All this time, I’d had this idea of Jax’s house as some pristine image from a Martha Stewart magazine. Now I could see that, despite the warm casseroles his mom made, his life wasn’t all that different from mine.
We walked through the living room, where Jax was watching TV on the couch with his back to us. As we passed, he turned and looked up at me. He shot me a sympathetic smile and then turned back to the TV.
Inside Leila’s messy bedroom, I sat at the end of her unmade bed. I picked up a small article of clothing that looked like a leather tube top and stared at it.
“It’s a skirt,” Leila said.
“This?” I held it up.
“For my work. I’ve been dancing. Didn’t Jax tell you?”
“No.” He was probably ashamed. I knew what she meant by “dancing,” but I wasn’t about to say anything.
She walked over to me and placed her hands on my thighs. She leaned in. “I take my clothes off for money because I got knocked up with Brian when I was sixteen. Ever since then, my life has been a shit show.”
I jerked back. “I’m sorry.”
“I take my clothes off for money, Emerson. How sad is that?” She stared into my eyes as she continued to work the same piece of gum she’d been chewing the whole night.
“Um . . . sad, I guess . . . but at least people want to see you naked?” I was always trying to be the silver-lining girl. In the months before my mom left, I’d trained myself to find a positive angle to every situation. I thought if I could be the happy-go-lucky girl, it would rub off on them. No such luck.
Leila wasn’t looking for acceptance, anyway. She was trying to teach me a lesson.
She stood up and crossed her arms. “Men will pay to see anything naked.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“It’s true.”
“Well, at least you stuck around. At least you’re here with Brian and Jax.” Leila didn’t deserve accolades for good parenting, but at least she hadn’t abandoned her kids.
Tears slipped from her eyes. I felt my own throat tighten at the thought of my mother living on some beach somewhere in paradise. Leila sat next to me on the bed without making a sound, but I knew she was crying.
“I could never leave these boys. They’re so precious to me.”
“You’re a good mom, even if you have to wear shit like this.” I held up the leather skirt.
THAT NIGHT, LEILA read to me from the back of the maxi pad package. She taught me how to use a tampon, which was weird, and she reminded me over and over again how hard it was to be a young mother. She talked about Brian and his musical gifts. She said he would be famous, a legend. He was ahead of his time and a natural genius on the guitar. She said he was going to save them all, travel the world, make lots of money, and rescue the family from the pits of Neeble.
Occasionally, Leila would go into the bathroom alone and say she was blowing her nose, but I knew otherwise. At about eleven p.m., we heard a knock on her bedroom door, and Brian walked in. There was a glow that followed Jax’s older brother, like he really was heaven-sent. He had longish hair and a superstar smile. I was smitten. I had been from the first time I saw Brian plucking his guitar in the garage.
“Mom? Mom?”
Leila seemed a little out of it as she sat at her tiny vanity stool, staring at her reflection. Brian gave me a small smile as he walked toward his mom, making my stomach do somersaults.
“Brian, I’m fine,” Leila said.
“You should call it a night, Mom. You have to work a double tomorrow. Emerson, I think it’s time to go.” He said it nicely, but it still made me feel embarrassed.
“Of course.”
“No, Emerson, stay. Brian, let her stay. She can read to me and then she can go.”
He looked at me first, as if to ask if this was okay with me. I nodded then he turned back to his mom. “Okay.” He headed toward the door, but as he came toward me he bent down and whispered in my ear. “Don’t let her keep you up.”
I shivered, little tingles shooting down my arms just from his breath on my neck.
“Yes . . . sir.”
He laughed. “You don’t have to call me ‘sir.’ ”
My heart bounced around inside of my chest. “Okay.”
After he left, Leila got under the covers. “Come sit here next to me.” I scooted up to the head of the bed, and she handed me a National Enquirer. “Read that, will you?”
“Okay.”
“I always wished I had a daughter,” she said, and it made me feel good. There were actually people in the world who wished they had daughters.
I read her an article about a boozy Hillary Clinton being shipped off to rehab. “This can’t be true,” I said.
“I knew Hilary was an alkie,” Leila slurred.
“I think this is fake.” I thumbed through the rest of the magazine, past the Jesus sightings and UFO reports. By the time I finished reading all the main articles aloud, Leila was sound asleep. I crawled off the bed and headed down the hallway. I spotted Brian in his room as he smoked something out of a pipe—pot, I assumed. He threw a hand up in a motionless wave as I walked by, so I did the same.
“Hey!” he whispered.
I backed up to his doorway. “Hi,” I said timidly.
He put the pipe down. “Come in here.”
I waved smoke out of my face and walked up to where he was sitting on the bed. “What’s up?” I looked around. There were posters of rock bands on his walls, along with a calendar with mostly naked women on it.