They Fought Over Who Had to Keep Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Nobody Sang
On her eighteenth birthday Lacey's parents slide a custody calendar back and forth over her cake, and she walks to her grandmother's building, where the landlord says the apartment is prepaid and he told her father in April.
I turned eighteen on a Saturday, and my parents spent it arguing about which of them was stuck with me.
Mom had asked us all to come to her apartment at four for cake.
Dad came with his girlfriend, who held her phone up in front of her the whole time.
My little sister Hattie came out of her room in her socks and asked if she could have the biggest piece.
"It's Lacey's cake," Mom said. "Lacey gets the first piece."
Then she picked up a sheet of paper from the counter and slid it across the table to my father.
It was the custody calendar, the same one that had hung on her fridge for two years, with Hattie's weeks colored in blue and green.
Someone had added a third color.
Every day in the third color said LACEY.
Dad looked at it for a second and slid it right back.
"She's eighteen, Denise," he said, easy and almost kind. "She's an adult. She's not on a calendar anymore."
"Then she's your adult," Mom said. "I have two bedrooms and one of them is Hattie's."
"I have a condo with one bedroom, and my girlfriend works from the other."
"That's not my problem, Curtis."
"It's not mine either."
I sat between them with my hands under my thighs.
The candles were already lit, eighteen of them, and the wax was starting to run down into the frosting.
Nobody had struck the match for the song.
Mom had lit them herself before anyone arrived, and now she had forgotten them.
Hattie climbed onto a chair.
She looked at the cake, looked at the two grown-ups, and put her whole face into the middle of it.
Dad's girlfriend laughed and held up her phone.
"Oh my God, post this," she said. "She's so funny."
Hattie came up with chocolate to her eyebrows and two candles stuck in her bangs.
Mom plucked them out, wiped her with a dish towel, and went straight back to the calendar.
"Lacey knows we love her," she said to Dad. "That's not the question."
"What's the question?"
"Whose name goes on the form for her car insurance. Whose address goes on her college paperwork. Whose phone plan she's on."
"Hers," Dad said. "She's eighteen."
On the table, his phone buzzed and lit up.
The screen said Crispin R.
I knew that name. Crispin Rainey owned Grandma's building on Wyatt Street.
I leaned over to look.
Dad turned the phone face down before I could read the rest.
"Is that Crispin?" I said. "Why is he calling you?"
"It's nobody. A work thing." He rubbed his jaw. "Nobody has called anybody, Lace."
I hadn't said that anybody had.
Mom put her hand on my arm, which she had not done all day.
"Nobody is throwing you out, honey. We'll work something out. Just let the grown-ups talk."
I looked at the cake.
Half of it was a ruin of frosting, and the candles were burning down to nubs.
Nobody had sung.
Nobody had even said happy birthday, not once, not the way you'd say it to a person you were glad to see.
I leaned forward and blew the candles out myself.
Not one of them looked up.
"I could go to Grandma's building," I said.
"That place?" Dad said. "It's a dump with a nice landlord. Crispin's got somebody for that unit."
"You've talked to him?"
"I've talked to a lot of people about a lot of things. Eat your cake."
I stood up and pushed my chair in.
"Where are you going?" Mom asked. "Sit. You're being dramatic."
"Let her cool off," Dad said. "She'll be back in an hour."
Neither of them got up.
Hattie held out a chocolate hand to me, and I kissed her sticky head.
"Save me a piece," I told her.
Then I took my backpack off the hook by the door.
The key to Grandma's apartment was still in the zipper pocket, on its ring with the little brass ladybug.
So I walked out.
It was three miles to Wyatt Street, and it started to rain at the second one.
I had no coat. I walked past the bus stop because I didn't have the fare on me, and I didn't want to ask anyone for anything.
The brick building stood where it always had, three stories with a green door.
The light in the front hall was on.
A man sat on the stoop under the little awning, in blue scrubs with a gray hoodie over them, drinking from a paper cup.
He stood as soon as he saw me.
Crispin was twenty-nine, tall, with dark hair that needed cutting and a tired face he was trying to straighten.
"Lacey," he said.
"My key still works, right?" My teeth were chattering. "I just want to sit in her kitchen for a while."
"It works."
He set the cup on the rail and took off his hoodie and put it around my shoulders without asking.
It was warm and smelled like hand soap.
"Your grandmother paid for 1A through next January," he said. "She did it in January, before she got sick. The apartment is yours until then, rent paid."
I stared at him.
"Nobody told me that."
"I know." His jaw tightened. "I told your father in April."
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