What Comes After (9 page)

And I called Beatrice. Late one night after Aunt Sue left for work. I figured it would be a month before Aunt Sue got the phone bill, and I would deal with the fallout then.

“Hey,” Beatrice said as if she’d been expecting the call. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Same old North Carolina. What about you?”

“Same old Maine.”

“Sounds better than here,” I said, keeping my voice low so Book wouldn’t hear — though I doubted he’d wake up. It was nearly eleven. “Look, I’m sorry about the other night, when I had to hang up on you.”

“Yeah,” Beatrice said. “Whatever. I was kind of drunk.”

“I wanted to talk,” I said. “It’s just that my aunt was right there, and everything’s been pretty terrible here.”

“Terrible how?”

“Well, she hit me, for one thing. She slapped me.”

“Damn,” Beatrice said, though she didn’t sound as angry as I thought she should. “What did you do?”

“What do you mean?” I asked sharply. “What did I do when she slapped me?”

“No, I mean, why’d she slap you in the first place?”

I started to explain about Gnarly barking, and about the chickens he killed, but Beatrice cut me off. “You shouldn’t have let out their dog.”

“What?” I said. “Are you kidding me? She
slapped
me, B. I can’t believe you said that.”

She sighed into the phone. “I’m not saying she should have slapped you. But she probably did have a right to be mad.”

“You’re taking her side?” I said, incredulous.

“Oh, just forget it,” Beatrice snapped. “Can we talk about something else besides your aunt and your farm and your goats? Can we talk about what’s going on up here maybe? You’re so caught up in your own stuff, Iris. Why don’t you ever ask about anything that’s going on with me? You could ask me about my parents, who aren’t even talking at all now, which is worse than when they were fighting all the time. You could ask me about Collie. You could ask me about
my
stuff.”

I sat down on the kitchen floor with the phone cord looped around my arm.

“I’m sorry,” I said, flattened by all she’d just said. “I didn’t know about your mom and dad. I thought maybe things had gotten better with me gone.”

“Well, they haven’t.”

I sighed, already letting go of the idea — faint in the first place — that Beatrice could help me with my problems at Aunt Sue’s. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“I don’t know,” Beatrice said. “Won’t your aunt kick you off the phone again?”

“Not tonight,” I said. “She just left for work.”

For the next hour, I let Beatrice talk — about her parents, about Collie, about whatever she wanted. She’d always done most of the talking, anyway, for as long as we’d been friends. Ironically, it even made me feel better to just be listening to her, to be back in my old familiar role — at least for a little while.

It was after midnight when we finally hung up and I crawled into bed. I was exhausted, my head crusty from lack of sleep — not just tonight, but since I’d been in North Carolina — but I was still wide awake.
Beatrice’s parents weren’t talking anymore.
I couldn’t stop thinking about that and what it meant. The chances of me going back to Maine were more remote than ever, and I felt myself sinking so low that I was in danger of being swallowed by my bed. I finally turned on the light and picked up
Huckleberry Finn.
I flipped through to a favorite passage I’d marked. Huck and Jim are drifting down the Mississippi River, just the two of them, hiding from the civilized world, which seems less and less civilized every time they go on shore. Off the river there’s only sadness and trouble: bloody feuds and dead children, grieving parents and lynch mobs, slave traders and murderers, the bloody corpse of Huck’s dad, Pap.

But when they’re on the river, it’s different.

It reminded me of Dad, and Maine, and the life we had when I was little — going on vet rounds, visiting farms, playing with animals, hiking through the Maine woods, climbing Mount Katahdin, watching movies about heroic dogs and horses with great heart. It reminded me of Beatrice, too — the Beatrice from when I was younger: playing softball, riding her horse, laughing about boys, casting off in our sea kayaks to explore hidden coves along the coast.

I finally fell asleep remembering all of that. None of it existed anymore, but I hoped I could dream about it and have it be mine again at least for a little while, for whatever was left of the night.

Aunt Sue bought a new truck that weekend. It was fire-engine red. She hadn’t told us she was getting it, just drove it into the yard when she came back later than usual from the farmers’ market. She parked next to the back steps and practically needed a ladder to get down.

Book scratched his big head. “How’d you get this, Mama?” Aunt Sue didn’t answer at first, but Book kept asking until she said, “It’s from the estate.”

“What estate?” I said, but I already knew the answer.

“Your dad’s,” she said. “They appointed me the executor, or I guess they said it was the execu
trix,
and I figured we needed a new truck. See? It’s got a king cab.”

I thought again about all the things Aunt Sue had bought lately, supposedly from her big raise: the high-definition TV, the new CD player, the satellite dish. And now this hulking pickup. How much of Dad’s money had she spent?

The truck especially was a slap in the face. I hated big polluter trucks and SUVs, and Dad did, too. When I was little, he called them “P of the P,” which stood for “Part of the Problem,” and I grew up yelling that out to him every time I saw one. “Dad! Dad! It’s a P of the P!” If it was a van with a really big family — four kids, two parents — he said that was an exception. Same thing if it was a working truck, like the one we had. But he hated them otherwise.

Aunt Sue could have fit all her stuff for the farmers’ market in a hatchback. There was no need for her to have a truck the size of the Tundra.

If she’d wanted to get to me, she’d finally succeeded. My dreams about Maine ended as soon as I woke up the next morning. I was never going back there to live. I knew that now. Beatrice’s dad didn’t come home from his office some nights; she thought he might be staying in a motel; she wondered if he was having an affair. Their lives were falling apart, and that meant there was never going to be room for me there again.

And what did I have here, in North Carolina, at Aunt Sue’s? Redneck field parties, a prisoner’s diet, an aunt who hit me, and the money my dad had made pissed away — stolen — on things he detested.

The more I thought about it, the more worked up I got. I was too angry to sleep, and lay awake for hours just shaking with rage. I finally got out of bed and got dressed. I went outside and looked at the truck. I kicked the bumper. I even spat on the windshield. Gnarly, maybe sensing my hostility, lifted his leg and peed on one of the rear tires. “Good boy,” I said, and scratched him behind his ears. I paced around the yard and the field. I glared at the truck.

And just like that, I knew what I needed to do. I marched back into the house and rooted through the giant silverware drawer in the kitchen until I found an ice pick way in the back. Then I flattened every one of the tires on Aunt Sue’s new Tundra, including the spare.

A small part of me was scared, afraid I’d get caught in the act, afraid of what Aunt Sue would do when she found out. But mostly I felt exhilarated, like I had that night with Beatrice on the seawall. Once I was done, I practically danced over to the barn to tell the goats. Patsy woke up and nodded at me sleepily. The chickens clucked.

I went back outside and lay with Gnarly in the grass, the way I had my first night in Craven County. I looked at the stars and wished I’d paid more attention when Dad tried to teach me the constellations. The Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, the North Star, Cassiopeia — those were the only ones I remembered. Finally, just before sunrise, I let myself into the house, crept up the stairs, and collapsed on the bed.

Aunt Sue stormed up to my room a couple of hours later. She didn’t say anything, just grabbed my hair, pulled me out of bed, and slapped me hard across the face again.

She yelled at me: “I know it was you, you ungrateful little bitch!”

At first I stood frozen in the middle of the room while the world circled around me, or maybe I was the one doing the spinning while everything else stood stone still. My face burned. My eyes teared up, but I swore I wouldn’t cry. Whatever she did to me now, it had been worth it.

“You had no right to buy that truck,” I said, struggling to keep my voice even. “Or any of that other stuff. That wasn’t your money. That was my dad’s.”

“You’re damn wrong about that,” she said, leaning her face so close I could smell her cigarette breath. “Plus you got no say in the matter. And you shit-sure better believe you’ll pay for those tires.”

“No, I won’t,” I said. I’d been looking for some trace of my mom in Aunt Sue since I got to Craven County — not just in how they looked, but in who they were — and I guessed I’d finally found it. Not the mom I liked to remember, singing Joni Mitchell and reading me books in a big overstuffed chair by a south-facing window in streaming sunlight, but the other one — the one who might turn angry all of a sudden without your knowing why, the one who Dad said hit me when I was five and left a dark bruise. The one who walked out on us not long after that.

“Oh, you’ll pay, all right,” Aunt Sue said. “I’ll see to that. I will not allow anybody to break bad in this house.”

She ordered me to stay in my room for the rest of the day, except to use the bathroom. Book brought up a jug of water and a couple of sandwiches he left on a plate outside my door. Both had baloney on them, which I peeled off and threw out the window. At least there was lettuce, and a little cheese.

I wrote Dad a letter, but I didn’t mention getting slapped again. I thought he’d rather just hear about the truck.

I did homework, exercised on the floor, and spent hours looking out the tiny window at the barn and the goats. Book must have been the one to milk them, and from the sounds of things — the bleating and complaining — the girls weren’t happy about it. I bet they wondered where I was, and why I wasn’t there, and why brick-handed Book pulled so mean and hard on their teats.

I couldn’t let myself think about that too much, though, so I started reading the new book Mrs. Roosevelt had assigned,
Their Eyes Were Watching God.
It was pretty depressing. The heroine, Janie Starks, marries a man who is nice to her at first but then gets jealous and won’t let her hang out on their front porch and visit with anyone. When she finally finds a man she truly loves, the guy gambles away their money. Then there’s a hurricane, and a flood. Then Janie’s man gets bitten by a rabid dog, so she has to shoot him. The man, not the dog. It breaks her heart.

It was a short novel for all that, and after I finished reading, I lay on the floor with my legs up on the bed and cried until my eyes ached. I felt as if my insides had been hollowed out.

Aunt Sue finally let me out Monday morning for school. We didn’t speak. She acted as if nothing had happened, but I was seething again by then, determined to do something. I had seen stacks of papers — mostly bills — balanced on a spindly table in the downstairs hall. I waited until she left for work that night, then rifled through until I found the paperwork for the truck. There were loan documents and payment forms and an authorization letter from a lawyer who I assumed must be the guardian, or estate lawyer, or something.

I skipped the bus after school the next day and hiked into Craven, which was a regular Mayberry, with wide streets downtown, an old Belk department store, smelly diners, offices with striped awnings. The guardian’s office was wedged between two taller buildings, and had a redbrick facade, just like everything else in Craven. The ceilings were so low and there was so much dark wood paneling that it could have been the inside of a log cabin. I waited half an hour before the secretary walked me back to see the lawyer. His name was Mr. Trask, and he looked like a beaver. His black suit coat even stuck out in the back like a big beaver’s tail when he stood up to greet me.

I introduced myself, or started to.