Free Heft by Liz Moore Page B

when she calls.
    I got the disability extension, she says.
    Cool, I say.
    She pauses. She holds the mug up to her face.
    Kelly, she says. I have a friend I want you to meet. I called him on the phone.
    I think, She’s crazy all the way now. She has no friends. She does not go out.
    Cool, I say.
    He can help you with colleges, she says. He’s very smart. We talked on the phone.
    Cool, I say again.
    Kelly, she says, and for a moment I think she is going to tell me something important, it’s the worry in her eyes. But all she says is Have a good day.
    I leave without anything, no goodbye.
    She thinks she’s dying. She is, probably, but she’s doing it to herself. One time I came home very late from Trevor’s and she had passed out on the couch with a pad of paper on her lap.
    Dear Kel.
    Do not read this until I am dead. If I am dead there are a couple things you should know. One is that I love you so much honey. Your a good kid always have been. Sometimes I can’t believe your mine. If
    It was terrible. I was embarrassed for her and I flipped the whole thing over and knocked it roughly out of her hands and onto the floor. The yellow pad she dug up God knows where. She didn’t budge.
    She drops little things into our conversations. I’ll say something about next summer and she’ll say We’ll see . . . very dramatically, as if to say If I’m around . . .
    Another time she made me write down her will for her, which was a pathetic undertaking because everything she had went to me. And she had nothing. Her parents are dead. She has no siblings. My dad left when I was four. Since then, since forever and ever, it’s been the two of us alone.

• • •
    E very day I drive half an hour from Yonkers to Pells Landing. I went to school in Yonkers all the way through middle school. My mom was better then. She grew up in Yonkers too, back when our neighborhood was OK. When they got married, she and my dad bought the house together and always said they were going to fix it up and never did. Our neighborhood got worse and worse. My mother found a job as a secretary at an elementary school in Yonkers right out of high school. But she wasn’t happy there, so when I was eight, she applied for a job at Pells Landing High School. When they gave it to her, she cried.
    I thought I’d go to Yonkers High. It was where my mother and father went. It was where my friends were all going. But I got into some trouble in eighth grade and it was a big deal when it happened. And to make everything worse, my friend Dee Marshall was involved, and Dee is the only son of her only friend Rhonda, so there went that friendship. My mother petitioned the Pells school board to let me go to high school there. It was without me knowing it. She didn’t like my friends in Yonkers, she never did, even though they’re good guys. She wanted to separate me from them, to drive me to school with her every morning, to give me a new start, she said. This was when she was still awake enough to care what I did.
    I hated her for it. I had been to Pells enough growing up to know that it was nothing like Yonkers, old friendly ugly Yonkers, with duplexes and projects and run-down libraries and police stations and pubs. Pells Landing is the opposite of Yonkers. It’s twenty miles north but it feels like a different world. The windows are cleaner, the lawns are always green. All the yards and streets are rolling and new. The doors are painted bright colors. There is a sailing club on the Hudson in Pells where rich families go in summer. Where rich kids go together. There is a restaurant at the marina. Trevor’s parents are members and I have been there several times and I have ordered steak there. There is a country club in Pells and it’s so old that I don’t even know anyone whose family belongs. One girl in my high school, her family belongs, and even though we are not friends I know it about her. It’s the thing that is always said next after her name.
    My