All Shook Up Read Online Free Page B

a worrier and if I told her the truth—that my clothes were still jammed in my suitcases and would probably stay that way for a couple more days—I knew I would get a long lecture on taking care of my stuff, and I wasn’t really into listening to all that. Plus, if I kept my clothes packed up, there was the slim chance that maybe I could still leave Chicago.
    “And how’s your dad?” she asked, which was typically the second Mom question. She said it that way every time.
Your
dad. Emphasis on the
your.
As if he was somebody she had no connection to and didn’t know very well. This always seemed bizarre to me since she had once been
married
to the guy, for cripes sake. My dad wasn’t much different when he talked about her.
    “He’s okay,” I said, knowing this was the perfect opportunity to tell my mom about Murphy’s closing and Dad’s Elvis business. I could start by saying how a few things had changed since the last time I’d seen Dad—and finish by telling her it was probably a good idea if I didn’t stay in Chicago. That it would be better for everybody if I came to Florida instead.
    However, unloading all of this news on my mom in the first thirty seconds of our phone call didn’t seem right, either. So I decided to wait a little longer, hoping maybe the topic would happen to come up on its own. If my mom asked me how work had been going for my dad, for instance, I’d have no choice but to tell her the truth, right?
    But she had already moved on to another subject.
    Chance number one, gone.
    I could hear an odd waver in my mom’s voice as she told me how my grandma was not as good as she had hoped. Mom had taken a flight to Florida just a few hours after I’d left for Chicago, and this was the first time she’d seen my grandma since her accident. “She’s still in the hospital and can’t do much of anything for herself. She’s in a lot of pain, I’m afraid,” my mom said, sounding worried.
    It was hard to picture my grandma in the hospital. The last time I’d seen her, she was perfectly fine. Mom and I had spent a week in June visiting her at the Shadyside Villas trailer park. Every night, she would ease into her blue recliner at six-thirty to watch the evening news, and afterward we would go with her on her “walkabout,” as she liked to call it: two laps of the trailer park at a pace that felt like being in a slow-motion movie to me.
    Then the three of us would sit around the picnic table on my grandma’s porch playing Hearts or Knockout or just Solitaire if nobody was up for a real game. Grandma had taught me to play Solitaire as a little kid, when I could hardly hold the cards, let alone shuffle them. Now I took a pack of cards everywhere I went. “Everybody needs a constructive way to pass the time,” my grandma often said, which I think was a not-so-subtle reference to my grandpa George, who had passed his time by smoking and drinking too much, I guess. He’d died way before I was born, so I’d never met him—which my mom said was probably a good thing. Evidently, he wasn’t a shining role model in general.
    “Grandma asked about you,” Mom continued. “She felt bad that you had to leave your school and your friends in Boston, but I told her not to worry—you are the kind of kid who can adjust to anything. Unlike your mom, who frets about everything, right?” She laughed uneasily, as if this was true—which it was. “I told your grandma that maybe this visit with your dad will turn out to be a good chance for you to spend more time with him, now that you’re getting older and can do more things together.”
    And right there, I knew my best chance to say something about Dad had totally evaporated. What was I supposed to say after that?
Hey, Mom, did you know Dad is now pretending to be Elvis?
Or
Mom, guess what? Dad lost his job and he’s broke, so he’s singing at some restaurant tonight and I’m eating a bucket of cold KFC chicken by myself.
    Even asking if I could