Hand Me Down by Melanie Thorne Read Free Book Online Page B

decide if I want to live with Dad or move in with Mom’s sister, Tammy, in Utah. Mom thought it would be a good idea to spend Christmas with Dad to help my “decision-making process.” The woman whose worst threats used to include sending me off to stay with him was now saying things like, “It will be good for you to spend more time with your father.” As if I really need a weekend with Dad and Crystal to understand how impossible it would be for me to survive in their two-bedroom trailer. What I need to decide is how well Jaime will survive without me.
    If not for her, I would run away. But instead, I’m sitting in between her and our father in the front seat of his pickup, with the gearshift digging into my thigh, and dreaming about my own little cottage in the woods. I’d have a fireplace and floor to ceiling bookshelves, big comfy chairs, and a skylight. A dog like Rambo for protection.
    “You know we need to go through Vallejo, right?” I say and Dad swerves to make the turnoff. Someone honks.
    “I was testing you,” he says. “You think you know everything.”
    “I was the one who wanted to bring a map,” I say.
    “We’ll find it,” he says and puts his arm around my shoulder. The fake ocean scent of his Old Spice deodorant is sharp. “Deborah gives good directions,” he says. “She’s related to me.”
    I roll my eyes. “You didn’t write them down.”
    “Don’t need to,” he says and nudges my shoulder with his hand. He pokes my temple. “I have an excellent sense of direction.”
    “
I
have an excellent sense of direction,” I say.
    “Exactly,” he says. “I also have a perfect memory.”
    “Me, too,” Jaime says.
    “That’s my girl,” Dad says.
    Jaime smiles. “I remember being born.”
    “You do not,” I say.
    Jaime turns to me and crosses her arms. “Yes, I do.”
    I say, “I don’t even remember.” Mom says I took one look at baby Jaime, pink and wrinkly, squirming and wailing in her arms, and I ran out of the room screaming. Mom had to get a nurse to chase me down because Dad didn’t show up at the hospital until Jaime was seven hours old, but of course, she doesn’t know that.
    “So?” Jaime says. “I remember things you don’t.”
    I think you have that backward.
“Whatever,” I say, crossing my arms over my chest like a shield near Dad’s dangling hand. “We should have brought a map.”
    He says, “Don’t forget, Liz,” and lifts his freckled arm off me. “‘We’re smarter than the average bear,’” he says in his best Yogi voice. A few years ago it would have been enough to make us laugh.
    I say, “That won’t help us read road signs in the dark.”
    “Lighten up,” he says to me and even though he’s not holding a beer, in my head I hear the sound of the can opening, the swift hissof pressurized air escaping, because it’s what usually happens after he tells me that.
    Jaime says, “Don’t you know how to get there?”
    Dad and I say in unison, “Of course.”
    I stare out the front window, the low winter sun setting behind the hills ahead, the light fractured orange, blue, purple, and pink atop the silver glassiness of the water’s surface on either side of this bridge. Jaime and I made this drive with Mom every Thanksgiving I can remember until Terrance showed up. On our way to Aunt Deborah’s, Dad’s sister and Mom’s best friend, through Vallejo and over the Mare Island Causeway, past the giant boats with rows of twinkling lights, circular portholes, and metal fixtures. We pass the marshes full of tall white cranes and egrets standing still as statues in the grass-encircled pools. Pitted and water-beaten wooden poles left over from forsaken piers pierce the water’s surface. Little birds perch on top, some tucked in for the night, their feet invisible, their beaks buried under their feathered necks.
    Dad clears his throat the way singers do before a performance, and I wait for his version of an apology. “Hey a, Boo-Boo,” he