When I get downstairs, there’s a card on the kitchen table for me in a blue envelope and it says Gerald on the front of it. Next to that is my lunch. Mom isn’t around and I can’t hear any rodent-reproduction noise from the basement, and I know Dad left at six today, because I heard him leave as I was getting up. So I grab my lunch and the card and stuff both into my backpack.
Happy birthday, Gerald.
Picking Hannah up for school this week has made my mornings earlier and berry-scented. We have to be in school by eight, but I pick her up at 7:15 so we have time together. She meets me at the end of her long driveway and we take off toward the back roads.
“Happy birthday!” she says.
“Thanks,” I say. “What’d you get me?”
“I like that shirt,” she says.
“Thanks. I got it at the mall this weekend.”
“It’s sexy.”
“Don’t start,” I say.
“Right. Rule number five. I remember now.” As she says this, she puts her hand on my leg. Near the knee. But still, it stirs me. She started doing this two nights after she cleaned the ASSHOLE off my dashboard.
“You know what I like about you?” she asks.
I don’t say anything.
“You’re a mystery, Gerald. I have no idea what you’re thinking most of the time and I can’t tell when you’re here and when you’re not here.”
“I’m here,” I say. “I’m driving the car.”
“But the mystery part of it. I like that,” she says. “Like—I’m the junkman’s daughter and everybody knows that and it makes me easily recognizable. People see me and they think junk. They don’t have to talk to me unless they crashed their car and they need a passenger’s-side door for a 2001 Honda or something, you know?”
I laugh through my nose a little, because she’s overlooking that I’m Gerald the Crapper. People see me and they think crap.
“See? Like just then. You thought something but you didn’t say it. Mysterious.”
“Just driving. To school, remember?”
“Let’s skip!”
“School?”
“School and work. Why the hell not? Let’s get out of here for the day and go somewhere exciting.”
“Which would be?”
“I don’t know. How about Philly? It’s only two hours. We could walk arm in arm and catch an arty movie or something. Eat street-vendor hot dogs.”
“That sounds nice,” I say. I think of my Gersday Snow White guidance counselor. “But I should really go to school.”
“Not so mysterious now.”
“School’s important at the moment.”
“Unsexiest statement ever.”
I sigh. “Can I ask you something?”
“Duh.”
“Why do you want to run away so bad? I understand the junkman’s daughter problem and all that, but is that it?”
“Is that it?” she says. “Dude. I am the original Cinderella. I cook. I clean. I wash. I scrub the f**kin’ mildew out of the tiles in the shower. All the time, I’m cleaning shit. Their shit. I literally have cleaned up their shit. It’s disgusting.” She gestures wildly. “On top of that, I work and have to deal with all those hockey creeps at the PEC Center and go to school with a bunch of wankers. Seriously. Why would anyone want to stay?”
“Sorry.”
“Eh. Life just sucks right now. Things will get better when Ronald gets home.” Ronald’s her brother. The one in Afghanistan.
“How so?” I ask.
“Well, as long as he doesn’t come home in a bag, then my mother might get off her ass again. That would be a start.”
We drive the rest of the way to school in silence. Content-birthday silence. Looking-out-the-window silence. Ignoring-the-lingering-pain-in-my-week-old-maybe-broken-ribs silence. When we pull into the parking lot and into my spot, she unzips her backpack and pulls out a small, wrapped CD-size box and a small card. “Don’t open them until I’m gone,” she says. Then she zips her backpack up and gets out of the car and walks into school.
I open the present first. It’s a CD she made with a really classy-looking cover that says Songs That Make Me Think of Gerald, by the Junkman’s Daughter. I know I don’t have enough time to listen to it now, so I stick it in the glove compartment and open the card.
Her tiny writing—perfected from years of writing in her tiny book, I presume—lines the entire interior of the card and I realize I don’t have time to read it now, either. But some words catch my eye as I close it. In the bottom right-hand corner, I see them. There’s something about those words that forms a recognizable shape. Even in tight, tiny printing, which is how she writes. Then I close the card and stick it in the glove compartment along with the CD.
At lunch, she looks shy. “Hey.”
“Hey,” I say.
We spread out in the booth and she dumps out her bag. Two Kit Kat bars, a bunch of peanuts in the shell, a lollipop, and a stick of beef jerky. I dump out my bag. I’m completely embarrassed. Mom has wrapped all my lunch items in wrapping paper. She even put a ribbon and bow on the sandwich, which is on a roll, not on bread, so it’s twice the size.
“Aw!” Hannah says.
We begin to unwrap my lunch. I shake my head because this is what my mother did this morning. She wrapped my lunch, when she could have been going to therapy or kicking Tasha out or reading a self-help article about how messed up she is. She could have been writing I love you on a birthday card, like Hannah did.
Instead, she wrote: Who loves ya, kiddo?
If it was a birthday e-mail, I’d have been able to hit REPLY and write I don’t know. Who?
“Did you open my card?” Hannah asks as she chews on half my chicken salad sandwich.
“I didn’t have time,” I lie. “I figured I could do it later… before work.”
“Cool,” she says.
“Thanks, though. It was really nice of you.”
She pulls out her little book and starts to write in it and her hair falls in front of her face so she can’t see me smiling at her.
“I did open the CD, though. The cover is awesome. Did you make it?”
“I did.”
“It’s really great,” I say, even though I’m thinking of her card the whole time. She can’t love you, Gerald. You are unlovable and you know it. She’ll find out soon.
“Thanks. Our Lady of the Junk appreciates compliments.”