Breakfast with Neruda Read online

  “No. Anything forbidden he would have taken with him to Europe or buried somewhere. Unlike me, Josh is pretty transparent.”

  “You’re about as transparent as Sheetrock,” I say.

  She sticks her tongue out at me and opens the bottom dresser drawer where she finds a couple pairs of swim trunks. Shelly holds them up. “Red or olive green?”

  “You choose.”

  She tosses me the green ones. “They match your eyes.” She walks to the door. “I’ll meet you down by the pool.”

  I change quickly, and carry my clothes with me. Shelly is already in the pool when I step outside.

  “You look like such a dork,” she says.

  “Are the trunks too big?”

  “No. You’re holding on to your clothes like a homeless vagrant,” she says. “Oh wait, you are one.” She splashes water at me and I step back.

  “You’ll pay for that.” I dump my bundle on the concrete and dive into the pool near her. When I surface I swoosh her with a wave of water and she squeals, and wooshes water back at me. She tries to dunk me, but I’m stronger and easily push her underwater. She’s slippery as a fish, though, and pops away. By the time I find her she has swum to the other side of the pool.

  She leans against the side and splashes with her feet. I swim beside her and paddle my feet too.

  “This is great,” I say. “If I lived here I’d never leave home.”

  She sloshes water at me. “Having a pool isn't reason enough to stay.”

  I give her a long look. “So you took off?”

  She is silent, so I know it’s true. I have figured out that Shelly is like a hunted animal, and one cannot prod her too quickly with questions. I have to let her tell me when she wants to. There’s more to the story than just running away.

  Around seven, Shelly walks me out to my car. “Your parents are nice,” I say.

  She shrugs. “Yeah. I could do worse.”

  I open my car door.

  “Hey, thanks again for today.”

  “It was fun.”

  I’m not sure what I am supposed to do now. Shake her hand? Kiss her? We’re friends, and I liked when she held my hand, but if I kiss her she might just kick me in the nads.

  I reach inside my car and pick up the bags of peaches and tomatoes and her bottle of wine. “Don’t forget these.”

  She grips the wine and pulls out a peach. She passes the sacks back to me. “Keep the rest.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “You need them more than I do.”

  “Thanks.”

  She starts to walk up the driveway. She turns. “See you at the salt mines Monday.”

  Inside the bag are two peaches and the last tomato. I eat them after I have found a parking spot at the rest stop just outside of town. I park on the side with the semis, figuring I have less of a chance of getting murdered in the night. It’s cool enough for me to close the windows most of the way. I never really got the whole "sleeping weather" thing until I started living in my car. This is one of the best nights of sleep I have had in ages. It gets so chilly at one point I have to wrap up in a blanket.

  Chapter Five

  I am sitting at McDonald’s around 9:00 A.M. when my phone buzzes. It’s a text from Shelly.

  -What R U doing?

  -At McDs. Having coffee.

  -CALL ME.

  -Cant. almost out of minutes.

  -JUST CALL ME!!!!!

  -OK!

  I hit Call, and she says in a rush, “My-dad-says-we-can-borrow-his-Miata-and-drive-to-Columbus-to-celebrate-your-birthday.”

  “But my birthday is . . .”

  “Today! I know! Happy birthday! And he gave me one of his credit cards so I can buy you lunch somewhere nice, so wear something not awful.”

  I laugh. “Okay.”

  “Half an hour.” She hangs up.

  I wash my face in the McDonald’s bathroom and wet down my unruly hair. Hopefully Annie can give me a haircut soon. She’s planning to study cosmetology at the vocational school next year and likes to practice haircuts. Sometimes she massacres me, but hey, the haircut is free.

  I rummage through my clothes. I don’t want to wear any of Josh’s castoffs in case Shelly’s folks recognize them. The nicest shirt I own is a short-sleeve Hawaiian print. Rick gave it to me last Christmas. Last year flowered shirts were sort of a fad at school. Since I’ve never worn it, it qualifies as my “not awful" shirt. My best pants are a pair of jeans Jeff gave to me on my actual birthday in May, and I have not yet worn them either. I had planned to wear the jeans on the first day of my second try at senior year. But hey, it’s my birthday again, and who am I to turn down a free lunch?

  I rub the sample of Chrome cologne I found in a Sports Illustrated magazine on my chest and neck. I check my look in the car window. I look like a dork, but this is the best I can do.

  I park on the street in front of Shelly’s house. The blue Miata sits in the driveway, and the top is already down. Shelly stands next to the open door of the passenger side wearing ginormous sunglasses, sandals, and a raspberry-colored sundress. Her black hair is neatly braided and she is wearing lipstick.

  “You clean up nicely,” I say.

  She hands me the keys. “So do you.” She touches the fabric of my floral shirt. “Nice shirt.” The compliment seems genuine.

  I slide into the driver’s side and Shelly sits down and closes her door.

  “Dad says don’t touch the radio. He has satellite.” She opens the glove compartment and pulls out two pairs of sunglasses. One is blue mirrored and the other is plain black. “Choose.”

  I try them each on. “Which one makes me look more like an international man of mystery?”

  She laughs and I try them on again. “The mirrored ones.”

  She stashes the black pair back in the glove compartment and I start the car. As I back down the driveway, I notice the tank is full.

  “You’re lucky my parents like you,” she says. “Dad only lets Josh drive this car.”

  “He doesn’t know we took it the other day?”

  “No,” she says. “And he never will.”

  It’s a little intimidating driving such a tiny car on the freeway, like being a tiny person in a land of giants, but I quickly find my pace and feel comfortable. I glance over and notice Shelly has donned a pink-and-green scarf over her hair. “Very retro chic,” I say.

  “And practical.”

  We don’t talk much on the way to Columbus. The wind and the traffic make it too loud to do anything but shout, but I enjoy the feel of the car, and the adventure of heading into an unknown. I’ve driven to Columbus many times, but never in a sports car with a girl.

  As we approach the outskirts of Columbus, I shout, “Where are we going?”

  “Since it’s your birthday I’ll let you choose,” she says. “If you like Italian, we could go to Buca di Beppo. That’s in Worthington. Good food, but no patio.”

  “And my other choice?”

  “Lindey’s in German Village. We can eat outside there.”

  “Lindey’s,” I say.

  I head straight into the city on I-70, get off at Fourth Street, and follow the signs toward German Village, just south of downtown. We drive around to find a parking spot a couple blocks up.

  “Should we put the top up and lock it?” I ask.

  “There’s nothing in it but a pair of sunglasses,” she says. She stashes the scarf in her purse and checks her look in the rearview mirror. I go around and hold the door for her. “Look at you being the gentleman.”

  “Given it’s my birthday, I’m demonstrating my increased maturity.” As we walk, I say, “So what made you want to see me today?”

  She shrugs. “I had nothing better to do.”

  “Gee, thanks, I think.”

  We stand at the entrance of the restaurant and Shelly points to a sign that reads Free Valet Parking.

  “That’s okay,” I say. “The walk felt nice.”

  There are still a
couple tables available outdoors. We settle into our seats and a waiter brings us water glasses and a basket of bread. I order iced tea and Shelly orders a glass of white wine with some Italian-sounding name.

  I open my menu and see an array of food I’d never be able to afford. Some of the terms I recognize from French class.

  “I could order a burger,” I say, “but I don’t want to be gauche.”

  “Order something unique, something you have never eaten before. You eat burgers all the time.”

  “What do you recommend?”

  “I’m getting quiche,” she says. The waiter sets down our beverages. “It’s your birthday. Live it up. Get something decadent.”

  I order the quiche as well.

  “Sorry,” I say, after the waiter walks away. “I’m not very imaginative when it comes to food. I was raised on canned pork and beans and corn dogs. The most exotic thing I’ve ever eaten is Gouda cheese in French class.”

  “I keep forgetting you’re a homeless hick.”

  My face reddens. I take a gulp of tea.

  “I meant that as a compliment,” she says. “You don’t seem like an ignoramus like so many of the guys at school. You have untapped potential.”

  “If this were a story,” I say, “I’m not sure if you’d be the hero or the villain.”

  “That’s what I mean,” she says. “Your sentences are grammatically correct. Most of those guys at school say crap like, ‘where you at?’ and ‘I seen that.’ You actually use verbs correctly.”

  “I have went there,” I say. “And I seen it.”

  She covers her ears in mock horror. “Stop! You’re murdering me.”

  I laugh. “Maybe I’m just naturally brilliant.”

  “No, that’s not it.”

  “You’re just full of the compliments today. Is that any way to treat the birthday boy?”

  She grins. “I guess not.”

  I rip into a piece of bread from the basket. “One of my mom’s husbands was a literature teacher. Annie’s dad. He read to us all the time, so I grew up reading and listening to stories.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Annie’s dad?” I take a long breath. This is one of the stories I don’t want to tell. It kind of serves as the beginning of our troubles. “I didn’t always live in Rooster either,” I say. “Before that, we lived here in Columbus, where Annie’s dad was teaching at Ohio State.”

  “He was a professor?”

  “A graduate student, working on his doctorate, and he taught classes there. That’s how my mom met him. When Jeff and I were small, I guess she wanted to better herself, and since we were poor, she got to take classes for free.”

  I rip another hunk of bread from the basket. “We lived in this one-bedroom apartment. I was three and Jeff was two. We all slept on a mattress on the floor. My mother had wanted to be something more than a breakfast waitress in a Tee Jaye’s. Plus she sometimes worked nights at 7-Eleven.”

  “So who took care of you when your mother worked?”

  “I don't remember a lot of the details about when I was a kid. My earliest memories are of being woken in the middle of the night and shifted from one location to another. Sometimes Jeff and I slept in the back of the car while she worked. In fact, I think we lived in Mom’s car for a while, so I guess my lifestyle is not new to me. It’s just not my first choice of addresses.”

  “How did your mom have time to take a class?”

  “I don’t know, but she took this class taught by a cute, young guy named Bob, and back then, my mom was still hot, even though she’d had two babies.”

  “So they started dating?”

  I nodded. “I remember the first time we went to his house for dinner. He was funny and nice. It was winter, and it snowed, so we spent the night at his house. He had a place near campus. I don’t think he owned it. Rented it maybe. We moved in with him shortly after that. It was on California Street. I remember that because I loved that we lived on California Street. I thought that made us closer to Hollywood. Bob used to say, ‘If we can’t live in California, we can live on California.’ There were a lot of students who lived in the area in big, old two-story houses with lots of room. Our house had three bedrooms, so Jeff and I each had our own room until Annie came along.”

  “So living with him was an improvement.”

  “Big time,” I say. “And Mom must be as fertile as a rainforest because she immediately got pregnant with Annie, so she and Bob got married.” I drink some tea. “My mom quit working once Annie was born, and for a while she was a housewife. Bob didn’t make a lot, but enough to rent a house, and Jeff’s dad sent support checks, so we didn’t starve.”

  “How old were you when he died?”

  “Six or seven, I think. Annie was like three.”

  “Did you like him?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I say. “Bob was a great guy.” Bob and Paul were both good stepdads. My mom may be nuts, but she chooses her men well. Most of them anyway, so I think my own father might be an okay guy. “Bob was smart, and we had books all over the place. We lived like a Norman Rockwell painting. Mom was home, the house was clean, and she cooked for us. Bob helped us with homework and we read stories. I even wrote a few.”

  “Do you still have them?”

  I chew on another hunk of bread. “I don’t have anything from that time.”

  “Because you live in your car?”

  I look down at the table. “No, because of what happened to Bob.”

  The waiter brings our lunches. A big pie-shaped yellow slab of eggs inside a crust with some fruit on the side. He refills my iced tea and Shelly’s water glass. We bite into our meals. I don’t know what to expect. The thing on my plate looks weird, but when I take a bite, my taste buds go into overdrive.

  “Wow, this is really good,” I say.

  “Told ya.” Shelly takes a sip of her wine.

  I want to devour it all at once, yet also take my time savoring the eggs and cheese and whatever else is in this quiche thing.

  “So what happened to Bob?” Shelly asks.

  I take a big bite and swallow. “He and my mom were saving to buy a house, so Bob started working a second job a couple nights a week. He tended bar at a place downtown.” I take a drink from my water, not wanting to tell this story. “Bob didn’t go in until nine or so, so he always read us stories before bed. Back then I went to bed around seven-thirty. He often read us tales from The Arabian Nights. He said those had been his favorite when he was a kid.”

  I chug some tea and wipe my mouth. “Anyway, one night he didn’t come home. When I got up the next morning my mom was in the kitchen sobbing her eyes out. Bob had been shot in a drive-by after work while walking to his car.”

  “Oh that’s terrible.”

  “Yeah. He got caught in the crossfire between gangs,” I say. “Things kind of headed downhill fast after that. Bob had only taught part-time, and didn’t have life insurance. We had to move out of the house since we couldn’t afford rent. Mom sold what she could and we ended up back in Rooster, where Mom came from. We lived with her mom for a while. But her mother threw us out.”

  “Why?”

  I grab Shelly’s wine and take a big swig. I set the glass back on the table, leaving my fingers around the base. “My mom, she was, well . . . she kind of went through a phase where she had a different guy every night.” I finish Shelly’s wine. “It may be how she made her living for a while.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.” I can’t believe I’m telling her this. I don’t think anyone outside the family knows. “She finally found another husband, though. Tomas. We moved in with him in the townhouse where she lives now.”

  “So is your stepdad the reason you got tossed out?”

  “No. He’s been out of the picture for a while. Tomas was the total opposite of Bob. He drank, smoked pot, lived on welfare, and was an all-around asshole.”

  “Why did she marry him?”

  I shrug. “Who knows? Lone
liness? Money? The bad thing is my mom drank with him, and the two of them just sat around the house drunk and stoned, so Jeff’s dad took him to live with him.”

  “How come he didn’t take you and Annie as well?”

  “He already had a whole family with his new wife.”

  “Oh.”

  “But Jeff has had it okay. His life is somewhat normal.”

  “So how bad was it for you and Annie?”

  “Kind of bad.” I suck down my tea until it’s just ice and set the glass down. “Tomas would take off for days, sometimes weeks at a time. Then he’d come back and act like it was normal for a husband to just disappear. If she yelled at him about it, he hit her.”

  “Did he ever abuse you or your sister?”

  “He came at me a couple of times, but I fought back. Tomas wasn’t a big guy, and by then I could almost kick his ass, especially when he was loaded.”

  “How long was he in the picture?”

  “He moved out at the end of my eighth-grade year.”

  It was shortly after that I started noticing the accumulation of things. The house had always been a mess, but things got worse. Piles of crap just grew. There were days my mom didn’t leave the house, but I am never telling Shelly this part of my story.

  “Eventually Tomas left for good,” I say. “He could be dead for all we know.”

  “Wow,” she says.

  “Yeah. I’ve had kind of a shaky history with dads, none of whom was my own.”

  The waiter fills my tea and sets a chocolate cupcake in front of me with a candle in it. “A pretty little bird told me it was your birthday,” he says.

  After lunch, Shelly suggests we walk over to The Book Loft. “I can get you a birthday present.”

  “I thought lunch was my present.”

  “The Book Loft is also part of your gift.”

  “Is it a bookstore?”

  “Yeah, and it has thirty-two rooms.”

  “That sounds cool. Let’s go.”

  We walk about three blocks. It’s a nice walk through an old neighborhood where the streets are made of cobblestone. “It’s a lot different here than Rooster,” I say.

  I spot a strip of shops in an old brick storefront. I notice a Cup O Joe coffee shop. Next to it is a neon sign and a giant red banner identifying The Book Loft. We stop at the entrance, which has a couple benches and planters. “It looks like someone’s house,” I say. We walk further in and there are several tables loaded with books. “This is awesome.”