I lick my salty lips once more and brush crumbs from my chest. “That loud?” I struggle to my feet, and he doesn’t offer a hand. I thought men in the South were supposed to have some manners.
“I figured a swamp rat got in here.”
Guess not. It’s obvious that Simon and I are not going to be friends.
7
March 17
Mom flips me shit.
Simon gives me the bird.
THE DAY from hell continues past midnight. Mom’s earlier potshots were nothing compared to the howitzer aimed at me now. We’d all gone to bed, or so Lindsey and I had thought, but Mom had different plans. Around one in the morning, she broke the infrared stream we’d placed across her door. Three hours after I said good night, we had to coax her back into bed and reset the alarm. Lindsey and I barely made it to the top of the stairs before she set it off again. No amount of coaxing and cajoling works this time. For over two hours now, she’s wandered the house, wringing her hands and wreaking havoc.
“You’re an ungrateful child!”
Rage has changed her face and glazed her eyes, but she still looks like my mother.
“What can I do to make you feel better, Patricia?”
“Nothing!” She turns her attention to Lindsey. “Who are you?”
“I’m Lindsey and I’m here to help you.”
“I don’t need your help. I need my shoes!”
“Here we go,” I mutter a little too loudly and she looks at me. “You want to get rid of me so you can keep everything for yourself.” She’s still worked up about the furniture, and no amount of reasoning on the part of either me or Lindsey has gotten her past it. “Grandmere will tan your hide for the way you treat me.” I know she’s anxious and afraid and will calm down once she gets into her routine. I should be grateful that she recognizes me at least.
I’m tired, my forehead hurts, and I don’t want to do this with Mom. “Let’s please go to bed and we’ll talk about it in the morning.”
“You’re going to kill me in my sleep.” She points at the door and yells, “Get out of my house and take that fat girl with you!”
“Mother! That’s horrible.” I turn to Lindsey and apologize for my mother.
“I’ve been called worse.”
Mom keeps it up for another hour before Lindsey finally manages to double-dose her with nighttime medication. I wish I was so lucky. I’m too hurt and wound up to sleep now, but even if I was calm as a millpond, my mattress is bumpy and lumpy as hell. I suspect it’s a Civil War survivor. Well, maybe it isn’t that old, but it’s as thin as toast—and this is the good one. I know because I pulled a Goldilocks and tested them all.
I do manage to doze off for half an hour here and there, and I wake in the morning with a back- and neck ache. I am tired and my head hurts. There’s no coffee to be found, and I grab my chest as a palmetto bug scurries across the kitchen counter and drops to the floor. God bless her, Lindsey smashes it beneath the heel of her tie-dye Croc.
I can still hear the crunch and now this:
“Can you say hello?” Mother pushes her face closer to the birdcage. “Polly wanna cracker?”
“Be careful,” I warn her, and pull her away from the cage and the African parrot inside. At least that’s what we were told he is, but at the moment it’s hard to say. He’s got red and green feathers on his head and wings, but the rest of him looks like a plucked chicken.
“I feel like I should knit it a sweater.” Lindsey scrunches up her nose and shakes her head. “It looks so pathetic.”
Its name is Raphael, or, as Simon pronounces it, Ray-feel. He’d belonged to Jasper, and, according to Simon, it was Jasper’s dying wish that the bird live in the only home he’d ever known. “I couldn’t leave him here by himself,” Simon told us as he set the cage on a big brass stand in the front parlor. “I had to take him with me, but he got so depressed from Jasper’s death and leaving his home that he quit eating and started pulling out his feathers.”
“Depressed?” If I’d known he was saddling me with a pitiful bird, I wouldn’t have opened the front door. I’d