What Comes After (10 page)

“Oh, I know who you are, Miss Wight,” he said, easing himself back into his black chair. “I have heard from your aunt. All about the situation.”

“‘The situation’?” I wondered if Aunt Sue had already told him what I’d done to the Tundra — if that’s the situation he meant.

“Yes,” he said. “And what brings you here today?”

I sat in a straight-backed chair. “I came to talk about the truck.”

Mr. Trask blinked several times, as if adjusting to the dim light. “If you’re asking whether your aunt had approval for the purchase of the truck from the estate — a forty-percent down payment — then the answer is yes.” He pulled a folder from a desk drawer and thumbed through the papers. “Miss Allen needed reliable transportation to care for you at her farm. It was a reasonable use of the estate funds. She will be responsible for making her own monthly payments on the balance.”

“But shouldn’t I get to have a say in what she buys, since it’s my dad’s money?” I asked.

Mr. Trask blinked again. “You aunt is your legal guardian. If she chooses to consult with you, that’s her decision. She did consult with me — about the purchase of the truck, and about the other purchases as well.”

“But why did you approve those?”

“Quality of life,” he said, with what I assumed was an attempt at a smile. His mouth seemed to rise a little on his face. “
Your
quality of life,” he added.

“But I don’t need any of that stuff. I don’t want any of it.”

Mr. Trask didn’t respond. He just rubbed his teeth with his finger, like a toothbrush.

“Is there anything else?” he finally asked.

“Yes,” I said, though it was clear whose side he was on. “Aunt Sue hit me. Twice.”

Mr. Trask steepled his fingers and looked at the ceiling. “I was made aware of the incident — of both incidents,” he said. “My understanding is that there was some provocation. An act of vandalism.”

I slumped back in my chair. Whatever anger or self-righteousness I’d come in with had vanished. “She shouldn’t be allowed to hit me, or steal my dad’s money, no matter what,” I said weakly.

Mr. Trask ran his tongue over his teeth. “A foster parent has every right to discipline a child, Miss Wight,” he said. “These acts of vandalism on your part, should they continue, will require us to take matters before the Juvenile and Domestic Relations authorities. We are all sympathetic to your loss. But that does not give you license to be disrespectful. Or to vandalize.”

“Weren’t you supposed to meet with me?” I said, grasping for something, anything. “Check up on me? Make sure I was OK? Isn’t that your job?”

He folded his hands on his desk.

“Is there anything else, Miss Wight?” he asked again.

It took two hours to hike out to Aunt Sue’s; once I got there, I went straight to the barn to milk the goats. I’d just gotten Patsy up on the milking stand and laid my cheek against her warm side when Aunt Sue came in. She stood in the open barn door, backlit by what was left of the afternoon sun. Mr. Trask must have already called her, though she didn’t say a word. I stayed as far away from her as I could while I milked Patsy, then Loretta, then Tammy. Nervous Reba, more anxious all the time as she got closer and closer to kidding, must have picked up on my anxiety, too. She kept nuzzling me, rubbing against me, gently butting me.

Aunt Sue was still standing in the door when I finished, and I was a wreck, waiting for her to say something, or do something, wondering if she was going to hit me again. Wondering what I could do to stop her.

Loretta and Tammy went back outside through their stall door, and Reba surprised me by following them out. Patsy stayed. She stood next to me, actually between me and Aunt Sue.

Aunt Sue finally spoke. “I know where you been,” she said. “Don’t you even think about trying to make a federal case out of this-here with anybody else. You’re lucky I don’t have you already locked up in the juvie detention for that little vandalism of yours. You step out of line again, and you better believe we’ll be considering that option. You understand me?”

I put my hand on Patsy’s shoulder. I didn’t say anything.

“There better be a ‘Yes, ma’am’ coming out of your smart mouth,” Aunt Sue said.

My jaw tightened so hard it ached, but I managed the “Yes, ma’am.” She’d been blocking the door, but now she stepped to one side to let me pass. I couldn’t help flinching as I walked by her, and I could practically feel her smug grin burning into my back. Patsy came with me. I stayed in the field with her and the others until long after dark.

I e-mailed Beatrice the next day at school, and she said all the right things when she wrote back — how sorry she was, and how terrible she felt, and how hard all this must be. Things were better between us since that night I called and let her talk, but she was still a thousand miles away, and besides a little sympathy I figured there was nothing she, or anybody, could do to help.

I started a letter to Dad but couldn’t think of anything to say after the salutation. So I drew a picture of our old house, and our old barn, and our old hog, who Dad never had the heart to have slaughtered. It was a pretty nice picture. I tore it into tiny scraps when I finished and fed the scraps to the goats.

We had to write an explanatory essay that week in English on the topic of our choice, and Mrs. Roosevelt assigned us all to small groups to read and discuss our drafts. I ended up with Shirelle, a cheerleader, a kid with a mullet, and a Goth kid whose first name was Littleberry.

I’d noticed him in class before, always wearing an oversize army jacket, usually sitting in the back but sometimes at different desks, which bothered some people who were used to being in the same seat every day. A few told him to move, but he wouldn’t unless Mrs. Roosevelt made him. He wasn’t very big — a couple of inches taller than me, maybe. Still, I thought he was kind of cute, except for the way his bottom lip stuck out, as if he was pouting.

Shirelle took charge as soon as we circled our desks, which didn’t surprise me. “OK,” she said. “Here’s the order. We’ll talk about mine first, then yours, then yours, then yours, then yours.” She pointed to each of us as she spoke. I was last, which was fine with me. Maybe we’d run out of time before it was my turn.

Shirelle had written her essay on “How to Play Zone Defense in Basketball.” The kid with the mullet wrote his on “How to Crop and Cure Tobacco.” The cheerleader, whose leg was in a cast, wrote hers on “How to Stunt.” Littleberry’s was on “How to Care for a Head Wound.” The cheerleader complained that it was gross, and Littleberry got defensive.

“Well, I wanted to write about ‘How to Survive a Zombie Attack,’” he said, crossing his arms over the front of his army jacket. “But Mrs. Roosevelt wouldn’t let me. And anyway, mine is personal, so shut up about it,
Lucy.
” He practically spat her name, which for some reason hadn’t registered with me when I was reading her essay.

“Whatever,” Lucy said, crossing
her
arms.

“Enough,” said Shirelle. “Let’s move on.”

With a glance at the clock, I read aloud my essay, which was on “How to Build a Pet Crematorium.”

The winter before Dad died, the smokestack cracked on our old crematorium behind the barn, and we decided to build a new one. It was so cold, the ground frozen so hard, that people couldn’t bury their dogs or cats or hamsters in their own backyards the way they usually did, so they called us. Just about every day when I got home from school, Dad had me driving out somewhere to pick up another body. Beatrice went with me sometimes but didn’t like it and usually begged off. I didn’t like it, either, but I’d seen and smelled a lot worse stuff than a dead Great Dane with his head locked inside a block of ice.

Dad designed the new crematorium and ordered all the parts and applied for all the permits, but he was already coughing a lot back then, especially out in the cold, so we had to hire some guys to come in and do the job. Dad called it a comedy of errors: first the steel beams for the interior of the furnace fell off the guys’ pickup truck onto the highway and clipped the bumper on a bus. Then the hoist bent, so we had to rent a forklift for the heavy materials. Then one of the guys burned himself welding and had to go to the hospital.

They finally finished, though, and Dad and I fired up the furnace right away. By then the bodies were literally piled up. It would have been convenient to just stoke it full of animals, but most people wanted to keep their pets’ ashes, so we had to cremate them one at a time and then collect what remained into little urns for the owners. I was the one who swept out the ashes, because I didn’t want Dad to be around all that dust. But it turned out that the ashes weren’t just dust. There were also tiny shards of bone, teeth, beak, hoof, and claw you could see if you looked close enough.

We kept the crematorium burning off and on for most of a week to catch up on the backlog of corpses. That frozen Great Dane was the hardest because he wouldn’t fit, and Dad had to break the dog’s legs so we could fold them in with the body. It almost got to the point where I didn’t mind all that death, and sometimes when I went with Dad to deliver an urn, I was actually surprised that the owners cried, that the urns represented something sad to them. Some of them wept so hard they couldn’t even speak. One old lady, once she got her voice back, said she wished there was a way she could be cremated, too, and have her own ashes mixed with her bird’s.

The bell rang just as I finished, so I didn’t have to listen while the group critiqued my essay. I stuffed my notebook in my backpack and was out of my seat and out the door before anyone else. Even so, Littleberry caught up to me halfway down the hall.

“Hey, Iris,” he said. “Hold on a second.”

I kept walking, but a little slower. He grinned. “So I really liked your story,” he said. “Man, that business with the Great Dane, that was just sick. I totally dug it.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I guess. It was just what we had to do.”

I stopped at my locker to drop off my books.

“So what I was wondering,” he said, “was if maybe you might want to hang out after school. Talk about pet crematoriums or something.”

I shut my locker and turned to look at him. He actually blushed.

“You want to go out with me?” I asked, just to be sure.

He grinned a little wider. “Or just hang out or whatever.”

I was tempted to say yes, partly because he was cute and I was lonely, and partly because I was curious about his head-wound essay. But then he spat a black stream of something into a paper cup. I’d thought he was just holding a drink all that time, but now I realized he was chewing tobacco.

“I can’t,” I said, trying not to stare at the cup, and trying not to show him how disgusted I was. “But thanks.”

He drummed his fingers on his notebook. “Well, what about tomorrow? You want to hang out then? I have an extra helmet. We could go for a ride.”

“You have a motorcycle?”

He looked down. “Not exactly. It’s more like a motor scooter, I guess. A Vespa.”

He seemed even cuter to me in that moment, all embarrassed about his scooter. It almost made up for the tobacco and the spit cup. Almost.

But I couldn’t go, anyway, and it wasn’t just the dip. “I’m sorry, Littleberry. I just can’t,” I said. “I have chores every afternoon. I have to milk our goats.”

His mouth dropped open — enough for me to see black goo between his lip and gum. “Goats?”

“Really,” I said, looking away.

“OK, Iris,” he said. “I guess I better get to class. I’ll see you around.” And he left.

I thought about Littleberry later that afternoon while I milked the goats. He
was
pretty cute, but I couldn’t imagine kissing someone who chewed tobacco. Not that I was thinking about kissing Littleberry. I wondered if he’d ask me out again and decided that if he did, and if he got rid of the dip, and if I could get away from Aunt Sue’s, I might just say yes.

Aunt Sue piled on the chores after the truck incident, but I felt as if I’d gotten off easy. She didn’t hit me again, or try, though I found myself flinching for the first couple of days whenever she walked past, wondering if she might.

First I had to haul an extension ladder out of the barn and clean the gutters on the house, which took a couple of afternoons and left me covered in mud and roof gunk. It was nice to work out my arms and shoulders, though, which hadn’t gotten much use since I quit summer softball back in Maine, except for throwing with Beatrice in her backyard. Two blue jays dive-bombed my head when I got too close to their nest, which was tucked under an eave at Aunt Sue’s house where the bird-blocking had pulled loose. Another time I had to stop because Tammy got her head caught in the fence again, and Loretta, who must have come over to investigate, got hers stuck, too.

After the gutters, Aunt Sue ordered me to paint the barn with a half dozen old cans of leftover paint in four different colors.

“Are you sure you don’t want to paint it all one color?” I asked her tentatively. “It wouldn’t cost that much for barn paint.”

Aunt Sue sniffed. “I don’t give a good goddamn what colors the barn is,” she said. “That’s usable paint, so you use it.”