After I left the jail I made a really stupid decision, and I mean stupid even for me. I decided I would go out to Brooke’s mother’s house and give Brooke one more chance to care about me for real.
It was stupid for a couple of reasons, one on top of the other. First of all, getting from the jail to West LA was not a simple thing. People who go everywhere in cars just have no idea how hard a thing like that can be. I couldn’t just sit down in a nice bucket seat and turn a key, or press a button with a smart key in my pocket. I couldn’t just shift into drive and fly all over the place at sixty miles an hour.
First I had to panhandle to get money for the bus, and it took me the whole rest of the morning, because people just brushed by me and wouldn’t listen.
I was on the boulevard, a few blocks down from where I used to walk around looking for bottles and cans, and there were some office buildings there, so there were plenty of people on the street. And I was trying to tell them that I was stranded here and I needed to get all the way to West LA on the bus before I could be okay, but most of them had already made up their minds not to listen to me. I guess I’d gotten pretty dirty again, and even though I still had the hairbrush and I’d used it that morning, I think my new jeans and sweatshirt looked pretty bad. Anyway, my point is, they knew before I even opened my mouth that I was on the street, so they knew it was about money and they didn’t want to hear a word of it.
It took me two hours to raise ninety-five cents. I knew it was two hours because I was standing in front of an office building with big, high windows and a clock in the lobby. And then a youngish guy in a nice suit came out and actually listened to me, and opened his wallet and gave me a five-dollar bill.
I thanked him a lot, and my eyes kind of stuck on him after he walked away, and I couldn’t stop watching him go, because that doesn’t happen every day—you know, finding somebody who wants to be helpful and nice. But anyway, he was already mostly gone, so there was no point just standing there staring.
So then I could do the second stupid part, which was riding all those buses all over the city, and getting all those transfers, and getting on the wrong bus and getting lost once.
Except, the whole time I was riding there I was thinking those hadn’t been the stupid parts at all. I figured the real stupid part was thinking maybe I’d find something good there, at Brooke’s mother’s house.
Then I had to get off the bus about a mile from where they lived, and walk the rest of the way. It was late afternoon by then, and I was thinking I’d spent most of a whole day on this, and that what she had to say had better be good.
But then when I saw the house I got scared and almost didn’t go up to it, because I knew if I knocked on the door her mother might answer. I really never wanted to see her mother again after all the things she said to me that morning when she threw me out. She was not a nice lady, and that’s putting it mildly. But I’d come so far to get there, so I just stood on the sidewalk on their block and thought about it.
I decided she wasn’t really that much worse than everybody else, because even though she’d said some very bad things about me because I lived on the street, I knew everybody else felt the same way but didn’t say it. I could see it in their eyes anyway so what’s the difference?
So I walked up to the house and I knocked, and while I was waiting for somebody to answer I was thinking, Please let it be Brooke, over and over and over in my head.
Brooke’s terrible mother answered the door.
She had this look on her face when the door first swung open, like she was okay with whoever was knocking, but then she saw me and that look disappeared. And then she looked like she’d just taken the lid off the trash can and gotten a whiff of some fish that had been in there a few days.
“I thought I’d made myself perfectly clear,” she said.
“I just want to talk to Brooke. We can go talk someplace else, okay? I just need you to tell her I’m here.”
She said something I wasn’t expecting at all. I mean, I really never once saw this thing coming.
She said, “Brooke doesn’t live here anymore.”
“Oh,” I said. And right away I felt really tired because now I would have to go look for her someplace else, and that was just so much work. “Where does she live now?”
“I’m sure I wouldn’t know,” she said.
I thought it was a very strange way to say a thing, and, also, I didn’t really believe her.
“I know you know,” I said, and it was a little bit like standing up to her, so it made my heart thump really hard in my chest and in my ears.
“I really, honestly do not know where Brooke is. Apparently I’m such a terrible person that I don’t deserve to know. Apparently Brooke and my granddaughter want nothing to do with me ever again. Now if you’ll excuse me . . .”
But she never finished the sentence. She just slammed the door in my face. Or maybe she finished the sentence by slamming the door in my face. It’s one of those things that I guess depends on how you look at it.
And then I
