1st 5 Pages January Workshop- Bates

Name: Lisa Lynn Bates
Genre: Middle Grade: Contemporary
Title: Man of the House

We moved on Cinco de Mayo, before school ended. I thought the change in scenery would help my mother. That it would change things for the better. But it didn’t. 

“Mom, what are you doing?” I asked the moment I caught her searching the walls of our new home.

“Close the shades,” she whispered. 

“Why?” I asked, twisting the rods until all blades closed shut. 

My mother looked over her shoulder. Her wide eyes, pupils spreading like ink spots, scanned the walls. “See?” She pointed. 

I moved in to take a closer look. There, in the wall, was a nail hole. 

“They’re watching us.” 

“They”: meaning aliens. 

“But Mom.” I held my breath and counted to five. Dad said it helps de-stress. “I already checked. I didn’t find any hidden cameras. Remember?” 

“Si, but you didn’t look here.” 

In our old apartment, my mother alien proofed our car, TV, microwave, and radio. No aliens ever attacked. The chances of me making friends here in Fayetteville, Georgia, were slim to none. I knew my mother’s condition would make it impossible. Who’d want to make friends with a kid whose mother walked around the house wearing a tin foil helmet with antennas, and sporadically shouted, “Aliens!” when cars honked? 

When I groaned, “Why Georgia?”

“Warmer than Rhode Island,” she said, singing and reaching for my hand. “Promise I’ll take my medicine.”

I wanted to believe her. Because she was almost normal when she took them. She finalized the moving date, after she found a help wanted ad online. It didn’t take more than a day before she received a reply. Her application was accepted. So off we went. Driving south I-95 for twenty-one hours and three gas stops. Just when I couldn’t take another hour sitting in the car, the GPS led us to a four-sided brick house with a large parking lot and sign that read: Welcome to Guerra’s Home.

“Strange name for a hair salon,” I told Mom.

“Freddie, look!” she said, ignoring me. 

Mom ran ahead, towards a sign posted three houses down: Two-bedroom, furnished home for rent. 404-555-1213.

She called the number. “It’s everything I ever wanted,” she said over the phone. 

I walked up to the front of this pink, cinder block house with yellow shutters and two palm trees in the yard.  

“It reminds me of PR,” she said. That’s short for Puerto Rico. 

To me, the house looked more like a giant guava.

Within minutes after calling, the owner showed up.

“How will you be making these payments?” he asked my mother. 

She showed him the letter she received from Survivor’s Life Insurance she kept in her purse and the job offer from Guerra’s Home.

“This here house is just across from the Home. What will you be doing, there?” he asked my mother.

“I’m a beautician,” she said. “Hair, nails, makeup.”

The owner examined my mother from head to toe. Her hair was matted at the back and her clothes were wrinkled. But what did he expect after hours of driving? 

He took the first month’s rent from my mother. When he gave her the keys, my mother’s eyes sparked, and her lips stretched back like rubber bands. She looked happy.

The new house was on Fayetteville Rd. It stood out from the rest. Ours was the only one painted a bold color. 

“I like bright colors,” my mother told me when I asked why not paint over the pink. If my father were here, he’d try to reason with her. He used to do that often. 


Mom claimed we moved to Georgia for my benefit. But I knew we moved because of my father’s younger brothers. There were no other grounds for leaving Providence. My mother insisted my uncles were part of an underground revolution and she didn’t want their ideologias to influence me. 

“Ideologias?” I had asked her a while back.  

“Yes. Your father’s family are communist.” 

“What'd you mean?” 

“It’s a government that tells you what to eat, what to wear, what to do. Even what kind of ice cream to eat. I don’t like vanilla. I like strawberry.” 

“I get that,” I said, I knew about communism, I learned it in Social Studies. But I didn’t understand how it applied to my family. “But—” I decided to drop the subject. Dad used to say that if I didn’t understand my mother, that one day I would, so I went to my room.

I unpacked my last box. My softball gear still had grass stains from the last game my father sat in to cheer me on. I slid down the side of my bed and read his last text message to me, the one I received before the accident: 

Freddie,
Take care of Mom. You’re the man now.
See you soon, love, Dad

I pulled my knees into my chest and wrapped my arms around them. I wanted to cry, but I held it in. I was the man now.  I’m the man.

**

We hadn’t been in the place for more than four hours when I heard a knock on the door.

I opened the door wide and found some girl, holding a lopsided flan on a plate. She was about eleven, my age.

“Hola.”

“Hi,” I said, wondering what she wanted.

“Welcome,” she said, and held out the plate. “I made this for you.”

I stared at it.

“Take it,” she said, smiling. “It’s not poison.”

I took the plate and said, “Thanks, I guess.”

“I’m Daisy Guerra. My parents want me to show your mom around the Home.” 

She looked over my shoulders, into the dark kitchen. “She home?”

I blocked her view with my body. Man, she’s nosy. “She’s busy unpacking.”

“Oh.” Daisy flipped her long brown hair over her shoulders. “What about you?”

“I’m busy too,” I said, and shut the door behind me.

I jabbed a corner of the flan with my finger and licked it. Tasted like vanilla caramel. Not bad. 

“I’m not leaving till one of you get the tour,” she shouted behind the closed door.

I held my breath, then let it out. My lips flapped. Could this girl get any more annoying? “Fine,” I said, loud enough for her to hear me.

“Great. I’ll wait.”

I put the flan in the refrigerator and checked on my mother. She laid sprawled over a pile of clothes on the bed. On the nightstand, she had left her medication bottle of pink pills open beside her sleeping pills. I decided not to bother my mother. After the long drive, carrying luggage out the car, and unpacking her make-up kits, she needed the rest. Tomorrow she’d start her new job as a beautician. I pulled a sheet out of a box, and snapped a tent over her frail body, where, before the pills, there used to be curves and squishy skin.

The tour was short and uninteresting. Daisy showed me into a large room with rows of purple upholstered chairs. Wall to wall carpeting the color of beets, my least favorite vegetable. A podium with white phony flowers. A kitchen with a long wooden table and ten chairs. And a dome shaped crystal chandelier that hung in the main entrance like a giant beehive. Quite an unusual salon.

“Now for the great finale,” she said, “Follow me.”

I followed Daisy through a locked door labeled Employees Only. She grabbed a pair of gloves from a box next to the door and handed me a pair.