What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay Read online

  Woodbury, Minnesota

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  What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay © 2011 by Amanda Cockrell.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Cover models used for illustrative purposes only and may not endorse or represent the book’s subject.

  First e-book edition © 2011

  E-book ISBN: 9780738728940

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  For Tony and the original Felix

  1

  I am not a religious fanatic. I want to say that right off. It’s just that ever since I got lost looking for the bathroom at church when I was little, and found a statue of St. Felix down in the basement, I’ve talked to him.

  He’s down there because we aren’t supposed to pray to him, since he’s one of those saints the modern church thinks might have been just a product of somebody’s imagination, which is embarrassing if you’ve been asking him to intercede with God for you. But he looked, I don’t know, friendly. Like someone I could tell things to. I’m fifteen now and I’ve been talking to him since I was nine. He’s life-size, and has gray hair and a gray beard and a kind of white gown with maybe a red and blue cross on the front, but he’s really faded and you can’t tell for sure. The name “Felix” is carved into the base, by his feet. I looked him up in a Lives of the Saints book and I think he’s Felix of Valois, but he might be one of the other Felixes—there have been lots, some of them even more dubious than Felix of Valois. Nobody knows where the statue came from. It looks hand-carved, and some early parishioner probably made it. Nobody pays any attention to him now. I dust him once in a while, while I talk to him.

  He’s like having a diary in invisible ink. From my lips to his ear, as my grandfather says, and no one can ever read what I’ve written. I told him when Noah Michalski tried to put his hand up my shirt at a church dance and then told the entire planet I’d let him, which I hadn’t; and when my cat died; and when my mother decided she was going to divorce Ben, who’s a perfectly good stepfather that I’ve had since I was eight.

  “Ben says Mom will come around,” I told Felix. I leaned against the dusty old wall and picked paint flakes off it. There was more dust dancing around in the light from the window over his head, like an extra halo. “Mom gets like this every summer,” I told him. “Like she wants to migrate or something, and then she settles down in the fall. But I don’t remember her ever being this bad.” Usually she just goes to Big Sur for a week and writes poetry. Mom teaches English at Ayala Middle School, where they all think she’s terribly cool because she has this head of wild red hair and wears arty clothes. I look a lot like her, except for having dark hair and my dad’s Latino coloring, but for some reason all that wild hair that looks arty on her just looks dorky on me.

  “I told Mom that Ben is the nicest guy I know,” I said to St. Felix. “And she said you can’t stay married to somebody just because they’re nice.”

  St. Felix looked sympathetic. I flopped down on the floor at his feet, poking with a finger at his carved sandals. “I remember when they got married. I was the flower girl. I had a big basket of rose petals.” I looked up at St. Felix. “People are supposed to hate their stepfathers. I like Ben. He’d probably have adopted me if we could have found my real father and proved he’s dead. You’d think my mother would want to set me a good example. How am I supposed to find a boyfriend with an example like that?”

  I poked at his sandal some more. “I haven’t spoken to her since she said she was leaving Ben and we had a big fight over it. I don’t know how long I can hold out. It’s not easy not talking to your mother.” It felt good to tell someone that, even a statue, since I couldn’t say it to Mom if I wasn’t speaking to her.

  And then, the next day, Mom moved out and went to my grandparents’ house. For a whole week now she’s been calling and pestering me to move there with her. I’m still living at Ben’s. Ben’s house is where I’ve lived since I was eight, and I’m not going anywhere. I’ve managed to hold out not speaking to Mom, too pig-stubborn to say one word to her when she tries to talk me into going to my grandparents’ house. Then she orders me to come, then threatens to call the police and have them bring me there. I’m mad, but I’m sort of enjoying how nuts it’s driving her.

  She finally came over here to argue about it some more while Ben and Grandma Alice and I were having dinner. Grandma Alice is Ben’s mother, and she moved in with us last month, not long before Mom moved out. Grandma Alice offered to move out again but Mom said that wasn’t the problem, she would rather have Grandma Alice than Ben. She said it right in front of him, but he just grinned at her. Grandma Alice says there may be things I don’t know.

  So Mom walked into the dining room as if she’d never left and started talking to me while I was buttering my potato. “Angela, I am your mother, and I will make the decisions as to what is best for both of us. You need to stop behaving in this childish fashion.”

  No, I don’t, I thought. You need me to. I cut my potato into tiny little bites, which Mom hates because she read somewhere that it’s a sign of an eating disorder—which I don’t have, but which she thinks I might develop at any moment, like a pimple on my nose.

  “Sylvia,” Grandma Alice said, “maybe it’s best to let Angie have a little time.”

  “No reason she can’t stay here,” Ben said, spearing another piece of steak.

  “Of course she can’t stay here,” Mom said.

  I got up while they were arguing and took my plate to the kitchen, and then went out the back door before Mom noticed. I figured I could get several blocks away before Mom got around to wondering why I was still in the kitchen.

  Our house—well, Ben’s house—is right downtown. It’s not much of a town. There’s only one stop light. I ducked under the big live oaks that shade the library and jaywalked across Ayala Avenue to my church, St. Thomas Aquinas. It isn’t one of the famous California missions that Fa
ther Serra founded, but it’s almost as old. I like it lots better than the new church Mom goes to. It’s always cool and dim at St. Thomas’s, even if Mom does think it has mice. It smells like incense, and the adobe walls and the stations of the cross are all dark from the candle smoke.

  It was dusk when I headed out and St. Thomas’s was dark inside, just the glow of the candles in the chapel that people light to thank the Virgin for something, or to ask her to keep their husband safe in the army or make him faithful or let them win the lottery. I skirted by them, thinking maybe on the way out I’d light one for Mom to get some sense.

  The stairs down to the basement are gloomy; they always make me think a nun is going to pop out at me wearing one of those old-fashioned habits, or some ancient padre from the colonial days will dodder past, speaking Spanish, but there’s never anyone down there. As I reached the bottom step, I saw St. Felix in the light from the one little high-up window. He looked tired, and kind of gloomy too. Whatever he was wearing looked like the mice had gnawed it, and it was more faded than ever. I felt around for the light switch and turned it on. St. Felix looked back at me and scratched his beard, and I screamed.

  “Oh, hell,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “Who are you?” I backed away.

  “Felix.” He pointed at his feet. “It’s on my pedestal.”

  I stared at him. I could have sworn it was St. Felix. He had on this sort of white bathrobe thing, and sandals—Birkenstocks, I think. His hair was gray and sort of shaggy like Felix’s. And he stepped down off St. Felix’s pedestal, and there wasn’t anybody else on there.

  “There’s all kinds of people upstairs,” I said. “People come down here all the time.”

  “No, they don’t,” he said. “But I’m not gonna hurt you. Are you still fighting with your mom over the divorce?”

  “How do you know that?” I demanded.

  He looked hurt. “What? You think we don’t pay attention to people who pray to us? It’s not like I have lots of people down here, lighting candles and gilding my halo.”

  “You don’t have a halo,” I told him.

  He felt around in the air over his head as if it had just gone missing. “Hmmm. I expect they don’t manifest well.”

  I knew I was probably trapped in the basement of St. Thomas’s with a lunatic, but where had the statue gone? “You aren’t St. Felix,” I told him.

  “I’ll prove it.” He sat down on a wooden box labeled NATIVITY, ODD PIECES. “For starters,” he said, “do not hang around with that Michalski boy. All that fifteen-year-old boys have on their minds is getting in some girl’s underwear.”

  I could feel my face going hot. It’s one thing to tell something like that to a statue; it’s another to have the statue turn into a live actual man.

  “Second, your mom is divorcing your stepdad and you don’t like that. And, three, you got nice hair.”

  Oh, God. I remembered telling him when I got my first period. He was a statue. Then.

  It was halfway a relief when it occurred to me that all the things he was talking about were stuff I’d told him recently. “If you’re St. Felix, what’s my father’s name? Not Ben, my real father.”

  My mother gets married and divorced when she hasn’t got anything else to do. She married her first husband, whose name I don’t even know, when she was sixteen, but her parents had it annulled. Lots later she married my father in a nuptial Mass, which didn’t work any better than the Las Vegas wedding had because all Mom got out of that marriage was me.

  “Gil Arnaz,” Felix said.

  I tried to remember the last time I had talked about Gil Arnaz. It might have been while I was talking about the divorce. I edged past him to look around the broom closet door, which was standing half open. A ratty old blanket and a backpack were on the floor with an empty can of spaghetti. There was probably enough room to sleep in there if you took out all the old mop buckets and moth-eaten cassocks, which somebody had done.

  “You’ve been listening to me!” I said.

  “Well, sure. You’ve been talking to me.”

  “I’ve been talking to St. Felix!”

  He smiled. His teeth were snaggly. “It was nice. Nobody else has talked to me in a long time.”

  “You’re not St. Felix!”

  He pointed a finger at me. “If I’m not, then where is he?”

  “If you are, how come you’re suddenly alive?”

  He looked like he was actually trying to figure that out. “I guess God finally decided I wasn’t a saint.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “On the other hand,” he said kind of thoughtfully, “it gets real hard to be a saint when somebody’s trying to kill you. I think God was expecting too much. What do you think?”

  “I think if Father Weatherford catches you down here, he’ll call the police.”

  “Are you going to tell him?”

  I absolutely did not believe this man was St. Felix. And in any case, nobody ever tried to kill St. Felix of Valois, who led a very boring life at his monastery—although he once found the Blessed Virgin and her angels in the chapel ringing the bells for him when he overslept.

  “I can ask God to change your mom’s mind about the divorce,” the guy said. “I don’t think he actually listens to me, but if you want me to, I’ll ask.”

  I pictured myself telling Father Weatherford about him. I’d have to explain about the statue being gone and why I’d been coming down here and I’d sound like those people who see the Virgin Mary in a cheese sandwich. Before I could make up my mind, I heard someone walking around upstairs in the chapel, which has a tile floor. I ran up the stairs and out the side door, and left St. Felix to fend for himself.

  Mom was gone by the time I got back. Grandma Alice and Ben were in the kitchen scraping plates and giving bites off their forks to the Todal, who is a giant dog named for the monster in The Thirteen Clocks, which was Mom’s favorite book when she was little. The Todal was the size of a calf when we got him, when he was ten weeks old. No one knows exactly what he is. He leaned against Ben, looking soulful and hoping for the rest of my potato.

  “The coast is clear,” Ben said. “Where’d you disappear to?”

  “Just out for a walk.” I didn’t feel up to telling anyone about the guy in the church basement. Mom would freak if she knew, and want me to carry mace, and Ben would probably call the cops. I didn’t think the guy was dangerous, though. I know that’s stupid, to assume some random man who’s been sleeping in the church basement and claims he’s a saint is harmless, but I did anyway. I’ll probably be abducted by aliens before I’m twenty.

  Ben was watching me, looking worried. He’s more worried about me than he is about Mom, I think. It drives me crazy that he’s so casual about her leaving—does he want her to divorce him?

  “Have you started getting your stuff for school together?” he asked, reminding me that there’s less than a month of summer vacation left, a dismal thought. “Backpack and everything? Do you need new clothes? Do we need to shop?”

  “Have you considered the possibility that Sylvia will go ape if you take Angie shopping?” Grandma Alice asked him.

  “I can take myself,” I said. “I can take the bus to Ventura.” Ayala only has one department store, where you can buy things that look like they came out of the Farmer’s Almanac. I absolutely did not want to go shopping with Mom, and I couldn’t picture Ben hanging around the Juniors section in Macy’s.

  Ben frowned at the bus idea.

  “I can go with Lily,” I said. “She just got her license.” Lily is my best friend.

  “Does Lily have a car?”

  “We can take her dad’s.” I slid out of the kitchen and into my room, hitting Lily’s number on my cell. I had it on silent, and I’d stacked up five missed calls from Mom since dinner.

  “People get very strange over custody issues,” Lily said seriously when she picked me up the next day in her parents’ old Volvo.

  “It
’s not as if Ben could get custody,” I grumbled. “She’s just freaking because I won’t talk to her.”

  “You’d be freaking if she wouldn’t talk to you,” Lily pointed out.

  What I like about Lily is that she takes everything seriously, even though she can be a goof. She never tells me I shouldn’t do something, she just makes what she calls “suggestions,” and when I do it and it turns out to have been a disaster, she never says she told me so. She also has absolutely straight blond hair that she winds up into a knot and sticks a pencil through, and it stays. I don’t know how. Mine is a mess of curls and it still won’t do the pencil thing. Lily is sixteen already, but she’s in tenth grade with me because her parents lived in a monastery in Nepal until she was seven and they just never got around to putting her in school there. They’re a little casual that way. Her family moved to Ayala when we were in middle school and we’re both such weirdos that we were destined to be friends. Neither of us has any clue how to deal with people our own age since we’re both only children and were raised by wolves. Arty, intellectual wolves.

  “Ben gave me his credit card,” I told Lily. “I don’t think it’s even an account that Mom’s on. That’ll make her mad, too.”

  “Are you trying to make her mad?”

  “Mmm hmm.”

  “Constructive.” Lily swung the Volvo around the corner.

  When she stopped for the light by the post office, I saw him. It was St. Felix of whoever-he-was. He was walking from St. Thomas’s toward the Spanish-style arcade that runs through Ayala’s one-block shopping district. He was still wearing that old bathrobe thing, but I could see he had jeans on under it.

  I poked Lily. “Who’s that?”

  “Someone who’s not taking his medication?” she suggested.

  We watched him go past the drug store, the bathrobe flapping around his legs. Lily turned the Volvo left and forgot about him, but I craned my neck around to see if I could see where he went.

  We spent the afternoon trying on clothes and counting up how many people we know whose parents are divorced, which was depressing.