The Deepest Roots Read online

  “Yep, he took one look at my résumé and realized how qualified I am.”

  “It’ll be a big help having someone full time in here. I’ve needed to do it for a while. It’ll give me a chance to get back to working in the shop.” Red looks pleased with the development.

  “Well,” Mom babbles, “I guess we should go so you can close up. But I’ll see you tomorrow morning at eight a.m. sharp. I am so excited! I’m going to do such a good job, Mr. Montgomery.”

  Her excitement twists something in my gut. She really wants to do this. She wants to make a better life with a better job.

  “Really, Stella, just call me Red.”

  “Red,” Mom says with a bright smile.

  “Or you know, we could go grab a bite or something to celebrate,” Red offers.

  Mom purses her lips, and I see the excuse ready for delivery. We don’t have the money to go out to dinner. And I’ve seen that look a hundred times before. Wouldn’t you know? We’ve already eaten. Maybe next time.

  Red doesn’t falter, “My treat.” Maybe he read the look. Or maybe it’s just a coincidence.

  “You know what?” Mom says, as if the next words were going to be her answer all along. “I’m starving. How about you, Rome?”

  “I’m fine,” I answer, hoping to avoid the situation altogether.

  Mom laughs. “Oh, Rome. You just kill me sometimes.”

  I would like to kill her right now, actually.

  “Great,” Red says. “What sounds good? Pizza?”

  “I’ve always wanted to try Martinello’s on Sixth,” Mom says. It’s not Pizza Hut. It’s a pricier Italian restaurant that sells wood-fired pizza and food with Italian names I can’t pronounce. I’ve never gone in, but I’ve seen the menu posted at the door. This is a test. Warning, Red Montgomery. Fasten your seat belt and prepare for impact.

  Red doesn’t flinch at all. “Sounds great. I’ll close up and we’ll head over.”

  In the car, I examine Mom’s résumé. It’s printed on the cheap paper that’s available for five cents per page at the library. “This is what you showed him?” I ask. “This says you have an associate’s degree in secretarial sciences. That’s not even a thing, Mom. They don’t even call them secretaries anymore. They’re administrative assistants. And besides, you haven’t even finished high school.”

  Mom sighs. “I knew you’d be a buzzkill.”

  “Mom, this says you type one hundred words per minute and are proficient in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe Photoshop, and the Google. Do you even know what any of these are?”

  “I got that book at the library, remember? And I used Word to type up this fancy résumé in their computer lab. Did you know that they have templates you can use and everything?”

  “Mom, did you show this to Red? Does he really think you can do all these things?”

  “Yes, I showed it to him. How was I supposed to get a job if I didn’t show the résumé to anyone?”

  “You lied to get the job, Mom! He’s going to figure it out when he needs you to actually do this stuff.” I try to swallow, but my throat is tight. “Please, Mom. I really like him. And I like this job. Please don’t mess this up for me.”

  “I don’t know why you’re so panicked, Rome. I can keep books. I did it some at the café last year. And I’ll figure out the computer stuff as I go along. He doesn’t even have a computer yet, anyway. He says he has to get one.”

  “What if he fires us both when he figures out that you have no idea what you’re doing?”

  Mom’s features tighten, and she rips the résumé from my hand. “I am doing the best I can, Rome. I am trying to make a better life for you. For both of us. You’re right. I don’t have that high-school diploma. I certainly don’t have some stupid college degree or any real fucking job skills, because I have been too busy just fucking surviving for the last seventeen years, okay? You sold your car. Now I’m writing fake résumés. We’re both doing the best we can.”

  I look away from her because I know that everything she said is true, but my next request is selfish. “Just please don’t make him another ex-boyfriend. I really like him.”

  “It’s just dinner, Rome. We’re both hungry. And I don’t know about you, but I’m broke.”

  Red gives us a wave from the door of his Silverado as he gets in. Mom hands me the keys and I start the car to follow him.

  The restaurant isn’t packed. We manage to get a table within minutes, and the waitress is friendly and chatty, thinking we’re some happy family out to grab a bite to eat. I watch Red as he pulls out Mom’s chair for her. He’s wearing The Collared Shirt. The one that hangs in his office like he’s going to change into it after work, but he never does. It’s plaid and has pearlized buttons, but for a guy who usually wears coveralls, it’s the equivalent of wearing a suit. Even if he’s a free dinner to Mom, he thinks this is a date, or something close to it. He’s going all out. He’s taking us both to dinner.

  Truthfully, out of all the guys Mom’s dated, he’d be one of the best, if not the king of them all. He’s got a job, he doesn’t do drugs, and he doesn’t stare at me in a way that makes me uncomfortable. Mom’s had a steady trail of ex-boyfriends, averaging a couple per year. I think she gets lonely, and sometimes she thinks I need a father figure in my life. But the moment they show the slightest hint that they might be losers, she gives them the heave-ho. When I was younger and actually liked some of the guys she dumped, I thought it was because she was the loser, but then I realized there had been good reasons. Carl partied too much and couldn’t hold down a job. Stefano stared at me whenever Mom left the room. Eliot wanted Mom to change her hair and her clothes and read the New York Times instead of her beloved paperbacks. And he wanted to get rid of Steven altogether, which was obviously a deal breaker.

  I guess the gist of it is maybe I didn’t realize how many of her decisions were made for me and not for her.

  Red surprises me by ordering a bottle of red wine rather than a beer. Mom is clearly unsettled by this as well, because I had seen her finger running through the list of beers that she thought would make her seem fun and flirty to a guy like Red. Her candy-apple-red nail had been hovering between a PBR and a Bud Light. I order a soda because it’s unlikely Red supports underage drinking.

  “So this is cozy, isn’t it?” Mom says, looking around.

  “Nice place,” Red says. “I came here once a couple years ago when my buddy from the corps was in town.”

  “That’s right! You were in the Marines!” Mom exclaims. “That’s so interesting. You must have traveled and seen so many things!”

  Like war, I think to myself, but Mom manages to put a positive spin on just about anything related to a man buying her dinner.

  Red goes on about his two tours of duty, telling only the light, funny parts and nothing about the scars I noticed on his left leg that time I saw him in shorts. As Red chats with Mom, my stomach churns. Mom got that job by lying to Red, one of the few decent human beings I know. And I’m just sitting here, watching her play him as the pizza comes.

  Red refills her glass of wine while they’re talking, and I barely notice through the haze of guilt that Mom has said something to me. She’s my mom, I tell myself. She needs this. Let her feel like she’s finally moving up in the world. Her words echo in my brain, I certainly don’t have some stupid college degree or any real fucking job skills, because I have been too busy just fucking surviving for the last seventeen years, okay? She’s right. Every move she’s made since I’ve been born has been about surviving.

  Mom repeats herself, “The ladies’ room?”

  “I’m good,” I mumble, and Mom’s face falls a little because she’d been hoping I’d join in her middate strategizing session. Does he seem interested? Should we press for dessert? We’ve been on these kinds of dates before, where the guy tries to impress Mom by taking us both out. The difference here is that Red is genuinely nice and those other guys had just been hoping for an invitation to come home wi
th Mom.

  Red stands when she gets up and leaves the table.

  What little food I managed to eat is hardening into a stone in my gut.

  “I have to talk to you,” I whisper.

  Red sits back down. “What?” he asks around a mouthful of pizza. Mom’s left, and he feels comfortable enough to stuff his face around me.

  “You have to know the truth about my mom.” I’m sure Mercy’s God is going to spear me right now with some kind of electric bolt for this betrayal.

  “What? She seems nice.”

  “Everything on that résumé is a lie. She’s been a waitress her whole life. She doesn’t have a degree in anything. And she’s only been using a computer for about three days now.” I grab Mom’s wine glass and take a couple of swigs to steady my nerves. I might as well go down completely in flames.

  Red sighs. “Rome, I’m a lot of things, but I’m not stupid.” He takes a gulp of his own wine.

  “You knew she lied?”

  “Even I know there’s no such thing as a degree in secretarial science or whatever she put on there. But here’s the thing. She’s trying. And you’re a good kid. A good mechanic. Let’s give her a chance. If it works out, great. If not, she gets some work experience that will look good on a real résumé.” He takes a moment to refill Mom’s wine glass so she won’t be able to tell I was drinking out of it. “I don’t know what I would’ve done with a kid at seventeen or however the hell old she was. But you turned out okay. So, let’s give her a shot.”

  I am momentarily dumbfounded. But Mom’s traipsing back across the dining room, and suddenly I think of Lux’s mom, Tina, and how much of a fairy tale it had been when she married Aaron, and she and Lux and Aaron had become this big happy family, or at least it seemed that way to me until recently. But the point is, I’d never dreamed of that for Mom and me.

  So I grind out, “If this is a date, and not really a work dinner, then you should know that I like you, but if you hurt her, I will gut you.”

  He chokes on his wine, coughing into his hand as Mom sits down. “Goodness,” she says, patting him on the back.

  Red waves her off and begins breathing again.

  The ride home is jubilant. Mom cranks the radio, singing along at the top of her lungs. During commercial breaks she revisits the dinner with me, commenting on how Red knew how to pronounce the name of the fancy red wine, and how interesting it is that he has tattoos on both arms. And did I know that he built that business all on his own? That he used to run it all by himself and live in the little apartment above it? And that the business kept growing and now he has five mechanics working for him?

  Normally I would have shut her down, made some comment about how his shaved head reminds me of a shiny cue ball. But Red is a genuinely good guy, and if he was interested in my mom, it would be really selfish and petty of me to ruin it for her. So I smile and nod, and take secret joy from the fact that Red Montgomery knows her game. He knows her game and he’s letting us stick around anyway.

  By the time we get to Cottonwood Hollow, Mom’s Focus is running on fumes. “Got any cash?” Mom asks as we pull into town. She hands me her purse. “I’ve got about three bucks in quarters.”

  When I was little, this was a game. How much money can we find? We’d search the couch cushions, the seats of the car, the booths of the café, and the pockets and wallet of whatever boyfriend she had at the time. I still have forty-five dollars left of the money Red paid me under the table on Monday, and I’m sure as hell not going to give it all to Mom.

  “I’ve got ten bucks,” I tell her. It’s enough to get her to work and back for a while, but not enough to make her think I’m hoarding it. I still need to put minutes on my phone. And maybe buy ramen for next week.

  “Great,” Mom says. “Eight in gas and two for M&M’s?” It’s another one of our traditions. Twenty percent tip, Mom always called it when I was kid. If we had twenty bucks, we’d blow four of it on something stupid. But it was those stupid things that I remember the most. The nail polish or the movie rental culled out of a wrinkled twenty-dollar bill. Not the frozen burritos or the gasoline.

  Mom looks so happy from her successful date with Red that I don’t want to shoot her down. I want those M&M’s and the look on her face when she thinks we’re going to make a comeback after a particularly rough bout in the ring of life. She’s fighting her hardest, harder than I’ve ever seen. She’s learning new things, taking risks, and it’s starting to pay off.

  “Sure thing,” I reply. I don’t pull the money out of my backpack while we’re in the car because I don’t want her to see the cash I really have.

  We turn into the gas station, and I pull up to the first pump, ignoring a group of five or six Cottonwood Hollow boys hanging out by the door. They’re drinking from Styrofoam cups that most likely contain soda and cheap alcohol stolen from someone’s parents’ liquor cabinet. The few boys I’ve dated from Cottonwood Hollow were mostly interested in me helping them Fix their trucks, but after Lux and the teacher scandal, they became more interested in what I was willing to do in their back seats.

  Sam is there, the boy who Mercy has had a crush on since she was fourteen. “Hey, Rome,” he calls as I’m putting the eight bucks into the fuel tank. I take a deep breath, because I’ve always loved the smell of gasoline, even though it’s not good for my brain cells. I guess we all love things that are bad for us.

  “Hey, Sam,” I reply. He’s a pretty nice guy as far as Cottonwood Hollow guys go, even if he’s too dumb to realize that Mercy is crazy for him. He’s got curly blond hair and light-blue eyes.

  “Need any help?” He leaves his buddies by the door and comes over to the Focus.

  “I think I’ve got it covered,” I reply. A Cottonwood Hollow boy asking a Fixer if she needs help with a car is ridiculous. Only Mercy’s interest in him makes me respond without adding any creative language.

  “I’ll wash the windshield,” he offers, picking up the squeegee from the bucket of wash water near the pump.

  “Go for it,” I murmur as the gas pump ticks.

  He pulls the squeegee out of the bucket and begins washing the windshield. Mom doesn’t even notice because she’s already reading a paperback that she’s produced from the depths of her purse. Any blank space that she can fill with fiction, she usually does.

  “So how’s school?” he asks, as if we don’t both go to Evanston.

  “Super. How’s things for you?” This gas pump has to be the slowest one known to mankind. The numbers inch slowly up in the machine. $5.98. $5.99. $6.00 . . .

  “Pretty good.” He scrubs at some particularly persistent bug guts, like he’s working his way up to his next question. “I heard you were hanging out with Jett Rodriguez. The pitcher.”

  “Yeah?” I prompt. I’m actually surprised that news about Jett has already made the rounds, but I try not to let on.

  “Just be careful around him. You know how those Evanston guys are. They think our girls are weird. He might be just messing with you.”

  “What do you think?” I ask, relieved when I can stop the pump at eight dollars exactly and exit this conversation. I pull out the pump, stopping to tap the tip on the edge of the tank, not wanting to waste a drop. I hang the pump up in the stand.

  “About Jett? Well—”

  “No, I mean about Cottonwood Hollow girls. Do you think we’re weird?”

  “No!” Sam exclaims. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I never see you talking with Mercy. And supposedly you all study your Bibles together every week.”

  Sam’s eyes widen. “Mercy? Well, she’s a real nice girl. But I don’t think her parents let her date.”

  “You could ask.” Mercy would kill me right now if she knew I was talking to Sam about her. “I’m sure her parents would let her go out with an upstanding young man like you.”

  “I’d rather ask you,” Sam says, offering me a pretty smile. He crosses to my side of the car and drops the squeegee back in the bu
cket. I’m careful to keep my face neutral. This is not the response I anticipated, and all I can think about is how heartbroken Mercy would be if she were here.

  “You’re barking up the wrong tree, Sam,” I reply. “A girl like me would eat you alive.”

  Sam opens his mouth to offer some response, but I hold up a hand to stop him.

  “Go on back to your buddies,” I tell him. “We’ll forget this conversation happened.” Because I can’t tell Mercy he asked me out. Ever. Ever. And whatever comes after ever.

  I walk past them and pull open the door, which squeaks. The hinges creak and the latch hasn’t worked right for the last six months. Every time I come in here, it tugs at me, makes my fingers twitch to Fix it.

  I head back to the candy aisle, the smells of dusty shelves and old hot dogs searing on rollers familiar to me. They have a special on a hot-dog-and-soda combo on Friday nights that only costs a dollar fifty, which Mom and I consider to be a bargain because there’s no limit on how many condiment packets we can take. While I’m picking up two bags of M&M’s beneath the glare of the fake security camera, I hear the unmistakable rumble of a 351 Cleveland pulling up outside.

  I look out the window, but I don’t need to. I already know who’s out there. It’s Garrett, driving my Mach. He’s got a For Sale sign in the back window, which is dumb because you can barely see out the rear window of a Mach to begin with. I wonder again if anyone has made an offer on it yet. He pulls up right in front of Mom, backing in until the rear bumper of the Mach is a couple feet away from the front bumper of her Focus.