“I’m pretty sure I’m her flesh and blood, too,” I said.
“You know what I mean. I don’t know why you all make such a fuss about that child.”
“He’s flesh and blood, too.”
“Oh my God, Mary Margaret, you are the most literal girl I’ve ever met. You’re worse than my sister. You think it’s right for her to talk about throwing me out?”
“What if Clifton and Callie moved in here with you? You’ve got two bedrooms you’re not even using. It would be company for you.”
“I like my privacy,” Ruth snapped. “Besides, your father won’t let her do anything. It’s his place. She forgets all about that. Your father’s the boss, pure and simple.”
I didn’t want to take sides, but the older I got the more Ruth seemed childish to me. Sometimes someone who had known her when she was a girl would say that that was because she was a youngest child, but I was a youngest child, too, and I didn’t sit around waiting for someone to make me cinnamon toast and put it on the end table with a cup of tea.
But I still brought her food, only from the diner instead of my mother’s kitchen. We were allowed to take things that wouldn’t look pretty on a plate, lopsided cakes, the end piece of a pork roast. Sometimes I made her something, a cheese omelet (“Not runny inside, Mary Margaret,” she would call from the living room) or a BLT.
“Ruth has always been a soft sort of girl,” said my father one day when we were riding in his truck. “I remember when I first met your mother, Ruth was maybe ten years old and was always saving baby birds. She’d put them in a little shoe box with some cotton, feed them bits of things.”
“Did she save them?” I asked.
“She sure tried hard enough.”
“But did it work? Did the birds live?”
My father thought for a moment. When my father was thinking it was like an aerobic exercise, like he was putting his whole body to the test. “I’m thinking not,” he finally said.
It was a hard time, the fall just before I turned sixteen. August 2 had come and gone, and Donald had never arrived. He sent me a postcard saying he couldn’t get off work, but his grandfather had already told me he wouldn’t be coming. “It’s that mother of his,” he’d said. “Don’t get me started.” He looked so sad. I knew how he felt. Our house was built for five, and now it was down to three. My brothers’ old shirts hung in their closets like the ghosts of people who’d once slept in their beds. I missed Tommy. I missed Donald. I even missed Eddie sometimes, and Donald’s grandmother. Sometimes I thought about her lavender smell and her warm pies. I think maybe more than anything I missed the Mimi I used to be. Getting older wasn’t working out so well for me. My brother’s words had made me think a lot about what I wanted, where I wanted to end up, and the truth was I had no idea in the world. I figured it should be clear, like that big strip of yellow tape they held across the end of the course for the sack race at the volunteer fire department picnic: this, here, this is how you win.
I did well in school. I’d always done well but now I moved to the head of the class because I didn’t have much to do except homework and helping Callie out. There were things we studied that I couldn’t see the point of, like poetry and ancient history, and there were things that made perfect sense to me, like algebra and biology. First term of sophomore year I got highest honors. The list was in the paper: three of us, the other two boys. “Don’t let it go to your head, Mary Margaret,” said Ruth, who got the paper a day late, my father taking it out to her when my mother was done with it. But my mother made me sit down at the kitchen table after it had been cleared and wiped, and she put her finger on my name like she was marking a point on a map.
“This is your road to something better than this,” she said. It was the only time I’d heard her say one single thing that made it seem as though her life wasn’t just what she wanted it to