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  “Yeah,” he said, but it was noncommittal. I turned around and leaned against the counter. I could hear Keisha and John talking in the other room and had to suppress another ball of jealousy crawling up my throat. What was wrong with me?

  “That wasn’t a very convincing answer,” I said, looking at him expectantly. “What’s up?” As his mother I was supposed to ask questions like this, but I didn’t really want to hear the answer. What if he were having problems at school or with friends? Was there any room left within me to deal with that? The thought of having to help him navigate his own troubles felt overwhelming, like being hit with ocean waves when I was already exhausted from treading water too long. But why was I so tired? Things were going the way I wanted them to, weren’t they? Well, except for the stunt Keisha had just pulled about going to Jessica’s.

  “I was just wondering how long Keisha was going to stay,” Landon said.

  John laughed again, a big bellowing laugh, and Landon and I both looked toward the table. It was a few seconds before I turned back to my son and remembered the question he’d asked. “She’ll stay here as long as she needs to,” I said. There was finality in my words. Was he questioning me the way John had been? Did he not understand why it was so important that Keisha was here with us? Then I remembered my own exhaustion and my fears about her being the one who took Ruby’s laptop, and I let out a breath. “Is it hard for you to have her here?” I asked, softer this time.

  He shrugged. “It’s okay, I guess, but . . .”

  “But what?” I asked, really trying to tune in.

  “But she acts really weird sometimes.”

  “Weird how?” I hadn’t seen her act weird—well, except for tonight.

  He paused, then shook his head and turned away. “Never mind.”

  I should have grabbed his shoulder, looked him in the eye, and pushed for the real answer, but I let him go. I didn’t have the energy, and I wasn’t sure I could handle whatever it was he was talking about. Surely it was just that Keisha left hair in the bathroom drain and wore tank tops around the house. Right?

  Chapter 21

  I took two Tylenol PMs in order to make sure I didn’t wait up for Keisha and make myself crazy. When I woke up at eight the next morning, however, I peeked in on her before I did anything else. She was there, wrapped in the comforter, and it was a lead weight off my chest to know she’d come home. Well, it was one lead weight off my chest. There were three or four other ones still in place.

  John and Landon went to his parents’ house in Anaheim again. John’s dad wasn’t feeling well, and I knew that John helping out was his way of staying connected. I’d had several hours to replay last night in my mind and was becoming more and more bothered by it. Why had Keisha put me on the spot? Why would she want to hang out with Jessica at all? Why had she kissed up to John, and why had he responded to it like he had? I’d asked her to write her schedule on the calendar when she started working, and she’d done it for a while, but she hadn’t kept up with it so I didn’t know if she was working today or not. Noon came and went, one o’clock, two o’clock. Why was Keisha sleeping so late? Was she hung over again?

  I couldn’t stop thinking about Aunt Ruby’s missing laptop. If Keisha had stolen it, it had to be because she needed money, but I’d paid Tagg off a few days before Ruby came home and discovered the theft. If Keisha had pawned the laptop, why hadn’t she paid Tagg off with the money she’d have gotten from it? Did she owe more than she’d told me about? Had she needed the money for something else?

  I was obsessing, so I called Aunt Ruby. I asked her how she was doing, and we talked about yesterday for a few minutes until she changed the subject, opening it up for me to ask for specific information regarding the break-in. I’d meant to ask about it yesterday, but the conversation had taken a very different turn. She had the times and dates of all the alarm disarmings, and I wrote them on the dates they’d occurred on the calendar as she reported them to me. I knew right away the date I hadn’t gone—Friday the 18 at 6:54 p.m. Keisha had worked at eight o’clock that night, but I couldn’t remember if she’d left for work early or not. “Did you find anything else missing?”

  “No,” Aunt Ruby said. “Just the laptop, but it had my banking information on it and there was money taken from my accounts. It’s been very frustrating, especially since I’m trying to figure things out over a weekend. But the bank says they’ll return the funds—it’s part of the fine print, I guess. I just had to pay a hundred dollar protection fee.”

  “How much money did they take?”

  “There was about twelve hundred dollars’ worth of charges.”

  “Did they buy things, or just get cash?”

  “Some of both,” Ruby said. “They bought a car stereo from some place in Orange, and some gift cards from Target, of all places. But they also hit several ATMs for cash—taking out the max amount for two days until the bank did an automatic shutdown. I’d told them I was going to Greece, see, and so it had some alerts on the account—though they acted a little slowly, if you ask me.”

  “So the police are tracking the stereo, I assume,” I said, feeling relieved to know that Keisha didn’t have a car to put the stereo in, though the gift cards were damning.

  “That’s what they said,” Aunt Ruby answered. “And they’re looking at video footage at Target, I guess, but they haven’t given me a lot of hope that they’ll find the criminals. Because the amount was under two thousand dollars, they don’t give cases like this much of a priority. Like I said, though, they’re refunding the money. It should all be back in my account by tomorrow morning.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, staring at the date on the calendar and feeling a headache starting from all the building stress. “You are the last person that deserves something like this to happen.”

  “Oh, I know this isn’t your fault, and it’s going to be all right. Athena stopped by last night to look at my pictures, and she helped me order a new computer and—like I said—the bank has been very accommodating. They have an entire department devoted to loss recovery. It would be a very difficult job if you ask me—all that negativity.”

  “I agree,” I said, turning back to the kitchen and feeling the need for a change in subject. “So, have you talked to Gabriel? Does he live close by?”

  It was the perfect topic-changing question, and from the way she hemmed and hawed, I guessed that she had talked to him but seemed to be struggling with her feelings. I asked a few more questions until finally making my good-byes.

  Once I hung up, I returned to the calendar by the fridge. I reviewed the calendar on my phone as well as Landon’s practice schedule, trying to remember the details of March 18, the day I hadn’t disarmed the alarm. I’d worked Fountain Valley that day, and John hadn’t been here when I got home from work, which would have been around six o’clock. Landon was at a friend’s house—it was on the calendar in orange pen. Keisha had been home when I got home, though, but had left soon after. I’d let her take my car because she worked and I wasn’t going anywhere. I raised a hand to my forehead and took a deep breath. I didn’t want to do this anymore.

  I needed to take a Tylenol for my headache and then switch the laundry, but though I went through the motions, I kept thinking about Keisha and Ruby and all the things I hadn’t told John that I wished I had so we could talk about everything. The information was bursting inside of me.

  When I’d finally run out of things to clean—well, not really, but I was sick of cleaning—I sat down with the book Tori had chosen for book group, The War of Art. I tried to give it a fair shake, but it annoyed me. It talked about “resistance,” which was some ethereal concept centered on the idea that we are out to sabotage ourselves away from success. It was kind of artsy—which I’d worried about when Tori first told us about it—and, honestly, I didn’t really get it. I wasn’t resisting anything in my own life. I wasn’t distracting myself from my potential. I was simply working hard on several fronts to fulfill my obli
gations. I didn’t like thinking that there was more to me than what was here right now. I didn’t like the idea that I wasn’t doing something I was meant to do.

  I heard Keisha’s bedroom door open and looked at the clock: 2:45 p.m. I put down the book, got up from my chair, and met her in the living room. “Are you okay?” I asked. I’d wanted to sound direct, but it came out tentative, careful.

  “Sure,” she said, rubbing her forehead.

  “How was Jessica’s?”

  “Fine.” She walked past me toward the kitchen. I turned and followed, determined to talk but hesitant to bring anything up too. I didn’t like confrontation and therefore spent so much time avoiding it that I wasn’t really sure how to confront someone correctly when it had to be done.

  “Do you work today?”

  “No, it’s my day off.”

  “You haven’t been writing your schedule on the calendar.”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  She pulled the cereal from the cupboard and the milk from the fridge. We’d run out of things to talk about much too soon, leaving me with only one option: face it head-on.

  I took a breath. “I don’t appreciate what you did last night.”

  She looked at me, cereal in one hand and milk in the other. “What did I do?”

  “You knew why I didn’t want you to go to Jessica’s.”

  She moved to the counter, put down her things, and turned to the cupboard to get a bowl. She busied herself with breakfast in the middle of the afternoon, and I waited her out. “Sorry,” she finally said as she poured the milk. It was a flippant apology, the kind someone said when they didn’t mean it but felt obligated to say it anyway. It was the kind of apology I would expect from a teenager, not a grown woman who owed me better than this for all the help I’d given her.

  So, did I push harder for information or just let it go? Ugh, where was my owner’s manual on how to handle this? Should I ask her if she used last night? Did I want to know the answer?

  “Are you okay?” I finally asked again, giving her the chance to tell me something and hoping that my compassion would be more effective than my questioning. If she chose to tell me, then I would feel as though I’d created a trusting relationship that made her feel comfortable enough to tell me the truth.

  “I’m good,” she said. She took the milk back to the fridge without meeting my eye.

  I stood there for a few seconds, scrounging my brain for something I could say to her. For all my worries about her and Ruby’s laptop, I couldn’t pin it on her. It seemed too unfair, but I needed to say something. Preferably something that would motivate her in good ways. I finally settled on “I love you, Keisha. I want good things for you. If you need to talk, I’m here, okay?”

  She smiled, but there was something fake about it. Did she not believe me? “I love you too, Shannon. I’m going to watch Jersey Shore, okay? I TiVoed it.” She walked past me with her cereal and out of the kitchen.

  I stared at the cabinets. I liked to feel strong and in control of a situation, but right now I feared I was completely delusional.

  Something was changing—or had changed—and it worried me. Yet I hadn’t pushed for information—didn’t want to. Didn’t know how. The dryer dinged, and I was relieved for something else to do. Something I knew, something I could control, something that didn’t terrify me.

  As I went about the rest of the afternoon, I told myself over and over again to be positive, to stay focused, not to give in to my fears. School started soon, and it would change everything. It had to. I would not focus on these negatives; I would look ahead, instead of backward, and be the support system she needed. I needed her to make this work more than ever. She could not fail. For both our sakes.

  Chapter 22

  Keisha started school on Monday. I was so excited I could hardly stand it. This was her ultimate chance to prove all the naysayers wrong, to move forward with her life and show the world what she could do. She was really nervous in the morning, to the point of getting snappy with me, but I didn’t take it personally. This was the first time since her sophomore year of high school that she was entering a school of any kind. I dropped her off on my way to work—she could take the bus home afterward—and texted her at lunch, asking how it was going.

  Keisha: This is going to be so hard.

  My stomach sank, but I responded with optimism and encouragement.

  Shannon: You can do it. I know you can! Tomorrow will be better.

  Tuesday wasn’t better, though, but I had high hopes for Wednesday until she came home with a list of things she needed to buy—$1,500 of equipment, makeup, and accessories! She hadn’t finished her financial aid application but had to have all her supplies by Monday.

  “Maybe this is a sign that I’m not ready for this,” Keisha said, flopping onto the couch and throwing the papers into the air. They fluttered down to the ground almost poetically. She threw an arm over her eyes. “It’s just so much . . . stuff.”

  I picked up the papers and sat down in the chair, smoothing them out on my lap and reading the list of supplies included in the kit: a mannequin head, pin curl clips, blow drier, ceramic straightener, brushes, combs, foils, curlers, picks, etc., etc., etc. My eyes focused on the price at the bottom of the page again. Nine hundred and fifty dollars for the complete hair startup kit. And another $600 for the required makeup kit. Holy cow. I took a deep breath, though, and schooled my expression. “It’s stuff you’ll use once you’re fully licensed though,” I pointed out. “And it says right here that it’s all top-of-line, so it will last.”

  Keisha took her arm off her face. “I don’t have fifteen hundred dollars,” she whined.

  “Well, how much do you have?” I’d paid off Tagg and made the first payment for her school. She had to have saved up something in the meantime.

  “I only have, like, two hundred, and now I can only work evening shifts. And the course work is so hard, Shannon.”

  Two hundred dollars? I wanted to ask why she only had that much, but it was her confidence and commitment I was the most worried about. “It’s always hard to start new things, but I really think this will be a good thing. You need something to focus on, something that will build a future.”

  She groaned and threw her arm over her face again. I looked back at the list. “Okay, what if I buy this stuff for now, and when your financial aid comes through, you can pay me back.”

  She didn’t answer right away and kept her arm over her eyes. Finally she sighed loudly. “I guess.”

  It wasn’t quite the grateful answer I had hoped for, but I had to remind myself of how overwhelming my first few weeks of college were. I remembered looking over my course syllabi and thinking there was no way I could keep up. She needed a cheerleader right now, and I needed her to make this work. How else could I keep justifying all I had done? “You’re going to do great, Keisha,” I said, reaching over to shake her leg. “We’ll get the kit and you’ll get into a new groove, and eighteen months from now you’ll get a job in an awesome salon and fill your pockets with cash every day.”

  She still didn’t respond. When her phone buzzed in her pocket, however, she sat right up and pulled it out, reading the text before looking up at me. “You really think so?” she said while typing a response into her phone. I didn’t know how people could carry on a verbal conversation at the same time they were texting with someone else.

  “I know so,” I said, still using my cheerleader voice. “I’ll go order the kit right now.”

  “Okay,” she said, putting her phone in her pocket. “I’ve got to go to work.”

  “I didn’t realize you worked today,” I said as I stood along with her. She still hadn’t written her schedule on the calendar.

  “Until midnight,” she said.

  “That late? You have class again in the morning.”

  She headed down the hall to her room. “The joys of a twenty-four–hour restaurant and being completely broke.”

  Less than five minutes la
ter she was back, dressed in her uniform with her hair pulled back and wearing more makeup than usual. “Can I take your car?”

  I’d hoped to meet John and Landon at Landon’s practice tonight, but I’d expected Keisha to be going with me since her schedule wasn’t on the calendar. “Maybe I could drop you off,” I offered.

  She made a face. “Then you have to pick me up at midnight. Or, well, maybe I can get a ride home from someone.” She pulled her phone out of her pocket. I hated her being a burden on her coworkers, and she was already taking the bus from school, which I knew was really hard for her. I wouldn’t like taking the bus either.

  “It’s fine,” I amended, heading into the kitchen. “Let me get the keys.”

  After she left, I ordered her kit, having to charge it to my credit card because funds were low in our account thanks to the money I’d given her to pay off Tagg and the tuition I’d paid. I was going to have to talk to John about this one and didn’t look forward to it.

  When he came home, I explained about the kit.

  “I wish you’d have talked to me before you paid for everything,” John said, opening cupboards in search of something to eat. I hadn’t made dinner, and Landon was at a friend’s house. “Maybe she should have waited on school if she isn’t prepared to pay for at least part of it. Why doesn’t she have any money? She’s been working for almost a month, hasn’t she?”

  I didn’t know where all her money was going either, but it wasn’t like waitresses made a ton, and she’d been out of work for a long time. I explained to him, much as I’d explained to Keisha, about how important it was for her to be working toward her future. He agreed.