Page 34 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH JOYRIDE

Sophomore Summer

Toward the end of the semester, Della asked to come home with me for the summer before junior year.

Her parents were on a two-year mission in Lebanon, leaving Della with nowhere to go.

Her bio-dad, literally famous for having wanted to parent her, had apparently said they should “get a bite to eat” over the break if she stayed with my family. Clearly something was going on there.

I thought all three of them were being weird.

My own mother had only one more summer after this one when I would have to come home to her (meaning, when I’d be a student kicked out of housing on breaks), and she would never agree to losing one.

I’d skipped out on her once, for Poland, and had never heard the end of it.

Della tried to defend her parents, if not Matthew.

She said they really did miss her so much , but the Lebanon mission was coveted and nearly impossible to get.

Middle Eastern countries were less permissive of missionaries, so her parents had been waiting for years to get their mission call letter.

It was an honor, and I would understand that if my own short-lived religious life had gone beyond what Della called “Sometimes Church.”

In June, my mother and Kayla picked us up from the Tulsa airport. They carried signs and a heart-shaped balloon, greeting us in the parking lot like returning soldiers. My mother looked so happy. She didn’t know about the baby.

Every Thursday night, Della used her parents’ debit card to take us all out for a thank-you dinner.

She said her dad said it was the least he could do, but my mother was still careful to choose somewhere inexpensive.

She told Della she’d be delighted to take the Ericsons out for dinner, whenever they finally got to meet.

Maybe at graduation? Della smiled. Eyes wide, mouth full of potatoes.

After dinner one of those Thursday nights, I got in the driver’s seat. My mother sat beside me. In my rearview mirror, Kayla and Della whispered, hands cupped over each other’s ears like children.

I’d been furious with Kayla, back in May, for telling me after Della about the baby.

Della could have told me, but I tried not to let myself be mad at her.

Whenever I felt myself getting jealous of the trust Della seemed to place in my sister, or Sam, or even her adviser Lucy over me, I made myself think about her terrible childhood.

It was my job to be gentle with her, to let her decide to let me in.

“Mom, can I tell you something?” Kayla said.

I stopped the car at an intersection, red light swinging lightly from a wire.

“Hm?” our mother said. Her hand was hanging out the window; she wore her favorite floral cotton shirt.

Now? I thought. On the drive home from Burger King? Still, I turned down the radio.

“I’m having a baby!”

A car screeched alongside us and came to a stop, both of us waiting for the light. It was a red truck, huge, sparkling clean. Two men sat in the front seat.

Kayla had silenced us. On the radio, a man and a woman bantered quietly about home insurance.

I leaned back and stared up through the windshield. Starless. I turned off the radio and my mother turned it back on.

“Ma?” Kayla said.

“I won’t allow it,” our mother said. “Absolutely not.”

This was almost funny, considering how far along Kayla was. Five months! She was showing, even in the loose and flowy dresses she’d sewn for herself. It was weird of our mother to have wished away any notice of this.

In my peripheral view of the truck idling beside us, the passenger-side window lowered. I tightened my grip on the wheel.

“Mom, that’s insane,” Kayla said. “And there’s nothing to worry about? I’m going to be a good mom.”

“Oh? And I wasn’t?”

Huh , I thought. It sure said something, her asking that.

The man in the passenger seat folded his arm over the edge of his car door. He rested his head on his palm. I knew he was close enough to reach out and touch me.

“Jason and I are keeping the baby,” Kayla said.

“Who in God’s name is Jason ?”

To meet the man’s eyes was to lose. To lock the car door was to lose. I was scared. He revved his engine, louder each time. From the seat behind me, Della put a soft hand on my shoulder, steady.

The light turned green.

“ Dyke ,” the man said. He turned his head toward me and spit. He sped away.

I stayed there, foot on the brake. I felt the wet on my cheek. I couldn’t bear to touch it. Della wiped my cheek, too roughly, with a crumpled napkin.

I made a right turn from the left-most lane, then a U-turn. Where was I going? Another U-turn. The radio was only noise. It took so much not to cry.

“It’s the haircut,” my mother snapped.

“The fuck?” I said.

Della passed me a tiny packet of tissues from her beaded purse, and I tore them all from the plastic in a fist. I bunched them together and pressed them to my cheek, though Della had already taken care of that. They—the man in the truck? My mother?—would not make me cry.

“ We do not talk like that! ” My mother punched a finger at the radio knob and the music stopped. “You girls are out of control.”

She stopped herself. “Not you, Della. I only meant my daughters. You’re doing fine, considering.”

“Considering what ?” Della said. “Ma’am,” she added.

In the rearview mirror, Kayla raised a tentative hand. No one called on her.

“Respectfully,” Kayla said, “Steph only meant that her lesbian haircut shouldn’t make her to blame for her hate crime.”

“I wouldn’t call it my hate crime ,” I said.

Della rubbed my shoulders like I needed comfort, which was embarrassing. “But isn’t it a bi haircut?” she whispered too loudly. “Do they know you’re bi?”

I banged my head against the back of my seat.

I hadn’t thought I was bi since freshman fall!

Della and I never talked about our sexual orientations with each other, which felt like something clinical or administrative.

I wanted everyone around me to forget my gayness immediately upon learning it, to avoid situations like this.

“Oh, honey, I’m not blaming you,” my mother said. “Haircuts like that are sacred to the lesbian people.”

“Jesus take the wheel,” I muttered. My mother said the lesbian people the same way she might say the Seminole people or the Muskogee people. I missed another turn.

“I’m only looking out for your safety. You were so beautiful. You used to have such long, dark hair. And it might have kept you a little safer from… people like that.”

“Mom, her hair’s light brown?” Kayla said. “Like, that hasn’t changed?” She must have been relieved. We were supposed to be talking about her pregnancy, and her vendetta against public education as a colonizing force, and her lack of plans for the rest of her life.

I did not want to be beautiful. I wanted to stop the car on the side of the road and leave them there, together.

I wanted to spread a towel on the grass below a short and leafless tree, to wait for the space station to fly by.

It always did, if you knew what to look for.

It was a constant in my life, arriving where and when it was scheduled, pointing me to where I belonged.

I’d find it, white speck falling slow across the sky—and I’d picture an astronaut watching me back.

Some astronaut would call his daughter through mission control and she’d say tell me what you see and he’d say oh, the Northern Hemisphere, North America, and that would be true, but also true was Oklahoma, a field, a tree. A girl alone, looking up.

Kayla’s announcement ruined July, as well as the first half of August. One night, while Kayla and my mother were once again yelling at each other across the room, I said to Della, “Don’t you wish you were converting the Lebanese?

!” She looked confused, then laughed, then left the house to get some air.

It was after midnight. I was making my bed in the living room (with Della staying with us, Kayla and I switched off weeks on the couch).

Della came back inside, her face expressionless. “The LDS mission in Lebanon is non-proselytizing. It’s strictly humanitarian,” she said, and then left the room again.

When our mother was at work, Kayla would follow me and Della around and talk shit about her.

Kayla said she couldn’t stand our mother’s disappointment and practical mindedness.

She hated how our mother brought home help-wanted flyers and little ripped-off phone numbers for house cleaners and babysitters.

How she picked up brochures for community colleges and left them under Kayla’s pillow like the tooth fairy.

How she nagged Kayla to be ready to “provide” for her baby, which meant less time making art and regalia and posting photos of it on her blog. (This was, I thought, fair.)

I thought Jason could be helpful here—unlike Kayla, he had plans. In the car before my hate crime, Kayla had said “Jason and I” when it came to keeping the baby. But I had no reason to think he even knew Kayla was pregnant. Weirdly, our mother hadn’t asked about him once.

In the last week of summer, when Kayla still claimed to be “figuring stuff out,” our mother summoned us all into the living room. Very delicately, she brought up the matter of adoption. Kayla stormed out the front door, Della close behind. Our mother stormed out the back door.

At eight o’clock, still alone in the living room and waiting to see how far they’d take this, I made myself a peanut butter sandwich.

I sat at the computer and read the bios, again, of the seven astronauts chosen for the upcoming Columbia mission to space.

Then I climbed out on the roof and squinted up at the sky, but there was more light pollution in our area than there’d been in my childhood.

I missed my telescope, in storage in Connecticut, or maybe I just missed Brett.

The night before I graduated high school, Brett had driven over to my mother’s house to give me his telescope.

It wasn’t supposed to be like that. The summer before senior year, Brett and my mother had promised he’d keep parenting us.

They’d put a weekly family dinner on the calendar.

But between our mother’s crying and Kayla’s sudden rise in acting out that year and my constant anxiety around college application season, it was canceled more often than not.

By the time I got into Hollis— off the waitlist , a secret I’d take to my grave—I hadn’t seen Brett in a couple of months.

He’d had to hear about Hollis at work, off a bulletin board list of student achievements.

The telescope had been repaired and cleaned.

It had a velvet bow around it, elaborately tied—maybe Beth’s doing.

Brett gave me a heartfelt greeting card with his phone number and new address on the back, and said he’d always be there for me and Kayla.

He couldn’t wait to see where our lives would take us.

I was cold to him that night, and never wrote back to the letters he mailed to me at Hollis.

It took a year for him to stop writing, and for me to move his telescope from my dorm closet to the window.

If he were with us now—even just with me, here on the roof—I wasn’t sure he’d like where our lives had taken us.

Della brought my mother and Kayla home at ten o’clock and asked to speak to me in private.

“The three of us figured it out. It’s handled now.” Della said the three of us with some attitude, like I should have been the one to facilitate this treaty.

But no one wanted that. My best advice would have been an abortion—followed by a GED, a Pell Grant, a free associate’s degree, and the grades to transfer to a four-year school. The abortion part of this plan would have only been relevant if Kayla had told me earlier. When she’d told Della.

With Della as mediator at a waffle restaurant nearby, this was where they landed:

Our mother would not provide free housing to Kayla and the baby, not unless Kayla had a job.

She also had to have a savings account (I was horrified to learn that Kayla kept her money in cash, in a clay pot under her bed, in solidarity with reservation Indians living in bank deserts.

I was pretty sure this was something she’d decided on her own, and not part of a movement any reservation Indians had asked for).

Kayla would not get “stuck in a job” that was not the right fit, “like Mom,” an addendum that did not go over well with Mom.

Kayla would tell Jason about the baby, and Jason would decide for himself on his contribution to the cause.

My contribution was, apparently, financial—and not for me to decide for myself, though they knew I had almost nothing. I would pay to fly Kayla, now fully six months pregnant, back with Della and me to Hollis.