Free Fingerprints of You by Kristen-Paige Madonia Page B

to California was to see where I had come from.

     
    Emmy brought two disposable cameras, one for the road and one for the city, and she made me pose in front of the bus before we boarded and picked two blue recliners we’d call home for the next three days. We started north, skittering along the highway until our first transfer in Pittsburgh, our dinner-stop layover before we drove west through the night. In Pittsburgh the buildings were checkered with rows of windows, the roads lit by cars and the streets lined with lampposts as we headed downtown toward the station. Snow draped the city from a storm that’d hit the week before, and the air looked heavy.
    I hadn’t been in Pennsylvania in a long time, not since we left Denny in Philadelphia, so when Emmy said, “Didn’t you used to live around here?” I looked out the window and tried to decide what I wanted and didn’t want her to know.
    “We lived in Harrisburg when I was little, before New York,” I said. “Stella moved us back to Pennsylvania when I was eleven, though, Philadelphia that time,” I told her.
    We pulled into the terminal, and Emmy started puttingaway the deck of cards, gathering the books and magazines scattered on the floor, and returning them to my backpack at our feet.
    “It’s weird, right, having lived in so many places? I mean, I bet in some ways it’s cool to have had all those different experiences, but sometimes, when you talk about it, it seems exhausting,” she said once the bus was parked.
    I thought of the Denny years in Philadelphia, when Stella worked day shifts processing Tastykake orders and night shifts bartending at Whiskey Tango on the north side of the city. I was in the sixth grade, and Stella was having a hard time taking care of us, when Denny showed up, a big guy with big plans and a big appetite for Stella and the life she was trying to make for me and her.
    “Some of it was good,” I said, thinking of how my mother would pick me up every day after school between her shifts at work. On a good day we’d stop at a coffee shop and drink hot chocolates, or she’d take me to a playground. Sometimes we’d just drive around watching the city and listening to music on the radio, swapping stories about my day at school and her shift at the baking company. “My mom and I used to go to a great park in the city, and we’d rent bikes sometimes or hang around the fountain throwing pennies in the water before her bartending shift at the nightclub,” I told her. “But some of it was bad, too,” I said, thinking of the day she met Denny.
    She was waiting for me in the parking lot by her old Geo Metro just as he came out to his truck to get a sheet of metal for the air duct. He’d been hired to fix one of the heating units at my school, and he took one look at her in her tiny white miniskirt and her big hoop earrings and knew, just like that, that he saw something he wanted. His next project, his next scam.
    Three weeks later Stella moved us into Denny’s two-bedroom apartment in Levittown. I shared my bedroom with all the boxes of the things he never made room for, the items he decided we didn’t need anymore, like photos from our life before him and toys he said I was too old for. Stella liked that Denny lived outside the city where she thought things would be safer for me. She liked that he didn’t drink, that he drove a big truck, and that he took a job at the club to keep an eye on her. And she loved the gifts. He’d show up at the apartment with lingerie and jewelry and perfume, presents he bought her on South Street when he went to Philadelphia for work. We lived with him for almost two years, moving again just weeks after my fourteenth birthday.
    “I liked my sixth-grade teacher in Philadelphia,” I told Emmy as we waited for the other riders to move through the aisle, “but I hated the winters up north, the way the days were so short in December. The darkness seemed longer there than anywhere else,” I