Home > All the Ugly and Wonderful Things(9)

All the Ugly and Wonderful Things(9)
Author: Bryn Greenwood

Until Old Man Cutcheon took me on at the garage, I was a dishwasher at the truck stop. It’s not hard, kinda nice even. Mindless. Scrubbing and rinsing. A couple things were too far gone—a burned and rusted skillet, a bowl of milk so rancid I about gagged over it. I took those out to the trash barrel behind the barn.

It tore me up a little, seeing where Wavy had been trying to make things decent. There were clean baby bottles, and she musta been the one who scrubbed the bathtub to gray. I went over it with bleach and borax, got it damn near white. Took a good hour, down on my hands and knees, scrubbing until my arm got to hurting where they put the screws in.

For lunch, I scared up a can of tomato soup with some stale saltines. One bite for Donal, one bite for me. No worse than what I ate as a baby. Didn’t stunt my growth none.

By that point I’d been there almost four hours, and I hadn’t heard a peep out of Mrs. Quinn. It spooked me, so I went to her bedroom door and called her name.

“Leave me alone,” she said. The sheets on her bed were so dirty they’d turned yellow. I guess she musta got up at some point and took Wavy to enroll in school. Unless Liam or one of his girlfriends did it.

“Mrs. Quinn, are you hungry?” I said.

“Go away.”

Once I had the kitchen and the bathroom cleaned, and Donal was napping, I looked around the rest of the house. Wavy’s bedroom was up in the attic, squeezed into the roofline, with a long window at each end. The window over the front porch had a trellis under it. Just bare dead vines in the winter, but might could be honeysuckle come spring. Wavy hadn’t made her bed up, but the sheets looked clean and she had a homemade quilt on top. There was a set of shelves with some books and the kind of junk I used to collect when I was a kid. An old purple glass bottle, a cat skull, a rock with a hole in it, a hood ornament, a mannequin’s hand. Just stuff that calls out to you. Up in the joists, a couple nails had dresses hanging on them. I lifted one up, and under it was an undershirt and a pair of panties.

I lit out of there, feeling like a spy.

I got back to the school just as the empty school buses pulled into the drive. That’s why Wavy gave me a funny look when I asked her what time school let out. She’d missed the bus in, but she coulda took the bus home. Except I’d said I was coming back for her. I didn’t like to say that and not follow through. Too many folks do you that way.

When Wavy came out, she had a pack of kids following her. She came down the sidewalk toward me, not looking right or left. I figured them kids must be hassling her, the way she looked. Little assholes.

“Hey, Wavy,” I said when she got to me. She climbed right up on the bike without any help, ready to get out of there. I put the bike in gear and roared away from them staring kids. I didn’t have to tell her to hang on, either. She grabbed my jacket tight and didn’t let go.

There wasn’t much food at the farmhouse, so I took us through the old Biplane Drive-Thru to pick up some burgers and fries. They’d be cold from riding in the saddlebags on the trip back, but they’d still be good to eat.

When we got to the house, Wavy looked downright scared as she pushed the door open and saw the kitchen. She let go of the doorknob and stepped back far enough to bump into me.

“Mama cleaned?” she whispered.

“No, I did it. I didn’t have anything else to do today and I figured you were busy at school. You know that used to be my job, doing dishes. It’s good work. Kinda lets you turn your brain off. My favorite thing is plates and bowls, just making circles in them.”

There I’d wanted to do something nice, and she looked like she was gonna cry. I put my hand on her shoulder, meaning to hug her, I guess, but she put her hands against my belly and shoved me away.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

She shivered hard, all the way down her back, before she stepped inside. I wasn’t sure if she was mad, but she looked back at me, so I followed her.

“Silverware you have to take more time washing,” I said. “Because of how food gets stuck in the forks. Eggs especially are a pain in the ass once they get dried onto something.”

It was easy to talk to Wavy that way. She didn’t seem to care what I said, but her shoulders relaxed.

“Man, I’m hungry. I hope these burgers aren’t too cold.”

I made us up plates, a burger and fries on each one. She watched me do it and, when I put the plates down on the table, she got up in the chair across from me. I tucked in, wrestling with those little plastic packets of ketchup. She opened one, I figured for herself, but she squeezed it out on my plate. Then another one. The whole time I ate, she watched me, but didn’t so much as touch her food. After I finished, she picked up the plate in front of her and carried it down the hall to Mrs. Quinn’s room.

I fixed Wavy another plate, but when she came back she was toting Donal.

“Here, why don’t I hold him, while you eat your dinner?” I said.

She put the baby up on my lap, but she didn’t sit down. Instead, she went around the kitchen, one little hand running along the edge of the sink, the range, the front of the icebox, like she was testing how clean they were. When she came to the end of the countertop, she stepped behind me. I went to turn around, but then I realized she was checking me out, making sure she could trust me. My neck prickled up from her watching me.

“It hurts?” she said.

I rubbed down my hackles with the flat of my palm. Once my hair grew back out, you wouldn’t even be able to see the scar running up the back of my head. “Nah. I told you, I’m about as good as new. It wasn’t so bad, really.”

Besides the road rash going up my arm, I ended up with this scar like a centipede, the marks from the stitches coming off it like legs. She took another step to my left and looked at it.

“That one hurts a little. They had to operate on me.” I reached around Donal to hike my sleeve up and show her how long the scar was, just that urge to show off a good scar. The way she frowned, I wished I hadn’t.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I said. “I know better than to come up that road so fast. It’s lucky for me you were there. If I’d wrecked with nobody around, I mighta died.”

She shook her head. She wasn’t buying that.

 

 

6

 


MISS DEGRASSI

 


September–November 1977


Her first year teaching, Lisa DeGrassi had Wavonna Quinn in her third grade class. One of fourteen names on the roster. Lisa saw them all as possibilities.

Most of the kids’ parents came on the first day to meet the teacher, but Wavonna arrived alone and slipped into the desk nearest the door.

“Hi! I’m Miss DeGrassi. Are you in my class?”

The girl unzipped her backpack and handed Lisa a copy of her enrollment form. Wavonna Quinn, age eight, parents Valerie and Liam Quinn, a rural route address. The handwriting was hardly legible, and at the bottom of the form, where there was a place for parents to write comments—allergies, health restrictions—someone had scrawled two short lines. The first was “She won’t talk.” The second looked like “Don’t try to teach her.”

It unsettled Lisa. Were the Quinns backwoods antigovernment types? Opposed to the public school system, but legally required to send their child? Whatever her parents’ politics, Wavonna didn’t protest when Lisa moved her to a more central desk, and she eagerly filled out the math worksheet Lisa distributed after lunch.

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