by Anna Villegas

THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION.

Amends. 

A.A. has not taught me anything new about making amends. As a very little kid, before I learned how to live with a dead mother and an exquisitely creepy stepmother, I’d sussed that navigating the world I’d been given was sure to be smoother sailing without damaging people right and left. A freaking dimwit could figure this out: it’s easier to sidestep the commission of sin than to pay reparation. Hurting anything makes my skin want to crawl off my bones. 

So when both my big brother Lyle and my Aunt Amy tell me that I should accept Jantell’s invite to go out to our old house, what used to be Mama and Daddy’s house and is now Jantell’s and her crazy teenage son Razor’s, to have lunch and fuss over old picture albums, I start scratching. 

“Bon,” says Aunt Amy, sitting across the booth from me and Lyle in the Home Run Café. “Stop that.” 

Lyle takes my hands and pins them under the table on his skinny thigh.  I stick my tongue out at him since I can’t flip him the bird. I answer my aunt, who always, always, always only means well.   

“What possible purpose,” I say.  It’s hard to talk when your older brother puts your hands on lockdown. Even when they’re decorated with a mess of scars running across the knuckles and a morning’s shift of mechanicking at the Tune-Up Shop has embedded the nubby fingernails with grease and what-all, hands are helpful.  Expressive.   

Eventually Lyle’s hands loosen up.  Pretty soon they’re just holding mine, his thumbs tracing the ridges of scar tissue.  “Let it go, Sissy,” he says.  “Let Jantell and Razor become nobody to you.” 

Lyle is ten years my senior by birth and my spiritual director by self-appointment.  His own biography has some chasms of self-awareness to it which I could outline right now, except retaliatory psychoanalysis would not suit my immediate purpose. 

“I know all about letting go.”  I snatch my hands back, but not before giving him a sharp pinch on the forearm.  “I even know about letting God.  But seeing as Jantell—”  I look soulfully at my Aunt Amy, just in case she’s missing the big picture.  “Seeing as Jantell is about as unacquainted with Christly behavior as anybody on the planet—“ 

“Bon, Bon, Bon,” Aunt Amy says in a whisper.   

Libby, the owner and manager of the Home Run Café and one of Lyle’s eternally hopeful romantic conquests from way back, stops at our booth with a pitcher of ice water and the tag for our three-burger lunch.  “Top anybody off?” 

Each of us—it must be the Walker genes we share—waves Libby off.  Lyle at least has the grace to thank Libby for the swell burgers.  Libby looks younger than she should, something about the streaky blonde highlighting in her shoulder-length auburn hair.  I wonder whether Lyle ever yearns for the glory days of Bakerville High the way she does.  I know I don’t. 

Once Lib is out of earshot and Aunt Amy and I agree to let Lyle pick up the tab, I continue. If Lyle and Aunt Amy are going to camouflage an intervention against my isolationist policies as a simple lunch at the Home Run, then I deserve extra speaking time. “She dyed my white clothes pink. All of them. One load. In my sophomore year.” 

Aunt Amy shakes her head.  Lyle makes not even the lamest defense of Jantell’s step mothering. 

“She made me pay Daddy back for the Ranger.” I’d totaled the Ranger, but it was mine to total: Daddy had given it to me. “Every dollar. And it was a junker to begin with.” 

Aunt Amy and Lyle study their napkins. 

I lean across the table and tap Aunt Amy’s plate.  “She deliberately touches the food on my plate.”  It’s been years and years since I ate anything Jantell cooked or served, but the mere thought of her habit of over handling lettuce greens and fruit salad pieces still turns my stomach.  “Deliberately.” 

My aunt and my brother can’t deny Jantell’s crimes—they’ve heard me recite them forever. What they can do is tilt their heads at the same moment in the same exact incline and fix me with their saddest dopey eyes.   

When the two people in the world who matter most to you insist that you are better than you ever claimed to be, when they want to elevate you into a twenty-something saint in the back booth of the Home Run Café, you can rise to whacked-out levels of delusion, even when it means you’re going to earn yourself some amends to pay. 

The dip at the highway end of the dusty driveway to the house outside Bakerville where I grew up, where I was my mama’s bright butterfly girl until she died, has worn deeper than it was in August when we all gathered for Daddy’s wake.  The Toyota beater I drive scrapes bottom; Razor’s been practicing for his permit by spinning the tires of Jantell’s Chevy Suburban in the gravel.  If it rains good in the next week the way they’ve been promising, somebody’s going to lose an oil pan.  It won’t be mine.   

Just turning off the highway to the old house has sunken me in sadness.  Lyle has mown the dry grass in the front pasture where I raised my 4-H sheep, just as he’d told Jantell he would.  We used to keep that pasture as green as a golf course, but nobody runs the old rain birds anymore.  Razor never discovered the easy summer joy of racing the lazy arc of the sprinklers in his swim trunks. Knowing this makes me feel sad for Razor’s childhood, too, and by extension for his sorry excuse of a mother who can’t seem to imagine herself into anybody’s head but her own.   

Lyle tries, but my big brother doesn’t truly understand how a kid can become an exile in her own home. Lyle, by then launched into life beyond Bakerville, didn’t have to live under the same roof with Jantell and Razor. He cannot comprehend how the occupying forces transform what should be the safest place on earth into a refugee camp, a place where, once you’re old enough to leave, you don’t willingly return. 

I kill the Toyota’s engine at the edge of the back porch under a canopy of Mama’s yellow climbers, just where my daddy used to park his truck. Our own little Angkor Wat, Lyle used to say when somebody complained about the low-hanging blooms turning the porch into a jungle. Our own little rainforest. Daddy was but two weeks in the grave when Jantell sold his truck to Dickie de Vane at the Tune-Up Shop and bought the gas-guzzler she drives now. She told us she needed a backseat for hauling Razor and his friends around. It’s common knowledge that Razor doesn’t have any friends, at least not friends who’d be seen sitting beside him in the backseat of a car driven by Jantell. We know better. She just wanted to sit higher so she could look down her nose at other folks on the road.   

On my passenger seat sits a basket of end-of-season tomatoes and bell peppers from Aunt Amy’s vegetable garden. Take these on over, she’d told me when I’d stopped by her house and tried to renege on my commitment. Tell Jantell she can stew them and put them in the freezer; she won’t have to do any canning at all. More likely, Jantell and Razor will eat one or two and let the rest sit until they turn to mush. I didn’t tell Aunt Amy this: I don’t want to endanger the meager joy she derives from giving gifts to the woman who’d replaced her sister. We all suffer in our own ways, Aunt Amy had told me once when I sat at her kitchen table in a drunken stupor. We all mend ourselves with what we have.   

The door slaps open and here’s Razor standing on the porch staring at me, not speaking. His stick-straight blonde hair, proof positive he’s no relation to Lyle and me, is immaculate as usual. Libby wants to know what it is Razor uses on his hair, she’s that envious; I tell her to ask him herself. Good luck to her. Razor rarely speaks, which in my book is a blessing to us all.  He does have an unnerving stare, though, so I throw open the Toyota door, heft the basket of vegetables, and climb the porch steps. 

“Razor,” I say. “Hey.” 

Razor moves aside. There’s a streak of foodstuff on his black T-shirt. Could be gravy, could be peanut butter. Maybe he’s autistic; maybe he’s another casualty of Jantell’s blitzkrieg parenting. It’s hard to know. We don’t have information about Razor’s father, never have. He and Jantell seemed to materialize in our family without warning, full-blown interlopers from the Brothers Grimm. 

“Hey, Bud,” I try the fit of one of Lyle’s endearments.  “Like tomatoes?” 

“Uh.” 

“How about I make us some tomato sandwiches?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Your mom in?” 

“Maybe.” 

I hitch the basket of vegetables against my hip and open the screen door.  “Great.” 

Razor doesn’t follow me into the kitchen. He’ll futz around the overgrown back yard long enough to get his T-shirt dirtier. Then he’ll plant himself in front of his computer, and I’ll have fulfilled my sisterly duty. 

I set the vegetables on the kitchen table and call to my stepbrother though the screen door. “Raze? You operate a lawn mower?” 

“Uh uh.” 

“I’m going to show you how to gas it up and start it.  You can mow the yard.  Surprise your mom.  What do you think?” 

Razor doesn’t hear me. Or he acts like he doesn’t hear me. He’s standing out there kicking his feet against the stubby brick path to the garage, upending the bricks, his blonde hair glinting like a cap of stolen gold.  In all fairness, it’s not Razor’s fault the yard has become such a dump.  It was Mama’s yard, and it’s where she lives for me most clearly.  Her yellow roses and orange daylilies and red geraniums still bloom something fierce in blind memoriam, but over the years of Jantell’s tenure the crabgrass and wild oats have seeded themselves into every flower bed as if they’d been biding their time for a chance to overthrow civilization. A person would have to raze the whole place and start over. 

“There you are,” Jantell says. She’s wearing a glittery gray sweat suit and hospital-white tennis shoes, the kind with mud-grip soles that creep up on you without warning. Her face is flushed. “I just came in from my walk.” 

“The tomatoes are from Aunt Amy.” 

“Of course.” 

“I told Razor I’d get the mower running for him.” 

“I may hire a yard service.” 

“I can still start it up. For now anyway.  It wouldn’t be hard.” 

“You and your engines, Bonita,” she says. Then, because she can’t stop herself and it’s the only way she knows how to be, she shakes her head. “You’d be a pretty girl if you took time with yourself instead of wearing those…” Jantell twists her hand in a spasm that’s meant to dismiss my sag-ass jeans and the hand-me-down Metallica T-shirt my landlord Barbi, another grown woman from Lyle’s roster of failed love affairs, gave me.   

I unload the vegetables from Aunt Amy’s basket, lining them up on the counter beside what looks to be a week’s worth of Razor’s cereal bowls, the Lucky Charms glued to the sides like Quikcrete.  I straighten the line of tomatoes, all seven of them.  “Cannonballs,” I whisper, to keep myself sane. 

“What’s that?”  Jantell sits at the table and begins to pick cockleburs from her sweatpants.   

“We can have tomato sandwiches.  These are the last of the tomatoes.”   

Jantell is building a pile of cockleburs next to a pair of rooster and hen salt and pepper shakers, stationed beak-to-beak for a kiss or a skirmish. Neither Jantell nor Razor knows the first thing about chickens. 

             Jantell doesn’t look up.  Ridiculously, I repeat myself: “The last of Aunt Amy’s tomatoes.” 

Here’s the thing about getting a stepmother when you’re fifteen. You have hopes that your daddy, having once loved wisely and married your mama, has picked a new wife who will resemble in some faint but reliable features your biological mother, whom of course you recollect in the best bits and pieces. You’ve retired the dismay and the disappointment inspired by your own shortcomings: the stubborn studiousness with which you dismembered every baby doll you ever received, the refusal to wear pastel dresses with lace collars, the insistence that the twin lambs got into your bedroom all by themselves and pooped on the crisp sheets your mama had just pulled off the clothesline.  Instead, you remember your mama slipping herself beneath your bedcovers and reading you to sleep every night, never once skipping pages the way your daddy and big brother sometimes did, no matter how many times she’d recited the same story to you.  You remember being her beloved Bonnie girl whatever you said or did or forgot to do.  Although your breathtaking selfishness crazed the rest of your family, you remember that there existed one faithful person who cajoled the world to revolve around you and you alone.  

At fifteen, you don’t expect perfection; you’re old enough to know that sooner or later everyone, even your rock star of an older brother, is going to let you down a time or two. You expect fairness, though, so you are no way prepared for its dogged opposite.  When your fate takes the form of someone as hellishly mercurial as Jantell, your only recourse is to let Rebel Yell dull the high notes of the hysterical shrieking fits instigated by your presence. The best you can with the tools you have, you mend your diminished world. 

When Daddy brought Jantell and Razor home, we didn’t resent that we hadn’t been consulted. Lyle was long gone, graduated from Poly and setting up his own engineering firm. Aunt Amy, who was made to cease her daily visits to our house within moments of the matrimonial ceremony, never breathed a word against Jantell. I myself couldn’t have conjured up an adult woman who would make a stay-at-home career out of torturing her predecessor’s offspring, so my welcome wagon crashed and burned more bitterly than if I had girded my loins for a horde of jealous queens from Snow White’s castle. 

Still, nine years free of cohabitation with Jantell, some turncoat hope maddening in its persistence makes me wish that once, just once, she would be kind to me. 

All will be lost if Jantell lays one finger on these tomatoes before I make our sandwiches. When the phone rings and she takes the conversation with her longwinded caller and her handful of cockleburs into the living room, I wash my hands and start toasting bread and slicing tomatoes. The only mayonnaise I can find in the fridge is an imitation dressing the color of old underpants, but I figure Jantell and Razor must eat it or it wouldn’t be stuck there between the gloomy Tupperwares of leftover this and that.  The refrigerator is where my aversion to Jantell’s food habits arises: she couldn’t throw out a leaf of spinach or a tablespoon of mashed potato if it were raining loaves and fishes.  What she does is wrap whatever the priceless remnant of the moment is into tin foil or Saran Wrap and then try to feed it back to you when you are least suspecting.  More often than not, it’s lost so much of its original character you never know what you’re getting.  What statute prohibits a person from eating the last tablespoon of stuffing instead of letting it fester into some microbiological goop fit for inclusion in the Guinness Book of World Records, I’d like to know. 

Jantell’s niggardliness disturbs me in a deep way. I know full well half the globe is starving, and food is precious—I don’t eat much of it—but my stepmother’s kitchen style has more to do with a desperate, cunning selfishness than with any kind of thrift, as if she’s ensuring she’s not going to be bankrupting her own larder any time soon. Right now, there are three greasy-looking sandwich-sized baggies hanging out to dry on the cup hooks under the spice cupboard. They look like deep sea creatures somebody tortured to death. Who but a weirdo nutcase reuses sandwich bags? Better to buy a couple dozen fewer pairs of tennis shoes. Sell the Suburban. Donate Razor to the Boy Scouts. 

“Oh.” Jantell reaches across the counter to set the phone into its cradle. “Tomato sandwiches.” 

I stand back. Body contact with stepmothers, even accidental, I avoid for mental health reasons. “Yep.” 

“I had some spaghetti in the refrigerator.” 

“Razor said he’d like a tomato sandwich,” I lie.  “You were busy.  I went ahead and made them.” I hang my hands at my side and wait for her to say doing just what you want to do as usual or something accusatory. In a handbook somewhere, Miss Manners has written that leaving your luncheon guests in the lurch while answering drawn-out telephone calls is beyond rude, but I don’t say a word. I’m only here because Lyle and Aunt Amy thought the ninth step would put old dogs to bed or get the snakes out of my head or accomplish something else metaphorical and impossible. 

Jantell rummages into the shelf where we used to keep the gear for doctoring my sheep and pulls out some spindled paper plates and napkins embossed with Spiderman images. “Voila!” she says and sets three places. “Razor will love seeing these again.” 

“Do you remember what happened to my record books?” 

“What record books?” 

“For my sheep. We kept them in that cupboard.” 

“Record books?” 

“For 4-H. Binders. Labeled.” 

Jantell won’t look me in the eye. “We’re going through picture albums today.  Not record books.” 

“I know. I just wondered—“ 

“I don’t remember a thing about record books. For sheep?” 

“Never mind.” 

“Bonita, you don’t remember correctly. There were no record books kept in that cupboard when your father and I were married.” Jantell takes a deep breath, as though I’ve sucked up every last ounce of air in the kitchen.  “There was so much that needed sorting—“ 

“Okay.  Okay.” 

“—That I didn’t know where to start.  Your poor father had let—“ 

“The housekeeping go to heck. Right. We’ve established that. More than once.” 

“I don’t remember any record books.”  Jantell sits down and draws her chair closer to one of the Spiderman place settings. She’s firing up to remind me that for several years after high school I was a wild woman and a drunk so couldn’t conceivably trust the location of anything to my own memory. She picks up the Spiderman plate, puts it down, fluffs her hair. 

It’s more gray than blonde now, but nobody believes it was ever real blonde, not like Razor’s is. I wonder how much gray it will take until Jantell, deciding she can no longer face the sight of herself in the mirror, turns it some unnatural color, maroon or platinum or high gloss ebony. I wonder if Jantell ever really hears the words that come out of her own mouth. If I make a run for it, I could be in the Toyota and down the driveway before she launches into chapter and verse about what an impossible child I was.    

The thing is: she’s right. I was as awful as a teenage girl could be. But Jantell was the adult. Now that I am an adult, too, I am making amends to all persons I have harmed.  There is one person remaining on my list, and she’s sitting here right in front of me, her hair going grayer as we speak. Lyle and Aunt Amy would be proud of me, except I keep getting sideswiped by the powerful feeling that I’m not the one who should be making amends.    

“Daddy thought you might know where they are, my record books.”   

I can speak for my dead daddy because I asked him specifically. Libby’s girls are raising the cutest pair of floppy-eared goats for their first 4-H project. Lib remembered my record books, the painstaking neatness of my printed entries, how mine were the best record books in the county. She’d asked to borrow them. I’d asked Daddy, not long before he met the maker none of us Walkers believes in. When he couldn’t find them, I supposed—as he did—that Jantell had dumped them, along with me and Lyle and Aunt Amy and everything else that belonged to my mama and the family we four had been. 

“Bonita, I am not going to argue any longer with you about this.” 

“I just wondered where they went, is all. Libby’s girls could use them.” 

“Where they went, I had nothing to do with.” Jantell crosses her legs one way.  Then she crosses them the other way and begins to untie her tennis shoes. “Lyle’s so lucky he didn’t end up with her.” 

A thud, thud, thud tells me Razor is throwing tennis balls against the garage door.  He’s getting closer to the lawn mower, at least.   

“Libby’s a nice person. She works hard. She’s a good mother.”  

“She may well be. You’re not hearing me.  She’s from a different class, Bonita.”   

I’ve heard Jantell’s dissertations on the requisite manners of people like us and how it would look since I was fifteen, but they never fail to give me a sudden case of hives. It was never explained to me, either at the New Dawn Recovery Center where I went to dry out for good or at my weekly A.A. meetings, what exactly is required if, just as you’re doing your sober best to make your own amends, somebody else’s inventory of victims is multiplying faster than bunny rabbits. Jantell’s working herself up to blame me yet again for everything from the cockleburs in her pants to the window Razor’s bound to break if he doesn’t let up pounding balls against the garage, so I do the only thing I can do. I put the tomato sandwiches on the Spiderman plates, push open the screen door, call in my stepbrother, and seat myself to meet my destiny.  Again. 

Razor eats his tomato sandwich without looking up once from his Spiderman plate. He finishes the whole thing, crusts and all, and downs a pile of Fritos, too.  He doesn’t make a peep the entire meal except to shove his empty glass toward his mother and grunt for a second can of Diet Coke, which she parcels out like food rations. She rarely denies Razor more of anything—soda pop or video games or black T-shirts. It’s as if she needs to be the gatekeeper of his consumption. Yet Razor has discovered the ultimate coping strategy for living with Jantell: forever hold your tongue. I wish I’d learned his method. It would have saved me from today, from having to sit in the same room with a person I never wanted to know and having to make up a script for a conversation I never wanted to have. 

Jantell opens her half-eaten sandwich, shakes salt onto the tomato slices, then straightens the hen and rooster shakers. They’re standing side-by-side, brittle yellow toes on the starting line.   

“Razor, you may be excused,” she says without looking at her son. 

Razor doesn’t excuse himself formally, but he does bend his plate in half and lob it into the garbage can. Leaving the kitchen, behind Jantell’s back, he performs a perfect Hip Hop crip walk, towhead notwithstanding. I stand, pick up my own plate and the Fritos bowl, and whirl around to the counter so Jantell won’t catch me smiling.  All is not what it seems. 

“I’d like a few of those,” Jantell says, miffed because I left the table without being excused.  

I cough. I am twenty-seven years old. I will not request release.  “Sure.”  I put the bowl of Fritos back on the table. 

“Sit down, Bonita.” 

Jantell has never called me by anything but my formal given name. When she pronounces Bonita, she stresses each syllable with a flat monotone so that all I can hear is tuna fish. She has never, ever, thanks be to the Higher Powers, called me Bon, or Bon, or Bonnie, or Sissy the way my genuine family does. I have never heard her call Razor anything but Razor, even though that’s got to be a nickname from somewhere in his shady past. His name is Roger, poor kid.   

I sit. My chair’s three feet from the table, though, in case I choose to excuse myself at high speed. 

“I always thought…” Jantell pets the rooster.  “I always knew I would marry a doctor or a lawyer.” 

I’m pretty good at tracking leaps of logic, but Jantell’s confession leaves a cold trail. She’s got a dreamy, despairing look on her face. 

“If you want to live in a nice house, drive a nice car, have nice vacations, France or someplace, you need to marry a doctor or a lawyer. Bonita.” 

Until Jantell and Razor, our house was the perfect house.  Everywhere we turned, even after her death on a freeway down in lousy Los Angeles, we saw our mama: the unruly but well-loved gardens, the funky hand-embroidered placemats, the bowls of broken seashells from our family pilgrimages to Aptos, the shelf of inevitably overdue library books in the living room.  Even our stinky sheep barn echoed Mama’s presence.  She was the only relative of mine with enough gumption to sleep beside my ewes and me at lambing time, braiding straw dolls from oat hay and telling spooky stories while we awaited the magical birth of my blue ribbon lambs. A kid couldn’t have asked for a sweeter home than ours. 

My daddy was a structural engineer, a talented one. He made a good enough living until the night he died, privately, sitting alone in his office in Bakerville, sparing Jantell and Razor the rude discovery of what his tired old sad heart had done. Right out of Miss Manners’ book of funerary etiquette, the manner of my daddy’s death.   

I don’t know what Jantell’s after. I could reach my long skinny leg over and knock her right off her chair for second-guessing the misery she made for all of us. 

She sighs: ten years of self-pitying regret in one exhalation.  “So I married accordingly.” 

“Daddy was an engineer.”  In case she’s forgotten. 

“My first husband. Razor’s father.  He’s a judge now.” 

“That’s none of my business.  Is it?” 

“I’m trying to tell you something, Bonita.” 

“I see.” I don’t. The most powerful microscope on the planet would not help me to decode my stepmother’s presentation.  I’m thinking: what would Lyle do? 

“I’m trying to explain that coming here to Bakerville to be your father’s wife–” Jantell ducks her head, as if she’s sure I’m going to throw something, maybe the salt and pepper shakers, at her. “Coming here didn’t turn out how I’d imagined.” 

“Because my daddy was an engineer?  Because we live outside town?”  

 “Because of you, Bonita.” Jantell splays her hands beside her head.  “I wasn’t your mother, and you wouldn’t…you wouldn’t have me.” 

“Jantell.” I pronounce my stepmother’s name exactly as she pronounces mine, without an ounce of inflection. I repeat it because I’m trying to cement words together to answer her preposterous revisionist claim. “Jantell.  Some of us don’t remember it quite that way.” 

“There you go. You and Lyle and Amy. Always the three of you.” 

“Make that four.” 

“Your father understood. He did absolutely nothing.” A fleck of spit flies from Jantell’s lips. I do not hold this against a person. Ordinarily. 

“What did Daddy understand?” 

“That you were incorrigible. You wouldn’t have welcomed anybody. You were living in a tomb, Bonita. A mausoleum.” 

“You’re not the reason for my drinking. I apologize for–”  What, exactly?  I’d say bad behavior, except that sounds like a phrase better suited to the training of rescue dogs. 

“That’s right.  You were going to be a–well, to drink to excess no matter who your father married.” 

The ninth step covers only the wrongs you yourself have committed. A.A. is very stern on this point: other people’s sins are none of your business.   

“Whom,” I say.   

“Straight A’s in English and you become a mechanic! Bonita, what were you thinking!” 

Jantell sets one white tennis shoe on the table, as if it’s a dessert course to our five-star meal, an offering for which I’m supposed to be grateful. “The albums are on the entertainment center.  By Razor’s videos.” 

Nobody in A.A. ever said whether amends have to be acknowledged by their recipient in order to count. If your apology circles its object like a buzzard, riding a thermal but never diving, will it save your immortal soul?   

“I remember my mama fine without albums.”   

“All right, then.” She lays her second tennis shoe on the table and starts pulling off her socks.  “I’d like them out of here.” Self-interest is never more than a scratch or two beneath the surface of Jantell’s hide.   

She corrects herself. “They don’t belong here anymore. Without your father.”  She folds her paper plate in half, then quarters it. Like with those baggies from which she wrestles a third or fourth life, Jantell doesn’t expend energy unless it serves her own eventual satisfaction. “Please take them home with you.” 

“That I can do,” I say, standing.  “Aunt Amy says you can stew the tomatoes.  Put them in the freezer.” 

Jantell extends a foot to the chair I’ve vacated. “Sounds like a lot of work for a couple of tomatoes.” She points her toes, then flexes. Corns or bunions or some other species of malformation have twisted the toes on her feet so they’re a good match for yellow claws on the salt and pepper shakers.   

If I just focus on those crooked toes, I can make it out of the house without saying a single word calling for regret. If I think of nothing else but Jantell rubbing her poor misshapen feet, no charges will be added to the tab of amends I owe.  “Five.” 

“Pardon me?” 

“There aren’t a couple of tomatoes. There are five. See?” 

“Bonita, take the damn picture albums.” 

I will and I do. I settle the picture albums against my hip as if they were the textbooks I carried so faithfully throughout my high school career, as if they might eventually yield more of the stellar homework I’d submitted so conscientiously until I foreclosed on becoming a trophy child and instead became a full-time wastrel. There are only four albums, not as many as one might expect. Daddy and Mama had expended most of their documentary energy by the time I was born. After Mama died, nobody wanted archival leftovers of the way we looked in her absence. Each of us specialized in erasure: my poor lonely daddy chose substitution. Lyle deserves gold medals for pre-emptive abandonment of every girl friend who ever loved him. Me, well, my remedy has led me to the ninth step.   

Jantell’s not in the kitchen, but she hears the screen door hit the jamb harder that I thought it would when I elbow my way out to the porch, the albums pressed against my heart.  “Bonita!  Do you have to slam things?” 

“Sorry,” I say.   

I don’t know where she’s calling from, whether my stepmother is in the living room or standing on the second-floor landing.  I can’t tell whether she’s heard me.   

“Sorry,” I say again, louder.  “Sorry.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

For forty-one years, Anna Villegas was a college English teacher in California’s Central Valley.  Her published work spans four decades and includes short stories, essays, poems, newspaper columns, and three novels (Synergistic Press, William Morrow, St. Martin’s Press).  Villegas lives in Nevada City, California, where her forebears settled during the 1849 Gold Rush.  The foothills and their folk inspire Bonnie, the eccentric but straight-shooting narrator of “The Ninth Step.”