They Always Do

The encyclopedias form a protective barrier between me and the world. They cascade along the built-in bookshelf behind the couch as I arch my neck along the cushions. I watch the red lava form question marks in the yellow tinted liquid, hot to the touch. I run my fingers over the dictionary’s toothy edges. The golden tin box with pheasants on its lid has embroidery thread of various colors in it, but I am too nervous to make a friendship bracelet, and I wouldn’t give it to Tegan Beckman, even if he might need it given his situation.

Last night I snuck into grandma and grandpa’s bedroom while they were having a beer and playing poker in the kitchen and I used the yellow pages to send two, large pepperoni pizzas to Tegan’s house in the hills, the area of town where the doctors and lawyers live. I gave the pizza place his number for verification. I did this all out of vengeance, not caring if he has a big fat allowance and would probably front the cost if he was home to get the order because somebody needed to show him how to bake something correctly.

Right about now, I should be taking my weekly trip abroad via the encyclopedias, yet here I am brooding over Tegan’s mistake. Yesterday in home economics, he ruined our group’s batch of chocolate chip cookies. They ran off the pan in a molten, carbon laced mud slide and our teacher squinted up her eyebrows and squawked, “Oh no!” Then I had to wash the baking sheet and you know we failed that assignment so no 4.0 honor roll in the Daily Express for me this semester. I was the cookie expert. I knew the exact size to let them drop off the tablespoon, to take them out a few minutes early so they would not burn into hockey pucks, and to not overheat the butter, but let it soften at room temperature. If Tegan had not been trying to impress Cyndi one oven over with his ability to use the microwave, we would not be in this precarious situation.

By ‘we,’ I mean Tegan and me and by ‘precarious’ I mean his mom is missing, and it may be my fault. I could be drifting off to the ukulele in Polynesia before I catch a ride on a porpoise’s back as I drift off on the Pacific but no, I keep thinking of penitentiary and penal colony because that’s where I should be, not here stirring a pot of beans on the stove waiting for my grandparents to call from the police station. An hour ago, Sheriff Dan came by the house. He knocked on the front door which nobody uses in the middle of the boonies and of course it was me who answered because Grandpa was out back listening to a baseball game on his transistor radio and Grandma was too busy working a crossword in the tabloids to bother.

“Samantha,” he said. “We are trying to locate a missing person, Mrs. Sheila Beckman. She went missing last night and your number came up on the caller ID at the pizza place downtown. The delivery driver was the last one to see her when she took the pizzas, but since you placed the order, we thought you might know her son, Tegan, from school.”

“Oh! That. Well, you see in home economics he ruined the cookies so to make up for the failed grade I sent him pizzas. He didn’t tell you because it was going to be a surprise…”

“Do you know his mom or do you go over there often?”

“Uh, no. It’s not like that. We are just classmates at school, not close friends. I’ve never been to his house or met his mom. Maybe she went to Panama.”

At this point, grandma piped up from the kitchen, “Samantha, who is that at the door and why all the yakety yak? I thought you were studying.”

Thankfully, grandma took over from there because sheriff looked like he might lock me up just for being annoying. She then called for grandpa and off they went in the blue beater of a pickup truck to meet with Tegan and his dad downtown at the station.

“Can I come, sheriff Dan? Shouldn’t I?”

“No, no. It’s better if you stay here. With your mom’s record, best to not get you involved. Ready, folks?”

I feel awful to see my grandparents take off after the police cruiser. At least he didn’t book them like he did my mom last year, but still, they have been through so much, and here I am, sitting here feeling completely stupid for my pizza revenge fantasy. I didn’t know Tegan’s mom would up and leave just for getting two pizzas that weren’t hers unless maybe they get lots of unsolicited orders given Tegan’s incompetence in the domestic engineering department?

The phone rings in the kitchen. I grab the pea green receiver and wrap the cord around my arm like the snake tattoo I want to get when I turn eighteen. “Hello?” I say, poking my free fingers into each hole on the rotary dial.

“Put grandma on the phone,” mom says.

“She’s with grandpa in town right now,” I half lie. “Are you only allowed ten minutes this time? Is that it?”

Mom cleared her throat. I hear a staticky click on the line as if somebody is listening in. “Yeah…about that…I need some cash wired. The toiletries went up.”

I hold the receiver to my check and cough an explicative into my shirt. The pot of beans bubbles so I stir it, making sure the meat falls off the hock into ribbons, although who will feel like eating tonight, I am not sure.

“Uh, they are not here and I spent my cleaning allowance on the sink repair. Hey, do you know Sheila Beckman? Like from high school maybe or one of your jobs?”

Mom knows jobs to mean scams but since it’s being recorded…

She laughs. “Sheila? Oh, she married the richest guy in our class, Heath. Yeah, I wouldn’t have worked for her. She’s not my type. Gotta go, hon. Tell them I called, would ya?”

With that, she hung up and left me to pull out the cornbread from the oven and hope the oniony aroma dampening the wallpaper could make me cry, but it won’t. It never does. I’m too dried up from my own sob story with my mom to even care anymore, and grandpa and grandma would come back anyways. They always do.

I slink back to the couch and find my place in P. Penitentiary. A place criminals go to pay back their crimes to society. Mom’s disappearance from my life started with the internet being available for the first time. Well, not at the house. Grandpa refused to pay for dial up because it wasn’t a ‘necessity’ like pork and beans, toilet paper, or Crystal Pepsi, all of which could be stockpiled for Y2K. She started going to the library under the auspice of studying to get her medical assistant certificate which would help the family.

What we later discovered when sheriff Dan came to our house the first time was that mom got access to Sister Shirley from the country church's credit card information because Sister Shirley didn’t want a trojan horse on her new computer she used for her gospel correspondence courses or typing up the weekly bulletin.

Mom took on her new, immaculate identity and got herself lots of nice things set up in a coastal town miles away from our landlocked butts until Sister's actual medical assistant who also opened the mail due to arthritis and just a tiny bit of dementia figured it out and filed a complaint. Mom got double time for fraud and elder abuse.

Grandma and grandpa took that pretty hard given their age and they send a care package to the state prison on Easter, Christmas and her birthday, and if they are feeling charitable, Mother's Day. Grandpa wouldn’t spring for an answering machine (and he doesn't like the idea of having to listen to people ramble on more than necessary but you didn't hear it from me) and he didn’t trust my mom so a computer was out of the question.

I went to the office/bedroom to type up my report on Polynesia. The office is where all our ancestors hang out in their frozen lives, forever frowning because they are doomed to wear their stuffy, black funeral attire over my rickety sofa bed for eternity. They watch me closely, scowling at my measly attempts to capture the history of the various ethnic groups in my favorite travel destination as a woefully abandoned white girl in the middle of the United States. I wish they would cut me some slack and let me dream a bit. I know, I know, great great grandma Enslow. I should be tilling the earth. Quit with the stink eye because I can only bake and not afford nursing home insurance for my elders, great, great, great uncle Harry…and so it goes.

The phone rings again. This time I pick it up on the black rotary phone in my grandparents’ room. “Hello?”

“They found Mrs. Beckman, but you have a lot of explaining to do, Samantha. And that young man, Tegan. You owe him an apology.”

“Okay, grandpa. I am sorry. It won’t happen again. Where was she?”

“That’s none of your business, young lady. Guess your little prank revealed Mrs. Beckman has her own little jobs just like your mother, so justice will be served, but you still need to make it up to that young man. And you’re grounded.”

Grounded from what, I don’t know. My wild trips to Micronesia? “Okay, grandpa. Will you be coming back soon?”

“Grandma and I are going to the lodge. Did you forget it’s Friday?”

I had forgotten it was bingo night.

“We’ll come back later. Call up that boy, now, you hear?”

“Okay, gramps. Bye.”

I pulled out the Betty Crocker and looked up the cookie section in the index. It was going to be a long night.

I picked up the phone and swung the dial around seven times.

“Hey, Tegan. Sorry about all of this. Um, are you allergic to chocolate?”

The dial tone rang in my ear.

They always come back. They always do.