Grace (7 page)

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Authors: T. Greenwood

BOOK: Grace
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“And mine was the first one to sprout. The first one!” Gracy said, grinning as she speared a fish stick with her fork. “Mrs. Nelson says I have the best handwriting in the whole class. Do you know how to spell difficulty? It’s hard. D-I-F-F-I-C-U-L-T-Y. That’s funny! It’s
difficult
to spell
difficult
.”
Trevor’s father hadn’t spoken a dozen words to him since the fight at school. And Trevor was afraid to look him in the eye, so he concentrated on cleaning his plate. When he was finished, he quietly asked for more.
“Help yourself, honey,” his mom said.
He scooped another pile of green beans, like slimy pick-up sticks, onto his plate, and took the last fish stick from the greasy cookie sheet.
“I need you to come to Pop’s house with me this weekend,” his dad said, without looking up from his own plate.
Trevor felt sick to his stomach, but it wouldn’t do him any good to argue. He hated going to Pop’s house. He’d have stacked a thousand tires at the yard if it meant not having to go to Pop’s. If they were looking to punish him, this was how to do it.
“What for?” his mother asked. Her voice was back to normal now, and her face looked like a fist. “I thought we could go to the outlets in North Conway this weekend. Gracy’s grown out of all her summer clothes. Plus, I wanted to pick up some annuals at the nursery on the way back.”
His dad looked up at her, but kept chewing. It was a good long time before he finally swallowed, like he was chewing on the words he might say. “Maybe we should hold off until the good weather sticks. Last year we got a frost in the middle of May. Ruined all those flowers you planted.”
Sometimes, when they did this, Trevor could hear the warble and hiss of all the words that
weren’t
being said. Of all the ones stuck inside. They were like angry whispers, squashed down. Suffocated. It made his throat feel tight. Made him feel like he couldn’t breathe.
“What does Jude need that can’t wait until next weekend?” she said, and set her fork and knife down. Trevor knew this meant she wouldn’t eat any more until she got her way. And as much as he would love to ask for the half a pork chop, as likely as it was to wind up in the trash, he knew he shouldn’t even think about it.
“Theresa Bouchard’s been making some noise. He needs me to take some junk to the dump.”
“Somebody oughtta take that whole
shit box
to the dump,” she said softly, the word like a snake slithering out of its hiding place in the grass, and then there it was. Out in the wide open.
“Mumma, you cussed,” Gracy said, her mouth open wide, half-chewed green beans inside.
“El,” his dad said sternly.
His mother shook her head like she was just waking up from a dream. She reached for Gracy’s hand. “I’m sorry, honey. Mommy shouldn’t use bad words.” She smiled and looked down at her own plate, nodding. “Okay. It’s fine. We’ll go another weekend.”
And just like that, there was silence again. Only Trevor knew that the unspoken words were being choked, asphyxiated, that all those unsaid things were slowly dying.
C
rystal lay in the bathtub in the bathroom she shared with her little sister, Angie, and watched as milk began to leak from her nipples, floating across the water like liquid clouds. Her breasts were hot, buzzing, and so large they hardly seemed to belong to her anymore. Her stomach looked different now too, like a partially deflated balloon.
At the hospital, after they took the baby away, the doctor had offered to give her medicine to help dry her milk up, but she’d declined. She told him she couldn’t swallow pills and then almost laughed because that’s how this happened in the
first
place. But now as she rose out of the water into the misty air, her boobs felt like bowling balls, heavy and aching, pulling on every muscle in her shoulders and back. She hesitated and then tentatively pinched one of her nipples, watching as three distinct, almost violent streams of milk squirted out, like a mini showerhead. She gasped and pulled her hand away, but it kept on spraying. The doctor had warned her not to do this, not to “stimulate” her nipples; if she just left them alone, the milk would dry up on its own and everything would go back to normal.
Normal
. God, she couldn’t remember what normal was anymore. Was normal back when the biggest worries she had were writing her college essay, what to wear to school in the morning, who would take her to the prom? Was normal back when she had only daydreamed about Ty, her best friend Ty—all that awful wishing, wanting, waiting? Or maybe normal was later, when Ty finally loved her back and they walked down the halls at school, his arm slung over her shoulder—the taste of Big Red gum in his mouth when he kissed her. When her whole world felt anything
but
normal. What she did know was this: There was no going back to
that
normal. Not now.
Her work shirt was still on the bathroom floor where she’d left it. The wet circles on the chest were dry now, crusty and dark. She’d need to toss it in the laundry before her next shift. She didn’t want her mother to see it either; she didn’t want to see the red shame on her mother’s flushed face.
She’d gotten the job at Walgreens to save money for college. Her parents said they would cover her tuition, but she’d need to pay for her room and board. She kept the job after she got pregnant, because for a while she thought she might keep the baby. She’d gotten the job so she could support herself. Support both of them. But later, after everything fell apart, she kept the job because it was the only thing she had anymore that she could count on. She couldn’t count on Ty; that was for sure. She couldn’t count on her best girlfriend, Lena. And she couldn’t count on her parents, even though they insisted she always could. That was only true now that she’d given the baby up; if she’d kept her, she wasn’t sure she’d even have been able to count on a roof over her head.
The people at work didn’t judge her the way the kids at school did, the way her parents did. They didn’t care that she was pregnant. They didn’t care that
normally
she’d be training for the state track meet, or that she’d been third in her class until all this happened. They didn’t even know that she was supposed to go off to UVM in the fall, nor would they care that she was starting to think she might not even
go
to college anymore. They didn’t care about her old dreams or who she was before all this; as long as she showed up on time and her register balanced out at the end of her shift, she was golden.
Crystal liked the way Walgreens smelled: like lemons floating in bleach. She liked how organized it was and that you could pretty much get everything in the world you’d need to live on here, except maybe fresh fruits and vegetables. She liked the electronic doors, the air-conditioning, and the white linoleum floors. She liked that you could go from brunette to blond with stuff from one aisle and then find everything you’d need to kill yourself in another. There was power here. There was possibility.
She had known today was probably going to be a little weird. Last week she’d been pregnant, and now she wasn’t anymore. Just like that. They all knew she wasn’t going to keep the baby. That wouldn’t be a surprise, but still. She knew it was bound to be awkward. She hadn’t even been back to school yet. That would take her a while longer, she figured.
Thank God, Howard wasn’t there. Howard was the day manager on the weekends when she usually worked. Howard had a crush on her, and once, in Feminine Hygiene, he muttered something about helping her raise the baby. She’d acted like she didn’t hear him and rushed back to the counter, pretending she had a customer. Today when she’d walked through the doors, it was Deena who was up on a stepladder replacing one of the fluorescent bulbs. “Hi,” Deena had said, like everything was normal. Deena was no-nonsense. She wouldn’t have cared if Crystal had had a litter of puppies right before her shift; there was work that needed to be done. “Someone just dropped a twelve-pack of MGD in Beverages,” she said. “Mop’s already out there.” And then, stepping down off the ladder, she scowled. “You okay to mop?” And Crystal nodded.
Six hours later, Crystal’s breasts had hurt so badly she thought she might die. Even the cheap polyester of her work shirt pressing against them was almost unendurable. And then as she was ringing up some creep buying Fiddle Faddle, socks, and duct tape, she felt her entire chest go hot and wet. The guy’s bug eyes got buggier and he gawked at her, staring at her chest. When she looked down, she could see perfect circles spreading across each boob, like blood from a pair of bullet wounds.
“Shit,” she said and threw the guy’s change at him, ducking out behind the counter and running to the Baby Care aisle. She grabbed a box of nursing pads and made a dash for the restroom. She found Deena restocking an endcap of batteries. “I gotta put these on my tab,” Crystal said, holding up the box. Ashamed.
Deena looked confused at first and then, noticing the two wet blossoms at Crystal’s chest, nodded. “You can take one of my shirts from my locker,” she said.
Somehow she’d managed to make it through the rest of her shift, even when the lady, the one who was always stealing shit, asked her if she was having a boy or a girl. That just about did her in. But she’d just kept working, and soon it was time to go home.
On her way to clock out, she walked down the baby aisle again, and when she saw the package of two Winnie the Pooh pacifiers, she felt a tug in her chest, a quickening of her heart. She thought about the lady slipping barrettes, Scotch tape, bubble gum into her pocket. How bold she was. How ballsy. She glanced around to make sure Deena wasn’t coming and plucked the pacifier package off the rack and, hands trembling, shoved it into her pocket. But then as she waved good-bye and headed toward the door, she felt guilty and slipped a couple of bucks into the register.
Now she wrapped her wet hair in a towel, put on her sweats, and pulled the pacifiers out of the pocket of her dirty work shirt before chucking it in the laundry pile.
Downstairs, her parents and sister were watching a movie on TV, but she locked her door anyway and sat down on the edge of her bed.
Eeyore
. He was her favorite character when she was a kid. She even had a stuffed one from one of their trips to Disney World. She put her finger through the plastic loop, held the pacifier to her nose, and sniffed the strange chalky latex smell. Then, after she climbed under the covers and turned out the light, she closed her eyes and put the pacifier in her mouth.
K
urt walked.
In the middle of the night, when his legs started warming up for their symphony of pain, he had no choice but to move them. He’d found that the only way to quiet his limbs was to listen to them, to stand up and let them sing. In the winter, he just walked up and down the hallway that ran through their small house, the wooden floors creaking loudly even beneath his careful feet. On warmer nights, he walked in the woods behind the house, through the neighbor’s fields. Tonight, he walked down the driveway and out onto the dirt road that would lead him, if he walked long enough, into town.
It was dark and cold out, the ground still patchy with snow from the last big storm. He walked down the long, steep driveway, wondering if he should have worn gloves, a hat, and he turned to look back up at the small house, at its paper cut-out silhouette against the bright sky behind it.
He and Elsbeth had rented this house for six years before they were able to make an offer to Buzz Nolan, their landlord. The house was small, just a two-bedroom ranch with one bath, but it belonged to them. That had to be worth something. Even when they were still just tenants, Kurt had kept it up well, making most of the repairs himself. He’d replaced the loose floorboards on the front porch, installed new windows when the sills in the original ones rotted out. He’d patched the roof and re-tiled the bathroom; he’d even upgraded the kitchen countertops a few years back. He’d caulked and snaked and plumbed. He’d painted every inch of every wall.
They’d refinanced a few years ago when the house appraised at almost twice what they’d paid for it, cashing in on a chunk of equity. He’d paid off their debts, upgraded the computer system at the salvage yard, and splurged on a real wedding ring for Elsbeth, who’d been wearing a cheap 14K gold band since their wedding day. He’d never seen her as happy as the night he took her into town for dinner at Hunan East and gave it to her in its velvet case, like he was proposing for the first time. But not even a week later, it was as though it had always been on her finger, and the gratitude and joy it had brought seemed to evaporate. It shamed him now how much he spent. It shamed him that he’d mortgaged their future for that flimsy moment of happiness. Because now they were upside down on the house, and despite the state-of-the-art computer system, the website, the salvage yard was barely surviving. And on top of all that, they had to figure out what to do about Trevor and how to keep Pop from losing his house. Christ. Even if his legs weren’t like live wires, he doubted he’d be sleeping.
He walked along the road kicking at rocks, studying the ditch that ran parallel to the road. When he got to the bend where two white crosses loomed ominous and sad, he stopped. The crosses had weathered three winters. You think he’d be accustomed to them by now, grown numb to the makeshift memorial. But each spring when they emerged from the melting snow a little more weathered for the wear, they never failed to startle him. A drunk-driving accident; two teenagers had been killed on the way home from a party out at the place where the rivers meet. Two boys, brothers. When summer turned to fall, he’d been the one who finally removed the rotting teddy bears, the deflated balloons with their sad ribbons, and the notes with their illegible Magic Marker scribblings. He hadn’t known the boys or their family, but he still considered himself the unofficial caretaker of this roadside shrine.

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