Cornerstone Read online

  Cornerstone

  By Misty Provencher

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2011 by Misty Provencher. All rights reserved.

  Cover and Interior Design by Streetlight Graphics

  www.streetlightgraphics.com

  First Kindle Edition: November 2011

  ISBN-10: 1467924628

  ISBN-13: 9781467924627

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The Author holds exclusive rights to this work. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited.

  For information:

  tenaciousink.blogspot.com

  Email:

  [email protected]

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Special Thanks

  Sneak Peak: Keystone

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated to

  Doug, Sydney, & Nolan

  who make ‘me’ happen.

  ~More Than Anything~

  And to Laura,

  who was my very first fan.

  Chapter 1

  I hate paper day. Hate. It. But I still do it every week, sometimes twice a week, because my mom asks me to. I know I shouldn’t. I know it doesn’t help. But I do it because the only people in the world that we can count on is us. My dad’s just a frozen smile in a brushed-brass frame on our living room wall. And since he hasn’t jumped down to run to the office supply store for her in the last seventeen years, it’s all on me.

  I lug home three stacks of printer paper every week, even though it kills my arms. The office supply is on my way home from school and the store manager, Buzz, keeps it waiting for me by the register now. Fifteen hundred sheets of their cheapest paper, wrapped up in individual paper packages. Buzz used to ask me what we do with it all. I told him my mom was a writer but I didn’t tell him about how all this paper ends up in storage garages, filled to the rafters. I don’t tell him that the reason I’m in this neighborhood and at his particular store counter is because our old house was so crammed with paper that we had to move. And I don’t tell him that my mom has never even finished one story.

  But I think Buzz assumes my mom is a crappy writer anyway because she has never published anything. It took a few weeks before he stopped making jokes about how we keep him in business, about how we buy enough paper to build a house out of it, and about how my mom sure must make a lot of typos. Now he just smiles and asks me how it’s going or we talk about things that don’t matter, like school or the weather.

  Even with Buzz behind the counter, smiling and joking with me, I can’t stand handing over the money for three more stacks. The paper is why we don’t have a bank account. And it’s why two different shrinks have files documenting my mom as a compulsive paper hoarder and me as a captive enabler. The paper is why social services keeps threatening to have me removed due to the ‘hazardous conditions’.

  My mom hates being labeled as a hoarder, she says it is grossly inaccurate, but it sounds a lot better than the label I have at school. A friend—it only took one, to show up at my house unexpectedly and to stare inside with a horrified face—started calling me The Waste. The name was all over school within a day. People were saying it to me casually in the halls. That’s what makes these stupid stacks of paper feel the heaviest. The Waste.

  But I still stop on my way home.

  And I still thank Buzz.

  And I still fork over the money that could help pay some of our bills on time, because, you know, my mom says she needs this. Once, when I told her I wasn’t picking up paper for her anymore because it was too embarrassing, she almost broke down in tears. She told me that whether or not I helped, she would still get the paper and keep writing because it is important. When I said I didn’t care, she grabbed my hand and squeezed it and said, “Please Nali. I mean it. This is a huge responsibility. I have to do this. It’s for…all of us. It’s for mankind.”

  There was something in her touch that tingled up my arm and into my brain. Like an adrenaline shot of belief. I know it sounds stupid. That’s why instead of telling my mom what I felt, I motioned to the stacks of paper that filled what was once our spare bathroom and made a joke about how much we do for mankind. After that, anytime there was something we didn’t want to do, we’d laugh and say, “just do it for mankind.”

  It’s a thirty minute walk home from the office supply on regular days, but it takes forty minutes on paper days because I have to stop and give my arms a rest. And today, my arms hurt so bad, I don’t feel like joking about mankind at all. I turn the corner of our street and see my mom waiting on the tiny slab of our front porch. Actually, she’s pacing. She does that when she needs her paper. Once she sees me, she meets me half way down the sidewalk and she takes two of the packages I’m carrying.

  “I was getting worried about you. Everything okay?” she asks.

  “I’ve got mid terms, you know.” I can’t help but snap at her. My shoulders are aching. I adjust the strap on my backpack to remind her of how full it is. “It stinks carrying all your paper home when I’ve got a big enough load already.”

  “It is for mankind, after all.” she smiles. When I don’t, she winces. “Sorry.”

  I sigh. I hate when she’s sorry for needing her paper.

  “I know.” I tell her. “Just wish mankind weighed less.”

  “Hey,” she gives me another grin. “I’ve got cookies.”

  I feel the hope nudge inside me. “Oh yeah? What kind?”

  “Oreos.”

  “Oh.” It’s stupid that I keep hoping my mom will surprise me with real cookies one of these times. The kind you make at home, with a wood spoon and a stove. It has never been possible, even after one of the more adept social workers made my mother remove a stuffed, cardboard file box from inside our oven. Once the social worker left, I could almost see the thought-balloon expanding over my mom’s head. She just disconnected the stove and filled it back up. She thought it was clever, since we only use the microwave anyway. I didn’t bother to mention that we only microwave because we can’t clear out enough paper to make real cooking safe.

  My mom goes up the porch steps and holds the door open for me.

  From the outside, our townhouse apartment looks normal. We live in a burnt-orange brick building, the middle black door in a row of five black doors. Every apartment looks exactly the same from the street. It is only by stepping inside that anyone can see how completely different we are.

  I remember the first time I visited a friend’s house and realized that you are supposed to be able to walk into a house and cross the room and open a window if you want. You should be able to see living room furniture and be able to tell what color it is. It shouldn’t be a mystery, whether or not there is carpet under your feet or if you have a kitchen or a staircase.

  In our house, no one notices the tiny square of clean wood floor where we kick off our shoes. That little patch is lost in the blinding avalanche of white paper that hides the rest of the house. Heaps of it fill every inch of our living room, an efficient blizzard of orderly, white stacks. My mother’s teeny tiny scrawl covers every inch of every sheet but when they are loaded into piles, al
l you see is the whiteness of it.

  The living room is parted down the center, leaving a thin walkway that only allows one person through at a time. No one would ever guess that there is a dining room buried under the paper wall to the left and that the boxes that pour beyond it are really the edges of a foxhole around our kitchen. On the right side of the room, there are sharp, swirling pillars so high that they appear to be holding up the ceiling but really, there is a staircase hiding behind them. Each step is flanked with loads of paper, leaving only enough room to maneuver up and down the stairs on tiptoe. Every once in a while, one of the stacks falls over and cascades down the steps, making what should be a simple walk up to my room as slippery and treacherous as scaling Mt. Olympus.

  I drop my backpack on one of the two available couch cushions. There is enough room to seat my mom and I, but the end cushion is compressed beneath milk crates, filled with paper.

  “So what’d you do today?” I ask.

  “Write.” she says. It’s what she always says.

  “Did you finish anything?”

  “Not yet.” She looks away, hearing the insinuation in my voice. “But they’re all important, Nalena, remember that. Every single one of them.”

  “I know.” I tell her, even though I don’t. My mom doesn’t write full poems or full stories or full novels or full anything. Instead, she fills pages with her miniscule print, listing shreds of plot ideas and characters. Her pages will have stuff like “Christos DelMinos, 14, stabbed, instead of his 3 year old niece; Martin Fowler, 24, returned the money he’d stolen but not all of it; Linda Hayes, 63, invited depressed neighbor in for long talk.” Sometimes it even sounds sweet: Olga Zitov, doesn’t know her age, still believes in fairies. I probably started asking my Mom to finish a story when I was about six years old and I gave up begging when I turned seventeen, almost three months ago. The last time I asked her, I’d been specific.

  “Could you finish this one?” I held up a piece of paper and pointed to one of the lines on the sheet. My mom leaned over my shoulder to read it.

  “Grace, one, saves us all.” she mumbled and then she smiled.

  “This one’s not like the rest.” I pointed out. “This one sounds mysterious, you know? The rest of them sound like endings and this one sounds like it could be a great start. Saves us from what? What could the rest of the story be?”

  My mom had just shrugged.

  “I suppose that’s it.” she said wistfully.

  “How could that be it? It’s only a sentence.” I argued. “Why don’t you make this one into something? It seems like it could really be interesting.”

  “It already is something, Nali.” She tried to smooth my hair behind my ear but I moved away.

  “I mean a whole story this time. Can you write this one? For me?”

  “Sure.” She smiled the lie. “It will be a story. I promise. But it’s important that I write all of them in my head. I have to make sure I don’t forget anything.”

  “Who cares about whatever else there is?” I’d said, grabbing a handful of sheets and holding it out to her. “What good will a million great ideas do if you never even finish one? If you’re not going to use any of these, why don’t you just let me throw some of this away?”

  She shook her head and frowned.

  “You can’t throw any of it away. Not one sheet, Nali. Promise me.” She searched my face as if recognition just needed a minute more to surface. I dumped her paper back on the nearest pile.

  “Oh, God bless it!”

  “Exactly.” My mom chuckles as she drops a reassuring arm around my shoulders and gives me a tiny shake like I’m a really good sport. “At some point, you’re going to understand your old mother. And why I do what I do. I promise you that.”

  “What’s there to understand?” I’d grumbled, but I loved the warmth and strength I felt when she was near. I could never stay angry with her.

  “Mankind.” she’d said and I had to nod and laugh.

  She’s told me all my life that hoarding all this paper is important, but it wasn’t ever my mom’s rationalizations that actually made things okay with me. It was what one cranky, overworked social worker had once told me, as he looked through our thick file with a disapproving sigh.

  “I guess you can make ‘normal’ out of any old thing, if you’ve got enough of it.” he’d said. At the time, I’d had a mental picture of my mom and I sewing our clothes, cooking our food and building a new house, all out of paper.

  Although I get how McCranky really meant it, I still think he got it right. We spend a lot of time coming up with plans together to deflect visitors so we don’t have to invite them into our paper cave. We compete in figuring out new ways to scrimp so we can pay for storage units that handle the overflow. We laugh together when a pile of paper teeters over and crashes to the floor, reporting it to each other as ‘an upheaval of mankind’. We’ve gotten used to living in the tight spaces between all the paper stacks. This is who we are. And I get that it’s entirely possible that if my mom began finishing stories, it could change everything about us.

  Understanding that is why, on the night I asked my mom to finish a story about the little girl, I also ended up vowing to myself that no matter how much I couldn’t stand our paper-stuffed life sometimes, I would never ask my mom to finish any of her stories ever, ever again.

  Chapter 2

  We have bologna sandwiches and cookies, everything right out of the packages and eaten over our laps, for dinner. As usual, we eat in silence because I don’t want to talk about how my day was at school. When all the stories were about how I found The Waste written on my locker in permanent marker, in my textbooks, and even across the butt of my gym shorts, my mom threatened to go down to school and find these kids herself to have a word with them. That probably would’ve gotten me killed, so out of pure self preservation, I did the smart thing and just stopped telling.

  When we first moved here, I begged her to let me be homeschooled to avoid this. Mom refused, saying I needed to be out in the real world away from her, to get more socialization. She’d be horrified if she knew that all my interactions consisted of stuff like walking into homeroom and finding THE WASTE gouged into my desk. When she used to ask about the friends I’d made, I just said I take after her. She hated that.

  “Then don’t take after me, okay?” she’d say. It’d sound like a joke out of her mouth, but the little worried crinkle between her eyes would sink even deeper.

  “Nope, I want to be just like you.” I’d say, but I’d always add what made her happiest to hear, “Minus about fifty tons of paper.”

  Then she’d squeal, Perfect! and throw her arms around me. “Mankind’s already got enough writers.”

  When I was in elementary school, she used to tell me she was sorry there was no place for friends to come over and play. In middle school, she tried to explain the importance of her writing, saying it was something bigger than just us, something that the world needed. But now that I’m finishing my Junior year in high school, I can’t help feeling like the world could do without another storage shed stacked with her story lines and we could do without the bill. Still, when my mom talks about the importance of every character she writes down, her belief is so super charged that it’s easy to get lost in her fog. Whether or not I can see the real importance doesn’t matter when her eyes get that clear and the worry line between her eyebrows vanishes. All I can see then is her belief in what she’s doing and I can almost forget the food stamps and The Waste and single-file paths through our apartment right along with her.

  “Are you going to go run the track tonight?” she asks when we are through eating. I run almost every night even though I’m not on the school team. I’m not looking to win any medals. I just do it to be out of the house. She slides the bologna back into its plastic bag.

  “Library.” I say. She doesn’t ask if I’m meeting anyone because we’re both painfully aware that I’m severely lacking in the friend department.
r />   The only place in our house for me to study is on my bed and sitting there, slouching over my books, gives me a backache. I had a hand-me-down desk once, but when her paper stacks began seeping into my room, I was still too little to understand everything I was giving up when we got rid of it. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder if she’s considered how much more space there would be if we could rig up our beds on the ceiling.

  She kisses me on the forehead when I pick up my backpack. I can smell the lavender-vanilla soap that I buy her every Christmas.

  “Have a good time.” she says.

  “Yeah right.” I tell her.

  “Well, we both have a lot to do tonight, I guess. Might as well get to it.” She pats my arm although her voice grows serious. “Just be careful out there. Take a flashlight and don’t talk to anyone you don’t know.”

  She says this almost every time I leave the house. Like a mantra is as good as pepper spray. All I say is, “Uh huh.”

  ~ * * * ~

  I don’t bother to use the flashlight because most of the way to the library is lit at intervals by streetlights or houselights and I don’t mind the dark parts anyway. I like the idea of passing through the shadows without anyone seeing me.

  I cut through the cluster of apartment buildings behind us, across the gap of a strip mall and follow the sidewalk that goes into what I call ‘the old sub’. The houses in the old sub were built in the 1920s and they fill up their yards with add-ons and wrap around porches. Every single one looks either sparklingly restored or totally haunted, but all of them reek of stability, unlike our apartment complex, which is as transient as a birdhouse. I miss our old house, the way it could’ve been if it wasn’t jammed with my mom’s mounds of one-line novels. I wonder if any of the houses here are filled with useless, unfinished stories as I jigsaw my way through the entire subdivision.