The Silver Star(5)

Liz’s school let out only an hour after mine, but that afternoon it felt like forever. When she finally arrived at the bungalow, I didn’t even let her set her books down before I started pouring out every detail of Mom’s blowup.

“I just don’t understand why she would make up all this Mark Parker stuff,” I said.

Liz sighed. “Mom’s always been a bit of a fibber,” she said. Mom was all the time telling us things that Liz suspected weren’t true, like how she used to go foxhunting with Jackie Kennedy in Virginia when they were both girls, or how she’d been the dancing banana in a cereal commercial. Mom had a red velvet jacket and liked to tell the story of how, when June Carter Cash had heard her play in a Nashville bar, she joined Mom onstage and they sang a duet together that brought the crowd to its feet. June Carter Cash had been wearing the red velvet jacket, and right there onstage she gave it to Mom.

“It didn’t happen,” Liz said. “I saw Mom buy that jacket at a church tag sale. She didn’t know I was watching, and I never said anything.” Liz looked out the window. “Mark Parker is just another dancing banana.”

“I really blew it, didn’t I?”

“Don’t beat yourself up, Bean.”

“I should have kept my big mouth shut. But I never really said anything, either.”

“She knew you knew,” Liz said, “and she couldn’t handle it.”

“Mom wasn’t just making up a little story about some guy she met,” I said. “There were the phone calls. And those liner notes.”

“I know,” Liz said. “It’s kind of scary. I think she’s gone through about all of her money, and it’s giving her some sort of a nervous breakdown.”

Liz said we should clean up the place so that when Mom came back, we could pretend the whole Mark Parker mess had never happened. We put the books back on the shelves, stacked the sheet music, and slid the records into their jackets. I came across the liner notes where Mark Parker had supposedly written to Mom: “I wrote this about you before I met you.” It was flat-out creepy.





CHAPTER THREE


We expected Mom to come back that night or the next day, but by the weekend, we still hadn’t heard from her. Whenever I started to fret, Liz told me not to worry, Mom always came back. Then we got the letter.

Liz read it first, then handed it to me and went to sit in the butterfly chair at the picture window.

My Darling Liz and Sweet Bean,

It’s 3 a.m. and I’m writing from a hotel in San Diego. I know I have not been at the top of my game recently, and to finish my songs—and be the mother I want to be—I need to make some time and space for myself. I need to find the magic again. I also pray for balance.

You both should know that nothing in the world is more important to me than my girls and that we will be together again soon and life will be better than ever!

The $200 I’m sending will keep you in chicken potpies until I get back. Chins up and don’t forget to floss!

Love,

Mom





I joined Liz at the window and she squeezed my hand.

“Is she coming back?” I asked.

“Of course,” Liz said.

“But when? She didn’t say when.”

“I don’t think she knows.”


Two hundred dollars buys you a lot of chicken potpies. We got them at Spinelli’s grocery, over on Balsam Street, an air-conditioned place with a wood floor and a big freezer in the back where the pies were stored. Mr. Spinelli, a dark-eyed man with hairy forearms who was always flirting with Mom, sometimes put them on sale. When he did, we could get eight for a dollar, and then we really stocked up.

We ate our pies in the evening at the red Formica table, but we didn’t much feel like playing Chew-and-Spew—or the Lying Game—so after dinner, we just cleaned up, did our homework, and went to bed. We’d looked after ourselves before when Mom was away, but thinking she might be away for days and days somehow made us take our responsibilities more seriously. When Mom was home, she sometimes let us stay up late, but without her around, we always went to bed on time. Since she wasn’t there to write excuses, we were never late to school and never skipped a day, which she sometimes let us do. We never left dirty dishes in the sink, and we flossed our teeth.

Liz had been doing some babysitting, but after Mom had been gone a week, she decided to take on extra work, and I got a job delivering Grit, a newspaper with useful stories about, say, keeping squirrels from eating the wires in your car’s engine by putting mothballs in an old pair of panty hose and hanging them under the hood. For the time being, money wasn’t a problem, and while the bills were piling up, Mom was always late paying them anyway. Still, we knew we couldn’t live this way forever, and every day, turning down the block on the way home from school, I looked up the driveway, hoping to see the brown Dart parked beside the bungalow.