“Yeah,” I say, “but if I weren’t here, you could just worry about your own family. Your relationship.”
“You are my family. As snotty and bitchy as you can be, and you can be, you’re ours, or mine. This isn’t the first disagreement we’ve had about you.”
“But still . . .”
“Enough. If I were to follow Jack’s ‘direction,’ or if you were to leave because of all this uproar, I’d resent him for the rest of my life, or until I poisoned his soup.” She stands. “Let us handle the big people’s problems and you just get yourself through the rest of this year and figure out what’s next. And you go see your family whenever you damn well please.” She starts to walk out. “Just don’t bring them here, except for Frankie, of course.”
“But if Pop stays and I stay, he’ll never talk to me.”
“You can always hope,” she says with a smile, and she’s out the door.
ChapterSeventeen
“This bitch better not start raggin’ on me,” Nancy says from the backseat as we turn off Interstate 90 at Ellensburg.
“Don’t do that,” Walter says. “You keep that in your head and anything she says will sound like ragging on you.”
“Well, she just better not.”
Having been in the system since I was a fetus, I’m pretty used to how therapy works. “It’ll probably be like with that woman we used to see at the mental health center,” I say. “The second one, Mary Ellen something. It’s just a way to get everything out in the open.”
“I don’t want ever’thing out in the open. People been stickin’ their nose in my life all of it. That’s what happens when ever’thing is out in the open.”
If I had the choice between being this therapist or Momma and Pop’s, I’d choose suicide.
Walter says, “Nancy, you’ve told me how many times you wished you could do it all over. Nobody gets a chance to do any damn thing over, but once in a while we do get to make repairs.”
“I don’ know. This was just a bad idea.”
I say, “You’re just scared. Do you know how I used to hate it when you were coming into therapy with me? I was always afraid you were going to rat me out. Look, you’ll be there an hour. You can take anything for an hour. Can’t be worse than the dentist. Then we go out on the town, stay in a nice place.”
“Damn straight,” Walter says. “’About time we classed this relationship up.”
Leah’s eyes are glued to the highway. This girl deserves a medal; she has no stake in any of this but agreed to drive so I didn’t have to borrow Momma’s car and get Pop all up in her face.
About ten miles outside Yakima, Leah takes a left into Re-Start’s long driveway, then coasts into a small side parking lot.
“Y’all wait in the car,” Walter says. “Or take a drive if you want. I’ll be in the waiting room; I’ll holler when they’re done.” He lifts his cell.
Walter and Nancy disappear through the front entrance and Leah drives around the circular drive. As she guns it, I see Walter waving in the rearview mirror. “Stop, Leah. We gotta go back.”
“Gone,” Walter says when we circle back.
“Where?” I ask.
Nancy stands on the concrete porch, stunned.
“Don’t know,” Walter says. “The woman in charge says some guy drove up and leaned on the horn. They called nine-one-one but Sheila ran out and jumped in. Left all her stuff.” He takes Nancy by the arm and leads her to the backseat.
“Bitch,” Nancy says. “Come all the way down here, ready to let ’er tear me up in front of one more damn counselor an’ jus’ like always. She runs.”
When Leah pulls in front of Nancy’s place that evening, we’re spent. The leisure aspect of this trip crashed in unanimous agreement. Nearly four hours in the car, I’ll bet we didn’t say five words. Nancy sat in the backseat pissed and sad and dumb as she’s ever been. Walter was smart enough to sleep. Leah drove and I stared out the window.
Walter gets out to open the door for Nancy, but she just bangs it open with her shoulder and stomps up her walk. He watches her go, looks for a second like he might follow, then gets back in the car. “Best drop me at my place,” he says. “Let her cool down. There’s no getting through that.”
Momma and Pop were expecting me to stay in Yakima for the night, so Leah and I go to her house because everyone’s out; she calls Tim and the three of us order pizza and watch a movie.
Maddy says, “This is a better story than most of the ones we read. What happens with Frankie?”
I have given the book club the Reader’s Digest version of “The Ballad of Frankie Boots,” with Leah filling in with an outsider’s perspective, to great interest.
“He’s with Wiz for now,” I say, “but the plan is for Sheila to pull it together. More a hope than a plan, really.”
Mark says, “It doesn’t sound like your sister is coming to her senses anytime soon.”
“I don’t know that she has senses to come to,” I say. “I should have remembered, just because Frankie aches for his mother doesn’t mean she aches for him.”
Leah says, “But remember, she came back after she disappeared and she also went to rehab; she had to have some connection to him. It was a dumb-ass plan to run, especially with all that gas I wasted. . . .”
I say, “Maybe she hates CPS more than she loves Frankie and came back just to show them. Anyway, I don’t know where it goes from here.”
Seth’s hand goes up. “I do believe we have come to the place where real life and literature separate.”
I say, “Tell us, Seth.”
“Editing,” Seth says. “In literature, when circumstances don’t play out well, the author rewrites. All
