A Month of Mondays Page 18

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “It’s all for the cause, right?”

  “Yep.” I gave her a hug and hurried off toward the bus stop.

  “Call me,” she said.

  “As soon as I know something.”

  I was going to get that woman to talk if it was the last thing I did.

  ^^^

  “AJ, you’ve got to help me,” I pleaded over a cup of hot chocolate and a cinnamon roll.

  “I told you. Trina doesn’t want to risk losing her job,” she said. “And quit whining, or I’ll give you something to whine about. No one’s cleaned your uncle’s washroom in a while.”

  I backed off right away because I’d seen it, and there was a reason he and AJ didn’t share. I regrouped by downing a slug of hot chocolate and letting it warm me from the inside.

  “Are you sure you won’t help?” I said, not a trace of whine in my voice. “Not even to save the jobs of all those custodians?”

  AJ got up, taking my plate out from under the last piece of cinnamon roll, which I snagged and stuffed in my mouth. “If we could only assure her it was confidential,” she said, more to herself than me. I could feel her starting to give in.

  I licked the sticky cinnamon goodness off my fingers. “I have an idea,” I said. I ripped a piece of notebook paper out of my binder and scribbled while AJ crowded my elbow to see what I was writing.

  “I’ll get you an envelope,” she said.

  “Two. One for the return.”

  “Good idea.”

  As soon as I was done, I hurried across the street to Mrs. Blevins’ mailbox. Looking around to make sure no nosy neighbors were watching, I peeked inside. Good. She hadn’t picked up her mail yet. I laid my envelope on top of the pile already in there and said a little prayer.

  ^^^

  Four hours later the phone rang once, giving us the signal. I raced out to AJ’s mailbox—stealthily, like a spy. Bingo! There it was. The envelope.

  “Got it!” I said, once I was back inside. I pulled out six pages of anonymous typed script, and AJ and I huddled on the couch, poring over the “insider info.” We could swear in court that we didn’t know where it had come from too. We hadn’t seen a thing. Not that we’d be going to court, but I’m just saying.

  “The real question is,” AJ asked, “how do we use this?”

  I loved the we. She was going to help me come up with something great. I looked around the living room. “Do you have a sheer curtain?”

  “Upstairs,” she said. “In my study.”

  “Can you get it? We need it.”

  “What for?”

  “Just trust me. I’ll meet you back here in a second.”

  Downstairs, Uncle Bill was watching the hockey game with my dad. “AJ needs you,” I said.

  “At the end of the period,” Uncle Bill said.

  “Not you. Dad.”

  My father peeled his eyes away from the screen. “Now?”

  “You have to run the video camera.” His gaze wandered back to the game. “It’s for school.” I said.

  He sighed. “Oh, okay.”

  Upstairs, the three of us hung the curtain in the middle of the dining room, using some plant hooks already on the ceiling. Then we put a chair and a lamp behind it, and sat AJ in the seat.

  “Let’s make a movie,” I said. “And kick some school-board ass!”

  “School board-butt,” AJ and Dad said together.

  “That too.”

  Chapter 30

  I’d decided to take Caroline up on her offer to see her hairdresser. I’d waited too long, though. Her stylist was all booked up. Someone she worked with had a daughter who’d just graduated from beauty school, and she could fit me in on Tuesday afternoon in plenty of time before the meeting. It was a half-day at school and Caroline took some personal time and picked me up at noon.

  “I hope this is okay,” Caroline said when we walked into the salon.

  She didn’t look convinced, and I can’t say I blamed her. The place was small and crowded, bright turquoise, didn’t have a receptionist, and the magazines looked about to fall apart. The local pop station blared from speakers in the corners, and I could hear a TV playing in a back room loud enough that I could make out the weather report for tonight—rain as usual. We waited for about ten minutes without anyone even noticing us, and then a bubble gum-chewing girl with fire-engine red hair and three eyebrow piercings came out to answer the phone and saw us sitting there.

  She waved stubby purple fingernails at us, and then put the call on hold. “Nia!” she yelled. “Your one o’clock is here.”

  ^^^

  I’d barely sat down in the salon chair when Nia threw a purple cape over me and secured it in a chokehold around my neck. I watched her tall, skinny body in the mirror as she fingered the rough orange chunks of my hair.

  She raised her blackened eyebrows at me. “Been playing with the bleach, have we?” she asked, smiling.

  “My friend Leigh did it,” I said. “We were trying to dye it electric blue.”

  “Blue?” Caroline asked.

  “There’s this cool author,” I told her, “who writes vampire books, and he has black hair with blue streaks. It looks awesome. And since my hair was already black, we thought it would be easy to do, but the bleach part that you have to do first didn’t really work out.”

  “Too right,” Nia said. “But it sounds fab. So is that what’s on for today?”

  I brightened up. I hadn’t considered the idea of having blue stripes done by a professional. “Okay,” I said at the same time that Caroline said, “Definitely not.”

  “Susan,” she said. “You’ve worked really hard on this presentation. Don’t you want to make a good impression on the school board?”

  She had a point. “I guess.”

  “So?” Nia asked. “What’ll it be?”

  “She’d like a trim and for you to dye it all one color,” Caroline answered as if I wasn’t even there. “Can you do that?”

  Nia picked at the orange chunks again, rubbing them between her fingers. “Probably. The grow-out is healthy but the bleached stuff, which frankly there’s a lot of, is pretty brittle.”

  The two of them discussed deep conditioners while Nia washed my hair. I concentrated on keeping my eyes shut tight so the water wouldn’t run into them. I’d never had anyone except Tracie shampoo my hair before. Either she or AJ usually gave me my haircuts. It felt amazing, like a million fingers rubbing and massaging my scalp. I never wanted it to stop, but eventually, Nia sat me up and towel-dried my hair, squeezing my head like she was trying to squash a grape. Then she rubbed something citrusy and creamy into my hair, which felt almost as good as the shampooing. After that, she put a plastic bag over my head and stuck me under the dryer.

  I messed around on my phone for a while, sending selfies to Jessica and Amanda, telling them about my beauty treatment. Caroline had topped off my phone because she wanted to be able to reach me without calling the landline and making it worse for me at home with Tracie and Dad.

  After twenty minutes, Nia rinsed my hair and then put me back in her chair. She pumped it up with a foot lever, and I rose in the air. I watched in the mirror as she took a smelly bowl of pasty goo and began painting the orange parts of my hair with it, and then wrapping those bits up in foil.

  “Will it match the rest of her hair?” Caroline asked.

  “Well,” she said. “I hope so. But her hair’s basically trashed. Corrective color can be a bitch.”

  “Can’t you just dye it black?” I asked. “So it’s all the same?”

  “We could’ve,” she said. “But it’s kinda late now because I already started this. Besides, not very many people actually have truly black hair. Yours has a bit of red and brown in it, which makes it tricky.”

  “I don’t care if it looks real,” I tol
d her.

  “Well, like I said, I’ve already started this. Let’s see what we get first, and we’ll go from there.”

  She put a plastic cap over my head and told me she’d be back in a while. She got me a can of pop out of the machine and brought Caroline a glass of white wine out of a box, which Caroline thanked her for but set on the counter without tasting. Then Nia disappeared, leaving us alone.

  “Thanks for bringing me here, Caroline.”

  “I hope we’re not sorry.”

  “It seems like she knows what she’s doing.”

  “Maybe. At least she started with the deep conditioner, although I’m not sure she would have if I hadn’t mentioned it.”

  I reached for my phone, thinking Caroline would probably do the same, but she stopped me with her words. “You know, Susan,” she said. “You don’t have to call me Caroline. You could call me Mom.”

  I choked on my pop, and she got up and thwacked me on the back until I stopped sputtering. “Or not,” she said, half-smiling.

  “Ummm…I don’t know. I mean…I guess. You still seem kind of like a stranger, though.” I didn’t mean to hurt her, but I could tell by the way she flinched that I had. “I feel like I don’t know all that much about you.”

  “What do you want to know?” she asked.

  Why did you leave?

  How come you never called?

  Did you miss me?

  Do you love us?

  “I don’t know what happened,” I said.

  “When?”

  “When you left. One minute you were there, the next you were gone, and no one ever talked about you again.”

  She thumbed through a beat-up fashion magazine for a minute, and then she met my eyes in the mirror. “I didn’t mean to go away for forever.” She dropped her gaze back to the page. “After your grandparents died, well…I was only twenty-nine, and I know that seems really old to you, but someday you’ll realize how young it actually is. No one I knew had ever died. And to lose them both like that. I could barely get up in the morning.”

  I studied my fingernails, so I didn’t have to look at her.

  “I didn’t even know how to be me,” she said after a while. “Let alone a wife and mother. I felt so alone.”

  “So you just left?” I asked. It came out way more bitter than I meant it to, but I didn’t stop there. “We kind of felt the same way, you know. When you left? Like totally abandoned?”

  “Susa—”

  “Okay,” Nia said, interrupting. “Let’s see how that hair looks now.”

  God, she was chirpy.

  Caroline and I sat there, neither of us saying a word, but Nia didn’t seem to notice the tension. She just unwrapped one of the foils, and then folded it back up and checked another. “Well, I don’t like how that looks, but let’s give it a few more minutes.” She snapped the plastic cap back into place.

  As soon as we were alone again, Caroline said, “You don’t understand.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Listen, Susan, I’m trying to explain.” She blew out air between her teeth, frustrated. Or maybe annoyed. “I just had to get away,” she said. “So I rented out my house and your dad took you two to live with Jenny and Bill.”

  “And?” I demanded when she didn’t go on.

  “I moved to Vancouver. Just for a little while, but then, I don’t know. I liked living alone. I told myself it was because it was the first time I’d ever had my own apartment, but actually, it was because I didn’t have any responsibilities.”

  “Like…oh, I don’t know…two little kids who were counting on you?”

  She shrugged. “And your father.”

  “You could’ve lived in your house here,” I said, “and still seen us on weekends or something.”

  “I know, I know, but—”

  Nia popped back in. “Oooookay,” she said. “It’s got to be done by now, or we’re in big trouble.”

  “What?” I asked. “Are you serious?”

  She laughed. “Just kidding. It’ll be fine. I haven’t lost anyone yet.”

  I wasn’t reassured.

  “Can we just have a minute here?” Caroline asked her.

  “Well…”

  I was actually thinking maybe I didn’t care what Caroline had to say if it meant my hair would be ruined, but she was nothing if not persistent. “Just one minute. Please?” she asked again.

  “Yeah, okay,” Nia agreed. “But I don’t want to leave the color on much longer.”

  “I understand.” As soon as Nia left, she turned to me. “It took me a year to pull myself together. I didn’t even have a job because I couldn’t face looking for one. I thought about coming back, but after all that time, I was embarrassed.”

  “About what?” I asked.

  “Leaving you. It seemed so selfish.”

  “It was,” I told her, and she flinched again. “Do you have any idea how much it sucks to get a check—but nothing else—every month from your mother?”

  “Sus—”

  I spun the salon chair around so I faced her. “It would’ve been better if you hadn’t even sent the checks,” I said. “Then we wouldn’t have had any hope that you actually cared about us.”

  “I did care, though,” she said. “I do care. I just—”

  “It’s not like the checks make that much difference anyway,” I said.

  Caroline drew back as if I’d slapped her. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Susan?”

  “Fine. Look at you,” I said, “with all your dripping diamonds, a fancy house and car. And the three of us live in a crappy apartment and buy our clothes at thrift stores. I always figured you just didn’t have any money, so I didn’t worry about it. But obviously it’s just that you never even thought about us.”

  Caroline took in several deep breaths. “I don’t think you know anything about the arrangement I have with your father,” she said.

  “I bet I know more than you,” I said, challenging her. “How much do you pay in support every month?”

  She swallowed hard.

  I shook my head. “You don’t have a clue.”

  But I knew exactly how much she paid, and it didn’t even cover our cheap rent. The truth was, she still sent what she and Dad had agreed on ten years ago. They’d settled it between them, out of court. AJ and Bill had tried talking him into asking for more over the years, but he wouldn’t do it.

  “Susan, listen to me,” Caroline said. “If your dad needed more support, he should’ve told me.”

  “Like that’s going to happen,” I said.

  “Okay,” Nia said, striding in and taking my arm. “We have to get this stuff off right now.” She sat me down at one of the shampooing sinks.

  Caroline followed us. “My accountant takes care of it,” she told me, “which is not an excuse, but I will make sure I review it first thing tomorrow. I promise.”

  Nia turned on the water and started yanking the foils out of my hair. Warm spray ran down the sides of my face, dripping under my collar.

  “Whatever,” I told Caroline, raising my voice over the noise of the water.

  Nia’s eyes stayed on my hair, and her hands worked inexpertly, tugging hard. Finally she got the last foil out and ran the water through my hair while she massaged my scalp. Her forehead was all scrunched up with worry, and I started to feel sick to my stomach. I wasn’t sure if it was Nia or the conversation with Caroline, though.

  She stood me up and led me back to the chair.

  “Susan,” Caroline said.

  “Just forget it,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  “You’re not being very fair,” Caroline said. “I said I’ll send more child support. What else do you want from me?”

  I’d been as
king myself that question ever since Halloween, and I still didn’t know. When I didn’t answer right away, I saw Caroline’s body language change. She pushed back her shoulders, her eyes went cold, and we didn’t speak for the rest of the appointment, except to answer Nia’s questions about my hair.

  When Caroline dropped me off at home, I got the distinct feeling I might never see her again. And I didn’t even care. At least, that’s what I told myself.

  Chapter 31

  Jessica hoisted herself up onto the washroom counter and watched me put on my makeup. Her mom still wouldn’t let her wear anything except lip gloss, unless she was in a play. Caroline and I had barely spoken after the shampoo-bowl discussion, but she’d still paid to have my eyebrows waxed and the skin around them was pink and sore, so I dabbed on a bit of concealer.

  “I can’t believe how good your hair looks,” Jessica said.

  I laughed. “Gee, thanks.”

  “No, I mean, it’s so natural.”

  “I know,” I said. “The hairstylist had trouble with it, though. After she fixed the bleached parts, they were sort of a weird brownish color. She ended up putting a temporary wash over the whole thing to even it out.”

  Nia hadn’t wanted to do anything more to it after the first round of color because she thought my hair was too damaged for more chemicals, but Caroline had insisted. Since she was paying the bill, Nia had done it in the end.

  My hair rocked, but the sick feeling in my stomach would not go away. The one where you did something mean, or you said something you wish you could take back. Maybe Caroline had been poor until recently. Maybe she’d been paying what she could afford. She was right, I didn’t really know.

  I doubted she’d show up tonight. She hadn’t mentioned it when she dropped me off. But I decided I’d call her tomorrow and try to talk it out a bit more. She wasn’t the best mother in the world, but so far, I hadn’t been a world-class daughter either. We were still feeling our way, I guess.

  So much for my big plan to get my whole family in one room and make them proud of me. Right now, I’d be lucky to get through the presentation, let alone save the janitors or convince my family to stop acting like idiots toward each other.