The Center of Everything - By Laura Moriarty Page 0,4

it’s no good. There’s an alarm that’s supposed to tell us that our seat belts aren’t on, and since there aren’t any seat belts anymore, the alarm stays on all the time. This sound makes me crazy. Also the stereo is broken. The Frank Sinatra tape is stuck inside it, and the off switch doesn’t work, so when the car starts, the stereo comes on automatically, and it can play only that tape. You can’t even turn it down.

“Well,” my mother says. “You get what you get.”

I liked the Frank Sinatra songs at first, but now I’m sick of them. I’m sick of “Love and Marriage,” sick of “Witchcraft,” sick of “Three Coins in the Fountain.” I tell my mother I’m so tired of Frank Sinatra that if I saw him walking down the street, I would turn around and run the other way.

She rolls down her window and asks if I would like some cheese to go with my whine. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” she says. “We need this car.”

It’s true. We live just off the side of the highway in an apartment complex called Treeline Colonies, four flat-roofed, black-and-brown units of eight apartments each, sixty-three miles from Wichita, three miles from Kerrville. There aren’t any sidewalks, and even if there were, there wouldn’t be anywhere to walk on them.

My mother says the rent is cheap cheap cheap at Treeline Colonies because they were going to put more buildings around it and then somebody lost all their money and that was the end of that. There are four units in Treeline Colonies, A, B, C, and D. We live in Unit C. The people on the upper floors get a balcony, but we don’t. My mother says balconies are just something to fall off of. She says she can see where they get the “Colony” part of Treeline Colonies, because that’s exactly what it feels like, a colony out in the middle of nowhere, waiting for reinforcements. She doesn’t see where they got the “Treeline,” though, because there aren’t any trees except for the two redbuds in front of Unit A that still need to be propped up with string and sticks. But I am starting to see that things get named wrong all the time. Rhode Island, for instance. Indians. There’s a strip mall in Kerrville called Pine Ridge Shopping Plaza, but there aren’t any pines, and there isn’t a ridge.

“See, Evelyn?” my mother asks. She has to yell so I can hear her over Frank Sinatra. “See? You never can tell what your luck is. The bus gets canceled, so then somebody gives us a car. A bad thing turns into a good thing, just like that.”

She snaps her fingers. Just like that.

But the Volkswagen always breaks down, so much that when the tow truck men get out of their trucks now they smile and say, “Hi Tina.” Mr. Mitchell has to give my mother rides home from work in his big red truck, and when I get home from school, he’s still there, standing in back of the Volkswagen, looking down at the engine with his arms crossed. He says that cars are like people, and you have to get to know them before you can fix them. He talks about the Volkswagen as if it is a person, a woman, with feelings that can be hurt. “Let’s see what’s troubling her, squirrel,” he says to me, but really, this is all he does. I think maybe he is afraid to touch the engine, with two of his fingernails already gone. And then my mother makes sandwiches or spaghetti and we all three sit out on the step and eat it, looking at the car.

Mr. Mitchell likes to do tricks for me, like pretending he can pull his thumb off with one hand, then put it back on. I am too old for this. I know his thumb is really tucked behind his hand, that things can look one way and be another, depending on where you’re standing.

On our way to the grocery store one afternoon, the numbers on the dash turn to 250,000 miles. Frank Sinatra is singing “You Make Me Feel So Young,” and my mother says isn’t that a coincidence.

But maybe now, finally, the Volkswagen has had enough. My mother has to use both hands to pull the stick shift, and when we stop at red lights, it takes too long to get it back into first. On a cold and rainy day