Jodi Paloni: BLING LIKE STARS • Cleaver Magazine

Fiction by Jodi Paloni
BLING LIKE STARS

Sparrow’s little brother hums at the kitchen table and talks about what it would be like to float on a giant Cheerio as an inner tube, kicking up the milky sea whenever he wanted a drink. He’d look up at the stars and see their mama up there talking with God and the angels. Sparrow doesn’t believe in God or angels, and their mama isn’t dead, not yet, but she likes sweet drinks, too. Ever since high school ended and no next steps, she started spiking Juicy Juice with vodka swiped from the freezer in her neighbor’s garage. She’s sipping some of that good juice now from the travel mug she got free from opening up a bank account. She’s sitting here with Boyd and Glory eating scrambled eggs with grape jelly before heading down to the harbor. This is how the summer days simmer: sleep through breakfast, eat breakfast for lunch, wait tables for tourists at Early’s Pizza while Ezra Early flings the dough.

Except today, when Boyd lets loose his crazy, it’s a buzz kill. He’s not even on anything. And though he’s got the brain differences, he’s thirteen, too old to go on and on like that. It’s up to Glory to help him become more aware.

Now, he’s talking nonsense about how his tiny green toy soldiers made a racket all night on his bookshelf. He says they’re looking for Hitler.

“That’s some imagination you’ve got there, son,” is all Glory says.

Sparrow checks Glory’s face, searching for lines of concern, but Glory only smiles, indulging Boyd, avoiding conflict. Glory has her own way of keeping her cool. She practices rain barrel pyro-therapy in the garden hoop house at night. Even though Sparrow is still technically the kid, and Glory’s the parent, Sparrow keeps an eye on Glory’s fires, makes sure they don’t go too far out of control.

Glory has taken Mama’s place. When they were younger, when it was only temporary, when Mama was off trying to kick her habits, Glory used to tease Sparrow and Boyd, tell her friends she won them at a Bingo game. Sparrow, all wide-eyed, would take in that story as if them living here with Glory—the roof over their heads, the good food and okay clothes, the cuddling sessions on the couch after playing Candyland—was a stroke of good fortune, as if Glory caring about them was some kind of dumb luck, and not because of how much Glory loved Mama, like a sister, since they were girls.

“Pick up your spoon, son,” Glory says. But she’s still smiling. “Time to eat.”

Boyd picks up his spoon, but he doesn’t eat. He arranges cereal floats into constellations and names them after the ones he loves—Apus, Aquila, Columba—all birds. Now Glory’s laughing. She can’t help herself. She covers her bad teeth with her chubby hand. Her three fancy-pants rings flash in the sunlight.

Life’s just a big fat joke to Glory, but maybe that’s okay. Sparrow doesn’t really mind Boyd’s nutty stories, Glory’s stupid fun. She sips her juice. It keeps her smooth. She loves the way the diamonds in Glory’s rings sparkle, cracking prisms of light against the jelly jar, loves the way the sapphires flicker blue like Glory’s eyes.

What Sparrow doesn’t love is when everything’s going along fine, like today, when it’s all fun and games, all love and light, and then gloom creeps over Glory’s face, like some sudden misery arrives to her brain, stealth-like, like the black mold behind the toilet in the downstairs bathroom.

Sparrow wants to crush misery before any real damage is done, like she tried to in earnest that one time last fall. She was sneaking a smoke on the old hammock in the backyard, millions of stars on fire above her. She thought she could become part of that sky infinity. Never again have two feet on the ground. Never miss being tethered to the earth.

That night, she imagined Mama was up there, too, like Boyd was just talking about at the table, as if dead was better than could-be dead, her mama’s hand reaching down. When Sparrow visualized that hand, her body began to lift toward it, not just in her mind, but lift in a way she could actually feel. But then a shadow moved across the yard, a raccoon skulking towards the shed, the same fat fuckity-fuck raccoon going for the trash again. Sparrow knew she’d be the one to have to clean up the yard in the morning, so she stubbed out her smoke, and grabbed a shovel. Sparrow was a gentle person. The rage came out of nowhere and the racoon was too far gone on its luck of finding half a pizza.

No more raccoon.

No more believing in heaven as the place that could save them.

But the misery did not go away. It only bloomed. After that, she smoked on the screen porch, squeezed shut her eyes at the tyrant memory of metal sound against critter skull.

At the kitchen table, Glory’s current mood looks the way a starshine-to-vermin-murder pendulum swing can feel, as if pleasantness is only fleeting, then gone altogether, how some unsuspecting lug is about to get whacked upside the head, maybe Boyd.

Sparrow’s seen the pamphlet from the sad social worker that makes home visits to the house. There’s a boarding school for kids like Boyd, all the way down in Connecticut, a four-hour trip. They didn’t have the cash and he would hate it.

Focus on the bling, Little Sparrow, she tells herself, Little Sparrow being the name Mama used to call her. She leans across the table and plants a kiss on Glory’s cheek to try and quell the shadows. Glory closes her eyes. Everything’s calm for a sec. Then Boyd starts to laugh for no good reason, snorting milk up his nose. Glory hands him a napkin.

“Soon, I’ll have enough to buy a pretty ring like yours,” Sparrow says, taking Glory’s lead, ignoring Boyd’s behavior as they’ve been taught by the social worker.

“Good! Because you can’t count on anybody else to get you what you want. If you can figure that out at seventeen, you’re ahead of the game.” Glory takes a swig of her coffee, leans back, and looks at Sparrow as if considering her possibilities. “That said, you’ll probably have to learn the hard way like the rest of us.” She crosses her beefy arms over her enormous chest.

Glory tells Sparrow all this stuff about the bling, same as she spouts off the money lectures once a week, harps on her to take an English class at community college. She’s bad at math, but good at English. It’s why Sparrow took the shit pizza job in the first place. The cash register does the work for her. The tips are great.

“Oh, I’ll definitely buy my own bling.”

“Your name should be Crow the way you love the shineys,” Glory says.

Boyd laughs. Snorts milk. Here we go again. It’s infuriating.

Sparrow’s getting antsy now, thirsty for more juice. Her travel mug is dry, but she stays seated at the table. She hopes Glory will bring up the school for Boyd, but Glory only runs her starfish fingers and all that bling through her bleach-blond bangs. Liver spots that come with age speckle Glory’s forehead, which is worrisome to Sparrow. Glory has always been here for them. Today she looks hound-dog tired.

“What are you looking at now, girl, always staring? You’d better get to work. Come on. I’ll drive you.”

“I’m walking,” Sparrow says. She jerks her chin towards Boyd who has fallen asleep on the table, his face smushed against his cereal bowl. “You two should do something special. Take him up the top of the lighthouse. Winds coming in tonight. Storm tomorrow.”

Sparrow watches as some kind of agony clouds Glory’s eyes, and Sparrow can’t take it. She rises from the table, goes to the fridge, and pours Juicy Juice into her mug. Halfway. Leaves room for the vodka.

“You’re going to get found out some day, girl,” Glory says. “Then what?”

Sparrow pretends to fiddle with the lid at the counter.

“Don’t you dare become your mother’s daughter,” Glory says.

Sparrow doesn’t answer. She’s out of here. She rubs Boyd’s mop of rusty hair in a gentle good-bye, knowing that one of these days, while she’s at Early’s, Glory will drive him down to that school without Sparrow’s say-so. Sparrow wonders if, later, she’ll regret not waking him, not hugging him so hard he can’t stand it and gets all stiff and hollers, but she can’t bear to rumple the smoothness she’s conjured with her juice.

“I’ll bring home meatball grinders for a late supper. Boyd’s favorite,” Sparrow says, squinting at Glory. Her offer is a power struggle. It’s as if to say, you want to talk about the drinking, Glory? Well then, let’s talk about what you really plan to do with Boyd today.

Sparrow takes the stairs two at a time to her room. She pulls a bottle from a snow boot in the back of her closet. She glug-glug-glugs vodka into her juice. This is what will get her through whatever another shit day in a summer town wants to bring.

It’s a slow Wednesday night at Early’s. Even with all the windows open and that they’re right there on the water, it’s hot and getting hotter. The smell of fish coming off the boats outside and chopped onions in the kitchen permeates the air. Things could pick up; no one will want to cook at home. But for now, bored to death, Sparrow studies the people who come in and out. They lift flimsy waxed paper cups to their lips, all high fructose corn syrup and fizz over ice. She thinks about the times when a sugar rush and some brain freeze had been enough to keep her going. She’s cracking gum to hide the smell of liquor, but more to calm her nerves, nerves always on wicked high alert. Her sweet juice from home is nearly gone.

She stares hard at the couple that comes in every Wednesday night. The dude is stuffing pizza in his face a half a slice at a time, chews it like a cow. He’s glued to reruns of The Simpsons on the stupid television. The girl’s name is Marina. She was a junior when Sparrow was a freshman. Marina was hot at math and tutored kids in the library, but she was different then. She was clear-eyed, plump, and wore hand-knit sweaters. Now she’s board thin and picks at her cheese with a freshly built fingernail painted black. She’s got on a skimpy, wrinkled dress, sleeveless, the color of mustard. Her shoulders are sun-burned and freckled. She used to wear her hair in tidy braids. Red hair and curly, hair like Boyd’s, like Mama’s. Now it’s pulled up into a bun on top of her head, tendrils streaming. She has a tattoo of a tiny squirrel behind her ear.

Sparrow squints and sips. Marina crosses her legs, wraps one foot around the calf of the opposite leg like a rope or a snake, no flesh to stop her. Marina’s feet are always bare, which is not allowed, but no one says anything. She looks at her phone, scrolling, swiping left and right, a hook-up app, which surprises Sparrow since Marina comes in here with this same guy every week. She has a fat diamond on her ring finger. Sparrow can hardly stand it. She wants a better look at the bling.

At the couple’s table, Sparrow holds a pen over her order pad, pretending she’s there to do her job. “Pretty ring,” she says.

The girl looks up. “Thanks.” Her voice is mousy, her mouth slightly open. She’s got drool on her chin. “Jay and I just got engaged.”

This close, Sparrow sees how Marina’s eyes are vacant, dull, glazed over in the way Mama’s eyes looked when Sparrow was old enough to notice something wasn’t right. There is no real smile in a pair of eyes like that. Not at all like Glory’s.

“Want dessert?” Sparrow says.

A car commercial blares in the background. Jay looks at Marina for the first time since they’ve been there.

“You’re not done?” he says. “Come on, baby. Eat your food.” He’s coaxing her, but in a mocking way, talking as if she’s a toddler.

Marina sniffs and lifts her chin. She scratches a scab on her arm, one of many arranged like constellations on her otherwise smooth and sun-brushed skin. Sparrow hones in on the ring. It’s at least half a carat.

“Do you have any blueberry pie?” Marina’s words float from her mouth.

“Not today. But we have strawberry ice cream.” Sparrow wants Marina to eat.

Marina raises her eyebrows at Jay, as if asking him a question. He shakes his head, and she forms her lips into an exaggerated pout.

What a guy! Sparrow decides then and there to swear off dudes for the summer. She places the check between Jay and Marina, careful not to make assumptions about who’s in charge. Jay picks it up, does some math out loud, and digs into the pocket of his jeans. He pulls out a few rumpled bills. The tip is going to suck.

“You’re pretty,” Marina says to Sparrow as Sparrow waits for Jay to settle up. “Do I know you?”

Sparrow feels her arms and legs suddenly bloom with gooseflesh now that the focus is turned on her. She doesn’t feel pretty, not pretty like the younger healthier version of Marina the hopeful math tutor. Sparrow’s hair is dull brown and limp no matter what she tries. She’s got her deadbeat dad’s genes when it comes to looks. She shakes her head.

Jay’s cellphone chimes. Marina cocks her head as if she isn’t sure where the sound is coming from.

“Time to go,” he says. He stands and grabs the uneaten slice from Marina’s plate and takes a bite.

Marina doesn’t move. She plays with the bangles on her right wrist, flicking them with her fingernail, making tinkling sounds, and suddenly Sparrow wants what Marina has, the pleasure of that sparkly sound. Maybe that’s all she needs, no diamonds, just a few cheap bracelets.

Like Boyd, Marina now laughs at nothing funny.

“Get up,” Jay tells her, but he’s back looking at the television.

When Marina stands, she loses balance. Sparrow catches her by the elbow.

“Whew,” Marina says. “Thank you. You’re so sweet.”

Marina’s scent is sour and metal and maybe a little rank from sex. Once Sparrow is certain that Marina is set to rights, she releases her. She watches the girl drift away, all bones and wrinkled dress and a nest of hair. She watches Marina swivel off in starts and stops as she moves slowly out the door, her ring catching the light from the streetlamps on the pier, her diamond flashing. The shop door swings shut behind her.

On the table, there’s enough money for the meal. And surprise! There’s an extra ten. She’ll have enough cash after tonight to get something pretty for herself, like Glory says. Bangles and something sparkly, both. Maybe she’ll get Boyd a new Lego set.

And there it is again, the smack of reality, as she envisions Boyd’s empty room.

That night, when Sparrow strolls home after work, her shorts’ pockets are bulging with bills and change from her tips. The money bulge hangs lower than the hem of her cutoffs. She does a little dance, hip hop streaming through her ear buds, likes the feel of the heavy change clattering against her thighs.

At home, she’ll separate her tips by currency, nickels, dimes, and quarters separated into jelly jars she collects and hides underneath her bed. It’s easier to count that way. She’ll place the bills between the pages of A Wrinkle in Time. It’s her mother’s copy. Though the buzz she sustained from the juice had crackled out, she smoked a joint with her boss, Ezra, after work. Money counting and good weed is the perfect combination. She looks up at the sky. No moon tonight, just a galaxy of glitter. Marina told her she was pretty. Weed made her feel like it was true.

Up the hill out of town, she comes to their lane. The house is dark, which doesn’t bode well. Boyd likes the place lit up like Christmas, afraid of the ghost soldiers that come alive on his shelf and, of course, Glory indulges him. But maybe she did turn out the lights tonight. Maybe they’re both asleep already. It’s super late. Eleven-thirty. Sparrow’s starving. She forgot the meatball grinders.

As she climbs the lane, she sees a glow coming from the backyard. She loves the looks of the light but feels conflicted. When she was little and Glory went out back to play with fire inside the hoop house, Sparrow would watch from her bedroom window. She became mesmerized at how the small glow would fatten and pulse, then grow dim, while her own blood sped up and calmed in time. Fire would wave and pop, grow loud then quiet, like the rhythm a person was born with, like the old jazz they listened to on the kitchen radio sometimes when they wiped the dishes. Glory would be out there making all that loveliness happen.

Sparrow used to pretend the glowing hoop house was a spaceship that aliens had brought down to earth, like a tent for camping in, pink and blue creatures that had chosen them for a study because they were a special kind of family, one without a father or a mother at home, but instead with a Glory who’d come from out of nowhere to take care of them.

Later, she learned that they’d all been making stuff up while they waited for word from their dad. Terrible news when it came. Trouble like Mama’s and his was too damn hard to beat. Mama had it worse. She might not make it. After that, Glory told her and Boyd they could start calling her Mama, if they wanted to. But Sparrow couldn’t, and Boyd followed Sparrow’s lead.

Sparrow knows for sure, now, that Glory is not inside, is not asleep, and she would never leave the lights off if Boyd was home. The dome is brighter than usual and growing brighter. Sparrow’s muscles tingle as if she has taken a vodka shot straight up, but she also notices the prickling. What’s to follow is the fear. What has goddamn Glory done with Boyd?

The change in Sparrow’s pockets clangs as she picks up her pace. It’s no longer a pleasant feeling. Her money legs are slowing her down, but she’s got to get to Glory to see if she’s alright. Find out what she’s gone and done with Boyd.

Funny, how quickly weight can shift, twisting the law of gravity she learned about in school. The pressure lifts from her thighs and lands in her chest as if all her money is packed inside her heart and her legs are light. Impossible. She runs to the backyard, calling Glory’s name, knowing Glory can’t hear a thing because of the fire roar in her rusted drum.

Outside the hoop house, Sparrow puts her palms on the taut plastic of the structure. She can’t see Glory through the blaze made milky by the cloudy plastic barrier between them, but she hears a scream come from Glory’s throat, a low-pitched wild animal cry, as if she’s the only being left living on this spinning planet, as if she can bring her very soul out from inside to keep her company. The flames lick higher. Sparrow closes her eyes. She lets the heat crawl into her hands and slide down her wrists. She smells melting plastic.

The reason Glory liked to come out here to soothe herself, molding fire as if it were clay, was because she missed Mama. She once told Sparrow that she prays out here. As her pink and purple candles drip onto the tomato and pepper starts, she prays Mama will come back home. But Mama’s gone from them for good. Sparrow’s known this for years, has said as much to Glory, and in some ways, she is older than Glory in her acceptance. Sparrow also knows that Glory’s plan to send Boyd to that school where he can become more comfortable on his spectrum has come to fruition. She knows that Glory left with Boyd as soon as Sparrow left for work, has dropped him off. She can see it. Boyd half-hugging her with one arm, a jumbo box of Cheerios crammed underneath his armpit. She knows that Glory drove back and went straight for her fire barrel.

The flames are high and wild. Sparrow looks up and sees a great hole split the top of the dome apart, looking like the blister of a giant’s heel, smoke oozing out like pus. Now it’s her imagination that’s run amuck. Will they take her away, too, for killing that raccoon? The social worker knew about it, made her bury it in the yard herself. Would they take her away for doing wild things and thinking wild thoughts?

As her hands absorb the heat, she knows this is harming. She’s got to stop. She wills her hands off the plastic, as she wills the coins in her pockets to pull her down like stones, but she is stuck. She might be wailing, too, as she watches ragged-edged sleeves of plastic tear off the hoop house ceiling and disappear into sky. The PVC pipe becomes a skeleton as if the plastic cover had never been there at all. Beyond that, the stars against a sky of indigo look like Mama Glory’s diamond ringlet.

Mama Glory! She said it! She has named Glory differently, called her Mama, if only in her head.

Before a scab of molten polymer can slough off and seam onto her skin, scar this night into her forever, she senses Mama Glory behind her, smells the scent of rose oil first, then feels Mama Glory’s hands pulling hard on her arms. They fall together. They are lying on their backs in the unmown grass. Mama Glory curls and becomes a nest. Sparrow, a little bird, shifts into the curve and settles. Together, they watch the gray frame blacken.

“Boyd?” Sparrow croaks, her lungs heavy with acrid smoke.

“He’s gone for now. But we can visit,” Mama Glory says, a whisper in her ear. “He liked it.” She pets Sparrow’s sweaty hair. “They have a ping pong table and a kickass telescope.” She laughs. Sparrow finds the laughter more comforting than words.

But how did Mama Glory pull this off? Where’d she get the money?

Sparrow reaches for Mama Glory’s hand, feels for her lumps of rings, finds what she’s suspected for a while, but couldn’t say it, couldn’t stop it. There is only flesh indented from the tightness of what had been there.

Mama Glory has never shared the story about where those rings came from, though Sparrow used to beg to know. Mama Glory did tell her it had to do with true love, and that to talk about it would make Mama Glory so sad, she couldn’t love and care for the two of them right.

Sparrow doesn’t like to think about that now, what the rings were worth in value outside of the money, how much it cost Mama Glory to lose them. She just holds on tight to Mama Glory’s wrist. They are lying there like that when a southwesterly picks up and builds the fire even higher. It will rain later in the day tomorrow, but tonight, the fire above them flames. Sparks travel skyward. Their pulses beat together.

Jodi Paloni is the author of the story collection, They Could Live with Themselves, runner-up for the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, an Independent Publishers Award Silver Medalist, and a finalist for the Maine Book Award in Fiction. Her stories appear in North by Northeast I and II, Short Story America IV, Carve, Whitefish Review, Green Mountains Review, and many other places. She won the Short Story America Prize, placed second in the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest, and is a three-time finalist for the Maine Literary Awards. She grew up outside of Philly and now lives on the coast of Maine.