Getting Over Jack Wagner by Elise Juska Read Free Book Online Page B

woman cut off and wafting, lacking a point of reference. She wore a big, untucked T-shirt and old khaki shorts that made her look wide and bloated. Her blond hair looked flat, dull, its natural brown beginning to creep in at the roots.
    My heart thudded in my chest, in the hollow of my throat. Our mother never looked like this. She was always in place, always presentable, always kempt. Her outside never revealed any traces of what was going on underneath. As she got closer, I saw her eyes were red and swollen.
    â€œWhere’s Dad?” I asked, scrambling to my feet. I needed to locate him, to pin him down in the world, to know that he was in the ugly green chair sagging prophetically in the corner of our living room. But I already knew that he wasn’t. “Is he at home? In the car? Where is he, Mom?”
    Mom focused at a spot somewhere over our heads, the dance shack or the tennis court or the thin, hot, drifting clouds. It didn’t matter. Camp Mohawk was another world, a place we’d left behind us years ago.
    â€œMom?” Camilla said, and I heard fear in her voice, too.
    â€œCome on, girls. Let’s go.”
    Looking back, I believe it was on the ride home from Camp Mohawk, while my mother told us how our father hadn’t come home from work on Friday, how he’d left no forwarding address, and how all of his jazz albums had disappeared with him, that the three of us began to solidify into the women we have become. My mother seemed to shrink inward, voice fading, knuckles whitening on the wheel. My sister appeared to grow a head taller, shoulders squaring, chin rising, voice taking on the crisp, purposeful ring of a business memo. I huddled in the backseat, knees drawn to my chin, watching the world from the other side of the window.
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    Within a week, my sister had found her Dad-substitute: her new boyfriend, Ivan. Ivan was long and shy, dressed in button-down browns and greens. He was running for student council president. Really, Ivan wasn’t presidential material. He was a little too gangly, a little too bucktoothed, a little too eager to please. He never seemed convinced of anything, even the easy things—whether to sit or to stand, whether to kiss Camilla on the cheek or the lips (I was spying, naturally)—much less the issues plaguing the student body of York High.
    But for Camilla, Ivan’s campaign was a project she could throw herself into. It was something to occupy her hands and her mind, like a patchwork quilt or a suffering vegetable garden. Camilla and Ivan spent long hours making posters at our kitchen table:
    Who Can? Ivan Can!
    I’ve An Idea: How ’Bout Ivan?
    They penned slogans on four hundred oversize buttons with permanent Magic Marker. If Ivan was being sloppy, Camilla grabbed the marker from his hand as he fumbled: “Is there anything I can do? Is there anything I can do?” Sometimes I could tell she was downstairs in the middle of the night by the squeak of a dying marker.
    Ivan was a good person, which is probably why, had he won, he would have made a bad president. Every night when he arrived at our house, he came into the living room first to say hello to Mom.
    â€œGood to see you, Mrs. Simon,” said Ivan, tall and awkward as a hat rack.
    Invariably, Mom was glued to her own Dad-substitute: prime-time television. She peered up at Ivan for a long, slow moment, squinting under her matted bangs as if trying to figure out where she knew him from. It was at moments like these when I worried, briefly, that we would soon end up either pan-handlers or circus freaks.
    Then Mom’s face would crack a tentative smile. “Good to see you, too,” she would say, and turn back to the screen.
    In general, Mom didn’t have much contact with the public in the year after Dad/Lou left. But she hadn’t completely lost her senses. Camilla and I were still fed and heated and laundered and bought the occasional pair of