“I can give you a ride, okay? Since I made you miss the bus.”
She looked at me real serious and nodded.
You wouldn’t think someone as small as her could pick up a baby that size, but Wavy heaved him up on her hip. She was stronger than she looked.
The baby set to wailing when she carried him away, and he was still going at it from somewhere in the house when she came back to the kitchen. I waited for her to say something, but she walked right out the door. I was making her late to school.
I hadn’t thought at all about how her riding on the bike was gonna work, but I went at it the only way I could see. I put my hands around her waist and hoisted her up to the seat. Her back went all stiff and her eyes got wide, so I could tell I’d messed up. I let go of her like a hot potato, and she settled herself on the back of the bike.
“Hold on tight, okay?” I said, after I fired up the engine. She didn’t answer and she didn’t touch me. I felt like a clod, like I’d missed something important. “You ever rode on a bike before?”
I looked at her in the side view mirror. She frowned and shook her head. Figure that. Liam’s kid and she’d never been on a motorcycle. Most guys as crazy for bikes as him, they take their kids riding.
“We’re gonna go pretty fast, so you need to hold onto me. I don’t want you to fall off,” I said.
Wasn’t like she could put her arms all the way around me, but she got a grip on one side of my jacket, and held onto my belt with her other hand. Out on the highway, her skirt fluttered around us, so I reached back and tucked it between us. Doing it, my hand brushed against her knee on accident, and she pulled back from me. Her being so light made me nervous. Like having nothing on the back of the bike. I tapped the front brake to slide her closer to me, just to reassure myself she was there. Soon as I did, her hand loosened up where she was holding my jacket. For those couple seconds she wasn’t touching me, my heart stopped.
“Hold on tight. Don’t let go!” I yelled. She got a grip back on my belt and my jacket.
At the stoplight into town, we caught up to the bus and followed it to the school. I pulled the bike up on the front sidewalk and, as soon as I came to a stop, Wavy slid off the back. For a second, she teetered back and forth, trying to get her skirt untangled. I was worried she was about to tip over, but as I went to grab her, she rested her hand on my thigh to steady herself. Then she pushed off and ran up the sidewalk ahead of the kids coming off the bus. They all stared at me on my bike in the middle of the sidewalk.
“Hey, Wavy! What time?” I yelled.
She turned back and squinted at me.
“What time do I need to come pick you up?”
She held up three fingers. The pack of kids off the bus caught up to her. One of them knocked shoulders with her, looked to me like on purpose. Then she dropped her hand and shoved her way into the building. I rode away feeling like I’d delivered her up to the gates of Hell.
I never liked school, was always looking for excuses to stay away, but when I thought about the mess out at the farmhouse, I could see why Wavy wanted to go. All I was thinking as I rode back out there, was that I could make things a little better for her. In a stranger’s house, it was easy to see what needed doing. I went in there figuring I’d just wash the dishes, but then I couldn’t leave the baby crying in dirty pants. It’s not my favorite thing, but I can change a diaper. I got the kid cleaned up and then I boiled a pot of oatmeal, skimming off the bugs as they floated to the top. When it cooled, I stirred in some crystallized honey and fed the kid that. He seemed to like it fine. Liked me okay, too. Patting me and smiling big while I talked to him.
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.