The Sky is Everywhere(40)
Author: Jandy Nelson

You can tell your story any way you damn well please.

It’s your solo.

This is the secret I kept from you, Bails,
from myself, too:
I think I liked that Mom was gone,
that she could be anybody,
anywhere,
doing anything.
I liked that she was our invention,
a woman living
on the last page of the story
with only what we imagined
spread out before her.
I liked that she was ours, alone.

(Found on a page ripped out of Wuthering Heights, spiked on a branch, in the woods)

Joelessness settles over the morning like a pall. Gram and I are slumped spineless over the kitchen table, staring off in opposite directions.

When I got back to The Sanctum last night, I put Bailey’s notebook into the carton with the others and closed up the box. Then I returned St Anthony to the mantel in front of The Half Mom. I’m not sure how I’m going to find our mother, but I know it isn’t going to be on the Internet. All night, I thought about what Big said. It’s possible no one in this family is quite who I believed, especially me. I’m pretty sure he hit the jackpot with me.

And maybe with Bailey too. Maybe he’s right and she didn’t have it – whatever it is. Maybe what my sister wanted was to stay here and get married and have a family.

Maybe that was her color of extraordinary.

“Bailey had all these secrets,” I say to Gram.

“Seems to run in the family,” she replies with a tired sigh.

I want to ask her what she means, remembering what Big said about her too last night, but can’t because he’s just stomped in, dressed for work after all, a dead ringer for Paul Bunyan. He takes one look at us and says, “Who died?” Then stops midstep, shakes his head. “I cannot believe I just said that.” He knocks on his head nobody-home-style. Then he looks around. “Hey, where’s Joe this morning?”

Gram and I both look down.

“What?” he asks.

“I don’t think he’ll be around anymore,” I say.

“Really?” Big shrinks from Gulliver to Lilliputian before my eyes. “Why, honey?”

I feel tears brimming. “I don’t know.”

Thankfully, he lets it drop and leaves the kitchen to check on the bugs.

The whole way to the deli I think of the crazy French violinist Genevieve with whom Joe was in love and how he never spoke to her again. I think of his assessment of horn players as all-or-nothing types. I think how I had all of him and now I’m going to have none of him unless I can somehow make him understand what happened last night and all the other nights with Toby. But how? I already left two messages on his cell this morning and even called the Fontaine house once. It went like this:

Lennie (shaking in her flip-flops): Is Joe home?

Marcus: Wow, Lennie, shocker … brave girl.

Lennie (looks down to see scarlet letter emblazoned on her T-shirt): Is he around?

Marcus: Nope, left early.

Marcus and Lennie: Awkward Silence

Marcus: He’s taking it pretty hard. I’ve never seen him so upset about a girl before, about anything, actually…

Lennie (close to tears): Will you tell him I called?

Marcus: Will do.

Marcus and Lennie: Awkward Silence

Marcus (tentative): Lennie, if you like him, well, don’t give up.

Dial tone.

And that’s the problem, I madly like him. I make an SOS call to Sarah to come down to the deli during my shift.

Normally, I am The Zen Lasagna Maker. After three and a half summers, four shifts a week, eight lasagnas a shift: 896 lasagnas to date – done the math – I have it down. It’s my meditation.

I separate noodle after noodle from the glutinous lump that comes out of the refrigerator with the patience and precision of a surgeon. I plunge my hands into the ricotta and spices and fold the mixture until fluffy as a cloud. I slice the cheese into cuts as thin as paper. I spice the sauce until it sings. And then I layer it all together into a mountain of perfection. My lasagnas are sublime. Today, however, my lasagnas are not singing. After nearly chopping off a finger on the slicer, dropping the glutinous lump of noodles onto the floor, overcooking the new batch of pasta, dumping a truck-load of salt into the tomato sauce, Maria has me on moron-duty stuffing cannolis with a blunt object while she makes the lasagnas by my side. I’m cornered. It’s too early for customers, so it’s just us trapped inside the National Enquirer – Maria’s the town crier, chatters nonstop about the lewd and lascivious goings-on in Clover, including, of course, the arboreal escapades of the town Romeo: my uncle Big.

“How’s he doing?”

“You know.”

“Everyone’s been asking about him. He used to stop at The Saloon every night after he returned to earth from the treetops.” Maria’s stirring a vat of sauce beside me, a witch at her cauldron, as I try to cover the fact that I’ve broken yet another pastry shell. I’m a lovesick mess with a dead sister. “The place isn’t the same without him. He holding up?” Maria turns to me, brushes a dark curl of hair from her perspiring brow, notes with irritation the growing pile of broken cannoli shells.

“He’s just okay, like the rest of us,” I say. “He’s been coming home after work.” I don’t add, and smoking three bowls of weed to numb the pain. I keep looking up at the door, imagining Joe sailing through it.

“I did hear he had a treetop visitor the other day,” Maria singsongs, back to everyone else’s business.

“No way,” I say, knowing full well that this is most likely the case.

“Yup. Dorothy Rodriguez, you know her, right? She teaches second grade. Last night at the bar, I heard that she rode up with him in the barrel high into the canopy, and you know…”

She winks at me. “They picnicked.”

I groan. “Maria, it’s my uncle, please.”

She laughs, then blathers on about a dozen more Clover trysts until at last Sarah floats in dressed like a fabric shop specializing in paisley. She stands in the doorway, puts her arms up, and makes peace signs with both hands.

“Sarah! If you don’t look like the spitting image of me twenty years – sheesh, almost thirty years ago,” Maria says, heading into the walk-in refridgerator. I hear the door thump behind her.

“Why the SOS?” Sarah says to me. The summer day has followed her in. Her hair is still wet from swimming. When I called earlier she and Luke were at Flying Man’s “working” on some song. I can smell the river on her as she hugs me over the counter.