Hungry Hill: A Memoir

Chapter 53 - Runaway

256 H u n g ry H i l l 53. Runaway “I’ll show you! I’m getting out of here. You’ll be sorry, all of you!” Joey yells on his way out the door. From the backyard hedges, he shouts back, “You’re all jerks anyway!” An experienced runaway, Joey has spat out the language of mistreatment and warning, but has ignored the lion/lamb March weather with its falling temperatures and risk of snow. Only in sixth grade, Joey has already taken off from home four or five times. Families of runaways on television always care about the “missing” child, call the police even, but Mary just said to let him go, and began coloring her hair. Michael and Danny agree that Joey will be back, and I only worry because I don’t have anything better to do and have an overactive imagination anyway . But over two hours have passed, Mary’s hair is now in curlers, and Joey is still not back. Now the house is tense, as we wait, not talking to one another, somehow afraid of words. I can’t get used to Joey’s running away. “What if he hops a bus for Connecticut? He knows where the bus station is, by now,” I fret, once Mary is tucked away in the bathroom. “He doesn’t have any money, so how far can he get?” Danny reasons. “But it’s freezing out again. He didn’t wear any mittens.” I am thumbing through the basket of mittens on the cellar stairs. “So that’ll make him come back all the sooner,” Michael says. “He’s eleven, how far do you think he’s going to get?” “Dad’s Mass is tomorrow morning. What if he’s not back for it?” I ask. Mary has arranged for a memorial Mass for my dad on his one-year anniversary . “I’d skip the Mass if I could,” Michael says. “Michael.” I raise my voice in shock. Then we are silent, alone with our thoughts. In the quiet, I can hear the clock ticking. “Michael, remember how Dad used to say we’d never visit his grave after he died? How on Saturday mornings he’d try to get us to go with him to the cemetery to put flowers on Mom’s grave?” My dad had been right, I have not been back to the cemetery. I was no better than Saint Peter in the garden denying Christ. A Memoir 257 “That was the only good thing about his getting married again. He stopped that cemetery ritual,” Michael says, knitting his eyebrows into a ragged line. “Mary wasn’t going to put up with any of that nonsense of his.” Michael’s pronouncements wear me down, strip me of any energy to contradict him. I say nothing, but secretly am frightened of how he has leveled my dad’s trips to the cemetery with the word “nonsense.” I imagine Joey running to the cemetery, scaling the wrought-iron gates, lost inside, frantically searching for the Saint George plot. “He’s probably over at Jeff Sullivan’s house, all warm and watching cartoons ,” Gerry says. “What about calling Jeff Sullivan’s house?” I ask as Mary slips back into the kitchen. “No, you are not calling anyone. The Sullivans don’t need to know what goes on here. Your brother will be back,” Mary orders. “It’s just what your father would have done.” I can feel myself shrinking, holding back. How does she know what my father would have done? I wonder. “Well, Carole, it is what your father would have done.” I hate her for reading my mind. “You disagree with me, don’t you, Carole?” Mary taunts me. “I don’t know what he would have done,” I say, making an effort to keep my voice calm, but failing. If my tone so much as displeases her, I am readying myself for a slap in the face. But, no, Mary does not hit me, crying instead that I have never cared for her, that she has never meant anything to me. I lie and tell her that I do care for her, all the while feeling as if I am going insane. While Joey is roaming around Springfield in freezing temperatures, I am reassuring Mary of how much I care for her. I stoop to using her line, Where would we be without her? She makes herself a cup of Sanka...