My brother did this weird thing with turtles, the little ones in any event. He'd pick one up by the little shell and take it home, holding it out away from his body, as if he were afraid the thing would hurt him.
He'd drop it into a sink of soapy water and scrub its shell clean. Clean as he could get it, with the turtle squirming and fighting him on it. I always felt bad for the turtle when he did that, but I was half terrified of my brother as well and for a few years, the fear had won.
The summer I turned eight, I felt brave enough to ask him things. He still washed turtles then, though he was almost ten at the time. The thing I found so odd about it too was that he never seemed to want to wash much of anything else. The day I finally asked him, he’d had a tiny little thing he’d found on the side of the road clutched in his hand, the dust coating its shell making a sort of halo around it as it tried to shake off my brother’s hold.
“I sell them, stupid,” he’d said to me. “And nobody would pay ten cents for a dirty turtle, but them kids from Vale - they buy these as pets.” I tried to picture my brother in his too-short trousers and his shoes with all the dirt and the bird shit and the holes in them talking to those preppy, clean Vale kids and just couldn’t see it. They’d laugh at him, the way the insurance man laughs at Mother when she is only a few pennies short. He tries to hide it too, but I’d seen him. Lips quirking up, his eyes narrowing on Mother’s face and then trailing down her body as if she has the money hidden there somehow and just doesn’t want to give it to him.
But she didn’t have any money then, none of us did, except for my brother, it seemed. Not until four whole years later when on a brisk Spring morning, Mother found a diamond bracelet in the back of the car.
Now if you know anything at all about Mother, you'd know that she'd never even seen a diamond bracelet before. But somehow when she saw that one, she seemed to know that it was the real thing, not one of those fake cheapo ones you can buy at a convenience store in some touristy place, the kind wrapped in crinkly plastic and with a price of 99 cents or whatnot stuck right on there for all to see. Not that I’d know anything about that, but it’s just how I’d always pictured it in my head. But this bracelet–this wasn't one of those, and Mother knew it.
She took it out of the tiny bag, a clear non-crinkly, kind of plastic and set it down on the dingy stained beige seat of Matilda, our always-falling-apart auto of indeterminate age. She stared at it wide eyed, as if it was a rattler gearing up to bite her hand, then very slowly she picked it up and twirled it in her hand holding it out to the light coming through the back window. “It's diamonds, Leah, real diamonds, I shit you not," she said to me in a stage whisper, as if we could be overheard by somebody if she'd just used her normal voice, but the occasion was far too grave for just a regular whisper.
"Did yah hear me? Real diamonds, Leah!" she said when I didn't seem to have an appropriate response the first time around. Thing is, I didn't know what she wanted from me. I didn't know anything about diamonds except I knew for sure that people like us never had any and never would. We were simply not diamonds people in the same way we weren’t big house with a dad and a dog and nice china people, or more pressingly, people with a car you could count on starting more than every other time people. We were Grobers, and Grobers were trailer-living, penny-counting people. Always had been and always will be, grandpop used to say, and right he was, by the looks of it.
And then it hit me. That weekend in Duluth when Mother’s aunt was dying and we all piled into the car and she’d stayed with the old woman my brother and I couldn’t remember well enough to want to see die, so we told Mother we’d walk back to the motel, only she’d handed my brother a key to Matilda and told him to please re-park it, so it was legal overnight.
She wasn’t going to miss just a little gas, my brother had said once I was all buckled in. He knew somebody who knew somebody who lived just around the corner from the hospital, he told me, and we would just go there and chill for a couple hours, have a beer or two. I’d laughed at him then. I’d never touch that stuff and he knew it, but it was like he was trying to be nice to me, and it wasn’t normal for him to be this nice.
He drove Matilda like an old person, barely going two miles over the speed limit and it took him a good long while to swivel the damn car good enough into the parking space where the curb was all crooked and stained. It smelled like pee when I finally opened the door to the street. The building we were in front of and were now apparently heading toward was the kind you see in movies where bad things always happen. Kids getting shot full of holes by slightly older kids or the cops bad, and I remember feeling the kind of fear I’d not felt before, not even when Mother said we could be homeless if she couldn’t find work kind of fear…. This fear was making my muscles feel funny.
But then the front door– black metal with graffiti I couldn’t read on it–opened and a young rail of a guy came out grinning at my brother as if he’d genuinely wanted to see him. His whole face was freckled and his smile was open and nice and he didn’t seem the least bit scary, so I’d decided that it would be alright after all.
The apartment Freckles took us to was small, but clean, cleaner than any of our places ever were, and it was strangely comfortable. My brother handed me a bottle of Sam Adams and for some reason I drank it, my head feeling only a little bit fuzzy at the end of it. Morgan or Meghan or something, a girl about my age sat next to me and was chattering away about things, girl things and parents sucking things, and I was actively tuning her out and enjoying the buzz when I realized that my brother wasn’t in the room and something in me started to panic a little. I ran down the stairs and there he was, at the bottom of the stairwell, holding all these plastic bags of flour or something that looked like flour only I knew that it wasn’t. And then my brother ran to the car and I recall being happy for him that it started and then feeling stupid for thinking about that of all things, and then he was off, only this time he wasn’t driving like an old man at all….
Mother must have been asking me something for a while now, as I felt her jab her fingernails into my arm.
“Dinner, Leah. If we could go anywhere and have anything - what would you want?”
She looked at me in that I want to celebrate way, a giddy smile on her too-old face. I had nothing. Mac and cheese kind of nothing. We weren’t going out to dinner kind of people and I didn't know how to suddenly become one of those.
“Mac and cheese would be good, mom,” I said and meant it. Our food. At our shitty house. With the too-old TV on in the background doing its staticky thing. We were Grobers....
This is a weekend freewrite challenge, hence it might not make a lot of sense, but I had fun doing it. Here is the post you want to go to for deets announcing what the challenge actually was. In deference to all things blockchain transparency - I had edited my three bits for grammar and typos.
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