She finally got off her phone, came back over, and threw her arms around me. It seemed to finally be hitting her that I was really leaving. I hugged her tight and started to speak, but before I could figure out what I was going to say, her cell phone went off again.
The ringtone wasn’t Collie’s, but she pulled away quickly. “Oh, hey,” she chirped. By the time she finished the new conversation, I was in the security line, and all she could do was call my name and wave.
I kept my eyes tightly shut during takeoff — not because I was afraid of flying but from the effort of holding it together. The minute they turned off the FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELT sign, I squeezed past two passengers in my row and made my unsteady way to the lavatory, where I finally crumbled into tears. I’d been holding them in for weeks, since Mr. Stone first told me I couldn’t stay with them, that I would have to live with Aunt Sue in North Carolina. But now it was actually happening. I was leaving Maine, leaving everything I’d ever known, leaving my whole life behind. I sat trembling on the toilet seat in that tiny airplane bathroom, knees drawn up to my chin, face buried in my hands. I might have stayed there sobbing for the entire flight, but people kept knocking on the door and I finally had to force myself to stop. I washed my face, pressed my hands over my puffy eyes, took a deep breath, and went back to my seat.
As we cruised over Massachusetts, I sipped a ginger ale and stared out the window. My thoughts kept circling back to Beatrice, to the bribe money Mr. Stone had given me, to the last glimpse of Maine coast through the salt-streaked car window. Finally I dug through my bag and pulled out a pen and my notebook.
Dear Dad,
You won’t believe where I am right now. I’ve got my face pressed against an airplane window and I’m looking down on Boston. I think I can see Fenway Park, but it might just be one of those Super Walmarts. . . .
I kept writing. I told Dad I loved flying, which might have actually been true if I hadn’t been so distracted. I told him about sneaking out of Beatrice’s house the night before, and about the storm, but not about the seawall. I knew he would have thought it was a foolish thing to do, even if he’d have understood why I did it. I didn’t tell him about how angry I was at Beatrice and her parents, or about how much I dreaded moving to North Carolina. I kept my letter upbeat and positive; I didn’t want to upset him.
I’d written Dad other letters like this since he died. They weren’t journal entries, or diary entries, or anything where I poured out my heart and soul. Just letters. Just the Iris news. I wrote them at times like this, when I got hit by one of these tsunamis of grief and needed something, anything, to keep me from drowning.
It had started with one of the last conversations we had. Dad had gotten confused. He thought I was going on a trip. He kept talking about my trip, and he wanted me to promise to write to him.
I tried to make him understand. “I’m not going anywhere, Dad,” I said. “I’m staying right here with you. There’s no trip. I’m staying right here.”
“It’s OK,” he said, his eyes squeezed shut, his hand locked tight around mine. “Just promise you’ll write me a letter when you get there.”
So I wrote him these letters, not that there was any place to send them. Usually I tore the letters into strips once I finished, and then tore the strips into scraps, and then threw the scraps away. I kept this one, though. I didn’t have much left of Dad, and I didn’t want to leave it on the plane.
Aunt Sue was waiting for me at the Raleigh airport, and she looked just like her voice: raspy and hard, though she was kind of pretty, too, in a fading, crow’s-feet, farmer’s-tan way. I could see my mom in her a little, though my mom had been younger and thinner than Aunt Sue the last time I saw her. Aunt Sue had on an orange baseball cap with a sweat stain in the front, jammed tight over her short gray-brown hair. Her charcoal Harley-Davidson T-shirt was tight, too, and showed off her figure. She wore old jeans, and socks and sandals, the same as me — I wasn’t sure what to make of that — and she held a sign with my name on it in all capital letters, spelled wrong: IRIS WHITE.
Book wasn’t with her.
I walked all the way up to her before she actually looked at me. “Aunt Sue?” I said.
Our faces were about level, though when she shrugged and straightened up I could see she was a couple of inches taller.
“You Iris?” she said.
“Yes. It’s Wight, though. W-I-G-H-T.”
She shrugged again. “That all you got?” She nodded at my shoulder bag. I also had the sack of Whoopie Pies.
I held them out to her. “These are from Maine. They make them up there. I just got them this morning.”
She nodded again and nearly smiled. “Yeah, I had one of them once. They’re right tasty. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, happy about that. Aunt Sue turned to leave, expecting me to follow, but I had to stop her.
“There is some more stuff,” I said. “I have two suitcases I need to pick up at the baggage claim.”
That erased any trace of a smile.
“I got a truck parked in the parking deck, and we’re gonna have to pay for having it there,” Aunt Sue said. “They give you any money for your trip here?”
Her question caught me off guard, and it took me a minute to understand that she expected me to pay for the parking. I pulled out one of Mr. Stone’s twenty-dollar bills and handed it to her.
“All right, then,” she said, and headed for the escalator with the sack of Whoopie Pies dangling at her side.
She ate one while we waited for my bags to show up on the carousel, then said, “What I wouldn’t give for a cup of coffee right about now.”
“There’s a Starbucks back upstairs at the Arrivals,” I said.
Aunt Sue snorted. “I’ll wait for a 7-Eleven.”
I didn’t say anything else. Neither of us did. Despite our one strained phone conversation, I’d thought Aunt Sue would be warmer, happier to see me. At least curious about this niece she’d never known. At least sympathetic.
The bags were slow, so after ten minutes, she went outside to smoke. I went up to the Starbucks. Dad never liked me drinking coffee but knew I was going to anyway, so we always compromised and drank half-decaf and half-regular when we made it at home. This time I got all regular.
I still had my cup when Aunt Sue came back inside, reeking of cigarettes. She sniffed when she saw it and said, “I guess you must be made of money.”
My face flushed, but I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t tell if I’d done something wrong or if she was just this way with everybody. I crumpled the cup and tossed it in the trash just as the carousel jerked into motion and suitcases tumbled out of the chute — mine first of all, which seemed like a miracle. Aunt Sue watched as I dragged them off the conveyor belt; she didn’t offer to help as I struggled behind her with them on the long walk to the parking garage. Once we got there, she had me throw everything in the back of her truck, an old Ford with a rusted-out bed, and when I said it looked like rain, she dragged a moldy tarp out from behind the driver’s seat and told me to tuck that around my stuff if I was worried.
We stopped once on the two-hour drive to Craven County — at a 7-Eleven. Aunt Sue finally got her coffee; I paid for the gas. It was mostly flat and mostly country there in eastern North Carolina — peanut fields, tobacco fields, pine forests — and I fell asleep an hour in. I hadn’t expected to doze off, but I guess I was exhausted from not sleeping at all the night before.
Rain whipping through my open window woke me. I rolled it up, but the truck didn’t have air conditioning and soon it got too hot, so I ended up cracking the window even though the spray came through. Aunt Sue lit a cigarette, and I cracked it open some more. I imagined everything in the back, which was everything I owned in the world, getting soaked under the leaky tarp.
It was dark when we finally reached the farm. A dog started barking when Aunt Sue stopped the truck, and that made me happy. I’d have at least one friend in North Carolina, anyway.
Aunt Sue yelled at him to shut up, and he did. Right away.
“His name’s Gnarly,” Aunt Sue said. “And he isn’t worth a damn.”
Gnarly’s leash was clipped to a long, drooping clothesline in the yard. He ran back and forth a couple of times but then settled down. I knelt in the dry grass — the rain hadn’t reached Craven County — and let him lick my hand, which calmed us both down a little. He was some sort of mongrel hound with a lot of slobber, and I liked him right away.
I smelled pine trees and something funky and familiar: manure and damp straw. There was a field, a fence, and a barn, so they must have had other animals, not that Aunt Sue had mentioned any.
My bags were soaked, just as I had feared. I grabbed a dripping suitcase and followed Aunt Sue up the steps and onto the back porch, and then into the kitchen. Book was there, a hulking guy with a shaved head and a gray, grass-stained T-shirt that said Property of Craven County H.S. Athletics. He sat hunched over a giant sandwich at the kitchen table. It was the kind of sandwich Dad used to call a Dagwood, because it had so much stuff piled so high in it, the way Dagwood made his in that Sunday comic strip Blondie: a mountain of baloney and cheese and lettuce and what looked like crushed potato chips and pickles and extra bread slices in the middle. Book’s chin was yellow with mustard.
The first thing Aunt Sue said to him was “I guess you’re eating tomorrow’s lunch the same time as your dinner.”
Book had too much food in his mouth to answer, but his eyes got wide with what looked like genuine panic. He flinched when Aunt Sue came up behind him, though he was twice her size.
Aunt Sue tilted her head at me. “This is your cousin, Iris. Put down your big sandwich and take her stuff upstairs to the little room.”
Book swallowed. He looked me up and down, and then grinned. “Hey, Iris,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”
I pulled the zipper up higher on my hoodie. “Yeah. You, too.”
He followed me out to the truck and grabbed my other soggy bag. “There’s a clothesline,” he said. “You can unclip Gnarly tomorrow and hang all your stuff out to dry or whatever. We don’t have a dryer. Got a washing machine, though.”
That surprised me. Dad and I used a clothesline during most of the year, but we still had a dryer. I wasn’t sure I’d ever known anyone who didn’t own one.
Aunt Sue wasn’t kidding about it being a little room. It had a twin bed, and that was all: no closet, no other furniture, nothing else except a small window. I shivered with claustrophobia. Book dumped my wet bags on the bare wood floor, grunted, looked at me up and down again, then said, “Jeez, nice manners. You’re welcome.”
I said, “Oh, sorry. Thanks,” and he mimicked me: “Oh, sorry. You’re welcome again.” I think he was trying to be funny. He tromped back down the stairs to his sandwich. I stayed behind and sat on the bed, expecting it to give a little, only it didn’t. I might have been sitting on a rock. I checked and there was a big sheet of plywood between the box spring and the mattress.
I heard Aunt Sue and Book downstairs talking about the Whoopie Pies, then I heard a great rustling of the bag and figured it was Book, moving on to dessert. Every breath I took in my closet of a room tasted stale, so I pried open the window and gulped in the cooler night air. Then I dumped everything out of my suitcases — wet clothes in one pile, dry clothes in the other. When I finished, there was no room left to stand, so I lay back on the hard bed and clenched my eyes shut, and stayed like that, trying and failing to pretend that I was somewhere else, until Aunt Sue yelled to me up the stairs.
“You can come down anytime. It’s sandwiches for dinner, so you can help yourself.”
The last thing I felt like doing was eating, especially if Aunt Sue and Book were still shoveling Whoopie Pies into their mouths. I stepped out of the little room and went down to the kitchen. Aunt Sue and Book both looked up, but without much interest.
“I don’t feel very well,” I said. “Thanks for coming to get me at the airport and all. I think I’ll skip dinner and go straight to bed if that’s all right.”
Aunt Sue shrugged. “Fine. Whatever. You’ll go to school with Book in the morning. You already missed the first three days.”
I nodded and went back upstairs. I left my stuff lying on the floor — there was nowhere to put it, anyway — and, after one last look around, pulled the string to shut off the faint overhead light, a naked twenty-watt bulb.
Later, as I lay on that hard bed, the heat and the sadness both pressing down on me, I heard the door slam shut downstairs, then somebody trying to start the truck — once, twice, a third time before it caught. Gnarly launched into a barking fit after the truck pulled out of the yard. I waited for him to stop. After half an hour I started to doubt that he ever would, so I pulled my jeans back on and went downstairs. All the lights were out, but I could see Gnarly in the moonlight, running back and forth again under the clothesline, barking at something in the trees, probably squirrels.
I went outside and squatted in the grass near the clothesline. Gnarly came over and sniffed me, and I let him. After a while he started licking me, which made me smile for the first time since I’d been in Craven County. I lay back in the grass and looked up at the North Carolina stars.
In the silence, I could hear the distinct sound of goats maaing in the barn. Lying there listening to them made me smile, too. I’d always loved goats — every one of them different from every other one, and all of them goofy and playful. Dad said they bleated in a higher pitch than sheep did — that’s how you could tell the difference — and the sound I heard was definitely a herd of goats. I thought about going in to see them, but the barn was dark and I didn’t know if I’d be able to find a light. Plus I liked what I was doing — petting this new dog, the way I’d done with hundreds of animals over the years in Dad’s vet office. I figured I would save the goats for tomorrow.
Book was snoring loudly from a downstairs bedroom when the mosquitoes finally chased me inside. Even though Gnarly had been peaceful when I left him, he started barking again not long after I crawled back into bed, and he kept me awake for another hour, though I was bone tired and desperate for sleep.
I even tried praying to God that Gnarly would stop, though I wasn’t surprised when that didn’t work. It hadn’t worked when I’d prayed to God to save my dad, either. I wasn’t even sure I believed in God anymore. I had confessed that to Reverend Harding the day he came to the hospital and wanted me to pray with him over Dad. He said everybody had their doubts, but it was all right to pray anyway, because you never knew who might be listening, and you also never knew when you might start to believe.
I woke up sweating early the next morning, panicked from another dream about my dad. We were together in a dark room. I had been looking and looking for him, and finally found him there, but no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t ever reach him — to touch him, to hug him. And I couldn’t see his face, either. I was desperate to see his face, and I called to him and called to him: Just look at me, Dad. Just look at me. Please!
Aunt Sue was sitting alone at the kitchen table, staring vacantly into a cup of black coffee, when I went downstairs. Beatrice’s mom had told me that Aunt Sue worked the graveyard shift as a stockroom supervisor at Walmart, so I figured she must have just come home. I studied her for a minute before I spoke — waiting for her to notice me and smile or offer coffee or do anything that might indicate some sort of kindness.
I finally gave up waiting and said good morning, but she still didn’t speak.
“Is it OK if I have some coffee?” I asked.
She studied her mug for another second, then got up and refilled it. “Rest is yours,” she said, gesturing at the nearly empty pot.
I had to wash a dirty mug before pouring myself what was left. Most of the kitchen counters were covered with what I quickly figured out was cheese-making equipment — stainless-steel pots, a mountain of plastic containers, a couple of cheese presses. I looked in the refrigerator for some milk, and
it was half full of what appeared to be containers of soft white cheeses. I’d noticed another refrigerator out on the screen porch last night, which I assumed Aunt Sue also used for her cheese-making operation.
Book stumbled in not long after that, slammed a couple of cabinets, then poured half a box of Walmart cornflakes into a mixing bowl. He followed that with several spoonfuls of sugar and most of a half gallon of milk. He practically ducked his whole face inside the bowl while he ate, and I had the impression that he would have taken a nap in there once he finished, except that Aunt Sue thumped him on the head with her coffee spoon and he had to come up for air.
“Goats,” she said. She picked up a two-gallon stainless-steel bucket from the floor and shoved it in front of him, knocking the cereal bowl to the side.
“Why can’t she do it now she’s here?” he said.
They both looked at me.
“Nah,” Aunt Sue said. “You show her how this afternoon. I want it done right. Then it’ll be her job.”
She turned to me again. “You ever milk anything? Cow, goat, anything?”
I nodded. “With my dad. He went to a lot of farms to take care of their animals. Mostly cows, but goats, too.”
Aunt Sue yawned. “Book will walk you through it this afternoon. You get the hang of that, then you’ll move on to helping make the cheeses for farmers’ market.”
“OK,” I said, happy that I would be working with ani mals again.
“OK?” She scowled. “Don’t you mean to say ‘Yes, ma’am’?”
I’d never said “Yes, ma’am” before. No one did in Maine. I apologized to Aunt Sue, though, and said, “Yes, ma’am,” though it sounded strange, as if someone else was speaking.
Book headed out to the barn. Gnarly yelped in the backyard, and I jumped out of my chair. I knew a kicked dog when I heard one.
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