Watching Nicki

When she drove up the driveway, Mom was hidden behind the sunshine on the Cadillac's windows. The rays of summer sun buttered the windows and the sleek bubble-sides of the car, so they gleamed and almost hurt your eyes to look. The air she diffused around her was that of a police officer; she had worked with them in the McCordsville Town Hall and took on their self-important and patronizing tone. The local cops passed on the torch, so to speak; now Mom thought she owned the world. The silver car - looking so much like a police car but was merely a over-priced civilian machine - squatted on the inky black driveway and the engine cut off. Mom came out and slammed the door. Resounded a hollow thunk against the high walls of the house in which she no longer belonged. 

"Is she ready?" she asked, her mouth half-smiling, half-grimacing. Behind her sunglasses, Mom looked like an old witch. her pale skin and cigarette-puckered mouth and thin nose didn't go well with large, dark lenses. Her corn silk hair was still short but spider wed fine now that it had grown back from her months of chemotherapy. I opened the service door that divides the garage from the house and saw her waddling toward me. 

I took a cursory glance at Nicki's empty car. It's a red Chevrolet Cavalier, two-door, made within the past ten years, still reliable. I could see through her windows: nothing but fast food to-go bags and empty Coke cans. I could smell the inside without being in it: warmth and plastic and faint Tommy Boy perfume. 

A solitary cardinal cheeped from the trees surrounding the driveway.

"You mean  Nicki?" I asked.

"Whell, who else do you think is driving to Seattle?" Her grimace sharpened now, and I took a step back into the house. Dad wasn't home. Her voice rose as she said her last few words, making them harsh.

It was time for my sister to move. She was seventeen years old, I was a year younger. She had been failing her senior classes at Mt. Vernon High School and Mom presented her with a glorious opportunity: finish out her senior year at Lake Stevens High School in beautiful Lake Stevens, Washington. Just an hour outside Seattle, thirty-minutes from the westernmost edge of the continental United States, home of old Spanish explorers who named grooves in topography the way people name their pets. Straits of Juan de Puca, Nicki will say later over the phone as I look out the window at our old familiar mailbox. Puget Sound. Such delicate-sounding names.

Nicki was going to re-do her senior year at a high school she'd never been to in a state she'd never lived in. At Mom's request. Months from now she'll be calling me and wishing she'd done better at Mt. Vernon, where she and I had attended from kindergarten through twelfth grade. I got pushed today, she'd say in a shaky voice. Somebody pushed me in the hallway.

Mom sighed as if already exhausted with the mere idea of driving all the way across the country, which I admit would be quite a feat. I stepped back ans allowed her to pass into the house like she was some neighbor a person doesn't want to invite in. A strange idea came into my mind: you don't have to invite her in if you don't want to. Her small frame turned on a heel like a drill sergeant calling ranks. She faced the stairs and shouted.

"Nicki-pooh, get down here, ready to go."

Heart beating fast, i  took a hesitant step forward and was split between the threshold between the mudroom and the foyer. I looked at Mom and up the quiet stairs. I shrugged and pretended I wasn't going to be the one in trouble.

Nicole Renee Buckland trundled down the stairs, her shoulders slouched like a middle schooler's. She was carrying nothing; her hands were empty. She carried herself as if ready for a blow. I pooched my lips out in question. Nicki opened her mouth but not a syllable came out.