Though I guess they were Dad’s, they made me think of Uncle Ivan and how he’d sat with me in the hall and smoothed my hair, smoke curling around us.
I started carrying a pack of the cigarettes in my jacket pocket. Whenever I needed to—like when I felt anxious, or alone—I reached into my pocket and felt for the light, cellophane-wrapped rectangle, its exact corners and slick surface. I’d study the packaging. Hacienda meant something like “home.” If I stared at the man in the serape long enough, I could imagine those were Uncle Ivan’s eyes squinting under the sun, looking right at me, whispering the word in Spanish.
I’d learned to smoke like a real smoker. Anyone watching me light up would think I did it all the time, but I kept it to one a day, mostly in the afternoon, between school and home. I’d told Mr. Bergstrom about it, how at least at first it made me feel close to Uncle Ivan and made me think of my dad, too, like he had personally given the cigarettes to me. “Aside from the fact that you shouldn’t be smoking and I wish you could maybe hold the cigarettes but not light them,” Mr. Bergstrom said, “I’m glad you have the ritual.” He said with that, like with all my rituals, I’d stop when I was ready.
After I read Dad’s letter, I went to my spot in the tiny, neglected park near our house. My bench had a view of a tree stump that people stuffed garbage into and a sliver of the street that ran by the park. I lit a Hacienda and inhaled.
I like my old dreams better, he’d written.
What did that mean? Did it mean us, his family? One thing he’d always say to Mom when he’d screwed up was how they were meant to be, that there was no one for him but her. Or did he mean opening a club?
“GEM.” I closed my eyes and saw it in neon, flashing in the Seattle mist. Inside there’d be a band on stage, my father circulating through the crowd to make sure everyone was happy. My mom . . . doing what? Working the bar? I opened my eyes and took a deep drag.
A club. What a stupid idea for people with no money, who were supposedly trying to stay clean and sober. His old dreams weren’t just old, they were expired and poisonous.
I wondered about my own dreams, if I even had any. I never thought about the future. Not in the way I’d hear kids at school talk sometimes, or how people at my old job did. I’m applying to colleges in California. I want to see London. I’m saving up for an apartment. Those seemed like real dreams or maybe goals. The things my parents talked about sounded more like fantasies.
Anyway, I reminded myself, even if Dad really did start a club, he’d name it after Dixie now.
The damp extinguished my cigarette and I couldn’t get it re-lit; my lighter sparked and sparked but didn’t ignite. Then I remembered the book of matches Mom had given me—I’d been carrying it around as if it actually meant something.
It took me two tries to get a match lit; then I went back to my thoughts.
What he’d written about me in the letter stuck in my head like a bad song. Dixie was his girl, not me. Me, I was a judgmental worrier.
You know how she is.
Fuck him. He didn’t know me and how I was.
Nobody did.
From the corner of my eye, I saw a homeless-looking man approach, half a dozen shirts and coats hanging off him, pants bagging down to his knees. People like that were always wanting to bum a smoke off me, but I didn’t want to share the one thing that felt all mine. Also, why should he think I had more in the world than he did, that I could spare anything?
I took a defiant drag, daring him to ask.
He didn’t. He just sat on the other end of my bench, quiet, pulling his coats around him and staring at the stump. The fact that he didn’t try to talk was almost worse than if he’d asked for something. I looked at him, hoping he’d sense it and turn, see me.
He didn’t move. My eyes stung, a sensation surprising and sharp.
I finished my Hacienda and dug into my pocket. I still had a handful of change from the doughnut shop. I stood in front of the homeless man and opened my hand to offer him the quarter and two dimes in my palm. He looked up at me, his eyes blank and uncurious.
“Here,” I said.
He arranged his coats but didn’t make a move toward my hand.
“It’s money.” Maybe he was crazy. Maybe he couldn’t see what I had.
“I don’t need that.” His voice was hoarse and thin.
The change got heavier and heavier. I couldn’t spare it but I didn’t want it; I wanted him to want it; I wanted to have something that someone, anyone, wanted.
He turned back to the stump. I left the change on the bench and walked away.
5.
DIXIE TOLD Mom all about the letter not long after she’d told me, just like I knew she would.
It happened Monday night. I’d been in bed for an hour without falling sleep, going over my day and all the ways I had been weird at school. Like asking Peter Chin in detention where he got his shoes. They were just sneakers but they looked new and unusual and I honestly didn’t know where people shopped for things like that. He didn’t even answer me.
When Dixie came home from wherever she’d been, I acted like I was asleep. Since Mom worked or went out most nights, Dixie could go anywhere she wanted without Mom ever knowing, as long as Dixie got home first. I heard her changing for bed. She left the door open, and a little bit after that I heard the TV go on in the living room. Then I must have slept some, finally, because the next thing I heard was our front door opening, the bolt being locked, and the sound of keys dropping on the table.
“Hey, baby doll,” Mom said to Dixie. She sounded tired but straight—not high, not tipsy. The rustle of a bag or something. Groceries?
I listened to their voices and could see, in my mind, the way they might be arranging themselves. Maybe Dixie lying on the couch with her feet in Mom’s lap. Or maybe Dixie on the floor, Mom on the couch, rubbing Dixie’s neck the way she liked.
“You do okay in classes and everything today?” Mom asked. “You went, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. I don’t love getting calls from school, so keep it together.”
Dixie answered, her voice too low for me to make out.
The murmuring went on. Then Mom said, louder, “Let me see it.”
A stretch of quiet.
Then Mom, even louder: “Are you shitting me?”
Dixie again, her voice ratcheting up, too. “Mom, just—”
“Gem! Get in here!”
I held my breath. I could have kept pretending to be asleep, but there’d have been no point because Mom was coming for me.
“Gem.” Her voice got closer. Her jeans swished in the hallway. She came to my bed, the letter in her hand. “Up.” She pulled the covers off me. “Your dad is trying to sell some bullshit story and we need to talk about it right now.”
I followed her out to the living room. Dixie sat cross-legged on the floor, angry, looking up at me like I’d done something to cause all this. “What?” I said. “You’re the one who showed her the letter.”