I was not the kind of girl to hate anyone, especially my mother, but I was having a bad summer. I had all these extra responsibilities, for starters. My mother had gotten a new job doing ad sales for a radio station in Lincoln, and she was working long hours, longer even with the commute. She did not need to work—my father’s drugstore was still doing okay then. But off she went every morning, lipstick, jacket, skirt, her hair done up nice in a little twist. Her heels would echo on the driveway in the quiet of the morning. I would wave goodbye from the front stoop and silently pray the car would not start, but it always did.
So I was stuck with taking care of Jenny, who had just turned six years old. From seven to seven, she was in my care, and I did not feel like being careful. It was not that I was wishing for danger. I just did not want the responsibility for someone else, especially not a whiny little baby, which Jenny was. She was just terrible when she was younger, or at least that was how I remembered her that summer. I had to walk her to the pool in my old red wagon, dragging her and all her toys. Otherwise she would fall and cry every five minutes, or lose a toy, or lag behind so far sometimes I would be a block away before I even knew she was gone. Sometimes we would leave the red wagon at home and I would give her a piggyback the entire way, and that was when we were closest. She sang made-up songs in my ear and I liked the feel of her hot breath on the back of my neck. Her tiny fingers tenderly clutching my neck. Then at the pool I had to watch her while she was swimming, her flopping around in her floaties. She would splash and laugh and flirt with everyone. I could not take my eyes off her for a second. She was my precious cargo, and secretly she gave me fresh hope for the future. Even then I knew my mother was so sour, and yet she had created this sweet, bubbly creature. From a pile of dirt grows beautiful wildflowers. Nobody knows where they come from; still, there they are. But if you had asked me that summer how I was doing, I would have moaned up to the heavens about how bored I was. Because all day long, all I did was watch Jenny.
And there were other things happening back at home that made life unpleasant. Dinner was always quiet now, except for the sound of Jenny clacking her silverware and chattering away about nothing in particular. My parents never joined me out back anymore to look at the stars on the summer nights. I began to forget which constellations were which without my dad reminding me as he stood behind me. I missed his hands squeezing my shoulders, the slim strands of hair near his knuckles glittering under the light of the bug zapper on the back porch. We could see so far off into the distance; we were only a quarter mile from where the farms started, where there was practically no light at all.
Instead my parents were inside snapping at each other. I could almost hear their jaws clicking from where I sat. I did not know what they were fighting about. I had an idea, but it was only that, and there was a haze around it, like the way the horizon looks after a daylong rainstorm: like the air and the earth will never dry up.
A month before school started my mother took a day off work and dragged Jenny and me around to a bunch of appointments. Jenny needed new gym shoes for school, I needed notebooks and a binder and some pens. We both had to see the dentist, one after the other. I did not want to go. I did not like the dentist.
His name was Howard Muttler and he was from Germany, and he had gigantic teeth that were so flat I was sure he filed them every night. He had a big head of blond hair, and he wore some sort of macho cologne and his shirts were always unbuttoned one button too many. He had married a local girl, Tracy Bottoms, after a whirlwind romance during her senior-year trip to Munich, followed by a long-distance courtship that had required Tracy to seek translation assistance regularly from the German teacher at the high school. Howard learned English when Tracy moved to Munich, and she had perfected her German. They lived there for a few years while he finished dental school, and then returned to our town to start his practice. Sometimes I wondered if he was really allowed to be a dentist. Were teeth the same in Germany? But there they were, with an office with his name on it two blocks down from the library. Tracy assisted him, and they would murmur to each other all day long half in German and half in English. I had heard that on Sundays they went to a special church in Lincoln, and I knew they went back to Germany for Christmas, which my mother always asked about.