“I’m sorry. It’s kind of a mess.” Just as when Will came over, I was seeing the house through the eyes of someone who didn’t wade through it daily.
“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “You’re sweet to come get me in the first place. And the house was a mess when I left.”
This was true, but I was pretty sure it was five months’ worse now. Before, we’d been kicking things aside to make a path through the den to our bedroom, but I didn’t remember that we’d been balancing piles on top of piles like now.
“Anyway,” she said, gesturing to her bed, “I won’t have trouble finding my stuff, because everything’s exactly where I left it.”
I took another long breath, shallower now. My body wanted the oxygen. When I was angry, I needed to remember to keep breathing. But now that I’d noticed the stale smell, I didn’t want to inhale it. I said slowly, “I . . . am going to call in to work and ask for the afternoon off . . . and clean.”
“Really!” she exclaimed as though this was a novel idea, like hanging festive streamers from the ceiling. She sat up and said, “I’ll help you.”
We stuffed a towel under the door of my dad’s bedroom and set up an electric fan for white noise outside the doorway so we wouldn’t wake him with our banging around. With both of us working, it didn’t take us long to pick up, sort through, and stash away everything in our tiny bedroom, and vacuum and dust the whole thing. She moved on to the bathroom. I tackled the laundry room. The den was going to take longer. By that time, some of my adrenaline from my fight with Will was draining away, but I wasn’t ready to think about him yet. As I folded blankets into boxes and found a place for books on shelves, I listened to Violet talk about Ricky, and what had gone wrong.
“You know, I never liked school, and I wasn’t doing too well. The whole thing seemed pointless. The only time I felt great was when I was with Ricky. Then he decided to drop out of school and get a job. I wouldn’t see him anymore. He asked me to go with him. And I felt so unexpectedly great thinking about that possibility, like the doors of heaven had opened. I’d thought I was saddled with high school and more school and living here for another few years, but instead of that, I could become an adult right then.”
I gazed at a history report that I was supposed to turn in last May but had gotten lost under the cushions of the sofa, apparently. I didn’t understand what she meant, not really. I didn’t see what was so awful about living here, or how a life with Ricky could seem better.
But I did understand how she felt good about herself when she was with Ricky. That’s how Will made me feel.
And I understood her view that a different life was within her grasp, a better life, like a magic door opening. I felt that way every time Will wanted us to get more serious. The thing was, Violet thought this was a magic portal. I thought it was a painting of a magic portal, like on the cover of one of Sophia’s fantasy novels. If you tried to step into it, you would realize it was only 2-D.
“I don’t know what to do now,” Violet murmured, wiping off a photo of Dad and Izzy and setting it on a shelf.
“Sure you do,” I said with all the fake cheerfulness that went with pathological cleaning. “You’ll get a job.” I snapped my fingers. “Actually, I have a good fit for you. You always loved helping Dad restore the woodwork and the fountain in the white house, right?”
“Aw, the white house!” She sounded as sad as I was about the loss of our mansion. We’d never talked about it, because moving out of that house had been tangled up with Mom leaving.
“I might be able to hire you at the antiques shop if you wanted,” I said.
“I love that place,” she said. “How’s Bob?”
“Better,” I said. Man, hiring Violet for the shop was the best idea I’d had in years. She would get a steady job that paid okay. With her working there too, I could wean Bob and Roger off relying on me to the point of making me feel trapped. I would have been impressed with myself if I hadn’t been panicking about Will underneath.
“You get a job there,” I told Violet, “live here, and go to school. Look for one of those programs where you study for your GED and take college classes at the same time.”
“School!” she said. “I couldn’t do that. I was never smart like you.”
“Like me!” I snorted.
“Of course like you. Are you crazy? We’re all proud of you for getting in that special class for smart kids, and for doing so well on the drums.”
I almost laughed when she put the gifted class and band together in the same sentence, as if they were related. But I probably sounded just as nonsensical to Izzy when I talked about hair color.
“Dad always said you’d be the first person in the family to go to college,” Violet went on.
“Well, of course he would say that now. You and Sophia and Izzy haven’t been to college.”
“He said that when you were a baby. You picked up on everything so quickly. Mom said Izzy didn’t talk until she was three, but she didn’t have another baby to compare her with. She said if she’d had you first, she would have put Izzy in an institution.”
I laughed. That was the funny yet slightly wrong sort of comment I remembered my mom making. “News to me,” I said. “I thought you only kept me around for comic relief. That’s all anybody ever seemed to think I was good for.”
“Well, sure,” Violet said, “back when you were in third grade. But now you’re grown up.”
That, too, was news to me. My heart started pounding again. It knew what I had done to Will. My brain didn’t want to deal with it yet. But as Violet pointed out how old I was, my fear of having a boyfriend seemed immature. It might have worked for me in ninth grade.
Not now.
“This didn’t take as long as I thought,” Violet said, rescuing the last pair of panties from the sofa and twirling them around on one finger. “If we could get the kitchen counters and the stove cleared off, I could run to the store for groceries.”
I inhaled as if the house already smelled like Puerto Rican food instead of dust. “We could make carne guisada,” I said.
Her dark eyes flew wide open. “And pasteles? And—”
“Amarillos!” we both said at the same time with all the reverence of two hungry girls who hadn’t eaten fried plantains in months. If we made them, maybe Dad still wouldn’t eat them. I didn’t care anymore. I would eat them.