She eats a bite of coleslaw. I have no idea why. I didn’t think anyone ate the coleslaw. “I thought you liked the food,” she says.
“Please. I eat this chicken practically every night. The whole point is to embarrass Murphy.”
“Yeah, well. Not happening.”
I sigh and stir my mashed potatoes around, trying to drown them in the gravy puddle. I flick my hand up like I’m going to wave and Mom flinches, and I laugh. She smacks my hand, but she’s laughing too, which is good to hear.
“Did you know that in France ‘KFC’ is ‘PFK’ for ‘Poulet Frit Kentucky’? That’s the only good thing I’ve learned in French all year,” I tell her. “C’est vrai.”
Mom shakes her head. “Justin. You are one interesting bird.”
“Mom, please.” I cover my drumstick with one hand and whisper, “No bird jokes in front of the chicken.”
She smiles, but her face looks tired from trying so hard. I eat my biscuit and watch Murphy at the register (without waving). He still has a little of his sunbeam smile, and he flashes what’s left of it at the customers. He chats with them and high-fives some and gives the little kids the thumbs-up.
“Murphy’s good at this job,” I tell Mom.
“Murphy is a junior in high school,” Mom says. “He should be at baseball practice. Like a regular kid.”
I open my mouth to ask how she can actually expect him to be a regular kid after everything, but Murphy slides in next to me in the red plastic booth and knocks me over. “Enjoying your KFC experience?” he asks.
Mom grins at him, like it was a serious question. “Couldn’t be better!” she says.
“Awesome,” Murphy says.
I roll my eyes at both of them. “Murph. You should be mayor of Wicapi when you grow up,” I tell him. “You know everyone in this place.”
He smiles. “Nah, not me.”
“Okay, fine, pro hockey star.”
But he shakes his head. “No, I’ll do something easy. Construction, prob’ly.”
“That doesn’t sound easy,” I say, but Murphy doesn’t hear me. He’s looking out the window like he can see his future hanging around in the parking lot. He’s not frowning, exactly, but it’s close.
* * *
“What’s your problem, Olson?” Mitchell shoves me against the wall. So today’s the day.
“I—”
“I’m so sick of you walking around like you’re better than everyone.” He moves his tongue around in his mouth like he might spit on me. Kids start to crowd in, and I can see Phuc at the edge. His face is blotchy with fear, and he opens his mouth, but I shake my head at him, just a tiny shake. But Mitchell sees it, like a piranha detecting a single drop of blood in the water. “What?” he snarls. “You got something to say?” He’s got me by the arms, and he slams me again.
The thud of my head against the wall reminds me of when Mom backed into a telephone pole in the grocery store parking lot a few weeks after Dad died. It was dusk, and shadowy and slippery, and we heard that sick bump. “Crap!” she whispered. “Crap, crap, crap.” We got out and looked at the busted taillight and the dent. It was snowing huge pretty flakes, and the air was warm like it is sometimes when it snows. Did you know that in Minnesota, it can get too cold to snow? Truth. And the word that came into my head was “mercy.”
There was something about how soft the snow was, and the air like velvet, and that it was just a taillight (not a person) and the car wasn’t wrecked. I was okay. Mom was okay. Just the mercy that we were both still alive, still here.
We got back in the car, but Mom didn’t drive it. We just sat, watching the snow fall. I tried to see the design of each flake before it melted on the windshield. Mom said, “If Dad were here, he would fix that light.” Her voice had tears in it. “He would say ‘Easy fix’ and go to the shop and get the part. Or if the toilet broke, he’d just go to the hardware store and get the…What’s the word I’m looking for?” She looked at me, and there were so many tears in the bottoms of her eyes that one blink made them spill over. I shrugged, helpless. I don’t know anything about toilets. “The flange,” Mom whispered, looking back out the windshield. “He could fix anything,” she said to the falling snow. “I should have told him that. I should have told him how good he was. How much money it saved us. How much I appreciated it.”
“You did,” I said, and she turned to me.
“Did what?”
“You did tell him he was good at fixing stuff. You told him all those things you just said. You did tell him.”
She blinked again. More tears fell. “Did I?” I nodded, and she smiled. She reached over and squeezed my hand, and I let her. I could still feel the word floating around the car. Mercy.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you, Olson!”
I blink, like Mom did, but lucky for me, I’m not crying. Yet. I’m still pinned to the wall. My feet are dangling, and please, God, don’t let me pee my pants.
“That’s your problem. You think you’re too good for all of us. Even though your dad…”
My head’s tilted, so I see Brandon coming before Mitchell does and before I can decide what that means, Brandon grabs Mitchell and yanks him back. I fall down from the wall and land in a crouch but stay on my feet even though every muscle is jelly. Small victories. “What’s wrong with you, Jergen?” Brandon asks. He’s got Mitchell by the shirt and a hockey player on each side. Mitchell is silent. He looks away. “I’m gonna let you go,” Brandon says, “but if I ever see you picking on Olson again, you’re done. Got it?” He lets go, and Mitchell walks off like he doesn’t care, like Axl Rose after Mom chases her off the counter.
“You okay, Cease-Fire?” Brandon reaches his hand down and I take it. I’m still crouching, which is super embarrassing. He pulls me up and fixes my shirt on my shoulders like Mom does before church. “I hate bullies,” he says, and the two hockey players nod. One says, “That dude’s such a poser.” Then some teachers are coming and everyone takes off before they start handing out pink slips. I watch Brandon and his buddies walk away, and the word hangs on. Mercy.
* * *
Benny H. is down the block when I get off the bus and I start to walk toward him but slow down when I get closer. He’s walking in a tiny circle, like looking for something. His huge black coat makes him look like a black crow in a gray world. Gray sky, gray wind, gray smoke from his pipe, and he’s muttering at the gray sidewalk. I start to turn around, but then I think of how fast Brandon came toward me. How he didn’t hesitate. And I keep walking toward Benny H.
“Hey,” I say when I get to him, and he glances up like I’m a stranger passing by. “It’s really cold,” I say. “You want to get a cup of coffee?” I have no idea how I’ll make this happen because I have no money. But Benny H. keeps walking in his circle. “Did you lose something?” I ask, even though there’s only ice and salt on the ground, between Benny H.’s black boots and my beat-up sneakers. He’s still muttering, and it sounds like the same word repeated but I can’t tell what word. “Can I walk you to the library?” I ask.
He finally stops and looks at me. There are tears in his eyes that might be from the cold but might not be. “Time to go,” he tells me.
“Go where?”
“Home.”
“Okay. Can I walk you?”
He shakes his head. “No, no. I’ll walk you.”
So we walk to my apartment building, and he waves his arm up and down like he can wave me up to the second floor. “Are you sure?” I ask. “Will you be okay out here?” He laughs his Jolly Green Giant laugh and waves me up again. I take the steps two at a time and unlock the apartment door and run to the living room window to look out. Benny H. is walking back up the sidewalk. He passes the spot where he got stuck in the circle and takes a left at the comic shop corner and disappears into the gray air.
* * *
I start flipping through the books and taking notes and marking the ones with good pictures with little scraps of paper like battle flags. And pretty soon I get why she’s so excited. Because this is so different from studying other history. Different from Plymouth Rock and the colonies and throwing tea into the harbor. Because this is our place. All the things we forgot about. All the things we used to know. Right in front of us if we bother to look.
“Hi,” Mom says. She sits down across from me, and I stare at her until I remember I wrote at the library on a sticky note and left it on the kitchen table. Last month I went to Phuc’s after school (like I did a million times before Dad died), and she freaked out when she got home and I wasn’t there and no one answered at Phuc’s (probably his sisters were louder than the phone ringing). I walked in the door literally the second before she started calling every kid in seventh grade looking for me. She had the student directory in her hand! Death does weird things to the living.
“Hi, Mom. What are you doing here?”
“I saw your note. Thank you for leaving it, by the way.”
“You’re welcome by the way.”
“And I thought I’d come and see if you needed help.”
“Oh. Thanks. I don’t really.”
“Can I help anyway?”
I smile. “Sure.”
“Great!” She actually pushes up her sleeves. I shake my head. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“What can I do?”
“Um, I’m looking for anything on the Dakota on Lake Minnetonka or in Wicapi or anywhere around here. And on their life in Minnesota. And on the founding of Wicapi.”
Mom raises her eyebrows. “Wow.”
“Yeah. It’s for our National History Project on conflict. Mr. Sorenson hates my idea. He thinks I should do an actual war.”
Mom picks up a book and flips to the index. “Yeah, well. I’m sure to the Dakota it was an actual war.”
Then I just reach across the table and hug her. In the middle of the library. Because she’s so good at saying the perfect thing and sometimes I forget I have her. Sometimes I go to junior high and Mitchell pins me to the wall, and Mom goes to work and church and counts pills and prays, and Murphy goes to high school and KFC, and we all just forget. And then a moment like this comes. And we sit in the middle of our own history. And we remember.
“You got homework?” Murphy asks. My mouth is full of taco, so I shake my head. Mom had to work late, so Murphy took me to Kmart for new gym shoes, then drove through Taco Bell. “You wanna go home?” he asks.
“No way,” I say through my taco.
“You want to just drive around?”
“Yeah.”
So we drive. Murphy’s heater only goes on high, so he blasts it and cracks the windows and the car is hot and cold and smells like meat and peaches from Murphy’s air freshener that’s shaped like a tree and makes me wonder about people who live where peach trees grow. Do they have pine-smelling trees in their cars and wonder about us?
There’s tons of traffic and nothing good on the radio, but there’s nowhere I’d rather be, including Florida (orange trees), which is where I almost always want to be. Mom took us down there once to visit her mom, and she spent the whole trip home saying how she’d never go back to Florida. I was super bummed but didn’t say so because Mom was even more bummed about how some things never change. I was only five, but I remember sitting on the white sand and staring at the turquoise water and not understanding why everyone didn’t live in Florida. I still don’t really.
“Let’s go around the lake,” Murphy says. So we wind around and I eat another taco and watch the moonlight flicker on the cold, dark ice.
“You ever want to live anywhere else?” I ask Murphy.
“No. Why?”
“I don’t know. I was just thinking about Florida.”
Murphy smiles. “Be good to visit, I guess. But there’s no hockey.”
“Oh. Right. Did you know that in the Dakota language they have, like, sixteen different verbs for ‘home’? Like, ‘coming home,’ ‘returning home,’ ‘bringing something home’?”
“Makes sense to me,” Murphy says.
“How come?”
“I mean, I don’t know, home is pretty important. What would we be without home?” Murphy slows down at a yellow light. We stop. We wait. We start to move again. “It must have been so sad for them,” Murphy says.
“What?”
“To love home so much, and then lose it.”
“Yeah.” Sometimes Murphy surprises me. “Murph?”
“What?”
“Can you do me a favor?”
“Anything, Monk.”
I take a deep breath. “Can you find out what happened when Dad died?”
Murphy swallows. I can tell because he has a lump in his throat that moves up and down like Dad’s. When did that happen? “What do you mean?” he asks.
“I mean, like, what happened? Did he walk out on the tracks? Did he fall? I just want to know.”
Murphy stares straight ahead. “Okay,” he says slowly. “And how would I find that out?”
“I don’t know. Ask around? You know everyone.”
“Ask around? What, I’m like, ‘Hi, would you like to try the new spicy hot wings? And by the way, you know Larry Olson? The guy who got killed on the train tracks? Do you happen to know anything about that? I’m his son. This isn’t weird or anything. I just want to know.’ ”
I sigh, and look back out at the lake. “Yeah, I guess.” Murphy curves the car along the shoreline. The lights are bright on the other side. Big houses. Rich families. Alive dads. “So, what? We just never know?” I ask.
“What difference does it make?”
“Are you kidding? It makes all the difference!”
“Monk. He’s dead either way.”
“Yeah. I know.”
* * *
The snow didn’t gear up this time. Usually it falls slow at first so you can get home, stop at the grocery store, whatever. Not today. It’s like it all collected in the clouds and then God (or Jesus or whoever is in charge up there—probably no one, the way things are looking down here) just pulled the lever and released it. Dumped it all, the way the M&M’s pour out of that machine at the rich grocery store where we only go on Kentucky Derby day because they sell fresh mint that Mom needs to make those drinks she likes. Her dad was from Kentucky.
They let us out of school at noon, and I feel off-balance seeing Rodney this early in the day and he’s off-balance too. The radio’s off and he keeps looking in the rearview mirror like we might be endangering ourselves in some new way he hasn’t thought of. He’s got both hands on the wheel like an old lady and his wipers on so high they squeak. I punch his shoulder, but soft, before I get off.
“Last stop,” I tell him. “You made it.”
Rodney lets out all his breath, like the snow cloud and the M&M machine. “I hate driving in snow. My older brother. Got in a huge wreck on a day like this. He was never the same. My whole family was never the same.” He shakes a cigarette out of a crushed white pack and lights it, and his hands are trembling. “And here I am driving all these little lives around. Too precious. Too precious for me.”
“I didn’t know you smoked.”
He blows the smoke sideways, out the cracked window into the falling snow. “Only on days like this.”
“Well, you did good, Rodney.”
He nods. “Thanks, little man. You’re the coolest.” He holds up his hand for a high five, and I smack it. He pulls the lever and the door swings open and I stomp down into the snow, which, despite freaking Rodney out, is totally amazing, how fast and heavy it’s falling, like grieving. (I should tell that to the social worker. She’d probably appreciate it.)
I walk down the white sidewalk through the white world (you can’t even see the lake, the snow is so thick) and up the steps to the apartment, and just as I unlock the door, there’s a sizzle and pop and the power goes out. Inside, the rooms are filled with snow light, which is an impossible color to describe because in reality it’s gray, but it’s the most beautiful gray and it lights up from the inside and there’s no word for that. I sit down on the couch and Axl Rose climbs into my lap. I close my eyes and listen for Dad, but all I hear is Axl Rose purring, which at this second is enough.
* * *
“Whoa,” Phuc says when he walks in. I’m in the middle of my bed surrounded by stacks of library books. They take up every possible space. There’s even one on my pillow. “That’s a lot of books,” Phuc says, and bounces onto Murphy’s empty bed. He clicks on Murphy’s lava lamp and watches the lava float and bounce in its purple sea. “Where’d your brother get this thing?”
“Some girl gave it to him for his birthday.”
“His girlfriend?”
“Huh?” I look up.
“The girl who gave it to him. Is she his girlfriend?” Phuc asks.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” I look back down.
“Are you failing history or something?”
“No. Why?”
Phuc pulls his backpack onto Murphy’s bed and unzips it. He pulls out his math book. “I’ve never seen you so…obsessed.”
Like Nothing Amazing Ever Happened Page 7