“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.
I lit out of there, feeling like a spy.
I got back to the school just as the empty school buses pulled into the drive. That’s why Wavy gave me a funny look when I asked her what time school let out. She’d missed the bus in, but she coulda took the bus home. Except I’d said I was coming back for her. I didn’t like to say that and not follow through. Too many folks do you that way.
When Wavy came out, she had a pack of kids following her. She came down the sidewalk toward me, not looking right or left. I figured them kids must be hassling her, the way she looked. Little assholes.
“Hey, Wavy,” I said when she got to me. She climbed right up on the bike without any help, ready to get out of there. I put the bike in gear and roared away from them staring kids. I didn’t have to tell her to hang on, either. She grabbed my jacket tight and didn’t let go.
There wasn’t much food at the farmhouse, so I took us through the old Biplane Drive-Thru to pick up some burgers and fries. They’d be cold from riding in the saddlebags on the trip back, but they’d still be good to eat.
When we got to the house, Wavy looked downright scared as she pushed the door open and saw the kitchen. She let go of the doorknob and stepped back far enough to bump into me.
“Mama cleaned?” she whispered.
“No, I did it. I didn’t have anything else to do today and I figured you were busy at school. You know that used to be my job, doing dishes. It’s good work. Kinda lets you turn your brain off. My favorite thing is plates and bowls, just making circles in them.”
There I’d wanted to do something nice, and she looked like she was gonna cry. I put my hand on her shoulder, meaning to hug her, I guess, but she put her hands against my belly and shoved me away.