Wavy
I never got any letter from the court, but there’d been a few weeks when I was moving around so much I didn’t know where I was gonna sleep, let alone where to tell my parole officer I was living. Then again, maybe it came and Beth threw it away.
Not knowing what was in that missing letter scared the hell outta me, because I couldn’t afford to go getting my hopes up. Whatever was in it, I had two choices. I either had to throw the letter back in the Dumpster and go to work, or I had to go upstairs and pack my stuff. There wasn’t no middle ground.
19
AMY
I hadn’t planned to go home for Labor Day, until Mom told me Wavy was coming.
“That’s what her letter said. The first one I’ve had from her in months,” Mom said.
Wavy hadn’t written to me since May, either, and now that she was twenty-one, I’d started to wonder if we would ever see her again. Hearing that she intended to visit was a relief, until I considered that she might be planning a showdown with my mother. The question was whether I wanted to witness it.
Mom threw the same Labor Day party every year: a Sunday lunch of daiquiris and burgers on the back patio with a few of her book club friends. Wavy didn’t show for lunch, and by four o’clock, everyone else had gone home. Mom and I were in the living room, when Wavy walked in the front door, carrying a couple of manila envelopes. She looked weary.
“You’re too late for lunch, but I’m glad you came!” Mom said.
I didn’t know what to say. Sorry I was an unwitting accomplice to my mother’s betrayal?
“Did you come down by yourself or did you bring Renee?” I was hoping for somebody else to be a buffer between Wavy and Mom.
“Meeting her boyfriend’s parents,” Wavy said.
“Oh, so she’s getting serious with a new boyfriend?” Mom said.
We managed small talk for twenty or thirty minutes, but just as I started to relax, the doorbell rang. Wavy glanced at her watch and, for a few seconds, weariness transformed into grief. Then she stood up and went to answer the door.
“What in the world?” Mom said it like she expected a pleasant surprise. When she and I got to the door, Wavy was signing something on a clipboard held by a skinny guy in a baseball cap. Behind him, a flatbed truck stood parked at the curb.
“Did you have car trouble?” I said.
“Or did you finally decide to sell that old motorcycle?” Mom’s look of triumph was wasted on Wavy, who was already backtracking through the house to open the garage door. The motorcycle stood in the corner with a bed sheet thrown over it to keep off the dust, in between visits from the mechanic.
As Wavy pulled the sheet away, the envelopes slipped out from under her arm. I bent to pick them up and found one addressed to my mother and one addressed to Kellen. His contained something small and square. A ring box. I held them out to her, but she had her hands over her eyes.
“You son of a bitch!” my mother screamed from the front yard. “You just broke the conditions of your parole! I’ll see you back in jail!”
Wavy grabbed the envelopes out of my hand and we both ran out of the garage.
Kellen stood out in the street next to an old dented pickup truck. He looked terrified, and who could blame him, with my mother shouting like that? I ran toward Mom, and I expected Wavy to go to Kellen, but she came after me.
We caught up with Mom on the front porch, as she was opening the storm door, probably going inside to call the police. Wavy reached past her and slammed the door closed.
“You lied to the parole board and you lied to me,” Wavy said through clenched teeth. She looked both angry and like she might cry.
“I was only trying—”
Before Mom could explain herself, Wavy flattened one of the manila envelopes against Mom’s chest with her open palm. “This is from the judge, to change Kellen’s parole.”
Kellen squinted up at the porch, at the three of us watching him. It dawned on me that he didn’t know why he was there. He was risking going back to jail on nothing more than Wavy’s word. He didn’t know it was the happiest day of his life.
I understood then why the reunion was happening there instead of someplace else. Not to throw it in my mother’s face, but because Mom’s house was the place where Wavy had drawn a line. The day she stood in our driveway and screamed, “Mine!” she wasn’t talking about the motorcycle.