What Comes After Page 7

  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 executrix, 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.

  Dear Dad,

  You would have been proud of me last night. I flattened the tires on a disgusting P of the P.

  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.
<
br />   “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 ste
el 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.”