Granddad knelt to wrestle the heavy bench grinder free from the other tools crowded under his worktable. He muttered curse words with every tug. My homeroom teacher, Ms. Heffler, had put the word involuntary on last week’s spelling assignment, and Granddad’s swearing was the first example that came to my mind. I didn’t write that down for my practice sentence, though. I wasn’t that dumb.
While Granddad set up the grinder, I opened the cardboard box of papers he’d told me to sort. We were making space. We called the little room carved into the hill below our house the garage, but only about half of Granddad’s truck would have fit inside. Mostly the garage was his workshop and a storage place for whatever he didn’t want in the house. The box of papers he’d given me was so full, it bulged at the sides. The cardboard was soft to the touch and smelled like rags left out in the rain.
Make three piles, he’d said. One for records from his contracting business, one for home stuff, and one for instruction manuals or anything else that didn’t fit the other two piles. I pulled out a handful of papers and started looking through them.
“Finish that fast,” Granddad said as he tightened bolts through the worktable to hold the grinder in place, “and I’ll teach you to use this. About time you worked with something other than hand tools.”
“What are you making?” I said. He had brought a sack of metal rods from the hardware store.
“Some disposable punches. For knocking out hinges and locks and the like.”
“What locks?”
“Never mind that. Get to it.”
I turned back to the papers. It wasn’t tough to sort them. Usually the first page of each bunch told me what pile the papers belonged to.
Then I found one lone page, stuck in the middle of a manual for a power wrench. A lined sheet of notebook paper, with a girl’s handwriting.
Moira Shaw
Ms. Cullen, Room 17
Native American Tribes of the Northwest
Mom?
I stared at the loops and slants of the letters. This had been hers. She had written it, touched the paper with her own hand.
Paragraphs in the same writing covered both sides. She’d gotten an A on the paper. If there had been more pages to it, they were missing. The top corner of the paper was torn, probably where a staple used to be.
I knew Ms. Cullen. She taught fifth grade at Bertha Landes Elementary. My school.
“Did Mom go to Landes?” I said.
“Eh?” Granddad looked up. “What’s that?”
“It’s Mom’s. Was Mom’s.” I showed him. He took the page from me. “Did she go to my school?”
“She did.” Granddad’s eye moved over the paper.
“You never said.”
He didn’t answer. Just held the page by his fingertips, like it would rip if he pressed any harder. Granddad had big hands, even for somebody as tall as he was, and I was suddenly worried he would decide to crumple the fragile page to dust.
“Was she at Hovick Middle School too?” I said quickly. “That’s where I’ll be going.”
“Next year. I’m aware.” Granddad set the homework sheet on the upper shelf with his router set.
“Because maybe some of the teachers remember her—”
“You’ve work to do.”
I knew better than to keep talking. I went back to the box, rummaging through the stack even faster than before, hoping to discover more of Mom’s stuff. Our house didn’t have anything of hers inside, not even a photo of Mom as a kid.
But I reached the bottom of the box without finding anything else of hers. The realization made a lump in my chest. I looked around the garage. Maybe there was another pile of old papers. Or books or toys or anything that might have been hers. All I saw was more of Granddad’s tools and a lot of paint and varnish cans.
“How come we don’t have any pictures?” I said. “Of Mom, or Grandma Fi? Or anybody?”
“Because I don’t want them around.”
“Why not?”
“Pictures are false. Better my haziest memory than the clearest photograph.” He hadn’t turned away from his task of putting a new wheel on the grinder.
Weird. But then a lot of things Granddad did were strange. Or scary. My friends from school didn’t like to come to our house. Only Davey Tolan was brave enough, and that’s because his home wasn’t much better.
Later, when Granddad went up the stone steps to the house to grab us coffee and a Coke, I stood on a stepladder to reach the upper shelf and Mom’s school paper. I folded the page into a square and slipped it into my back pocket.
When kids at school talked about their parents, I avoided the subject. If they didn’t get the hint or a teacher asked me a direct question, I just told them my mom and dad were dead and that usually shut them up fast. At least half of that answer was true, anyway. Maybe all of it.
Granddad wasn’t going to say any more. But Ms. Cullen or some of the other teachers might. They’d met her. Mom. I wanted to learn whatever they could tell me.
Anything would be more than I knew now.
In the warehouse, the whole derby squad was on the track, doing laps. Their trainer with the thick dark braid of hair stood in the center, shouting out the elapsed time from a stopwatch. Two minutes. Two-thirty. The skaters pushed harder, racing to achieve some goal unknown to me. The older teens skated in a line, with long fluid strides that ate up the track, weaving like a Chinese parade dragon around kids like Cyndra, who doggedly ground out their own laps in disorganized and gasping clumps.
Impossible to say who tripped first. One girl went down on the far side of the track, and then three and four, most of them just tapping the concrete with their kneepads before bouncing right back up.
Cyndra stayed down, cradling her arm. In an instant I was running the length of the hangar.
The trainer reached her first. Two members of the squad around Cyndra’s age hovered anxiously as the woman helped Cyndra stand and roll to the outside of the track.
“I’m sorry,” one of the girls kept saying.
“Not your fault, Jaycie,” the trainer said. “Take my stopwatch and call out when they hit five minutes.” The girls reluctantly skated back to the track. The woman held out her hand to Cyndra. “Let me see.”
Cyndra uncurled her arm. Her fingers were bright pink, the same color as her face, and scraped raw. “I’m fine,” she said. The reflexive answer of any kid embarrassed by sudden attention.
“Uh huh. Make a fist.” Cyndra did, carefully. “Good. Wiggle your fingers.”
“What happened?” I said.
“Somebody ran over it,” Cyn said. “It’s okay.” She used her other hand to quickly wipe her eyes.
“It is,” the trainer agreed, “though you need some antibiotic. C’mere.” She led us over to the bench, the two of them floating on wheels, me thudding behind. When the woman knelt to fish an equipment bag from under the bench, her black-coffee braid fell to one side, revealing her derby name stenciled in block white letters on the back of her ebony tank top: pain austen.
“What do we always say, Mortal Cyn?” she asked.
“Fall small,” Cyndra answered, giggling despite herself.