“Yes.”
“How did you make your father stop?”
“I don’t remember.”
“I think you do.”
“He wasn’t supposed to hurt Mommy.”
“That wasn’t your fault.”
David said nothing.
—Charter Observation Team – 309
1
“Read.”
“Oh, come on.”
Auntie Jo’s gaze fixed on me, her lips pursed tight over the nub of a cigarette dangling from her mouth. “Read.”
I rolled my eyes. “Kaitlyn Gargery Thatch. February 16, 1958 to August 8, 1980. Loving wife, mother, and sister. Can I go now?”
Auntie Jo narrowed her eyes and lit another cigarette. “Where exactly do you run off to?”
I snatched my comic book off the blanket. “Just over the hill, there’s a bench up there where I can read.”
“You can read here. Why not read aloud to your mother and me. I’m sure she’d like that.”
“I don’t think she’d give two shits about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”
She smacked the side of my head. “Language! Don’t think you’re getting so big I won’t put you over my knee.”
“Yes, ma’am. Sorry.”
Auntie Jo grunted and puffed at the new cigarette. She dropped the butt of the old one in the vase attached to Daddy’s gravestone. I made a mental note to fish it out later.
Two shits was my favorite new word—well, two new words. A kid transferred to Lincoln about a month before the school year let out, Duncan Bellino. His dad was a plant manager, and they moved here from Chicago. We called him Dunk. He smoked and said things like two shits. Dunk had the largest comic collection I had ever seen outside of a store, boxes of them. I had spent most of the summer digging through those boxes.
When word got around school about what happened at the grocery store, my popularity factor went through the roof and held steady for about two weeks before kids realized I was still the same kid they ignored before. After that, things returned pretty much to normal. Dunk stuck around, though. When he heard what happened, he shrugged it off, said stores in Chicago got robbed two, sometimes three times a day. You’d be lucky to get in and out without tripping over a robber, no big deal.
His dad had a gun on account of him being a former Army ranger. He kept it hidden in a shoe box on the top shelf of their closet. We had to drag a chair in from the kitchen just to get to it. The ammo was there, too. Dunk let me keep one of the bullets. He said if the robber ever came back for me, he’d let me borrow the gun so I could blast him in the face. With the gun in a shoe box at the top of his dad’s closet, I was fairly certain I wouldn’t be able to reach it in time. We had yet to work out the logistics. Logistics was my second favorite word.
“Have you seen my Walkman?”
Auntie Jo fished it out of her bag and handed it to me. I had used a good part of my savings buying the Walkman, but it was worth it. The device not only had a built-in radio, it also played cassettes. No antenna, either. It was much better than our old transistor radio.
I started up the hill.
“One hour!” she called out from behind me. “I start at four today, and Krendal said you can bus until eight when Carter gets in—we need the money!”
I waved over my shoulder.
She started coughing then, and I could still hear her as I reached the mausoleums. She had been coughing a lot lately.
The bench was empty. I figured it would be. I was a little early. Last time she didn’t get here until after four. I sat, put on my headphones, and turned on the Walkman.
Static.
I expected that, too. I lowered the volume.
Last year, I let Stella keep my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles number one. This year, not only did I bring her volume two but three Wonder Woman comics I borrowed from Dunk’s personal stash. At first, I thought it was weird that he owned every Wonder Woman, but he was quick to point out they were filled with half-naked women. I had since become a fan.
If Dunk knew I was about to share part of his prized comic collection with a girl, he’d kill me.
Twenty minutes passed.
Thirty.
I began to worry she wasn’t going to show, and then I spotted the white SUV coming up the access road followed closely by a second vehicle, also a white SUV of the same make and model. Both stopped about thirty feet from the bench.
I wiped the sweat off my palms on my jeans. The driver-side door opened and the older woman stepped out, smoothing her long, white coat. The sun was out today, and the temperature was hovering somewhere in the low eighties, hardly coat weather. I couldn’t help but think about the gun, not like the one Dunk’s dad had but something longer, like a rifle or a shotgun, hidden under that coat.
The backdoor of the SUV opened, and I expected Stella to get out, but instead a man with dark brown hair and sunglasses stepped out, also wearing a long white coat. Another man and a woman stepped out on the passenger side. Four more people got out of the second SUV, all adults, no sign of Stella. All of them in long, white coats. The driver of the first SUV, the woman I recognized from my other visits with Stella, approached and took Stella’s seat on the bench.
The static from my Walkman crackled at my ears, and I switched it off, pulling off the headphones. “Where’s Stella?”
The woman smiled. It was cold, the smile of a Cheshire Cat greeting a mouse moments before devouring the little creature, tail and all. She wore a smile of convenience, a mask. I didn’t want to peek behind her mask.
“Stella will not be joining us today.”
“Where is she?”
The woman crossed her legs. She didn’t look at me. She stared straight ahead, her eyes on the SUVs, on the others standing around them. “Ms. Nettleton is somewhere other than here. Where that might be is none of your concern.”
“Is she okay?”
I couldn’t help but think Stella had gotten hurt, been in some kind of terrible accident. Why else wouldn’t she come?
The woman’s long, white hair was pulled back in a ponytail, hanging down over the collar of her coat. Her fingernails were long and manicured, painted a white not unlike her coat. She folded her hands on her lap. “My name is Latrese Oliver. You may call me Ms. Oliver or even Mrs. Oliver. You are never to call me Latrese, and you never will. I am, and always will be, above your station in life. Regardless of whatever minor success you may one day achieve, even if you stumble into a major success at some point in your feeble little life, even if you find riches and stature, you will always be beneath me, inferior to me. Do you understand? Am I making myself clear to you? Nod if you understand.”
I nodded before I even realized I was doing it. I forced the motion to come to a stop, willed my head still.
“Good,” she muttered. “Not that I expect much of you. I think you may have found your peak as a busboy, picking up the filth and waste of others. Wiping the urine stains from the grimy porcelain tiles of the bathroom floor, scraping away the dried shit of strangers from a communal bowl, that is where you truly belong.”
“Where…where is Stella?” I wanted the words to sound forceful, tough even. They didn’t, though. They squeaked from my lips as if from a boy half my age, as if from the boy in the grocery nine months earlier as he wet his pants.