Driving With Dead People (6 page)

When we turned down Julie’s road, I noticed she lived in the wealthy part of town. I fiddled with my backpack.

The outside of Julie’s house was beautiful: a modern one-story with beige stone on the outside. The entryway was large and trimmed in black, and when we walked in, there was an elegant living room with fancy couches and glass end tables. To the right was a kitchen that opened up into a large family room with a stone fireplace. I realized my family didn’t have as much as other families. I started feeling less confident.

Julie said I could put my suitcase in her room, so we headed downstairs to the basement, which was fully remodeled.

There was a large pool table and a sauna, which I had never heard of. It smelled like Granda’s cedar chest. Julie explained, “You sit in there with your clothes off and sweat.” I hoped we wouldn’t be doing that.

Julie took me into her room, which had been built especially for her and was separated from the rest of the basement by a brown paneled wall and a beige louvered door.

When we walked in, the first thing I noticed was a toilet sitting right by her dresser. It had a green fuzzy toilet seat cover, which matched her green bedspread and the “This Is Horse Country” rug lying on the floor beside it. There was a tall wooden bunk bed against the wall, and I hoped Julie would let me sleep on top.

I put my suitcase down by her bed, and that’s when it hit me—I was a bed wetter. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? I wet the bed
every single night
.

I hadn’t put this into the equation when Julie had asked me to spend the night, and Mom hadn’t mentioned it at all. I panicked, until I thought of the only solution; I would stay up all night and I would even sit on that toilet, out in the open, if I needed to. Now I would have to sleep on the bottom bunk so I could get up and pee.

Julie nudged my arm. “Let’s grab a snack.”

Her mom offered us a taco pizza she had ordered from the local Pizza Palace. I rarely had pizza from a restaurant, and who’d ever heard of a taco pizza? It turned out to be a regular pizza except instead of sauce it was covered in refried beans, chicken, cheese, lettuce, tomato, and tortilla chips. We sat down at the kitchen table and Joan opened bottles of Cokes for us. We didn’t have Cokes at my house.

Dave came in the back door and joined us. He was wearing tan pants, a white oxford cloth shirt, and a dark brown sweater vest. He looked like the dad from
Dennis the Menace
.

“You’ve grown a little since the barbecue,” he said, reaching for a piece of pizza. “You’re going to be tall like your dad,” he said. My dad wasn’t tall, and I didn’t want Dad in the conversation.

“I look like my great-aunt Lillian,” I countered, even though I’d never met her. But that’s what Mom always said.

We ate pizza and laughed about school. Dave asked questions about my family.

“How’s your grandma Mildred?” he asked. That was Granda’s formal name.

“She’s pretty good,” I said, “but she has to have surgery at the Allensburg Clinic for piles.” I didn’t know what piles were, but Dave nodded.

“And your mom?” he asked.

“My mom?” I wondered. Why would Dave care about my mom?

“We went to high school together,” Dave said.

“WHAT?” I said, louder than I meant to. It occurred to me quickly that Mom had made the biggest mistake of my life by not marrying Dave Kilner. I could have had a toilet in my bedroom. I could have owned a mortuary.

“Your mom and I were in school together,” he repeated.

“I didn’t know that,” I said. Now I was flustered. Even though she bought clothes and furniture at fancy stores in Cincinnati and drove a black Oldsmobile Cutlass, it was clear to me now that my mom had no taste whatsoever.

At that exact moment I knocked over my Coke and flooded my own plate with soda. I sat completely still, waiting for Dave to erupt in fury. Instead, he said, “Whoa, looks like you need another plate.” He stood up and walked it to the counter.

I was ashamed and worried. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention,” I said, tears stinging my eyes. Now they would never ask me back.

“This happens around here at least once a day,” Dave said. Tears fell anyway.

Joan leaned over, smiling, her hand patting the center of my back. “Monica, don’t worry about it. It’s no big deal.”

It was a big deal at my house. I once saw Dad knock Jamie off a stool with the back of his hand when he accidentally spilled milk on the table.

Dave placed a clean plate in front of me and walked to the family room to pick up the newspaper. I resisted the urge to wipe my runny nose on the cloth napkin in my lap. I hadn’t even wiped my mouth on it for fear of staining it.

“Are you okay?” Joan asked.

“Yes, definitely,” I said, sniffing, and Joan got up to join Dave in the family room. As soon as she walked away, I took a swipe at my nose with the napkin. I had to. Snot was really starting to drip.

Julie and I were finishing our pizza when I looked at her and quietly said, “We could have been sisters, you know. My mom almost married your dad.”

“What?” she said between bites.

“My mom and your dad went to school together. We could have been sisters,” I reiterated. Julie looked at me blankly. Clearly she hadn’t been paying attention.

Later that night we were in the basement playing The Dating Game when Dave came downstairs. I couldn’t imagine what he was still doing home.

“Are you having fun?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“I’m making popcorn if you girls want to come up in a minute.”

“Okay,” Julie answered.

Why was Dave hanging around?

We went upstairs for popcorn in our pajamas and then sat on the couch for a movie. Dave sat down too. I had a crush on him, but he was starting to get on my nerves.

Finally, Julie and I went downstairs to brush our teeth for bed. There was a deep white plastic sink down there beside a shower that sat right out in the open with just a thin blue curtain around it. That’s when I finally got the courage to ask about Sarah Keeler.

“Did you know that girl, Sarah, who was killed on her bike?” I asked. “She was at your dad’s funeral home.”

“Sure,” she said, toothpaste foaming around her mouth. “She died right out there,” Julie said, casually pointing her toothbrush toward the front of her house.

“What? Are you kidding me? She was killed by your house?”

“Yeah.” Julie tapped her toothbrush on the sink. “We used to play together. She lived right over there.” She pointed in the same direction. “Lowell, who lives above the mortuary, pronounced her dead. But Dad embalmed her.”

I couldn’t think of which questions to ask first. I started with, “Did you see it happen?”

“No.” Julie offered me a green terry cloth towel. I took it and wiped my mouth off.

“So you guys were friends?” I asked.

“I told you, she lived in the neighborhood.” Julie began combing her hair.

“Did she spend the night here?”

“No.”

“Did my dad film the accident?” I asked.

“What?”

“My dad takes home movies of accidents,” I explained. Julie gave a pretend shiver. I felt embarrassed to have a dad like that, but I needed facts.

“Why do you want to know about Sarah Keeler?” she wondered. No one had ever asked me that, because my obsession with Sarah Keeler was a secret. I thought up a lie.

“I met her once at a church picnic,” I said quickly. “Then I saw her picture in the paper and wondered what happened.”

“At St. Mary’s?” she asked.

“What?”

“The picnic, was it at St. Mary’s?” she asked again.

I nodded. Julie shrugged.

“Do you want to make bracelets?” she asked, grabbing a shoe box from under her bed.

I wanted to say,
No, I don’t want to make bracelets. I want to go out to the road, in the dark, and lie in the place where Sarah died. I want every detail. I want your dad to tell me what she looked like when he saw her. Did she look sad or scared or just dead? Were her eyes open or closed?

“Sure, let’s make bracelets,” I said, pulling out some colored yarn from the box. My stomach was flip-flopping all over the place.

I couldn’t sleep that night even though I was exhausted—because if I did, I’d wet the bed.

While Julie slept on the top bunk, I sat crouched on the bottom, humming to keep myself awake. I thought about exploring the basement, but it was too dark to do anything but stay where I was.

Besides, I started hearing scary creaking sounds coming from the Kilner’s basement stairs. I was afraid it might be Sarah’s ghost coming back to kick my ass for pretending to know her.

I imagined all the ghosts of all the people Dave had buried traipsing through the house, and prayed that Julie’s louvered door was strong enough to keep them out.

There weren’t windows in the basement, so I couldn’t tell when the sun was rising, allowing me to pee one last time and still get a little sleep.

The next morning Mom picked me up in her black Oldsmobile Cutlass wearing large Jackie O sunglasses. Dave and Joan came out to the car to chat with her. Julie and I stayed inside until Mom yelled that it was time to go.

Driving away from their house, Mom asked how it went.

“Really fun,” I said, “but Dave’s kind of weird. He hung around the whole time. He didn’t leave once. And he kept asking us questions,” I said, rolling my eyes.

“That’s the way it should be,” Mom said. “That’s the way dads are supposed to act. They stay home.” She turned onto Highway 64 leading to our house. “They like having families and want to spend time with them.”

My chest hurt. I looked at the cornfields barreling by.

We were the weird ones.

The following Saturday the phone rang and the woman on the other end told Mom she was dating my dad. Mom called Casanova at work.

“Get your butt home,” she barked into the phone.

“What?” he asked.

“I just got a call from your ‘girlfriend.’” Mom slammed down the receiver.

JoAnn, sensing things were about to blow, grabbed her single-shot twenty-two rifle out of the coat closet and headed out across the field to find Cousin Ben. When things got tense, they hiked back to the creek and shot cans off fences and chain-smoked Lucky Strikes.

Jamie wasn’t home; he was at practice. He was fourteen years old and a freshman track star. After practice he’d tie his long pole to the top of Mom’s Cutlass and bring it home so he could pole-vault over everything. I’d look out the kitchen window at Jamie vaulting over the back fence or an old tree lying out in the field. He catapulted his skinny body over anything higher than four feet. Girls were calling him all the time now.

Becky and I had spent the day building a rambling Barbie village under the baby grand piano, complete with beauty parlor and roads made out of masking tape. We somehow missed the urgency to clear out.

It took Dad under four minutes to make the eight-mile trip from Elk Grove to Galesburg. He was pronounced guilty by the speed at which he drove home to deny the “girlfriend.”

When Dad skidded into the driveway and we heard Mom yell, “That son of a bitch!” Becky and I jumped up and ran to the backyard, leaving Barbie and Skipper to fend for themselves.

We sat on the metal swing set listening to them fight. We didn’t swing or go down the slide or even look at each other. Buddy sat tucked under my grass-stained feet.

The fight escalated into Mom slamming out the door, jumping into her Cutlass, and squealing out of the driveway. Becky started crying.

Dad came out a few minutes later in just a pair of shorts and tennis shoes. He walked to his truck, grabbed a sledgehammer out of the back of it, and began attacking the neglected one-car garage that Mom had been harping on him to tear down. I guessed today was the day.

Boards and nails started flying, so Becky, Buddy, and I moved to the back fence. Obviously, he wanted to kill something, and we’d rather it be the garage than us. We sat in the grass watching that building collapse around Dad. Becky and I were picturing Mom’s car crashed up against a tree by now, or her deciding to drive away forever.

“She should have married Dave Kilner,” I told Becky.

“What are you talking about?” she snapped.

“Mom had a chance to marry Dave Kilner, but she married
that
.” With my hand I indicated the maniac on the lumber pile.

“Thanks a lot, Patricia,” I said to Mom, who wasn’t even there.

“You’re a weirdo,” Becky snapped, and tears started running down her face again. “Mom can’t help the way
he
is.”

“Maybe she shouldn’t have bothered with him in the first place,” I said.

“Maybe she shouldn’t have bothered with YOU in the first place,” she said.

“She would have done me a HUGE favor,” I countered. “I could’ve missed all of this.” I made another huge sweeping gesture with my hand.

“And she would have done me a huge favor too, because I wouldn’t have to put up with YOU,” she cried.

“Why are you attacking me?” I asked.

“Why are you attacking Mom?”

“You’re just mad because she left without you,” I snapped.

Becky pounced on me with all her ten-year-old strength. She thumped me in the chest with her fist and I yanked her ponytail. She knocked me onto the grass and I kicked her legs. She smacked my arm as I was trying to get up so I hit her as hard as I could in the back. She stopped, looked right at me, and yelled, “I HATE YOU!” She yelled it over and over again as she ran toward the house.

I started crying because it shocked me to hear her say she hated me, but I hated her too.

I hated all of us.

A half hour later Dad was standing on top of a pile of broken lumber, sweaty and panting, covered in dirt and sawdust. His thumb had been ripped on something and he kept flicking the blood off it.

He screamed my name. Oh shit. I ran to where he was hulking over the lumber pile.

“Grab those boards and carry them out to the field,” he hollered.

I stared at that lumber in disbelief. It would take me weeks to haul it to the back field, but I was in no position to argue. I started dragging boards, heavy and filled with splinters and nails, out to the field, where he was going to set “the whole damn thing on fire.” A weenie roast was probably out of the question.

In between trips I hustled Buddy into the house. I was afraid she’d get a splinter in her paw if she kept following me around, or that Dad might kick her in the side if she accidentally got in his way. He’d kicked her before.

I picked up a board, and a nail went clear through to the other side of my hand. I pulled out the nail, which was probably a mistake, because then it really started bleeding. I held it up to show the monster.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?” he asked. I stood there, staring him down. I was really pissed off now. In fact, I felt like knocking down a building myself, preferably with him inside.

Finally, realizing I wasn’t going to walk away, he took a used white hanky, crusty and wrinkled, out of his back pocket and tied it around my hand. It stopped the bleeding.

Then it was Becky’s turn.

Dad found a huge rat’s nest in the back of that garage. He filled a tall white plastic bucket with water, scooped up the nest—babies and all—with an enormous snow shovel and threw it into the bucket. He gave Becky a wooden yardstick and made her stand there and stir until they were all dead. She did it, tears pouring down her face, stirring and stirring. I could see shadows of all the little bodies swirling against the side of the plastic bucket.

Becky could not look at me the rest of the day. Mom didn’t come back until after dark.

The next morning we all ate bacon and eggs as if the garage were still standing.

Three days later, when the four of us kids got home from school, Fielding Brothers Home Furnishings had delivered a brand-new living room set, the one Mom had been coveting for more than two years.

There was peace (and new furniture) in Galesburg.

Summer came, and that meant long, warm nights where we could stay out and away from home as long as we wanted.

One night the Whitmores invited us to play a new game up at the cemetery. It was called Dark Side of the Moon, after Pink Floyd’s album.

During the game, we walked cautiously up the gravel path toward the pitch-black cemetery, and when we least expected it, Jamie or an older Whitmore would rise up behind a headstone with an old flowered bed sheet over his head and howl. We’d turn and run as fast as we could, but if you were too slow, and I always was, a sheet dropped over your head and you were captured. Prisoners lay flat out on top of someone’s grave until everyone was declared dead.

JoAnn refused to play because, as she put it, “I don’t like to be stalked.” Becky loved to play but insisted on bringing Mrs. Beasley. I played, but got so terrified every time I was captured that Jamie let me sit cross-legged behind the tombstone he was haunting instead of lying parallel to a buried person.

The only problem with playing in the graveyard was Alton Cotterman. His property butted up against the cemetery, and he used to sit in his green-and-white metal glider with a shotgun across his khaki-covered knees, ready to shoot any animal that dared step foot in his yard. During the day, shots could be heard on and off all summer long. All of us kids kept a close eye on Buddy.

He mostly shot cats, but we were positive he’d shoot a kid one of these days. I always picked out brightly colored T-shirts to wear so as not to be mistaken for a fur-bearing creature, thus improving my chances of survival. With Alton nearby, Dark Side of the Moon was a life or death situation.

One Saturday afternoon JoAnn saw Alton Cotterman walking up the lane, holding a yellow cat by its tail. It was still wiggling, but there was blood all over its side. When he got to the cemetery, he swung the cat over his head and banged it against a headstone until it was a mush of blood and fur. Then he tossed it over the fence and into the field. JoAnn ran and got Becky and me so that poor animal would have a decent funeral.

We were all in tears looking down at that cat, bones busted and skin split. Bullies chose the smallest and most silent. We were all at risk.

JoAnn brought over a shovel and we gingerly scooped the goopy, bloody mess with the torn ear into an old striped pillowcase and buried it under a locust tree. We cut peonies out of Etta Mae Shaw’s yard, and the Whitmore kids came, out of respect.

It wasn’t a classy Kilner and Sons funeral, but I did make small remembrance cards out of white envelopes cut in half. I drew a cat on the front and wrote the date he died on the back.

As we lowered the pillowcase into the ground, JoAnn recited a poem from our old nursery rhyme book that Granda had read to us many times. It seemed appropriate.

One day, while I was sitting on Mammaw’s front porch shelling peas from her garden, I heard this coming from the Zenith clock radio sitting in the window behind the screen: “WMCR is holding its annual Father of the Year contest. Write an essay about why your father is the number-one Father of the Year, mail it to our studio here at 120 South Orchard, Elk Grove, and the winner will be announced July twenty-fifth at three p.m.”

I knew where the radio station was; it was right next to Dad’s store. I decided to write an essay.

I wrote about how Dad tried to save his store from the fire, how he cooked steaks for us on Saturday nights and always provided money. When I was at Dad’s store the following week, I walked the essay over to the radio station and handed it to Eugene Fox, who was sitting behind the front desk.

It was my attempt to enter Dad’s fan club. If he were chosen, people would see that I thought he was a great guy too. It would also convince Dad that I saw what other people saw in him, and maybe things would change.

I knew from church that he had a soft side, and I knew from the Rotary Club barbecue that he liked to have fun, so it was possible he might include us someday.

Dad was not chosen on July twenty-fifth at three p.m. I figured whoever was choosing the winner either didn’t buy my story or my letter lacked the passion necessary to win a title as impressive as “Father of the Year.” Whatever the reason, I received a note thanking me for my submission, and life went on as before.