Kristan Higgins - Now That You Mention It

She nodded instead, then hefted my two suitcases into the back of the car. “I didn’t know you were bringing your dog,” she said. Boomer wagged his fluffy tail, oblivious. “He better leave Tweety alone.”

Tweety was Mom’s parakeet (and favorite creature in the world). “Tweety’s still alive, then?”

“Of course, he is. Where’s that dog gonna sleep?”

“It’s good to see you, too, Mom,” I said. “I’m fine, thanks. In a lot of pain, actually, but doing okay. After being run down in the street. By a van. Sustaining many injuries, in case you forgot.”

“I didn’t forget, Nora,” she said. “Get in the cah.”

Boomer jumped in at the magical words, filling the entire back seat.

A thickly built woman with hard yellow hair approached our car. “Hey, Sharon. Who you got there?” Who y’gawt they-ah? Good to see the Maine accent was alive and well. The speaker was Mrs. Hurley, mother of Carmella Hurley, one of the mean girls from high school. I’d called them the Cheetos back then (not aloud, of course)—the popular, mean girls who’d go to Portland to woo cancer at tanning salons, resulting in a skin tone not found in nature.

“It’s my daughter,” Mom said.

“Lily, you’re back, sweethaht?”

“Uh, no. I’m Nora. Hi, Mrs. Hurley. Nice to see you. How’s Carmella?”

Her face hardened. Right. I was not an islander who had brought pride to my hometown. I was the girl who stole the prince’s crown. Also, I looked a lot different from the olden days, when I’d been a fat, lumpy teenager with bad hair and worse skin.

“Cahmeller’s wonderful,” Mrs. Hurley bit out. “Well. You have a good day, Sharon. Nora.”

It would soon be all over town that I was back.

Mom got into the driver’s seat, and I flopped gracelessly in mine, ass first, bumping myself in the face with the crutch.

“So how is Carmella?” I asked, fastening my seatbelt.

“Good. Five kids. Cleans hotel rooms in the summer, bartends at Red’s. Hard worker.” Hahd wehrkah. Man, I guessed my accent had faded more than I realized. That, and I hadn’t talked very much to my mom these past few years. Perfunctory phone calls, her annual twelve-hour visit to Boston.

“You’ll be sharin’ your room with Poe,” she added.

“I will?”

“Well, where do you think she’s sleepin’?” Mom pulled away from the curb.

Good point. I suppressed a sigh and looked out the window. Main Street had gentrified a bit. There was a bookstore I’d never seen, called The Cracked Spine. Cute name. Lala’s Bakery, which would have a line around the corner every day in the summer, was fairly deserted now. A kitchen goods store. Huh.

“How is Poe?” I asked. I hadn’t seen my niece for five years.

My mother shrugged.

“Mom, could you actually tell me?” I snapped. Five minutes, and already I was irritated.

“She’s grumpy. Hates it here.” She turned onto Perez Avenue, renamed for the man who’d sent a Scupper Island kid to college every year for the past quarter century...including me. We passed the ubiquitous made-in-China souvenir shop, unimaginatively called Scupper Island Gift Shoppe (I always hated the spelling), a restaurant I’d never seen, an art gallery, another restaurant.

We’d never be Martha’s Vineyard—too far, too cold, too small—but it seemed my hometown had blossomed.

“Did things go okay in Seattle?” I asked, referencing my mom’s recent visit to fetch Poe.

“Dirty town,” Mom said. “Lots of litter. And beggars.”

Of course. Look on the dark side, that was my mother’s motto. She didn’t approve of panhandling, having grown up poor herself. But her version of poor was scrappy. It meant hunting and fishing for your food if you had to, knowing how to put up the vegetables from your garden, dry fish, smoke meat. If you didn’t have something, you made do.

I’d been to Seattle four times to see my sister. I would’ve gone more, but Lily was always slippery about letting me come out there to see my niece. Once, Roseline came with me, which was a good thing, because Lily became “too busy” to see me, and I only got to see Poe for an hour. I’d been crushed, having pictured the four of us going out for pastries, visiting the public market on Pike Street, eating at the top of the Space Needle. Rosie stepped up, and we did have fun—we ate crab and salmon till we just about turned pink, kayaked in Puget Sound, almost peeing ourselves when a pod of orca whales came within a hundred yards of us, giggling hysterically with fear and awe.

But in the back of my mind had been the thought, If only Lily was here. Now this is adventuring! If only it was like old times. The fact was, those old times had been old for more than a decade at that point.

“And how is Lily?” I asked, when it became apparent my mother wasn’t going to mention her.

My mother’s gaze didn’t stray from straight ahead. “She’s in jail, Nora. How do you think?”

I took a slow breath before speaking again. I knew she was in jail. My mom didn’t have to be an ass about it. “Is she doing okay? Did you see her?”

“Ayuh. She seems fine.”

Fine. Really? Was she devastated? Heartbroken? Remorseful? Angry? She was probably angry. She had been for the past twenty-four years, at least as far as I could tell. Since the day our father left.

Within three months of landing in Seattle at the age of eighteen, Lily had gotten tattooed, pierced and pregnant. She had a series of boyfriends; I had never met Poe’s father, and to the best of my knowledge, neither had Poe. Lily’s job history was spotty—barista (of course, it was Seattle), band manager for a local group, temp, barista again, tattoo artist.

My sister was also a petty criminal. Identity theft, credit card fraud and drug dealing, though the legalization of marijuana had put a dent in her business. I hadn’t known about any of that until last month, when my mother told me she had to fly out and get Poe, because my sister had been sentenced to two years, out in August with good behavior.

Beantown Bug Killers had given me a plan. Stay on Scupper until Lily got out. Then she’d either come east to fetch her daughter, or I’d fly back with Poe. And I’d...fix things.

How, I wasn’t sure.

We turned onto the dirt road that led to our house, and I held my arm across my chest to minimize the jostling. My collarbone ached. Mom glanced at me but said nothing. In the back seat, Boomer whined with excitement, sensing we were close to our destination. The car jolted over a pothole, and I sucked in a breath, my knee and shoulder flashing white with pain. My back ached, too, heavy and dull thanks to the bruised kidneys. Hopefully, I wouldn’t be peeing blood later on.

And there it was. Home. A humble, gray-shingled Cape with a screened-in deck on one side, almost exactly as I’d left it, the bushes in front taller than I remembered.

I’d been away for so long.

My mom pulled into the unpaved driveway—we didn’t have a garage—and threw the car into Park. She got out, opened the back door for Boomer, who raced off to sniff and mark his territory.

Lily and I used to think home was the most magical place on earth—the sound of chickadees and crows, gulls, the frigid ocean slapping against the rocks a few hundred yards away, the gray seals that would visit the shores with their pups. The wind would scrape and roar across the sky almost constantly, howling in the winter. The yard was just a carpet of pine needles, and beyond that, forest and ocean. The Krazinskis were our next-door neighbors, and they were half a mile away. Lily and I, and sometimes Dad, used to sit for hours in trees or makeshift forts and wait to see animals—fox and deer, pheasants and chipmunks, porcupines and raccoons.