“Where’s Dad?”
“He went fishing with Mad Earl. I think Dad’s hoping to ask the old man for a loan. Money is getting pretty tight. I’ve still got some of the money from my mom, but I’ve been using it for cigarettes and Polaroid film.” She gave Leni a soft smile.
“I’m not sure Mad Earl is good for Dad,” Leni said.
Mama’s smile faded. “I know what you mean.”
“He’s happy here, though,” Leni said. She tried not to think about the conversation she’d had with Matthew, about how winter was coming and winter was dark and cold and crazy-making.
“I wish you remembered your dad from before ’Nam.”
“Yeah.” Leni had heard dozens of stories of that time. Mama loved to talk about Before, about who they’d been in the beginning. The words were like a much-loved fairy tale.
Mama had been sixteen when she got pregnant.
Sixteen.
Leni would be fourteen in September. Amazingly, she’d never really thought about that before. She’d known her mama’s age, of course, but she hadn’t really put the facts together. Sixteen.
“You were only two years older than me when you got pregnant,” Leni said.
Mama sighed. “I was a junior in high school. Christ. No wonder my parents threw a clot.” She gave Leni a crooked, charming smile. “They were not the kind of people who could understand a girl like me. They hated my clothes and my music and I hated their rules. At sixteen, I thought I knew everything, and I told them so. They sent me away to a Catholic girls’ school, where rebellion meant rolling up the waistband of your skirt to shorten the hem and show an inch of skin above your knees. We were taught to kneel and pray and marry well.
“Your dad came into my life like a rogue wave, knocking me over. Everything he said upended my conventional world and changed who I was. I stopped knowing how to breathe without him. He told me I didn’t need school. I believed everything he said. Your dad and I were too in love to be careful, and I got pregnant. My dad exploded when I told him. He wanted to send me away to one of those houses for unwed mothers. I knew they’d take you away from me. I’ve never hated anyone more than I hated him in that moment.”
Mama sighed. “So we ran away. I was sixteen—almost seventeen—and your dad was twenty-five. When you came along, we were flat broke and living in a trailer park, but none of that mattered. What was money or work or new clothes when you had the most perfect baby in the world?”
Mama leaned back. “He used to carry you all the time. At first in his arms and then on his shoulders. You adored him. We shut out the world and lived on love, but the world came roaring back.”
“The war,” Leni said.
Mama nodded. “I begged your dad not to go to Vietnam. We fought and fought about it. I didn’t want to be a soldier’s wife, but he wanted to go. So I packed my tears with his clothes and let him go. It was supposed to be for a year. I didn’t know what to do, where to go, how to live without him. I ran out of money and moved back home with my parents, but I couldn’t stand it there. All we did was fight. They kept telling me to divorce your father and think about you, and finally I left again. That’s when I found the commune and people who didn’t judge me for being a kid with a kid. Then your dad’s helicopter got shot down and he was captured. I got one letter from him in six years.”
Leni remembered the letter and how her mother had cried after reading it.
“When he came home, he looked like a dead man,” Mama said. “But he loved us. Loved us like air. Said he couldn’t sleep if I wasn’t in his arms, although he didn’t sleep much then, either.”
As always, Mama’s story came to a stumbling halt at this point, the fairy tale over. The witch’s door slammed shut on the wandering kids. The man who’d come home from war was not the same man who’d boarded the plane for Vietnam. “He’s better up here, though,” Mama said. “Don’t you think? He’s almost himself again.”
Leni stared down at the sea, rolling inexorably toward her. Nothing you did could hold back that rising tide. One mistake or miscalculation and you could be stranded or washed away. All you could do was protect yourself by reading the charts and being prepared and making smart choices. “You know it’s dark up here for six months in the winter. And snowy and freezing cold and stormy.”
“I know.”
“You always said bad weather made him worse.”