it was just us. Our house wasn’t…even…touched.”

I try to imagine it, a tornado hopping over her house at just the right moment, like a skip in a record. “You were lucky, Eileen.”

She shakes her head, wiping her eyes. “Not lucky, Evelyn. We were spared.”

My mother turns around so only I can see her face and puts her soapy hands around her own throat, sticking her tongue out to one side like she is choking. Eileen is somehow able to see her doing this, though she does not turn her head.

“Think what you like, Tina,” she says, picking her rib back up, her eyes already dry again. “Think what you like.”

 

My mother doesn’t like cigarettes, so Eileen has to go outside and sit on the front step when she wants to smoke. She smokes Virginia Slims out of the right side of her mouth because the left side doesn’t move. Something’s wrong with it. When she’s happy, only the right side of her mouth goes up and it looks as if she’s making a funny face. She is only forty-five, and she says as much as she loves me, she doesn’t feel like a grandmother yet. This is why I call her Eileen.

I go outside with her sometimes, and she tells me that the real problem with my mother is that she believes everything she sees, but really, Eileen says, they can put anything on television these days. There are pictures of astronauts standing on the moon, but they have been faked by the government, and if you look closely, you can tell. There aren’t even any stars in the background, but people are just too stupid to notice. The scientists want us to think that they know more than they really do, but really, the stars are where the angels live and also a way for God to see you, even at night. If you do something wrong, or even think it, he’ll know.

She wants us to come visit her in Wichita sometime, to come with her to her church. But we have never gone, and when Eileen isn’t there to listen, my mother says it’s because one crazy person in my life is enough. I don’t need to meet the people from Eileen’s church.

But when my mother isn’t there to listen, Eileen says yes, actually, I do. When we’re outside on the step, she lowers her voice so my mother can’t hear what she’s saying and tells me I have to believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross for my sins even before I was around to make them. She says it’s very important that I believe this all the time, every single second of the day, because if I’m a believer when I die, I will go to heaven, but if I die a doubter, I will go to hell and I will be on fire for the rest of everything. If I am walking down the street and I start to doubt just a little, if I just start to wonder if Jesus and heaven is a story that somebody made up and a bus comes around the corner and hits me before I’m a believer again, too bad. She says she loves me so much that she can’t stand to think of this happening to me, so it’s very important that I always believe and never doubt.

“What about my mother?” I ask. “What will happen to her?”

Eileen frowns, taking a drag off her cigarette. “She’ll go to hell, honey, if she keeps making fun. I know it’s sad, but those are the rules.”

 

Men like my mother. They run after her with socks if she drops them from the laundry basket, and they dig into their pockets and wallets for change when we run short in the checkout line at the store. The bag boys are only in high school, but they found out her name. When we go through the line they smile and say, “Hi Tina.”

She is almost beautiful, her eyes large and blue like Eileen’s, and so many straight, white teeth in her smile. But she’s got a bad nose. It’s thin like Eileen’s but longer, with a bump, like someone tried to pick her up by it before she was done drying. She sometimes looks cross-eyed, both eyes maybe trying to see over the bump. But she also makes herself cross-eyed on purpose when she’s telling a joke, and she does it slowly, so it’s difficult to tell where being cross-eyed for real stops and where the joke starts. And this makes her funny, I think. People laugh more at her jokes than they would if somebody else said the same thing.

I have a normal nose, without the bump, but I have to wear glasses, and underneath them my eyes are brown and turned downward, drooping, so I look like I’m sad or tired even when I’m not. Brad Browning at school has asked me, “Why are you always so sleepy, Evelyn? Why don’t you just take a nap?” But my mother says she thinks sad sleepy eyes are pretty. She crosses her eyes and says, “Let’s just say if your father didn’t have sad brown eyes you probably wouldn’t be here today.”

But I don’t think most people think sad-looking eyes are pretty. Brad Browning says I look like the plastic basset hounds at grocery stores that you can put quarters in to give money to the Humane Society. There is a chance I could grow up to be ugly, and this is one of many things I worry about.

 

My mother works at Peterson’s Pet Food, right across from the slaughterhouse on Highway 59. Her boss at Peterson’s is Mr. Mitchell, and he’s also her friend, even though he’s old. My mother says his hair is salt and pepper, not gray, and she thinks he’s still handsome. Don’t call him old, she says.

Two of Mr. Mitchell’s fingernails are purple, with some of the nail missing and yellow where the white should be. My mother says this happened when Denise Fishbone the knucklehead got her hair caught in the grinder, and Mr. Mitchell reached in and yanked it out, just in time.

“He saved her,” she says. “Saved her life. Two more seconds and she would have been a goner.” She drags a red fingernail across her neck, making a slicing sound, her eyes bulging.

Mr. Mitchell saved us too. When the bus service got canceled, he gave us a car. Just like that. He said it was just sitting there anyway, making his yard look trashy and his wife mad. But when he first drove it over to give to us, my mother didn’t believe it. She stood in the doorway, watching his face.

“You’re going to give me a car? For free?”

He smiled, first at her, and then down at me. “I’ve got the new truck now, so I don’t really need it.” He held out the key in one of his big hands. “It’s the trickle-down theory, Tina. Embrace it.”

For a moment my mother did not move. She only looked at him, as if she were waiting for something else, some more information. And then she leaned forward quickly and kissed him on his forehead, her hands in his salt-and-pepper hair. “This is unbelievable!” she yelled, running to the Volkswagen. “Too good to be true!”

“Exactly, Tina,” he said, laughing now, walking behind her. “I might just be giving you a headache. It’s an old car. It’s got some problems.”

“No, no.” She rolled down the window as soon as she got inside, waving us over. “Come on, both of you. Let’s go for a ride.”

So we did. We drove up and down the highway, the three of us, a Frank Sinatra tape in the stereo. Mr. Mitchell sat in the passenger seat, telling my mother when to shift. When she went too fast, the car would shimmy back and forth, and Mr. Mitchell would turn around and look at me like he was scared, but really I knew he wasn’t.

 

The Volkswagen is okay from the outside, but on the inside, it’s no good. There’s an alarm that’s supposed to tell us that our seat belts aren’t on, and since there aren’t any seat belts anymore, the alarm stays on all the time. This sound makes me crazy. Also the stereo is broken. The Frank Sinatra tape is stuck inside it, and the off switch doesn’t work, so when the car starts, the stereo comes on automatically, and it can play only that tape. You can’t even turn it down.

“Well,” my mother says. “You get what you get.”

I liked the Frank Sinatra songs at first, but now I’m sick of them. I’m sick of “Love and Marriage,” sick of “Witchcraft,” sick of “Three Coins in the Fountain.” I tell my mother I’m so tired of Frank Sinatra that if I saw him walking down the street, I would turn around and run the other way.

She rolls down her window and asks if I would like some cheese to go with my whine. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” she says. “We need this car.”

It’s true. We live just off the side of the highway in an apartment complex called Treeline Colonies, four flat-roofed, black-and-brown units of eight apartments each, sixty-three miles from Wichita, three miles from Kerrville. There aren’t any sidewalks, and even if there were, there wouldn’t be anywhere to walk on them.

My mother says the rent is cheap cheap cheap at Treeline Colonies because they were going to put more buildings around it and then somebody lost all their money and that was the end of that. There are four units in Treeline Colonies, A, B, C, and D. We live in Unit C. The people on the upper floors get a balcony, but we don’t. My mother says balconies are just something to fall off of. She says she can see where they get the “Colony” part of Treeline Colonies, because that’s exactly what it feels like, a colony out in the middle of nowhere, waiting for reinforcements. She doesn’t see where they got the “Treeline,” though, because there aren’t any trees except for the two redbuds in front of Unit A that still need to be propped up with string and sticks. But I am starting to see that things get named wrong all the time. Rhode Island, for instance. Indians. There’s a strip mall in Kerrville called Pine Ridge Shopping Plaza, but there aren’t any pines, and there isn’t a ridge.

“See, Evelyn?” my mother asks. She has to yell so I can hear her over Frank Sinatra. “See? You never can tell what your luck is. The bus gets canceled, so then somebody gives us a car. A bad thing turns into a good thing, just like that.”

She snaps her fingers. Just like that.

 

But the Volkswagen always breaks down, so much that when the tow truck men get out of their trucks now they smile and say, “Hi Tina.” Mr. Mitchell has to give my mother rides home from work in his big red truck, and when I get home from school, he’s still there, standing in back of the Volkswagen, looking down at the engine with his arms crossed. He says that cars are like people, and you have to get to know them before you can fix them. He talks about the Volkswagen as if it is a person, a woman, with feelings that can be hurt. “Let’s see what’s troubling her, squirrel,” he says to me, but really, this is all he does. I think maybe he is afraid to touch the engine, with two of his fingernails already gone. And then my mother makes sandwiches or spaghetti and we all three sit out on the step and eat it, looking at the car.

Mr. Mitchell likes to do tricks for me, like pretending he can pull his thumb off with one hand, then put it back on. I am too old for this. I know his thumb is really tucked behind his hand, that things can look one way and be another, depending on where you’re standing.

 

On our way to the grocery store one afternoon, the numbers on the dash turn to 250,000 miles. Frank Sinatra is singing “You Make Me Feel So Young,” and my mother says isn’t that a coincidence.

But maybe now, finally, the Volkswagen has had enough. My mother has to use both hands to pull the stick shift, and when we stop at red lights, it takes too long to get it back into first. On a cold and rainy day in late April, the gear sticks for too long, and when people start honking she gets out of the car, her arms straight above her head, and yells, “Shut up! Just shut the fuck up! I’m doing the best I can!” She says “fuck” right in front of me. When she gets back in the car, she looks like a crazy woman, her curly hair flying all around her.

The man at the garage says a new clutch is going to cost three hundred and fifty dollars, and that is just the beginning. There’s also the transmission. At home, she sits at the kitchen table, making long lists of numbers on yellow notebook paper, subtracting and adding, rubbing her eyes.

“Why don’t you ask Eileen for money?” I ask. “She’ll give it to you.”

She looks at me, and now there is nothing funny about her face. She tells me no one ever just gives anyone anything. She tells me to go to bed.

 

The next time Eileen comes over, she brings a strawberry jelly roll, so buttery and sugary I tell her I am going to pass out from happiness when I take a bite. I pretend to faint, and lie down on the floor, shaking for a moment and then lying still. Eileen thinks this is funny, but my mother is too worried about the three hundred and fifty dollars, and has not laughed at anything all day.

Eileen is almost out the door when my mother finally asks. Instead of answering yes or no she comes back in and sits down at the table across from my mother, her arms folded in her lap.

“He sees my checkbook, Tina.”

“Can’t you just make something up?”

Eileen stares at my mother for a moment, like she is waiting for my mother to laugh or at least smile. When she doesn’t, Eileen looks down at her hands and shakes her head. “If you want his money, you’re going to have to come see him. That’s reasonable. That’s fair.”

They’re talking about my grandfather. He doesn’t visit us. I’ve never met him. My mother takes her plate to the sink and turns on the water. Eileen stares and stares, but still my mother won’t say anything else. It’s mean to do this, to pretend someone isn’t there when they are.

“You know, Tina, most people don’t go giving money to daughters who don’t talk to them.”

My mother comes back over to the table to get my plate, not looking at Eileen.

“You going to ask her father for the money, Tina?” Eileen tilts her head at me. “Do you even know where he is?”

My mother says nothing to this either, and she gets a very serious look on her face. She bends down and looks under the table, then up at the ceiling. She peers into the hallway. “No. Now that you mention it…,” she says, scratching her head. She looks at me. “Oh my God, where is he?”

Finally, for the first time all night, she is smiling. It’s just a joke. The sad-eyed man who was my father left two months before I was even born. There’s no way he’s under the table. I laugh, but this time Eileen doesn’t. She stands up to leave again, picking up her keys.

“He’ll give you the money, Tina,” she says. “You just have to ask.”

 

The only good thing about Treeline Colonies is the flat roof. There’s a stairway in the back of the building and a door that opens to the roof, but my mother says this door is for maintenance men who know what they’re doing and not ten-year-old girls who don’t know what it’s like to fall three stories off a roof and have their heads go splat on the pavement. But I like to go up there in the evening, watching the sky turn from blue to pink to violet, seeing the first twinkling stars of night.

I just did a report on Venus at school, so I know where it is in the sky. It’s the closest planet, made up mostly of vaporous gases. Ms. Fairchild says that no one could live on Venus. It’s covered with clouds, but the clouds are poisonous, and the poison would kill you as soon as you breathed it, and anyway it’s too hot. The stars are balls of hydrogen and helium and fire, just like our sun, and no one could live there either.

Ms. Fairchild says people used to think the Earth was flat, with an edge you could fall off of. They thought the sky was just a big dome, and that the sun moved across it every day, pulled by a man with a chariot. It’s easy to look back now and say, “Oh, you dummies,” but when I’m up on the roof, watching the sun disappear behind the fields on the other side of the highway, I can see how they would think that. If everybody I ever met told me the Earth was flat and that somebody pulled the sun across the sky with a chariot and nobody told me anything else, I would have believed them. Or, if no one would have told me anything, and I had to come up with an idea myself, I would have thought that the sun went into a giant slot in the Earth at night, like bread into a toaster.

I watch the cars on the highway, their red taillights getting brighter as the sky grows dark. Two deer move quickly through the corn, just their ears showing over the green stalks. There are more deer out, now that it’s spring. Sometimes they try to cross the highway. I saw one get hit by a car last year. The police came and took the body away, and Eileen said they were going to sell it to people who would eat it. A dark line of blood stayed on the road until it rained.

I hear my mother’s voice from below. “I know you’re up there, Evelyn. You’ve got two minutes to get back in here. Two minutes.”

When I get down, I find her back in her bedroom, lying on her stomach, reading a book. She used to just watch television after dinner, falling asleep on the green couch and then waking up again to ask me what time it was, but now she says she is tired of watching television and letting her brain turn to mush. Last week, she went to the library and checked out a stack of books, and now she falls asleep while she is reading. She is still on the first one, The Grapes of Wrath, and she says it isn’t nearly as bad as it was when she had to read it in high school, but of course, then she was busy getting pregnant. She had all the wrath she needed, ha ha.

“I don’t want you on the roof,” she says. “How many times do I have to tell you?”

“Okay.”

“You could really hurt yourself. You go up there again and I’ll ground you. No TV. No radio.”

“Okay.” I say this in a mean way. She’s bugging me.

“Okay then. Do you want to get your homework and bring it in here?”

“I did it at school.”

She rolls her eyes. “Of course you did.”

I crawl up on the bed next to her. I am not supposed to read over her shoulder because I read more quickly than she does, and it makes her mad when I get to the end of the page and look up and hum, waiting for her to turn it. “Mom?”

“Yes.”

“Are we going to be able to fix the car?”

She squints, but does not look up from the book. “I don’t know.”

“Are we going to Wichita to get the money from your dad?” I am kicking my feet up and down on the bed. She crosses her leg over mine, makes me stop.

“I don’t know,” she says.

“What happened to Eileen’s mouth?”

“She married my father,” she says, quickly, half smiling, like it’s a joke she just made up. But even as she says it her voice trails off, catches at the end. She looks up from her book, her eyes on mine.

“He hit her?”

She nods. “A long time ago. Yes.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. I wasn’t there.”

She shuts the book with her finger inside it to mark the place, waiting, and I know this means I can ask whatever else I want. I know I want to know something, but I can’t think of how to ask it. I know you’d have to hit someone pretty hard to do that to somebody’s mouth. You’d have to be really mad.

I’ve been that mad. I wanted to hit Brad Browning last week. He was standing right in front of me, smiling, and he wouldn’t stop saying mean things, and I could feel my hand ball up in a fist. It was like electricity, lifting my arm up for me. And then Ms. Fairchild was behind us, calling us in from recess.

Maybe it was like this. Maybe Eileen was saying something bad to my grandfather over and over again, and no one was standing behind him, telling him it was time to go back in.

WHEN I GET HOME FROM school the next day, my mother tells me we’re going to Wichita.

“We’re just going for dinner.” She is brushing her teeth, hard and fast, looking at me in the mirror. She looks right at my eyes, knows where they are even though it’s just a reflection. “We’ll be back by eight.” She spits and rinses, turns around. “Do I look okay?”

I tell her yes, though I’m not sure this is true. She’s wearing a yellow dress with a high collar, a slip underneath it. She isn’t wearing makeup, and her curly hair is pulled back with two of my barrettes. I like her better the other way, in the gray sweatshirt, or, when she’s dressed up, with lipstick that matches her clothes.

She makes me change into a pink dress that I hate, a present from Eileen from last Christmas. It itches, and I know I look stupid. When it’s time to go, I run to the Volkswagen with my head down, my arms in front of my face. Mr. Rowley is outside, sitting in a lawn chair in front of Unit B. Kevin and Travis Rowley stand in front of him. They are playing some kind of game, taking turns throwing a white-handled knife in between each other’s feet, their legs spread wide. Kevin and Travis are usually fighting, and although the knife throwing is just a game, the fighting is real. Yesterday I saw Travis running out the Rowleys’ door, a magazine tucked under his arm, Kevin running right after him yelling, “You shit! You little shit!,” and grabbing Travis’s ankle just as he started to jump down the stairs. Travis went flying forward, his ankle still in Kevin’s hand, his head and arms falling on the concrete with a smack that I could hear even through my window. They rolled over each other for a while, their hands on each other’s necks, until Mr. Rowley came out and told them to knock it off. When they got up, there was blood on the sidewalk, and Kevin had the magazine.

Today, when they see me, they stop throwing the knife. Both of them look at Mr. Rowley.

“Well hello there, little Evelyn,” Mr. Rowley calls out. “What a nice dress. Where’s your pretty mother?”

Mr. Rowley always wants to know where my mother is. Don’t tell him, she says. Don’t say anything. So I go to the car without saying anything and wait for her to come out.

Mr. Rowley stands up, watching our door. He’s in love with my mother, but not in a good way. He used to be drunk most of the time and sometimes he would fall asleep on our front step instead of in his own house. I would have to step over him in the morning, and even then he would wake up and move his mouth like there was a lemon inside it and say, “Oh. Evelyn. Where’s your pretty mother?”

The Rowleys moved here last year from Wisconsin, and Mr. Rowley said he made steel there, until one day he went to work and there was a padlock on the door. He used to have a T-shirt that said MEN OF STEEL! WISCONSIN STEEL! But he doesn’t have it anymore because he set it on fire. I saw him do it. He was barbecuing out on their balcony and all of a sudden he took the shirt off and squirted lighter fluid on it and then got out a match. The shirt went poof! into a bright little ball, and he threw it off the balcony down onto the parking lot. No one’s car was there, but he didn’t look to see either way before he threw it.

He stopped drinking last year because of AA, and he doesn’t sleep on our step or set things on fire anymore, but he still always wants to know where my mother is. Sometimes when she walks out to the Volkswagen in the parking lot, he whistles at her or growls like a tiger, limping along beside her, even though she won’t look at him and she is a fast walker, so it’s hard for him to keep up. My mother says we can never, ever, make fun of Mr. Rowley’s limp, even though he’s a pain in the butt, because that happened to him in Vietnam when he was only eighteen years old.

But, she says, we don’t have to talk to him either.

He has a tattoo on his shoulder, a picture of a dancing naked lady with breasts like staring eyeballs, CARMEN written underneath in blurring blue letters. Mrs. Rowley’s name is Becky. She’s very thin, and she wears eyeglasses with a gold chain that loops down on each side of her face. She is not a very nice person. I don’t have to see her so much, except when she is walking their poodle, Jackie O, and then she does. . .