Miss DeGrassi asked me to stay the night, but I could see how she’d regret it as quick as she sobered up, and I’d likely regret it sooner than that. After I left her place, I shoulda gone home, as much as I’d had to drink. I shoulda taken my own advice, and got the hell outta Powell.
Except for Wavy. She kept me there. More than that. She kept me tethered, not just to Powell, but to being alive. In the whole world, she was the only person who cared whether I lived or died. If there was anybody who remembered tonight, it was her.
When I pulled into the drive at the farmhouse, there was a light on in the kitchen. I hoped it wasn’t Val, because I didn’t need that kinda grief. I was doing the best I could for Wavy, and Val always treated me like garbage.
I walked through the door, not sure what I was gonna find, but there sat Wavy reading a book. On the table in front of her was a chocolate cake with candles stuck in it.
“You made me a cake,” I said.
She put a finger up to her lips, so I reckoned Val and Donal must be asleep. I didn’t even know what time it was. While I took off my coat and pulled out a chair to sit, Wavy went to get the box of matches off the stove.
On the way back to the table, she stopped at the chair I’d put my jacket over. Leaning down ’til her nose was almost touching the collar, she took a long whiff of it. I started to laugh, until I figured out what she was doing. Wavy wasn’t sniffing my coat because it smelled like me. It musta smelled like Miss DeGrassi.
“I been down to Liam’s party,” I said.
She nodded and climbed up in the chair across from me. After she lit the candles, I let them burn for a while, just to look at them reflected in Wavy’s eyes. When the wax started to run down to the cake I blew out the candles in one big go.
The knife was there to cut the cake, but neither of us reached for it.
“You wanna know what I wished for?”
“Won’t come true if you say,” she said in this husky voice.
“I don’t believe that. Lean across here and I’ll whisper it to you.”
She got up on her knees in the chair and put her hands on the table to lean across. I put my hands on either side of the cake and met her half way. I put my mouth up to her ear, like I was gonna whisper something, but all I did was blow a big puff of air into her hair like it was more candles. She ducked her head down against my chest and started laughing, so I kissed the only part of her I could reach: the top of her head.
“It already came true. You remembered my birthday,” I said. “And I got cake.”
6
KELLEN
July 1981
Wavy walked around the garage bay, looking at herself in the finish on the Barracuda. I picked the thing up cheap at an insurance auction and bought a new back end from a salvage yard down by Tulsa. For a good six months, Wavy had been watching me put it together in the evenings. I was all the time teasing her about how I was gonna paint it Moulin Rouge.
“That’s a factory color,” I’d say. Just to get her to roll her eyes, thinking about me driving a pink car. I ended up painting it black with metallic gray striping.
I’d planned to sell the car, but the way she looked at it once it was painted and ready to go, I wasn’t sure. She looked impressed.
“Wanna take it out?” I said.
She nodded and gave me that squinty look of hers that meant, “Let’s go fast.” She was like me that way, kind of a speed fiend, and the Cuda was built for it. We took it easy out around the lake, taking in the view, but the damn thing was champing at the bit. So I took it out to Highway 9 and opened it up a little.
Wavy leaned back in the seat, smiling, the wind blowing her hair around. I put my foot in the gas, kicked it up to about eighty. Then we came over a hill, damn near on top of a cop sitting on the shoulder. I braked hard, got it down to somewhere around sixty, and coasted past the cop.
I held my breath, but a mile on, the cop hadn’t come after us. I looked over at Wavy, who’d sat up to see why we slowed down.
“You tired?” I said.
She shook her head. She was a night owl.
“Feel like doing some drag racing?”
Hell yeah, she did. We ran the Cuda into Garringer and down to the flatlands where they drag on the weekends. It’s not legal, but the cops mostly look the other way, because it keeps the draggers off the main roads. And if you’re looking to sell a car like the Cuda, that’s where you find buyers.
The place was nothing but hard-packed dunes and old gravel pits. Not a tree to cut the wind and just ugly. When we pulled in, there were probably thirty cars, guys talking trash and checking out the competition. I parked and got out, went around to put up the hood. Let people know I was thinking about selling. Behind me, I heard some guy say to his buddies, “Look, it’s that big goddamn Indian.”
That was Billy, still wearing a letter jacket for football, when he’d been outta high school longer than I had.