We were best friends who grew up like sisters, our world contained within the ten-block patch that spread like an oil stain around the street where we lived with our dads, two three-flats between our place and theirs. Our moms had been best friends, too, before dying a couple of years apart. We had this superstitious belief that the same thing would happen to us one day.
Our dads loved us, they tried, but they weren’t all there. Uncle Nestor was a good man who couldn’t look at his daughter without seeing his lost wife. And my dad ran like our bathroom faucet: wicked hot or freezing. I was his best girl or his heaviest burden, and I never could predict which it would be.
In a lot of ways we grew up fast—we were taking the train alone when we were eight, working part-time for our fathers at ten. I spent so much time haunting my dad’s local that I couldn’t actually remember when I had my first drink.
But in all the ways that counted, we were babies. We didn’t know how to dress right or act cool or talk to people who weren’t each other. My dad had told me, bluntly and early, why I should kick, scream, and run if a man ever tried to grab me, and I’d told Fee, so we had a cloudy understanding of sex. I wondered sometimes what our mothers would’ve wanted us to know, if they’d been around to teach us.
We made it all the way to fifteen this way. Who knows how much longer we might’ve gone if we hadn’t met Marion.
CHAPTER SIX
The suburbs
Right now
I woke in the predawn hour to the sound of Aunt Fee’s truck clearing its throat at the end of our drive. I listened for my mom’s step in the downstairs hall, the creak and sigh of the front door, the resettling of the house around her absence. An hour of quiet passed, then the familiar unfolding of my dad’s morning routine. Shower, NPR, coffee grinder. A band of thickening daylight crawled up my legs. When I heard the garage door close, I sat up.
Hank’s bed was empty. He must not have come home last night. Still I crossed the hall on tiptoe, stopping in front of my parents’ door. I tried to remember the last time I’d been inside. It gave me vertigo, straining to dredge up one memory of this room.
There, I had it. The feeling of my younger self lying between my parents. Eyes tracing a water stain on the ceiling, feet shoved beneath my dad’s warm legs. My head propped on my mother’s shoulder. The memory almost hurt.
Was it even real? Gingerly I pushed open the door, crossed the threshold, and lay back on the bed. There, on the ceiling, the water stain.
I scrambled to the floor. Their bedroom looked like a college dorm shared by roommates with nothing in common. My dad’s side was friendly, full of the kind of clutter you couldn’t tidy: dog-eared books of poetry, cube-thick fantasy novels, a framed photo of me and Hank with blue Popsicle mouths. Hers was sparer. There was a spindly glass-fronted bookcase stocked with memoirs and biographies, an empty bedside table. An aggressively vivacious fern sprawled beneath the window, a clipping from Aunt Fee’s garden.
I moved to the photos that marched along the master bathroom’s vanity top. Here were my parents looking impossibly young on their wedding day, next to school pictures of my brother and me randomly stuck at thirteen and eleven. At the end of the row was a photo of Mom and Aunt Fee, taken when they were in high school. I picked it up.
The old paper had warped, bowing against the glass on one side. The camera’s papery flash sheened over the fearsome curve of my aunt’s brows, my mom’s oxblood nails, the broken-heart necklaces glinting from their throats. They had poison-apple mouths and bad eyeliner, and this look on their faces like they knew they were the only girls in the world.
I was at least as old as they were in this picture, but still it made me feel like a child, forever locked out of their two-person circle. I started to set it down, but something made me pause. Scrubbing my shirt over the dusty glass, I peered closer.
It was their necklaces. Old-school cracked BFF hearts on chintzy chains, made of the same bendable metal used to cast diary keys. The hearts weren’t broken halves, like I’d assumed. They were cut into thirds. My mom wore a jagged rim and Fee the middle piece, serrated on both sides. Someone must’ve had the other edge.
Still chewing on that thought, I moved to the closet. I ran an eye over my mother’s tightly packed clothes, and sifted crinkled receipts and faded cookie fortunes out of the change tray. Stuck into the closet’s doorframe was a photo booth strip of my mom as a child, squeezed in beside the dissolute mug of my long-gone granddad. He was rocking tinted newscaster glasses and too much visible chest hair, she a brick of bangs and no front teeth. Along the side of the strip ran the words TOPS OFF AND BOTTOMS UP AT SHENANIGANS BAR.