Robin Hobb - The Inheritance and Other Stories

She looked me up and down. The lower half of my jeans and my socks were sopping. “Where have you been?”

I could have lied and said I was at the library, but Mom and I don’t do that to each other. And I needed to tell someone about Lonnie. So I told her everything, from the one-boobed Barbie to the cat-carpet and Carl. Her face got tight, and I knew she didn’t like what she was hearing. But she listened, while we fixed dinner. We didn’t have to talk about dinner. Wednesday was spaghetti. I chopped mushrooms and peppers, she chopped the onions and smashed the garlic. She put the water to boil for the pasta, I sawed the frozen French bread open and spread it with margarine.

By the time everything was ready, she had heard all about Lonnie. Her first words were pretty hard on me. “I trust you to have good judgment, Mandy.”

“I don’t think I did anything wrong.”

“I didn’t say you did wrong. I said you used poor judgment. You let a stranger in while I was gone. You left without telling me where you were going or when you’d be back. If something bad had happened to you, I wouldn’t even have known where to start looking.”

“Why do you always assume something bad is going to happen? When am I supposed to have friends over? I can’t have them in while you’re gone, and I can’t go out with them. What am I supposed to do, just come home and be alone all day?”

“You can have friends over,” my mom objected. “But I need to know something about people before we let them into our home. Mandy, just because a person is your own age and a girl doesn’t mean she can’t hurt you. Or that she won’t steal from us.”

“MOM!” I exploded, but she kept on talking.

“Lonnie is probably a nice kid who’s just had a hard time. But the people she knows may not be nice. If someone knew that I’m at work all day and you’re at school, they could rip us off. I certainly couldn’t afford to replace the stereo and the television and the microwave all at once. We’d just have to do without.”

“You haven’t even met Lonnie and you’re judging her!”

“I’m not judging her. I’m trying to protect you.” Mom paused. “Mandy. There’s a lot of Lonnies in the world. As much as I’d like to, I can’t save them all. Sometimes, I feel like I can’t even protect you anymore. But I do my best. Even when it means . . .” She halted. Then she spoke gravely. “Mandy, if you hang out with Lonnie, people will treat you like Lonnie. Not that Lonnie deserves to be treated like she is; in fact, I’m sure she doesn’t. But I can’t protect Lonnie. All I can do is try to protect you.”

She was so serious that my anger evaporated. We sat at the little table in the kitchen with our dinner getting cold between us. I tried to remember the big table in our old dining room with the hardwood floor and the wallpaper. I couldn’t. “Mom?” I asked suddenly. “What is the difference between Lonnie and me?”

Mom was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “Maybe the difference is me. Someone who cares fiercely about you.”

“Lonnie loves her mom, even if she did throw her out a window.”

“Lonnie may love her mom, but it doesn’t sound like her mom cares about her. It doesn’t sound like anyone does.”

“Only her cats,” I conceded. “And half of them are deaders.” And me, I thought. I care about her.

In the end, we made compromises. I could have Lonnie over if I told Mom she was there. Mom had to get Lonnie’s phone number, address, and her mom’s name. If we went out, it had to be somewhere like the library, not just to walk around. I had to call Mom before I went and when I got back. I had to stay out of Dumpsters. And I wasn’t allowed to go to Lonnie’s house.

“But why?” I ventured.

“Because,” Mom said darkly, and that was the end of that.

I looked for Lonnie at school the next day. I even went to the special-ed rooms. No Lonnie. Three days later, I found one cat-body outline, but I couldn’t tell if it was new or old because of all the rain. I was afraid to go to her building. Mom was right, it was a tough neighborhood. But on the fourth day, I screwed up my courage and took the long way home from school to walk through her neighborhood.

I saw her from half a block away. She was standing at the corner of a convenience store parking lot, her arms crossed on her chest. There were three boys facing her. Two were our age, one looked older. They had her bike.

It was so beat up I wouldn’t have recognized it, except for the Amazon Barbie. One of the boys sat on the bike possessively while the other two stood between Lonnie and the bike.

“I don’t care what he said,” Lonnie told them. “It’s my bike and I want it back.” She tried to circle, to get close enough to get her hands on the bike, but the two boys blocked her lazily.

“Your dad said we could have it.” The boy on the bike was cocky about it.

“Carl’s not my dad!” Lonnie declared furiously. “Get off my bike!”

“So what? He said we could have it for picking up his junk for him. Gave us ten bucks, too.” There was a sneer of laughter in the older boy’s voice.

I froze, watching them. They moved by a set of unspoken rules. Lonnie could not physically touch the boys, and they knew it. All they had to do to keep her from the bike was to stand between her and it. She moved back and forth, trying to get past them. She looked stupid and helpless and she knew it. A man walked up to them and stopped. My hopes rose.

“It’s a piece of shit bike anyway,” one of the boys declared laughingly as they blocked her yet again.

“Yeah. We’re gonna take it down to the lake and run it off the dock into the water.”

The light changed. The man crossed the street. It was as if he had not even seen Lonnie and the boys and the bike. He didn’t even look back.

“You better not!” Lonnie threatened helplessly. She darted once more at the bike. And collided with a boy.

“Hey!” he pushed her violently back. “Keep your hands off me, bitch!”

“Yeah, whore!”

Suddenly, in the physical contact, the rules of the game had changed. The boys pushed at her. Lonnie cowered back, and the one on the bike rode it up on her, pushing the wheel against her. Now instead of trying to grab her bike back, she was trying to back away from it. The other boys touched her. Her face. “God, you’re ugly!” Her chest. “She ain’t got no tits, just like her dolly! Your momma cut them off, too?” Her crotch. “Whoo, whoo, you like that, ho?”

Across the street, a bus stopped and two people got off. They walked away into the darkness. Cars drove by in the gathering dusk of the overcast October evening. No one paid any attention to Lonnie’s plight. Deep in my heart, I knew why. She was already broken, already damaged past repairing. If you can’t fix something, then don’t worry about hurting it even more. The boys knew that. She wasn’t worth saving from them. It was like jumping on the couch that already had broken springs. She was just a thing to practice on.

“Stop it, stop it!” She flailed at them wildly, trying to slap away the hands that darted in to touch her insultingly, pushing, poking, slapping her face. She had forgotten she was a warrior. She was just a girl, and that was a boy’s game. She couldn’t win it. Leaves in the gutter rustled by. I was so cold I was shaking. So cold. I should get home; I was cold and it was getting dark and my mom would be mad at me. One of the boys pushed her hard as the other one rammed her with the bike. She fell down on the sidewalk and suddenly they ringed her, the bike discarded on the pavement as they sneered down at her.

Some tribal memory of what came next reared its savage face from my subconscious.