Beyond Eighteen(87)

Joanie’s face lit up at the memory of the lemonade incident. She started laughing, the type of laugh that was contagious. I felt my face tense and a smile broke wide as an uncontrollable laugh began to take over my entire body. My eyes narrowed and my nostrils flared as tears rolled down my cheeks. I physically couldn’t say the last word to finish my sentence as my body surrendered to a hysterical laugh. I tried to look away from J, hoping I could stop laughing, but every time I tried, the vision of my grandpa chasing down the crawling sign along the highway as cars sped by and kicked up the wind flooded my mind. He looked so crazy running, trying to catch it as the two of us cheered him on from the back seat of his car. And the look on his face once he finally caught it; he was so pissed.

I was laughing so hard that the only sound that came out of my mouth was from the gasps I had to take to breathe. I pulled the front collar of my pajamas into my eyes, trying to soak up the lake of tears that spilled into the corners of my eyes. Finally I took a huge, refreshing breath, trying to return the oxygen that my laughing stole from my lungs as Joanie mirrored my actions and we both sighed. Suddenly, we were those nine-year-old girls in the back of my grandpa’s car, comfortably in love with the collection of memories that scared the shit out of us back then.

“Oh, J, I sure do miss them.” I felt a pressure build in my chest.

“I know,” she said as she rolled over and we faced each other.

“I just can’t stop thinking…I don’t have the security of them being here for me anymore,” I said as the energy in the room became solemn.

Joanie listened as words began to flow from my mouth. “I don’t have the ability to call Gramps and ask him stupid questions about random things. And I miss hearing Grams’s voice in the background telling him to ask me if I’d been eating right. I’ll never have that simple comfort, ever again,” I sighed.

“Not that anyone can ever take your grandparents’ place, but…you have…Max. He loves you, and his mom seems really nice,” Joanie said, delicately dancing on each word.

“Nancy is amazing. I really do love her. She is the epitome of the perfect mom. You look up mother in the dictionary, you’ll find Nancy’s picture there.” I felt warmth flood my chest.

“Yeah, she seemed really put together, even through the death of her husband,” Joanie whispered.

The words put together hung in my mind. I felt the blood drain from my face as my heart hammered against my sternum. That’s what I wanted my whole life, I wanted a mom put together, not the broken fucked-up druggie I got saddled with. I couldn’t help seeing the visions of where I’d find Candi’s picture in the dictionary. Maybe I’d look under the words Fucked-up Druggie, Ninth-Grade Egg Donor. Yeah, well guess what, Wilson? That’s not an actual word. The profane words to epitomize the woman who birthed me, well, they’d probably incite massive book-burning rallies. But of course as thoughts of Candi filled my head, so did the idea that there was a letter I refused to open downstairs from her in my hideaway drawer in the china cabinet.

“Wilson? Hellllloooo?” Joanie sang as she waved her hands in front of my eyes. I didn’t realize I’d spaced out.

“Yeah, well, Candi has nothing on Nancy. She couldn’t even hold a match in the same vicinity as Nancy,” I spat.

“What? When did we start talking about her?”

“We didn’t,” I answered.

Joanie lay there, silently studying my face, her eyes grazing every line, every curve, every blink I forced my eyes to make and every twitch I tried to stop my lips from making. She read me like a book.

“It’s that letter, isn’t it?” Joanie asked.

I shook my head. I couldn’t lie there any longer and pretend that I wasn’t pained by not knowing what she wrote.

“Maybe it’s time to move away from being so angry to discovering some type of closure,” Joanie said in a very delicate manner.

I knew she was right. It was time to grow up and face the one obstacle in my life. She was like a thorn in my foot. How was I going to move forward in my life while dragging all the crap from my past? Even though I wanted to keep it in the drawer, suddenly I needed the closure more than the anger I held for Candi. I looked over at the clock—9:45 p.m.

“Maybe it’s time,” I mumbled as I flung back the covers and stretched out of bed.

“What are you doing?”

“I’ll going to get the letter.”

“Do you want me to go with you?” Joanie pulled the covers back.

“No, I’ll be right back,” I said as I shuffled out across the cold oak floors. The creaking floorboards whispered, trying to convince me to go back to bed.