Then I saw my friends—Meri and Finn, Grace, J.C. and Spencer. Meri had told them Michael and I had been friends, and they’d come to lend support. They’d dressed up for the occasion. J.C. and Spencer had even splashed on cologne, and Finn had tidied up his hair.
“Thanks, guys,” I whispered to them, and we shared hugs all around. Then my dad led my sisters and me over to the Gardiners, Michael’s foster parents, to introduce us. We waited while they finished hugging a man with a Mohawk and an elaborate tattoo spreading up his neck from the collar of his dress shirt.
“I just don’t understand, Ian. I thought we had gotten through to him,” Mrs. Gardiner said, her voice thick with emotion. “Didn’t he know how much we loved him? Maybe we should have—”
“He knew, Sue,” the man interrupted in a hushed baritone. “This wasn’t your fault.”
Mrs. Gardiner shook her head uncertainly.
“You did your best with him,” he reassured her, “which is more than I did.”
“Ian, don’t say that. Come see us next week. We’ll talk. Okay?” she said. The man with the Mohawk nodded, his eyes damp, as he broke from her embrace and shouldered his way out into the hall. We stepped in to take his place.
“Bill, Suzanne, I’d like to introduce my daughters, Claire, Catherine and Cecilia. Catherine knew Michael when they were in second grade together at Saint Paul,” my dad explained. The middle aged couple turned toward me with interest.
“I am so sorry for your loss,” I offered, saying the words I’d rehearsed earlier that day in the mirror, then added impulsively, “He was such a sweet little kid.”
“Thank you so much for that,” Mrs. Gardiner replied warmly. “Maybe you could stop by sometime, and we could share our memories?”
“I’d like that,” I agreed, thinking that I really would.
Then Mrs. Gardiner caught me off guard by taking my hand and asking, “Would you like to see Michael, now?” I panicked. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see him, but what could I do? Snatch my hand away and run from the room? Cici sensed my uneasiness and grabbed my other hand as Mrs. Gardiner led me over to the coffin. I don’t know what I was afraid I’d see, but when I stood in front of the casket and saw Michael’s peaceful face, my fear was replaced with only a tender longing to turn back the clock. He looked like himself, only sleeping.
I reached out and brushed the tips of my fingers over his knuckles, not caring whether it was allowed or appropriate. They were cold and unyielding, the opposite of the warm hands that caught me when I fell into them on the bus only five days before.
Where the hell were God and His Angels when Michael fell? I sent the heated question skyward, a God-seeking bullet. Receiving no satisfactory answer, I stood up abruptly and walked out.
As soon as I reached the foyer, Cici put her arm around my waist and squeezed. “I’m so sorry, Cate,” she whispered.
I squeezed her back then took a few steadying breaths and looked around. There was a mahogany table set up in the corner that held some of Michael’s possessions and pictures. The first thing that caught my eye was the beat-up acoustic guitar propped up against it.
Ah…that explained his interest in the guitar club. Cici plucked at a few of the strings. “I wonder if he was any good,” she murmured.
My throat was too tight to reply, so I moved along the table, stopping to study a picture of him as a small child standing between his mom and a policeman. Rugged like Michael, the officer was quite good looking except for a scar that crossed his cheek from his ear to the corner of his mouth. Michael was holding hands with both of them and grinning up at the officer who I assumed was his father.
Cici pointed to the Michael in the picture. “He was adorable,” she said, a soft smile on her face.
I smiled back reflexively. “Yeah…” I said, my voice catching. I looked past the picture and grabbed the edge of the table for support, feeling dizzy. There at the end of the table was a little black velvet box, and nestled within it was Michael’s mother’s aquamarine Claddagh ring. The memories attached to that ring were too strong, and a lump grew in my throat. Then I was bumped from behind by someone in the crowd.
“Ah…sorry…” came the apology. Cici and I turned to see a thin boy with dark curly hair looking at me apologetically. I recognized him as a junior at Saint Joan. His intense brown eyes sought my own as he reached his hand out to introduce himself.
“I’m Luke Devlin,” he said, dropping his hand when he saw the dazed expression on my face. “Did you know him well?”
“Yeah…” I murmured, my thoughts still wrapped up in the ring.
“Back in second grade,” Cici added for me. “And she saw him again this past week.”
A shadow passed over the boy’s face. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Suddenly feeling the need to distance myself from him, I took a step back and crossed my arms protectively over my chest. “You?” I asked politely.
“What?” His mind had obviously wandered elsewhere.
“Did you know him well? Michael, I mean.”
“Yeah. Some…” I was about to ask how, wondering if he was just following the train wreck too, when someone touched my shoulder. I could tell from the strong scent of cologne that Spencer or J.C. had found me.
“Hey, you all right?” J.C. whispered, slinging his arms around mine and Cici’s shoulders. I let him pull me in close while the boy with the curly hair disappeared into the crowd.
“Yeah. It’s just hard to accept, you know?”
“No doubt,” he said. “But you know Michael’s in a better place, right?”
Did I? Before I could answer, the rest of my friends and family found us.
“You ready to go, Bug?” my dad asked.
I took one last look at the table of memorabilia. It was all that remained of my friend.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. Let’s go.”
Around midnight, I heard the back door open and the clatter of my mom’s keys hitting the kitchen counter. She was home from Bluefield. I rolled over and listened to my dad welcome her back and walk with her up the stairs.
“It’s horrible, what happened to Michael,” she whispered to him. “After all the trouble his family went through.”
She came into my room, and sat behind me on the edge of my bed. “Catherine? Are you okay? I am so sorry about Michael. He really was a good kid.”
I wanted to ask her how she knew that. Why God let things like this happen. But my lips remained stubbornly closed. I didn’t want to talk about it. Not with her. Instead, I reached around behind me, placed my hand over hers and borrowed J.C.’s sentiment. “It’s okay, Mom. He’s probably in a better place.”
She squeezed my hand back and said, “He is, Catherine. Michael is where I hope we all will be someday. Home, with God.”
And as my mom disappeared into the soft darkness of the hall, I prayed that she and J.C. were right.
God, I really wanted them to be right.
SIX
CLETUS, THE AX-TOTING FREAK
AFTER THE WAKE and funeral, my mom quit her job at the church and turned our dining room into a command center for directing Mina’s move. Over the next few weeks, new equipment arrived almost every day: special bedding, breathing apparatus, a walker, a bedside toilet. There were disordered piles of paperwork everywhere. They were spilling out of the dining room and into the living room, while all of Claire’s earthly possessions spilled down the stairs and into the basement, which was now her domain. Sure, she still let me watch the flat screen down there, but I had to do it surrounded by all her cross country trophies and Nike spandex. It was no longer our space. The whole house was in a state of flux and had moved on without me.
At school it was the opposite. My friends had thrown themselves back into their insanely busy high school routines—AP classes, sports conditioning, volunteer commitments—while I was the one who had changed. I should have cared about all that stuff too, but I didn’t. I couldn’t seem to care about anything
. My friends noticed.
“Jesus, Cate,” Finn said, after fighting with the cafeteria windows again for my attention one day. “It’s been like, almost a month since Mike died.” I winced at the blunt way he dug the subject up out of the hole I’d buried it in.
“Michael,” I said.
“What?” asked Finn.
“His name. It was Michael,” I corrected him.
“Okay…look, Cate. Mer says you’re not answering your phone, and you won’t go out.” I glanced down at my hands, which were preoccupied with tearing up my napkin into little strips. Finn looked at J.C. sideways and nodded down at the napkin. J.C. tugged the shreds out of my hands and took up tearing where I had left off. Finn rolled his eyes. “Cate, seriously, you need to go out this weekend. We’ll go build a fire at the shelter down in the park and—”
“No!” I said, a little too loudly.
“Cate, so like, what, are you going to avoid the park for the rest of your life?”
“Come on, Cate. It’s our favorite place,” Grace chimed in.
“And we’ll make s’mores, Cate. The kind where the marshmallows are burned all black on the outside, but soft and gooey on the inside, just like you like ‘em,” promised J.C. He abandoned the napkin, snatched up one of my Teddy Grahams and stuffed it in his mouth. “You know,” he continued, biting the head off another pilfered bear, “the kind normal people throw into the fire?”
I had to smile at that. I knew they were right. I couldn’t avoid the park forever. I didn’t want to. “What night?”
“Saturday,” Finn said. “My brother can drop us off. Pick you up at eight.”
Saturday morning, Mom rented a car to drive down to Bluefield so she could accompany Mina back to our house in the chartered ambulance. It was just my dad and me out on the driveway to see her off. Claire had gone for an early run and Cici, who had tried out for cheerleading after all and made the squad, was attending her first practice. After my mom hugged my dad goodbye, she and I stood awkwardly facing each other.
“Thank you for understanding that I have to do this,” she said. She hugged me quickly then pulled away and climbed into the car. I knew she’d feel better if she thought she had my blessing, so I set my face in what I hoped was a look of stalwart support.
“’Bye, mom!” I called and waved as she drove away.
My dad smiled down at me. “So, I think someone has a birthday next week—one of the big ones.”
I grinned back at him.
“Oh, is it you, Caty Bug? Turning sixteen?” he teased, stroking the day-old stubble on his chin. “I think you better get some more driving practice in if you want to pass your test. How about you take your scruffy dad out for breakfast? I’ll pay if you drive.”
“Deal,” I agreed, punching him in the arm before jogging back into the house to throw on a thick hooded sweatshirt. Even with the sunny late September sky overhead, it was a brisk morning. When I got back outside, I saw that my dad had opened the garage door and was standing next to his “baby.” Not good.
“Um…Dad? Can’t we just take the van? It’s already in the street.”
Dad’s baby was gunmetal gray with mottled patches of lighter gray and pea green. He’d traded the last car he’d restored for this one, and spent the whole summer replacing parts, cutting out rusted areas, and sanding it. Now it had several jagged, ropy welding scars across the back and hood. Frankenstein’s monster had come to live in our garage, and it looked like I was going to have to drive it.
My dad leaned on the hood and patted it lovingly, his eyes going soft. “Hon, don’t you know what this car is?”
“Yeah, I think so.” I was about to fire off that it was his midlife crisis on wheels, and then follow that up with “Couldn’t you have purchased a nice new red Mustang like Grace’s dad did when he turned fifty?” But the look of utter joy that came over his face when he thought I might actually know what was so special about his baby stopped me. Instead, I asked, “Isn’t it one of those old muscle cars?”
His eyes clouded a bit as he realized I had no idea what the car’s draw was.
“Climb in,” he directed. “I’ll try to explain on the way.”
“Dad…it’s a stick!”
“Everyone needs to know how to drive stick.”
“Why? Mom can’t drive stick.”
“My point exactly.”
“Dad…”
“What if there’s an emergency and the only car around is a stick shift? Claire couldn’t drive it. It wasn’t ready to drive when she was learning.” My dad was certainly not blind to the sibling rivalry that smoldered under his roof, and he wasn’t afraid to use it to his advantage. I shook my head, but I knew I would cave after he said that.
“Get in the car, Caty. You’ll be fine. Trust me.”
“Keys?” I prompted impatiently, holding my hand out.
“Oh.” He dug into his pocket, pulled out the keys and tossed them to me over the hood. I caught them easily, separated out the biggest, shoved it into the lock, and tried to rotate it. It was stuck. “Sometimes you have to jiggle it, you know, find the sweet spot,” he said.
“Oh, for the love of…” I groaned as I wiggled the key back and forth a few times. The lock sprang open.
It was stuffy in the car, so I grabbed the crank handle in the door and pushed it around and around until the window was rolled all the way down. Then I looked at the stick that was growing out of a ribbed rubber mound in the floor between the two front seats, waiting for my dad to tell me what to do first, but he just regarded me thoughtfully.
“In 1971,” he said, “when I was around twelve, my dad bought a used Chrysler Town and Country station wagon. It was a dependable white car with a wide stripe of wood paneling down the sides.” He made a face and shivered. As I sat in his car, I could seriously sympathize with his twelve-year-old self. My dad went on, oblivious.
“My uncle, on the other hand, who was quite a bit younger than my dad, bought a green two-door coupe with black racing stripes down the sides and across the hood. That, my friend, was a cool car. Uncle Jack took me cruising in that car on Saturday nights sometimes.” Then he leaned over and whispered, “Sometimes we peeled away from traffic lights, leaving the cars next to us in the dust. I loved that car. And when I was sixteen, the girls loved that car too, especially the—”
“Ugh, Dad! Way too much information,” I blurted out, throwing my hands over my ears.
“Caty, the thing is, this is the same kind of car. It’s a 1971 Dodge Dart Demon. I’ve been looking for one like it to restore for years.”
“Oh, cool,” I said, feigning enthusiasm.
He wasn’t buying it. “Look, let’s fire it up. Maybe that will shed some light on it for you.”
I looked at him blankly.
“Oh, right,” he said. “Okay. First put the car in neutral.” He took my right hand and placed it on the stick between our seats. “Now, push down on the pedal on your far left—that’s the clutch.”
I pushed it down with the toe of my tennis shoe.
“Now, shift into neutral,” he said, pushing down on the ball through my hand and pulling the stick back an inch. I heard a soft “kathunk” sound and felt a popping sensation. He then slid the stick back and forth from left to right a few times. “Feel that? That’s neutral,” he said. Then he moved my hand and the stick through all the gears to show me where they were. “Okay. Let’s get this baby on the road. Keep your right foot on the brake, your left foot on the clutch, and turn the key.”
The key jangled on its key ring as I twisted it away from me. The engine turned over with a loud thrumming sound and then settled into a deep throaty growl. It definitely sounded different when I was in the driver’s seat. I placed my hands in the two and ten o’clock positions on the steering wheel and felt the steady rumble of the engine through my hands and feet. It felt good.
“Okay, what next?” I asked my dad, who was nodding approvingly.
“Shift into reverse and keep
your left foot on the—” I shifted into reverse and lost my focus on the clutch, releasing it. The car hopped backward, throwing me forward against the steering wheel. It made a horrible coughing sound that turned into a feeble death rattle. “Clutch,” my dad finished, then said, “Okay, start her up again.” When I raised my eyebrows at him, he said, “You stalled. Happens to everybody. Won’t be the last time today, either.” I was determined to prove him wrong. I started the car again, shifted into reverse with my foot still on the clutch and waited for the next instruction.
“Now for the tricky part. You are going to slowly let up on the clutch while you slowly depress the gas, and I mean slowly. This car has a lot of power under the hood, and we don’t need to shoot out into the street without stopping to look both ways.” I smiled to myself. I could handle it.
“To stop,” he continued, “hit the clutch before hitting the brake if you want to avoid stalling again.”
I repeated my dad’s directions to myself a few times and squeezed the steering wheel firmly with both hands. Then, I pressed what I thought was lightly down on the accelerator and let up a fraction of an inch on the clutch. The car roared, and when I released the clutch, it rocketed backward out of the garage and down the driveway.
“Brake! Brake!” my dad shouted. I took my foot off the gas and stomped down on the brake and clutch at the same time. The car screeched to a stop a foot from the end of the drive and then resumed its contented throaty growl.
“Whoa…” I breathed, my cheeks flushed with excitement.
“See what I mean?” my dad asked.
I put the car back in neutral and then turned to my dad and asked, “Um…did your uncle’s Demon have that much power?”
“Um, no,” he admitted, chuckling softly. “I added a little something extra to this one. I shored up the chassis and installed a 426 Hemi last summer.”
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