Catalyst (11 page)

The boy is not so sure about this. The Litches have neglected his education.

“No, wait. It gets better. And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium . . . hey, what are you doing?”

“Uck.” Mikey pulls his hands away, stands up. “Up.” He stretches his arms over his head.

I pick him up and settle him on my hip. He rests his head against my shoulder, thumb in his mouth. I sway back and forth. What does he think about all this? His mom gone, his sister . . . well, I guess he’s used to her. Maybe Mikey could stay with us for a while. He could go to the preschool at church. Dad obviously likes him. He could stay with us while Mrs. Litch gets her life back together. Between the three of us, we could take care of him, just for a while.

Teri comes out of the house carrying a black garbage bag and a basket of toys. Mikey scrambles out of my arms and runs to her. Dad follows with another bag. A teddy bear pokes out the top of it. The cop refastens the the yellow caution tape across the door.

Teri puts the toy basket on the ground for Mikey.

“Is everything okay?” I ask.

“Kind of.” The wind grabs her hair and tangles it.

Dad sets down his bag. “I explained the situation. Mrs. Litch hadn’t had the chance to tell Teri about this. I assumed she had. My fault.”

Teri picks up the teddy bear, sniffs it, then holds it out to me. “Can you smell smoke on this?”

I sniff. “Yeah.”

“Damn.”

I check the tag sewn into the bear’s foot. “We can wash it at our house. I have a lot of laundry to do.”

Mikey finds what he was looking for in the basket. “Twuck,” he crows, waving his fire truck in the air. “Woowoo-woo!” It’s a pretty good siren imitation.

“You have to go grocery shopping, too,” Teri reminds me.

The police have started to push people away from the barn. It’s ready to topple. Dad watches the crowd move backward and sighs.

“If you want to go to work, Kate, that would be fine,” he says. “We don’t need you here. It’ll be all right.”

I nod. Mikey drives his fire truck over my slipper. The wind runs over the new grass.

“They’ve already called someone in to take my shift,” I say.

“No, really,” Dad says. “The volunteers will be here soon. One of them can take Teri on her errands. You’ve got a lot to do. Plus, we have to talk about the college thing. We could do that at lunch.”

I crouch down to gather the metal cars and trucks. “Don’t worry about it. I can take her. Mikey, too, if we can find a car seat.”

Teri raises an eyebrow. “You’re driving me around? Not in those pajamas, you’re not.”

The wind gusts hard and the crowd watching it steps farther back. The barn shakes once, then collapses. The timbers scatter on the ground like pickup sticks.

4.2 Neutralization

Before we leave, I refill Bert’s radiator and give him a friendly pat.
Don’t let me down, buddy. We do not want to be stranded with these passengers.

The engine starts the first time. Teri rolls down her window and fiddles with the radio as I wind my way to the main road. She taps the bumper sticker on my dashboard. “So, this MIT, it’s like a big deal, huh? A brainiac school?” she asks.

I nod once, eyes ahead. “It’s the best, the very best.” Mikey throws a truck at the back of my seat.

Teri chuckles. “You think I never heard of MIT? Duh. I’m not retarded, you know.”

“Let’s not talk about MIT right now, okay?”

She sits back. “Your dad said they blew you off. He didn’t want me to think you were being a bitch because you didn’t like me or anything.”

“My father is a very sensitive man. Here, this is Betty’s house.”

Teri and Mikey spend half an hour closed in the bedroom where Mrs. Litch is “recuperating.” Betty serves me tea and orange bundt cake and gives me the 411 about Mrs. Litch’s “conditions.” She has a number of them, apparently. At least Betty doesn’t bug me about college.

A door slams. Teri strides through the kitchen without a word, dragging Mikey behind her. I guess that’s her way of saying we can leave now.

Mikey is already buckled into his car seat by the time I get outside.

“Hurry up,” Teri says.

I start the car, buckle my belt, and reverse. “How’s your mother?”

She flips the door lock up, down, up, down. “Coughing a little. Whining a lot.”

“Is she excited about the house getting fixed?”

Up, down. Up, down. Up, down.

All right, don’t answer me. I look in the rearview mirror. Mikey is watching the traffic, his thumb in his mouth.

Up, down. Up, down.

“Knock it off,” I say. “This car is a collector’s item.”

Up, down.

I try again. “Is she still upset about the fire? Does she want you and Mikey to stay with her?”

“Okay, listen up,
Katie
. My mom got hit in the head with a bat once. My dad was holding the bat. Mom gets confused. She doesn’t understand what’s going on with the house. Hell, she thinks old Betty there is a cousin. I don’t want to talk about her anymore.”

Up, down. Up, down. Up, down. Up, down.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

Up, down. “I gotta get paid. Take a left.”

Getting paid means a visit to The Moon, a biker bar on the lake. The owner pays Teri in cash, and I don’t have the guts to ask what kind of work she does for him. I’m just the driver. It’s a lot of money, though.

What do you do after you get paid? You might think you would go to the bank. But not if you were Teri Litch. We go to Burgerbarf, where Teri and Mikey get jumbo-sized orders of french fries, soda, and cheeseburgers. Then I drive to the car wash so I can clean the jumbo soda Mikey spilled in the back. Then we go back to Burgerbarf for more fries. I drive them to the mall and stay in the car watching Bert’s temperature gauge. When they come out, Teri is holding a plain white bag, and Mikey is holding a strawberry ice cream cone. The cone is upside down on the seat before we leave the parking lot. She should never have gotten him a double scoop. Poor little guy. We revisit the car wash.

When the seat is clean, I take a detour by the pharmacy so I can apologize, grovel, and beg to keep my job. After that, my afternoon on chauffeur duty crawls by at twenty-five miles an hour. Teri pays her family’s water bill and electric bill with cash. She spends forever in the social services office arguing about a check Mikey is supposed to be getting. After that, she’s on a rampage. She starts up a running monologue mocking my car, complaining about my driving, and bitching about the fire. Mikey throws cold french fries at my head, then falls asleep. I turn off the radio and Teri goes silent, watching the stores and the streets slip by.

“I have to pick up my contacts now,” I say. No response. I check the mirror, get in the left lane, and turn when the green arrow flashes. “You can stay in the car if you want. It shouldn’t take long.”

She turns around to check on Mikey. “He’s out cold. He’ll sleep.”

I drive down the boulevard a few more blocks, then pull into the shopping center. I park in front of Ocu-Brite.

“You know how to use a hammer?” Teri asks as I open my door.

“What?” I drop my keys in my purse.

“Can you hammer things? Nails. Or are you a total spaz?” She snorts and turns to the window again. “Forget it. Go on. You’re a spaz. I shoulda known.”

“No, open the eyelid wider, wider, that’s it, nice and big. Right. Now, keep the contact on the tip of your finger, ease it onto your eyeball, and . . . No. You have very dry eyes, don’t you? Let’s try some artificial tears.”

Ocu-Brite’s official contact trainer is dressed like a medical person: white coat with big pockets, serious glasses, pager at her belt. It’s all bogus. She used to be a grocery store cashier. I can’t figure out if teaching people to poke themselves in the eye at Ocu-Brite is a step up or a step down on the job scale.

“One more time,” the trainer says. “Deep breath.”

I take a deep breath and study my eyeball. In the magnifying mirror, it’s as big as a grapefruit, with bright red capillaries snaking away from the pupil. I have Medusa eyes, and they are battling the contacts.

As I peel back my eyelid, the bell on the front door jingles. Teri and Mikey toddle in.

“Can I help you?” the contact trainer asks.

“I doubt that,” Teri says. She sits next to me and looks in the magnifying mirror. “Dang, look at your nostrils! And you’ve got a zit getting ready to pop out. Right there, on your chin.”

I push the mirror away. “Why didn’t you stay in the car?” I ask.

“Mikey’s awake.”

Mikey shoves a pile of magazines on the floor before running to the far end of the store.

“Hurry up,” Teri tells me.

Like she’s in any kind of position to be ordering me around. Like she hasn’t already messed up my day enough, plus my night when you figure I got about three hours of sleep.

“Let’s try this one more time,” the trainer says.

Teri sits in a waiting room chair and Mikey jumps into her lap. She reads him a copy of
This Old House
magazine. The little guy settles in and listens to the benefits of proper insulation. He is clutching a pair of demo frames in his fist.

Pop!
The contact snuggles up against my eyeball.

“It’s in! It’s in!”

“Congratulations,” drones the trainer. “Follow me.”

At the counter, she rattles off a list of instructions and stuffs a paper bag with freebie contact junk. Then she hands me the bill. I take out my wallet and remove the faded twenties. She takes my money. It’s that simple. I pay, I can see. Next customer.

I walk out of the store and clutch a concrete post. The light is blinding, screaming off the windshields and the metal cars, amplified by the white stucco walls of the shopping center. Water gushes from my eyes. Not tears, just water, eye water.

After a couple of minutes the water level goes down, and I can open my eyes, a little. If I block out the sun with my hand it’s not so bad. Holy crap, I can see
everything:
the numbers on the license plates, the small print on the signs in the music store window, the price of gas at the Sunoco. (Yikes, when did that go up?) I can see the street signs. I can see cardinals flying. I can see the cardinal’s beak, the twig in the cardinal’s beak, the flash in the cardinal’s eye.

I have magic eyes.

The bell jingles again and Teri and Mikey strut out of Ocu-Brite. Mikey is wearing the stolen frames and Teri is carrying the issue of
This Old House
. I can see the ice cream stain on his shirt and the scar under her chin. I follow them to the car, squinting from the intense light, captivated by the exquisite details of our little strip mall. The dust caught in the petal of a buttercup growing in a crack in the sidewalk. The weary faces of the teenagers working at the video store. A woman walks by carrying a briefcase. Her nails are bitten and torn. I can see them. A family bounces out of the sports equipment store carrying a huge rubber raft. I can see the price tag. They paid too much.

4.3 Free Radicals

Just a few normal hours, that’s all I wanted. I drove Teri and Mikey back to our house. I made hamburgers and mashed potatoes, and Toby made salad. At that point, I figured I was off the hook. Since I was avoiding my friends, I figured I could hide in a movie theater for a few hours. At the very least, I figured Teri was going to put Mikey to bed and watch television. And leave me alone.

That, my friends, is what they call hubris. Dad asked me to get out my acceptance letters and course catalogs. Teri bitched about the lack of grape juice and oatmeal. It was a no-brainer. Off to the grocery store we go.

As the Superfresh doors glide open, I rip the shopping list in two and hand half of it to Teri. “I’ll meet you at the checkout counter,” I say. “And don’t get any junk, okay? I don’t have much cash.”

Teri shoves the list in her back pocket without looking at it, takes a shopping cart, and wheels away without a word. I head for the produce aisle, where my best friend in the universe (whom I am avoiding like the plague) is squeezing pomegrantes. Shoot. She spots me before I can duck behind the display of grapes.

“Oh ma gah, Kate!” Sara drops the fruit and runs over to hug me. “I’ve called you like ten million times. Your dad said you hadn’t started any more fires or anything, but Kate, damn, how are you?” She squeezes me again and pats me on the back. “I am soooo sorry. They should have let you in. They are morons. We should organize a boycott.”

“MIT is already boycotting me, Sara.”

“Whatever. They suck.” She steps back, her hands on my arms. “Let me look at you. Oh ma gah! You got your contacts!”

“Keep it down. People are staring.”

She covers her mouth briefly. “You look amazing! How are they?”

“Except for the pain, I love them.” I pull the bottle of eye-lube out of my purse, tilt my head back, and squeeze a few drops into each eye. “My eyes are a little dry.” When I blink, the fake tears run down my cheek, making a mess.

Sara digs out a tissue and hands it to me. “Have you figured out which safety you’re going to accept?”