The September Sisters by Jillian Cantor Page B

noticed this was something Tommy did when he got nervous, and I wondered why talking to his mother would make him nervous. “I don’t want to talk to her,” he said. I was surprised bythe forcefulness of his voice, the finality of his statement.
    “She you mama. You talk.”
    He shook his head. “Just tell her I’m not here.”
    “I not going to lie to my niña .” Mrs. Ramirez held her hand over her heart.
    He shrugged. “Then don’t lie. Tell her I don’t want to talk to her.” He looked at her so defiantly that for a moment I thought Mrs. Ramirez might slap him. But she was the one who retreated, looking wounded.
    I can’t imagine not wanting to talk to your mother. As crazy or as distant as my mother seems, I always want her to talk to me. I found it strange that Tommy pushed his mother away while I constantly wished for mine to come closer.
    Tommy picked up his cards and started playing as if nothing had happened. I debated leaving it alone, but I was too curious. “Why won’t you talk to your mother?” I asked him.
    He looked directly at me, his brown eyes as wide and lost as I’d ever seen them. “I’ll tell you someday,” he said.
    I nodded. I was okay with that answer. It was an indication that Tommy actually intended to be my friend.
     
    Strangely enough, it was my mother who told me why Tommy hated his mother, not Tommy himself. My mother came to know all this from Mrs. Ramirez, who’d offered to drive my mother to the supermarket and such. We didn’t get another second car after my mother’s accident, and I’d just sort of assumed that my father was no longer going to let her drive. I was sure he was paying Mrs. Ramirez for these trips, as if she were babysitting my mother too, but I was also pretty sure my mother didn’t suspect, because she seemed to think that Mrs. Ramirez enjoyed her company.
    The whole thing came up when my mother started asking me about Tommy and how I liked him so far. “He’s okay,” I told her.
    “That poor thing,” my mother said. “That poor, poor thing.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Now don’t you repeat this, Abby, you hear? What I tell you stays in this room.”
    I nodded. I always thought that was a funny thing to say, as if what she would tell me would literally hang above us in the kitchen for the rest of our lives or something. “He walked in on his mother having an affair.” I tried to imagine Tommy entering a dark room and finding a younger,prettier version of Mrs. Ramirez in bed with a man who wasn’t his father. “And then his father left. Just walked out of the house and hasn’t come back yet.”
    It may have been an odd comparison, but I immediately thought of Becky. Tommy’s father was a grown man, and he left on purpose, but it seemed to me that once a person was gone and you didn’t know where, it didn’t matter how he’d left or why. It was being left behind, not knowing, that was worse than anything. I began to see Tommy differently then, and not because he was the first person my age I knew to have witnessed something relating to sex, but because I began to understand him—his quiet stare, his lost eyes, his nervous hair flips. “I guess Tommy blames his mother for a lot,” I said.
    My mother laughed, a nervous, guilty sort of laugh, and I felt bad because I didn’t want her to think that I blamed her for something. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “It takes two to tango, honey.” She paused and played with her hair for a minute, tucking the wispy strands behind her delicate ears. “You know Tommy’s father is black.” She lowered her voice a little when she said this, as if this were something that should be kept more secret than anything else she’d told me.
    I didn’t see how his being black had to do with anything that had happened, but I don’t know anyone else who is a racial mix. We don’t talk about things like that in my family—race or ethnicity or even divorce. Where we live almost everyone is