But purchasing a deodorant for the girl—this seemed more intrusive, somehow. Maybe not a good idea just yet.
Next, Miss Schine asked Dawn if she was “feeling sad” about anything and if so, did she want to talk about it; and Dawn said, with startling frankness, that yes, she did feel sad—“My father doesn’t live with us now and we don’t know when he will come home.”
Miss Schine did not know how to respond to this and could think only to say, “Really! That is—that is sad . . .”
“He got arrested for something he didn’t do—he didn’t do in the way they are saying. Because it was something Daddy had to do. And they don’t let him out when it’s supposed to be ‘innocent till proven guilty.’ But that’s a lie.”
Miss Schine was surprised that Dawn Dunphy spoke at such length, and with such clarity. It was the first time she’d heard Dawn utter even a complete sentence.
Very likely, the girl was not mildly retarded, as her other teachers were saying. Miss Schine had looked at Dawn Dunphy’s test scores and wondered if it was test-taking that was the problem. Less confident students were made anxious by tests and performed poorly, thus insuring that, next time, they would perform even more poorly.
Miss Schine was uncertain what to say. It did not surprise her that the daughter of a man who’d shot two men down in cold blood—in a public place—might yet perceive the father as somehow “innocent”; she understood blood-loyalty, family ties. Faith that is blind—the strongest faith.
She told Dawn that she had heard of some of this “trouble”—and thought it was a “very sad” situation. Maybe the second trial would “help clear things up . . .” Dawn should know, however, that there were several other students in the school with relatives who were incarcerated—the situation was not so uncommon in Farloe County.
But now Dawn glared up at Penelope Schine. She’d remained seated on the stairs, hugging her knees to her chest and gazing up at Miss Schine, and she spoke hotly now, and loudly: “People like that are criminals. They belong in prison. My Daddy isn’t like them. My Daddy Luther Dunphy is a soldier of God.”
SOON THEN she began to turn up after school. I would be in my homeroom preparing to leave, clearing my desk, and there she was stammering she’d forgotten something and she’d go to search through her desk seeming embarrassed and excited. She had trouble understanding some of her math homework so I would help her—she wasn’t so comfortable asking the math teacher for extra help. She had trouble “organizing her thoughts” for writing so I would help her—I was her teacher for eighth grade English and she was always silent in class, just sitting kind of tense and anxious and furrowing her forehead so I wanted to go to her and smooth her forehead with my fingers—I hate to see a child frowning so hard . . . She seemed to understand when I was speaking with her and she could do problems while I watched but—for some reason—she seemed to forget what she’d learned from one time to the next. But getting help for homework was just the pretext. The girl was lonely and she wanted to talk. This was around the time I gave her a hairbrush—just an inexpensive little pink plastic hairbrush from the drugstore. I’m sure she had one at home—there had to be at least one hairbrush in the Dunphy house!—but having this seemed to inspire her, so she began brushing her hair—(not when I was around; she’d just show up at school in the morning looking much, much better). I mulled over whether to give her one of those little stick deodorants—for girls—and finally I did this, and she was embarrassed, and muttered something like OK, and did not thank me; but I think she used this too, and she didn’t seem to smell so strongly as she had, or maybe I was getting used to her, and didn’t so much mind.
She brought me a dozen oatmeal cookies she said she and her aunt had baked—they were very homemade-looking cookies that crumbled easily but they were delicious!
After snow fell during one of our school days there was Dawn outside in the parking lot at my little Nissan and she’d brushed away the snow and ice from the windshield—from all the windows! It was a total surprise to me that she even knew which car in the lot was mine.