Steering Toward Normal

by Rebecca Petruck

  “Is he still drunk?” Diggy asked.

  Graf fumbled inside, loudly, then the door flopped open. “You home now?” He got a leg out but missed the ground and fell to all fours. “What the … ?”

  “You’re in the ditch,” Wayne snarled. He dug his toes in to make the climb out.

  “We can’t leave him here, Wayne.” Diggy sighed. The man was still drunk. He shouldn’t drive and couldn’t get the truck out anyway. Wasn’t dressed properly for the cold. If he wandered … Diggy didn’t want to think about what could happen.

  Wayne slipped a couple of times but used his hands to get enough purchase to make it to the top. Then he kept going.

  “Wayne!” Diggy yelled. The kid was crazy if he thought he was leaving Diggy to deal with Graf. “Wayne!”

  Too far away, Wayne turned back around. “Just leave him.”

  “You know we can’t. Help me pull him up—” The truck lurched forward a foot, and Diggy jumped back about ten.

  Graf leaned on the open door, pulling himself up. Back on his feet, he gawked at the truck. “Am I in the ditch?”

  Wayne’s sigh was so explosive, Diggy heard it despite the distance. Wayne finally headed back.

  “Come on, Mr. Graf.” Diggy shut the door. A heavy arm thudded across his shoulders, and he stumbled. He pushed the arm over his head and ducked back, letting Graf tip forward against the ditch’s slope. Wayne reached down, Graf reached up, and Diggy was stuck shoving the rear. But they got him out.

  Graf slung an arm around Wayne. “I miss you.”

  Wayne staggered under the weight, so Diggy caught Graf on the other side. He and Wayne guided his dad in as straight a line as they could.

  Diggy concentrated on keeping their three sets of feet from tangling up. The smells distracted him. Graf was smoky and beer-stained, but the BO was worse. The guy really needed to do some laundry. At least one load. For all their sakes.

  He didn’t do much to carry his own weight. Diggy was about to say something, when Graf moaned, “Only thirty-four.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Diggy asked.

  Suddenly, Graf was a lot heavier. Diggy huffed and said, “Front door,” but Wayne had staggered out from under his dad’s arm, leaving Diggy half crushed.

  “Come on, Wayne,” Diggy protested.

  “It was her birthday yesterday!” Wayne shouted at him. “I was so busy with your crap, I didn’t even …” His face looked on the verge of collapsing in on itself. He whispered, “She was thirty-four when she …”

  Diggy shifted Graf’s weight. He sighed. “Push the doorbell, Wayne, okay?”

  Wayne swiped at his face and pressed the ringer, taking hold of his dad’s arm again.

  Pop opened the front door, his questioning “What the …” very quickly replaced by a growl of a frown. He took over for the boys, muscling Graf to the living room, and barked, “I thought you were going to the meetings.”

  “You don’t get to bawl me out, Lawson,” Graf blustered. “You’re the one took my son.”

  “You dumped him with me. If you want him back, you gotta keep working the steps.”

  “The steps,” Graf cried, flopping onto the couch. “AA can’t do nothing about Ann missing her thirty-fifth birthday.”

  Pop ran a hand down his face, but there wasn’t any energy in it, like the information wore him out as much as it drove Graf to drink.

  Diggy felt the same, but it was because he kept hearing, You dumped him with me. He knew Pop was mad and probably didn’t mean it that way, but Diggy had been “dumped” once, too. He had always tried to convince himself Pop didn’t think of it that way, and he knew Pop loved him, but it still made Diggy skittish to hear the words. He glanced at Wayne, but Wayne’s pale, blank face could have been wiped bare by his mom’s birthday or his dad’s fall off the wagon as much as by Pop’s comment, if he’d even registered it.

  Pop straightened suddenly and looked back at where Diggy and Wayne stood in the doorway. “You boys all right?”

  Diggy shrugged.

  “What happened?” Pop asked.

  Diggy waited, but Wayne stared at the bookshelves rather than at Pop or his dad. Finally, Diggy said, “His truck’s in the ditch.”

  Pop pulled in a long breath, then let it out as his fingers unclenched. “We might as well haul it out while Harold …” He trailed off. Graf sat with his head tilted against the sofa back and snored.

  Wayne crashed outside, slamming the front door behind him.

  Pop went for his coat, and Diggy followed. They didn’t speak. Diggy climbed into the pickup’s cab while Pop rummaged in the toolbox always in the truck bed. Pop got in and passed Diggy the tow strap to untangle.

  Wayne reached his dad’s truck before they did. Pop idled while Diggy jumped out; then Pop went on into the road and backed the truck into line with Graf’s. Diggy had already hooked one end of the tow strap to the mount under Graf’s bumper. When Pop idled again, Diggy hooked the other end of the strap to their trailer hitch. He signaled, and Pop eased forward until the tow strap went taut. Diggy stepped far out of the way, checking that Wayne followed; then Pop inched forward. Minutes later, Graf’s truck was back on the road.

  Diggy unhooked the tow strap, then looked over at Pop, eyebrows up. Pop nodded. Diggy tried not to look too excited as he hopped into the driver’s seat of Graf’s truck. As he’d expected, the keys were in the ignition.

  “What are you doing?” Wayne said, sliding into the cab.

  “I know how to drive.”

  “Like it’s driving to pull in and park.”

  “You’re not fooling anyone,” Diggy said, putting the truck in drive. “I called it.” He inched forward.

  “It’s my dad’s truck.”

  “Shh,” Diggy said, making the turn. “I need to concentrate.”

  “To go down a driveway?”

  Diggy ignored him. He drove the tractor all the time to mow or plow snow, but Pop hardly ever let him drive the truck. Diggy savored the occasion, no matter the circumstances.

  “How could I forget her birthday?” Wayne whispered.

  There was nothing to say to that.

  Diggy pulled up alongside Pop’s truck, where Pop stood drumming his fingers on the hood.

  “What am I supposed to say to him?” Wayne asked.

  Diggy glanced out at Pop again. “I think he’s worried, not angry—not at you, anyway.”

  Wayne blinked at him, then shook his head. “Not Pop. My dad,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

  It was Diggy’s turn to blink. Wayne had a “Pop” and a “Dad” and talked about them in the same breath. Weird hardly covered it.

  Pop opened the driver’s side door and leaned against it, making the effort to smile. “Good driving?”

  “Good,” Diggy said.

  “Wayne, you drive any?”

  “About as much as this,” Wayne said.

  Pop nodded. “I thought you each might want to take a turn around the block.”

  “Yes!” Diggy said immediately, and would have had the door shut as fast, too, if Pop weren’t leaning on it.

  “But what about …” Wayne trailed off.

  “He’ll keep.” Pop slammed the door, and Diggy suspected the driving lesson was as much about getting some cool-down time as it was about teaching them anything. Driving around the block was significant. A country block was a square with sides a mile long. Diggy had only ever driven some in the fields, mostly in the driveway, and now he was getting four miles. He bounced in his seat, then pretended it was part of the business of Wayne moving over and Pop climbing in.

  “He’s still going to be there when we get back,” Wayne mumbled.

  Pop sighed. “Sometimes you’ve got to take the moments you can.”

  When Wayne pulled into the drive and parked, Diggy leapt out and pretended to kiss the snowy ground.

  “I wasn’t that bad,” Wayne grumbled.

  “You drove at wherever you looked,” Dig
gy argued. “We’re lucky we didn’t end up in the ditch.”

  As soon as the words popped out, Diggy wanted to shove his foot into his mouth. Wayne probably would have helped, except he was staring at the house like it was the mouth of hell.

  Pop squeezed Wayne’s shoulder. “I can take care of this.”

  Wayne hovered. A calf mooed, and Wayne nodded. He headed toward the cows.

  Diggy didn’t like the idea of Pop going in there alone, but Pop shooed him off.

  Wayne had turned on the radio by the time Diggy got to the calves. Though it was part of the routine to get the animals used to noise, Diggy worried about being able to hear if Pop called out from the house. He turned it off.

  Wayne froze for a second, then hunched more tightly over the Scotch comb he worked through the hair on Fang’s hind legs. The calf’s head was tied high, and Diggy matched it when he tied Joker. The calves needed to get used to the posture they’d hold in the show ring.

  With both Diggy and Wayne’s attention only half in the barn, the cows shuffled and fidgeted. When they got even more fidgety, Diggy checked the door and saw that they weren’t alone anymore—Pop hung back, while Graf edged forward.

  “Wayne,” Diggy hissed over Joker’s back.

  Wayne didn’t move for so long that Diggy almost believed the guy didn’t know his dad was there—but not quite. After a few more seconds, Wayne patted his calf’s rump, then looked over at his dad.

  Graf’s hangdog look hung lower than ever. Diggy was afraid the man might start crying—he looked that pitiful.

  Graf cleared his throat and walked on over to them. “He’s filling out good.”

  Wayne may have left the door cracked open for his father to redeem himself back when he first moved in and Pop encouraged him to, but Diggy was pretty sure that door was closed now.

  Graf cleared his throat again. “You still feeding him that alfalfa hay?”

  Wayne shrugged.

  The silence got to where Diggy was embarrassed, so he filled it with talk about how they would get the steers transitioned to feed in April, the flakes of hay they went through each day, and the linseed oil he mixed in to promote hair growth.

  “Good, good,” Graf said, like he hadn’t really been listening. He scrubbed his hair, then muttered to Wayne, “I owe you an amend.”

  Wayne snorted. “Yeah, like the steps are working out for you.”

  He might as well have smacked his dad; his words had the same effect.

  “I’ve got a sponsor,” Graf said.

  “Don’t come out here anymore.”

  “It was a slip, but I can—”

  “Don’t come out here anymore.” Wayne turned to his calf and brushed long, smooth strokes along its back.

  Graf flopped his hands a couple of times, but no words came. He even looked at Pop, like he wanted help, but Pop only shook his head—not mean or anything, but as if to say now was not the time.

  Diggy guessed that Pop was right. Wayne had his shoulders up in that way like he could block his ears with them.

  Graf watched Wayne for a while, then walked on out. Pop spoke quietly with him on their way to the man’s truck.

  Diggy turned back to Wayne. “You were kind of hard on him, weren’t you?”

  It was a long time before Wayne answered. “Your mom leaving you like she did was bad, but you’ve always had Pop.”

  Diggy didn’t need any time to get Wayne’s meaning: Diggy had gotten the better end of the deal.

  AFTER THE THING WITH HIS DAD, WAYNE DIDN’T MENTION DIGGY’S MOM’S PARENTS again, and January rolled into February with the routine of steers, school, steers, homework, and steers. Normal.

  Until Valentine’s Day, when Crystal got asked out by one of the guys from 4-H, and she said yes. Chad didn’t go to their school, but Crystal started spending some of her lunch periods with her girlfriends, leaning in to one another to whisper things, then laughing loudly. It was surreal. Even though she hung out with him and Jason most days, it still felt like one day she was one of the guys, and the next she was a girl girl.

  Jason didn’t say anything about it, and he was the one who had to be with her every day, since her sheep was at his place, so Diggy didn’t bring it up, either. But by the next 4-H meeting, Diggy’s excitement to see July was dimmed by worrying about how Crystal would act when she was actually with her boyfriend. He felt stupid for thinking about it at all, but if she was different in school, it seemed likely she’d be even more different at 4-H.

  After Pop dropped them off, Diggy headed for the church basement and found Jason in their usual spot, while Crystal watched her boyfriend demonstrate his latest robot.

  Jason kept looking over at them. Diggy didn’t really want to have this conversation, but he also felt he’d be a bad friend if he didn’t ask. “Why didn’t you ever ask her out? She wanted you to.”

  “She did?”

  Diggy blinked at him. Even before Crystal had made Diggy talk about it, he had pretty much guessed that she liked Jason. Jason spent more time with her than Diggy did, so it had seemed obvious that he would have guessed, too. Though Diggy hadn’t realized Darla liked him until it was too late, either, so he supposed he wasn’t one to judge.

  “Huh,” Jason added.

  When Crystal finally sat down with them, her boyfriend followed. They all said hi and stuff, but the usual talk about rate of gain and feed was replaced by junk-drawer robots and the display Chad’s team was planning for the fair. Only high school teams competed, but Chad and a group of kids hosted exhibits in the 4-H building to demonstrate how the robots worked.

  It wasn’t until Jason asked Chad a question about the supplies 4-H considered junk-drawer stuff that Diggy relaxed enough to realize he had missed his chance to talk to July before the meeting started—and to see that Wayne hadn’t.

  The weather turned into the kind of ice-age freeze that kept Diggy in the house when he was home. He puttered around with his Navaho model rocket. The level-three design wasn’t all that different from others he had built. The trick was in fitting the two stages together, aligning the two sets of fins, and setting the engines in the body tube correctly so the ejection charge from the first would ignite the second. It wasn’t difficult; it only required patience and time. Pop could have let Diggy have a go at a level three ages ago.

  Every now and then Wayne came in to see what he was doing, so Diggy made him hold together pieces while glue dried. The next time Wayne came in, he was carrying something in his hands.

  “You’re a fast learner,” Diggy said and laughed, figuring the guy didn’t want to get stuck waiting for glue to dry again.

  “I thought you’d want this back.”

  Wayne set the red metal box on the bed.

  Diggy looked over, dusting balsa-wood shavings from his fingers, and froze. It was his mom’s box. The small fireproof safe he’d bought all those years ago to protect the three things he had from his mother.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “In my closet.”

  Diggy glared. “How did you know it was mine?” It was a locked box. There was no reason to think it was his unless it had been opened.

  “Do you know what’s in there?” Wayne asked.

  Diggy didn’t have to respond. Wayne already knew the answer.

  “I guessed it was yours,” Wayne said. “I suppose Pop could have locked it up to hide the stuff from you, but that didn’t seem like something he’d do.”

  Diggy grabbed the box and felt the lid give too much. “Did you break it? You shouldn’t have messed with it.”

  “It was an old, locked box that obviously hadn’t been touched in years. You would have looked, too. Besides, it was rusty. It practically opened itself when I picked it up.”

  Diggy yanked on a drawer too stuffed with rocket supplies. When he tried to jam the box in, the lid broke from its hinges and slid off.

  “You want to find her, too,” Wayne said.

  “I was a little kid,” Diggy argue
d. “I might have wondered about her for a while, but I don’t anymore.”

  Or he hadn’t until Wayne kept trying to make him.

  “Is that all you have?” Wayne asked.

  Diggy nodded. A cap. So small, he marveled that it had ever fit his head. The card from the hospital crib that read Douglas, Lawson. His mom must have given the nurse both her last name and Pop’s. By the time the third item was put on Diggy, the plastic name band from the hospital, his mom’s last name had become his first. Even when he was little, the small pile had fit into one palm. “I think she tucked them in with me so Pop would know who I was.” Though Diggy had seen baby pictures; the tuft of orange hair said it all.

  Since he had nothing else, those three things had been everything. But, really, they were nothing.

  Wayne put his hands in his pockets. “I thought you’d want them back. That’s all.”

  Diggy fit the lid on again as well as he could. He cleared a spot for the box on the shelf in his closet and pushed clothes around until it was gone.

  “She could have left you with her parents,” Wayne said.

  Diggy squinted at him.

  “She chose Pop for you. She can’t be all bad.”

  Diggy had never once thought of that, of her having chosen to leave him with Pop for Diggy’s sake. He suspected that might be giving her more credit than she deserved, but part of him didn’t care.

  When Wayne left, Diggy knew he wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the model anymore, so he figured he might as well head downstairs and do his homework. Wayne was already propped on the couch. Diggy dropped sideways into the armchair and pulled books around him.

  Had his mom wanted to make a point? Or had she thought Pop would give him to her parents in the end? Or had she wanted Pop to have him?

  By the time he was old enough to understand about grandparents and that he was supposed to have two sets of them, he had lived without his mom’s parents for so long, it was weird to think about them being around. He didn’t even know what they looked like.

  Not that it mattered. His mom had left town on a tractor.

  He tossed aside his math homework and pulled out his charts of feed percentages and weight gain per time period. It never took long to get lost in that math.