Page 1 of January (New Orleans #1)

“M om, you didn’t even tell us,” Kyle said as her mother rushed into the kitchen.

“What’s there to tell? You didn’t even know her.”

Kyle rose from the beaten-up sofa, nodded for her sister, Jolie, to join her, and watched as Jolie rolled her eyes at her and reluctantly stood.

“She’s being dramatic, as always,” Jolie muttered under her breath.

Kyle heard her but didn’t really take it in as she moved into the kitchen. Her mom placed a half-finished cup of instant coffee onto the counter next to the sink, but not in it, and didn’t dump the coffee out and clean the cup, either. It had always bothered Kyle that her mother had so little space in this trailer but insisted on packing it with more stuff than Kyle had in her two-bedroom apartment, rarely cleaning the place. She was awful with dishes and typically just wiped them off with a rag or ran some water over them as if that would make them instantly clean and offered them to Kyle or Jolie.

“Mom, she died, and you didn’t even tell us. I had to hear about it from Dad, and you ’re her daughter.”

“She always liked him better than me,” her mother said.

“Mom, come on. Don’t be like this,” Jolie spoke, crossing her arms over her chest. “Just tell us.”

“She died. She was old. It happens. There’s nothing to tell.”

“But she was your mother and our grandmother,” Kyle argued.

“You never met her,” her mother stated a little louder this time. “And you should thank me for that. She was awful.”

“All you’ve ever told us is that you two didn’t get along and that you left the house when you were sixteen.”

“Yes, that’s true.” The woman turned back to the sink and dumped the coffee out of the cup she likely got from a thrift store.

“But you never told us what happened,” Jolie noted.

“Because it never mattered. I had Kyle to deal with, and your father wasn’t exactly helpful.”

“I always assumed she kicked you out because you got pregnant with me, and that’s how you and Dad ended up here,” Kyle said.

She watched as her mother turned on the water, ran it over the cup, and placed the cup upside down on the counter on top of a rag that had probably been there since she’d moved into this trailer years ago. Then, she turned, and Kyle caught something in her mother’s expression that had her doubting anything that was about to come out of her mouth. She’d seen it when her mother had told her that their father would be back in time to take them to the park or that she hadn’t spent their grocery money that week on cigarettes instead, and they’d be fine. So many times, they’d gone without dinner or had to rely on generous friends at school to give them things off their trays at lunch to make it through the day just in case they wouldn’t have anything for dinner later. She’d seen that expression when her mom told her that this time, it was going to work with her boyfriend of the month, but shortly after, he’d be gone, and at least twice, he’d left with either some of their belongings or whatever money he could find.

“Yes, that’s what happened. I’ve told you that before. She didn’t like that I got knocked up and told me to go. She was hoity-toity and didn’t want a pregnant teenager at home, so she gave me a hundred bucks and told me to get my ass to a hotel. So, that’s what I did. You act as though I haven’t told you that story before.”

“You haven’t,” Jolie reminded. “You just said that you left. You’ve told us that she was a bad mother and that you hated living there, but we put the rest together ourselves over the years.”

“Well, you were right. ”

Kyle knew they weren’t. At the very least, they weren’t all the way correct, and something else was going on that their mother wasn’t telling them. She thought about leaving and having Jolie talk to her. Jolie, as the baby of the family, was the one her mother felt more comfortable opening up to on the rare occasion she did actually open up about something. Kyle, on the other hand, had been the reason the woman had gotten kicked out of the house, or at least, that was what she’d always believed because her mother hadn’t ever been particularly kind to her. Three years after Kyle was born, when her mother was close to twenty years old, she’d had Jolie, named after her father’s mother, and they’d been a happy little poor family for another couple of years.

Her mother had even been relatively nice, and they’d each gotten a couple of birthday and Christmas gifts during those years. Then, the arguments had started. A year later, her father had moved out, and she’d only seen him once every month or so. Eventually, he had remarried, and after sending child support payments for a while and finding out that their mother hadn’t used them on their children, he’d started giving them money on the side. Kyle had been nine years old when her father had handed her twenty dollars each week and told her to keep it a secret from her mother. For a while, he’d given her Jolie’s money, too, and when Jolie got old enough, Kyle would hand it over to her, so he began giving her the twenty dollars himself.

“She’s still our grandmother,” Kyle said, pushing those memories out of her mind and getting back to the point.

“She never wanted me. And she never wanted either of you. Did you ever even see her here? Did she come for a visit? Write you letters? Send money when we desperately needed it? No. I took care of both of you. I did that. Your father left, and I took care of you.”

“Mom, we see Dad all the time.” Jolie uncrossed her arms. “He helped both of us get through college.”

“And I didn’t?” she asked, louder still. “I came to your graduations. ”

“Dad helped us pay for it,” Kyle added. “And I’m not mad at you because you couldn’t. It’s just that–”

“He got some high-paying job and bought a house with that younger wife of his, and I’m stuck here? Is that it? You’re too good for a trailer now?”

“Mom, she’s, like, three years younger than him. And no one said that. We just want to know about our grandma,” Jolie replied.

“Well, there’s nothing to know. She didn’t care, so that’s the story. Now, if we’re done with this little visit, I have to get ready for work.”

“I thought you were off today,” Kyle said.

“I took an extra shift for the overtime,” she replied, crossing her arms over her chest.

Kyle laughed silently because she and Jolie looked so much alike when they did that.

“Fine. Whatever.” Jolie turned to grab her coat from the chair next to the ragged sofa. “I’ve got to go, anyway.”

“Since when?” Kyle asked.

“Since now. Are you ready?”

“I guess so,” Kyle said.

Having driven Jolie over to the trailer to ask their mother these questions, she was Jolie’s ride, so before her younger, fierier sibling started full-on fighting with their mother about this, Kyle wanted to get them both out of there. It just wasn’t worth it. She knew her mother was lying about something, but they weren’t about to get the truth out of her when she was like this. Perhaps they could get her drunk later and get it out of her. She was always more open when she’d had a few. It was wrong to do, and they had other options, like going to their father, but he didn’t like talking about that time in their lives, either. Kyle got the impression that he didn’t know all that much. He’d always been kind toward their mother’s family, not bad-mouthing them, but he also tried to respect their mother’s wishes to leave that life behind and not mention them.

“Sometimes, she’s infuriating,” Jolie said the moment they were out of the trailer and their feet crunched in the gravel of the trailer park.

“Just sometimes?” Kyle teased. “Where do you need to go?”

“Oh, nowhere. I just wanted out of there,” Jolie admitted.

Kyle laughed and asked, “Do you want to see if Dad has any more info? He just told us what he heard from his cousin.”

“We missed the funeral,” Jolie replied, walking toward the car. “She was our grandmother, Kyle.”

“I know. I don’t like it much, either. Maybe she was as bad as Mom is saying she was.”

“Oh, please. That woman was lying through her teeth, and you know it.”

“There’s got to be a reason, though, right? Something had to have happened that made her hate her or for them to hate each other. And she’s right about one thing: our grandmother didn’t exactly request a meeting with us or ask us to visit her. I never got a single birthday card or Christmas gift from her. Did you?”

“No, but there’s still something we have to be missing. I get that she might have been mad at Mom because she got pregnant with you, but Dad said she was nice, from what he remembered. Would she really kick Mom out and tell her never to come back?”

“I don’t know,” Kyle said, pressing the button on her key fob to unlock the car. “Maybe. It happens.”

“I get her being shocked and maybe doing the whole ‘hundred bucks, go away’ thing initially, but making Mom stay away when she was four months along with you? Mom doesn’t exactly have any real-life skills, so I doubt she had any before this happened. Maybe if Grandma really did that to her, we shouldn’t want to learn more about her.”

“So, are you saying that you believe Mom now?” Kyle asked, opening the door.

Jolie opened the passenger door and said, “No, I stopped believing her the third time she told us that she was getting married, that we were moving out of the one-bedroom trailer, and that we’d each have our own rooms.”

Kyle nodded and climbed inside the car.

“Sometimes, I wonder how we both came from that woman. We’re so different than her,” Jolie added.

“Well, I think we both grew up wanting more than what we had, and to change our circumstances, we had to do something about them because she couldn’t or wouldn’t,” Kyle said as Jolie buckled her seat belt.

“She hates that Dad helped us with college, you know?”

“I know. But it’s not like he paid for everything. He gave us a few hundred bucks a semester.”

“She didn’t have anything to give,” Jolie replied. “And if she did, she would’ve spent it on herself.”

“Addictions are addictions,” Kyle offered, starting up the car.

“And cigarettes and booze are more important than making sure your kids have food to eat? I swear, Kyle, I will never do that to my kids. They will always have food to eat. I don’t care if I have to work four jobs, give up Netflix, and never do anything fun in my life again – my kids will always have food.”

“You’re going to make a great mom one day,” Kyle said, smiling at her younger sister as she pulled them through the gravel toward the main road.

“One day. I’m only twenty-seven. I’ve got time. I’d like to have fun while I can.”

“Do you want to try to talk to Dad again?”

“No,” her sister replied, sighing. “He’s got a wife and another kid now. I don’t think he likes it when we bring up the past. His face scrunches up a lot whenever we mention Mom.”

Kyle laughed and said, “It does do that.”

“We can just drop it. We missed the funeral, anyway.”

“We could always visit the cemetery.”

“Why? What’s the point?” Jolie asked. “We never met her. What would we even do? Talk to the headstone or something?”

“Why not?” Kyle asked.

“Are you expecting her to say something back about why she never reached out? Explain herself, maybe?”

“No,” Kyle said, laughing a little. “It’s more about just getting some closure, I guess.”

“How can we do that when we don’t know anything about her?”

“Dad mentioned her house. He said it’s empty and that she left the key to the place with the neighbor.”

“So?”

“So, we could fly down and check it out. Maybe we’ll get some answers there.”

“Just show up and ask the neighbor for the key, telling them that we’re the grandchildren she never acknowledged? The neighbor probably knows nothing about us.”

“I haven’t exactly thought it out, but that’s the gist, yeah: we just go and see.”

“You’re serious?” Jolie asked.

“Yes. I feel like I need to know, Jol. Mom isn’t telling us the truth, and I don’t know why or what that means, but there’s this whole part of our history that we don’t even know. Dad’s family is pretty much gone, besides that distant cousin he told us about, and Mom, from what she told us, only had her mom left. That house might be our last chance to learn about where we come from.”

“So, you want to just pack and go? I’m sure that house will sell soon or is still owned by the bank or something, and they’ll have it all locked up.”

“That’s why I think that we have to leave soon. We might only have a few days to check it out before it’s gone.”

“You want to go now?”

“Before the new year, yes,” she replied, pulling them to a stop at a light.

“For real?” Jolie asked. “You’re really serious about this?”

“Can you take time off work? ”

“You want me to go with you?”

“Yes. What have I been saying?” Kyle laughed.

“I guess I could. I’m allowed five days off when someone dies, and I still have a couple of weeks of vacation saved up. I don’t want to use it all, though, because I’d like to take a real vacation this year.”

“It’s New Orleans, Jol. It is a real vacation. We don’t have to just learn about where we come from by digging through her old house. We can learn about the city and have fun, too.”

“Oh, there’s an idea,” Jolie replied, leaning back in her seat. “Bourbon Street, beads, booze, and boys.”

Kyle laughed and said, “Sure.”

“Well, girls for you , but I had some good alliteration going on there.”

Kyle laughed again and asked, “So, you’re in? You’ll come with me?”

“Yes. But what will we tell Mom?”

“Nothing. We just made our monthly pilgrimage to the trailer. She won’t expect another visit for a while. And if she calls or texts, we just lie.”

“Well, turnabout is fair play. She lies to us all the time,” Jolie noted.

“So, we’re going to New Orleans?” Kyle asked.

“When I get home, I’ll look up everything I want to do, so be prepared, sister.”

Kyle laughed again.