Lu Read online

  “But you ain’t never tell me that he all messed up now. We saw him today—Coach dropped off Ghost before me—in Glass Manor, buggin’ out.”

  My father stopped the hand rubbing mid-rub and sighed. “Yeah, I know.” Even though he ain’t wash not one dish, he reached over and turned the faucet off.

  “I’m not done yet,” I said, but Dad ain’t care.

  “Lu, you know how I got the name Goose?” What is it about grown-up men and changing the subject? It’s like moms always ask what’s wrong, and dads always say, let’s talk about something else. Truth is, I never even thought about the Goose thing. No one ever brought it up. I hadn’t even brought it up. It just—was. I was talking about Wolf, and here he go, jumping animals.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, when I was young, I used to stutter.” He jammed his fingers back in his pockets. “I mean really, really stutter. It was bad. I could barely get a sentence out. And when the words would get stuck in my throat, I would jerk my neck almost like I was trying to cough ’em up. And I did it so much—bobbing my head like a chicken or a goose—that that’s what people started calling me.” He bobbed his head a few times, then continued. “Well, mainly it was one dude.” Now Dad started smiling. Not a full smile. Just a smile of remembrance, which usually be small smiles. A peek of teeth. “Otis.”

  “Who . . . Oh, you mean . . . Coach?”

  “Coach. He gave me that name. We were kids growing up together in Glass Manor. My folks used to take care of him whenever his mother was working, and his dad was in and out, struggling with dope. We were like brothers, actually. Even joined the high school track team together. He was great. I was . . . okay. My mother pushed me to run because she knew I’d be with Otis and felt like track was keeping us both out of trouble. And it was, but I wasn’t good enough to stop people from teasing me about my stutter. I would run my race and get third place, and to celebrate me—to cheer for me—my own teammates would cluck and flap their arms and go, Guh-Guh-Guh-Guh Goose!”

  “Wait. Coach flamed you? Because that don’t really sound like something he would do.”

  Dad flipped his eyes up in his head. “First of all, we didn’t call it ‘flaming’ back then. And we were young. And I don’t think he, or any of them, meant it to be mean. It was just something everybody was in on,” Dad said, brushing off the question. “But after a while it started really getting to me. So I quit. I wanted to be a winner, Lu. To be cool. And at the time, I couldn’t see nothing down the line in my life. I could only see what was right in front of me. And what was in front of me was stuttering and Goose jokes. So at fifteen I decided to do the only other thing I saw as cool around my way.”

  “Sell drugs.”

  “Right. I’ve told you that before, and you know I’m not proud of it. And you know if you ever even think about—”

  “I know, and I’m not.” I put my hands up quick.

  “Anyway”—my dad sucked in a long breath—“to bring this back around to Torrie, there were a lot of people jealous of him. Dude was unbeatable and he felt, and acted, like nothing could get him. Like nothing could happen to him. And people hated it. You should’ve seen him. He walked around like a celebrity. Be signing autographs and all that. It was nuts. But he also had so much pressure on him. I mean, he was seventeen and the track was supposed to be his way out. There were coaches and recruiters fighting over him. So just before the championship meet, his junior year, he asked me if I had something that could give him some extra speed. He really wanted to impress the colleges, and by then, everybody knew I had everything. Stuff to put people down, stuff to take people up. I had it all. So I met him, served him, and that was that.”

  “You sold the Wolf his first hit?” I asked, gaping at my dad, just to make sure I was catching it all.

  Dad nodded, then dropped another bomb. “Unfortunately, I also ended up selling Otis’s dad, Mr. Brody . . . his last.”

  All the words in my head went away. Shut down. Thoughts, gone. And a few seconds later my mind came back on, like a reboot. But I was still confused about what my father was telling me. I mean, I could hear his words, but none of them were making sense. I mean, they were. But they weren’t.

  “Wha . . . what? What?” I said, my brain still on fuzz. On loading. “Do he know that? Do Coach know you—”

  “Look, Lu, I work every day, every single day trying to make it right,” Dad said, his face becoming weird, as if he was wearing a mask of his own face . . . on his face. That was my cue to ease up on the questions. “You know that.”

  I did.

  I do.

  But still.

  My dad’s job—the job that had him working so hard that he was never around—was basically being like a rehab hustler. Always out at basketball courts, and on hot corners, and anywhere else he knew there would be people having a tough time with drugs, and the same hand-to-hand he used to do when he was younger, he did in a different way now. Now he slips them tiny ziplock bags with notes in them. Notes he be getting from family members. Their brothers and sisters and kids and cousins. And if, after reading those notes, an addict felt like he might want to try getting clean, my pops would personally take them to the rehab place, help them do all the paperwork stuff, and get them back in touch with their families. Back to themselves.

  “The point I’m trying to make with all this is, when I see you, I see the me before all that. Before the smoke. The rock and the junk. Before the flash and the fly. When I look at you, I see the me with potential. The me, who was . . . different, but good”—he pointed to my chest—“in here. I don’t care what you lose, kid. Just don’t lose that.” Dad rubbed my head, yanked me close. “You’re gonna be a good big brother, Lu. Hear me?” I heard him, but I ain’t say nothing. “Matter fact, and I haven’t talked to your mother about this yet but I think she’ll be okay with it, I want you to think of a name for your new little sister.”

  “A nickname?”

  “No.” My father took his arm from around me. “Her name.”

  Her real name.

  Whoa.

  5

  A NEW NAME FOR SPRINTING: Surviving Stinky Dudes Who Got Nothing Better to Do Than Talk Trash Because They Haters

  Christina. That’s my mom’s name. And that’s what she go by. Christina. Either that or Mom, or Mrs. Richardson, which is what kids call her, unless you Patty or Cotton. Then you call her Mama Richardson, the babysitter. Because that’s what she was when we were younger. And by younger, I mean a few years ago, before Patty moved away from Barnaby Terrace to live with her aunt and uncle (and started eating turkey wings like she fancy), and Cotton started staying at home with her older brother, Skunk. But I hate the word “babysitter,” because we weren’t babies, and we definitely weren’t being sat on. We barely even sat down. If anything, we were always up, jumping around while my mom put together these super-hard dance routines with all kinds of ticks and booms to old-head jams with Cotton and Patty. And . . . me. I would try, but I ain’t really no dancer, so the girls would always tell me to take a time-out, which was their fake-nice way of telling me I danced like a door, opening and closing, and that I should just pretend to be an audience member at their make-believe concert. Take a seat, Lu. Several seats.

  “Clap louder!” Cotton would snip at me. And my mom would just go along.

  But Mom’s babysitting (child look-aftering) life is over—been over—and now she the queen of fruit sculptures. Sculptures . . . made of . . . fruit. Okay, so maybe not sculptures. Sunny been showing me real sculptures of old white people without arms, and even though they look weird, what my mother be making ain’t nowhere near as sculpture-y as that. She just makes, like, artsy things with watermelons and cantaloupes, funny-looking faces with grape eyes, and strawberry noses, and slices of the green melon I can never remember the name of, as the smiles. I know it sounds kinda silly, but business is booming. She was even on one of those morning shows—even though I barely recognized her because of all the ma
keup they put on her. On there showing people how to turn a pineapple into a boat.

  That’s my mom. A trained artist. Went to art school and everything but put it all on pause after she had me. Now she’s back to it and has become the Picasso of Produce.

  I ain’t make that up. She did.

  And she calls me the Orange Master. It’s not another nickname. It’s more like a title. And because school was out, on Tuesday morning the Orange Master had no choice but to get to work.

  “Sleep well?” Mom asked as I came into the kitchen.

  “I slept okay,” I said, the taste of toothpaste sour on my tongue. Coffee in the air. “You supposed to be drinking coffee with a baby in there?” I asked, grabbing the handle of the fridge.

  “It’s a half cup. Sheesh.”

  “If you say so.”

  “So . . . just okay?” she asked again about my sleep, not letting it go.

  “Yeah, just okay.” The truth is that I slept pretty good, but it took a while for me to get there. For my brain to stop moving around, thinking about what my father told me. I already knew about his past. About his time in the street and how he’d changed. But I never thought about who he sold to. About who those people’s families might’ve been. Like Coach. Like Whit. Like who knows who else. And then when I finally got those thoughts to chill, new thoughts popped in there, like, I can’t believe I’m having a little sister. A sister. Little girl. And me. Snowflake and Lightning. And then that turned into, Name her? Oh no. What am I supposed to name her? And then:

  Name ideas (for Snowflake):

  Snowflake

  Snow

  Flake

  Turkey Wing

  Wing

  Ghost

  No, not Ghost.

  But maybe . . . No. Hmm. Little No Richardson. And we can maybe nickname her No-No.

  “Your dad told me y’all talked last night.” Mom got the cereal and a bowl from the cabinet and set them on the counter.

  “Yeah,” I said, scanning the inside of the fridge. Ketchup. Leftover veggies. Baking soda. I grabbed the milk and the orange juice.

  “Wanna talk about it?” See? That’s a mom.

  I thought about if I wanted to talk about it as I poured cereal into the bowl, then milk onto the cereal. Did I want to talk about it? Did I have questions? Nope. Not really. My dad wasn’t always my dad. I guess I get that. I mean, I wasn’t always the fine-o albino. I used to be Lu with the thick glasses that made me look like I was part fish. Like I was a mermaid man. A man-maid. A merman. This was before Dad gave me some of his gold chains. Before the earrings. Before the fresh fit and the contact lenses. But now all that’s fixed, and I’m me. So I guess as long as you try to fix the mess-ups, then . . . well . . . but my father’s mess-ups messed other people’s lives up. Big-time. Maybe that’s different. I don’t know.

  But I can understand wanting to be cool.

  Everybody can understand just wanting to be cool.

  “Nah. Not really,” this time out loud. I jammed a spoon into the bowl, shoveled cereal into my mouth.

  Mom nodded but looked at me to make sure I was good. Make sure there were no cracks. No flash of water in my eyes. “Okay, well then, as soon as you finish breakfast, we can get to work,” she said, flipping through the pages of her list. This was a list of all the people who’d placed orders with her for fruit art gifts, which meant she (we) had to first go grocery shopping for enough fruit to last the rest of the week, then come back to make the . . . thing—whichever one was being delivered today—and deliver it. And because I was out of school, I pretty much had to be her assistant.

  “Let’s see here. The first order is for a man named”—she double-checked the paper—“Charles Ringwald. Hmm. Sounds like a distinguished gentleman.” Distinguished is my mother’s way of saying fancy, and whenever she says it, she makes her mouth do this weird frown thing, but it’s not a sad frown, it’s a . . . distinguished frown. “Celebrating an anniversary. The message says, ‘Dear Picasso of Produce, can you please deliver a gift to my friend Charles? I’d love it to look like a cowboy. And for the message on the card, I’d like it to say, Four years ago you saved our lives. And we’ll always be grateful. Love, Terri and Castle.’ ”

  “Terri and who?” I almost choked on my cereal.

  “Says . . . Castle,” my mother repeated, squinting at the paper.

  “That’s Ghost! I mean, maybe there’s another Castle out there, but I’m pretty sure that’s Ghost.”

  “Ghost . . .”

  “From the team.”

  “His mama named him Castle?”

  “Yeah. I mean, you rather she named him Ghost?”

  “Good point.” My mother took a sip from her cup, swallowed, and aah’d dramatically. “Well, this is business, so don’t go running your mouth about it to him.” She read farther down the letter, mumbling to herself about the time this cowboy needed to be delivered. “Okay, between noon and three . . . yadda yadda yadda . . . son’s gonna be there,” she read on, before rolling the paper up.

  “He’s gonna be there?” I asked. He, being Ghost.

  “Look, you know my rule. People give gifts for all kinds of reasons, and it’s none of our business. Our business is to deliver and move on. Got it?” She pointed at me.

  “Of course. Sheesh.”

  “Good.” She tapped her chin with the paper tube, thinking. “Now . . . a cowboy . . .”

  In the spring and summer, my mother skips the normal grocery store and goes all the way across the city, over where Sunny lives, to an outside market where people sell fruit they say came from their own farms. But ain’t no farms around here, so the way I see it, we might as well just go to the regular store, where I can at least pretend the shopping cart is a scooter. At the so-called farmers’ market, where the so-called farmers (though they never even look like farmers) sell fruit and veggies, and all kinds of other stuff, there was an old lady named Granny who was selling cookies, which seemed weird because those ain’t grow on no farm. Other folks were selling like fifteen different kinds of honey and ten kinds of peanut butter. Some dude who looked like he was all hair and no skin was selling drinks made of blended-up grass, which seems silly because I don’t think you supposed to drink grass, and if you wanted to, you definitely shouldn’t have to pay for it.

  We grabbed a few watermelons, some cantaloupe, and some of the ones that’s green on the inside. Some strawberries, grapes, bananas, a bunch of kiwi, and a few different kinds of oranges, because there are a bunch of different versions of orange, but they all pretty much taste like orange. Navel oranges got the belly button, but they don’t have seeds. Valencia oranges got seeds, thin skin, and all the juice. The blood orange is red on the inside. The tangerine is called a tangerine even though it’s still an orange. Same as the clementine. And the grapefruit. I don’t really know if that’s true or not, but it seems like a grapefruit is just a nasty-tasting orange.

  We got everything we needed from the same lady—a woman named Frankie, who had the dirtiest fingernails I ever seen in my whole life, and a faded T-shirt that said YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT.

  When we got home, we unloaded everything, then got to work.

  Mom has made it all. I’m talking about baby cribs out of watermelon rind, cars out of cantaloupe. She’s made solar systems using grapes and cherries and kiwi for planets, and turned slices of apples into small canoes. One time she made peach pits—the part in the middle of the peach—look like a bunch of little brains. That one was for a Halloween party at a brain doctor’s house, so it was a double whammy.

  Today, a cowboy. Well, not really a cowboy. See, even though people ask for certain things, my mother pretty much gives them what she feels like she can make, which is sometimes the thing they asked for, and . . . sometimes something close to the thing they asked for. So, a cowboy hat. I mean . . . same thing, right? It’s related, and it’s definitely the part that matters most. Without the hat, a cowboy’s just a dude. Plus, cowboys call themselves cowboys
and don’t never be with a cow. So, the way I see it, my mom can call a cowboy hat a cowboy, if she feels like it.

  “Okay, so you already know what I need you to do.” Mom laid out the fruit on the counter, round things rolling all over the place.

  “Peel the oranges.” I said it flat, in the same voice I use when Coach asks us what the best do.

  “Because you’re the Orange Master,” she sang, pulling knives from the drawer. “But first, wash your hands. I know it’s early, but your fingers probably been all up in your nose, and who knows where else.” She only said that because before I was the Orange Master, I was the Booger Master, but that was a long time ago and she just won’t let it go.

  The plan was simple. First she cut the rind off the watermelon, cutting the round parts into straight parts, like turning a circle into a square. Or in this case, a rectangle. Then she cut chunks out the sides of the rectangle, like . . . hmm . . . turning it into an upside-down T, but an upside-down T if the stem part of the T is short and fat. This probably ain’t making no sense. So . . . let me see. Just . . . she cut the watermelon into the shape of a cowboy hat, okay? Just take my word for it. Then, what I did, after peeling a few oranges, was pull them into slices and put them in a bowl.

  “Toothpick,” my mother said, like a surgeon asking for the surgery knife. I handed her one from the container. She grabbed one of the slices from the bowl, stabbed it with the skinny wooden spear, then jammed it into the hunk of watermelon.

  “Another one,” she commanded. I handed her another toothpick. The thing about this process is that I honestly never knew what she was doing or how she was going to turn whatever fruit we had on the table into some kind of masterpiece. It usually happened just like it was happening this time. She’d tell me what I was supposed to cut or peel the skin off—usually oranges—and then she’d say random words like, “toothpick” or “honey,” or my favorite, which is “wallawallabingbang,” which she only said when she was done and happy with her creation. Because my mom thinks it’s funny. Because my mom is . . . my mom.