“What? I’m listening!”
I laugh some more. “I know. It’s just, it’s not that serious. Anyway, I don’t want her to think I don’t like her. I mean, I don’t like her like her, like that. I just like her like she’s a nice person. But I can’t send her a heart-o-gram now ’cause Valentine’s Day is over. So what should I do?” This is a lie. I do like her like her. But I didn’t realize it until now so I’m not counting it as a lie. Plus it’s my mom, so even if I knew it was a lie, I might have still said it. No way to know.
Mom squints, like she’s trying to see the answer in the distance. I squint back at her.
“Knock it off,” she says. “Okay. Why don’t you just write her a note and stick it in her locker?”
“And say what?”
“I don’t know. ‘Thanks for the heart-o-gram. Sorry I didn’t send you one, but I forgot my money. It was really nice, though. Happy Valentine’s Day.’ ”
I smile. “Pretty good, Mom.”
She shrugs. “Thanks.”
Then it hits me. It’s Valentine’s Day. And Mom. And Dad. And maybe she was the sad one and I didn’t notice because I was so freaking hungry. “Happy Valentine’s Day, Mom!” I blurt out.
“Thanks.”
“Sorry I didn’t get you anything.”
She laughs. “No problem. That’s not your job.”
“This is a really crappy Valentine’s. Sorry.”
“No, it’s not. And don’t say ‘crappy.’ ”
“Okay.”
“Seriously, Justin? All that stuff is overrated. I’m totally content with you, a frozen pizza, and Mr. Pibb.”
“Yeah. He’s such a romantic.”
* * *
“Mr. Engstrom. Your own country is at war. Don’t you want to understand why?” Mr. Sorenson insists on calling us by our last names like we’re adults, even though we’re very obviously not. He looks like a college professor instead of a junior high history teacher. He’s got a white beard that he keeps perfectly trimmed and he wears spectacles and tweed jackets with elbow patches. I don’t know if there’s a technical difference between glasses and spectacles, but his are definitely spectacles. If they let teachers smoke in here, I know he’d have a pipe. He’s super smart. I don’t know why he’s wasting his time on us.
“I know why,” Brandon replies.
“Care to enlighten us?”
“ ’Cause Saddam Hussein’s insane, and we need to take him out.”
The class murmurs and laughs. “Not a very precise analysis, Mr. Engstrom,” Mr. Sorenson says. But Brandon doesn’t hear him. He’s turned back around, sliding his finger across Josh’s desk to show how some hockey play went last night. A finger from his left hand slams the one from his right, and Josh pumps his fist in the air. They high-five.
Mr. Sorenson clears his throat. “We tend to think of history as inevitable,” he says. “But look at what just happened. Congress voted to use military force in Iraq, fifty-two to forty-seven in the Senate, and two hundred fifty to one hundred eighty-three in the House.” He writes the numbers on the board, trying to make them mean more to us. “Those are the closest margins in authorizing military force since the War of 1812.” He looks at me. “Things can always go a different way.”
I copy Mr. Sorenson’s map from the board, with the arrows showing advancement and the circles for bombs. Dad was a news junkie. He read three newspapers a day and ran news radio like it was oxygen. He watched the war ramp up all last fall. The planes, the troops arriving in Saudi Arabia, it was all on TV. It didn’t feel real. It felt more like a video game. But Dad knew better. He’d pace, especially when they showed the troops close-up. They didn’t look much older than Murphy. Two hundred thousand troops. Then one hundred thousand more a few weeks later, like they’d miscalculated somehow. After Thanksgiving the UN gave Saddam until January fifteenth to get out of Kuwait. “You think he will, Dad?” I asked. “You think he’ll leave?” Dad shook his head and left the room.
But before he left for work that night, he came into my room. “Son,” he said, and I bolted straight up, like lightning struck my bed. Dad didn’t spend many words on me. Especially big ones like “son.”
“Don’t become a soldier,” he said. And I said, “Yes, sir,” even though I never called him “sir.” He walked to the doorway and the hall light crossed his body, making half of him shine.
“Nothing is as simple as it seems,” he said. I nodded. “Good night.” He shut the door and I counted the words. Fourteen. All for me.
Dad was right, even though he didn’t live to see it. Saddam didn’t leave Kuwait, and we “bombed the piss out of them,” as Brandon would say, on January seventeenth. I hadn’t gone back to school yet, so I watched it all day on CNN. When Mom came home and shut the TV off, I couldn’t really see her, my eyes were so dry and blurry. “Okay. That’s enough horror for one day,” she said. “Get your coat. We’re going to the Platter.” And I wondered, Is that how she handled Dad? How she pulled him through? Just, That’s enough, let’s get some pizza? Anyway, after all those bombs, the war’s still going. Ground troops mostly. It’s going well, I guess. No one’s really watching.
* * *
I’m on my way to the office to get more paper for Mrs. Peterson because she prints five million poems a day, and I’m taking my time because the halls are peaceful when they’re empty. I’m trying to think of other peaceful/empty things (the Grand Canyon, new notebooks) when I realize Jenni is walking toward me. Time gets gooey, like a Jolly Rancher left in a hot car. We’re moving so slow, and then suddenly she’s right in front of me. She smells like oranges even though it’s the dead of winter, which reminds me of Mrs. Peterson telling us how Laura Ingalls Wilder was thrilled to get an orange in her Christmas stocking. Which would totally suck.
“Hey,” Jenni says.
“Hey.”
“Thanks for the note.”
“Oh. Yeah. Sorry I didn’t send you a heart-o-gram. I just…”
She shakes her head. “It’s totally fine. Those things are kind of crazy anyways.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you ever coming back to book club?”
“I don’t know.” I shove my hands in my pockets. We’re standing in the main entry, which is all glass and flooded with white winter light. Jenni’s hair is full of static, like maybe she just took her hat off, and the tiny blond strands hover in the air.
“We’re reading Fahrenheit 451. It’s a tenth-grade book, but Peterson says we can handle it. It’s futuristic. You’d like it, I think. It’s about real things.”
I nod. “Sounds cool.”
“Yeah. Well, I gotta get back to band. See ya.”
“See ya.”
She walks away, but my body’s stuck like it refuses to leave this moment, with the sparkly light and the girl who likes real things. “Hey!” I call to Jenni. “What instrument do you play?”
She keeps walking but turns her head and calls back, “Tuba!”
I give her a thumbs-up, and she laughs. Then she’s gone, around the corner. I take a deep breath and whisper to the empty space, “That girl is so cool.”
* * *
As much as I didn’t want to come to Prince of Peace Lutheran Church on a Wednesday, it actually feels pretty good to sit in the same red cushion pews and see the same old ladies way up front and hear the babies crying in the back. We stand up to sing the first song, and Murphy slides in next to me, smelling like chicken and cologne. I cough and wave a hand in front of my face.
“Shut up,” he whispers. “Hi, Mom!” She beams at him and manages to sing, pick up another hymnal, turn it to the right page, and hand it to Murphy, without missing a word. Moms are kind of amazing that way.
“Why are we at POP on a Wednesday?” Murphy asks me. “I had to take a double on Saturday to be off tonight.”
I shrug. “They’re trying something new. Lenten Soup and Service. Mom’s into it.”
“Is it always Lenten soup? What’s wrong with chicken noodle?”
“You’re such an idiot.”
It turns out that the service part of Lenten Soup and Service is super short, so pretty soon we have our soup (ham and wild rice—shocker) and rolls and pop and fake Oreos, and we’re sitting at the end of a long table in the church basement.
“So,” Mom says. “What are you two giving up for Lent this year?”
Murphy swallows half his roll in one gulp. “I’m gonna give up punching Justin.” He slugs me in the shoulder. “Oh well. Better luck next year.”
“I’m going to give up Lenten soup,” I say. “Oh, that was easy. ’Cause it doesn’t exist.”
Mom rolls her eyes, but I can tell she’s happy because it’s the first time we’ve been kind of ourselves in a long time. What did you expect? is still floating around the church basement, but I block it out. They didn’t know him. He never came here, except on picture day. But Mom’s been spending so much time at church that all kinds of people stop at our table to say hi.
“Mom,” Murphy says after a while, “you’re like the queen of POP.” Then he grins and nods at us because he made a pretty decent joke by accident.
“Murphy!” A gray-haired man wearing khaki pants and a royal-blue Minnetonka sweater walks up.
Murphy turns, wipes his right hand on his pants, and holds it out for the guy to shake. “Hey, Coach.”
“How are you, son?”
“Fine, sir. You know my mom. And this is my little brother, Justin.”
Coach smiles at us. “Hey, everybody. Nice to see you. Listen, Murphy. We really missed you at tryouts.” He puts a hand on the back of Murphy’s chair and leans down. “What’s going on?”
Mom’s whole face falls and goes pale. Murphy looks down, then back up at Coach. “I’ve been workin’ a lot, Coach.”
Coach nods. “I see.” His eyes are sad, like Mom’s. I can tell because his glasses make them humungous. He straightens back up. “Well, you just call me if you change your mind. Practice starts in a couple weeks, and you’ve always got a spot on my team.”
“Thanks, Coach. I will.”
“Murphy,” Mom whispers after he walks away. “Why didn’t you go out for baseball?”
Murphy stirs his soup around. “It’s not a big deal, Mom. Hockey’s really my sport. Baseball I just do for fun. Plus the hockey coaches are always worried I’ll throw my arm out, so I’m just…taking the season off.” He looks up, finally. “Maybe I’ll play senior year.”
Mom leans forward. “We don’t need money so bad that you can’t play baseball, Murph.” She’s still whispering, like she’s afraid of what her voice might do if she lets it get louder. “You’re seventeen. You’re supposed to just do things for fun.”
“Yeah, dude.” I pat him on the back. “You got your whole life to work at KFC.”
Mom frowns at me. “Please play, Murphy,” she says.
“Yeah, please play,” I tell him. “I like the peanuts.”
But Murphy looks away. “I’ll think about it.”
* * *
Another frozen Saturday. I start walking without a plan because I can’t sit alone in the apartment for one more second. The sun is shining in a surprisingly blue sky. I try not to think about the sheep eye. And the sheep it belonged to. I walk down by the beach covered in snow and circle back up the hill. Then past the end of Water Street and the corner bar and the expensive apartments facing the lake and the paper shop. And guess where I end up? The train tracks. The exact spot where Dad got killed, and before I can stop myself, I look for blood. There isn’t any, obviously, ’cause it’s been washed away by a hundred snowfalls. Or maybe he only bled on the inside.
They wouldn’t let me see him at the hospital. I found out later it was because he was already dead. The doctor came to the waiting room to explain it to us. Mom was holding Murphy’s hand and I was sitting on the floor but I don’t know why. There were plenty of chairs. “The trolley wasn’t moving that fast,” the doctor said. “It’s just the way he fell, and the place on his head that hit the tracks. It hit in just the right spot.”
“You mean just the wrong spot?” I asked, and the doctor looked down at me. He was so young! Couldn’t they get anyone better than this guy? He still had baby cheeks! He should have been flipping burgers at Arnold’s, not saving lives (or not) in the ER.
His baby cheeks turned pink. “Sorry,” he said. “Yes, the wrong spot. It hit in the wrong spot.” Then my memory blurs for a while. That night comes in and out. The next thing I remember is Pastor Steve with an expression I’d never seen before and hope I never see again. What’s the word? Grim. He’s always so smiley at church. He has a cup full of candy on his desk and lets us take as much as we want. He just keeps refilling it. Isn’t that awesome? Every grown-up in the history of the world with a cup of candy has a rule about how many pieces you can take. But not Pastor Steve.
There’s a bench at the train tracks so I sit on it, even though the snow will soak through my pants and freeze me. It’s a totally normal place, to anyone else. Just the track coming in and the circle where the trolley turns around. The lake is frozen and white with its ice house city on top. Dad took me ice fishing a few times, when his buddy let him borrow his house. It was strangely warm in that house on the ice. Dad and I got so hot we took our jackets off. I start laughing at that, like a crazy person, but stop before I say “Remember, Dad?” out loud. Because that would be just too much. But is that what crazy people are? Just people talking to the dead?
* * *
When Brandon and his buddies walk in and see the TV at the front of the room, they all yell “Movie day!” which is idiotic because Mr. Sorenson never shows movies. There’s only one word on the board: CEASE-FIRE.
“Never heard of that one,” Brandon says as he slides into his desk next to mine. “You?” I just stare at him, so he asks again, slower, like I’m stupid. “Olson. You…ever…heard…of the movie…Cease-Fire?”
“It’s…It’s not a movie. It’s a thing,” I tell him. “That happened.”
Brandon drops his chin toward his chest and widens his eyes, like the parrot in the art room. He says, “Okay. Well, good talkin’ to ya, Olson.”
Mr. Sorenson turns off the lights, and the blue glare from the TV makes us instantly quiet. President Bush comes on the screen, sitting at his desk in the Oval Office. Mr. Sorenson turns the volume up. “Kuwait is liberated,” the president says. “Iraq’s army is defeated.” The class cheers.
Brandon reaches over and slaps me on the back. “Cease-fire!” he yells.
“Kuwait is once more in the hands of Kuwaitis, in control of their own destiny,” the president says. His voice fills the dark room, all the way to the walls. This is a time of pride, he tells us. Our victory was quick, decisive, and just. It was a victory for all mankind, for the rule of law, for what is right. But I can hear Dad’s voice too, small, in a corner of my head. Don’t become a soldier, he says. “We can be a catalyst for peace,” the president says. “This war is now behind us.” Dad says, Nothing is as simple as it seems.
“Let us give thanks to those who risked their lives,” the president says. “Let us never forget those who gave their lives.” Is he talking about Dad? I mean, I know he’s talking about the soldiers who died in this war. But is Dad included, when people thank soldiers who gave their lives? Because in a way he did give his life. And in another way, he got drunk and got hit by a trolley. “May God bless our valiant military forces and their families, and let us all remember them in our prayers,” says President Bush. Is that us? Mom and Murphy and me? Dad says, Good night.
Phuc stayed after school for math team so I’m sitting alone on the bus, watching tiny houses pass by with snow high in all the
yards and curvy paths shoveled to the doorways. I picture walking up each path, living in that house or that one or that one. Would it be better? Or worse? We pass one that belongs to an old lady whose yard Mom made me rake once. The lady gave me one dollar. She was so grateful there were tears in her eyes. I tried to give the dollar back, but she wouldn’t take it. I didn’t want to spend it, so I just stuck it in my sock drawer. I see it sometimes and wonder about her, if she still needs help. If she’s still alive. Weird that I don’t just ask Mom. Or walk up to her door and knock. Maybe I don’t really want to know.
“Yo, little bro,” Rodney says softly, like trying not to startle me. I look up and he smiles at me in the rearview mirror. The bus is empty and still. Mine’s the last stop. I stand up and swing my backpack onto one shoulder and walk down the gritty, slushy aisle that Rodney will have to clean as the last thing. I imagine him singing as he slides his mop down the aisle, the sky dark and all the cars rushing home to their golden windows and dinners on the table. I wonder where Rodney goes. I hope he has a golden window.
“Deep in thought today,” he says when I get to the front. He’s wearing a Vikings hat with a yellow puffball on top that should seem out of place with his earring, but on Rodney, somehow everything works together.
I shrug. “I guess.”
“Something on your mind?”
I should say, Yes. I should say, Lots of things. I should say, Was my dad destined to die? Are the words mostly true? Trolley, drunk, Vietnam, what did you expect? Was it—what’s the word? Inevitable? Was he a walking ghost? A ticking bomb? Were we just biding our time? And also, Did he do it on purpose? Rodney’s a man. He could take it.
Instead I say, “Not really.”
Like Nothing Amazing Ever Happened Page 3