All the Roads That Lead From Home by Anne Leigh Parrish Page A

jail.”
    “He could.
Only what would my mom do then? She can’t go one day without a man to hang her
arms around.”
    My mother
stood in the doorway to the kitchen in a tight pair of jeans and a lace
underwire bra. In her hand she had a sweater I’d put in the wash. “This goes to
the dry cleaner! How many times must I say the same thing?”
    “I’m
sorry,” I said.
    “It’s all
well and good to be sorry, but here’s my sweater, all shrunken down like an
African head.”
    She held
it out to me, a pink fuzzball that was always too tight, even when it was new.
    “Maybe the
dry cleaner can do something with it,” I said.
    “Not
unless he’s a bloody magician.”
    “Maybe you
can buy another one.”
    “As if
money just grows on trees.” She sighed and went upstairs to her bedroom. Mary
looked at me and shook her head.
    “No wonder
your old man split. No offense,” she said.
    “He left
because he found someone else.”
    “Yeah, but
why was he even looking?”
    For all
the reasons I’d never told anyone and suddenly wanted to tell her, like how my
mother rode my toy rocking horse in front of company once, and hosted an
elegant party in bare feet, and answered the door wearing a shower cap she’d
forgotten to take off. Mary laughed, the first time she had since coming here,
and went on laughing, even after my mother slammed her door against the noise.
     
    ***
     
    August came, and with it
my mother’s birthday. Mary baked a cake and decorated it with sloppy pink
hearts. My mother stared at it a while before saying, “Thank you,” and then
asked me to give her just a tiny slice. Mary and I were both on our second
piece when the phone rang.
    “Hey, kiddo,”
he said, when I picked up. “Thought I oughtta call and wish You Know Who a
happy birthday. She there?”
    “It’s
Dad,” I said, my hand over the receiver.
    I could
see her thinking she might just refuse to speak to him, then she took the phone
into her room. They didn’t talk long. I was sure she told him it was time to
come to his senses and to stop all this nonsense, and from how bummed she was
afterwards—so much that she lay down on the couch with a cold rag on her head—I
knew he wasn’t coming to anything, and certainly not home.
    I put the
dishes away, then found Mary in her room, reading a fashion magazine. She’d
rearranged the furniture a few days before. The bed wasn’t in front of the
window any more, but facing it, so she could see outside the minute she opened
her eyes.
    “She down
again?” she asked.
    I nodded
and sat in the rocking chair we’d gotten from the attic. I thought about my
dad. I’d seen him only twice since school ended. He’d driven by a couple of
times with his girlfriend. They’d bought a house a few blocks away, a short
walk, if an invitation ever came. As for Mary, she hadn’t had a single phone
call from her mother in all the weeks she’d been there, which bugged her, I
think, but also made her glad, because then they couldn’t talk about her going
back home.
    “That’s a
nice dress,” Mary said, showing me the picture she meant.
    “It’s OK,
I guess.”
    “You don’t
like clothes, much, do you?”
    I
shrugged. I usually wore T-shirts and blue jeans.
    “I love
‘em,” said Mary. “I should learn how to sew, make up some of my own.” Her own
clothes looked like shit, the kind of stuff you found in thrift stores, lots of
polyester and puffed sleeves.
    “Be nice
to have something new for the first day of school,” she said.
    “Don’t
remind me about school.”
    “Only a
couple weeks off, now.” She looked at me suddenly.
    “What?” I
said.
    “Bet you
she didn’t sign me up.”
    “Who?”
    “Your mom.
That weird friend of hers said if I was still living here in August, then I’d
have to go to your school, on account of the one I went to last year’s about
twenty miles off, and the bus probably won’t come all that way just for me.”
    “Shit!”
    “I got an
idea. Call the