Lone Star

by Paullina Simons

  “Like Terri?”

  “Not Terri. I think she’s rather fond of her daughter. And Terri works the hardest in that family. That’s why she doesn’t give a damn about the raccoons and dinner and Hannah’s homework. When you have to care desperately about bringing home the bacon, you’re hardly going to be bothered about who cooks it or what species eat it.”

  “Who do you mean, then? Mason and Blake? But you love Janice.”

  “There you go again, putting words in our mouths and feelings into our hearts. I didn’t say Janice. I don’t mean anybody in particular. I’m just saying. We thank you for not letting us down.”

  “Not letting you down how? By not dying?” Chloe was disappointed in herself. With her mother, and only with her mother (and maybe a little bit with Blake), she sometimes had trouble hiding her tortured heart.

  A composed Lang said nothing.

  For a few minutes, neither of them spoke.

  “Just stay safe, all right?” Lang said quietly. “As safe as you can.”

  “Mom, why do you want me to find you a strange boy?” Chloe whispered.

  “Not strange,” Lang said. “Just someone who might need a little help. Someone you think your father and I might like. We’re not adopting him, Chloe. We’re sponsoring him. What are you worried about?”

  “I’m not worried.”

  Lang got up. “In this one way I echo Flannery O’Connor,” she said. “For the last eighteen years, my avocation has been raising peacocks. This requires everything of the peacocks and very little of me. Time is always at hand. Especially now that the last surviving peacock is leaving.”

  The conversation was over. Lang smoothed out Chloe’s blanket and bent down to kiss her head. “How was the cemetery?”

  “Fine. Moody insisted on putting my flowers on Uncle Kenny’s grave.”

  Lang sighed as she took the railing to descend the steep attic stairs. “Why not? I do.”

  13

  Uncle Kenny from Kilkenny

  WHEN CHLOE WAS ELEVEN HER UNCLE KENNY DIED. HE was a wild one, lived small, died small. He was cremated and a portion of his ashes were interred in Fryeburg’s rural cemetery, while the rest was flown to Kilkenny to be buried in the family plot next to Lochlan. Chloe’s parents flew to Ireland for his burial. Chloe got excited. Then she found out she wasn’t going.

  They were gone a month.

  “Must have been some funeral,” she said when her parents returned, all flushed and refreshed, as if they’d been on a honeymoon. They showed her photos of Dublin and Limerick, of glens and castle ruins, of moors and churches and pubs with names like the Hazy Peacock and the Rusty Swan. They began inexplicably to refer to the time away as a “trip of a lifetime.”

  Chloe didn’t know what that meant, but she did internalize it.

  Seven years later no one spoke of that trip of a lifetime, or of Kenny, or Kilkenny, or glens, or moors. Most of the pictures of Ireland had been taken off the walls of their wood cabin and stored in a box in the shed her father had built for the specific purpose of storing boxes with photos of Ireland in it, and of other mementos. One black and white Castlecomer dell remained in a frame in the hall.

  A colossal vat of frightful things was stirred up by Kenny Devine’s vagrant life and subsequent (or consequent?) demise.

  The Chevy truck he crashed his speeding swerving rattletrap into belonged to Burt Haul.

  On the way home from work, Burt had stopped at Brucie’s Diner to pick up some meatloaf on Monday special. It was eight in the evening in July, not yet dark. It was warm, glorious, chirping.

  Burt survived because his truck, built like a Humvee, had been in second gear. The same could not be said of Kenny or his Dodge Charger. Eyewitnesses, unreliable but myriad, clocked his miles per hour at somewhere between seventy and a hundred and twenty. He had no chance.

  Burt lived, but barely. He suffered three broken vertebrae, a punctured lung, and five broken ribs. His kneecap, hip and femur were crushed almost beyond repair. It was upon visiting Burt in the convalescent facility that Moody first noted how blessed were those who could push around their own wheelchairs. Burt couldn’t.

  His livelihood depended on his truck and his able body. When he wasn’t driving the school bus, he was a handyman. After four months in recovery, he found himself on a disability pension, still unable to walk. Janice Haul got a job at the attendance office at Brownfield Elementary School, but it barely paid half the bills. Little by little Burt improved, but was never the same. He couldn’t sit behind the wheel of a bus anymore, his fused and compressed vertebrae barking so loud they required handfuls of Oxycontin to quieten, and how well could anyone drive a school bus numbed up on Oxy?

  Until Burt got well enough to return to work, he was replaced by a Brian Hansen, a recent Vermont transplant, and apparently an excellent driver.

  Jimmy Devine’s animosity toward his brother, whose reckless existence had set into motion the spinning wheels of fate, was so violent that it ate apart the bond with his own family. He blamed Moody for never reining Kenny in, for indulging him, spoiling him, coddling him, paying his tickets, his suspended license fees, his legal bills, bailing him out of jail, buying him new wheels, allowing him to live in her basement and to drink her liquor. “Not just a good man’s back, but a whole family has been shattered, all because you could never say no to your firstborn son,” was one of the accusations Jimmy hurled at his mother, way back when. Burt and Jimmy and their families had been close before the accident, then less so, and then hardly at all. Burt blamed Jimmy for his ruined life, for knowing that Kenny should’ve never been allowed behind the wheel and yet doing nothing. “How much more could I do?” Jimmy argued in his defense. “Kenny’s license had been permanently suspended!”

  And then, three years later, after another tragedy, Jimmy blamed not only Kenny for all the misfortune, but also Burt for not being man enough to get up every morning and drive the bus. It didn’t matter to Jimmy the pain Burt was in. Living three houses apart, the Hauls and the Devines stayed barely civil, even though Lang kept pointing out in feeble attempts to effect a truce between the men that Burt had done nothing wrong. “It’s not his fault he has a weak back, Jimmy.”

  “Nothing wrong,” Jimmy said, “except stroll out of Brucie’s Diner with his arms full of meatloaf at precisely and absolutely the worst moment. Nothing wrong except not go to work, and ruin everybody’s fucking life.”

  “He’s suffering too, Jimmy.”

  “That’s why I said everybody’s fucking life, Mother.”

  Chloe and Moody stood shoulder to shoulder near two graves in the small rural cemetery under the pines as tall and gray as emerald redwoods. Chloe placed all the flowers they had brought in front of a black granite tombstone that read “JAMES PATRICK DEVINE, JR. 1998-2001.”

  Moody made her put half of them on Kenny’s stupid grave.

  They stood with their heads bent. Moody held on to Chloe’s arm.

  “Do you come here with your mother?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “How often does she come?”

  “I don’t know.” The gravesite was beautifully tended, weeded, neatened, full of flowering azaleas, faded lilacs, knockabout roses. “Often, from the looks of it.”

  “Your dad?”

  “When Mom forces him.”

  Moody nodded. “You have to forgive Uncle Kenny,” she said. “It’s not his fault he was born with bad genes and couldn’t walk straight. Not everybody can make a life like your mom and dad, child. Not everybody can push his own wheelchair. Some aren’t so lucky.”

  “Yes. Like my brother.”

  “Yes. Like him. But he was lucky to be loved. That love is better than hate for my Kenny. No question he did wrong. But it wasn’t all his fault. Sometimes catastrophic things just happen. And your father doesn’t understand that.”

  Moody bent her head deeper. Chloe too.

  “He understands,” Chloe said. “But that’s not what happened here. A c
atastrophic thing didn’t just happen.”

  They stood.

  “What was the poem you used to recite to Jimmy? He knew it by heart. You and he were so cute with it. Do you remember?”

  “No.”

  “Something about Santa, and vampires. Come on. You do remember. Tell your grandmother. It’s a sin to lie to old people.”

  “I don’t remember, Moody.” Chloe ground her teeth. She didn’t tell, though she well remembered.

  I wonder if Santa Claus is real

  The Easter Bunny

  The Tooth Fairy too

  I wonder if ghosts really say boo

  I wonder if leprechauns collect pots of gold

  I wonder if vampires ever grow old.

  Little Jimmy, who used to yell YES for the first five and an emphatic NO to the last, had been conceived around the time of Uncle Kenny’s death. Her parents had been trying for little Jimmy all of Chloe’s life. For all she knew, she was supposed to be little Jimmy and they had been trying for nine years before she was born and for eleven after. In some ways her mother was very much a Chinese mother. Two decades of trying for that one highly valued masculine child. Jimmy lived for three very good years. Their little cabin in the woods was full of noise and tricycles and paint on the walls and mess everywhere, and Lang didn’t care, and Jimmy didn’t care. Jimmy came home at six o’clock sharp every night, punctual as Big Ben. Lang called the Fryeburg police station a dozen times a day. Jimmy, you won’t believe what your son just said, Jimmy, you’ll never guess what your son just did.

  When it was time for little Jimmy to go to nursery school, he was so excited to be taking the big boy school bus. He would jump with joy off the curb when he would see the blue bus pulling up to take him home. One early afternoon Brian Hansen’s wallet had fallen into the footwell. He noticed it when he was in the parking lot, about to pull up to the waiting kids. He bent down to retrieve it. He was driving so slowly. He thought he could take his eyes off the road for just a second. But Jimmy was little and his bones were greensticks. They were no match for a school bus, even a small one, even a slow one.

  Lang was at ShopRite buying fruit snacks and juice boxes. Big Jimmy was in a meeting about police logistics for the upcoming summer festival. Chloe was in ninth grade math, dreaming of a tuna sandwich she was about to eat for lunch.

  Had Uncle Kenny not broken Burt’s back, Burt would have been driving the blue bus as he had been driving it for thirteen years. Burt would have never taken his eyes off the road. But Kenny did break Burt’s back. And with Burt out of action, the town had hired an out-of-towner with “very good credentials” to drive over the little ones to and fro.

  Afterward, Burt didn’t care how bad his back was. Though big Jimmy said it was one fucking day too late, Burt stuck a syringe of cortisone into his thigh three times a week and got behind the wheel of the bus until the town gently retired him, because every time he went over a pothole, he cried out in such anguish that the little kids shrieked in terror. Fryeburg had to either repair the town’s potholes or golden-shake Burt’s hand. The second option was cheaper.

  On Jimmy’s tombstone: “THE LORD GIVETH AND THE LORD TAKETH AWAY.”

  Other repercussions: three years ago, Mason comforted Chloe by taking her hand one summer night and becoming her boyfriend.

  Still other repercussions: instead of Barcelona, Chloe was headed to an orphanage in Latvia. Damn Uncle Kenny to all hell.

  After it happened, Lang did not come out of her house for five months. Then she bought a sewing machine, learned how to stitch herself bright new clothes and staggered on. She bought a heat-gun and heat-cured paints and took up painting lifesize dolls, the height of a small girl, or perhaps a boy. She made fifty of them, and then sold them on consignment, immersing herself instead in gardening with Chloe. The money from the fifty dolls was still dribbling in. And now Lang was giving some of it to Chloe to go to Latvia to search for another lifesize boy.

  14

  The Meaning of Typos

  YOU HAD TO GIVE IT TO HER. LANG TRIED. BY HERSELF SHE took Chloe to apply for a passport. Turned out both parents had to be physically present to sign the application. Chloe, of course, knew why her mother would prefer her father not come, but said nothing.

  With Jimmy in tow, Lang quickly filled out the application form while Chloe, bored and hungry and anxious because her mother was anxious, tried to distract her father. The scene would’ve been funny if her mother wasn’t so stressed out. Her dad, bless him, was barely paying attention to the words Lang was writing down, but when it came time to sign, he moved Lang’s hand away from the paper so he could sign his name by the X at the bottom, and casually glanced over the document.

  “Mother,” he said, “why are you so careless? You’re as bad as the incompetents in the school records department. Look, you’ve misspelled her name.” He turned to the postal clerk. “Dave, get us another application. My wife here doesn’t know her own daughter’s name.”

  “Sure thing, chief.”

  “Thanks, buddy. Careful this time,” Jimmy told Lang. “Want me to do it?”

  “No, your handwriting is terrible. I’ll do it.”

  “At least I know how to spell.”

  “Who can tell? No one can read it.”

  He watched her.

  Lang gestured to Chloe, who once again tried to distract her father with idle chatter about the upcoming prom, graduation, her dress, a limo, a chaperone. Lang said her pen was running out of ink; could Jimmy go get her another?

  He went, but as soon as he returned, he peered over the top of her rounded shoulder.

  “Lang! You did it again. What’s the matter with you? I don’t know what’s wrong with your mother today, Chloe. Dave, sorry, I need one more application.”

  Lang sighed and straightened up from the counter. Chloe stepped away. She made eye contact with Dave and shook her head, as if to signal him to wait, but also to scram because all kinds of crap was about to go down inside the peaceful Fryeburg post office on a weekday afternoon.

  Lang placed her hand on her husband’s chest, on Chloe’s father, Jimmy Devine. “Jimmy,” she said mildly. “Wait.”

  He waited.

  “I didn’t misspell it, Jimmy,” Lang said. “Look.”

  She thrust Chloe’s birth certificate into his face. Jimmy stared, perplexed. Plain as noon, printed in black, with a raised seal from the state of Maine confirming the official nature of the words was “Divine.” Preceded by “Chloe Lin.”

  Jimmy understood nothing. “For eighteen years you knew the registrar’s office misspelled our kid’s name and you never told me?”

  “Oh well.” Lang patted him. “Nothing we can do about it now. Let’s sign and go.”

  “Nothing we can do about it?” he bellowed. “Of course there’s something we can do about it.”

  “Not in time for her to get her passport for Europe.”

  “She can’t have a passport with her name misspelled in it, Mother,” Jimmy said in his best no-arguments-will-be-entertained chief-of-police voice. “A passport is good for ten years. But a mistake like this is forever. No.”

  “Jimmy.”

  “No! I said we will fix it and we will fix it.”

  Lang did not raise her voice. “It’s not misspelled, Jimmy,” she said. “That’s what I told the lady to write.”

  “What lady?” He was dumbfounded.

  “The lady at the hospital who came to take the baby’s name for the birth certificate. I told her to write Divine.”

  “Well, the idiot clearly didn’t hear you correctly. She needs to be fired. Chloe is not going to have the wrong name on her passport because of a typo.”

  “It’s not a typo, Jimmy. I spelled it out for her. I told her to write D-I-V-I-N-E.”

  There was commotion at the post office. A man was taping a box shut, the plastic ripping off loudly. The metal door to the postmaster’s quarters slammed, a phone trilled, somebody laughed.

  Jimmy was mute
.

  “It’s not a typo,” Lang repeated. “I wanted her to be Chloe Divine.”

  “You made a mistake.”

  “I wrote Divine on purpose.”

  “But our name is Devine! With an E!”

  “I know that. But not her name.”

  Jimmy stammered. “What are you saying, woman? That you deliberately gave my daughter a different last name from her father?”

  “Same name. One letter different.”

  “That’s a different name!”

  “No. Just one different letter.”

  “A different name!”

  “Jimmy.”

  Jimmy was hyperventilating.

  Chloe hid her amusement. She knew her mother was being disingenuous, for no one knew the power of a letter or two better than Lang, who could have been Lin, which meant beautiful, or Liang, which meant good and excellent, or Lan, which meant orchid, but instead she was Lang, which meant sweet potato. Lang knew the difference between Devine and Divine very well, which is why she changed it in the first place, why she wrote it with an I, why she kept it from her husband for nearly eighteen years. She knew. Divine: altogether marvelous and lovely, celestial and glorious, of the gods, with the gods, exquisite, heavenly, limitless and great. Divine.

  15

  She Will Be Loved

  AT THE END OF JUNE, CHLOE WENT TO HER PROM. IT WAS held in the glass ballroom at the Grand Summit Hotel in Attitash, at the foot of the White Mountains. All the boys dashing, all the girls beautiful. Chloe tried not to judge through her mother’s eyes: who was on parade at a bordello? A few would’ve fit that description. Mackenzie O’Shea in particular. The trouble with Mackenzie was that she thought herself to be quite a tasty morsel. Chloe couldn’t figure out why Mackenzie annoyed her so much. Plenty of girls at the prom were dressed much sluttier.

  Mason did his best to match his cummerbund to Chloe’s funky pewter jewelry and silk silver dress, but he was more granite than metal. Hannah, of course, was a tall glass of water in a clingy mango dress, almost like a slip, with shoulder straps and a bare back, but Hannah had nothing to reveal under her dress except skin, no folds, no fat, no breasts, no sags, nothing unseemly, nothing out of proportion, nothing to make her self-conscious. Her dress was low-cut, but because she was so slim, she didn’t look slutty, she looked royal. Chloe, on the other hand, couldn’t wear anything low-cut for obvious reasons, and she couldn’t wear anything too high-necked because then she looked like a retiring female politician. She couldn’t wear an open-back dress because she required a full-back bra to contain what she normally contained under three or four layers of clothing. Summer was always a challenge. She opted for lifeguard bathing suits—red and two sizes too tight—that slammed anything that might bounce against her sternum. Unfortunately, bathing suits were not a dress option for the prom.