He laughed. “Hear that, Cor? She doesn’t think I’m crazy.”
I looked down at the circle again, then back at my sister. She’d come into the room, although not that far, and still had her arms crossed over her chest as she stood there, watching us. For a moment, our eyes met, and I wondered how on earth I’d ended up here, the last place I knew either one of us wanted me to be. Then she opened her mouth to speak for the first time since we’d pulled up in the driveway and all this, whatever it was, began.
“It’s cold,” she said. “You should come inside.”
Before one o’clock that afternoon, when she showed up to claim me, I hadn’t seen my sister in ten years. I didn’t know where she lived, what she was doing, or even who she was. I didn’t care, either. There had been a time when Cora was part of my life, but that time was over, simple as that. Or so I’d thought, until the Honeycutts showed up one random Tuesday and everything changed.
The Honeycutts owned the little yellow farmhouse where my mom and I had been living for about a year. Before that, we’d had an apartment at the Lakeview Chalets, the run-down complex just behind the mall. There, we’d shared a one-bedroom, our only window looking out over the back entrance to the J&K Cafeteria, where there was always at least one employee in a hairnet sitting outside smoking, perched on an overturned milk crate. Running alongside the complex was a stream that you didn’t even notice until there was a big rain and it rose, overflowing its nonexistent banks and flooding everything, which happened at least two or three times a year. Since we were on the top floor, we were spared the water itself, but the smell of the mildew from the lower apartments permeated everything, and God only knew what kind of mold was in the walls. Suffice to say I had a cold for two years straight. That was the first thing I noticed about the yellow house: I could breathe there.
It was different in other ways, too. Like the fact that it was a house, and not an apartment in a complex or over someone’s garage. I’d grown used to the sound of neighbors on the other side of a wall, but the yellow house sat in the center of a big field, framed by two oak trees. There was another house off to the left, but it was visible only by flashes of roof you glimpsed through the trees—for all intents and purposes, we were alone. Which was just the way we liked it.
My mom wasn’t much of a people person. In certain situations—say, if you were buying, for instance—she could be very friendly. And if you put her within five hundred feet of a man who would treat her like shit, she’d find him and be making nice before you could stop her, and I knew, because I had tried. But interacting with the majority of the population (cashiers, school administrators, bosses, ex-boyfriends) was not something she engaged in unless absolutely necessary, and then, with great reluctance.
Which was why it was lucky that she had me. For as long as I could remember, I’d been the buffer system. The go-between, my mother’s ambassador to the world. Whenever we pulled up at the store and she needed a Diet Coke but was too hungover to go in herself, or she spied a neighbor coming who wanted to complain about her late-night banging around again, or the Jehovah’s Witnesses came to the door, it was always the same. “Ruby,” she’d say, in her tired voice, pressing either her glass or her hand to her forehead. “Talk to the people, would you?”
And I would. I’d chat with the girl behind the counter as I waited for my change, nod as the neighbor again threatened to call the super, ignored the proffered literature as I firmly shut the door in the Jehovah’s faces. I was the first line of defense, always ready with an explanation or a bit of spin. “She’s at the bank right now,” I’d tell the landlord, even as she snored on the couch on the other side of the half-closed door. “She’s just outside, talking to a delivery,” I’d assure her boss so he’d release her bags for the day to me, while she smoked a much-needed cigarette in the freight area and tried to calm her shaking hands. And finally, the biggest lie of all: “Of course she’s still living here. She’s just working a lot,” which is what I’d told the sheriff that day when I’d been called out of fourth period and found him waiting for me. That time, though, all the spin in the world didn’t work. I talked to the people, just like she’d always asked, but they weren’t listening.
That first day, though, when my mom and I pulled up in front of the yellow house, things were okay. Sure, we’d left our apartment with the usual drama—owing back rent, the super lurking around watching us so carefully that we had to pack the car over a series of days, adding a few things each time we went to the store or to work. I’d gotten used to this, though, the same way I’d adjusted to us rarely if ever having a phone, and if we did, having it listed under another name. Ditto with my school paperwork, which my mom often filled out with a fake address, as she was convinced that creditors and old landlords would track us down that way. For a long time, I thought this was the way everyone lived. When I got old enough to realize otherwise, it was already a habit, and anything else would have felt strange.
Inside, the yellow house was sort of odd. The kitchen was the biggest room, and everything was lined up against one wall: cabinets, appliances, shelves. Against another wall was a huge propane heater, which in cold weather worked hard to heat the whole house, whooshing to life with a heavy sigh. The only bathroom was off the kitchen, poking out with no insulated walls—my mom said it must have been added on; there’d probably been an outhouse, initially—which made for some cold mornings until you got the hot water blasting and the steam heated things up. The living room was small, the walls covered with dark fake-wood paneling. Even at high noon, you needed a light on to see your hand in front of your face. My mother, of course, loved the dimness and usually pulled the shades shut, as well. I’d come home to find her on the couch, cigarette dangling from one hand, the glow from the TV flashing across her face in bursts. Outside, the sun might be shining, the entire world bright, but in our house, it could always be late night, my mother’s favorite time of day.