Gimme Everything You Got - Iva-Marie Palmer Page 0,18

them, I didn’t know who was who. “This is Candace, and Tina,” I said, wondering if Joe had heard me arguing with Candace. “I’m Susan. I used to go by Susie, but that was because I was five and my parents didn’t give me a choice.”

He laughed. That was twice tonight I’d said something funny right in the moment, instead of thinking of it two days later.

“Well, I’ll let you and your friends be on your way, Susan,” he said, still holding on to my hand. “For real, that was impressive, the way you shut down Webster. Being witness to it was a quite an experience.”

The way he said “experience,” I knew he’d heard me telling Candace I had it.

“Thanks,” I muttered, now flustered. I dropped his hand and hurried toward Tina’s car, almost tripping when the toe of my sneaker got caught on a square of the sidewalk where a massive tree root had buckled the concrete.

“I’ll see you around,” he called after us as we walked away.

“I think he likes you,” Candace said, when we were—I hoped—out of earshot.

“You’re just trying to make up for being a bitch,” I told her. “And I doubt it. Just a weirdo in the dark, messing with me.”

He probably called out to every girl walking past his car. He seemed like the type, with his permanently amused face.

The whole way home, as Tina and Candace sang along to ABBA, it wasn’t Joe I imagined watching me tell off Michael, but Bobby. Maybe he would have been impressed, too.

Five

On Sunday morning, part of me regretted not drinking more at the party on Saturday. Like, enough to be so messed up that I passed out in a drainage ditch like Renee Ozlowski had after prom last year. Because spending early Sunday only semiconscious and covered in mud on the side of Roberts Road would have been preferable to what I had to do: go visit with my dad and his girlfriend Polly.

Polly wasn’t the first of my dad’s post-divorce girlfriends, but she was the most serious. I knew because I hadn’t met the others, just overheard my mom and Jacqueline, at times over the past year and a half, discussing “Albert’s latest catch.” My dad had started dating pretty soon after the divorce papers were signed, but he’d seemed to only go out with women for a couple of dates, maybe a few weeks at the most. I only knew this because sometimes my weekend visit would be pushed back by an hour or two, and that was when my mom got mad and accidentally badmouthed my dad. “He’s not even serious with this . . . dancer . . . and he’s rearranging your visit.” Or “He’s acting like a sex-crazed fifteen-year-old instead of a grown man with responsibilities.”

But Polly was serious: she’d lasted for six months already. My dad had met her at Jeffries Auto, a used-car lot Polly’s dad owned in Elm Ridge, where Polly answered phones and made coffee. He’d traded in his Oldsmobile for a white Chevelle Laguna and she’d gotten him a coffee, one sugar. Now they lived together. “From Mommy’s bosom to a divorcé’s condominium,” Jacqueline had said when Mom told her the news. But Polly was thirty-five, not nearly as young as some of the women Dad had dated. And when Mom heard they’d moved in together, it was one of the few times since the divorce that she’d seemed a little sad about the whole thing, which she otherwise regarded rationally, like a business arrangement with agreed-upon terms that, when not honored, irritated her. When she told me, “Your father’s seeing someone, and it’s serious,” she was drinking his favorite whiskey and staring at the ice cubes melting in the glass a little too long for me to believe she was entirely okay.

It was bizarre, my dad living with someone else. The last time I was at his condo—at the start of summer, a month before Polly moved in—there’d already been signs of Polly. A long blond hair on the brown couch, a second toothbrush in the cup with his. But what was even weirder were the things like the glass bowl of seashells next to the bathroom sink, the fake flowers on the kitchen table, and the pitcher of fresh orange juice in the fridge when my dad had only ever bought the store brand in the carton. If I hadn’t known he had a girlfriend, I’d have thought he’d been replaced by some