She looks away, embarrassed, insisting simultaneously that Max call her Charlotte, causing me to wish I were, in fact, either dead or in Europe.
“Why, thank you, Max! Speaking of living a little, did Jean Louise tell you how my mother once dated Jack Kerouac?”
“Not dated,” I mumble. “Just kissed.”
Max sits up. “No, that’s incredible!”
“I’ll get the food. You tell him the story, Jean Louise.” She disappears into the kitchen.
“Jesus. She didn’t actually date him,” I say.
“A passing fling, really!” my mother calls from the kitchen, exaggerating. “He lived near here for a time, way back when. Did you know it?”
“I’m not sure,” Max says. “Yeah, maybe I did hear that.”
“It’s true,” she says, returning with a large tray in her hand. “Same town I grew up in. Right around the corner from my mother.”
Dinner is a prepared roasted chicken from Delaney’s, the gourmet deli around the corner, plus some mashed potatoes I assume also came from there, or maybe a box of instant. All on another fancy serving dish as part of some greater ruse.
“Tell me more about this shared love for Kerouac we have,” Mom says, not helping my lack of appetite. I have to force myself to stay at the table. But maybe I’m being ungrateful. I should be happy she cared enough to have Max over for dinner, and Max seems to be enjoying it, wolfing it down with relish.
“You know,” he says, looking up, mouth still full, “I read a lot. My mother made me when I was little, and my father doesn’t, not at all, so … Anyway—” He forks in another bite and says, “I read somewhere that the whole wrote-it-in-three-weeks story isn’t exactly true.”
“Wrote what?” I ask, taking another sip of wine. I may not know what he’s talking about, but I’m getting better at this whole drinking thing. Half a glass and the room isn’t even spinning yet.
“On the Road,” Max says. “Legend has it he wrote the whole thing in three weeks on one continuous scroll.”
“Oh right,” I say, remembering. “The scroll thing.” I take another sip of wine and try not to roll my eyes.
Mom looks up, concerned. “It’s true, isn’t it?”
“The scroll part, yes,” Max clarifies, “but not the three-week part. He’d worked on it for months, writing pieces in notebooks. You might say he typed it in three weeks.” He finishes his glass of wine and pushes back his plate. “Thank you, Mrs. Markham. This was delicious.”
She smiles at him. “You should get ready, Jean Louise. It’s probably time for you two lovebirds to go.”
Now I do roll my eyes, but I’m happy to be done. I leave Max at the sink handing dishes to her, and go to my room to change into the blue chiffon gown. Ten more minutes and I’ll be out of here. Away from this house and my new mother, the crazy Amanda Wingfield version. And only a few days more till I’m on the road with my boyfriend. The real road, not some dumb novel I never read and don’t really care about at all.
The limo honks. I take one last glance in the mirror, say a small prayer, and head outside.
WINTER
SIXTH GRADE
“No, JL, you hold it like this.” You pour another splash of grape juice into your mom’s crystal wineglass and pick it up by the stem with your pinky out.
“Aubs, I think that pinky thing is for tea,” I say, but you shake your head and insist, so I copy you, lifting my “wine” to my lips. “Okay, fine, like this?” I ask.
“Yes, and you have to sip slowly, or you get plastered. Like my mother was last Thanksgiving. That’s what my dad called her. Plastered.”
“Really?” I ask, and you nod, holding a finger to your lips as Ethan walks through the basement with a laundry basket in his hand, plowing through the center of our fake restaurant we’ve set up. We’ve named it JL Aubrey’s because that’s how clever we are.
“What are you goofballs doing, besides trying to break Mom’s good glasses and burn down the house?” He nods at our table we’ve covered with a fancy lace tablecloth. In the center sit two lit candles in pretty silver candlesticks, the bottle of Welch’s grape juice we swiped and wrapped with a taped-on sheet of construction paper where you’ve written Aujean’s Fine Wine, a bit more clever, at least, by virtue of being a mixture of our first names. We each have a plate of tuna fish and Cheez