Steering Toward Normal

by Rebecca Petruck

  Diggy flipped some more, thinking suddenly of Gs. When he found Graf, it was like there had been some mistake. Graf was a scrawny teen and looked a little afraid, like the photographer had caught him off guard, even though it was one of those posed school portraits.

  They had all known one another—Pop, Diggy’s mom, Mrs. Graf, and Wayne’s dad. They had all been in the same school when they were young, and who knew what they had been like then? The photos were like pictures taken of other people from another town, from another life. But they weren’t. They were photos of people he knew.

  But they weren’t.

  As well as he knew Pop, Diggy didn’t know this Pop, the one in the pictures.

  “We can find her,” Wayne said.

  “What?”

  Wayne flipped slowly between two pages. On one, Mrs. Graf kicked leaves at the camera. On the other, Diggy’s cheerleading mom did a high kick.

  “We can find her,” Wayne repeated. “Your mom.”

  Diggy blinked at him.

  Then he pushed all the books to the floor.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Wayne protested. “You’ll mess them up!”

  “You all right over there?” Mrs. Schafer called from her desk.

  “You will not look for my mom,” Diggy said.

  “We will,” Wayne said. “Just think. If she came back—”

  “She hasn’t come back!” Diggy hissed. “I am exactly—literally, exactly—where she left me. Have been for thirteen years.”

  “But she doesn’t know how much we—”

  “Hey, what’s going on?” They heard the librarian coming closer.

  “How much we what?” Diggy whispered. “There’s no we.”

  Diggy picked up the books and was shoving them at the empty space on the shelf when Mrs. Schafer arrived. “You two okay?”

  Diggy could barely nod. He was sure he looked the way he felt, that he could blow any second.

  Wayne sat at the table, a lump, not even staring at the wall, just … staring.

  “If either of you would like to talk,” Mrs. Schafer said quietly, “I knew your moms. Ann, of course, but, Diggy, I had some classes with your mom, too.”

  Diggy couldn’t stand it. “I’ve got to get the activities bus.”

  He ran out of there like a wolf was on his tail.

  The bus wasn’t anywhere near arriving, but Diggy opted to wait outside. The weather suited his mood. The wind had kicked up. Clouds buzzed across the sun, casting fast-moving stretches of shadow that could pass for swarms of locusts. Every now and then a sudden blaze of light broke through as if making a desperate last grab at fall. Winter had poked around for a while but now was tearing its way in.

  The steers would be spooked, and Diggy wouldn’t be there for them for another hour plus. He told himself it was good for them—the weather was nothing compared to the show ring. The entire fair was loud. The constant noise in the cattle barn, the herds of people walking through all day, the bustle of two hundred competitors prepping as many animals—blowers, clippers, and sprays in perpetual use. And that was before they got to the show ring. The coliseum was like an echo chamber, with every sound magnified to nearly unintelligible. Calves not trained to be used to the distractions tended to rodeo. Heck, even calves with experienced exhibitors sometimes rodeoed. Loud had a different meaning in the coliseum.

  He could use that loudness now.

  Diggy was ticked and got more ticked the more he thought of Wayne and those stupid yearbooks.

  He should have known. Wayne had asked Diggy about his mom that time. And after Graf brought over that picture of Wayne and his mom, Wayne had been weirder than usual. Still. What made the kid think it was okay to get in the middle of Diggy’s life? Was Wayne so crazy he really believed they could find Diggy’s mom and be together like some picture-perfect family? If that was even a little bit possible, Pop would have made it happen years ago. But he hadn’t, and it wasn’t. You don’t ask a woman who left you on a doorstep and drove off on a tractor to be your mom.

  When the bus finally arrived, Diggy sat as far from Wayne as possible and counted the minutes until he could be with Joker again. The steer always calmed him down, and Diggy needed all the help he could get today.

  Wayne let Diggy go to the barn on his own, for which Diggy was grateful—for about five seconds, until he realized the guy was probably searching the house for Pop’s old yearbooks.

  Joker and Fang bawled at him as soon as he walked in the door. “I know, I know. It’s freaky out there.” The moon was already out and bright, so all that flashing light from the clouds passing over so fast was even creepier than in the daytime.

  Diggy scratched the steers’ rumps in greeting and brushed them while telling them about his bad day. Joker listened for a while, then pooped, which Diggy took as agreement that his day had, in fact, been crappy. The steer kept looking at the barn door to make sure the wind and crazy light stayed outside where it belonged, but he was otherwise stoic.

  Fang, however, crowded Diggy so much that, at one point, he pinched Diggy between the two steers. Diggy had to thump him hard to get him to back off.

  Tied up, he bawled so much, Diggy left Joker to tend to Fang. “You can’t be a baby in the ring, buddy.” Diggy combed and coached, “You’re still little, so it’s okay, but you’re going to have to toughen up.”

  Like he was one to talk. A few yearbooks, and look what happened. A part of him was mad that Wayne was going to get his hands on Pop’s yearbooks. They should be Diggy’s. He should have thought of them first. Pop should have offered them first. Diggy had barely anything from his mom, just those three things in that box he used to hide in the tree, a box he didn’t even know where to find anymore. Had Pop never thought that Diggy would be curious? Or had Diggy been so good at not being curious?

  To distract himself, he measured Fang’s hip height. The calf was little, probably a good twenty-five pounds behind Joker. Not the end of the world, but Wayne would have to work to get the calf’s weight up a bit. Joker was right on schedule to hit eight hundred pounds by April.

  Diggy finally had both calves pretty well settled when Wayne slammed in. “I found them.”

  DURING THE WEEK LEADING UP TO CHRISTMAS BREAK, DIGGY SPENT ALL THE time he could stand in the freezing barn. It helped distract him from the yearbooks. He didn’t want them; Wayne could do whatever he wanted.

  Diggy stepped up Joker’s setup training, using the show stick to press just above the front of the hooves and move the foot back or to pull on the dewclaw and move the foot forward. In the show ring, when the steers lined up side by side, Joker’s feet would be set at all four corners under him, bearing his weight evenly. At that view, the judge looked at the front and rear. For the side view, when the cattle lined up head to tail, the feet were set staggered to give the judge a sense of depth and thickness. Diggy also used the stick to correct the topline, sometimes putting pressure on the navel or flank to raise the top and other times pressing on the rump or loin to bring it down.

  Proper setups were only a few of the thousand things he’d have to do and remember on show day. He had to know which hand to use to hold the halter, where to hold the halter, when to switch hands, when to use the show stick, when to use the Scotch comb, which way to put the comb in his pocket so he wouldn’t injure anyone with it. Diggy had done it all before, but this year was different. He planned to win.

  Each day, Joker put up with Diggy’s instruction a lot longer than any of his other steers had. But when Joker was done, he was done. He turned his back on Diggy and kept turning when Diggy tried to get back to the calf’s head. When Diggy finally put the show stick away, Joker permitted himself to be washed, blown out, and brushed.

  There was more homework than ever. Final exams were both boring and horrible. Home was quiet—a loud quiet.

  By winter break, Diggy was ready for a break. His first morning of freedom, he wanted to sleep in but woke well before dawn. It was like he hadn’t had tim
e to think before, and now all the thoughts that had been lurking scuttled back and forth between his ears.

  He tried to go back to sleep and tossed and turned for what felt like an hour, though the clock showed only two minutes had passed. He grabbed his steer-tending bundle of clothes and tiptoed downstairs.

  At the back door, he pulled on the fleece-lined flannel shirt, sweatshirt, and down-filled coat. He held his breath and stepped outside.

  If it was possible to step into a block of ice, it would feel like this. The cold was a shock that temporarily froze him in place. He concentrated on his breaths. His body made the adjustment from warm house to frozen outside.

  A picture popped into his head, that photo of Wayne and his mom. Ever since Thanksgiving, out of nowhere, he’d see their faces again. Then his brain tricked him, replacing Wayne’s face with his. Why did Wayne want to find Diggy’s mom when he had had one of the best moms in town?

  Joker mooed. Diggy pretended it was the steer asking, “You coming or what?”

  Diggy went through the routine of feeding and walking and brushing Joker. He worked without turning on any lights, relying instead on the glow from the tall safety light across the yard. His muscles loosened despite the cold. He attempted to form rings out of the clouds of his breath. Joker watched and chewed cud. Diggy laughed. Joker could always be counted on to play the straight man.

  Except that he couldn’t. Joker would be sold. For steak.

  Diggy was startled every time he remembered where Joker would end up. Though he had gone through it before, that walk to the packer’s truck was hard every time. It was simply self-preservation to go for days without really thinking about the steer’s ultimate role.

  Diggy watched the ghostly swirls of his breath.

  It was barely dawn when Pop found him in the barn.

  Pop greeted Joker first, giving his rump a good scratch. “You’re up early.”

  Diggy was so used to talking to Joker himself, it took him a moment to realize that Pop wasn’t addressing the steer.

  Diggy shrugged.

  Pop waited.

  The dawn light, shaded orange, added enough color to Pop’s hair that it should have looked silly. It didn’t. As far back as Diggy could remember, Pop had looked as he did now: orange hair, square jaw, tall, strong, face scuffed by weather. One day he would be old. It was as impossible to imagine as Pop at thirteen, like him.

  His head fizzed. If he were alone, he would have put his head between his knees. But Pop had already walked to Diggy’s side.

  He held the back of his hand to Diggy’s forehead. “You feeling okay?”

  Diggy pulled away. Feeling foreheads was the kind of thing moms did, but Pop had been stuck doing it all this time.

  Because Diggy’s mom had never come back.

  And Wayne wanted to find her.

  “I wanted to talk to you about something,” Pop said.

  Diggy’s heartbeat jumped about ten seconds ahead of itself.

  “We may not have done much the last few Christmases, but we’ve marked it in our way. I thought we should ask Wayne what he’d be comfortable with this first year without his mom, but I don’t want to be unfair to you.”

  Diggy hoped his face was blank, because he could feel Pop watching him. Give up Christmas? Was that what Pop was asking?

  When Diggy was little, Pop had put up a tree each year and stocked it with presents from Santa. The tenth Christmas, Diggy had changed things. At the tree lot, he saw all those cut trees lined up, the green so dark and strong it was nearly black. Their scent was as sharp as the winter air itself. He thought of where they had come from, and it was a postcard of perfectly formed pines poking up from a white hillside. Then it was like a gray slurry washed over the image, and he was left with piles of dry brown trees no one had bought, needles pooled underneath in wasted protest.

  Though Pop had suggested a fake tree, Diggy wasn’t interested anymore. Instead, he and Pop had driven into the city Christmas morning, found an open restaurant for lunch, and went to a matinee. There were still a few presents to exchange, but mostly they tried to make each other laugh with them. Diggy’s longtime favorite was the T-shirt that read I support recycling. I wore this yesterday.

  “I thought we might take flowers to her grave,” Pop said.

  Grave was one of those words that blacked out everything around it.

  “And we’ve got to figure out what to do about Harold,” Pop said. He hugged an arm around Diggy. “We’ll still do Christmas.”

  It was weird how Pop could make Diggy feel bad but then make him feel better at the same time, just by being there and trying to think ahead about stuff like this.

  Then Diggy pulled away. Pop was trying to think ahead about stuff like this for Wayne. Meanwhile, Wayne had those yearbooks with pictures of Diggy’s mom. Yearbooks that had been in the house Diggy’s entire life.

  Pop squinted at him. “We can talk.”

  Wayne stamped into the barn. “I swear it gets colder out here than it does in town.” He rubbed his gloved hands over his cheeks, then flapped his arms around.

  “You’ll spook the steers,” Diggy grunted.

  Pop turned from Diggy and let his attention focus on Wayne.

  Wayne frowned, suspicious. “What were you talking about?”

  “Christmas,” Pop replied.

  Wayne grabbed a brush and started working it through Fang’s hair. The calf shuffled his feet and snorted.

  Pop soothed the animal, though Wayne continued to brush too forcefully.

  “How do you feel about calling your dad?”

  Wayne froze, though Diggy wondered if it was the prospect of calling Graf or because he had gotten used to thinking of Pop as his dad. “He hasn’t called much lately.”

  “I think he’s embarrassed,” Pop said. “But he told me he’s been working the steps and will have a new thirty-day chip from AA soon.”

  Wayne slanted a glance at Diggy, but Diggy didn’t have any energy for him. His brain had gotten hung up on Mrs. Graf’s grave, her under there in the frozen ground. It had been four months since she died. How could that seem so short and so long at the same time?

  Pop sighed. “Your grandparents have been calling.”

  “They have?”

  “I wanted you to have time to think about what you want to do before you speak with them.”

  “We used to go there on Christmas Eve.” Wayne brushed in short, quick strokes. “I don’t think they’ll let Dad come without Mom.”

  “Is there something you did with your mom and dad that we can do together?” Pop asked.

  Wayne was bent too close to the steer, like he was trying to see every hair he worked over. He hadn’t pulled his hat on straight. Part of it was folded under in back, and sleep-twisted blond hair poked out, looking like the end of a calf’s tail.

  “Me and Mom went to church,” Wayne said. “Really late on Christmas Eve. We liked all the candles.” His voice barely covered the sound of the brush whisking across the calf’s back. “Then we’d go out by the old bridge and search for Santa.”

  Wayne darted a glance at Diggy, but Diggy remained silent. His body popped all over with goose bumps.

  “Dad stayed home, said we were crazy, but I knew it was to put out the presents from Santa so he could joke how we’d just missed him. Mom had blankets and hot chocolate. We sat on the hood and watched the sky until we got too cold.”

  If Diggy had been asked to guess how Mrs. Graf celebrated Christmas, he would not have guessed what Wayne had described. But now that he knew, it seemed obvious. It was exactly the kind of thing Mrs. Graf would have done. She was the only teacher from elementary school Diggy remembered in any real detail.

  Diggy knew what it felt like when he thought about his own mom. He multiplied that by ten and pictured a combine not only cutting and stripping corn but also chopping the tough stalks into inch-long pieces, leaving nothing behind but a vast stretch of crusty, jagged, sand-colored trash. It was violent an
d painful, and if Wayne felt like that every day, Diggy didn’t know how he could stand it.

  Maybe Wayne couldn’t. He stood over his calf, brush on his back, not moving, not seeming to breathe. Diggy remembered a TV doctor talking about a disease that made people vibrate so intensely, they seemed frozen in place. Wayne was like that now, vibrating to a standstill.

  Pop put a hand on Wayne’s shoulder, and the shaking became more visible. Wayne swiped a forearm across his face and resumed brushing.

  Diggy grabbed a handful of hay and let Fang lip it off his palm. He didn’t like it, but maybe all Wayne’s talk about finding Diggy’s mom was Wayne’s way of easing his own pain. Which Diggy was still not okay with, but …

  “I don’t know about the church stuff,” Diggy said, “but the bridge sounds good.” It sounded more than good. It sounded so Mom-like and so Mrs. Graf–like that Diggy suddenly looked forward to sitting out in the cold searching the skies for a nonexistent fat man. He thumped Wayne’s shoulder.

  Wayne flinched. Words tumbled around in his mouth. “I don’t think I want to this year.”

  Pop patted his shoulder and released him. “That’s okay, son. Let us know.”

  Pop left. Diggy unhooked Joker’s brush again and set to work on the steer’s hair. Joker didn’t seem to appreciate the extra attention, but that didn’t slow down Diggy.

  He hated it when Pop called Wayne “son.” He didn’t say it a lot, and most of the time Diggy convinced himself that when Pop did say it, it was in a general way, like he used it with the bagger boy at the grocery store. Still, Diggy didn’t like it.

  It was enough that Wayne lived with them. He had his own room, he got an allowance from Pop, he had his steer. Wayne should be grateful, not stingy about sharing Christmas.

  How different would a Mom-Christmas be? Pop always did something to make the day special, and he listened to how Diggy wanted to spend the holiday. Diggy had nothing to complain about, but a Mom-Christmas, even if they did the same thing Pop and Diggy always did, would be different. Moms probably noticed different things and thought in different ways. Wayne knew something about that; he had already had thirteen Mom-Christmases. Diggy hadn’t had a single one. He’d had grandparent-Christmases but no mom, and he was pretty sure there was a difference.