All the Roads That Lead From Home (9 page)

“So it
is,” said the Father.

“It’s
yours. Free.”

“That’s
most generous of you.” The Father’s face took on a look of worry as he watched
her from above.

“Better
get it inside before the weather changes,” she said.

“Miss—”
But Angie had gone around the corner by then, back to her apartment. She needed
to give Marta another walk after breakfast, get the bag of Kevin’s stuff to the
thrift shop and take whatever they’d give her in return, then gather up her own
things.

Then she’d
find a pay phone. The call she gave the police would bring him in. He’d know it
was her and one day, if he stopped hating her guts, he might realize that being
taken wasn’t the same as being bought.

She was a sullen child, a
little slow to catch on, and thus easy to make fun of—
Pinny
said
two
and two is five!
And that Miami’s the capital of Maine—
the nickname
a clever blend of “pinhead” and her real name, Penny. She was tall for her age
with light hair some called ash or “dirty” blonde, gray eyes that were green in
brighter light, and a clumsy gait because her feet turned in, giving her at
times another name—“Pinny pigeon-toes.”

She was
also an only child. Her mother stayed home and her father sold cars with a
flair that should have put him on the stage. Loud suits, loud voice, dropping
down to a whisper carefully breathed in the neat pink ear of a lovely young
woman needing a car for her new job, or for her life as a new mother, or
because she’d finally escaped her wretched marriage and was all on her own.

The
flirtation took its toll. Pinny’s mother—a snob who always said she’d married
down—accused and swore, and then one day announced that she’d had enough, she
was not put on this earth to tolerate the disgusting appetites of a fat,
balding husband or the glum stupidity of her only child, and off she went,
suitcase in hand, leaving Pinny and her father still at the dinner table, their
meatloaf greasy and cold.

After
that, meals were from a can, or Chinese food containers, or pizza boxes, or
when necessary, the drugstore where Pinny bought candy with the change her
father left on his dresser after having made his own dinner out on pretzels and
beer.

Some
talked of calling Child Protective Services. One teacher did, and a sallow
woman with dark circles below her eyes came to the house unannounced to find
Pinny doing laundry and sweeping floors, the father paying bills at the kitchen
table, and determined that the pair had formed a good, viable team in the
mother’s absence.

Pinny
didn’t mind housework. She didn’t mind cooking a fried egg sandwich now and
then. She didn’t mind her mother being gone, because her mother was often harsh
and critical—
No
,
no, stupid, a minotaur and a centaur are two
different things!—
and could really sink a cold finger into Pinny’s heart.
She didn’t mind the way her father’s breath smelled when he’d been at the bar,
or the jagged sobs he let out some evenings when the twilight was particularly
tender and soft.

In fact,
just about the only thing she minded was how people treated the fat girl.

The fat
girl had transferred from another high school in the middle of the year and
often arrived after the last bell. Some said it was because she stayed too long
at the breakfast table, and the bus was long gone by the time she waddled out
to find it. The truth was that she had a little brother to dress and feed, and
a barn to muck out, with her big rubber boots still on to prove it. She smelled
funny, like earth and sweat and something sweet—like hand soap she would later
say, a cheap scent of honey and lemon.

One thing
was sure—the fat girl knew how to make an entrance. She took her time crossing
the classroom to her seat by the window, looking at the faces turned her way as
if they were all her loving fans.

The fat
girl’s name was Eunice, and hearing it called out by the homeroom teacher made
the other students roar. A person couldn’t help the name she was given—like
Penny, for Penelope and her mother’s passion for all things ancient Greek—any
more than she could help smelling weird or being fat. Pinny was soon a quick
defender of the fat girl—
Oh, yeah? Well, you’re ugly, how about that?
—sometimes
with a raised fist though she had never actually hit anyone.

“You don’t
need to stick up for me,” the fat girl told Pinny one day. “Not that I don’t
appreciate it, but I got some ideas of my own on how to fix these losers.”

Not long
after that a boy opening his locker was met with a rotten egg smeared on
photographs of racing cars taped lovingly to the inside of the door. This boy
had been a principal teaser of the fat girl only days before, taunting her in
the lunchroom as she ate her two bologna sandwiches, one cheese sandwich, and
several cookies, calling her
Blimpo
and
Miss Piggy
. A pretty girl
who’d told the fat girl she smelled like a used Kotex found exactly that in her
locker the following morning.

After
school, the fat girl took a bus that drove sixteen winding miles through the
farmland of upstate New York to deposit her at an intersection of two country
roads. She walked along the one that bore east until its cracked pavement
turned to gravel and then to dirt, to arrive at her house, a two-story wooden
structure that must have been very beautiful about seventy-five years ago. The
porch wrapped around three sides, the peak had a lightning rod with a ball of
purple glass on top, and the windows were framed with shutters. The paint had
long since worn away, and the bare wood stood against the revolving seasons
like a tired, old face. She lived there with both of her parents and the baby
brother, just a year and a half old. The father had a herd of dairy cows whose
milk brought in some income, otherwise he worked for Tompkins County repairing roads. The mother sometimes waited tables at a bar six miles away and was
rumored to have a boyfriend over in Slaterville Springs, an ex-con named Lyal
who sometimes sold a hot stereo or a shotgun from the back of his mobile home.

One Friday
afternoon, Pinny rode the bus home with the fat girl. Their walk to the house was
colored with the green light of newly leafing trees.

“It’s nice
out here,” Pinny told the fat girl.

“It bites.
I’d rather live where you do.”

Pinny
lived in “the flats,” or downtown Dunston, near a creek that ran noisily in
summer and froze over in the winter.

“No, you
wouldn’t. The college kids hit the bars, then wander around singing and
shouting like a bunch of retards. It’s a pain,” said Pinny.

The fat
girl breathed loudly as she walked, her thick arms swung wide with the effort
of moving her forward, and her backpack thumped and rustled with the rhythm of
her stride.

The fat
girl’s mother was sitting on the porch with a pan and a plastic bag of green
beans. With a small knife she removed the end of each bean, threw it into the
yard, snapped the bean in two, and dropped the pieces in the pan at her feet.
She had the same yellow hair the fat girl had, but not as bright and shiny.

She looked
at Pinny.

“Who’s
this?” she asked.

“A friend
from school,” said the fat girl.

“Hello,
friend from school.”

Pinny
watched the fat girl’s mother work her beans.

“Go on in
and get something to eat if you want. There’s lemonade and Ding Dongs,” the fat
girl’s mother said.

The house
smelled of fried fish and sour milk. A television set was on in another room
playing what sounded like a game show. The fat girl dropped her backpack on the
kitchen floor, helped herself to the contents of the white cardboard box on the
counter, then went to the refrigerator and drank lemonade right from the
pitcher. Pinny put her backpack in the corner by the door they’d come in
through. In another corner was a playpen, and in the playpen the fat girl’s
little brother was moving a red plastic train back and forth on bright green
wheels. His yellow hair was cut so short it was a light fuzz on his head. There
was a pink Band-Aid stuck to his scalp that was black and sticky-looking along
its edge.

He looked
up and wailed.

“Stick it,
Zach,” the fat girl said. Zach kept up his wail. The mother called, “See to
him, Eunice, will you?”

The fat
girl lifted Zach from the pen. He turned to Pinny and watched her with huge
blue eyes.

“He’s
pretty,” said Pinny.

“Handsome,
you mean.”

Pinny
shrugged. Boys could be pretty just the way girls could. There was a boy in her
English class who was very pretty, small-boned and delicate. He was from India. His parents taught at the university. His skin was coffee-colored, and his hair was
black. Kids called him “faggot” and “homo,” which made no sense, because he
didn’t seem to like boys more than he liked girls. He didn’t seem to like
anyone.

The fat
girl returned Zach to the pen, and then showed Pinny her room. It was bigger
than Pinny’s with three tall windows so dirty the sunlight was dim. On a shelf
over the bed was a row of glass dolphins. The fat girl said she loved dolphins
because they were smart and helped people. Pinny’s mother liked dolphins, too,
and had had a small golden one on a bracelet that Pinny said she’d be wearing
herself right now if her mother hadn’t taken it with her.

“Where did
she go?” asked the fat girl.

“A
friend’s.”

“Why?”

“My dad
sort of has a thing for other women.”

“You hear
from her?”

“Sometimes.”

Pinny’s
mother called home once a week to update Pinny’s father on the progress she was
making with the injustice she’d suffered. Sometimes she wanted to talk to Pinny
and Pinny managed to listen and say little.
Fine
was her answer to every
question which made her mother say,
Well, I see you haven’t broadened your
horizons much in my absence
. Pinny’s mother was living in Connecticut with
her college roommate, also separated from her husband. She said they had great
times, ladies out on the town, but Pinny could tell her mother found it boring
and probably wanted to come home. Pinny’s father wasn’t asking her to anymore,
not the way he had the winter before, around the holidays, and Pinny’s mother
hinted that she might return before the end of the summer, if
things
improved
. Pinny didn’t know what things she referred to, and knew better
than to ask.

***

The days got long and
warm and school was as dull as toast. There was nothing to pay attention to and
nothing to get upset about.

Then the
fat girl fell in love. The boy was Carl Pratt, and Pinny saw nothing remarkable
about him, except that he was skinny and tall and threw a good softball in gym
class.

“You’re
nuts,” the fat girl said. “He’s totally hot. And I think he likes me.” Carl
Pratt looked at Pinny, not at the fat girl when they were together. Pinny had
gotten very curvy in the last year, and when Carl Pratt smiled, he was smiling
at Pinny and Pinny knew it, so she tried to discourage the fat girl’s passion
for Carl Pratt, saying he was a geek, he had greasy hair, he didn’t know how to
tie his own shoes. The proof of that were the gray laces that flopped by his
huge feet as he took himself at full tilt down the hall, his notebook pressed
flat against his hard thigh, and his pen balanced with the grace of a feather
behind his ear.

After
making eyes at Pinny for two whole weeks, Carl Pratt appeared at her locker,
put his hand firmly on her back and said, “You’re awfully sweet, you know
that?” Her response was a solid blow to his upper arm, which made him gaze down
at her with pure adoration before wandering away.

When the
fat girl realized that Carl Pratt actually liked Pinny, she was driven to
bitter weeping, and flung herself down on Pinny’s bed so hard the springs
creaked and the headboard slapped the wall. Her milk white arms raised above
her head in a gesture of defeat and she said, “I’m going to take a header off
the bridge.”

There were
several bridges in Dunston to choose from, all built across a deep section of
gorge. People committed suicide by jumping from them every year, usually
students from the Ivy League university when semester grades were posted.
Locals didn’t jump. They shot themselves, or were found hanging from a barn
beam, or on the floor with an empty bottle of sleeping pills.

“Bull,”
said Pinny. The fat girl looked at her with wet eyes and howled with misery. By
the time she stopped crying, the light had died in the spring sky and Pinny’s
father called up the stairs to ask what was for dinner.

Pinny
fried some hot dogs in a pan and heated a can of yellow corn. She put slices of
bread in the toaster and spread peanut butter on them. Her father and the fat
girl ate their food without a word. Then her father looked at the fat girl and
asked, “Who’s the fella?”

“What
fella?” asked Pinny.