Morning in Vermont

“Morning in Vermont”

BY JOHN BANKSTON

Romeo gets 180 days. Less than twenty-four hours later, his girlfriend is banging on the door. Stacey is pale and drunk; acting like the sentence was six years, not six months. Although she smells faintly of smoke, marijuana and cigarettes, it doesn’t mask her strawberry shampoo. 

The living room fills with the sweet essence of Stacey MacNamara. She’s been his girlfriend for over a year – she was still in high school when they met.

She collapses on the worn out couch; picks at a ciggie hole as I promise, “It’ll be okay.” The words die in a cough. I am fifteen. My brother was a thin membrane between foster care and starvation.

I wash dishes at Gillie’s, a divey restaurant-bar three hundred yards from the poshest ski area in Vermont. That covered food, school supplies and a winter coat. Romeo took care of everything else.

“Mosher fucker,” Stacey slurs before digging in a crumpled pack for a stray smoke. I sit beside her, leaving enough space so it doesn’t feel weird. I pat her leg. She runs her hands through hair that is the same dirty brown shade as my brother’s. She’s on the tall side, he’s on the short and despite their seven year age difference sometimes they looked like twins – not identical, the other kind.  

A drug dealer named Romeo. Touristas assumed a Puerto Rican was gonna show up, but he was Irish and stole the name from a kung fu flick. 

He lifted weights and took karate and besides –

“He was so fuckin’ smart, Jacob.” 

I shrug. He was in custody for two months; bail too high to swing. I didn’t talk to anyone. Then I found a shoe box filled with cash under his bed. The money went to rent, oil for the furnace but mainly the lawyer who got him half-a-year when the state wanted five.

There was ten bucks remaining, folded in my pocket like a promise.

“What was he thinking?” 

Instead of an answer, Stacey passes me the cigarette. I never smoke solo, but I’ll steal a drag when Romeo isn’t around. He saw me, he’d smack me across the back of the head. 

“He wasn’t… Thinking, I mean,” Stacey offers, loud in the drafty room. 

My brother got drunk carrying over a pound in his backpack. Cops pinched him on a “D and D.” Romeo had a clean record but a dirty reputation. The lawyer I paid with money discovered beneath Romeo’s bed (looking for nudie mags, discovering the shoebox of cash) got my brother sent to Woodstock Correctional.

The place where he now lives is so minimum there’s no bars, no wire. Just a line you aren’t allowed to cross. Break the rules, you go upstate. Romeo says there are even black people there.

“What are we going to do?”

I stare at her. She’s eighteen and crazy hot. What are we going to do? Well, Stace, you’re gonna find another Romeo to buy you overpriced mascara and I’m gonna try to avoid getting sent somewhere I have to worry about a foster dad who really, really likes me.

Outside the wind picks up. Thanksgiving was last week – I got to work a double. The windows rattle and I feel a blast of cold air through masking tape my brother used as caulking.

“Where you stayin’?” The question arrives unexpectedly. In my head I was gonna ask for a ride to Main Street; see if I can pawn my brother’s guitar.