Cherylene moves around me, batting me away like a fly in her ear, and puts the broom into Janet’s hand. “And allow me to introduce you to your new bestest, most straight-haired friend, the broom.”
She turns and begins walking to her office in the back.
“Miss Cherylene, didn’t you notice Jack’s hair? I styled it this morning. And I did it without any product other than a bit of hair spray. Two whole hours ago.”
Cherylene sighs heavily and then picks up some towels and puts one at each station. “I noticed nothing but our trouble with tribbles.” Her long, neon-orange manicured fingernail points down at the fat clumps of hair.
“But Cherylene, you have to look—”
“No, Janet. I don’t have to do anything. You’ve pestered me for years about working here and then I said you could come and sweep and clean and silently soak up the life of salon work. I am captain of this ship, so you either want to sweep the deck, or you don’t want to be here at all.” She glares hard at Janet and then disappears into her office.
Janet is statue-still, but I can see her fists tightening. The rest of the hair stylists, who had gone silent moments ago, begin to move again and chat with their clients.
“Come on,” I whisper to Janet. “Let’s go.”
“No,” Janet says through her teeth. “It’s time for me to sweep.” With the Janet scowl, and her own shoulders pushed back, she walks onto the salon floor between the chairs and raises her voice a little louder. “Because apparently the captain can’t keep her ship’s deck clean.”
Birdie and me head outside.
He looks back through the shop window.
“Come on,” I say to him, tugging his shirt toward Uncle Carl’s apartment down the block. “She’ll be okay.”
“I’m not worried about Janet,” says Birdie. “But Cherylene doesn’t know what she’s gotten herself into.”
• • •
When we get to Uncle Carl’s apartment, we pause. Before this weekend, we would’ve just walked right in. I knock three times, but he doesn’t answer. I peek inside, because Uncle Carl never locks the door. The apartment looks the same as it ever did. I call out hello, but no one answers.
The whole situation with Uncle Carl really started to go wrong when Marlboro died. It happened about nine months after we’d moved in, on the same day as Birdie’s makeup-makeup back-to-school meeting with his teacher. It was a double makeup because Uncle Carl never went to the first two.
Maybe if Marlboro hadn’t died on that exact same day, we’d still be living above the Lock & Key shop on Main Street.
Marlboro, “the most noble bearded dragon to crawl the earth,” had been fine that morning. Then, at some point, Uncle Carl fed her some crickets and went downstairs to the Lock & Key. He didn’t come back up for hours and by then it was too late. A fat cricket had lodged itself in her throat and that was that. Sometimes, when I think about my day at school, I try to imagine what class I was in when it happened. I know it’s kind of creepy to do that, but I can’t help it.
So because he discovered Marlboro like thirty minutes before the back-to-school meeting, Uncle Carl didn’t show up. He spent the time at his apartment crying and I guess probably drinking too.
Birdie and me were still hanging around his school library when his teacher came and scowled like we had done something wrong. She had her big ham hock arms folded across her chest and said, “Where is your uncle?”
Birdie and me looked at each other for a second and all I could say was something stupid like, “Isn’t he with you?”
“Would I be here if he was?” Her eyes were so narrowed that I couldn’t see her pupils.
Her pale pink forearms flushed as she said, “This is the third meeting we’ve scheduled. The missed meetings combined with your brother’s already poor attendance means I will have to go to the administration about this. It’s unacceptable.” She turned and went out the door and Birdie and me were left sitting in the quiet library with the nice school librarian looking sad for us.
Okay, so we did have some attendance issues. Birdie, who had always liked school, started claiming to be sick a lot, but he never felt hot to me except for maybe once. Uncle Carl told me to leave him alone, that it would take time. Well, nine months into it, four weeks into a new school year even, Birdie was still sick at least once a week. Uncle Carl never once took his temperature.
I’m not saying Uncle Carl didn’t try to cheer us up and fix the problem. Sometimes he’d take us to the mall and we’d all share a giant Cinnabon and then walk around Scare Monkey, the gag gift store. Other times we went miniature golfing, but only on Two-Buck Tuesdays.
To be honest, I liked not having to go to school on those days too. I never felt like I was missing anything. It’s not like I had any friends at school who would call me up later on and ask, “Hey, where were you today?”
Still, we didn’t hear anything from Birdie’s teacher until about four weeks after Marlboro died. There was this spelling bee at Birdie’s school. Birdie was not keen on participating, but he was the best speller in his class by far and I think he wanted to try and win his teacher over.
Uncle Carl was in the middle of trying to get Marlboro back from a taxidermist who he paid five hundred and sixty dollars to get her stuffed and mounted to a piece of shiny wood with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. I guess as a baby she got a twig lodged in her mouth
