Then the man was backing down the stairs, and my mom appeared in the doorway on the other end of the TV. I didn’t recognize her at first. She’d been a bleach blonde the last time I saw her a few days ago. Now she was a bright redhead. I knew it was her by the way she walked.
I exhaled smoke. The man must be my mom’s boyfriend. She’d said we were moving here to Heaven Beach because he was going to get her a job at the restaurant where he worked. But she hadn’t gotten a job yet, and he hadn’t come over while I was home. I’d begun to think she’d made him up. Sometimes we moved because a boyfriend said he would get her a job. Sometimes this was what she told me at first, but I’d find out later we’d really moved because she’d owed someone money.
She must have been telling the truth this time. A TV was the first thing she asked for from her boyfriends because she knew I loved it. It kept me company. It was also the first thing to get pawned because it was worth so much cash and was easy to carry. The refrigerator had been pawned only once.
“Hey, hon!” my mom called to me. “Open that door for Billy, would you?”
I opened the driver’s door of the car and leaned the seat forward so they could wrangle the TV into the back. They had a hard time of it, cussing at each other. The TV was almost as big as the backseat itself. They propped one end inside. My mom held it while Billy sauntered around the car. While she was bent over like that, it was obvious her shorts were too tight, but she still had a great figure for a mom. She should have, since she was only thirty.
Finally she straightened, left the door propped open for Billy to slide into the driver’s seat, and turned to me. “You look so pretty today! Give me a hug.”
I walked into her embrace and felt my whole body relax, just like after my first puff on a cigarette. At the same time, I held my lit butt way out so it wouldn’t set her hair on fire. I wasn’t trying to hide the cigarette. I’d gotten over my fear of her seeing me smoking. I’d thought at first that she’d be mad, but she’d walked in on me smoking a couple of times and hadn’t said a word.
She squeezed me and let me go. “I’m sorry we have to take the TV. Billy needs to make a car payment.”
This was either a lie or just stupid. Who would make payments on this car?
“It’ll only be for a few weeks,” she said, “until he gets paid.”
Also a lie or stupid. Pawnshops didn’t work this way. They would give Billy so little money for this TV and charge him such high interest to retrieve it that I would never see it again. Besides, if he didn’t have enough money to live on now, this was not going to change the next time he got a paycheck. I’d been through this scenario with my mom and her boyfriends enough times to predict the outcome. I was never sure whether she didn’t know or didn’t care or simply saw no way out.
She flinched and her eyes snapped skyward as a plane roared overhead. The trailer park was at the end of the airstrip where the planes landed. The prickly forest shielded the trailers from some of the noise, so the planes could sneak up like this. The unlikely piece of machinery suddenly appeared overhead and loomed in the sky as if by magic, slow enough to look like it ought to fall, loud enough to vibrate the corrugated metal of the trailers. Adrenaline rushed through my veins, like nicotine but better.
“God, I hate those f**king airplanes,” my mom said. “Billy’s going to get me that job soon and we’ll move someplace nice, I promise.”
“Okay,” I said with no emotion. She said stuff like this all the time. Occasionally she really did get a job, but the longest she lasted was a month. I watched the plane until it dropped behind a stand of pines. Even after that I could hear the engine, and I looked in the direction of the airstrip where it had gone.
“Wait a minute,” my mom said. “You have some money you could give to Billy.”
My cigarette had burned down to the filter. I took a drag anyway as I turned back to my mom, concentrating on not glancing down at my pocket where all my money was. Exhaling smoke, I asked casually, “From the airport? I don’t make very much. They take out taxes. And I’m already paying the power and the water.”
The afternoon light glinted weirdly off the creases in her heavy blue eye shadow as she considered me skeptically. “You work there every day after school and all weekend long.”
“Actually…” I was horrified at how easily the lie came out. “I’m not working half the time I’m there. They won’t give me enough hours. My boyfriend works there, and I hang out with him.”
“Really,” my mom said, raising her penciled eyebrows. “What’s his name?”
Mark. Mark was the obvious answer, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell that fib. Before I knew what I was saying, this came out: “Grayson Hall. His dad owns the airplanes that tow the advertising banners at the beach.”
“I hate those things,” she said. “But a boy like that, maybe he’ll stay in school and amount to something.”
“Maybe,” I said, feeling sick.
“Sheryl,” Billy called from inside the car. “This year.”
“See you soon, hon,” my mom said. She air-kissed her fingertips and blew the kiss to me, then shuffled around the car, kicking up dust, and got in on the other side.
Waving to the car as it disappeared into the forest, I realized I was still holding a dead cigarette. Normally I would have taken it inside, made sure the fire was out, and deposited the butt in the trash. Today I tossed it onto the dirt along with countless butts from my mom and everyone who’d ever lived here, then climbed the cement blocks and went inside the trailer.
The wall where the TV had been looked bare, even though it wasn’t. Before the TV had appeared, my mom had hung my first-, second-, and third-grade school photos there in frames. Fourth grade was the year she started saying the school was gouging her and the pictures were highway robbery. My newly exposed smiling faces watched me as I passed through the combined den and kitchen. I escaped down the hall and into my bedroom, where I opened my dresser drawer and pulled out the trailer lease agreement. My mom threw stuff like this away. I tried to snag it from her first. Sometimes having the paperwork helped when a landlord wanted to kick us out. This time it would help me forge her signature.
I pulled the permission form out of my pocket and unfolded it. For something to press down on, I drew the magazine off the top of my dresser: last month’s issue of Plane & Pilot, which I’d borrowed from the airport office. I hadn’t thought much about it at the time. I liked to read the articles in bed at night. They kept me company. I’d always intended to take the magazine back. Suddenly I felt like a thief.