by Vicki Grove
I finally swalloed and said, “Janet needs to sell the Olds. She doesn’t know how much a vintage car like that can bring these days. Everything’s retro, and that car’s in great condition now that the grime is off it. I mean, sure it’s a gas guzzler, but it’s also a classic. Somebody will buy it to drive once a week, and not far, to shows and stuff. She needs the money it’ll bring. She needs to sell it.”
I hadn’t heard Janet come into the kitchen, but she said quietly from not far behind me, “Sweetheart, I could never sell Dad’s car. He would be so proud to see you have it.”
Bud, proud of me having his car? I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t. “You don’t know everything that happened,” I pushed out. “He . . . had a heart attack. I took him to the emergency room, but I couldn’t make him go in. I didn’t make him go in. All he wanted was to look for his truck, so that ended up being what we did. The last thing he did.”
Silence. Then, Janet said, “Do you know how many times that happened to me with him, Tucker? At least three times I got him to the hospital parking lot and that was as far as I could get him. Other times he checked himself out of the hospital against doctor’s orders. That was Dad. As he liked to say, his wounds were his own. You gave him the ride of his life, taking him up to his old farm like that. You know that, don’t you?”
I braced my palms against the stainless steel rim of the sink as tears I hadn’t known I had began hitting the suds, popping and scattering them, exploding them like shells falling from the sky can explode a muddy trench, can blow things into bits too small to recover. Like a great red bird of a flying car can explode into sandy ashes that rain back down, scalding both chilly sand and fragile flesh, melting everything together so you don’t know what is what. You just don’t know what is . . . what.
My shoulders were heaving, but I tried not to make any noise, tried to stifle at least the sound. My mouth was open and my nose was running. I could taste salt.
I hoped no one would touch me, and they didn’t.
“Janet?” I whispered. “Trey and I loved those stories of Bud’s so much. I don’t know why we quit listening, I guess we just grew up. But Trey remembered things from those stories all the time, like just a couple of weeks ago he reminded me of what Bud said about his dad’s two mules and how they were yoked together to load walnut logs onto a railroad car. On the way to Nebraska, Bud told me more stories, and I know he knew that was exactly what I needed, his stories. I mean, Janet, I’ll always be so grateful for Bud’s stories, and for getting to watch his old game tapes with him. I loved that too.”
I heard Janet draw in a breath and begin sobbing again, then I heard the two of them quietly leave the kitchen. They closed the door behind them, and I just kept standing there, dropping tears, destroying the suds so that I had to keep adding more detergent.
When all the visitors had finally gone home, I went out to the driveway and pulled everything out of Bud’s glove compartment. I put the obolus inside, then crammed everything else back in on top of it.
So all that happened right before Halloween, and now it’s almost Thanksgiving. The chamber of commerce has all the streets downtown looped with green and gold lights, and there are banners of smiling fat turkeys with Pilgrim hats giving folks a wing wave. Clevesdale spends a fortune on bizarre holiday decorations. You should see Christmas.
At school, people have made shrines of Steve, Zero, and Trey’s lockers, piling stuff in front of them, starting with leftover homecoming carnations in the school colors and Halloween candy, which was finally removed when the night custodians caught a bunch of the school mice having a midnight feast. The wilted carnations are still there. There’s also a lot of stuff taped to the doors, which started with these cheesy poems one of the English classes wrote. I guess I shouldn’t be like that about people’s poetry, but if you write about a thing like death, your words should, well, bring some uniqueness to the subject. These poems are mostly about crying, and I have a feeling that’s because so much rhymes with that word, including the obvious first choice, dying. Buying, lying, trying, denying, drying (as in the tears you were crying), even why-ing. Would you believe it, four of those poems used why-ing? “I can’t understand and so I keep why-ing.” Well, who can understand death? Not understanding death is universal, is a given, no use going on and on about it, as Bud might have said.
One night I was doing homework at my desk when Janet knocked and came in with a clean pair of my jeans over her arm. She noticed the mustard-stained napkin on my bulletin board for the first time. “What’s this?” she said, and stood there reading.
I got up and took the jeans from her, then stood beside her. “Bud’s rules of the road.”
She bit her bottom lip and ran her fingers under her eyes, then she started at the top and quietly read the list out loud.
“One. Never leave a lady stranded on the highway. Two. Things loom up fast, remember. Three. Keep a map in your vehicle, but know when to toss it. Four. Carry tools in the trunk and don’t be tempted to take them out and use them for whatnot around the house. Five. Change the oil every three thousand miles. Six. A day of freedom on the open road beats a year cooped up inside four walls.”
She turned to me and smiled. “That sounds just like him.”
I’ve had the six things on Bud’s list memorized for quite some time, but still the list stays up there. There’s a narrow ledge along the bottom of the bulletin board where I keep Trey’s green lighter and the last rock he threw. The rock no longer jiggles, never dances around on a windless night. He’s gone from it, completely. From it, not me. I wish I could show Trey Bud’s old car.
Officer Stephens picks Janet up and drives her to work now, so the Taurus stays in the garage most of the time and the Olds stays in the driveway. I keep it polished up. It’s that sort of car, needs to have a shine. I like how I can see it from my window. I like how the moving leaves on the big sycamore tree in our yard are mirrored in its chrome hubcaps and along the wide bumper.
Last week I was standing at Trey’s locker, reading some of those bad poems, when I felt someone nearby and glanced over to see Grace Reiser. She wrinkled her nose and said, “I think they should throw away these ugly dead carnations, don’t you?” She crouched down and gathered up a handful. Her dark hair moved like water, came sliding across her shoulder. “I’m tossing some of these,” she looked up and told me.
I nodded. “I don’t know about some of these poems, either,” I surprised myself by confiding. “But, well, I guess I don’t know all that much about poetry.” I shrugged.
She smiled. “Are you okay, Tucker? Can I help in any way?”
“I’m fine,” I told her, then I decided on more honesty. “Well, I’m getting there.”
She shifted her books, shook back her bangs, and smiled again. Then she walked on.
I was watching her go down the hall when someone clutched my elbow from behind and jerked me backward, hard. “What is wrong with you, Tucker?”
I turned to look into the legendary green eyes of the beautiful Aimee.
“What?” I asked. Had she forgotten what a loser she’d decided I was, that I was far too hopeless to communicate with? No, wait—she was probably here to remind me, in case I’d let the fact of my loserness momentarily slip my loser brain.
“What’s up, Aimee? I gotta get to track.”
She smacked her gum in a you-are-too-stupid-to-live sort of way while she explored a strand of her own hair. “Ick, a split end,” she murmured, then she flipped her hair over her shoulder, folded her arms, and ran her eyes over me from head to toe, shaking her head in obvious disgust.
I had a sudden inspiration. I read somewhere that if you want an honest evaluation of yourself, you should ask an enemy. “Aimee, what do you think Trey and Steve and Zero . . . liked about me, as a friend?” This was really lame, but I was in too far to go back. “I mean, I sometimes wonder why they wanted me to hang out with them. They were so flashy and I’m . . . obviously not.”
She frowned at me, then shrugged. “There’s this thing that’s honorable about you, like you’d try not to let anyone down. It’s kind of old-fashioned, and it’s really cute.”
I waited for the shot of sarcasm, but she stood there like what she’d said was a given.
Then she delivered a zinger. “Tucker, you are a good-looking guy, especially now that your long eyelashes have grown back. Still, if it weren’t for sweet Zero, I would give up on you completely, you are that dense. News flash! That cute girl has been hitting on you for weeks.”
Something in me turned over. “Grace Reiser? No way.” I snorted.
“Whatever you say, Tucker.” She sashayed down the hall still shaking her head, then turned around to call to me, “I’m so sure you’re better at reading such things than I am, you’re such a social guru and so in the loop.”
She had a point. And as I thought about it, I did remember a couple of things. Grace had asked me to hold her place in line once in the cafeteria, then offered to save me a seat since I would be coming through after her. And she’d called one night to get clarification on a homework assignment. Several of her girlfriends were in that class, so she could have called one of them instead. Wow. Grace Reiser.
On the other hand, Aimee might be pulling something, trying to trap me into making a fool of myself for retribution since she was convinced I’d deliberately tried to make a fool of her and her friends at the funeral. Funerals. I mean, she might have just noticed me watching Grace walk away and seen her chance to make me look stupid. Stupider.
Thing is, hanging out with Zero, Steve, and Trey so much had made me rusty where approaching girls was concerned. The girls I’d dated had basically been girls I’d gotten to know at parties or Trey’s band gigs where I’d gone with the three of them. I’d just end up with a girl from some cluster of girls we all met and we’d go out for a while.
There’d been no one like Grace, though. I decided to call her, about homework.
Her mother answered. “Um, I think she’s with Josh. Should I have her call you when they get back?”
“No thanks. It’s not important.” I hung up the phone, glad that at least I hadn’t given my name. Which Josh? Probably Josh Hinstrom. I felt gutted, hollowed out.
It turned out Grace figured out it was me who’d called from caller ID, and after school the next day she tapped me on the shoulder while I was feeding the soda machine in the gym. She was buckling on a bike helmet, which for some reason made me notice the delicate line of freckles across the bridge of her nose.
“So what’d you want when you called last night?” She smiled up at me. Her smile is great, the delivery especially. She just beams it right into you. “I was over at my cousin’s and I could have called you back from there.” Again, the smile.
“Your cousin . . . Josh?”
She nodded. “We were trying to make a centerpiece for the big family Thanksgiving bash, out of feathers and pinecones? It turned out really gruesome.” She laughed.
“I wanted the homework assignment. No big deal. Just, you know. Math.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, that’s good. That it wasn’t a big deal, I mean.”
I nodded and grinned, but I couldn’t think of anything to say, nothing at all. I was just too afraid to take a chance on doing it wrong, saying the wrong thing.
I realized right then that this was much worse than just being rusty. My confidence was gone, not that I’d ever been the most confident of people. Still, I’d had confidence that the ground would hold me up, that the sky would stay above my head.
Now, suddenly, I wasn’t so sure. Would the ground hold? Could you trust the sky?
Grace bent to roll up the right leg of her jeans, and as I watched, I made a final desperate struggle to find something, anything, to say or do. Nothing. The place where I used to keep that stuff was vacant, emptied out. No courage anywhere, no talk to talk.
She stood up, took a breath, and gave a little bounce on her heels. “Okay, that’s it, then.” She adjusted her helmet, then jogged through the gym and out the back door.
I watched her take her bike from the rack out there. She pedaled away, fast. She’s that kind of cyclist, a competitor, a long-distance rider. That’s it, then. The way she’d said it made me feel sick to my stomach. I chugged the orange drink I had in my hand, then crushed the can and shot it viciously into the trash can as I strode out of the school.
I sat in the car, clutching the wheel, flexing my fingers. Put it behind you. Put her behind you. Think of something immediate to do, anything. Get busy.
I usually work the Christmas season at Greenfield’s, wiring together wreathes and pruning Christmas trees. So I’d fill out my application like I’d been meaning to do. That’s what I’d do. I’d do it now, right now.
I didn’t realize I was on Maple Street until I got to the wild soccer kids’ block and had to slow to a total crawl to keep from running over a few of them. They bobbed and jumped around the car like little maniacs, but I’m not sure any of them recognized me or the Olds. Life is a series of strange events when you’re that age, if I remember right. Always you’re in the present, never in the past. Who could remember from clear last month a green car in Jeremy’s yard with a guy maybe dead inside it? How I envied them.
Maple is the main road that goes clear through Clevesdale, but nothing takes me down it on a regular basis except when I’m working at Greenfield’s. I probably should have checked before then on the three fake deer Bud had knocked over that day, but to be honest, I hadn’t thought of it. Now, though, I watched for the yellow-shingled house, anxious to see if all three of those deer had survived the hit they took.
There was the house. I spotted it a block away. And there were the deer, standing where they’d stood before Bud creamed them. I slowed to a crawl again as I got nearer, checking out their details, looking to see if anything on them was broken or missing or . . .
Grace! Her bike was lying on the sidewalk, and she was bent over it on her knees, her helmet on the ground beside her. I pulled to the curb and jumped from the car.
“Grace!” I called, my heart racing. “What happened?”
“Hey, Tucker!” She stood up and took a step toward me, smiling a sheepish version of her smile. “I’ve got a flat. It’s weird, I think I hit a plastic antler, it looks like. From those deer up there in the yard, I guess. Sliced my tire.”
It’s hard to describe what happened next. Something clicked inside me. I don’t mean clicked in the sense of someone finally figuring out how to do algebra or even remembering how to talk to a girl. I mean clicked in the sense of I heard a small but distinct click, and then I felt something thick and golden speeding through my veins.
“No problem!” I called, smiling my own smile right back at her. “I’ve got a patch kit and an air compressor right here in my trunk.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS TK