First, Last, and in Between Page 5

  “Here, I don’t like it that much,” Isobel told me, and she slid a large hunk of pasta onto my plate.

  “You sure?” My fork hovered above the food, and she nodded. Still, I hesitated. I thought she should eat more. She was pretty skinny, a little too much. “Really sure?” She nodded again and I ate this as slowly as I could as she watched me. Then, when I finished the last bite, she got up and went to the freezer to get a carton of ice cream

  “Dessert,” Isobel told me, and handed me a spoon.

  “I remember giving you ice cream,” I said. “You thought I was after something from you. I remember the look on your face when I put it in front of you.”

  “How did I look?” she asked.

  “Like a cornered animal,” I said plainly.

  “Yeah, you said I ate like an animal, too. I guess I was pretty bad,” she said, and looked down at her spoon, frowning.

  “You were dirty, hungry, frightened. You kept rubbing your side where I’d kicked you.” I winced and shook my head. “I have big feet and I kicked you hard, and you were so small. You’re not much bigger now.” I wanted her to eat more of the ice cream, but she only played with the spoon and shrugged. Then I asked her something I’d been wondering about for all these years. “You told me that you were living with your mom. Was that a lie? Were you homeless, and that’s why you were sleeping in the hallway?”

  “No! No, I really did live with my mom,” she answered, and now she looked offended. The woman showed every emotion on her face. “I was in front of our apartment that night. She…she just forgot to let me in. Rella asked you if you knew her, right? Of course, I wasn’t homeless.”

  She had really lived with her mom, who hadn’t known where her daughter was that late? “Is your mom still around?”

  “Sure, she’s around,” Isobel told me, and her eyes stayed on her spoon. “What about your family? Have you visited them since you got out? You told Rella they live up north.”

  “They do, most of them.” I paused, thinking about my parents, my brother. “No, I haven’t been home yet,” I said slowly. “My brother came down the day I got released and picked me up, and he wanted to drive me right back with him, but I told him to bring me here instead. I’m on parole here and anyway, I have things to do first, before I go back.”

  She nodded, like she understood. “What is it like, where you grew up?” she asked. “I guess there’s no big city.”

  “Not like Detroit,” I agreed, and lit a cigarette. I started to talk, which wasn’t really like me, but I had done the same thing with her friend Rella when I told her about the woodworking. I guessed I had been missing people some. So I told her about lakes and swimming in the summer, playing in the snow in the winter. I told her about my parents, my brother, my aunts and uncles, everyone celebrating holidays together, everyone loving each other.

  Isobel had listened carefully, nodding and tilting her head as I talked. But then what she said about it surprised me. “It doesn’t sound real,” she told me, shaking her head a little.

  “Do you think I’m lying?” I asked. “I’m not. No, we really had a great life. My brother and I did our best to screw it up, of course.”

  “Why? Why would you do that?” she asked, horrified.

  I sighed a little. “We didn’t mean to. We were wild kids. I don’t know why, when we had everything we needed. Not like we had a lot of money, but we had parents who loved us, a big family around all the time. But we got in trouble constantly.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “You name it. We started small but as we got older, we got worse. My brother would take the blame if we got caught, because he’s older and he was always trying to protect me.” I shifted in the chair to pull my phone out of my pocket. “That’s him,” I told her, and showed her the screen. “We look a lot alike. We’re fraternal twins, but he has seven minutes on me.”

  She studied the picture, holding up a delicate finger like she was going to touch it. “When was this taken?” she asked.

  “When he picked me up, when I got out. He sent it to our parents to show them that he had me. You can see that he was crying.”

  She studied the picture more. “And you wouldn’t go home with him?”

  “I have things to do,” I said again. Watching my brother drive away had been...I looked around her little apartment to stop thinking about it. “How did you end up here, in this place?”

  “I came on the bus.”

  I cracked a smile by mistake but quickly squelched it before I scared her. “I mean, what have you been doing with yourself since you were thirteen and I kicked you in the hallway?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  I moved my shoulder up and down. “I don’t know. Like I said, it feels like time stopped for me, but everyone else kept on going. My brother’s getting married. He wants me to be in their wedding. His best man.” I thought about that, my big brother with a wife. He’d be good at that, at taking care of her and loving her. I thought briefly of him as a dad, too, and wondered if I’d ever know his kids. Probably his wife wouldn’t want his felon brother around them.

  “A wedding?” Isobel’s face lit with excitement. “That would be fun. I’ve never been to a wedding but I’ve heard a lot about Rella’s and I’ve seen all the pictures. She had eight bridesmaids and they wore tulle. It’s a kind of fabric,” she explained. “It was yellow for spring. That’s my favorite color.” But then she frowned a little. “Her anniversary with Barry is coming up.”

  “Where is her husband? Is he in a home or something?”

  “He’s been dead for almost twenty years. Since before I met her,” she told me. “But he’s really still there in her life. She misses him a lot.”

  I nodded. “My parents couldn’t be without each other and I can see that my brother’s the same way. He’s crazy about this woman he wants to marry and I hope she’s good for him.”

  “You haven’t met her,” she pointed out. “Why don’t you?”

  Yeah, that wasn’t a good idea. “What about you and that guy? What’s the deal with Kash?” I asked her.

  “Kash?” Isobel echoed, like it was the first time she’d heard the name.

  “Yeah, the one who almost took your door off its hinges and hit you with it,” I reminded her.

  She stood up quickly and put our dishes in the sink and the empty ice cream carton in the garbage. “Kash is my boyfriend, that’s all.”

  “Why does he have a gun stuck down his pants?” I lit another cigarette and watched her clattering the forks, nervous again.

  “Why did you have three guns in a bag that you gave to a thirteen-year-old girl to hide?” Isobel countered, and immediately ducked and bit her lip, tensed up and waiting. After a moment, she cautiously looked out from under her eyelashes at me, and I stayed perfectly still, keeping my face calm. What did she think I was going to do to her now? She waited a moment, watching, but then went back to the dishes.

  “I gave that bag to you because it was all that I thought was valuable back then,” I told her. “I thought I was invincible, too. Like nothing would ever catch up to me. But it was a lesson to me that you can’t outrun your actions and that things have consequences. I had to face my consequences and I still do.”

  “What does that mean?” she asked.

  “It means that I don’t blame you for selling the guns, and I don’t blame you for getting the drugs stolen off you. But I needed what was in that bag.” Isobel nodded a little and pressed her palm to her chest and I rubbed my hand over my face, tired suddenly. And then I heard a crack and felt the chair shift under me, and I jumped—but I wasn’t fast enough. I was fine, but the chair wasn’t.

  “Sorry,” I told her. I picked up some of the broken plastic that had once been a piece of furniture off her kitchen floor. “It wasn’t very sturdy.” It wasn’t the first time I’d broken stuff, because you didn’t get to eight inches over six feet without the pounds that went with it. And down in Adrian, I’d spent a l
ot of my time lifting so I was bigger coming out than I’d been going in. I hadn’t wanted to give anyone there the impression that I was available to be screwed with.

  “I don’t care about the chair,” Isobel said stiffly. Her whole body was back to being stiff, actually, stiff and scared again. “Um, why exactly did you come here tonight? I’m sorry, but I really don’t have your stuff anymore. And I really don’t have any money to give you. I spent all that a long time ago.”

  “Are you worried about your boyfriend? Is he going to be upset that I’m here?”

  It seemed like that was part of it, because her eyes went right to the door like that little muscle-bound guy in his tight shirt was going to come through it. “Kash is at work right now,” she said. “He’s busy most weekends and most nights. He does security for some guys and that’s why he has a gun.”

  “Security,” I repeated. “Huh. That was my gig, too.”

  “No, he’s…”

  “Legit?” I asked, and she shook her head so fast that I was sure that was what she had been thinking. She didn’t believe that her boyfriend was a criminal like I had been, no matter about the gun in his waistband.

  “Why did you bring dinner over here? Why were you at my door?” Her pretty mouth formed an O. “Do you have a place to live?” she asked me. She actually sounded worried. “Do you have anywhere to go?”

  Was she going to let me stay here with her? “Yeah, I’m good,” I told her. “I came because I wanted to see you again. It was like I said before—I was remembering you as a teenager, a little girl with the dirty face. It was a shock to see you now, to see how much you grew up. And I wondered about that boyfriend. He wasn’t very happy that I was here.”

  “I can handle him,” she said, but her eyes looked worried. “He knows that I wouldn’t do anything to mess up our relationship.”

  “So, if he knocked on the door right now?”

  Isobel jumped and spun to stare at it again and her shoulders sagged in relief when she realized that he wasn’t waiting there. Then she looked back at me and bit her lip. “Uh, I don’t want to be rude,” she said carefully, “but I have some stuff to do and I wasn’t expecting company tonight.”

  “Sure.”

  “Thanks for bringing dinner,” she told me. I saw her hands grip the back of the other chair and I held in a sigh. I had spooked her again, obviously.

  “You’re welcome,” I said. I bent and picked up more splinters of plastic from the floor. “I’ll get rid of this for you. I guess I owe you some furniture.”

  “Let’s call it even, since I owe you a lot of cocaine,” she said, and then immediately bit her lip and looked horrified.

  But I laughed again, for the second time that day. “I guess we’re even, then. I’ll be seeing you, Isobel.”

  She nodded and walked me to the door and I waited in the hallway until I heard her click the locks behind me. Then I stood a little longer, wondering about Isobel with an O, Starr with two Rs. I wasn’t sure that I had her whole story yet and I wanted it.

  Chapter 3

  Isobel

  I knocked again, a little harder, and waited. I could hear her moving around inside—well, I could hear somebody or something moving around inside and I hoped it was her, and not a stranger she had let live in her apartment. That had happened many times, or it could have been an animal. She’d adopted pets before, too, like cats, birds, a vicious dog. Really, there could have been anything going on behind that dented door. Nothing would have surprised me anymore.

  “Mom?” I called. She knew I was supposed to come today. I had written it on the calendar that I’d hung on her wall, my name up there just like all the other appointments she was supposed to keep: AA, NA, clinic, therapist, etc. But sometimes she didn’t look at it. Sometimes, she didn’t even know what day it was.

  I used my key and cautiously opened her door, calling to her loudly so she wouldn’t be scared. “Mom? Jade? Jade Starr?” I was pretty sure that name wasn’t what was on her birth certificate, but that was what she’d gone by for as long as I’d known her.

  Her head popped out of the bathroom. “Oh! Izzie.” She hurried over to hug me. “I didn’t know you were coming today.”

  I looked at the wall, and the calendar was still there, with Saturday circled and my name in red. “Yeah, today’s my day.” I sniffed, but I didn’t smell any animals. “How are you doing?” I asked. I assessed her hair, which was usually a good indicator of where she was at the moment. Today, it looked like she had started to tease the front for a half-up, half-down look, or maybe she had been planning to put it all into a bun. My mom had worked on and off in various hair salons (on when she was functioning ok, off when she wasn’t), and she really did have talent. She generally liked to do elaborate, complicated styles on herself and she always loved hair accessories.

  But whatever had been her original plan for her look today, she hadn’t followed through after ratting out the top to make it larger. Her blonde hair just stood away from her head in tangles, like messy, scraggly rays coming out from the sun, and it hung down her back in knots, with a few rhinestone clips and colored hair pieces stuck in random places. I sighed inwardly, because today wasn’t going to be a great day for her. I would have to deal with her very carefully.

  She saw me looking and her hands flew to her head. “I didn’t have time to finish,” she defended herself. “If you drop by unannounced, you can’t expect people to be…to be…” Her eyes filled up with tears. “Does it look bad?”

  “No, it’s fine,” I soothed. “Let’s go in front of the mirror and you can tell me what you were planning.” It turned out that she had been going for a bun, so I helped her find the pins that were scattered around the sink and floor and we finished the style, and then she kept me company while I cleaned the bathroom. I wasn’t sure how she managed to get it into such confusion in the six days between my visits. But then again, that had always been her specialty: creating a mess, and not caring about making things right.

  I worked on straightening her kitchen, too, and tried to ferret out information about what she had been doing during the week. Not going to her appointments, I already knew, because I had made some calls in between jobs yesterday to check up on her. I looked in the refrigerator and sighed.

  “Mom, really?” I asked, and held up the cans of beer. “You can’t be drinking.”

  “I can do whatever the hell I want!” she snarled back at me, but then got teary again. “It was just a little, Izzie! What can that hurt?”

  “Where did you get it?” I asked, and when she didn’t answer, I shook my head. “Mom, no! No, you can’t do that, either. You can’t go—” I still had a hard time saying it, admitting out loud how my mom got the alcohol fixes when I wouldn’t buy it for her. “That’s not how a lady should live,” I finished, like Rella would say.

  “A lady?” My mom laughed raucously, and even I had to crack a smile.

  “Never mind,” I told her. “Let’s go get your groceries.” We took my car, which she always wanted to drive, but I didn’t think she’d ever really had a license.

  “Oh, Izzie, do you remember these?” My mom swooped toward a cookie display the moment we walked into the store, ignoring how I was heading into dairy and as far away from the wine aisle as I could get us. “We used to eat these together, do you remember?” she repeated, getting louder. She smiled at me. “We would have them as we watched TV, that dance competition with the salsa couple who was so good!” She wiggled her hips and sang some song that sounded vaguely Spanish in front of the pyramid of cookies. Several people turned to look.

  I had no memory of that, none at all—in fact, it probably hadn’t ever happened, but it sounded like it would have been nice to hang out together eating cookies. “We can get some if you want,” I said. They were on sale. “One, only one bag,” I cautioned, as she started to throw them into the cart. It was very different from shopping with Rella, who stuck methodically to a list and had already figured out the coupo
ns for the best deals on each item. She had been a bookkeeper before she had retired, and she was serious about saving.

  My mom, as usual, seemed to have no concept of money, like where it came from (in her case, the state of Michigan and me) and how much she was spending (unless I watched her carefully, it was way too much). We walked through the grocery store and she talked and laughed, put things into the basket, and argued a little when I took them back out. We stayed away from the beer section, too.

  Afterwards, we went to lunch at a Coney Island, her favorite one on Lafayette where she had maybe worked when she had been a teenager and where she now claimed to have met the man who was my father, about twenty-two years before. “He tipped me forty dollars for his Coney dog,” she said proudly. “Imagine that! And he told me that I was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen.”

  But that story, like all the stories about her past and about mine, was iffy. I’d heard many versions of how she’d met my father. Today, his name was Jax with an X, but the name she gave him changed frequently, as did the tip amount, and also the restaurant’s location. And the space for “father” on my birth certificate was blank, so there was that.

  “Remember when we used to come here when you were in high school?” she asked me as she dipped a fry into chili.

  Once again, I had no memory of this. “Did we?”

  “Sure! You were dating that boy with the funny name, and he was running with that big bunch of guys that always got in trouble. Remember? They fought with the group of rich kids.”

  I realized that she was telling me the plot of a movie that I had seen, too. “He was nice,” I agreed, because he had been a good guy in the movie, and it was easier to go along with her.

  Jade leaned forward over her fries. “That’s so important, Izzie. You have to find someone who’s sweet to you.” She went on about the plot and her part in it, so I let her talk for a while, but gradually, I pushed the conversation around to her real life. Specifically, we had to talk about her getting to her appointments.