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Pearl

Henry Holt and Company

Henry and I get comfortable in our usual Days of Our Non Lives positions on his mother's scratchy plaid couch in their tiny living room. We're just in time for the familiar hourglass. Sally hushes us for the opening voice-over.

Like sands through the hourglass ...

Henry and I look at each other and telepathically exchange a single, familiar phrase: We are pathetic.

... so are the days of our lives.

The small air conditioner duct-taped into the only window in the cramped living room hums mournfully over the tragedy about to play out on the TV, as well as the sagging couch the three of us sit on — Sally in the middle, as always. I close my eyes and feel the cool air against my sweaty face as the opening scene starts.

Sally leans forward to watch. Her huge breasts rub over the top of the metal mixing bowl filled with Doritos she holds in her lap. She grips the edges of the bowl, her dimpled arms blocking Henry and me from reaching in to grab a chip, as if we don't know the rule or might try to break it: No eating during Days. Sally says the crunching is too distracting. Instead, we wait for the commercials and crunch during the ads while Sally fills us in on whatever we've missed since the last episode we watched with her. Her face always gets a warm glow when she talks about TV love, like it's going to ooze into her own life any day now. Sally believes with every molecule that makes up her large pink body that somewhere out there is the perfect man for her. Henry always looks sad when his mom says this. Neither of us believes it. Even if that man did exist, how could he find Sally when she never leaves the house? There is only one man who knows where Sally is, and he left fifteen years ago, two months after Henry was born.

Henry doesn't know much more about his father than I know about mine, and maybe that's how we got to be such good friends, sharing our soap-opera-like dreams about who our real fathers are and how they might come back into our lives. The only things I know about my father are the hints I get from listening at closed doors. Not that I get that many opportunities. But sometimes, when my mom comes home particularly late from her waitressing job, I can get lucky. Whenever she's late, it means she's spent her extra tips at the bar on half-priced booze. If her keys jingle in the lock for more than fifteen seconds, I know it's a night to listen for information. The first thing my mom does after going to the bathroom is head to her bedroom and call her best friend, Claire, to recap the last fifteen years of her life and all the places it's gone wrong.

One night three years ago, the keys were jingling in the lock for nearly a full minute before I heard Gus, my grandfather, rush down the hall. As soon as his footsteps thundered down the stairs, I inched out of my room to the top of the stairs to listen.

"Where the hell have you been?" he roared when he opened the door for her. "Have you forgotten you have a twelve-year-old daughter upstairs? Have you forgotten how she came to be?"

"I haven't forgotten," my mom said in the resentful voice she used when she talked to him. "I haven't forgotten that it wasn't my fault!"

Gus gave a doubting grunt.

"You think I asked for it? You think I wanted to be attacked?" My mom's voice shook with anger and drunkenness.

"I don't know what you expect, Lexie. I don't know what you ever expected. You come out of work late every night, drunk, dressed like —"

"Don't. Don't you dare!"

"I'm asking you, Lexie. What the hell did you expect?"

I leaned farther over the stairs, waiting for my mom to reply. I hated it when they fought, which was practically every time they were in the same room. Luckily, that wasn't very often if they could help it.

"Nothing," she finally said almost in a whisper. "I didn't expect a goddamned thing."

I scooted back to my room as soon as she neared the stairs, then pressed my ear against the wall that separated our bedrooms.

"Damn that Bill. Damn him to hell!" she kept crying on her side of the wall. She was telling Claire all about the horrible things Gus had implied. "That bastard thinks I wanted to get pregnant?" she asked.

I can still remember how her words punched my chest. I quickly tried to piece them together, hoping some image of the truth might emerge. Attacked. Pregnant. Bill. Twelve years. But there were still too many missing pieces.

Up until then, Henry and I had been pretty satisfied with the stories we'd concocted about our dads. Mine was a pilot who disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle. Henry's had been kidnapped by terrorists. These scenarios were a lot more interesting than the unsatisfactory ones our moms fed us up to that point: My dad was simply a "mistake" and better off gone, and Henry's dad "disappeared" when he was still a baby. We needed our dads to have names and lives, and — most important — futures with us. I wasn't expecting the story about Bill.

The next morning I crept into my mom's room and gently woke her up. Her eyes were puffy from crying, and she smelled like hangover.

"Who's my father?" I asked her, trying to sound like I meant business. "Tell me who Bill is."

"What? How?"

"I heard you," I told her. "Last night. I know his name is Bill, and I want to know who he is."

She closed her eyes for a minute, then opened them again and looked me straight in the face. "Please don't ask me about him. Please don't say that name." She rolled over and put her pillow over her head.

"Is he my dad? Where is he?"

She lifted the pillow. "Some things are better left unsaid," she said to the wall. "Trust me."

"I have a right to know," I told her.

She put the pillow back over her head. "There's nothing to tell," she mumbled into the pillow.

"Liar," I whispered.

"I heard that! And stop listening in on my phone calls!"

I left her and went to my room where I shut my door, got back into bed, and put my own pillow over my head. Later, when I told Henry what had happened, he was as disappointed as I was. I selfishly suspected it was because he realized if the father we'd invented for me could turn out to be a sham, so could his.

* * *

When the phone rings, Sally motions for Henry to answer even though the only people who call here are me and telemarketers, and I'm sure Henry would prefer to just let the machine pick up. Sally refuses to be put on the Do Not Call list. I think it's because she's so lonely she actually likes to have a chat, even if it pains her to refuse to give money after the five-minute spiel she's just been patient enough to listen to.

Henry grabs the phone off the coffee table and heads down the hallway so Sally's show won't be interrupted. As soon as the door to his room clicks shut, a commercial comes on.

Sally and I reach for a handful of Doritos and crunch quietly. Then we reach in again. My orange fingers collide with the back of her puffy white hand, leaving an orange print. She pretends not to notice. We're crunching through a Jenny Craig ad when Henry returns.

"That was your mom, Beany," he says casually. "She says come home she has something to tell you."

"My mom?" I ask. Never, in the history of our friendship, has my mom ever called me at Henry's house. I didn't even know she knew Henry's last name to look up his number.

Henry shrugs, failing to recognize the significance.

"Come with me," I say.

He looks at the rattling air conditioner longingly, but nods okay. Sally's show is back on so it's understood we don't need to say good-bye. We leave the cool cave of their living room and step into the blinding, baking sun.

Henry wipes his forehead with the back of his hand and pulls his T-shirt away from his body as we trudge along. He has a thing about sweat spots. Even though he puts two layers of deodorant on, he still sweats through three shirts a day in the summer. He says he must have inherited overactive sweat glands from his father because Sally never sweats. I don't point out that Sally never moves enough to work up a sweat in the first place.

"Why would my mom call me?" I ask him for the third time.

Henry shrugs and fans his shirt.

We walk the rest of the familiar two blocks in silence, except for the steady smack of my flip-flops sticking to my sweaty feet and Henry huffing disagreeably, flapping his T-shirt. The old, run-down houses that line the street are quiet in the still, hot summer air. Time seems to have stopped thirty years ago on our road. Gus says ever since the economy tanked in the late eighties and the rich people moved out, the neighborhood has gone to seed. There are just a handful of old folks from his day who still live here. The rest are from "away" as he likes to say.

As we walk, I look at each house, thinking about the stories Henry and I have made up about each family living inside. When we get to my house, I think about the real stories it holds, and wonder what new drama my mom is about to add to it.

This can't be good is all I can figure.

When we get to the paint-chipped front steps of my house, Henry moves closer to me. I can smell his deodorant and the fabric softener Sally uses because she likes the little teddy bear in the ads. I move closer too, so that our arms touch.

Being close to Henry has always made me feel safe. Ever since I met him at the MiniMart on the corner of our street. I was there to buy my mom some ginger ale for her hangover and get myself a treat with the change. Henry was buying his mom Soap Opera Digest and some Suzy Q's. We were seven and it was July. Sally said later this was a sign, us being seven and meeting in the seventh month. She said we were meant to be friends forever.

That first day, Henry and I stepped out of the MiniMart together and began to walk home, side by side.

"What's your name?" he asked shyly.

"Bean," I said. At school everyone called me by my real name, Pearl. But right away, I knew Henry wasn't like everyone else.

"Bean. As in the vegetable?"

"Actually, it's a legume."

He gave me a weird look. I just shrugged. I knew it was a stupid name, but it was what I'd always been. My mom said she named me Pearl because I was her unexpected gem. But I don't think pearls are actually gems. And I don't think I'm one, either. Gus said the first time he held me, I felt soft and squishy like a bean, not hard and cold like a pearl. But I personally believed the real reason he wouldn't call me Pearl was because it was the name my mom chose.

"I'm Henry," Henry said. I thought he might hold his hand out to me for a shake, only he couldn't because he had a plastic bag in each hand.

On our way home, we stayed side by side. We discovered that we would be in the same class in the fall and that we lived only two blocks from each other. By the time we reached his house, I felt like I had my first real friend.

Unlike Sally, my mom never paid much attention to Henry and me and our fated friendship. She also never seemed to notice that Henry was my only friend. She never commented on the fact that I didn't have any girls come over for what other parents called "playdates." Or that I was never invited to sleepovers or birthday parties. My mom never signed me up for soccer or swimming lessons or Girl Scouts or any of the other things the rest of the girls did in my classes. I'd eagerly hand her the permission slips sent home in my folders from school, but she just scoffed, wondering who had time to trek their kids all over town. My mom always said there was no such thing as a normal childhood and that I should be glad I wasn't having one. But I think that was just her pathetic attempt to make my pitiful lack of a social life — and her disinterest in helping me get one — into something resembling cool. It was also her way of avoiding all the other moms, who were at least ten years older than her.

Behind her back, I'd ask Gus to take me. I remember the first Girl Scout meeting I went to, and how all the other girls' moms came into the host's house to pick them up. The host mom made them coffee, and they stood around in the kitchen and gossiped and complained about their husbands. When Gus came to get me, all the moms gave each other the eye, which I was pretty sure was their way of saying, "Poor Pearl. Her mom had her when she was fifteen and never married. I guess we could have it a lot worse." And I swear all the girls looked at me in the same pitying way their moms did.

The truth is, I was better off with Henry. I didn't need to play soccer or learn how to make a sit-upon to use when I went camping in the woods. Because no one was ever going to take me camping in the first place. I didn't need badges or trophies. Just a friend.

* * *

I pause on the front porch before opening the screen door. Henry stops, too. We look at each other just for a second, then Henry gives me a "let's get this over with" nod and opens the door for me.

Inside, I smell tomato sauce cooking. This is not a good sign. Whenever my mom is nervous or upset, she cooks. Unless it's nighttime. Then she drinks.

As we walk down the hall to the kitchen, I peek into the living room to say hi to Gus, but his chair is empty, which means he's out fishing or taking a nap — the two activities he always resorts to when my mom is home during the day. The sunken spot molded to his sagging body makes me feel lonely.

This morning when I left for Henry's, Gus was sitting there reading the paper. When I stopped to say good-bye to him, he looked up and sighed at me in his sad way. "Be good, Bean," he said, just like always. Be good. As if I've ever gotten into anything resembling trouble in my entire so-called life. Now that I'm the age my mom was when she had me, I know what he really means. Don't be like your mother.

Henry and I make our way to the kitchen and the sounds and smells of cooking. My mom stands at the stove with her back to us. Her hair is tied in her waitress ponytail. She looks about eighteen, not thirty. I think whoever my dad was must have been a real scag because my mom is tall and beautiful and I am short and plain. The only clue I have to what my father looked like is by looking in the mirror, which I try to avoid at all costs.

I am no Pearl.

My mom turns around when we enter the kitchen.

"Sit down, Bean girl," she says, turning back to the pot.

I don't want to sit down.

Henry pulls out a chair from the kitchen table in the corner of the room, but he doesn't sit, either.

"What's going on?" I ask.

Her back rises and falls slowly as she takes a deep breath. The ends of her ponytail curl up in a perky way, but the wisps of hair falling on the side of her face show how worn out she really is.

She has a tank top on under her apron. She's also wearing the cutoff jeans shorts that Gus says make her look "loose." I hate that word. When she turns back to face me again, the front of the apron covers her shorts so it looks like she isn't wearing anything underneath. She keeps stirring the pot, even though she has to reach behind her to do it. The sauce bubbles. She wipes the sweat off her forehead with the back of her other arm.

"Okay," she says. "I'm just going to tell you."

But instead she keeps stirring and staring at me.

"What?" I finally ask.

"Gus is dead," she says, just as if she's saying "I have to work late tonight."

"Huh?" I say. I shake my head as if I have water in my ears and misunderstood.

She turns back to the pot and reaches for the pepper grinder, which she carefully turns above the bubbling sauce, sprinkling a fine, gray dust into the pot.

"Mom! Would you just stop for two seconds! What's going on?"

I step closer and pause, remembering Gus's empty chair in the living room.

"Wait," I say. "Where's Gus?"

My mom looks up at the ceiling.

"I called at the bottom of the stairs when it was time for lunch and he didn't come down. I kept calling, yelling at him." She shakes her head. "I called him a bastard under my breath," she says quietly. "But he still didn't answer me. So I finally went up and found him there. In bed. Dead."

The sweat on my forehead starts to drip down my temple. Henry breathes behind me. It is stifling in this kitchen.

"Are — are you sure?" I finally ask.

"Yes, Beany. I'm sure."

"But, then —" I see him in the living room this morning, looking up at me from his paper.

Be good.

I stand in the kitchen with the simmering pot as the prickles of truth start at my toes and make their way all the way up to my heart. My lip quivers. I bite it still.

"Where — where is he now?" I ask, trying to steady my voice. I don't know why I don't want to cry. It's what normal people would do when they find out their grandfather's dead. But ... we aren't normal.

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Excerpted from Pearl by Jo Knowles. Copyright © 2011 Jo Knowles. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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