“Your family?” she said. Before I could stop her, she reached across my desk and picked up the framed picture that I always kept facing myself. It was an old photo, from when my children were small, and my husband and I were both thinner and less gray.
“Yes.”
She shifted her gaze from the photo to me. I was discomfited by the intensity of that look, and I saw it for what it was: an accusation.
“Your family is real, but mine isn’t? Real people with real feelings, but my family isn’t—” She ran out of air and took a gulp. “—real to you. You think. I’m a character. A story. Those women you talk about. Not real people to you. Stupid women. Stupid photo albums. But you. You’re smart. You make smarter choices. For us.”
She was almost panting and, seeing the way the picture trembled in her hand, I rolled my chair back from the desk. Although there had been a few close calls, I’d never actually had a physical altercation with anyone. I always kept the door open so that if things got heated the bailiffs could hear, but Wavy’s anger was so hushed no one had noticed.
“Please don’t upset yourself. I really do have to go to court.” I stood up and walked around the desk. Although she was still holding my family photo, she didn’t try to stop me, so I poked my head out into the hallway and gestured for the bailiff. “Edward, would you please escort Miss Quinn out?”
She put the picture frame down and went with Edward, but as she walked away, she raised her voice.
“I’m real. I’m as real as you are. My family is real like your family,” she said.
17
WAVY
I needed to get back to Norman in time for my afternoon class, but when I passed the exit for the old quarry where we raced the Barracuda, the rotation of the Earth seemed to slow. The sun hovered at a standstill in the sky while I turned the car around and drove back through Garringer. I used to think of it as a big city, but now it was gone in a blink, and I was on the road to Powell.
Driving down Main Street, I felt like I was in a ghost story, but I didn’t know who was the ghost—me or all of Powell County. Downtown wasn’t much different than I remembered, maybe a few more storefronts were empty, but the hardware store had the same tools in the window, and the Shop ’n Save had hail damage to their front sign. Off Main Street, Cutcheon’s Small Engine had a yellowed sheet of notebook paper taped in the window. “Closed till further notice,” it said in Mr. Cutcheon’s handwriting.
Kellen’s house was occupied, but rundown. Nobody had painted it since we did, and the carport looked like it was about to fall down. Two dogs chained up in the front yard barked at me as I walked past.
On the drive out to the meadow, I turned off the air-conditioning and opened the windows. The heat and the dust rolled into the car, but the wind in my face was the closest I could get to riding on a motorcycle.
There was a new double-wide parked where Sandy’s trailer used to be, but I think the people living there were actually farming, because there were tractors parked by the barns. Cattle grazed in the meadow, and they turned their heads and watched me with soft brown eyes as I drove past. The driveway to the farmhouse was so washed out, I had to park on the road and walk up, getting gravel in my fancy shoes.
The honeysuckle vines had crawled up over the front porch and collapsed the trellis below the attic window. The screen door flapped in the breeze, and the kitchen door stood partway open. When I lived there, we’d never had a key to the kitchen door, so the police must have simply pulled the door closed. Anyone who wanted to walk in, could, including me.
I hadn’t been inside the house since Donal and I left that July to go visit Aunt Brenda. She never allowed us to come back. The kitchen floor was stained brown from Val’s blood, and grayed over with the dust of strangers walking through. Vandals must have used the table and chairs to build fires in the front room’s fireplace. They’d left behind beer bottles and spray painted the dining room walls. Upstairs in my room, Aunt Brenda had only taken the quilt Grandma made. She took that to Tulsa and packed it away, because it was an heirloom, too valuable to use. She’d left the little black and white TV, and someone had broken out its screen. I could see from the dirty sleeping bag and the condom wrappers that strangers had used the bed where Kellen and I spent so many nights lying next to each other.
I came back down to the kitchen and stood at the spot where Val had died. Just a few feet away from where Kellen kissed me for the first time. I pulled the kitchen door closed as I went out, and the porch floor creaked as I crossed to the steps. Walking back to my car, I followed the overgrown path to the limestone steps, where Kellen had sat after his wreck.
I’d been wrong about the Earth’s rotation slowing. It went on as steadily as always, and the afternoon was long gone. To the west, Venus and Jupiter held court with the setting sun. A few days before, the Magellan spacecraft had reached Venus, and started sending back pictures. Below the horizon lay Orion, resting until autumn, when he would rise over the meadow with only the cows to see him.
I thought then of Voyager 1 and 2, so far away. They were launched the same year I met Kellen, and now they had reached the end of our solar system. Although their programs were being powered down one by one, they traveled on. NASA said that in another twenty-five years, they would exit our heliosphere and cross into interstellar space. In another three hundred thousand years, Voyager 2 might reach as far as the star Sirius, but it would never come home.
That was how I felt, as I walked down the driveway to my car. I was moving forward into space, but I would never come home again.
Hours later, walking up the stairs to the apartment, I still felt like a satellite untethered from gravity. Above me, Renee opened our apartment door.
“Wavy! Oh my god, where have you been?” she shouted.
When I reached her, she was a star, pulling me into her orbit.
“Judge Maber called. She said, ‘Tell Miss Quinn that she was right. She is just as real as I am.’”
18
KELLEN
September 1990
Beth could nag at me all she wanted about my cholesterol, but I went back to eating bacon and eggs and pancakes with real butter like Wavy used to cook. That’s what I had for breakfast before my weekly meeting with my parole officer. Beth was at the counter packing her lunch while I ate, but she kept looking over her shoulder at me. Made me real self-conscious.
“What?” I said.
“Did you see the mail yesterday?” she said.
“No.” I figured somebody had stuck another flier about me in the mailbox. People still did that, even though I was careful. I never talked to kids, not for nothing. Far as I was concerned, kids didn’t exist. Which left me feeling like shit any time I saw some kid’s busted down bike. I coulda fixed it, but people mighta thought the wrong thing.
Beth pitched a letter on the table in front of me. The only mail I ever got was official stuff from the Department of Corrections, only this one wasn’t. It’d been years since I got a letter in that handwriting, but I knew it from back when Wavy used to send me Christmas cards from her aunt’s house.
“I won’t tell you again,” Beth said. “If you break your parole, you can’t live here.”
She went back to fixing her lunch, and I tried to finish my breakfast, but that letter had thrown me for a loop.
First, it meant Wavy knew I was living with Beth again. All she had to do was call the Department of Corrections and they’d give her my current address off the sex offender registry. I had to figure she thought the worst of me, because what else was she gonna think? I’d made her keep the ring, and went back to living with Beth, like the ring didn’t mean a thing to me.
Second, it meant Wavy had something to say to me, but what?
“Are you going to open it or read it through the envelope?” Beth said. It was the same voice she used to say all the mean things she said when I came back.
“Neither. Just throw it away. That’s what you were gonna do anyway, isn’t
it?”
She didn’t hardly wait for me to get the words out of my mouth before she picked it up and tossed it in the trash can. After that I couldn’t get the food down my throat, and it was time to go. When I went to scrape my plate off into the trash, there was the letter staring up at me. I dumped what was left of my breakfast in on top of it.
My parole officer was a good guy, but busy, so I was usually in and out in under ten minutes. It started out like all the other meetings. How are you doing? How’s work? Having any troubles? Then all the sudden, he said, “Have you been in contact with Wavonna Quinn?”
“No. Hell, no.” First outright lie I ever told him. I broke out in a cold sweat and I couldn’t figure which made me seem guiltier: looking him in the eye or looking away. I gave him a good long stare and said, “No way. Why would you think that?”
“Just curious,” he said. Just curious, my ass. I thought about that letter and about how Beth was still pissed off at me. Made me wonder if she hadn’t called him. He didn’t push me on the subject, and two minutes later I was out of there.
I shoulda gone to work, but I didn’t.
I drove home, went into the apartment, and first thing, yanked the lid off the trash can. Inside was a new trash bag. It was my job to take the trash out, but Beth had done it, just so she could throw Wavy’s letter away.
That’s how I ended up in the garbage Dumpster, sifting through bags of trash. The day was warming up and that Dumpster stank like hell. I musta opened a dozen bags before I found Wavy’s letter, sticky with syrup. I crawled out of the Dumpster and sat down on the curb next to it. My stomach was right up under my throat, when I opened the envelope.
Dear Kellen,
I thought you would come to me after you got the letter from the court, but you didn’t. I can imagine a thousand reasons you wouldn’t come and only one reason you would, but I hoped that reason would be enough. I won’t bother you again. I’m only writing because I have something I need to return to you. Because of its size, it would be best if you could come get it. Will you meet me at my aunt’s house over Labor Day weekend? Sunday at 4? If you prefer not to see me, you can come after 5 pm. I’ll be gone by then.
See you soon.
Love,
Wavy
I never got any letter from the court, but there’d been a few weeks when I was moving around so much I didn’t know where I was gonna sleep, let alone where to tell my parole officer I was living. Then again, maybe it came and Beth threw it away.
Not knowing what was in that missing letter scared the hell outta me, because I couldn’t afford to go getting my hopes up. Whatever was in it, I had two choices. I either had to throw the letter back in the Dumpster and go to work, or I had to go upstairs and pack my stuff. There wasn’t no middle ground.
19
AMY
I hadn’t planned to go home for Labor Day, until Mom told me Wavy was coming.
“That’s what her letter said. The first one I’ve had from her in months,” Mom said.
Wavy hadn’t written to me since May, either, and now that she was twenty-one, I’d started to wonder if we would ever see her again. Hearing that she intended to visit was a relief, until I considered that she might be planning a showdown with my mother. The question was whether I wanted to witness it.
Mom threw the same Labor Day party every year: a Sunday lunch of daiquiris and burgers on the back patio with a few of her book club friends. Wavy didn’t show for lunch, and by four o’clock, everyone else had gone home. Mom and I were in the living room, when Wavy walked in the front door, carrying a couple of manila envelopes. She looked weary.
“You’re too late for lunch, but I’m glad you came!” Mom said.
I didn’t know what to say. Sorry I was an unwitting accomplice to my mother’s betrayal?
“Did you come down by yourself or did you bring Renee?” I was hoping for somebody else to be a buffer between Wavy and Mom.
“Meeting her boyfriend’s parents,” Wavy said.
“Oh, so she’s getting serious with a new boyfriend?” Mom said.
We managed small talk for twenty or thirty minutes, but just as I started to relax, the doorbell rang. Wavy glanced at her watch and, for a few seconds, weariness transformed into grief. Then she stood up and went to answer the door.
“What in the world?” Mom said it like she expected a pleasant surprise. When she and I got to the door, Wavy was signing something on a clipboard held by a skinny guy in a baseball cap. Behind him, a flatbed truck stood parked at the curb.
“Did you have car trouble?” I said.
“Or did you finally decide to sell that old motorcycle?” Mom’s look of triumph was wasted on Wavy, who was already backtracking through the house to open the garage door. The motorcycle stood in the corner with a bed sheet thrown over it to keep off the dust, in between visits from the mechanic.
As Wavy pulled the sheet away, the envelopes slipped out from under her arm. I bent to pick them up and found one addressed to my mother and one addressed to Kellen. His contained something small and square. A ring box. I held them out to her, but she had her hands over her eyes.
“You son of a bitch!” my mother screamed from the front yard. “You just broke the conditions of your parole! I’ll see you back in jail!”
Wavy grabbed the envelopes out of my hand and we both ran out of the garage.
Kellen stood out in the street next to an old dented pickup truck. He looked terrified, and who could blame him, with my mother shouting like that? I ran toward Mom, and I expected Wavy to go to Kellen, but she came after me.
We caught up with Mom on the front porch, as she was opening the storm door, probably going inside to call the police. Wavy reached past her and slammed the door closed.
“You lied to the parole board and you lied to me,” Wavy said through clenched teeth. She looked both angry and like she might cry.
“I was only trying—”
Before Mom could explain herself, Wavy flattened one of the manila envelopes against Mom’s chest with her open palm. “This is from the judge, to change Kellen’s parole.”
Kellen squinted up at the porch, at the three of us watching him. It dawned on me that he didn’t know why he was there. He was risking going back to jail on nothing more than Wavy’s word. He didn’t know it was the happiest day of his life.
I understood then why the reunion was happening there instead of someplace else. Not to throw it in my mother’s face, but because Mom’s house was the place where Wavy had drawn a line. The day she stood in our driveway and screamed, “Mine!” she wasn’t talking about the motorcycle.
As Mom opened the manila envelope, Wavy started down the sidewalk. Kellen crossed the street and stepped up on our curb. I expected a joyful, over-the-top romantic movie reunion, but they walked toward each slowly. They met about halfway, and she handed him the other envelope. He felt the bottom of it, where the ring box was, and shook his head. It was easy to make out the word no, but I don’t know what else he said. When Wavy spoke, I could guess what she was telling him. His answer made Wavy throw her head back and laugh.
Kellen opened the envelope and stuck his hand in. He pulled out the ring box, just as Wavy jumped up and threw her arms around his neck. The force of it staggered him back half a step, but when they kissed each other, it was a romantic movie. The sequel to that good-bye in Kellen’s shop.
I think they would have gone on kissing for a long time, but Mom stepped off the porch and shouted, “Get off my property, you bastard, or I’ll have you arrested for trespassing!”
Blushing and frowning, Kellen lowered Wavy to her feet. She took his hand and led him toward the driveway.
“If he steps foot on my property, I’ll call the police!” Mom knew Wavy couldn’t move the motorcycle by herself, and the tow truck driver seemed to take the trespassing remarks to heart. He stood by the cab of his truck watching us warily.
“I’ll help you,” I said.
Together, Wavy
and I pushed the bike down the driveway. A few times I thought we were going to drop it, but we made it to the curb. Ignoring my mother’s glared threat, Kellen took it from us and rolled it into the street with a stunned look on his face.
“I wonder if it’ll even start,” he said, as he swung his leg over the bike.
I just knew it would start the first time and it did. When he twisted the throttle, the whole street echoed with the engine. Kellen grinned at Wavy, and then he seemed to remember something. He stood up and pulled the ring box out of his pocket. The ring wouldn’t go up over her middle knuckle until he ducked his head and licked her finger. He laughed as he slid the ring up.
“We gotta get that resized,” he said. He raised her hand to his mouth again and kissed the ring. I’d taken a few steps back, feeling awkward about intruding on them, but Kellen looked at me and said, “Do you really think your mom’s gonna call the cops? ’Cause technically, I am breaking my parole. I’m not supposed to cross state lines without my parole officer’s permission.”
“I don’t know,” I said. We all three turned to look at Mom, who came across the front lawn toward us, glowering. “But now might be a good time to leave.”
“Where should we have him take the bike?” Wavy gestured to the tow truck driver.
“To hell with that, sweetheart,” Kellen said. “Get on and let’s ride this thing.”
“Give me your keys and I’ll have him take your car home,” I said.
Practically glowing, Wavy handed me the keys. She hugged me so fast and hard, I didn’t even manage to hug her back.
Then she hiked her skirt up and got on the back of the bike. Laying her cheek against Kellen’s shoulder, she wrapped her arms as far around him as they would go. He gunned the bike and they rode away, leaving Mom, me, and a confused tow truck driver standing in the street.
All the Ugly and Wonderful Things Page 32