Gimme Everything You Got - Iva-Marie Palmer Page 0,35
wasn’t home until seven or so on Fridays.
“Oh, it was a goof-off,” Mom said, now attacking one of the crusty casserole pans with a brush. “The instructor was sick so the fill-in told us to think about where we see ourselves in five years. And then pretty much sent us home.” She turned from the sink and looked at me as I took out three slices of bread to make a double-decker sandwich. “Can you imagine?”
“You mean, where I see myself in five years?” I asked, peeling several round circles of salami away from one another. Did all the salami slices have amazing potential, or only one?
“Sure, but the idea that someone is even asking me that question and there being more than one reasonable option,” my mom said. “When I was your age, if you’d asked me, I would have said, ‘I guess married and maybe with a baby.’ And I would have been right, since I was twenty when I had your sister.” She put the casserole dish in the drying rack and turned to me. “I hope I don’t need to tell you that I don’t regret that path for a second, since it got me you and your sister. I guess I just think it’s nice that your worlds can be bigger.”
“I wonder what Tonia’s five-year plan is,” I said. The last time I’d talked to my sister, she told me she was on her way to an aura-cleansing disco.
“You mean Chartreuse?” My mom laughed. I supposed it was good that she was taking my sister’s new identity in stride. “Well, I told her your dad would really like if she could make the wedding. It would be nice to see her.”
I had assumed my sister would be required to come to town for Dad’s wedding. In fact, I was counting on it. Wasn’t the point of having a sibling that you had to endure your parents together? I bit into my giant sandwich and caught the fuzzy look in my mom’s eyes as she swiped beneath them with the knuckle of her glove. Okay, maybe Tonia’s faraway life bothered her more than she let on.
“So where do you see yourself in five years?” I asked her.
“Management,” she said decisively. “And maybe attending your college graduation.”
College wasn’t something I’d necessarily planned on. Even my mom had never talked about me going to college until after the divorce, and I really couldn’t imagine it as something I’d do. If you asked me to look five years down the road, from my seventeen-year-old vantage point, my first thought was that I’d be twenty-two, and Bobby would be twenty-seven and not my coach anymore. But I couldn’t picture marriage or a white dress or, jeez, a kid. I also couldn’t picture management, whatever that meant. The surroundings in my future were a blur, but I could still see me. The same me who was standing at the counter, finishing her sandwich.
Then that me was on a soccer field. The wavy vision cleared up and there I was, playing forward, kicking that goddamn goal with Bobby looking on approvingly. I didn’t have five years to wait.
“You should think about your future,” my mom said gently as she picked up the next nasty casserole dish. “The possibilities are so much bigger for you than I ever thought they could be.”
Those possibilities scared me. It would be so easy to pick the wrong thing, wouldn’t it? “I know,” I told her, instead of coming up with something better.
My mom smiled faintly. In the kitchen light, the dark circles under her eyes stood out.
“Give me the gloves,” I said. “I’ll do this.”
She didn’t protest, just passed me the gloves, then put her arm around my shoulder and squeezed. I hoped she saw my offer as a way of saying thank you.
I washed the rest of the dishes and scrubbed the sink again until it shone. Then I went to my room and found the Wendy’s receipt with Joe’s number on it and called him.
When I turned the corner to Oak Meadows at eight a.m. the next day, I was jolted with surprise to see Joe already there. I would never have taken him for a morning person. He had a stack of cones next to him—did he and Coach McMann shop at the same cone store?—and was bouncing a ball off the top of his foot, with the quick repetition of one of those paddleball games.